Some of the great poets of the Romantic Revival took mediaeval literature
for their model, but they did more than that. They returned to the cult
of wild nature; they reintroduced the supernatural, which is a part of
the nature of man; they described seas, and deserts, and mountains, and
the emotions of the soul in loneliness. But so soon as it passed out of
the hands of the greater poets, this revived Romance became as bookish as
decadent Classicism, and ran into every kind of sentimental extravagance.
Indeed revived Romance also became a school of manners, and by making a
fashion and a code of rare emotions, debased the descriptive parts of the
language. A description by any professional reporter of any Royal
wedding is further from the truth to-day than it was in the eighteenth
century. The average writer is looser and more unprincipled.
The word Romance supplies no very valuable instrument of criticism even
in regard to the great writers of the early nineteenth century.
Wordsworth, like Defoe, drew straight from the life. Those who will may
call him a Romantic. He told of adventures--the adventures of the mind.
He did not write of Bacchus, Venus, and Apollo; neither did he concern
himself with Merlin, Tristram, and the Lady of the Lake. He shunned what
is derived from other books. His theme is man, nature, and human life.
Scott, in rich and careless fashion, dealt in every kind of material that
came his way.
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