[In the excerpt below, Levin offers a brief account of Romantic Hellenism as a reaction against eighteenth-century neo-classicism.]

The Romanticists and the Classical Tradition

Although we ordinarily expect to find the man reflected in the books that he reads, what are we to judge from the classical tastes of É mile, the romantic child of nature? "En général, É mile prendra plus de goût pour les livres des anciens, que pour les nôtres," explains his godfather, Rousseau, "par cela seul qu'étant les premiers, les anciens sont le plus près de la nature, et que leur génie est plus à eux." Emile, then, took his books along with him into the thicket and the shadows of leaves sifted over the pages as he read them. They reflected him in the sense that the whole world became, for the romantic egoist, a dim gallery of mirrors. The classical tradition, in a civilization which had hesitated to take a single step without looking back to Greece and Rome, was too strong to be swept aside, but men can always put new interpretations upon a body of laws too venerable to be flouted or abolished.

There were, early in the romantic movement, various attempts to flout and abolish the classics, and the literatures of Greece and Rome were, for a time, completely obscured by the literatures of the north. Battles of books and querelles des anciens et des modernes had been fought at the very height of neo-classic dominance, but both parties had then stood behind the ensign of correctness, and prominent classical scholars had engaged on the side of the moderns. The early romanticists attacked both the ancients and the correct moderns, and allied themselves to the primitives of their own respective races. It was, no doubt, a protest against the cast of formalism into which the classics had firmly settled during the period from the middle ages to the eighteenth century. We have only to recall Rousseau's youthful struggles with Vergil or Byron's confession (to Horace) that he abhorred

Too much, to conquer for the Poet's sake,
The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word
In my repugnant youth. . . .

So they turned from these formalized studies to more novel explorations. The individualistic doctrines of Rousseau had undergone a new development when Herder and the German romanticists placed them on a collective and national scale. New self-conscious nationalisms supplanted the old commonwealth of nations, cosmopolitanism took on an imperialistic taint, nations went digging after their origins, and Latin was no longer the language of Europe. Universality gave way to particularism. And the course of classical studies, hitherto on the main road of European culture, was forced into a bypath down which it is still straying.

The Renaissance has been described as the addition of a new Hellenism to the old Latinity of the schoolmen. It was the claim of the romanticists that their school had purified the Greek tradition by repudiating Rome. There never was a time, during the romantic movement, when the classics were completely disregarded. Greek and Latin were still the staple of education and most of the romantic writers were brought up on them, although poetry may have been obscured by pedagogy, as Byron charges. But there is no sharp cessation or sudden revolution in the general attitude toward the classics; very gradually the formalistic and pedantic elements come to be identified with Latin culture.

The second romantic generation, no longer under the necessity of reacting to a Latinized neo-classicism, held no bias against the glory that was Greece. Schooled in the fundamental tenets of their predecessors, and yet weary of the mediaeval tinsel, they proclaimed a renaissance of ancient Greece. It was to be, in the paradoxical and confusing terminology of the literary historian, "the end of classicism and the return to the antique." The function of the classics as an intellectual discipline came to be neglected, and the cult of Greece became a mere enthusiasm in the long series of romantic obsessions. Poets began to indulge in Hellenic nostalgia. "La Grèce apparaît toujours comme un des cercles éclatants qu'on aperçoit en fermant les yeux," sighed Chateaubriand, the high priest of mediævalism, in a letter to the Hellenist Marcellus. "Quand retrouverai-je les lauriers-roses de l'Eurotas et le thym de l'Hymette?"

The manifesto of the new point of view had been the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums which appeared in 1764. Madame de Staël sensed its significance when she wrote, "L'homme qui fit une véritable revolution de la manière de considérer les arts, et par les arts la littérature, c'est Winckelmann." And indeed it was Winckelmann who crystallized in his studies the scientific approach to Greece made by the antiquarians, the sentimental approach of the travellers, and the aesthetic approach of the poets. Winckelmann's glorious task, in the opinion of Walter Pater, was to supplant a "flimsier, more artificial classical tradition" by "the clear ring, the eternal outline of the genuine antique." Although the infancy of his new spade-and-footrule Hellenism forced him to over-emphasize Roman civilization and to draw inspiration from masterpieces at third hand, still his chest heaved and fell when he viewed the Apollo Belvidere.

Winckelmann's generation was intermediate between the neo-classicists and the romantic Hellenists. Like those of the editors and grammarians who heralded the Renaissance, the names of these scholars and enthusiasts are mostly forgotten. It is hard to pass judgment upon individual figures in the movement, or to do anything but trace a general progression from the one point of view to the other. The travels of "rapid Gell" (the epithet is Byron's), Chandler, Wilkins, Colonel Leake, and Fauvet, the archaeological endeavors of Humboldt, Cockerell, Raoul-Rochette, and Elgin, the philological studies of Boeckh, Matthaei, Gesner, and Heyne, and the doctrines of Quatremère De Quincey, Mengs, Quinet, and Cousin contributed to this development.

