ABSTRACT
In the writings of the German poets, critics, and moralists who adapted the word "romantic" to their own uses and introduced it into the vocabulary of literary history and of philosophy. Romantic art must be progressive as well as universal because the universality of comprehension at which it aimed was assumed to be never fully attainable by any individual or any generation. Nature and man, for the Romanticist, were various enough to afford the artist ever new material; and his task was indefatigably to appropriate and to embody it in equally various and changing aesthetic forms. The temporalized principle of plenitude and the opposite idea of the restriction of content by the imposition of immutable rules of formal perfection are made by Schiller the joint dictators of the program of life and of art.
