Queen Anne literature was classical, then, in its lack of those elements of mystery and aspiration which we have found described as of the essence of romanticism.  It was emphatically a literature of this world.  It ignored all vague emotion, the phenomena of subconsciousness, “the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound,” the shadow that rounds man’s little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity.  The writings of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth.  They never try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily intelligible.  The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley, the darkness of Browning—­to take only modern instances—­proceed, however, not from inferior art, but from the greater difficulty of finding expression for a very different order of ideas.

Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods—­which may be regarded as one, for present purposes—­was classical, or at least unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect sense of beauty.  It was a literature not simply of this world, but of the world, of the beau monde, high life, fashion, society, the court and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assemblies, ombre-parties.  It was social, urban, gregarious, intensely though not broadly human.  It cared little for the country or outward nature, and nothing for the life of remote times and places.  Its interest was centered upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial type of civilization which it found prevailing.  It was as indifferent to Venice, Switzerland, the Alhambra, the Nile, the American forests, and the islands of the South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the manners of Scotch Highlanders.  The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly national in foreign ways is a romantic note.  The eighteenth century disliked “strangeness added to beauty”; it disapproved of anything original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture.

Professor Gates says that the work of English literature during the first quarter of the present century was “the rediscovery and vindication of the concrete.  The special task of the eighteenth century had been to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been analysis and generalization.  It asked for no new experience. . .  The abstract, the typical, the general—­these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14] Classical tragedy, e.g., undertook to present only the universal,