p>The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 34, August, 1860 / A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics
THE CARNIVAL OF THE ROMANTIC
Whither went the nine old Muses, daughters of Jupiter and the Goddess of Memory, after their seats on Helicon, Parnassus, and Olympus were barbarized? Not far away. They hovered like witches around the seething caldron of early Christian Europe, in which, "with bubble, bubble, toil and trouble," a new civilization was forming, mindful of the brilliant lineage of their worshippers, from Homer to Boethius, looking upon the vexed and beclouded Nature, and expecting the time when Humanity should gird itself anew with the beauty of ideas and institutions. They were sorrowful, but not in despair; for they knew that the children of men were strong with recuperative power.
The ear of Fancy, not long since, heard the hoofs of winged Pegasus striking the clouds. The long-idle Muses, it seemed, had become again interested in human efforts, and were paying a flying visit to the haunts of modern genius from the Hellespont to the Mississippi. They lingered in sunny Provence, and in the dark forest-land of the Minnesingers. In the great capitals, as Rome, Berlin, Paris, London,—in smaller capitals, as Florence, Weimar, and Boston,—in many a village which had a charm for them, as Stratford-on-Avon, Ferney, and Concord in Massachusetts,—in the homes of wonderful suffering, as Ferrara and Haworth.—on many enchanted waters, as the Guadalquivir, the Rhine, the Tweed, the Hudson, Windermere, and Leman,—in many a monastic nook whence had issued a chronicle or history, in many a wild birthplace of a poem or romance, around many an old castle and stately ruin, in many a decayed seat of revelry and joyous repartee,—through the long list of the nurseries of genius and the laboratories of art, they wandered pensive and strangely affected. At length they rested from their journey to hold a council on modern literature. The long results of Christian time were unrolled before them as in a chart. They beheld the dawn of a new historic day, marked by songs of fantastic tenderness, and unwieldy, long, and jointless romances and poems, like the monsters which played in the unfinished universe before the creation of man. The Muses smiled with a look more of complaisance than approval, as they reviewed the army of Troubadours and Minnesingers and the crowd of romancers who followed in their train. They decided that the joyous array of early mediæval literature was full of promise, though something of its tone and temper was past the comprehension of pagan goddesses. The legends of saints and pictures of martyrdoms were especially mysterious to them, and they regarded them raptly, not smilingly, and bowed their heads. Anon their eyes rested on an Italian city, where uprose, as if in interstellar space, an erect figure, with a piercing eye, pleasant as Plato's voice. His countenance was fixed upon the empyrean, and a more than Minerva-like form hovered above him, interpreting the Christian universe; and as he wrote what she dictated, the verses of his poem were musical even to the Muses. Dante, Beatrice, and the "Divine Comedy," with a Gothic church as a make-weight, were balanced in Muses' minds in comparison with the "Iliad" and the age of Pericles; and again they put on the rapt look of mystery, but a smile also, and their admiration and applause were more and more. To England they soon turned, and contemplated the round, many-colored globe of Shakspeare's works. As playful swallows sometimes dart round and round a lithe and wondering wingless animal, so they, admiringly and timidly, attracted, yet hesitating, delighting in his alertness, but not quite understanding it, flitted like a troubled and beautiful flock around the great magician of modern civilization. Their glance became lighter and less intent, as if they were nearer to knowledge, the pain of perplexity disappeared like a shadow from their countenances, their plaudits were more unreserved, and it seemed likely that the high desert of Shakspeare would win for our new literature a favorable recognition from the aristocratic goddesses of antiquity. Knowing that Jove had made perfection unattainable by mortals, they yet found in the chart before them epics, dramas, lyrics, histories, and philosophies that were no unworthy companions to the creations of classical genius, and they were jubilant in the triumphs of a period in which they had been rather ignorantly and ironically worshipped. Their sitting was long, and their review thorough, yet they found but one department of modern literature which was regarded with a distrust that grew to an aversion. The romances, the tales, the stories, the novels were contemned more and more, from the first of them to the last. Nothing like them had been known among the glories of Hellenic literary art, and no Muse now stood forth to be their defender and patron. Calliope declared that they were not epical, Euterpe and Erato that they were not lyrical, Melpomene and Thalia that they were neither tragical nor comical, Clio that they were not historical, Urania that they were not sublime in conception, Polymnia that they had no stately or simple charm in execution, and Terpsichore, who had joined with Melpomene in admiring the opera, found nothing in the novel which she could own and bless. Fleeting passages, remote and slight fragments, were pleasing to them all, like the oases of a Sahara, or the sites of high civilization on the earth; but the whole world of novels seemed to them a chaos undisciplined by art and unformed to beauty. The gates of the halls where the classics live in immortal youth were beginning to close against the voluminous prose romances that have sprung from modern thought, when the deliberations of the Muses were suddenly interrupted. They had disturbed the divine elements of modern society. Forth from all the recesses of the air came troops of Gothic elves, trolls, fairies, sprites, and all the other romantic beings which had inspired the modern mind to novel-writing,—marching or gambolling, pride in their port, defiance in their eye, mischief in their purpose,—and began so vigorous an attack upon their classic visitors and critics, that the latter were glad to betake themselves to the mighty-winged Pegasus, who rapidly bore them in retreat to the present home of the Dii Majores, that point of the empyrean directly above Olympus.
And well, indeed, might the Muses wonder at the rise of the novel and its vast developments, for the classic literature presents no similar works. One of Plato's dialogues or Aesop's fables is as near an approach to a prose romance as antiquity in its golden eras can offer. The few productions of the kind which appeared during the decline of literature in the early Christian centuries, as the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius and the "Æthiopica" of Heliodorus, were freaks of Nature, an odd growth rather than a distinct species, and are also to be contrasted rather than compared with the later novel. Such as they are, moreover, they were produced under Christian as much as classic influences. The æsthetic Hellenes admitted into their literature nothing so composite, so likely to be crude, as the romance. Their styles of art were all pure, their taste delighted in simplicity and unity, and they strictly forbade a medley, alike in architecture, sculpture, and letters. The history of their development opens with an epic yet unsurpassed, and their literary creations have been adopted to be the humanities of Christian universities. A writer has recently proposed to account for their success in the arts from the circumstance that the features of Nature around them were small,—that their hornet-shaped peninsula was cut by mountains and inlets of the sea into minute portions, which the mind could easily compass, the foot measure, and the hand improve,—that therefore every hillock and fountain, every forest and by-way was peopled with mythological characters and made significant with traditions, and the cities were adorned with architectural and sculptured masterpieces. Greece thus, like England in our own time, presented the character of a highly wrought piece of ground,—England being the more completely developed for material uses, and Greece being the more heavily freighted with legends of ideal meaning. Small-featured and large-minded Greece is thus set in contrast with Asia, where the mind and body were equally palsied in the effort to overcome immense plains and interminable mountain-chains. But whatever the reason, whether geographical or ethnological, it is certain that the people of Greece were endowed with a transcendent genius for art, which embraced all departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like all remote nations, were indiscriminately regarded by them as barbarous. But guarded by the bounds of their civilization, as by the circumfluent ocean-stream of their olden tradition, they were prompted in all their movements by the spirit of beauty, and philosophers have accounted them the very people whose ideas were adequately and harmoniously represented in sensible forms,—unlike the nations of the Orient, where mind is overawed by preponderating matter, and unlike the nations of Christendom, where the current spiritual meanings reach far into the shadowy realm