Author: Felix Emmanuel Schelling

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-10

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 9781331082804

Excerpt from Ben Jonson and the Classical School "The words, classical and romantic, although, like many other critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood them vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in the history of art and literature. The 'classic' comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as the measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never displease us. And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in beauty, which they possess, indeed, to a pre-eminent degree. It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organisation, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper." These are the words of that rare interpreter of the "House Beautiful," the late Mr. Walter Pater, and may serve us as a fitting position whence to depart in a search for the origin of some of those elements which combined to produce the many and noteworthy changes that came over English literature during the seventeenth century. Without entering here into definitions and distinctions which have been much aired and not a little abused, it is well to notice that these terms are not necessarily hostile to each other or even mutually exclusive. Classicism and Romanticism are tendencies rather than opposed methods in art. Literature has always partaken of both, although one may dominate in one age, the other in another. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.