Page:Columbia University Lectures on Literature (1911).djvu/27

13 APPROACHES TO LITERATURE 13 tained an unworthy and unwholesome license. His new knowledge made him arrogant and intolerant; and he was ready to reject all restraint. Yet in time he was able to recover not a little of the harmony and of the proportion which had characterized the great Greeks, even if he never quite attained to their simplicity and to their sympathy. Then the reaction came at last, and just as Hellenism had shriveled up into Alexandrianism, so the Renaissance in its turn dried up into the empty and formal Classicism of the eighteenth century, with its code of rules for every art. Clas- sicism lost its grasp on the realities of life, and it cheated itself with words. It kept the letter of the law and refused to con- form to its spirit. It sterilized the vocabulary of verse. It left the poet with no fit instrument for the wireless communi- cation of emotion. In England it gave us the poetry of Alex- ander Pope and the criticism of Samuel Johnson; and in France it codified the regulations which were responsible for a long succession of hfeless tragedies, and by its emphasis upon legislation to curb Literature it brought about the reaction of the Romanticists, who succeeded only in the negative work of destruction and who failed lamentably to establish their more positive contentions. Romanticism had its rise contemporary with the American Revolution and with the French; and in all its manifestos there rings the tocsin of revolt. It promulgates its declaration of the rights of man in the domain of Art; and it tends to a stark individualism leading straight to the anarchy which refuses to acknowledge any check upon the caprice of the moment. It exalts the illegal, the illegitimate, and the ilhcit. It glorifies the outlaw and the outcast; and it relishes the abnormal rather than the normal, the morbid rather than the healthy. The violence and extravagance of the roman- ticism of Victor Hugo, for example, made inevitable the real- ism of Turgenieff and Howells. The principle of Art for Art's sake, which the French Romanticists took for a battle-cry