The definition of Romance

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.--Walter Pater

An American transcendentalist, Dr. F. H. Hedge, thought the essence of romanticism was aspiration, having its origin in wonder and mystery. An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact or the actual (realism), a formula which recalls Hazlitt's statement (1816) that the CLASSIC beauty of a Greek temple resided chiefly in its actual form and its obvious connotations, while the "romantic" beauty of a GOTHIC building or ruin arose from associated ideas which the imagination was stimulated to conjure up. The term is used in many senses, a favorite recent one being that which sees in the romantic mood a psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities.--A Handbook to Literature, C. Hugh Holman 4th ed.

This last reminds me of the paper I wrote in college comparing Keats's two great Odes, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale," the first being Classical, the second Romantic. "Urn" is of course about a Grecian urn on which is depicted various pastoral scenes, frozen in time, in motion, in growth. It does ask questions but ultimately ends in a statement: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." "Nightingale" is all about escape--it's a sensual and rather wild trip into the night-forest where "Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death..." and travels to the Biblical era where "Perhaps the self-same song that found a path/Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,/She stood in tears amid the alien corn." And of course "Nightingale" ends in a question: Do I wake or sleep?

The addition of strangeness to beauty. I love that.

One of my professors at Sweet Briar told me I was a "true child of the Romantic era." I'm sure it was no surprise to him that I went on to do my honors project on John Keats.

No nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt
Among Arabian sands;
No sweeter voice was ever heard
In springtime from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago...--"The Reaper," William Wordsworth

The Fountainhead

I'm reading one of Mike's copies of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead right now. I will agree, it is better and more readable than Atlas Shrugged (which I wrote about last July) but that's not saying a great deal, as AS is a much better manifesto than a novel. There are still the same problems with the painfully obvious characterization (hero = handsome and of course has really HOTTT sex), although there is more ambiguity--greater variety in the villains and some are actually interesting. I must say, what I said before about her embarrassingly pre-feminist sex scenes applies here as well--Dominique* (the Gorgeous, Thin, Devastatingly Intelligent heroine) shows up in Howard Roark's apartment and says she wants to sleep with him. Only she doesn't say it that concisely of course--God forbid she say it like that when she could make a speech as well! She says "I want you to sleep with me. Now, tonight and at any time you may care to call me...not hysterical with desire--but coldly and consciously...I have no self-respect to bargain with me and divide me--I want you--I want you like an animal, or a cat on a fence, or a whore." There's more to her speech--much more, believe me--but that's the essence of it.

( Dominique Francon, Naked Financial Advisor )