German romanticism extends over a relatively long period, since in part it goes back to the ideas of Herder and the Storm and Stress movement in the seventies of the eighteenth century. Within narrower limits, one may assign to it the period from the seventeen-nineties to about 1830, when it was challenged by the Young German Movement. Obviously, however, this does not mark the end of its influence. To give a brief account of so complex and varied a movement, and to attempt to generalize in the face of marked individual differences is an undertaking beset with pitfalls.

In France, romanticism is first of all a revolt against a firmly entrenched classicism. In this respect, French romanticism is markedly different from romanticism in England, Germany, or Spain, where classicism had been less in accord with the national temper and had not risen to the glorious heights of the century of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. It is not surprising therefore that classicism, having produced so rich a literature of profound psychological insight, should have prolonged its dominance in France, to a considerable degree, even into the early years of the nineteenth century. It is significant too that in France, romanticism established itself first in prose with Rousseau and his successors, then in poetry with Lamartine, and only at last in drama with the final triumph of Hugo's Hernani in 1830. This sequence corresponds to the degree of resistance in these three literary forms. The victory over the codified rules of classic tragedy could come in France only after a long fight extending over more than a hundred years. This explains why so much of French debate about the theories of romanticism turns about the drama.

Since the flowers of English romanticism are thoroughly familiar, I shall pay what might otherwise be a disproportionate amount of attention to the roots.

Italy, for obvious reasons, always kept closer than other countries to ancient classical literature. There the classic spirit was native, for the Italians were always conscious of being the heirs of the ancient Roman Empire; there Humanism and the Renaissance arose; there the counter-Reformation resisted the Protestant spirit of the northern countries; there Arcadian academies and pseudo-classicism flourished. But the Romantic attitude was present in many Italian writers from the Middle Ages on. Petrarch was romantic in his introspective melancholy, Ariosto was romantic in his love of picturesque adventure; yet both are classic in the perfection of their style as well as in their knowledge of antiquity. Thus the two tendencies existed side by side, frequently in the same man, although in theory Italy remained classicist until the end of the eighteenth century. The pre-romantic literature of France, England, and Germany was modified in Italy by the prevalent classical tradition, but it found there a fertile soil. As a literary movement, Romanticism in Italy is best considered as represented by a group of writers in the period which followed the collapse of Napoleon's empire.

During the romantic era Spain enjoyed for perhaps the first time in her history a genuine European vogue. The theorizers of romanticism in Germany, England, and France—especially Germany—discovered in Spanish literature, as they imperfectly knew it—chiefly the Don Quixote, the ballads, and the theatre of Calderón—ammunition for their critical and anticlassical campaign, while the creative writers of these countries found in the land and its people, their history, legends and letters, a new and rich store of themes and settings, made as if to order in response to the demand of the moment for the picturesque and the passionate, the chivalresque and the medieval. But having little interest in Spain for herself nor (Mérimée excepted) any real knowledge of her language, history, or culture, they recreated a conventional, literary Spain according to their own needs, desires and imaginations, that “romantic” Spain best typified perhaps in the Carmen of Mérimée and of Bizet, a conception which has persisted in the popular mind down to the present and against which Spaniards and Hispanophiles—then and now—have reacted more or less violently and in vain. (And, may I add, not with complete justification, for creative artists are hardly to be censured for not being exact historians or archeologists.)

In any brief consideration of the implications for English romanticism of the five papers just presented, it is necessary to choose one method of treatment. I must disregard, therefore, international influences, a subject full of danger unless one has time to bolster each statement, and also comparisons and contrasts as such between individual writers or even, to any extent, between nations. I confine myself to a suggestion of the complexity of English romanticism, which seems to share in all the manifold characteristics of romanticism as a general European literary phenomenon and to manifest and combine them in ways of its own. But first I must say what I understand by romanticism.

Some time ago, in a comparative study of European balladries, the problem of the melodies halted me till Professor César Barja told me that my problem had already been solved by Professor Sigurd B. Hustvedt, who sent me a short time later his valuable pamphlet, A Melodic Index of Child's Ballad Tunes (Univ. of California Press, 1936). I have made an extensive use of his system, having introduced a few modifications, and venture to think that my experiments may serve as (so to say) laboratory confirmation. His business has been with English and Scottish ballads; mine has been international.

In the merry England of Queen Elizabeth the life of the professional writer was seldom dull—witness the careers of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Kyd. Not less varied, though perhaps less appealing, is the career of Barnabe Rych, well known to students as a pamphleteer, romancer, and Shakespearean source. It is the lesser known but more humanly and historically interesting phase of his character which the writer ventures here to present: that of soldier and chronicler of the Irish wars, persecutor of Catholics, and informer to the Crown.

As a supplementary note to the volume of Milton's Letters of State in the Columbia edition of his Works (Volume XIII), as well as an illuminating guide to his reputation immediately subsequent to his death, when Williamson's phrase, “that late Villain Milton,” would have met with nearly unanimous approval, it seems worth while to furnish a summary of information bearing on their publication. The gathering of this material has been in progress now for some time. The principal contributors have been Sumner (in his edition of the Christian Doctrine), Hamilton, Masson, Tanner and Howarth (editors of Pepys), and Hanford. Their contributions being somewhat scattered, I have here brought together the chief items. I am also able to add several new letters which have not previously been published, to correct and clarify certain dates, and, I hope, to arrange the whole in such a way that its story unfolds logically and easily.

“A Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform.” While the solemnity of this pronouncement is certainly more characteristic of Rapin than of Dryden, the reverence for epic poetry is quite typical of the author of An Essay of Heroic Plays. As every reader of Dryden knows, the influence of Renaissance epic theory is all but omnipresent in his critical essays and prefaces. It is equally well known that the epic manner which Dryden often adopted in his verse owes much in a general way to the idea of the heroic poem. But fewer readers, I believe, realize the extent to which Dryden's epic style is directly indebted to his “master,” Virgil.

