Introduction

This chapter presents some of the classicism of the Romantics and the romanticism of the Classics. The picture may be said to grow at the same time more precise and less clear. A further complication is added by the decision to look at the classical periods of three countries, namely France, England and Germany. The student of Romanticism cannot help reflecting on the impact made by the Middle Ages and the Gothic on pre-romantic and romantic writers. The student of Classicism must perforce cast his eyes back to antiquity, for it is there, in Greece and Rome, that the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to a greater or lesser degree, found their sources of inspiration. Classicism always looks back, when it theorizes and when it creates. Theophrastus had many imitators and commentators both in Greece and in Rome. His method was passed on to the Scholastics in the Middle Ages, and then on to the moralists of the Renaissance.