United States or Germany ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Lessing and Herder, who were the critical protagonists of the new world, had indeed a knowledge and admiration of ancient art which was probably superior to that of the classicists, but they refused to admit that art was bound to follow the forms of antiquity, and maintained rather that its forms would necessarily change with the changing conditions of the world, and with the varying characteristics of different nationalities or races.
The convention itself, if it is unfamiliar to us, is what fills our attention, so that we forget to look for the moving spirit behind. And indeed, in the work of the later classicists, there was too often no spirit to look for. The husk alone remained a finicky pretentious framework, fluttering with the faded rags of ideals long outworn.
For one thing, these great classicists make the mistake of thinking that only through literature, and, what is more, the austere literature of Greece and Rome, can this sense be developed. I myself have a deep admiration for Greek literature.
In general, three schools of writers are noticeable: first, the classicists, who, under Johnson's lead, insisted upon elegance and regularity of style; second, the romantic poets, like Collins, Gray, Thomson, and Burns, who revolted from Pope's artificial couplets and wrote of nature and the human heart ; third, the early novelists, like Defoe and Fielding, who introduced a new type of literature.
The advice of the classicists, who wished to ignore the crude drama beloved of the public, was not heeded; it will not be heeded now. Our task is to make a bourgeois democracy fruitful. We must work with what we have. Much has been said of the advantage for us, and perhaps for the world, which has come from the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain.
The sooner, in short, that this theory of copying, which some, even besides the classicists, have maintained, is abandoned, the better, not only for the truth, but for the literary reputation of those who put it forth.
He offended the pedants and the formalists by his daring originality, he had secured the hate of rival musicians by the vigor and keenness of his criticisms. Berlioz was in the very heat of the artistic controversy between the classicists and romanticists, and was associated with Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Delacroix, Liszt, Chopin, and others, in fighting that acrimonious art-battle.
It is precisely because Goethe is an elusive Proteus that all doctrines may equally claim him. Romanticists turn with predilection to the creator of Werther or the first “Faust.” Classicists admire the plastic beauty of Tasso and Iphigenia. The cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the Weltbürger, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of die Weltweisheit.
But as John Addington Symonds wrote: "The shams of the classicists, the spasms of the romanticists have alike to be abandoned. Neither on a mock Parnassus nor on a paste- board Blocksberg can the poet of the age now worship. The artist walks the world at large beneath the light of natural day."
And the maxim of laissez faire became the last word of social wisdom. The argument of the classicists ran thus. If there is everywhere complete economic freedom, then there will ensue in consequence a régime of social justice.
Word Of The Day