ry many in
number. The danger of basing a name on a theory of literature is that
the theory may very easily be superseded, or may prove to be inadequate,
and then the name, having become immutable by the force of custom, is
left standing, a monument of ancient error. The terminology of the
sciences, which pretends to be exact and colourless, is always being
reduced to emptiness by the progress of knowledge. The thing that struck
the first observer is proved to be less important than he thought it.
Scientific names, for all their air of learned universality, are merely
fossilized impressions, stereotyped portraits of a single aspect. The
decorous obscurity of the ancient languages is used to conceal an immense
diversity of principle. Mammal, amphibian, coleoptera, dicotyledon,
cryptogam,--all these terms, which, if they were translated into the
language of a peasant, would be seen to record very simple observations,
yet do lend a kind of formal majesty to ignorance.

So it is with the vocabulary of literary criticism: the first use of a
name, because the name was coined by someone who felt the need of it, is
often striking and instructive; the impression is fresh and new. Then
the freshness wears off it, and the name becomes an outworn print, a
label that serves only to recall the memory of past travel. What was
created for the needs of thought becomes a thrifty device, useful only to
save thinking. The best way to restore the habit of thinking is to do
away with the names. The word Romantic loses almost all its meaning and
value when it is used to characterize whole periods of our literature.
Landor and Crabbe belong to a Romantic era of poetry; Steele and Sterne
wrote prose in an age which set before itself the Classic ideal. Yet
there is hardly any distinctively Classical beauty in English verse which
cannot be exemplified from the poetry of Landor and Crabbe; and there are
not very many characteristics of Romantic prose which find no
illustration in the writings of Steele and Sterne. Nevertheless, the
very name of romance has wielded such a power in human affairs, and has
so habitually impressed the human imagination, that time is not misspent
in exhibiting its historical bearings. These great vague words, invented
to facilitate reference to whole centuries of human history--Middle Ages,
Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Revival of Romance--are very often
invoked as if they were something ultimate, as i