s. This, he contends, is what all great workmen had
always understood. Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere, had exercised an
absolute independence in their choice of subject and treatment. To
turn always with that ever-changing spirit, yet to retain the flavour
of what was admirably done in past generations, in the classics, as we
say--is the problem of true romanticism. "Dante," he observes, "was
pre-eminently the romantic poet. He adored Virgil, yet he wrote the
Divine Comedy, with the episode of Ugolino, which is as unlike the
Aeneid as can possibly be. And those who thus obey the fundamental
principle of romanticism, one by one become classical, and are joined
to that ever-increasing common league, formed by men of all countries,
to approach nearer and nearer to perfection."

Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, [257] is in its
essential characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all
times, in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and
the amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one by one,
than the peculiarity of a time or a school. Depending on the varying
proportion of curiosity and the desire of beauty, natural tendencies of
the artistic spirit at all times, it must always be partly a matter of
individual temperament. The eighteenth century in England has been
regarded as almost exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, a
type of so much which breaks through what are conventionally thought
the influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in it,
and the reaction in favour of naturalism in poetry begins in that
century, early. There are, thus, the born romanticists and the born
classicists. There are the born classicists who start with form, to
whose minds the comeliness of the old, immemorial, well-recognised
types in art and literature, have revealed themselves impressively; who
will entertain no matter which will not go easily and flexibly into
them; whose work aspires only to be a variation upon, or study from,
the older masters. "'Tis art's decline, my son!" they are always
saying, to the progressive element in their own generation; to those
who care for that which in fifty years' time every one will be caring
for. On the other hand, there are the born romanticists, who start
with an original, [258] untried matter, still in fusion; who conceive
this vividly, and hold by it as the essence of their work; who, by the
very vividness