1918] on The Romantic Revival 261 



earlier bards did not disappear. Deli.crht in the Classic age never 

 wholly died. The French painter De la Koche prided himself on 

 his Classical severity. He was at work one day upon a picture, when 

 the amiable and accomplished secretary of a French society came 

 and watched him at his work, and after a silence of observation, 

 exclaimed, thinking to compliment hiir, "You are the very Victor 

 Hugo of painters." The painter flung down his brush in disgust. 

 He had no wish to be compared with a leader of the Romantic 

 school. There were many in the world of letters who felt like the 

 French painter The love of the Classical age did not die in 

 England any more than it did in Prance ; but the new school, in 

 whose atmosphere the old among us spent our younger days, reached 

 a pre-eminence and popularity which changed the current of thought 

 and of what is perhaps more powerful — of taste. Let me imagine 

 that a student has strayed into a library. Let me suppose that he 

 has no knowledge of the rival claims of Classical and Romantic 

 writers. He turns to the long rows of bound volumes of the 

 Reviews. He takes down a volume of the Quarterly or the Edin- 

 hurgh and reads a criticism on the writings, we will say, of Scott or 

 Wordsworth. He learns that in the judgment of the reviewer 

 "Wordsworth has little claim to the respect of the public or the title 

 of a poet. I give you one or two specimens of what he might read— 

 indeed, of what you may all read if you were minded to spend an 

 hour or two among old Reviews. Of Scott we read that he has ''a 

 tone of animation, unchecked by any great delicacy of taste or 

 elegance of fancy." The reviewer regrets that a writer of such 

 talents should " consume them in imitation of obsolete extravagance. 

 To write a modern romance of chivalry is like building a modern 

 abbey or an English pagoda. There is little connected incident and 

 a great deal too much of gratuitous description" {Ed. Rev.. 180'S). 

 Of AVordsworth the same Review fourteen years later says : " The 

 Lake school of poetry we think is now pretty well extinct. Words- 

 worth has fallen into a way of writing prosy, solemn, obscure, feeble 

 kind of mouthing, sadly garnished with shreds of phrases from 

 Milton and the Bible, but without nature and without passion, and 

 with a plentiful lack of meaning, compensated only by a large 

 allowance of egotism " {Ed. Rev., 1822). Our reader is tempted to 

 think that it will be but wasted time to spend thought or study upon 

 a writer who is thus described. But the articles are piquant, and 

 he would like to hear a little more. He takes down another volume 

 of the same Review, and now he reads criticisms of a wholly different 

 strain. A man called Wordsworth is now declared to be a poet of 

 no mean order. His principle of pure diction has caused the ex- 

 purgation of absurd terms. The nightingale is no longer Philomel 

 or the tuneful bird of night. 



Our reader rubs his eyes. Can this be the same poet ? If so, 

 how has cursing turned to blessing ? Is Balaam also among the 

 Vol. XXII. (No. 112) t 



