Here again the essayist is careful to explain that there are certain epochs which are predominately romantic.  “Outbreaks of this spirit come naturally with particular periods:  times when . . . men come to art and poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual excitement, after a long ennui.”  He instances, as periods naturally romantic, the time of the early Provencal troubadour poetry:  the years following the Bourbon Restoration in France (say, 1815-30); and “the later Middle Age; so that the medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed to Greek or Roman poetry, as romantic to classical poetry.”

In Pater’s use of the terms, then, classic and romantic do not describe particular literature, or particular periods in literary history, so much as certain counterbalancing qualities and tendencies which run through the literatures of all times and countries.  There were romantic writings among the Greeks and Romans; there were classical writings in the Middle Ages; nay, there are classical and romantic traits in the same author.  If there is any poet who may safely be described as a classic, it is Sophocles; and yet Pater declares that the “Philoctetes” of Sophocles, if issued to-day, would be called romantic.  And he points out—­what indeed has been often pointed out—­that the “Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than the “Iliad:”  is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic.  The adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly of the medieval romans d’aventure.  Pater quotes De Stendhal’s saying that all good art was romantic in its day.  “Romanticism,” says De Stendhal, “is the art of presenting to the nations the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure:  classicism, on the contrary, presents them with what gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great grand-fathers”—­a definition which is epigrammatic, if not convincing.[8] De Stendhal (Henri Beyle) was a pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism stands for progress, liberty, originality, and the spirit of the future; classicism, for conservatism, authority, imitation, the spirit of the past.  According to him, every good piece of romantic art is a classic in the making.  Decried by the classicists of to-day, for its failure to observe traditions, it will be used by the classicists of the future as a pattern to which new artists must conform.