NTICISM

CHAPTER I.

The Subject Defined

To attempt at the outset a rigid definition of the word _romanticism_
would be to anticipate the substance of this volume. To furnish an
answer to the question--What is, or was, romanticism? or, at least, What
is, or was English romanticism?--is one of my main purposes herein, and
the reader will be invited to examine a good many literary documents, and
to do a certain amount of thinking, before he can form for himself any
full and clear notion of the thing. Even then he will hardly find
himself prepared to give a dictionary definition or romanticism. There
are words which connote so much, which take up into themselves so much of
the history of the human mind, that any compendious explanation of their
meaning--any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended
description--must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark
of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like
renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia,
pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? _Definitio est negatio_. It
may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism
off from everything else--tell in a clause what it is _not_; but to add a
positive content to the definition--to tell what romanticism _is_, will
require a very different and more gradual process.[1]

Nevertheless a rough, working definition may be useful to start with.
Romanticism, then, in the sense in which I shall commonly employ the
word, means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and
thought of the Middle Ages. Some other elements will have to be added to
this definition, and some modifications of it will suggest themselves
from time to time. It is provisional, tentative, classic, but will serve
our turn till we are ready to substitute a better. It is the definition
which Heine gives in his brilliant little book on the Romantic School in
Germany.[2] "All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, "has a certain
definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of the
Greeks and Romans. In reference to this difference, the former is called
Romantic, the latter Classic. These names, however, are misleading, and
have hitherto caused the most vexatious confusion."[3]

Some of the sources of this confusion will be considered presently.
Meanwhile the passage recalls the fact that _romantic_, when used as a
term in literary n