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Updated: May 14, 2025
The tomb of that great vision bears for epitaph the ironical inscription which defines a Classic poet as "a dead Romantic." In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death. A universal agreement in the use of words facilitates communication, but, so inextricably is expression entangled with feeling, it leaves nothing to communicate.
The first lesson of their own experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed judgment of free minds. No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic movement, to the Contrat Social of Rousseau and the Political Justice of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the romantics that Burke's fundamental influence remains.
Zola's realism certainly does not; Jane Austen's decidedly does. You will find far less shrinking from the unpleasant, of one sort, in Poe, of another sort, in Catulle Mendès both of them romantics than in the novels of Jane Austen. What is the use, then, of Professor Perry's definition of realism, since it remains open to so many exceptions?
David rescued painting from the charming and slightly sentimental disorder of the later eighteenth century by concentrating on Roman virtues and generals' uniforms. The Romantics freed themselves from Davidism by getting frantically excited about a little hazy nonsense rather unfairly attributed to Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.
But our romantics do not so weave them; they fling them out as contributions to life's evidence, they fail to relate them to a single interpretation of living, and half of the best incidents are waste, and clog the slow-rolling wheels of the story. They waste their energy also.
The world into which Cézanne tumbled was a world still agitated by the quarrels of Romantics and Realists. The quarrel between Romance and Realism is the quarrel of people who cannot agree as to whether the history of Spain or the number of pips is the more important thing about an orange. The Romantics and Realists were deaf men coming to blows about the squeak of a bat.
Your life will be sullied, your character blighted for ever. We have come to entreat you in the name of our friendship, weakened though it may be, not to soil yourself in this way. You have been prominent in attacking the Romantics, the Right, and the Government; you cannot now declare for the Government; the Right, and the Romantics."
The classical school was followed by the romantics, the romantics by the realists; each was a protest and a reaction against its predecessor. These swerving movements must have a cause. Now there are no reactions in literature unless there is some excess to provoke them.
Blondet read aloud an extremely clever article against the Romantics; Lousteau's paragraph drew laughter, and by the Duc de Rhetore's advice an indirect eulogium of Mme. d'Espard was slipped in, lest the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain should take offence. "What have you written?" asked Finot, turning to Lucien.
Scientific discovery, philosophic understanding, and artistic expression of the truths of human life are phases of creation common to romantics and realists alike; but though the writers of both schools meet equally upon the central ground of philosophic understanding, is it not evident that the realists are most interested in looking backward over the antecedent ground of scientific discovery, and the romantics are most interested in looking forward over the subsequent ground of artistic expression?
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