and heat of their conception, purge away, sooner or
later, all that is not organically appropriate to it, till the whole
effect adjusts itself in clear, orderly, proportionate form; which
form, after a very little time, becomes classical in its turn.

The romantic or classical character of a picture, a poem, a literary
work, depends, then, on the balance of certain qualities in it; and in
this sense, a very real distinction may be drawn between good classical
and good romantic work. But all critical terms are relative; and there
is at least a valuable suggestion in that theory of Stendhal's, that
all good art was romantic in its day. In the beauties of Homer and
Pheidias, quiet as they now seem, there must have been, for those who
confronted them for the first time, excitement and surprise, the
sudden, unforeseen satisfaction of the desire of beauty. Yet the
Odyssey, with its marvellous adventure, is more romantic than the
Iliad, which nevertheless contains, among many other romantic episodes,
that of the immortal horses of Achilles, who weep at the death of
Patroclus. Aeschylus is more romantic than Sophocles, whose
Philoctetes, were it written now, might figure, for the strangeness of
its motive and the perfectness of its execution, as typically romantic;
while, of Euripides, it may be said, that his method in [259] writing
his plays is to sacrifice readily almost everything else, so that he
may attain the fulness of a single romantic effect. These two
tendencies, indeed, might be applied as a measure or standard, all
through Greek and Roman art and poetry, with very illuminating results;
and for an analyst of the romantic principle in art, no exercise would
be more profitable, than to walk through the collection of classical
antiquities at the Louvre, or the British Museum, or to examine some
representative collection of Greek coins, and note how the element of
curiosity, of the love of strangeness, insinuates itself into classical
design, and record the effects of the romantic spirit there, the traces
of struggle, of the grotesque even, though over-balanced here by
sweetness; as in the sculpture of Chartres and Rheims, the real
sweetness of mind in the sculptor is often overbalanced by the
grotesque, by the rudeness of his strength.

Classicism, then, means for Stendhal, for that younger enthusiastic
band of French writers whose unconscious method he formulated into
principles, the reign of what is pedantic, c