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so it went on, and I thought I had never read anything so lovely, Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung, it all seemed to my fancy intoxicating beyond anything I had ever even dreamed of, since I had not yet become acquainted with any of the modern romanticists.
Hence, in reading the romanticists, who went to these sources for their material, we are seldom wearied but often surprised; and the surprise is like that of the sunrise, or the sea, which always offers some new beauty and stirs us deeply, as if we had never seen it before. The romantic movement, while it followed its own genius, was not altogether unguided.
The early culmination of its extravagance is found in the youth of Goethe and Schiller, Germany's two greatest poets; and Goethe's famous novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, became the text-book of the rising generation of romanticists. Werther kills himself for disappointed love, and the book has been seriously accused of creating an epidemic of suicide in Germany.
The German Romanticists of the end of the last and the beginning of this century were extravagant in his praises, Schlegel declaring that he was superior to Luther. Novalis was scarcely less ardent in his admiration. Kahlman protested that he had learnt more from him than he could have learnt from all the wise men of his age together.
However, the artist had retained since his youthful days, which had been spent in the camp of the Romanticists, the habit of wearing a special costume, and it was in flowing trousers, in a dressing-gown secured at the waist by a silken cord, and with his head covered with a priest's skull-cap, that he received his visitors. He came to open the door himself, holding his palette and brushes.
On the night of the first performance each side Romanticists and Classicists had packed the theatre with partisans. The air was charged with feeling; the curtain rose, but less than two lines were uttered before the pent-up passions of the audience burst forth: DOÑA JOSEFA "Serait-ce déj
It is not a mere romance that calls it a land of magic, or even of black magic. Those who carry that atmosphere to us are not the romanticists but the realists. Every one can feel it in the work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and when I once remarked on his repulsive little masterpiece called "The Mark of the Beast," to a rather cynical Anglo-Indian officer, he observed moodily, "It's a beastly story.
The classic school shunned as vulgar all exhibitions of enthusiasm and strong emotion, such as the love of Juliet and the jealousy of Othello; but the romanticists, knowing that the feelings had as much value and power as the intellect, encouraged their expression.
Life may not be orderly, but literature must be. That is a platitude which it seems necessary to repeat. It is difficult to estimate absolute achievement except across time, and the time has been too brief to judge of the merits of the young romanticists. My guess is that some of them will go far. But the diagnosis at present seems to show an inflammation of the ego.
His acute sense of literary form sets him off from the whole generation of Romanticists, who held the author's personal caprice to be the supreme law of poetry, and most of whose important works were either medleys or fragments. He was his own severest critic, and labored over his productions, as he did over his own education, with untiring energy and intense concentration.
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