One would have difficulty in finding a stranger case of the growth and decline of a vogue than that of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau as a lyric poet. Before a single verse of his poems had been published he was being referred to as “Rousseau, fameux poète.” When the first edition of his poems appeared, in 1712, he was in disgrace, in exile, but the poems were avidly read and soon he was being spoken of this way: “le seul poète qui nous reste dans notre siècle” and “il faut avouer que nous n'avons de véritable poète que Rousseau.” And yet the vogue of the so-called “grand lyrique français” has so declined that when the Tuffrau revision of the Lanson manual of French literature appeared (1931), with the announced intention of treating only important figures (“seuls les écrivains de premier plan ont trouvé place dans le manuel”), the hundred or more authors treated did not include Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. He suffered the indignity of not being even mentioned, not receiving a passing reference, not even a footnote.

Edmund Burke's youthful essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, first published in 1757, sets forth a theory that the impassioned language of poetry and oratory may rouse emotion without the entry of any clear images into the mind. This proposal—audacious if read by the light of the Augustan sunset, but prophetic of romanticism—has received occasional notice from historians of criticism because it anticipates Lessing's brilliant attack upon Wortmalerei in Laokoon (1766). But the way in which Burke seems to have invented his theory from scraps of Locke and Berkeley, left on the battlefield where the contest over abstract ideas had once been waged, has gone apparently unnoticed.

In 1862, eight years after the death of John Wilson, appeared his biography written by his daughter, Mrs. Mary Gordon. George Gleig in a critique of this volume in the Quarterly Review of January, 1863, unsympathetically declares that Mrs. Gordon's “story of his first love, and of its influence upon his character and prospects, is mere silliness.” Later he declares also that the disproportionate space devoted to this romantic story “is a mistake into which only a woman could fall.” There is certainly a difference, sentimentally, between reading the faded manuscript letters now in the National Library of Scotland and reading these same letters in the cold print of a book; but Mrs. Gordon's inclusion of them is not “mere silliness.” Perhaps she would have omitted them had she realized how vividly they illustrate not only her father's emotional nature, but also his inherent weakness.

There is an extraordinary instance of Shelley's indebtedness to Keats, which has, so far as I know, escaped notice. It is in stanzas III–VI, VII–XI, XIV, XVII–XVIII, XXI–XXII, XXXI, XXXVIII, XLII, LIII, LV, LVIII of The Witch of Atlas. And in those stanzas Shelley has drawn upon all four books of Endymion, and twice, it would seem, upon Sleep and Poetry. That there are other similar instances is not improbable. But a bare statement of this group of facts must, for the moment, suffice.

The current conception of Browning's reputation before his marriage is based to a large extent on that little book of pleasant and readable scholarship by Professor T. R. Lounsbury, The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning. Lounsbury attempted to show that Pauline (1833) and Paracelsus (1835) were surprisingly well received for first poems; that Strafford (1837), a bad play, chilled this initial enthusiasm; and that Sordello (1840), a foolishly obscure poem, killed all enthusiasm except in a few. He went on to assert that the effect of Sordello lasted for many years, and that thereafter there was an ignorance “almost incredible” among “the great majority of the most highly educated class,” even among those “distinguished in letters,” and that this ignorance did not begin to lift until the publication of The Ring and the Book (1868–69).

Out of the pages of Pickwick step many of Dickens's funniest eccentrics. Characters with mannerisms and tags of speech parade through the novel, illustrating a distinctive style of characterization which is usually labelled caricature in every novel he writes later. How and why did he begin this style? Much light can be thrown upon his early narrative development by a study of Mr. Jingle, the character which has one of the most extreme of all Dickens's uses of eccentric mannerism—a rapid-fire, staccato habit of speech. Furthermore, an unbelievable anecdote usually constitutes the subject-matter of Mr. Jingle's remarks, as:

Don Bolaro Fizzgig—Grandee—only daughter—Donna Christina—splendid creature—loved me to distraction—jealous father—high-souled creature—handsome Englishman—Donna Christina in despair—prussic acid—stomach pump in my portmanteau—operation performed—old Bolaro in ecstasies—consent to our union—join hands and floods of tears—romantic story—very.

The relation between Balzac's fiction and that of the popular novelists of his generation has often provoked discussion. Various opinions have been advanced: at one extreme, the over-hasty and malignant judgment of Sainte-Beuve, who persisted in classing Balzac with Sue and the feuilletonistes; at the other, the adulation of those who resent any comparison between Balzac and men of second and third rank. Perhaps, in view of the importance which attaches to questions of technique, a resuscitation of the controversy is permissible: an investigation, this time, of Balzac's treatment of violent physical action. The conclusion of such a study might prove only that Balzac differed from the popular novelists—in which case, we should be bringing merely another coal to Newcastle. If, however, our investigation of violent action can be related to the problem of the novelist's general technique, the effort may not be altogether in vain.

Hofmannsthal's Ad Me Ipsum, which appeared posthumously in 1930, was an attempt on the part of the author to reduce his major work to a compact, often gnomic, schema of his creative intentions. Long before the appearance of this confession, which is a compendium of literary interpretation rather than æsthetic evaluation, it was obvious that the premature criticism of the nineties had wrongly classified the poet in the art-for-art's-sake school. Not only were his early plays and lyrics highly colored by an exacting ethos (though its clear formulation came slowly and subsequently), but the various prose-pieces (Gespräche, Reden, Aufsätze, etc.) published at intervals from the early pseudo-authorship of Loris until the close of the poet's life testify to an æsthetic theory in which ethical considerations play an important, if not dominant, rôle.