Fixity in the midst of change, fluctuation at the heart of sameness, such is the estate of language.According as they endeavour to reduce letters to some large haven and abiding-place of civility, or prefer to throw in their lot with the centrifugal tendency and ride on the flying crest of change, are writers dubbed Classic or Romantic.The Romantics are individualist, anarchic;the strains of their passionate incantation raise no cities to confront the wilderness in guarded symmetry, but rather bring the stars shooting from their spheres, and draw wild things captive to a voice.To them Society and Law seem dull phantoms, by the light cast from a flaming soul.They dwell apart, and torture their lives in the effort to attain to self-expression.All means and modes offered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape them to this one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences, and appropriate or invent strange jargons.They furbish up old words or weld together new indifferently, that they may possess the machinery of their speech and not be possessed by it.They are at odds with the idiom of their country in that it serves the common need, and hunt it through all its metamorphoses to subject it to their private will.Heretics by profession, they are everywhere opposed to the party of the Classics, who move by slower ways to ends less personal, but in no wise easier of attainment.The magnanimity of the Classic ideal has had scant justice done to it by modern criticism.To make literature the crowning symbol of a world-wide civilisation; to roof in the ages, and unite the elect of all time in the courtesy of one shining assembly, paying duty to one unquestioned code; to undo the work of Babel, and knit together in a single community the scattered efforts of mankind towards order and reason; - this was surely an aim worthy of labour and sacrifice.Both have been freely given, and the end is yet to seek.The self-assertion of the recusants has found eulogists in plenty, but who has celebrated the self-denial that was thrown away on this other task, which is farther from fulfilment now than it was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave up their patriotism and the tongue of their childhood in the name of fellow-citizenship with the ancients and the oecumenical authority of letters?
Scholars, grammarians, wits, and poets were content to bury the lustre of their wisdom and the hard-won fruits of their toil in the winding-sheet of a dead language, that they might be numbered with the family of Cicero, and added to the pious train of Virgil.It was a noble illusion, doomed to failure, the versatile genius of language cried out against the monotony of their Utopia, and the crowds who were to people the unbuilded city of their dreams went straying after the feathered chiefs of the rebels, who, when the fulness of time was come, themselves received apotheosis and the honours of a new motley pantheon.The tomb of that great vision bears for epitaph the ironical inscription which defines a Classic poet as "a dead Romantic."In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death.A universal agreement in the use of words facilitates communication, but, so inextricably is expression entangled with feeling, it leaves nothing to communicate.Inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic tradition, which is everywhere lackeyed, through a long decline, by the pallor of reflected glories.Even the irresistible novelty of personal experience is dulled by being cast in the old matrix, and the man who professes to find the whole of himself in the Bible or in Shakespeare had as good not be.He is a replica and a shadow, a foolish libel on his Creator, who, from the beginning of time, was never guilty of tautology.This is the error of the classical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality.Nature avenges herself on those who would thus make her prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to house it.In their search for permanence they become unreal, abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is transformed into a science, their expression into an academic terminology.Immutability is their ideal, and they find it in the arms of death.Words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless for the purposes of art.Whosoever would make acquaintance with the goal towards which the classic practice tends, should seek it in the vocabulary of the Sciences.There words are fixed and dead, a botanical collection of colourless, scentless, dried weeds, a HORTUS SICCUS of proper names, each individual symbol poorly tethered to some single object or idea.
