ABSTRACT
Romanticism is the art of offering people the literary works which, in the present state of their customs and beliefs, can give them the greatest pleasure. Classicism, by contrast, offers them the literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers. Sophocles and Euripides were eminently romantic; to the Greeks, assembled in the theatre in Athens, they gave tragedies which, in the light of that nation's manners, religion, and concepts of human dignity, surely vouchsafed them the greatest possible pleasure. To imitate Sophocles and Euripides today, and to pretend that these imitations do not make nineteenth-century French men yawn, that is classicism. Shakespeare was romantic because he proffered to the English of 1590 first the bloody calamities of the civil wars, and then, as a respite from these sad sights, a host of subtle portrayals of the stirrings of the heart, the most delicate shades of passion.
