And 'returning to
the nature which had inspired the ancient myths', the Romantic poets
must have felt with a keener sense 'their exquisite vitality'.
[Footnote: J. A, Symonds, _Studies of the Greek Poets_, ii, p. 258.]
The whole tenor of English Romanticism may be said to have been
affected thereby.
For English Romanticism--and this is one of its most distinctive
merits--had no exclusiveness about it. It was too spontaneous, one
would almost say, too unconscious, ever to be clannish. It grew,
untrammelled by codes, uncrystallized into formulas, a living thing
always, not a subject-matter for grandiloquent manifestoes and more or
less dignified squabbles. It could therefore absorb and turn to
account elements which seemed antagonistic to it in the more
sophisticated forms it assumed in other literatures. Thus, whilst
French Romanticism--in spite of what it may or may not have owed to
Chenier--became often distinctly, deliberately, wilfully anti-
classical, whilst for example [Footnote: As pointed out by Brunetiere,
_Evolution de la Poesie lyrique_, ii, p. 147.] Victor Hugo in that
all-comprehending _Legende des Siecles_ could find room for the Hegira
and for Zim-Zizimi, but did not consecrate a single line to the
departed glories of mythical Greece, the Romantic poets of England may
claim to have restored in freshness and purity the religion of
antiquity.
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