it which changes its nature? something extraneous, ornamental, fantastic— And while the robes imbibe the solar ray something more alien from true classical than almost anything you can find in the wildest romanticist—as you will call him? VIII When you apply the word "classical" or the word "classicism" to such tawdry overlay as I have quoted, are you not-are your professional instructors notcommitting the first of literary offences, that of perverting the sense of words? Do you not-do not your professional instructors-by this use of the word "classical" mean in fact "conventional"-a word which contradicts almost every notion that can be even remotely associated with the classics? Your professors and compilers of little handbooks may not go about like Théophile Gautier, wearing crimson waistcoats: but beneath whatever waistcosts they wear they carry a stupidity which was never Gautier's, in his most intoxicated moments. Pope sealed a fashion. It was an artificial manner of writing, as far removed from the practice of the men we call classical authors as any manner of writing could well be. Sophocles or Virgil or Dante would have shuddered at it. Still he set up a fashion under which it became unpoetical-that is, was esteemed unpoetical -to call the moon the moon without adding "sole regent of the night," or to talk of drying clothes: to be garments worthy of poetry they had to "imbibe the solar ray. But are we sure that our poets, having repudiated Pope, are not practising very similar fooleries in our own year of grace? The inventions of one age are always in process of becoming the conventions, the tyrants, of the next. Listen to this, from Francis Thompson's Essay on written of our own day: Shelley; and mark you, it is There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to the poetical purple, and without whose prescriptive aid none dares aspire to the poetical purple; against these it is time some banner should be raised. And he goes on: It is at any rate curious to note that the literary revolution against the despotic diction of Pope seems issuing, like political revolutions, in a despotism of its own making. If our teachers persist in labelling Pope and his imitators as "classical," let us cheerfully claim the bulk of Greek and Roman literature as "romantic" and have done with it. Why not? Do you postulate, for romantic writing, glamour and magic, adventures on 'perilous seas in faery lands forlorn"? Very well; then I exhibit this same Odyssey to you, with its isle of Circe, where that Æaean isle forgets the main, its garden-court of Phæacia, its wonderlands of the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Lotus-eaters, its scene, a moment ago related, of the princess playing at ball with her maidens on the strand; or I exhibit the marvellous tale of Cupid and Psyche, parent of a hundred fairy-tales dispersed throughout the world (Beauty and the Beast for one). Or is it passion you demand of romance? I exhibit the passionate verses of Sappho, preserved for us by Longinus, beginning Φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν or a speech of Phaedra, or Catullus's lyric of Acme and Septimius. Is it pathos?-utter pathos? I exhibit to you Priam on his knees, kissing the hand that has murdered his son; Helen on the wall; Andromache bidding farewell to her husband at the gate, her boy kicking and crowing on her arm at sight of his father's nodding plume; and again that last glimpse Virgil gives of her, in slavery, returning from vows paid to the dead-of her that was "Hectoris Andromache." Is it any sense of predestinate doom fulfilled? I refer you to the last stand of the Sicilian expedition in Thucydides. Or is it a general sense of the woe, the tears, the frailty, the transience inherent in all human things? A dozen passages from Virgil might be quoted. I think, if you will look into "classicism" and "romanticism" for yourselves, with your own open eyes, you will find-though the whole pother about their difference amounts to nothing that need trouble a healthy man-it amounts to this: some men have naturally a sense of form stronger than their sense of colour: some men have a sense of colour stronger than their sense of form. In proportion as they indulge their proclivities or neglect to discipline them, one man will be a classical, the other a romantic, writer. At their utmost, one will be a dull formalist, the other a frantic dauber. I truly believe there is not much more to be said. I conclude by reciting to you two compositions by opposing which you may summarise for yourselves all that I have been saying today. The first is a Table of Contents of a volume by Doctor George Brandes (Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, vol. iv). Common Characteristics of the Period National Characteristics The Political Background The Beginnings of Naturalism Strength and Sincerity of the Love of Nature Naturalistic Romanticism The Lake School's Conception of Liberty The Lake School's Oriental Romanticism Historical Naturalism All-embracing Sensuousness The Poetry of Irish Opposition and Revolt Erotic Lyric Poetry The British Spirit of Freedom Republican Humanism Radical Naturalism Byron: the Passionate Personality Byron: the Passionate Personality (continued) Byron: his Self-absorption Byron: the Revolutionary Spirit Comic and Tragic Realism Culmination of Naturalism Byron's Death Conclusion What shall I oppose to this? Something quite simple, something you all know by heart, yet something so lovely that it never can be hackneyed. Ah what avails the sceptered race, Ah what the form divine! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee. Is that classical? It is as classical as anything in Catullus. Is that romantic? Yes, I think it is also romantic. But what matters either? It is the pure loveliness of it that alone should concern you. All things considered, I advise that it may help our minds to earn an honest living if we dismiss the terms "classical" and "romantic" out of our vocabulary for a while. |