ROMANCE

two lectures by

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

m.a., professor of english literature in the university of oxford, fellow of merton college

lectures delivered at princeton university, may 4th and 6th, 1915

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1916

p. iiCopyright, 1916, by Princeton University Press

Published October, 1916

p. 1THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE

The period of English political history which falls between Pitt’s acceptance of office as prime minister, in 1783, and the passing of the Reform Bill, in 1832, is a period rich in character and event. The same period of fifty years is one of the most crowded epochs of our national literature. In 1783 William Blake produced his Poetical Sketches, and George Crabbe published The Village. In 1832 Scott died, not many months after the death of Goethe. Between these two dates a great company of English writers produced a literature of immense bulk, and of almost endless diversity of character. Yet one dominant strain in that literature has commonly been allowed to give a name to the whole period, and it is often called the Age of the Romantic Revival.

We do not name other notable periods of our literature in this fashion. The name itself p. 2contains a theory, and so marks the rise of a new philosophical and aesthetic criticism. It attempts to describe as well as to name, and attaches significance not to kings, or great authors, but to the kind of writing which flourished conspicuously in that age. A less ambitious and much more secure name would have been the Age of George III; but this name has seldom been used, perhaps because the writers of his time who reverenced King George III were not very many in number. The danger of basing a name on a theory of literature is that the theory may very easily be superseded, or may prove to be inadequate, and then the name, having become immutable by the force of custom, is left standing, a monument of ancient error. The terminology of the sciences, which pretends to be exact and colourless, is always being reduced to emptiness by the progress of knowledge. The thing that struck the first observer is proved to be less important than he thought it. Scientific

names, for all their air of learned universality, are merely fossilized impressions, stereotyped portraits of a single aspect. The decorous obscurity of the p. 3ancient languages is used to conceal an immense diversity of principle. Mammal, amphibian, coleoptera, dicotyledon, cryptogam,—all these terms, which, if they were translated into the language of a peasant, would be seen to record very simple observations, yet do lend a kind of formal majesty to ignorance.

So it is with the vocabulary of literary criticism: the first use of a name, because the name was coined by someone who felt the need of it, is often striking and instructive; the impression is fresh and new. Then the freshness wears off it, and the name becomes an outworn print, a label that serves only to recall the memory of past travel. What was created for the needs of thought becomes a thrifty device, useful only to save thinking. The best way to restore the habit of thinking is to do away with the names. The word Romantic loses almost all its meaning and value when it is used to characterize whole periods of our literature. Landor and Crabbe belong to a Romantic era of poetry; Steele and Sterne wrote prose in an age which set before itself the Classic ideal. Yet there is hardly any distinctively Classical beauty in p. 4English verse which cannot be exemplified from the poetry of Landor and Crabbe; and there are not very many characteristics of Romantic prose which find no illustration in the writings of Steele and Sterne. Nevertheless, the very name of romance has wielded

such a power in human affairs, and has so habitually impressed the human imagination, that time is not misspent in exhibiting its historical bearings. These great vague words, invented to facilitate reference to whole centuries of human history—Middle Ages, Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Revival of Romance—are very often invoked as if they were something ultimate, as if the names themselves were a sufficient explanation of all that they include. So an imperfect terminology is used to gain esteem for an artificial and rigid conception of things which were as fluid as life itself. The Renaissance, for instance, in its strict original meaning, is the name for that renewed study of the classical literatures which manifested itself throughout the chief countries of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Italy, where the movement had its origin, no p. 5single conspicuous event can be used to date it. The traditions inherited from Greece and Rome had never lost their authority; but with the increase of wealth and leisure in the city republics

they were renewed and strengthened. From being remnants and memories they became live models; Latin poetry was revived, and Italian poetry was disciplined by the ancient masters. But the Renaissance, when it reached the shores of England, so far from giving new life to the literature it found there, at first degraded it. It killed the splendid prose school of Malory and Berners, and prose did not run clear again for a century. It bewildered and confused the minds of poets, and blending itself with the national tradition, produced the rich lawlessness of the English sixteenth century. It was a strong tributary to the stream of our national literature; but the popular usage, which assigns all that is good in the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a mysterious event called the Renaissance, is merely absurd. Modern scholars, if they are forced to find a beginning for modern literature, would prefer to p. 6date it from the wonderful outburst of vernacular poetry in the latter part of the twelfth century, and, if they must name a birthplace, would

claim attention for the Court of King Henry II.

In some of its aspects, the Romantic revival may be exhibited as a natural consequence of the Renaissance. Classical scholarship at first scorned the vernacular literatures, and did all its work of criticism and imitation in the Latin tongue. By degrees the lesson was widened, and applied to the modern languages. Study; imitation in Latin; extension of classical usages and principles to modern literature,—these were the regular stages in the progress of the classical influence. When the poets of France and England, to name no others, had learned as much as they were able and willing to learn from the masters of Greece and Rome, the work of the Renaissance was done. By the middle of the eighteenth century there was no notable kind of Greek or Latin literature—historical, philosophical, poetical; epic, elegy, ode, satire—which had not worthy disciples and rivals in the literatures of France and England. p. 7Nothing remained to do but to go further afield and seek for new masters. These might easily have been found among the poets

and prophets of the East, and not a few notable writers of the time began to forage in that direction. But the East was too remote and strange, and its languages were too little known, for this attempt to be carried far; the imitation of Chinese and Persian models was practised chiefly by way of fantasy and joke. The study of the neglected and forgotten matter of mediaeval times, on the other hand, was undertaken by serious scholars. The progress of the mediaeval influence reproduced very exactly the successive phases of the Classical Renaissance. At first there was study; and books like Sainte Palaye’s Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry, and Paul Henri Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, enjoyed a European reputation. Then followed the period of forgery and imitation, the age of Ossian and Chatterton, Horace Walpole and Bishop Percy. Lastly, the poets enrolled themselves in the new school, and an original literature, suggested by the old, was created by Sir Walter p. 8Scott, Coleridge, and Keats. It was the temper of the antiquary and the sceptic, in the age of

Gibbon and Hume, that begot the Romantic Revival; and the rebellion of the younger age against the spirit of the eighteenth century was the rebellion of a child against its parents.

It is not needful, nor indeed is it possible, to define Romance. In the mathematical sciences definitions are all-important, because with them the definition is the thing. When a mathematician asks you to describe a circle, he asks you to create one. But the man who asks you to describe a monkey is less exacting; he will be content if you mention some of the features that seem to you to distinguish a monkey from other animals. Such a description must needs be based on personal impressions and ideas; some features must be chosen as being more significant than the rest. In the history of literature there are only two really significant things—men, and books. To study the ascertained facts concerning men and books is to study biography and bibliography, two sciences which between them supply the only p. 9competent and modest part of the history of literature. To discern the significance of men and books, to classify and explain them, is another matter. We have not, and we never shall have, a calculus sufficient for human life even at its weakest and

poorest. Let him who conceives high hopes from the progress of knowledge and the pertinacity of thought tame and subdue his pride by considering, for a moment, the game of chess. That game is played with thirty-two pieces, of six different kinds, on a board of sixty-four squares. Each kind of piece has one allotted mode of action, which is further cramped by severe limitations of space. The conditions imposed upon the game are strict, uniform, and mechanical. Yet those who have made of chess a life-long study are ready to confess their complete ignorance of the fundamental merits of particular moves; one game does not resemble another; and from the most commonplace of developments there may spring up, on the sudden, wild romantic possibilities and situations that are like miracles. If these surprising flowers of fancy grow on the chess-board, how shall we set a limit to the p. 10possibilities of human life, which is chess, with variety and uncertainty many million times increased? It is prudent, therefore, to say little of the laws which govern the course of human history, to

avoid, except for pastime, the discussion of tendencies and movements, and to speak chiefly of men and books. If an author can be exhibited as the effect of certain causes (and I do not deny that some authors can plausibly be so exhibited) he loses his virtue as an author. He thought of himself as a cause, a surprising intruder upon the routine of the world, an original creator. I think that he is right, and that the profitable study of a man is the study which regards him as an oddity, not a quiddity.

A general statement of the law that governs literary history may perhaps be borrowed from the most unreasonable of the arts—the art of dress. One of the powerful rulers of men, and therefore of books, is Fashion, and the fluctuations of literary fashion make up a great part of literary history. If the history of a single fashion in dress could ever be written, it would illuminate the literary problem. p. 11The motives at work are the same; thoughtful wearers of clothes, like thoughtful authors, are all trying to do something new, within the limits assigned by practical utility and social sympathy. Each desires to express himself and yet in that very act to win the admiration and liking of his fellows. The great object is to wear the weeds of humanity with a difference. Some authors, it is true, like timid or lazy dressers, desire only to conform to usage. But these, as M. Brunetière remarks in one of his historical essays, are precisely the authors who do not count. An author who respects himself is not content if his work is mistaken for

another’s, even if that other be one of the gods of his idolatry. He would rather write his own signature across faulty work than sink into a copyist of merit. This eternal temper of self-assertion, this spirit of invention, this determination to add something or alter something, is no doubt the principle of life. It questions accepted standards, and makes of reaction from the reigning fashion a permanent force in literature. The young want something to do; they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom p. 12where no land remains to be taken up, nor will they allow the praise of the dead to be the last word in criticism. Why should they paraphrase old verdicts?

