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There is satire, which rebukes both romanticism and romance, which exposes the fallacies of the one, and punctures the exuberance of the other. More effective, perhaps, than either humor or satire as an antiseptic against romance, is the overmastering sense of fact.
Romanticism was a revolt against eighteenth-century pseudo-classicism, and it had its day, and did its work, and went out. Haydn did not want to revolt against classicism, nor even pseudo-classicism. In fact, in music Haydn stands for classicism, and this is no contradiction of what I have written about his throwing away the formulas of his predecessors.
And such romanticism is not a sin. It is none the worse for the knowledge of truth. It only tries to make the best of it, hard as it may be; and in this hardness discovers a certain aspect of beauty.
The ordinary reader will pass them by, but to the student they are all significant as expressions of very different phases of the romantic revival. Thomson belongs among the pioneers of Romanticism.
HISTORY. Text-book, Montgomery, pp. 280-322; Cheyney, pp. 516-574. General Works, Greene, ch. 9, sec. 7, to ch. 10, sec. 4; Traill, Gardiner, Macaulay, etc. LITERATURE. General Works. The Cambridge Literature, Taine, Saintsbury, etc. Special Works. The Romantic Revival. W.L. Phelps's The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement; Beers's English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century. The Novel.
Certain of them called themselves realists, certain romanticists; but none of them seemed to know what realism was, or what romanticism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of material. March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work or not; but this was not an easy matter.
By instituting a new criticism and by opening new literatures to the French, she succeeded in emancipating art from fixed rules and in facilitating the sudden growth of romanticism in France. In her life, her great desire was to spread happiness and to obtain it, to love and to be loved in return.
This is indeed the explanation of what I mentioned at the outset as the chief characteristic of this sculpture, the academic inelasticity, namely, with which it essays to reproduce the Renaissance romanticism.
But I like all the books of Galdos that I have read, and though he seems to have worked more tardily out of his romanticism than Valdes, since he has worked finally into such realism as that of Leon Roch, his greatness leaves nothing to be desired.
The only French novelist whose books have a circulation approaching the works of Daudet and of Zola is Georges Ohnet, a writer whose popularity is as interesting as his stories, because it explains, though it does not excuse, the contempt the Goncourts had for the favor of the great French public, and also because it shows how the highest form of Romanticism still ferments beneath the varnish of Naturalism in what is called genius among the great masses of readers.
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