Pleiades

17. S'EOLICOS petav rye 11eXetaSunl 7 TnX6Oev Tapionict veicreat. (PDTDA) 1 A3i not very Sure what " inVerted romanticism" may be. I saw the phrase, the other day, in a literary article written (as I gathered) by an undergraduate. Undergraduates, in the golden hours of their youth; at the time of the bursting of their intellectual wings from the sheath, are like dragon-flies asWoop in a swift and glittering flight over the waters Of art and literature: They adorn ivhateVer'they touch : they have a erisp and incisive way they move with a bright certainty and confidence down the shining alleys of thought. They are devastatingly satirico-critical ; and I confess to an elderly terror at the flight and whirr of their shafts. I have heard that tutors spend solitary hours with these lords of the far-shooting bow, "alone with them alone," as the poets say, in the process of tuition.' I wonder how a tutor can come unscathed from the adyturn at the end of the hour. I should have thought that it was like consorting with a bright and brilliantly eruptive volcano. You may well be covered With scoriae and lava at the end of the hour ; but will there be Much of you left, or Will you peradventure be saved by the modesty, the demure, ironical modesty, of undergraduate youth ? It is all a matter of guessing ; and anyhow it has " nothing to do with Dionysus." . . We had better get on with the play.

* * * * * * * Romanticism should mean, on the principles of etymology, something Roman. Actually it means nothing of the sort : it is not at all Roman : it is not even Greek. If it has any local habitation, it is German ; it is a sort of sister of terman idealism. The romantic desires impossible beauty, impossible love, impossible perfection ; and he desires it not as one who gazes on the nightly heavens, and longs, "Bright Star, would I were perfect as thou art,"

but as one who muses over the glow of a dying sunset. -There is, indeed, something of the sunset in romanticism—a sense of the thing that is passing, or, indeed, of the thing that has passed. You may say that it has an antiquarian quality : you may even define it as a sort of "antiquarian idealism." Sunset and the far bells of a vanished past—there is something of this strain in the youthful romanticism of Goethe ; and if the strong and sane Sir Walter had a more robust quality, he, too, could sigh

for the voice of that wild horn, On Fontarabian echoes borne, - The dying hero's call.

But this is not the whole of romanticism ; nor is it bounded by sunset and evening bells. Romanticism may not be Greek in its beginnings, or, perhaps, even in its end ; and, indeed, it is a word and a term of art which is generally opposed to the classical in all its manifestations.. •But Plato was a Greek, and Plato was an idealist ; and there is a sort of purified romanticism (the romanticism of Shelley, if Shelley was a romanticist) which does, after all, aspire to the starry ideas of Plato, and seeks to transfigure human life and the human world into their likeness—seeing us not as what we are, but as what we may become ; looking at life not-in its mere actuality, but rather in the diffused light of all its ideal possibilities. Lord Bacon was not a romanticist, but in his Advancement of Learn- ing he has grasped the aim of a purified romanticism—" to give Some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul ; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample great- ness, a More exact goodness, and a more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things."

* * * * * * *

If this be purified romanticism, what shall we say of "inverted romanticism " ? Perhaps it is a ease of' "the nature of things," or_of a hungry sense for the nature of things, taking its revenge upon the "shadow of satisfaction." The revolting mind .says, "It is but a shadow ; and you shall not wrap yourself in the easy and calm complacence of a shadow." It is the nature of revolts to rtin to the other extreme ; and that is where the revolt of our days has run. The inverted romantic is not content with plucking poetry

and all play of the imagination down front the stars to the nature of things ; he Would bring them down &ten further, . into' the 'dark roots Of being and the subterranean Caierns

and b-asenienti of the mind, in which the other 'and under side of the world is revealed. This seems to be the -secret, and the motive, of a 'good deal of our modern literature. What,' after all, is man ? If you look at his biological begin- nings, he is but a spermatozoon—one poor /sfoah out of a

'cataclysm of a million million—who has sonielimi survh-ect , And among that billion minus one Might have chanced to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne— But the One was Me.

Perhaps, however, it is not so much the biological beginnings • of man that, inspire the inversion of romanticism, as it. is his psychological and subliminal recesses. Romanticism espoused history ; and if it sometimes made history unhistorical

-(Ivanhoe cannot survive the criticisms of a" history specialist" in a sixth form), it also made it, in some curious way, a

trumpet-call to nobility. Inverted-romanticism has espoused psychology, and especially, perhaps,- the psychology of sex --whatever that -may be. Is the issue of these espousals good literature ? The answer depends on our notion, of good literature ; and as men's notions differ, there may well be a rich variety Of answers. But there is at any .rate this to be said. Psychology, as it affects a good deal of modern writing, takes the writer away from action, and away. from

the ethics of action. It makes imaginative literature a matter of nuances, sublimina, the sinuosities and the subtleties

of a perplexed and anguished self-consciousness. That is

not what Aristotle made of the "poetic art," when he wrote ofirp"cits and 461v. It is not what George Eliot made of -The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarclz, when she drew the figures of Hetty or Lydgate. After all, the nature of things,

or, if you will, the normal objective fact, is the human character, the human eonScience, the human choice,. the

human action. And if the old romanticism sublimated these things, at any rate it actually dealt with them. -The new romanticism subliminates instead of sublimating ; and. it gets away from the nature of things even more in the process. For it leaves the normal objective moral fact.;, and it falls into a sort of dark underworld, which is not the world of men and women whom we know.

* * * * * * * Perhaps there is a good deal of this inverted romanticism in the war books which have been latterly current. ' ThOse who lived through the early days of the War Cannot but

remember a certain idealism—not all of it solid, -bid !noel, of it, in its way, noble—which moved not only those who

stayed, but also those who went and fought. . We are now

bei g talc61 down -into the dark roots and subterranean e,averns of the War. "You have had your &earn :" new you shall know' what it was." But 'was it, after . all; -the sort of thing' we have lately heed told ? Here there -Coin& a

curious reflection to the mind. There . is a sense in which men make the past,. and make it after it has become the Pa...st. They tell a story about it after it has happened and it' is the story they tell then which - becOines the past that lives in the mind, and acts henceforth as a Mental' force in the rriaking of the future. That is why it is important to 'settle the story of the past well and truly —because it is not Only a Past happening, but also a future force. There is a deep

responsibility on those who are settling the Stork of the War to day They need a true theory of art, which means a trim theory of life. That is a. difficult and graye matter. _krenOt

some of our writers forgetting its diffieuIty—and grai*? . . OnioN.