Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

“ When Shakespeare treated the same problem, he made King Richard II, the most romantically minded of all his kings, call for a mirror. The thing that it is easiest for a man to see in a mirror is himself; egotism in its many forms, self-pity, self-cultivation, self-esteem, dogs Romanticism like its shadow. The desire to be the spectator of your own life, to see yourself in all kinds of heroic and pathetic attitudes, is the motive-power of Romantic poetry in many of its later developments. Yet life must be arrested and falsified before the desire can be fulfilled. ”

“ There is no need to distinguish carefully between poetry and painting in discussing their contributions to Romance. A great outcry was raised, in the last age, against literary criticism of pictures. But in this question we are concerned with this effect of pictures on the normal imagination, which is literary, which cares for story, and suggested action, and the whole chain of memories and desires that a picture may set in motion. Do not most of those who look at a romantic landscape imagine themselves wandering among the scenes that are portrayed? ”

“ Romance is a perennial form of modern literature, and has passed through many phases. No period has been without it, though the esteem in which it is held has varied a good deal from age to age. English literature is strong in romance; there is something in the English temper which makes scepticism ungrateful to it, and disposes it to treat even dreams seriously. Chaucer, who laughed at the romantic writers of his day, yet gave a new lease of life to Romance in Troilus and Cressida and The Knightes Tale. ”

“ The Romantic school taught a wider imaginative outlook and a more curious analysis of the human mind. They also are right: it is the way to investigate a case in the police courts. Both were cumbered, at times, with the dead things that they found in the books they loved. All literature, except the strongest and purest, is cumbered with useless matter—the conventional epithet, the grandiose phrase, the outworn classical quotation, the self-conscious apology, the time-honored joke. But there are only two schools of literature—the good, and the bad. ”

“ The realism of the early literature of the Middle Ages is perhaps best seen in old Irish. The monk bewails the lawlessness of his wandering thoughts, which run after dreams of beauty and pleasure during the hour of divine service. The hermit in the wood describes, with loving minuteness, the contents of his larder. Never was there a fresher or more spontaneous poetry than the poetry of this early Christian people. But it is not in the direct line of descent, for it was written in the Celtic speech of a people who did not achieve the government of Europe. ”

“ To study the ascertained facts concerning men and books is to study biography and bibliography, two sciences which between them supply the only p. 9competent and modest part of the history of literature. To discern the significance of men and books, to classify and explain them, is another matter. We have not, and we never shall have, a calculus sufficient for human life even at its weakest and poorest. Let him who conceives high hopes from the progress of knowledge and the pertinacity of thought tame and subdue his pride by considering, for a moment, the game of chess. ”

“ It began very early in the eighteenth century, long before the death of Pope. No sooner did a dynasty of moralists and satirists claim possession of the high places, and speak in the name of English literature, than all the other interests and kinds, which survived among the people, began to range themselves in opposition, and to assert their right to be heard. The supremacy of Dryden and Pope was the most despotic rule that English poetry has ever known, and the revolt was strong in proportion. Satire and morality very easily becomes tedious, especially when they are in close alliance. ”

“ A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare; their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught discipline. ”

“ The danger of basing a name on a theory of literature is that the theory may very easily be superseded, or may prove to be inadequate, and then the name, having become immutable by the force of custom, is left standing, a monument of ancient error. The terminology of the sciences, which pretends to be exact and colourless, is always being reduced to emptiness by the progress of knowledge. ”

“ And are not men prone to admire in Nature what they have been taught by Art to notice? The landscape art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries taught them to imagine themselves in lonely scenes, among old ruins or frowning rocks, by the light of sunrise or sunset, cast on gleaming lakes. These were the theatre of Romance ”

