ot so much of nature essentially--though happily it is
sometimes so by accident--as of Art, the essence of which is to require,
whether it be art classic or art romantic, art of literature or art of
design, art of sight or art of sound, something _added_ to the truth--as
that truth exists in reality.

Of what this addition is presently. But Romance, as I see it, insists
upon and gives the truth and the whole truth of nature itself. Who is
the greatest of Romantics? By agreement of all but the purblind and the
paradoxer, Shakespeare. Who is the truest and the most universal of all
writers? By consent of classic and romantic, at least of those of either
kind who "count"--again Shakespeare. Let me say at once that, having
early sworn allegiance to Logic, I am perfectly aware that a coincidence
of two things in one person does not prove the identity of the things.
But it proves their compossibility, and when it is found _in excelsis_,
it surely goes near to prove a good deal more. Nor is one in the least
confined to this argument from example, strong as it is. When you
examine Classicism, which, whatever we may say or not say of it, will
always stand as the opposite of Romance, you find that it always leaves
something out. It may--it does in its best examples--give you truth; it
may--it does in its best examples--add something which is its own
"generosity"--its castigation, its order, its reason, its this and that
and the other. To be very liberal, it may be admitted that the perpetual
and meticulous presence in it of "Thou shalt not" do or say this or
that, is most conspicuous--let us go to the extreme of generosity
ourselves and say, is only conspicuous--in its feebler examples. But
there is always something that it does not give, and some of us think
that there are not a few things which it cannot give. There is nothing,
not even ugliness itself, which Romance cannot give, though there its
form of generosity comes in, and the ugly in simple essence becomes
beautiful by treatment.

I could bestow any amount of tediousness in these generalities on my
readers if I thought it necessary: but having developed my proposition
and its meaning, I think it better to pass to the applications thereof
in the present subject.

Of the wide extension of aim and object effected by Romantic influence
in the novel, as in other departments of literature, there can be little
denial, though of course it may be contended that this extension t