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 ancient 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 English 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.
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