hould have treated his subject
under this special aspect,[3] and attributed to him so leading a place in
the romantic movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long and
wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historic
restoration--Scott, certainly, and not Coleridge was the "high priest of
Romanticism." [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or
Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and
proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists
(_Romantiker_), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic
versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble
life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme,
sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as
in "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814);
not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of
England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to the
compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneous
jobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturer
of big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not;
and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all
descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original
inspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again,
though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century
tradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge.

But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; and
the passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to
define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets
as our romantic school _par excellence_. "'Lake School' is a name, but
no designation. This was felt in England, where many critics have
accordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained that the
members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their
personal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together,
and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a
strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the
aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle
against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be
various and individual as life itself is. .