Mortality and the Heart of Midlothian, Guy Mannering, and the Fair Maid of Perth, where there are interests woven into romance-interests of character and conversation-which are not, properly speaking, romantic at all the humours of Dandie Dinmont and Cuddie Headrigg.

Quite unlike the diffuse historical manner of much of Waverley and Kenilworth and Quentin Durward, there is the form, or rather many forms, of short story: Wandering Willie's Tale in Redgauntlet-The Highland Widow The Two Drovers: these last bringing in a tragic element of mistake and misunderstanding with more effect than any of the longer novels. And in verse there is the same enormous variety-between the plain straightforward narrative of the Lady of the Lake and the lyrical mystery of County Guy and some other of the shorter pieces. All which goes to prove what needs no particular proof, that Romance means almost everything from the two horsemen riding together at the beginning of the historical novel, or from the pasteboard Moors of the puppet-show, to the spell of the enchanted ground, the music of dreams and shadows.

ADDITIONAL NOTE

The following passage from the Citizen of the World gives a glimpse of a romantic school not now very clearly remembered:

'I was going to expose his mistakes when it was insisted that I had nothing of the true Eastern manner in my delivery. This gentleman's conversation,' said one of the ladies who was a great reader, 'is like our own-mere chit-chat and common sense; there is nothing like sense in the true Eastern style, where nothing more is required but sublimity. Oh! for a history of Aboulfaouris the

grand voyager, of genii, magicians, rocks, bags of bullets, giants and enchanters, where all is great, obscure, magnificent, and unintelligible.' 'I have written many a sheet of Eastern tale myself,' interrupts the author, and I defy the severest critic to say but that I have stuck close to the true manner. I have compared a lady's chin to the snow upon the mountains of Banek; a soldier's sword to the clouds that obscure the face of heaven. If riches are mentioned, I compare them to the flocks that graze the verdant Tefflis; if poverty, to the mists that veil the brow of Mount Baku. I have used thee and thou upon all occasions; I have described fallen stars and splitting mountains, not forgetting the little houris who make a pretty figure in every description. But you shall hear how I generally begin: "Eben-benbolo who was the son of Ban, was born on the foggy summits of Benderabassi. His beard was whiter than the feathers which veil the breast of the penguin; his eyes were like the eyes of doves when washed by the dews of the morning; his hair, which hung like the willow weeping over the glossy stream, was so beautiful that it seemed to reflect its own brightness, and his feet were as the feet of a wild deer which fleeth to the tops of the mountains." There, there is the true Eastern taste for you; every advance made towards sense is only a deviation from sound. Eastern tales should always be sonorous, lofty, musical, and unmeaning.'" Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, Letter XXXIII.

XXXVIII

ON THE VALUE OF THE TERMS " CLASSICAL" AND "ROMANTIC " AS APPLIED ΤΟ

LITERATURE.

classical" and "romantic

THE technical terms "classical have never had so much vogue in England as in Germany and France. We made the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century without the exaggerations and extremes which the English observer notices in the literature, as in the politics of less fortunate nations on the Continent. Yet we too had our revolt against ancient established authority in literature; it was not without its confused noise and shoutings. There was a great battle of the books all ●ver Europe at the beginning of this century, and every reader of books, ever since, has compulsion laid on him to know something about the rights and wrongs of the contest. One can hardly open a newspaper without finding evidence that there is or once was a Romantic School in the world-were it only in this point, that newspapers, in defiance of every classical code, use the name Tragedy exclusively for the bloodshed which they delight in reproducing coram populo. The modern journalistic tragedy—“ Tragedy in Camberwell (or Euston Square, or wherever it may be)-belongs to the school of Victor Hugo rather than Sophocles.

The terms "classical" and "romantic" were used, in France especially, to denote two antagonistic parties. Whatever the truth may be about "classical" and 'romantic," it may be fairly presumed that they do not indicate mutually exclusive camps; that it is not, now, a question of war to the death, as in the days of 1830, when Théophile Gautier put on his red waistcoat -when to have romantic views on the subject of rhyme and phraseology might prejudice a man with his relations, even alter a will. We, nowadays, claim the right to circulate between the two camps-between the Versailles of Louis XIV. on the one side and "Notre Dame de Paris" on the other. We will read Boileau if we please, and Rasselas, and Congreve's Mourning Bride. We will have no Roman Index in our Republic of letters.

Here a misgiving arises. Do you really want to read Congreve's Mourning Bride? or Ambrose Philips's Distrest Mother? Is it not the case that all your reading, from Grimm and Mother Goose to the Scalp Hunters and the Headless Horseman, from the Mysteries of Paris to the Ring and the Book, is all but exclusively romantic with perhaps an occasional page of Horace scanned in some conscientious moment-a halfpenny worth of classical bread to an intolerable deal of romantic sack. Here and there may be found a rare spirit who from his school days has by preference read -for his serious reading, at any rate-the great masters of antithesis and rhetoric, and strong understanding. But the majority of us, it may be guessed, have failed to resist the course of the stars and the dial-have not renounced our birthright as Macaulay did, a profane person who kept his Gibbon and his Horace Walpole, but refused to listen to Carlyle, Ruskin, or Tennyson.

(He made some exceptions-he read the works of Hallam.) We are all of us impartial; but we vote with the Romantics. We have no prejudice against bag-wigs or shoe buckles, but they are not in fashion just now.

So we get to this position that while we have no dislike of the classical school of literature, no such hatred as was entertained by the French romantic school of 1830 towards the Conservative tradition; still, on the whole, the great mass of our reading has been romantic. We incline to think that romantic works-e.g. Sartor Resartus and the Stones of Venice —have more weight with us, are nearer to us, than Johnson's London or Bishop Butler's Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion.

It is time, however, to look at the matter with somewhat greater exactness. For, after all, though we may be content with the name "romantic" for the works of most of the nineteenth-century authors whom we admire, from the author of the Ancient Mariner to the author of Treasure Island, and even for such old writers as the inventor of Caliban and Ariel, yet we know very well that it is really a very vague term, and that "classical" is equally vague and may be claimed by Lucretius, Virgil and Milton in another sense than that which makes it applicable to Pope or Johnson.

The conclusion one is almost irresistibly led to adopt is that the terms are used each of them in two wholly different ways.

"Classical" is used to denote the eighteenthcentury modish literature-prim, moderate, whiggish and priggish.

"Romantic" denotes the literature of enthusiasm, mysticism, freedom.