Abstract
AT the Royal Institution on December 6, Mr. F. L. Lucas, fellow and librarian of King's College, Cambridge, delivered a discourse on this subject. Romanticism, he said, may perhaps be called the literature of intoxication and dream. Freud has pictured the human ego as living a harassed life between the conflicting claims of the instinctive, animal ‘id’, the ‘super-ego’ or sense of social obligation, and the ‘reality-principle’ or sense of fact. Eighteenth-century classicism shows above all a too tyrannical control, by the two last, of the dreams and impulses that rise from the less conscious depths of personality. The Romantic revival was a revolt of dreamers against those twin sleepless dragons ‘good sense’ and ‘good taste’. Though the Romantic Empire declined and fell, at its heart remains an eternal city. Romance is not dead. The science of the nineteenth century seemed to expel her with a brandished test-tube; the science of the twentieth re-opens the door to her with a bow. Yet this should not be exaggerated. The recently expressed view that poetry is independent of truth, a mere alcohol to stimulate ‘emotional attitudes', is in its turn a mystical excess. The world about us grows, it is true, more and more a dance of phantom formulae on the points of dial-needles—the very stuff of dreams. Yet there are dreams and dreams. Some cohere and work; others do not. Incoherence was the weakness in the romanticism of Shelley or Victor Hugo; it is the romanticism of Homer or Hardy that is more enduring. Though dreaming, they imposed order and consistency even on their fantasies. Classicism, realism, romanticism, are all extremes the three points of a triangle within which lies inscribed the magic circle where walk the greatest masters.
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Romanticism and the Modern World. Nature 136, 944–945 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136944c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136944c0