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Updated: May 10, 2025
The short poems are Attic in their serenity and their grace. It is not the rococo pseudo-classicism of the later versifiers of the eighteenth century, it is the delicate flavour of true Hellenism that breathes from them; and, as one reads them, one is reminded alternately of Theocritus and of Keats.
In some of his tragedies his classic learning was thought to be ostentatiously displayed, but this was not true of his comedy, and on the whole he was too strong to be swamped in pseudo-classicism. For his experience of men and of life was deep and varied.
On the one hand was the insatiable desire for voluptuous spectacle, for the lascivious pseudo-classicism of the pictorial dance, for the bewildering richness of movement which had originated in the earlier triumphal processions, and for the stupendous scenic apparatus made possible in the open air sacred plays.
He thus represents a reaction against the romantic movement, yet has experienced the emotional deepening which that movement brought with it. Accordingly, he finds a shallowness in the pseudo-classicism of Pope and his contemporaries, and turns rather to Sophocles on the one hand and Goethe on the other for his exemplars.
The days are over, when every petty German prince must create in his domains a servile imitation of the stiff parks of Versailles, the days of powdered wigs and long cues, when French ballet-dancers gave the tone, and French actors strutted on every stage, when Boileau was the great canon of criticism, and Racine and Molière perpetuated in tragedy and comedy a pseudo-classicism.
But his more serious talents would never have found their opportunity save for his skill in ministering to the pseudo-classicism of rustic Saxons. Each of these Emperors turned his back on Germany at the first opportunity. Each met in Italy with bitter disillusionment and an untimely fate.
Another salient trait of Russian literature is its tendency toward realism, the germ of which can be seen even in the most old-fashioned works, when, following the precepts of the West, they were taken up first with pseudo-classicism, and then with the romantic spirit which followed.
Just as the "Storm and Stress" of 1770 to 1780, and the Romantic movement of the opening nineteenth century, represented a spirit of sharp revolt against the then dominant pseudo-classicism and rationalism, so "Young Germany" reacted passionately against the moonlight sentimentality of the popular romantic poets, as well as against the stupid political conservatism of the time.
The latter is the most appalling example of a Renaissance building which one is likely to meet with, and shows in its remarkable façade, in sheer perversion of misdirected labour, the grossness of pseudo-classicism, which quite entitles it to rank with that other equally abominable example in Paris, St. Eustache.
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