There was a great deal of talk about "New Humanism" (absit nomen!), preached by Christ in Germany, and later by Villemain in France, and by certain obscure Russian cults. Lectures and feuilletons announced the marriage of Faust and Helena, and celebrated the coming of the Hellenic angel of peace to reconcile Latin-French classicism with English-Teutonic romanticism. At the very outset, Diderot had ranked Æschylus with Shakspere, and compared Sophocles favorably to George Lillo. A copy of the Abbé Barthélemy's Voyages du jeune Anacharsis lay on every boudoir table in France, although a more thoroughgoing romantic Hellenist, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, was to label these the travels not of a young Scythian, but of an old Parisian. Considering this current of thought in the light of the contemporary Industrial Revolution and of the social consequences of the romantic movement, we may call it a bourgeois classicism.

Such a spirit is present in the art and architecture of the period. It reveals itself in Empire and "Biedermeier" furniture. Imported by Thomas Jefferson in a convoy of romantic ideas, it makes itself evident in American homes built at the time. It calls to mind the demagogues of the French Revolution, and how they were constantly likening themselves to Greek and Roman heroes. We find Neo-Hellenism on the one hand in the pompous vulgarity of David, and on the other in the fragile idealism of Canova. Piranesi, Fragonard, Thorwaldsen, Flaxman, and Danneker may be summoned up to show the extent of its artistic ramifications. Many contemporary manifestations, such as "physical culture" or the late Miss Isadora Duncan, continue to remind us of the pervasive influence of romantic Hellenism.

What classics—it will be inquired—did these admirers of the classics read? Homer, Sophocles, and Plato did not hold sway as undisputed favorites. They read such authors as reflected their own feelings: Demosthenes for his rhetoric and republican sentiments, Herodotus for his narratives of marvels, Daphnis and Chloe for its languorous eroticism, Anacreon for his trivial lyrics, and Plutarch for his mysticism, his idealism, and his religious liberalism. Of the Latin writers, Seneca found the least disfavor. Few of these authors or the qualities for which they were read, obviously, are in the main stream of the classical tradition.

An inherent change in the nature and scope of classical studies becomes apparent before the end of the eighteenth century. The Greek culture had been codified and vulgarized by Rome, which in turn supplied the intellectual framework of the middle ages. Down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, education and the classics meant almost the same thing, and successive generations of minds were molded by this unchanged discipline. It may have been perverted by involution and pedantry, but it remained essentially humanistic, because it placed authority in tradition, and accepted a body of human experience as evidence. The modern, naturalistic point of view accepts nothing but physical phenomena.

Scholarship has reversed its methods and turned from internal to external evidence. The early eighteenth-century scholar pored over his texts of Homer, which the approval of the past had bequeathed to him for their just representation of life as a whole, until he was rewarded by his discovery of the digamma and thereby enabled to recover many forgotten felicities of poetic style. The late nineteenth-century scholar rolled up his manuscripts and his sleeves, took down his pickaxe, and clambered over the Troad in search of the actual remains of that small tribe from Asia Minor whose particular activities had set Homer singing. He found his reward in a half-defaced inscription or the fragment of a drinking-bowl.

Centuries of Homeric doubts culminated in the attempt of romantic scholarship to settle a question which had wearied generations of scholiasts. The contentions of the Chorizontes and the Peisistratidean tradition attest the fact that the Greeks themselves were conscious of the obscurity which surrounds the origin of the Iliad and the Odyssey. European classicism was not untroubled by this problem; Perrault had attacked Homer in the name of good taste, D'Aubignac had denied his very existence, and Vico had begun to suspect that all epics were derived from ballads. Still the prevailing pre-romantic attitude is better expressed by Dr. Johnson, with his complete faith in Homer as a real poet and his utter contempt for the "sequel of songs and rhapsodies" theory.

It remained for Wolf, basing his Prolegomena of 1795 upon the accumulated arguments of the disintegrating crities, to lay down the principles for a completely romantic reinterpretation of Homer. His task had been facilitated by Villoisin's edition of the Scholia, and anticipated by the essays of Blackwell and Wood, which had laid great stress upon the oral character of the epics and crowned Homer with the newly garnered laurels of the original genius, the bard of the soil, warbling his native woodnotes wild after the manner of Ossian. But Wolf, in attacking the unity of the Iliad, went a step farther and argued that the Homeric epic was no polished production, deliberately planned and carefully executed by a skilled poet, but a mere potpourri of the random utterances of any number of rustic bards and rhapsodes.

Thus Herder, in Homer und das Epos, had only to draw the moral: that the epic was the haphazard, vegetative outgrowth of the folk themselves, and, as such, was chiefly remarkable for its national idiosyncrasies. This conclusion is perhaps most significant of the many changes which affected the humanities under the influence of the new ideas. Modern criticism has rejected the authority of the classics and split up classical studies into such categories as archaeology, epigraphy, palaeography, economic history, and comparative philology. If anything is left, it may be served up as pure aesthetics. The critical tendencies of the eighteenth century must account for the wide gulf between a pair of classicists like Bentley and Mommsen in their aims, methods, and intellectual outlook. The international republic of letters was no more, learned treatises were written not in Latin but in German, and classical study became the expert's research and the dilettante's diversion. . . .