enough and has long been admitted. Did not Victor Hugo say as much when, in 1830, he placed in Hernani's mouth the words:
"tu me crois peut-être
Un homme comme sont tous les autres, un être
Intelligent, qui court droit au but qu'il reva.
Détrompe-toi: je suis une force qui va,
Agent aveugle et sourd de mystères funèbres,
Une âme de malheur faite avec des ténèbres,
Ou vais-je? Je ne sais, mais je me sens poussé
D'un souffle impetueux?"
Certainly it is inevitable, if one is to paint romanticism adequately, to paint it against the pseudo-classical background. Otherwise one is likely to err and to think, as so many English critics have done, that the romantic is simply the imaginative. We can be grateful to Mr. Babbitt for upholding the distinctions; for, as he makes clear, each age has its "imaginative" and "realistic" phases, and the French seventeenth century has its romanesque writers who, like Corneille, emotionalized the reason and depicted it imaginatively in the lives of their characters. Thus Pascal's moi haïssable is quite a different type from the moi of Hugo's Hernani, for example. And the point of departure for any study of the romantic is without question the sentimental and expansive eighteenth century, no matter what country we are considering. So that Mr. Babbitt's repetition of the oft-quoted statement that "romanticism is all that is not Voltaire" is again in place.
But if by a series of negations we arrive at the limits within which the romantic spirit rules, we must everlastingly affirm if the reader is to get a just idea of what romanticism positively is. "If I object to a romantic philosophy," says Mr. Babbitt, "it is because I do not like its fruits." Well and good, reply "the smart young radicals" whom Mr. Babbitt would confound, but first show us that you appreciate the fruits, and cite to us one passage in your book to set beside the following from the no less negative aperçu by F. Y. Eccles: La Liquidation du Romantisme (page 7.):
"L'art qui en issu prétend satisfaire à une curiosité diffuse sur tout l'univers, en égalant l'opulence des rêves à la diversité des choses;
