While accepting provisionally Heine’s definition, it will be useful to examine some of the wider meanings that have been attached to the words classic and romantic, and some of the analyses that have been attempted of the qualities that make one work of art classical and another romantic.  Walter Pater took them to indicate opposite tendencies or elements which are present in varying proportions in all good art.  It is the essential function of classical art and literature, he thought, to take care of the qualities of measure, purity, temperance.  “What is classical comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as a measure of what a long experience has shown us will, at least, never displease us.  And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a pre-eminent degree."[6] “The charm, then, of what is classical in art or literature is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless listen over and over again, because it is told so well.  To the absolute beauty of its form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity.”

On the other hand, he defines the romantic characteristics in art as consisting in “the addition of strangeness to beauty”—­a definition which recalls Bacon’s saying, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”  “The desire of beauty,” continues Pater, “being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper.”  This critic, then, would not confine the terms classic and classicism to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are certain ages of the world in which the classical tradition predominates, i.e., in which the respect for authority, the love of order and decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for strangeness and novelty.  Such epochs are, e.g., the Augustan age of Rome, the Siecle de Louis XIV, in France, the times of Pope and Johnson in England—­indeed, the whole of the eighteenth century in all parts of Europe.

Neither would he limit the word romantic to work conceived in the spirit of the Middle Ages.  “The essential elements,” he says, “of the romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is as the accidental effect of these qualities only, that it seeks the Middle Ages; because in the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age there are unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out of things unlikely or remote.”  “The sense in which Scott is to be called a romantic writer is chiefly that, in opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange adventure and sought it in the Middle Age.”