I know that in using the words 'classic' and 'romantic' I am doing a danger
ous thing. They represent five or six different kinds of antitheses, and while I
may be using them in one sense you may be interpreting them in another. In
this present connection I am using them in a perfectly precise and limited
sense. I ought really to have coined a couple of new words, but I prefer to use
the ones I have used, as I then conform to the practice of the group of polem
ical writers who make most use of them at the present day, and have almost
succeeded in making them political catchwords. I mean Maurras, Lasserre
and all the group connected with L'Action Frangaise.'
At the present time this is the particular group with which the distinction
is most vital. Because it has become a party symbol. If you asked a man of a
1. Charles Maurras (1868-1952) and Pierre Las-ported the Catholic Church as a force for order. serre (1867?1930) were intellectuals associated (T. S. Eliot also fell under the movement's influwith I'Action Frangaise, a reactionary political ence.) movement that denigrated Romanticism and sup
.
HULME: ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM / 1999
certain set whether he preferred the classics or the romantics, you could deduce from that what his politics were.
The best way of gliding into a proper definition of my terms would be to start with a set of people who are prepared to fight about it?for in them you will have no vagueness. (Other people take the infamous attitude of the person with catholic tastes who says he likes both.)
About a year ago, a man whose name I think was Fauchois gave a lecture at the Odeon on Racine,2 in the course of which he made some disparaging remarks about his dullness, lack of invention and the rest of it. This caused an immediate riot: fights took place all over the house; several people were arrested and imprisoned, and the rest of the series of lectures took place with hundreds of gendarmes3 and detectives scattered all over the place. These people interrupted because the classical ideal is a living thing to them and Racine is the great classic. That is what I call a real vital interest in literature. They regard romanticism as an awful disease from which France had just recovered.
The thing is complicated in their case by the fact that it was romanticism that made the revolution.4 They hate the revolution, so they hate romanticism.
I make no apology for dragging in politics here; romanticism both in England and France is associated with certain political views, and it is in taking a concrete example of the working out of a principle in action that you can get its best definition.
What was the positive principle behind all the other principles of '89? I am
talking here of the revolution in as far as it was an idea; I leave out material
causes?they only produce the forces. The barriers which could easily have
resisted or guided these forces had been previously rotted away by ideas. This
always seems to be the case in successful changes; the privileged class is
beaten only when it has lost faith in itself, when it has itself been penetrated
with the ideas which are working against it.
It was not the rights of man?that was a good solid practical war-cry. The
thing which created enthusiasm, which made the revolution practically a new
religion, was something more positive than that. People of all classes, people
who stood to lose by it, were in a positive ferment about the idea of liberty.
There must have been some idea which enabled them to think that something
positive could come out of so essentially negative a thing. There was, and here
I get my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by Rousseau5 that
man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had
suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man would
have a chance. This is what made them think that something positive could
come out of disorder, this is what created the religious enthusiasm. Here is
the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir
of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppres
sive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.
One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man
is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely con