“ Yet it is insisted on by society, and enforced by fear and fashion. If the forms are taught, the soul of them may be, and sometimes is, breathed in later. So this imitative and timid artifice, this conformity to opinions the ground and meaning of which is not fully understood, becomes a great engine of social progress. Imitation and forgery, which are a kind of literary vulgarity, were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. Some of the greater poets who passed this way went on to express things subtler and more profound than had found a voice in the poetry that they imitated. ”

“ These quotations are enough to show what a width of view is given to modern Romantic poetry. Man is, in one sense, more truly seen in a wide setting of the mountains and the sea than close at hand in the street. But the romantic effect of distance may delude and conceal as well as glorify and liberate. The weakness of the modern Romantic poet is that he must keep himself aloof from life, that he may see it. ”

“ All these gardeners and aesthetic critics who busied themselves with wild nature were aiming at an ideal which had been expressed in many painted landscapes, and had been held up as the top of admiration by one of the greatest English poets. The influence of Milton on the new landscape interest must be held to be not less than the influence of his contemporaries, Salvator Rosa and Claude. His descriptions of Paradise did more than any painting to alter the whole practice of gardening. They are often appealed to, even by the technical gardeners. In garden-lore Milton was a convinced Romantic. ”

“ Yet there is another side to the work of Keats, more wonderful in its broken promise than all the soft perfections of his tender Muse. He grew tired of imitation and ease. Weakness may exclude the world by forgetting it; only strength can conquer the world. ”

“ If the history of a single fashion in dress could ever be written, it would illuminate the literary problem. p. 11The motives at work are the same; thoughtful wearers of clothes, like thoughtful authors, are all trying to do something new, within the limits assigned by practical utility and social sympathy. Each desires to express himself and yet in that very act to win the admiration and liking of his fellows. The great object is to wear the weeds of humanity with a difference. Some authors, it is true, like timid or lazy dressers, desire only to conform to usage. ”

“ In the mathematical sciences definitions are all-important, because with them the definition is the thing. When a mathematician asks you to describe a circle, he asks you to create one. But the man who asks you to describe a monkey is less exacting; he will be content if you mention some of the features that seem to you to distinguish a monkey from other animals. Such a description must needs be based on personal impressions and ideas; some features must be chosen as being more significant than the rest. In the history of literature there are only two really significant things—men, and books. ”

“ Yet those who have made of chess a life-long study are ready to confess their complete ignorance of the fundamental merits of particular moves; one game does not resemble another; and from the most commonplace of developments there may spring up, on the sudden, wild romantic possibilities and situations that are like miracles. If these surprising flowers of fancy grow on the chess-board, how shall we set a limit to the p. 10possibilities of human life, which is chess, with variety and uncertainty many million times increased? ”

“ Perhaps he makes too much of allegory and symbolism, which have always been dear to the church, but are not conspicuous in early Romance. Yet no one can go far astray who keeps in touch, as Heine does, with the facts of history. Goethe, impatient of the wistful intensities of youth, said that the Classical is health, and the Romantic disease. Much has been made, by many critics, of the statue and the picture, as types of ancient and modern art, the one complete in itself, the other suggesting more than it portrays. ”

“ It may be very reasonably maintained that in Rome education killed literature. A carefully organized, universal system of education, which takes for its material the work of great poets and orators, is certain to breed a whole army of slaves. The teachers, employed by the machine to expound ideas not their own, soon erect systems of pedantic dogma, under which the living part of literature is buried. ”

“ But now they desire a better country, that is an heavenly.” The material prosperity and social order which Law and Politics take such pains to preserve and increase are no part of their care. They are strangers and pilgrims in the country where they pitch their tent for a night. How dare they spend time on cherishing the painted veil called Life, when their desires are fixed on what it conceals? When Tacitus called the Christian religion “a deadly superstition,” he spoke as a true Roman, a member of the race of Empire-builders. ”

