The end of the eighteenth century, swept by vast
disturbing currents, experienced an excitement of spirit of which one
note was a reaction against an outworn classicism severed not more
from nature than from the genuine motives of ancient art; and a
return to true Hellenism was as much a part of this reaction as the
sudden preoccupation with things medieval. The medieval tendency is
in Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, the Hellenic in his Iphigenie.
At first this medievalism was superficial, or at least external.
Adventure, romance in the frankest sense, grotesque individualism--
that is one element in medieval poetry, and with it alone Scott and
Goethe dealt. Beyond them were the two other elements of the
medieval spirit: its mystic religion at its apex in Dante and Saint
Louis, and its mystic passion, passing here and there into the great
romantic loves of rebellious flesh, of Lancelot and Abelard. That
stricter, imaginative medievalism which re-creates the mind of the
Middle Age, so that the form, the presentment grows outward [215]
from within, came later with Victor Hugo in France, with Heine in
Germany.
In the Defence of Guenevere: and Other Poems, published by Mr.
William Morris now many years ago, the first typical specimen of
aesthetic poetry, we have a refinement upon this later, profounder
medievalism. The poem which gives its name to the volume is a thing
tormented and awry with passion, like the body of Guenevere defending
herself from the charge of adultery, and the accent falls in strange,
unwonted places with the effect of a great cry.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23