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out all periods and schools. Their forms and manifestations alter, and cause confusion among critics who would measure by rules of thumb the utterances of the human spirit; but the same forces not only recur, but continuously endure. As a theory, this has often been recognized by literary historians; yet their books still profess to describe "the beginnings of classicism" and "the beginnings of romanticism," terms which, if ever applicable, belong only to the dawn of civilization. If the exigencies of text-book-making demand that history be divided into epochs, let it be remembered not only that no hard lines separate these epochs, but that the characteristics which are used to mark them exist before and after, and are chosen for emphasis only because they dominate, but do not extinguish, other characteristics which, for the time, happen to be exhibited with less strength or frequency.

This limitation of the prevalent characteristic may be carried still farther. Not only is no period purely Classical or purely Romantic, but no writer who has expressed his personality with any fullness is purely Classical or purely Romantic. Pope and Johnson had their Romantic moments as surely as Wordsworth

and Keats their classical. And this is due to the fact that these terms indicate effects of which the varying proportions of the constituent elements of poetry are the cause.

III

This view receives corroboration from another fact which is not likely to be questioned upon reflection: that the supremely great writers, and the recognized masterpieces even of writers usually of the second class, are especially difficult to label with the catchwords of any of the schools. It is in a man like Dekker, for example, that one finds Elizabethan Romanticism most clearly exhibited; Shakespeare is too much besides; it is Götz von Berlichingen, not Faust, that serves as the convenient specimen of a movement. "Perhaps," says a modern writer, à propos of ethics, "all theories of practice tend, as they rise to their best, as understood by their worthiest representatives, to identification with each other." A somewhat similar statement could be made of theories of art, and illustrated by works of art. It is the lesser men, or the greater men in their immaturity or in their decline, who show extreme tendencies and invite nicknames. The supreme artists at their best rise above conflicts and propaganda, and are known, not by the intensity of their partisanship, but by the perfection of their balance. They show the virtues of all the schools; and in them each virtue is not weakened, but supported, by the presence of others which the lesser men had supposed to be antagonistic.

This situation points to the conclusion that the tendencies thus balanced in great art are in themselves perfectly sound, however they may at times seem vicious in the work of the inferior artists; that what has sometimes made Classicism seem a barrenness and Romanticism a disease, is not the positive element in either, but the lack of the supporting and balancing qualities, and the loss of truth or beauty consequent upon the disproportion. The controversial critic who indulges in tirades against either Classicism or Romanticism as the root of all artistic evil, is himself guilty of the vice he is actually, though unconsciously, attacking; for he fails to see that it is not the essential element in either of these tendencies that rouses his protest, but the same lack of balance that distorts his own critical view. Any human impulse that persists from generation to generation, and under favorable conditions manifests itself in forms of beauty, is unlikely to be essentially vicious. This persistence and these manifestations should rather warn us to avoid wholesale condemnation, and to seek to understand under what conditions, with what checks and complements, such an impulse finds its most beautiful and satisfying expression.

IV

"The best division of human learning," according to Bacon, "is that derived from the three faculties of the rational soul, which is the seat of learning. History has reference to the Memory, poesy to the Imagination, and philosophy to the Reason." 1 Modern representatives of these three forms of intellectual activity object to being confined to the exclusive exercise of one of these functions. The historian now claims the right to reason philosophically and to reconstruct the past with the aid of imagination as well as merely to chronicle memoranda. The philosopher observes facts and uses the imagination to construct hypotheses, as well as reasons. And the poet, as we shall see, extends his province in similar fashion. Yet the threefold division supplied by Bacon, though perhaps not expressed in terms which would satisfy the modern psychologist, is sufficiently fundamental to supply a basis for the discussion of those elements of poetry of which we are in search.

1 De Augmentis, book II, chap. 1.

The criticism of antiquity began the inquiry into the nature of poetry, not, like Bacon, by assigning it to the field of imagination, but rather to the memory. The characteristic which Aristotle found to be common to the kinds of poetry he examined - epic, dramatic, and lyric - was that of imitation, and imitation depends primarily on observation and recollection, on what Bacon called memory, on what may be called more comprehensively the sense of fact. But imitation as used by Aristotle and his successors meant much more than the reproduction of what was observed and recorded. The important element of selection plays a large part; and in later criticism we hear much of " ideal imitation," that is, a reproduction of

1 Memory with Bacon implies not merely the faculty of recollection, but all those mental activities which deal with the apprehension of facts: observation, for example, and the interpretation of the evidence of the senses, as well as mere reminiscence; since history for him included what he called "Natural History," what we call the physical sciences.

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