DISCOVERY 



333 



the early German Romanticists called their school 

 " Romantic " in defiance of a popular meaning of the 

 word which they did not at all wish to attach to it ; 

 to them Romantic meant rather of the nature of 

 the Romance or Latin nations than an imitation 

 of media:val romances of faery. As a hterary school 

 they were, in fact, far less romantic, in the popular 

 sense of the term, than the generation that had pre- 

 ceded them. And when Madame de Stael, in her 

 great book on Germany — a book, by the way, that 

 was written with the leader of the German Romantic 

 School at her elbow — opened the sluice-gates, and 

 German influence poured across France and the rest 

 of Europe, the undelined term Romantic became a 

 kind of household w'ord everj'where. To make the 

 confusion worse, no attempt was made in other lands 

 to employ it for the same thing which the Germans 

 meant by it. With perhaps a surer literary instinct, 

 the French and ourselves recognised what the Germans 

 were unwilling to admit, a kinship between the new 

 tendencies and the individualistic revolt associated with 

 Rousseau, the revival of an interest in nature and 

 mediaevalism which had taken place some decades 

 before there was any talk of a Romantic school at all. 

 Romanticism in lands outside Germany thus went its 

 own way and grafted itself on earlier movements ; 

 each people worked out for itself a conception of 

 Romanticism suitable to its own needs. Thus the 

 German Romantic School is one thing, the Ecole 

 Romantique in France quite a different thing ; different, 

 too, is the Romanticism of Italian literature, and 

 certainly different our own somewhat vague concep- 

 tion of Romanticism as a kind of general antithesis 

 to all that is not bound by classical rule. So compli- 

 cated is the problem that one might well give up as 

 hopeless any attempt to correlate these various forms 

 of Romanticism. The analogue, for instance, of German 

 Romanticism in English literature is — apart from 

 Carlyle, who is obviously an immediate representative of 

 the German Romantic mood — not our so-called Roman- 

 tic writers, Scott and Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, 

 but Ruskin and the pre-RaphaeUte Brethren ; the 

 Romantic poets in France have nothing in common 

 with either group, their nearest analogue being possibly 

 their own si.xteenth-century literature ; while so 

 despairing is a recent Italian critic of finding a common 

 basis that she plaintively questions whether there is 

 any Romantic school in Italy at all. Correlation is 

 clearly not to be attained on the lines of precise national 

 definitions. Other critics have gone to the opposite 

 extreme and started from the widest possible con- 

 ception of Romanticism. This is especially true of 

 the ItaUans, as witness Signor Borgese's most stimulat- 

 ing volume on the history of Romantic criticism in Italy. 

 But we doubt whether a common basis for the various 



national developments is to be obtained by going back 

 deep into the eighteenth century. 



The tendency of recent works on Romanticism — and 

 the chief books we have in mind are enumerated at 

 ihe end of the present article — has been to try to get 

 beneath the surface, to discover, if not a common 

 definition applicable to all literatures, at least one 

 common denominator in the Romantic equation. 

 Several of these new works contain a definite effort to 

 discover the esoteric secret of the Romantic faith, 

 to understand the extraordinary vitality that made 

 Romanticism such a power in literary Europe. In 

 Germany — and, after all, Germany was the home of 

 the Romantic " idea " — there has been in the past ten or 

 twenty years a large mass of painstaking investigations 

 into the doctrines of Romanticism ; these investiga- 

 tions have cleared away old prejudices and established 

 new values. Gradually Friedrich Sclilegel has emerged 

 from the mist that formerly enveloped him, as the 

 great inspiring force of the new movement ; while 

 his better-known brother, August Wilhelm, is now 

 seen to have been but a populariser of Friedrich 's 

 ideas. It has become clear that the outer parapher- 

 nalia which we commonly associate with the move- 

 ment — the ruined castles and medievalism, sham and 

 real, the moonlight and sentimentality — had little to 

 do with the stability and potency of Romanticism ; 

 these were merely a heritage from an earher period, 

 and of themselves not possessed of any redeeming 

 virtue. Literary Romanticism, as is coming to be under- 

 stood in Germany, is by no means in antagonism to 

 what we usually regard as essentially classical charac- 

 teristics, such as unities, regularity of form, and poetic 

 decorum. On the contrary, the German school has 

 room for classicists as well as contemners of classic 

 form ; it is a widehearted cult based on individual 

 freedom. Recent French critics of Romanticism have 

 taken a somewhat different hne ; they, too, have been 

 looking beyond the individual phenomena and endea- 

 vouring to discover the essential root of the matter. 

 To M. Lasserre, for instance, whose brilliant if a little 

 specious work on Romanticism caused considerable 

 commotion a few years ago. Romanticism is an evil 

 thing and has its source in Rousseau ; the object of 

 his work is, while insisting on the unbroken continuity 

 of literary evolution from the eighteenth century, to 

 refute accepted estimates of the French Romantic move- 

 ment. The Italian investigators, too, have shown much 

 searching of the heart, and are beginning, somewhat 

 discouraged, to see in the so-called Itahan " Romanti- 

 cismo " merely a kind of outer, inessential shell, an 

 imitation of Sir Walter Scott, and a bhnd faith in 

 that " Bible of Italian Romanticism," Schlegel's 

 Lectures on Dramatic Literature; in other words, a 

 movement without any deeper roots in Italian soil. And 



