238 DEMOCRATIC ART 



vivid, passionate, and grotesque was their main object. Pro- 

 portion and harmony gave place to wayward incoherence. 

 The gutter, the hospital, the galleys were ransacked for 

 examples of pathos and nobility. Witches and vampires 

 superseded the Pantheon of Olympus. Murder, rape, suicide, 

 disgust of life in love-lorn youths*and maidens, formed the 

 motive principles of wild unhealthy fiction. It was a time 

 of spasms and contortions, of Sturm und Drang and Welt- 

 schmerz ; of Goethe's Werther, De Musset's Holla, Byron's 

 Manfred, Heine's Batcliffe, Schiller's Bobbers. Sense and 

 stateliness, the precepts of Boileau, Voltaire's pellucid irony, 

 Pope's correction, Lessing's moderation, were assailed with 

 ridicule and sarcasm. The great but essentially imperfect 

 work of men like Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Gautier, testified 

 to the vitality of this reactionary movement. It found a 

 prose Shakespeare in Balzac, and produced a monumental 

 masterpiece in Goethe's Faust. 



Meanwhile a thorough-going emancipation of taste and 

 judgment had been effected. The freedom for which the 

 earlier romanticists had fought was gained. New forms of 

 expression and new standards of artistic excellence prevailed. 

 Pseudo-classical insincerity and hollowness were purged away ; 

 and it became apparent that romanticism, in its turn, was not 

 devoid of pedantry. The main result of this romantic revolu- 

 tion was the discovery that no subject in human history or 

 life, no object in the eternal world of nature, is unpoetical 

 or unfitted for artistic treatment. At the same time, all 

 methods of handling, all ways of seizing and presenting the 

 material of art, obtained an equal right to exist. At the end 

 of the conflict, criticism only demanded that style should 

 realise the end proposed by the artist, that workmanship 

 should be honest, the craftsman conscientious, and the pro- 

 duct faithful to the concept. 



This in itself was a great gain. Yet if this had been all, 

 the prospect for the future would not have been cheering. 

 As their names imply, both classicism and romanticism were 

 derivative and not spontaneous ways of conceiving the art 

 problem. The classical schools of modern times rehandled 



