onventional, and narrowly
academical in art; for him, all good art is romantic. To Sainte-Beuve,
who understands the term in a more liberal sense, it is the
characteristic of certain epochs, of certain spirits in every epoch,
not given to the exercise of original imagination, but rather to the
working out of refinements of manner on some [260] authorised matter;
and who bring to their perfection, in this way, the elements of sanity,
of order and beauty in manner. In general criticism, again, it means
the spirit of Greece and Rome, of some phases in literature and art
that may seem of equal authority with Greece and Rome, the age of Louis
the Fourteenth, the age of Johnson; though this is at best an
uncritical use of the term, because in Greek and Roman work there are
typical examples of the romantic spirit. But explain the terms as we
may, in application to particular epochs, there are these two elements
always recognisable; united in perfect art--in Sophocles, in Dante, in
the highest work of Goethe, though not always absolutely balanced
there; and these two elements may be not inappropriately termed the
classical and romantic tendencies.

Material for the artist, motives of inspiration, are not yet exhausted:
our curious, complex, aspiring age still abounds in subjects for
aesthetic manipulation by the literary as well as by other forms of
art. For the literary art, at all events, the problem just now is, to
induce order upon the contorted, proportionless accumulation of our
knowledge and experience, our science and history, our hopes and
disillusion, and, in effecting this, to do consciously what has been
done hitherto for the most part too unconsciously, to write our English
language as the Latins wrote theirs, as the [261] French write, as
scholars should write. Appealing, as he may, to precedent in this
matter, the scholar will still remember that if "the style is the man"
it is also the age: that the nineteenth century too will be found to
have had its style, justified by necessity--a style very different,
alike from the baldness of an impossible "Queen Anne" revival, and an
incorrect, incondite exuberance, after the mode of Elizabeth: that we
can only return to either at the price of an impoverishment of form or
matter, or both, although, an intellectually rich age such as ours
being necessarily an eclectic one, we may well cultivate some of the
excellences of literary types so different as those: that in li