2. Jean Racine (1639?1699), French tragic playwright associated with classicism. The riot occurred at a lecture delivered by French playwright Rene Fauchois (1882-1962) at the Odeon Theater, Paris, on November 3, 1910. 3. Police officers (French). 4. The French Revolution (1789-99). 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712?1778), Swiss- born French writer and philosopher whose ideas greatly influenced the leaders of the French Revolution and the development of Romanticism.
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2000 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS
stant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.
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Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.
One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy*' and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.
It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed?in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads.7 The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle8 over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.
I must now shirk the difficulty of saying exactly what I mean by romantic and classical in verse. I can only say that it means the result of these two attitudes towards the cosmos, towards man, in so far as it gets reflected in verse. The romantic, because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about the infinite; and as there is always the bitter contrast between what you think you ought to be able to do and what man actually can, it always tends, in its later stages at any rate, to be gloomy. I really can't go any further than to say it is the reflection of these two temperaments, and point out examples of the different spirits. On the one hand I would take such diverse people as Horace, most of the Elizabethans and the writers of the Augustan age, and on the other side Lamartine, Hugo, parts of Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Swinburne.9
6. Controversial Church doctrine denying the (1509?1564), Protestant theologian who stressed transmission of original sin, named after the the-the predestination and the depravity of humanologian Pelagius (ca. 354?after 418). kind. 7. Puritan members of the Parliamentary Party 8. Molasses (British). during the English Civil War (1642?51), named 9. Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), Roman poet. 'The Elizfor their short haircuts. Girolamo Savonarola abethans': English poets and playwrights (such as (1452?1498), Dominican monk who denounced Shakespeare) writing during the reign of Queen the extravagance of the Renaissance. John Calvin Elizabeth I (1558-1603). 'The Augustan age': the
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HULME: ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM / 2001
What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.
You might say if you wished that the whole of the romantic attitude seems to crystallise in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line.
In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish. You never go blindly into an atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere too rarefied for man to breathe for long. You are always faithful to the conception of a limit. It is a question of pitch; in romantic verse you move at a certain pitch of rhetoric which you know, man being what he is, to be a little high-falutin. The kind of thing you get in Hugo or Swinburne. In the coming classical reaction that will feel just wrong. * * *
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I object even to the best of the romantics. I object still more to the receptive attitude.1 I object to the sloppiness which doesn't consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other. I always think in this connection of the last line of a poem of John Webster's which ends with a request I cordially endorse:
'End your moan and come away.'2
The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a kind of chill when they read them.
The dry hardness which you get in the classics is absolutely repugnant to them. Poetry that isn't damp isn't poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.
The essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind. Verse strictly confined to the earthly and the definite (Keats is full of it) might seem to them to be excellent writing, excellent craftsmanship, but not poetry. So much has romanticism debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest.
In the classic it is always the light of ordinary day, never the light that never
