In general a thing is romantic when, as Aristotle would say, it is wonderful rather than probable; in other words, when it violate...s the normal sequence of cause and effect in favor of adventure. Here is the fundamental contrast between the words classic and romantic which meets us at the outset and in some form or other persists in all uses of the word down to the present day. A thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique, etc. A thing is classical, on the other hand, when it is not unique, but representative of a class. In this sense, medical men may speak correctly of a classic case of typhoid fever, or a classic case of hysteria. One is even justified in speaking of a classic example of romanticism. By an easy extension of meaning a thing is classical when it belongs to a high class or to the best class.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Classical art, in a word, stands for form; romantic art for content. The romantic artist expects people to ask, What has he got to... say? The classical artist expects them to ask, How does he say it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is ...intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards him like a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The words "classic" and "romantic," like many other critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood them too v...aguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in the history of art and literature.... The term "classical," fixed, as it is, to a well-defined group in art, is clear, indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard, and merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about it--people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus of old Greece and Rome, only because they fancy her grown into something staid and tame. And as the term "classical" has been used in a too absolute, and therefore in a misleading sense, so the term "romantic" has been used much too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The sense in which Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this; that, in opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange adventure, and sought it in the Middle Ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exe...rcise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational--an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »