book; but the trouble came not from
the reading, but from their suddenly ceasing to read.

There is in all these poems of the Middle Ages a marked character which
distinguishes them from those of Greece and Rome. We characterize this
difference by calling the first Romantic and the other Classic. Yet
these appellations are only uncertain rubrics, and have led hitherto to
the most discouraging, wearisome entanglements, which become worse since
we give to antique poetry the designation of "Plastic," instead of
"Classic." From this arose much misunderstanding; for, justly, all poets
should work their material plastically, be it Christian or heathen; they
should set it forth in clear outlines; in short, plastic form should be
the main desideratum in modern Romantic art, quite as much as in the
ancient. And are not the figures in the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante or in
the pictures of Raphael as plastic as those in Virgil? The difference
lies in this, that the plastic forms in ancient art are absolutely
identical with the subject or the idea which the artist would set forth,
as, for example, that the wanderings of Ulysses mean nothing else than
the journeyings of a man named Odysseus, who was son of Laertes and
husband of Penelope; and further, that the Bacchus which we see in the
Louvre is nothing else than the graceful, winsome son of Semele, with
audacious melancholy in his eyes and sacred voluptuousness on his soft
and arching lips. It is quite otherwise in Romantic art, in which the
wild wanderings of a knight have ever an esoteric meaning, symbolizing
perhaps the erring course of life. The dragon whom he overcomes is sin;
the almond which from afar casts comforting perfume to the traveler is
the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, which
are three in one, as shell, fibre, and kernel make one nut. When Homer
describes the armor of a hero, it is a good piece of work, worth such
and such a number of oxen; but when a monk of the Middle Ages describes
in his poems the garments of the Mother of God, one may be sure that by
this garb he means as many virtues, and a peculiar significance lies
hidden under this holy covering of the immaculate virginity of Maria,
who, as her son is the almond-kernel, is naturally sung as the
almond-flower. That is the character of the medieval poetry which we
call Romantic.

Classic art had only to represent the finite or determined, and its
forms could be one and the same