, that he may really lie beside her in
death--figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicately
beautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit. In
Germany, again, [243] that spirit is shown less in Tieck, its
professional representative, than in Meinhold, the author of Sidonia
the Sorceress and the Amber-Witch. In Germany and France, within the
last hundred years, the term has been used to describe a particular
school of writers; and, consequently, when Heine criticises the
Romantic School in Germany--that movement which culminated in Goethe's
Goetz von Berlichingen; or when Theophile Gautier criticises the
romantic movement in France, where, indeed, it bore its most
characteristic fruits, and its play is hardly yet over where, by a
certain audacity, or bizarrerie of motive, united with faultless
literary execution, it still shows itself in imaginative literature,
they use the word, with an exact sense of special artistic qualities,
indeed; but use it, nevertheless, with a limited application to the
manifestation of those qualities at a particular period. But the
romantic spirit is, in reality, an ever-present, an enduring principle,
in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought and style
which that, and other similar uses of the word romantic really
indicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widely
working influence.

Though the words classical and romantic, then, have acquired an almost
technical meaning, in application to certain developments of German and
French taste, yet this is but one variation of an old opposition, which
may be traced from the [244] very beginning of the formation of
European art and literature. From the first formation of anything like
a standard of taste in these things, the restless curiosity of their
more eager lovers necessarily made itself felt, in the craving for new
motives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of style. Hence,
the opposition between the classicists and the romanticists--between
the adherents, in the culture of beauty, of the principles of liberty,
and authority, respectively--of strength, and order or what the Greeks
called kosmiotes.+

Sainte-Beuve, in the third volume of the Causeries du Lundi, has
discussed the question, What is meant by a classic? It was a question
he was well fitted to answer, having himself lived through many phases
of taste, and having been in earlier life an enthusiastic