But the extension of these opposing terms to the work of writers who have so little in common with either the antique or the medieval as Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop here.  It is one of the embarrassments of the literary historian that nearly every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular meaning.  In common speech, classic has come to signify almost anything that is good.  If we look in our dictionaries we find it defined somewhat in this way:  “Conforming to the best authority in literature and art; pure; chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best Greek and Roman writers, but also applied to the best modern authors, or their works.”  “Classic, n. A work of acknowledged excellence and authority.”  In this sense of the word, “Robinson Crusoe” is a classic; the “Pilgrim’s Progress” is a classic; every piece of literature which is customarily recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style upon is a classic.[4]

Contrariwise the word romantic, as popularly employed, expresses a shade of disapprobation.  The dictionaries make it a synonym for sentimental, fanciful, wild, extravagant, chimerical, all evident derivatives from their more critical definition, “pertaining or appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages, as opposed to the classical antique.”  The etymology of romance is familiar.  The various dialects which sprang from the corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of romans.  The name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this vernacular instead of in the ancient classical Latin.  And as the favorite kind of writing in Provencal, Old French, and Spanish was the tale of chivalrous adventure that was called par excellence, a roman, romans, or_ romance_.  The adjective romantic is much later, implying, as it does, a certain degree of critical attention to the species of fiction which it describes in order to a generalizing of its peculiarities.  It first came into general use in the latter half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth; and naturally, was marked from birth with that shade of disapproval which has been noticed in popular usage.

The feature that struck the critics most in the romances of the Middle Ages, and in that very different variety of romance which was cultivated during the seventeenth century—­the prolix, sentimental fictions of La Calprenede, Scuderi, Gomberville, and D’Urfe—­was the fantastic improbability of their adventures.  Hence the common acceptation of the word romantic in such phrases as “a romantic notion,” “a romantic elopement,” “an act of romantic generosity.”  The application of the adjective to scenery was somewhat later,[5] and the abstract romanticism was, of course, very much later; as the literary movement, or the revolution in taste, which it entitles, was not enough developed to call for a name until the opening of the nineteenth century.  Indeed, it was never so compact, conscious, and definite a movement in England as in Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came from abroad, from the polemical literature which attended the career of the German romanticismus and the French romantisme.