definition of
things" in classical writers and the "thrilling vagueness and
uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating or colored light--the
"halo"--with which the romantic writer invests his theme. "The romantic
manner, . . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions,
may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed and
measured preciseness of statement. . . But on the other hand the
romantic manner lends itself, as the true classical does not, to inferior
work. Second-rate conceptions excitedly and approximately put into words
derive from it an illusive attraction which may make them for a time, and
with all but the coolest judges, pass as first-rate. Whereas about true
classical writing there can be no illusion. It presents to us
conceptions calmly realized in words that exactly define them,
conceptions depending for their attraction, not on their halo, but on
themselves."

As examples of these contrasting styles, Mr. Colvin puts side by side
passages from "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale,"
with passages, treating similar themes, from Landor's "Gebir" and
"Imaginary Conversations." The contrast might be even more clearly
established by a study of such a piece as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
where the romantic form is applied to classical content; or by a
comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "The Lotus Eaters," in which
Homeric subjects are treated respectively in the classic and the romantic
manner.

Alfred de Musset, himself in early life a prominent figure among the
French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and
contradictory definitions of the word _romantisme_ that were current in
the third and fourth decades of this century.[18] Two worthy provincials
write from the little town of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the
"Revue des Deux Mondes," appealing to him to tell them what romanticism
means. For two years Dupuis and his friend Cotonet had supposed that the
term applied only to the theater, and signified the disregard of the
unities. "Shakspere, for example makes people travel from Rome to
London, and from Athens to Alexandria in a quarter of an hour. His
heroes live ten or twenty years between two acts. His heroines, angels
of virtue during a whole scene, have only to pass into the _coulisses_,
to reappear as wives, adulteresses, widows, and grandmothers. There, we
said to ourselves, is the romantic.