real life, if he exists there, and certainly in M.
Feuillet's pages, it is a refreshment to meet him.

1886.

POSTSCRIPT

ainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnon neoteron+

[241] THE words, classical and romantic, although, like many other
critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood
them too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in
the history of art and literature. Used in an exaggerated sense, to
express a greater opposition between those tendencies than really
exists, they have at times tended to divide people of taste into
opposite camps. But in that House Beautiful, which the creative minds
of all generations--the artists and those who have treated life in the
spirit of art--are always building together, for the refreshment of the
human spirit, these oppositions cease; and the Interpreter of the House
Beautiful, the true aesthetic critic, uses these divisions, only so far
as they enable him to enter into the peculiarities of the objects with
which he has to do. The term classical, fixed, as it is, to a
well-defined literature, and a well-defined group in art, is clear,
indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard, and merely
scholastic [242] sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed,
at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have
discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old,
who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and
chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about
it--people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus
fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and
Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and
tame.

And as the term, classical, has been used in a too absolute, and
therefore in a misleading sense, so the term, romantic, has been used
much too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The sense in which
Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this; that, in opposition
to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange
adventure, and sought it in the Middle Age. Much later, in a Yorkshire
village, the spirit of romanticism bore a more really characteristic
fruit in the work of a young girl, Emily Bronte, the romance of
Wuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of Catherine
Linton, and of Heathcliffe--tearing open Catherine's grave, removing
one side of her coffin