part of the truth. Mme. de Staël was right when she asserted in her
'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South,
antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of
literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a
combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North,
and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some
thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite
Mme. de Staël's, will not give such a very different idea of
Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughout
Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that
element seems to me to be the return of each country to its national
past; in other words, mediaevalism.

A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much.
Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of
Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are
romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is
romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an
idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve
the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I
think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for
omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not
accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was
not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a
link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my
justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth
Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary _history_
of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The
public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading
his books. . . . He was practically an unread man."