What, then, are these characteristics? The account has now been brought to a point where a reasoned resume of it will give as definite an answer as can be given.
Even yet we may with advantage interpose a consideration of the answer that was given to this question universally (with a few dissidents) from the Renaissance to nearly the end of the i8th century and not infrequently since; while it is not impossible that, in the well-attested revolutions of critical thought and taste, it may be given again. This is that romance on the whole, and with some flashes of better things at times, is a jumble of incoherent and mostly ill-told stories, combining sameness with extravagance, outraging probability and the laws of imitative form, childish as a rule in its appeal to adventure and to the supernatural, immoral in its ethics, barbarous in its aesthetics, destitute of any philos ophy, representing at its very best (though the ages of its lowest appreciation were hardly able even to consider this) a necessary stage in the education of half-civilized peoples, and embodying some interesting legends, much curious folk-lore and a certain amount of distorted historical evidence. On the other hand, for the last hundred years and more, there have been some who have seen in romance almost the highest and certainly the most charming form of fictitious creation, the link between poetry and religion, the literary embodiment of men's dreams and desires, the appointed nepenthe of more sophisticated ages as it was the appointed pastime of the less sophisticated. Between these op posites there is of course room for many middle positions, but few of these will be occupied safely and inexpugnably by those who do not take heed of the following conclusions.
Romance, beyond all question, enmeshes and retains for us a vast amount of story-material to which we find little correspond ing in ancient literature. It lays the foundation of modern prose fiction in such a fashion that the mere working out and building up of certain features leads to, and in fact involves the whole structure of the modern novel (q.v.). It antiquates (by a sort of gradual "taking for granted") the classical assumption that love is an inferior motive, and that women, though they "may be good sometimes" are scarcely fit for the position of principal personages. It helps to institute and ensure a new unity—the
unity of interest. It admits of the most extensive variety. It gives a scope to the imagination which exceeds that of any known older literary form. At its best it embodies the new or Christian morality, if not in a Pharisaic yet in a Christian fashion, and it establishes a concordat between religion and art in more ways than this. Incapable of exacter definition, inclining (a danger doubtless as well as an advantage) towards the vague, it is never theless comprehensible for all its vagueness, and, informal as it is, possesses its own form of beauty—and that a precious one. These characteristics were, if perceived at all by its enemies in the period above referred to, taken at their worst ; they were per ceived by its champions at the turn of the tide and perhaps exaggerated. From both attitudes emerged that distinction be tween the "classic" and the "romantic" which was referred to at the beginning of this article as requiring notice before we con clude. The crudest, but it must be remembered the most inten tionally crude (for Goethe knew the limitations of his saying), is that "Classicism is health; Romanticism is disease." In a less question-begging proposition of single terms, classicism might be said to be method and romanticism energy. But in fact sharp distinctions of the kind do much more harm than good. It is true that the one tends to order, lucidity, proportion; the other to freedom, to fancy, to caprice. But the attempt to reimpose these qualities as absolutely distinguishing marks and labels on particular works is almost certain to lead to mistake and disaster, and there is more than mere irony in the person who defines romance as "Something which was written between an unknown period of the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, and which has been imitated since the later part of the i8th century." What that something really is is not well to be known except by reading more or less considerable sections of it—by exploring it like one of its own forbidden countries. But something of a sketch-map of that country has been attempted here.