The influence of the "Encyclopædia," great during its day, is by no means yet exhausted. But it is an influence indirectly exerted, for the "Encyclopædia" itself has long been an obsolete work.
There is a legal maxim that the laws are silent, when a state of war exists. Certainly, amid the madness of a Revolution such as, during the closing years of the eighteenth century, the influence of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopædists, with Beaumarchais, reacting against the accumulated political and ecclesiastical oppressions of ages, precipitated upon France, it might safely be assumed that letters would be silent. But the nation meantime was portentously preparing material for a literature which many wondering centuries to follow would occupy themselves with writing.
XVIII.
EPILOGUE.
In looking backward over the preceding pages, we think of many things which we should like still to say. Of these many things, we limit ourselves to saying here, as briefly as we can, some four or five only.
To begin with, in nearly every successive case, we have found ourselves lamenting afresh that, from the authors to be represented, the representative extracts must needs be so few and so short. We have, therefore, sincerely begrudged to ourselves every line of room that we felt obliged to occupy with matter, preparatory, explanatory, or critical, of our own. Whatever success we may have achieved in fulfilling our purpose, our purpose has been to say ourselves barely so much as was indispensable in order finally to convey, upon the whole, to our readers, within the allotted space, the justest and the fullest impression of the selected authors, through the medium of their own quoted words.
In the second place, it was with great regret that we yielded to the necessity of omitting entirely, or dismissing with scant mention, such literary names, for example, as Boileau, of the age of Louis Quatorze, and, a little later than he, Fontenelle, spanning with his century of years the space from 1657 to 1757,—these, and, belonging to the period that ushered in the Revolution, Bernardin St. Pierre, the teller of the tale of "Paul and Virginia," with also that hero of a hundred romantic adventures, Beaumarchais, half Themistocles, half Alcibiades, the author of "The Barber of Seville." The line had to be drawn somewhere; and, whether wisely or not, at least thoughtfully, we drew it to run as it does.
A third, and a yet graver, occasion of regret was that we must stop short on the threshold, without crossing it, of the nineteenth-century literature of France. With so many shining names seen just ahead of us, beacon-like, to invite our advance, we felt it as a real self-denial to stay our steps at that point. We hope still to deal with Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo, and perhaps others, in a future volume.
Our eye is caught with the antithetical terms, "classicism" and "romanticism," occurring here and there; and the observation is forced upon us, that these terms, in their mutual relation, are nowhere by us defined. The truth is, they scarcely, as thus used, admit of hard and fast definition. It is in a somewhat loose conventional sense of each term, that, in late literary language, they are set off, one over against the other. They name two different, but by no means necessarily antagonistic, forces or tendencies in literature. Classicism stands for what you might call the established order, against which romanticism is a revolt. Paradoxical though it be to say so, both the established order, and the revolt against it, are good things. The established order, which was never really any thing more or less than the dominance in literature of rules and standards derived through criticism from the acknowledged best models, especially the ancient, tended at last to cramp and stifle the life which it should, of course, only serve to shape and conform. The mould, always too narrow perhaps, but at any rate grown too rigid, needed itself to be fashioned anew. Fresh life, a full measure, would do this. Such is the true mission of romanticism,—not to break the mould that classicism sought to impose on literary production, but to expand that mould, make it more pliant, more free. A mould, for things living and growing, should be plastic in the passive, as well as in the active, sense of that word,—should accept form, as well as give form. Romanticism will accordingly have won its legitimate victory, not when it shall have destroyed classicism and replaced it, but when it shall have made classicism over, after the law of a larger life. To risk a concrete illustration—among our American poets, Bryant, in the perfectly self-consistent unity of his whole intellectual development, may be said to represent classicism; while in Lowell, as Lowell appears in the later, more protracted, phase of his genius, romanticism is represented. The "Thanatopsis" of Bryant and the "Cathedral" of Lowell may stand for individual examples respectively of the classic and the romantic styles in poetry. Compare these two productions, and in the difference between the chaste, well-pruned severity of the one, and the indulged, perhaps stimulated, luxuriance of the other, you will feel the difference between classicism and romanticism. But Victor Hugo is the great recent romanticist; and when, hereafter, we come to speak somewhat at large of him, it will be seasonable to enter more fully into the question of these two tendencies in literature.