French classicism

“ French humanism had still to attempt a stricter classicism, not adapting but imitating, not domesticating but importing. Ancient gods were to be recalled in the style of Vergil or of Ovid. Odes were to be Horatian, and might be Pindaric. Lyric diction was to be “enriched” by the interweaving of correct allusions in classical phrase. The allusive value would thus be heightened by summoning the hearer’s culture to answer the poet’s. Since poetry would be elevated by becoming learned, poets should be docte. ”

“ Men rebelled against the aristocracy, the narrow conventions of society, the authority of the church and of the government, against the supremacy of cold classicism in literature, against confining intellectual activity to tangible commonplace things, and against the repression of imagination and of the soul's aspirations. The two principal forces behind these changes were the Romantic movement, which culminated in changed literary ideals, and the spirit of the French Revolution, which emphasized the close kinship of all ranks of humanity. ”

“ The Revolution in America, soon followed by that in France, is the historical sign of the passing of the aristocratic spirit of classicism. Freedom, equality, the destruction of the bondage that had held the common people back from education and advancement, these are the new ideas. In literature as in life a reaction broke out against the formal, stilted, unemotional style of classicism. ”

“ But the intense admiration of the severe beauties of classical literature, which was the dominant literary note of the Renaissance, translated itself in their active minds into a determination to make, if it were possible, French itself more able to emulate the triumphs of Greek and of Latin. ”

“ At the beginning of his career he recognised, in common with his associates, that the contemporary classicism had run to seed, and that, beyond an effort after perfection of technique, the art of the period was all but devoid of purpose, of thought, imagination, or spirituality. ”

“ This critic, then, would not confine the terms classic and classicism to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are certain ages of the world in which the classical tradition predominates, i.e., in which the respect for authority, the love of order and decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for strangeness and novelty. ”

“ I believe that the modern tendency is toward something which, for want of a better name, we may call classicism. I use the term with hesitation, for it is hardly more than analogical: we must scrupulously guard ourselves against measuring living art and mind by dead laws of order. ”

“ Yet in these gnarled times, the classical spirit would be so inimical to the spirit of modern business that when all its ramifications have been followed through we learn that classicism would be nothing other than howling rebellion. ”

“ In the second of these processes the classic is superior.' Classicism is only the organ of a certain reason, the raison raisonnante; that which insists upon thinking with as little preparation and as much ease as possible; which is contented with what it has acquired, and takes no thought about augmenting or renewing it; which either cannot or will not embrace the plenitude and the complexity of things as they are. ”

“ Now, come to stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism, showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature and the arts, after the sterility of so many years. ”

“ To define the meaning of classicism is as difficult as it is to fix the date of its beginning. By contrasting, as we usually do, the style of that period with a later one, usually called the Romantic, by comparing the ideal of classicism with the romantic ideal of subjective expression, we get a negative rather than a positive definition ”

“ When one of the Universities undertakes to provide our colleges and schools with comments and notes on a poem so saturated with classicism as Adonais, the least that could be expected from bodies who are, as it were, the guardians of classical literature, is the provision that the classical part of the work should be done at least competently ”

“ In the literary world these impulses have come to be known, somewhat absurdly, as romanticism and classicism. Both impulses are necessary, both must be present in every artist, and either without the other is futile. Paul Elmer More spoke for the classical tradition and carried it to the extreme of condemning everything in his own time that had real vitality. ”

“ But it is not so much the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture and painting—work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's sake, in which even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays itself—but rather the profane poetry of the middle age, the poetry of Provence, and the magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France, which those French writers have in view, when they speak of this Renaissance within the middle age. ”

“ The latter half of the eighteenth century was, throughout Europe, a period of revolt against the old ideas, the outworn bonds of mediæval society. In art and literature the older system, with its elaborately planned rules and formulas, is technically called "classicism"; and the outburst against it established "romanticism," the spirit of desire, the longing for higher things, an impulse which ruled the intellectual world for generations, and which many critics still believe to be the chief hope for the future. ”

“ But to keep proportion, and observe the plan, is one of those critical warnings to which Classic and Romantic alike had much better attend. In the division which I have adopted of eighteenth-century writers into those who, as adherents of Neo-Classicism, are to be treated here, and those who, as forerunners or actual exponents of Modern Criticism, are to be reserved for our next, there must necessarily be much which invites cavil, and not a little which excuses objection. ”

“ There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For the Renaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from the classical world, but also that curious strength of which there are great resources in the true middle age. ”

“ We have endeavored here simply to show the meaning of terms in general use in our literature; but it must be remembered that it is impossible to classify or to give a descriptive name to the writers of any period or century. While "classic" or "pseudo-classic" may apply to a part of eighteenth-century literature, every age has both its romantic and its classic movements. In this period the revolt against classicism is shown in the revival of romantic poetry under Gray, Collins, Burns, and Thomson, and in the beginning of the English novel under Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. ”

“ And besides the mediæval life, with its habits and its thought, the student will trace in this poetry the gradual development of the true French Muse—her mockery, her satirical spirit, her cynicism, her incredulity, her curiosity, her want of reverence, with her inimitable wit and fresh buoyancy of spirit—a muse gaillarde et moqueuse, unlike any other that the world has seen, whom to know is to love, though not always to respect. It is no fault of modern France if her old literature is not known as it deserves to be. ”

“ Such an intellectual feat is likely to produce what, in the most obvious sense, one would call highly artificial work. Modern classicism must be fine-spun, and smell rather of the hothouse than the open air. ”

“ It was inevitable that there should be a certain narrowness in a literature which was in its very essence deliberate, refined, and select; omission is the beginning of all art; and the great French classicists, more supremely artistic, perhaps, than any other body of writers in the history of the world, practised with unsparing devotion the virtue of leaving out. The beauties of clarity, simplicity, and ease were what they aimed at ”

“ The love of traditional forms, for example, which we have seen to be the base of classicism, exists in a certain measure in every poet, for the reason that every [Pg 45] poet employs, re-lives and renews the words of a given language, which has been historically formed, and is therefore charged with a literary tradition and full of historical meaning. ”

“ This definition presents Classicism as the regulative and conservative principle in the history of the art, and Romanticism as the progressive, regenerative, and creative principle. It is easy to see how the notion of contest between them grew up, and the only harm which can come from [Pg 69] such a notion will ensue only if we shut our eyes to the fact that it is a contest between two elements whose very opposition stimulates life, and whose union, perfect, peaceful, mutually supplemental, is found in every really great art-work. ”

“ Therefore the creative power of poetry wanted, for success in the highest sense, materials and a basis; a thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it.
At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or out of that of the Renaissance, with its powerful episode, the Reformation. ”

“ Behind this modest title, apparently, we must recognize one of the most original talents of the French Renaissance; and it is a proof of the vigor of the artistic life of that period that, brilliant production being everywhere abundant, an artist of so high a value should not have been treated by his contemporaries as a celebrity. ”

“ I have put my finger before on this question: whether music is not an example of Counter- Renaissance art? whether it is not the next of kin to the baroque style? whether it has not grown in opposition to all classic taste, so that any aspiration to classicism is forbidden by the very nature of music? The answer to this most important of all questions of values would not be a very doubtful 279 one, if people thoroughly understood the fact that music attains to its highest maturity and plenitude as romanticism likewise as a reactionary move ment against classicism. ”

“ The ‘Picturesque’, a critical concept that had been increasing in authority for two generations in England, received the dignity of a capital P in the 1790s. The term Romantic Classicism is a twentieth-century historian’s invention, attempting by its own contradictoriness to express the ambiguity of the dominant mode of this period in the arts ”

“ In a less question-begging proposition of single terms, classicism might be said to be method and romanticism energy. But in fact sharp distinctions of the kind do much more harm than good. It is true that the one tends to order, lucidity, proportion ”

“ But the classical covers an immense field, embracing that which is best in many ages and in many different lands, and it is utterly impossible that the practical worker in the arts should utilize all the classical styles at one time. ”

“ The history of literature and the history of philosophy touch each other only at certain points of their course. There are periods (the nineteenth century itself is perhaps an example) when the study of philosophy is almost divorced from style. There are others when the two are intimately wedded. Nowhere is this latter more the case than in the seventeenth century, and in France. ”

“ There is a great deal to be learned from the French poets—Parnassians, Symbolists, Whitmanites, Fantaisistes—who have, in the years 1860 to 1900, created a new Renaissance under our noses. But above all, what will teach us the most is our language and life. ”

“ And, yet once more, let us recognise that adjustment of criticism to creation—mysterious or simply natural as it may seem to different temperaments and different systems of thought—which we have observed before, in the cautious check of Renaissance criticism on the heady exuberance of the great Renaissance creation, in the support given by Seventeenth-century classicism to such mediate powers and dispositions as those of Corneille and even Racine, of Dryden and even Pope ”

“ It describes classical authors as those "who have become models in any language whatever," and in all the articles which follow, the expressions, models, fixed rules for composition and style, strict rules of art to which men must conform, continually recur. That definition of classic was evidently made by the respectable Academicians, our predecessors, in face and sight of what was then called romantic—that is to say, in sight of the enemy. ”

“ Classical art and traditions dominated the whole French school, and no artist, however great his reputation, attempted for many years to swim against the stream. In spite of the principles of liberty and equality which were claimed for all under the new régime, a terribly strict eye was kept upon any innovations which might break out in the form of a naturalistic art. ”

“ Notwithstanding recent censures of classical studies as a useless waste of time, there can be no doubt that they give the highest finish to intellectual culture. The ancient classics contain the most consummate models of literary art; and the greatest writers have been their most diligent students. Classical culture was the instrument with which Erasmus and the Reformers purified Europe. It distinguished the great patriots of the seventeenth century; and it has ever since characterised our greatest statesmen. ”