. Goethe had little but rebuke for the whole of
the romantic movement, which began in his old age. The German form of it
he thought unnatural, and at best a conventional imitation of an earlier
period; and the French form, of which Victor Hugo was then the rising
star, he thought a perversion of naturalism, an exaggeration of it until
it became insipid or merely revolting. To Byron alone he gave the
tribute of the most ungrudging admiration: in the opposition between
classicism and romanticism, he declined to take him for a follower of
either, but as the complete representative of his own time. The maxim
that "the classical is health, and the romantic, disease," may not
altogether commend itself to us now; but with wonderful insight Goethe
foresaw the direction in which the romantic movement would lead. "The
romantic," he says here, "is already fallen into its own abysm. It is
hard to imagine anything more degraded than the worst of the new
productions." If he could have said this two generations ago, what would
he have said now? How could he have spoken without contempt of those who
make all that is common and unclean in itself a subject with which
literature may properly be occupied? These are the writers who profess
to be realists, under a completely mistaken notion of what realism
means, as applied to art; and to them the chief realities seem to be
just the very things that decent people keep out of sight. They forget
that in literature, as in all art, the dominating realities are the
highest Ideals. As an antidote to this poison of corruption Goethe
pointed to the ancient world, and bid us study there the types of the
loftiest manhood. "Bodies which rot while they are still alive and are
edified by the detailed contemplation of their own decay; dead men who
remain in the world for the ruin of others, and feed their death on the
living--to this," he exclaimed, "have come our makers of literature.
When the same thing happened in antiquity, it was only as a strange
token of some rare disease; but with the moderns the disease has become
endemic and epidemic." Akin to these pseudo-realists, and coming under
the same ban, are some of our modern novel-writers who do, indeed, avoid
the depth of degradation, but try to move the feelings by dwelling in a
similar fashion on matters which are not, and never can be, fit subjects
of literary treatment; such as painful deaths by horrible distempers, or
the minute details of prolong