Then it is not what he did that attracts the notice of the younger sort,
but what he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be no great thinker.
Pope, who, when his star was in the ascendant, was "Mr. Pope, the new
Poet," has to submit to examination by the Headmaster of Winchester, who
decides that he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. Shakespeare
is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree
of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly in clear and
vigorous English, that Shakespeare has no capacity for tragic writing.
Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renaissance, into the Gothic
darkness. So the pendulum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, even
in the shortest of its variable oscillations, to revisit the greatest
writers, who are nearest to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are
raised by one age into the very essentials of good poetry, are denied the
name of poetry by the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is the
exploded vice of another; and Romance comes in and goes out with secular
regularity.
The meaning of Romance will never come home to him who seeks for it in
modern controversies. The name Romance is itself a memorial of the
conquest of Europe by the Romans. They imposed their language on half
Europe, and profoundly influenced the other half. The dialectical,
provincial Latin, of various kinds, spoken by the conquered peoples,
became the Romance speech; and Romance literature was the new literature
which grew up among these peoples from the ninth century onwards,--or
from an earlier time, if the fringe of Celtic peoples, who kept their
language but felt the full influence of Christianity, be taken into the
account.
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