“ Readers of poetry knew what it was they wanted, even before they knew whether it existed. Writers were soon at hand to prove that it had existed in the past, and could still be made. The weakness of vague desire is felt everywhere in the origins of the change. Out of the weakness came strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole was enlarged to house the magnanimous soul of Scott; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth to Faust.
p. 80The weakness of the Romantic movement, its love of mere sensation and sentiment, is well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and strong mind of Keats. ”

“ In the underworld of literature Romance never died out. The Revival of Romance took its special character from a gradual and powerful reaction against Dryden and Pope and all those masters of Classical method who, during half a century, had legislated for English poetry. ”

“ Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renaissance, into the Gothic darkness. So the pendulum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, even in the shortest of its variable oscillations, to revisit the greatest writers, who are nearest p. 13to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are raised by one age into the very essentials of good poetry, are denied the name of poetry by the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is the exploded vice of another; and Romance comes in and goes out with secular regularity. ”

“ A rough summary of this kind is enough to show how large a question is involved in the history of Romance. All literary history is a long record of the struggle between those two rival teachers of man—books, and the experience of life. Good books describe the world, and teach whole generations to interpret the world. ”

“ An author who respects himself is not content if his work is mistaken for another’s, even if that other be one of the gods of his idolatry. He would rather write his own signature across faulty work than sink into a copyist of merit. This eternal temper of self-assertion, this spirit of invention, this determination to add something or alter something, is no doubt the principle of life. It questions accepted standards, and makes of reaction from the reigning fashion a permanent force in literature. The young want something to do; they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom p. ”

“ How foolish it is to suppose that nature and truth are to be found in one school of poetry to the exclusion of another! The eternal virtues of literature are sincerity, clarity, breadth, force, and subtlety. They are to p. 29be found, in diverse combinations, now here and now there. While the late Latin Christian poets were bound over to Latin models—to elegant reminiscences of a faded mythology and the tricks of a professional rhetoric—there arose a new school, intent on making literature real and modern. These were the Romance poets. ”

“ A general statement of the law that governs literary history may perhaps be borrowed from the most unreasonable of the arts—the art of dress. One of the powerful rulers of men, and therefore of books, is Fashion, and the fluctuations of literary fashion make up a great part of literary history. ”

“ When, therefore, we see this imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and more accurate productions of art. On this account our English gardens are not so entertaining to the fancy as those in France and Italy, where we see a larger extent of ground covered over with an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial wildness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country. ”

“ In the summer of that year Home was drinking the waters at Moffat, and among the visitors assembled there found Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, then a boy of ten, and his tutor, James Macpherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambitious, who had been educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse. Home, full of the literary gossip of the hour, seized upon the opportunity to question Macpherson concerning the poems that were rumored to have survived among the Gaelic-speaking population of Scotland. ”

“ Ancestral voices prophesying war!
p. 55Romance demands scenery; and it should never be forgotten that the age of Pope, the age of symmetry and correctness in poetry, was an age when the taste for wild scenery in painting and in gardening was at its height. If the house was set in order, the garden broke into a wilderness. Addison in the Spectator (No. 414) praises the new art of landscape gardening:
There is generally in nature something more grand and august, than what we meet with in the curiosities of art. ”

“ If an author can be exhibited as the effect of certain causes (and I do not deny that some authors can plausibly be so exhibited) he loses his virtue as an author. He thought of himself as a cause, a surprising intruder upon the routine of the world, an original creator. I think that he is right, and that the profitable study of a man is the study which regards him as an oddity, not a quiddity. ”

“ Then followed the period of forgery and imitation, the age of Ossian and Chatterton, Horace Walpole and Bishop Percy. Lastly, the poets enrolled themselves in the new school, and an original literature, suggested by the old, was created by Sir Walter p. 8Scott, Coleridge, and Keats. It was the temper of the antiquary and the sceptic, in the age of Gibbon and Hume, that begot the Romantic Revival; and the rebellion of the younger age against the spirit of the eighteenth century was the rebellion of a child against its parents.
It is not needful, nor indeed is it possible, to define Romance. ”