The sway of Fashion often bears hardest on a good author just dead, when the generation that discovered him and acclaimed him begins to pass away. Then it is not what he did that attracts the notice of the younger sort, but what he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be no great thinker. Pope, who, when his star was in the ascendant, was “Mr. Pope, the new Poet,” has to submit to examination by the Headmaster of Winchester, who decides that he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. Shakespeare is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly in clear and vigorous English, that Shakespeare has no capacity for tragic writing. Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renaissance, into the Gothic darkness. So the pendulum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, even in the shortest of its variable oscillations, to revisit the greatest writers, who are nearest p. 13to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are raised by one age into the very essentials of

good poetry, are denied the name of poetry by the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is the exploded vice of another; and Romance comes in and goes out with secular regularity.

The meaning of Romance will never come home to him who seeks for it in modern controversies. The name Romance is itself a memorial of the conquest of Europe by the Romans. They imposed their language on half Europe, and profoundly influenced the other half. The dialectical, provincial Latin, of various kinds, spoken by the conquered peoples, became the Romance speech; and Romance literature was the new literature which grew up among these peoples from the ninth century onwards,—or from an earlier time, if the fringe of Celtic peoples, who kept their language but felt the full influence of Christianity, be taken into the account. The chief thing to be noted concerning Romance literature is that it was a Christian literature, finding its background and inspiration in the ideas to which the Christian Church gave currency. p. 14While Rome spread her conquests over Europe, at the very heart of her empire Christianity took root, and by slow process transformed that empire. During the Middle Ages the Bishops of Rome sat in the seat of the Roman Emperors. This startling change

possessed Gibbon’s imagination, and is the theme of his great work. But the whole of Gibbon’s history was anticipated and condensed by Hobbes in a single sentence—“If a man considers the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.”

Here, then, is the answer to a question which at once suggests itself. How do we get this famous opposition between the older Latin literature and the literature of those countries which had inherited or accepted the Latin tradition? Why did not the Romans hand over their literature and teach it, as they handed over and taught their law? They did teach it in p. 15their schools; grammar and rhetoric, two of the chief subjects of a liberal education, were purely literary studies, based on the work of the literary masters of Rome. Never was there an education so completely literary as the organized education of Rome and of her provinces. How came it that there was any breach between the old and the new?

A question of this kind, involving centuries of history, does not admit of a perfectly simple answer. It may be very reasonably maintained that in Rome education killed literature. A carefully organized, universal system of education, which takes for its material the work of great poets and orators, is certain to breed a whole army of slaves. The teachers, employed by the machine to expound ideas not their own, soon erect systems of pedantic dogma, under which the living part of literature is buried. The experience of ancient Rome is being repeated in the England of to-day. The officials responsible for education, whatever they may uneasily pretend, are forced by the necessities of their work to encourage uniformity, and national education becomes a warehouse of p. 16second-hand goods, presided over by men who cheerfully explain the mind of Burke or of Shakespeare, adjusting the place of each, and balancing faults against merits. But Roman education throughout the Empire had further difficulties to encounter. To understand these it must be remembered what

Latin literature was. The Latins, when we first discern them in the dim light of the past, were a small, strenuous, political people, with a passion for government and war. They first subdued Italy, and no very serious culture-problem resulted from that conquest. The Etruscans certainly contributed much to Latin civilization, but their separate history is lost. No one knows what the Etruscans thought. The Romans do not seem to have cared. They welded Italy together, and thereafter came into contact with the older, richer civilizations of the Mediterranean shores. The chief of these, in its influence, was the Greek civilization, as it had developed in that famous group of free city states, fostered by the sun and air, and addicted to life. In Athens, at the time of her glory, life was not a habit, but an experiment. Even p. 17the conservative Romans were infected. They fell under the sway of Greek thought. When a practical man of business becomes intimate with an artist, he is never the same man again. The thought of that disinterested mode of life haunts his dreams. So Rome,

though she had paid little regard to the other ancient peoples with whom she had had traffic and war, put herself to school to the Greeks. She accepted the Greek pantheon, renamed the Greek gods and goddesses, and translated and adopted Greek culture. The real Roman religion was a religion of the homestead, simple, pious, domestic, but they now added foreign ornaments. So also with literature; their own native literature was scanty and practical—laws and rustic proverbs—but they set themselves to produce a new literature, modelled on the Greek. Virgil followed Homer; Plautus copied Menander; and Roman literature took on that secondary and reminiscent character which it never lost. It was a literature of culture, not of creed. This people had so practical a genius that they could put the world in harness; for the decoration of the world they were willing to depend on foreign loans.