Romance: Two Lectures

by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

The word Romance supplies no very valuable instrument of criticism even in regard to the great writers of the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth, like Defoe, drew straight from the life. Those who will may call him a Romantic. He told of adventures—the adventures of the mind. He did not write of Bacchus, Venus, and Apollo; neither did he concern himself with Merlin, Tristram, and the Lady of the Lake. He shunned what is derived from other books. His theme is man, nature, and human life. Scott, in rich and careless fashion, dealt in every kind of material that came his way. He described his own country and his own people with loving care, and he loved also the melodrama of historical fiction and supernatural legend. “His romance and antiquarianism,” says Ruskin, “his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false.” Certainly, The Heart of Midlothian and The Antiquary are better than Ivanhoe. Scott’s love for the knighthood and monkery was real, but it was playful. His heart was with Fielding.

There is nothing inconsistent in the best of the traditions of the two parties. The Classical school taught simplicity, directness, and modesty of speech. They are right: it is the way to tell a ghost story. The Romantic school taught a wider imaginative outlook and a more curious analysis of the human mind. They also are right: it is the way to investigate a case in the police courts. Both were cumbered, at times, with the dead things that they found in the books they loved. All literature, except the strongest and purest, is cumbered with useless matter—the conventional epithet, the grandiose phrase, the outworn classical quotation, the self-conscious apology, the time-honored joke. But there are only two schools of literature—the good, and the bad. As for national legend, its growth is the same in all ages. The Greeks told tales of Achilles, the Romans of Aeneas, the French of Charlemagne, the British of Arthur. It is a part of the same process, and an expression of the same humanity.

I have tried to show that the Renaissance bears the same relation to classical literature as

the Revival of Romance bears to mediaeval literature, and that the whole history of the literature of Europe is an oscillation between Christian and Pagan ideals during that long and wavering process whereby Christianity was partially established as the creed and way of life of a group of diverse nations. The historical meaning of the word Romance is exact and easy to define. But in common usage the word means something much vaguer than this. It is a note, an atmosphere, a kind of feeling that is awakened not only by literature but by the behavior of men and the disposition of material objects. John Evelyn, the diarist, enjoys the reputation of having been the first to speak of a “romantic site,”—a phrase which leads the way to immeasurable possibilities in the application of the word. Accuracy in the definition of this larger meaning is unattainable; and would certainly be false, for the word has taken its meaning from centuries of usage by inaccurate thinkers. A whole cluster of feelings, impressions, and desires, dimly recognized as cognate, has grown around the word, which has now been a centre of critical discussion

and controversy for the better part of a century. Heine, in his dissertation on the Romantic School, takes the Christianity of the Middle Ages as his starting-point, and relates everything to that. Perhaps he makes too much of allegory and symbolism, which have always been dear to the church, but are not conspicuous in early Romance. Yet no one can go far astray who keeps in touch, as Heine does, with the facts of history. Goethe, impatient of the wistful intensities of youth, said that the Classical is health, and the Romantic disease. Much has been made, by many critics, of the statue and the picture, as types of ancient and modern art, the one complete in itself, the other suggesting more than it portrays. Mr. Walter Pater, borrowing a hint from a sentence of Bacon, finds the essence of Romance in the addition of strangeness to beauty, of curiosity to desire. It would be easy to multiply these epigrammatic statements, which are all not obscurely related to the fundamental changes wrought on the world by Christian ideas. No single formula can hope to describe and distinguish two eras, or define two tempers

of mind. If I had to choose a single characteristic of Romance as the most noteworthy, I think I should choose Distance, and should call Romance the magic of Distance. What is the most romantic line in Virgil? Surely it is the line which describes the ghosts, staying for waftage on the banks of the river, and stretching out their hands in passionate desire to the further shore:

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

Scott expounds the harmonizing power of distance in his Journal, where he describes the funeral of his friend Laidlaw’s infant:

I saw the poor child’s funeral from a distance. Ah, that Distance! What a magician for conjuring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by the influence of the imagination. A Scottish wedding should be seen at a distance; the gay band of the dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of the spectators,—the glass held high, and the distant cheers as it is swallowed, should be only a sketch, not a finished Dutch picture, when it becomes brutal and boorish. Scotch psalmody, too, should be heard from a distance. The grunt and the snuffle, and the whine and the scream, should be all blended in that deep and distant sound, which rising and falling like the Eolian harp, may have some title to be called the praise of our Maker. Even so the distant funeral: the few mourners on horseback with their plaids wrapped around them—the father heading the procession as they enter the river, and pointing out the ford by which his darling is to be carried on the last long road—not one of the subordinate figures in discord with the general tone of the incident—seeming just accessories, and no more—this is affecting.

The same idea is the subject of T. E. Brown’s poem, The Schooner: