It becomes somewhat more difficult to twist and twine the threads of our Interchapters as we come to the complexity and diversity of modern times; but, in the same proportion, each web or yarn becomes more important as link and guide-rope of the whole History. The present period—or stage, for it has more logical than chronological unity—may seem at first sight extremely confused; composed as it is of constituents separated from their countrymen, their contemporaries, and in some cases even their fellow-workers, whom we have dealt with formerly. But these constituents have in reality the greatest of all unities, a unity (whether conscious or unconscious does not matter a jot) of _purpose_. “One port, methought, alike they sought, One purpose hold where’er they fare.” The port was the Fair Haven of Romanticism, and the purpose was to distinguish “that which is established because it is right, from that which is right because it is established,” as Johnson himself formulates it. And now, of course, the horse-leeches of definition will ask me to define Romanticism, and now, also, I shall do nothing of the sort, and borrow from the unimpeachable authority of M. Brunetière[341] my reason for not doing it. What most of the personages of this book sought or helped (sometimes without at all seeking) to establish is Romanticism, and Romanticism is what they sought or helped to establish. In negative and by contrast, as usual, there is, however, no difficulty in arriving at a sort of jury-definition, which is perhaps a good deal better to work to port with than the aspiring but rather untrustworthy mast-poles of “Renascence of Wonder” and the like. We have indeed seen, throughout the last volume, that the curse and the mischief of Neo-classicism lay in the tyranny of the Definition itself. You had no sooner satisfied yourself that Poetry was such and such a thing, that it consisted of such and such narrowly delimited Kinds, that its stamped instruments and sealed patterns were this and that, than you proceeded to apply these propositions inquisitorially, excommunicating or executing delinquents and nonconformists. The principal uniformity amid the wide diversities of the new criticism was that, without any direct concert, without any formulated anti-creed, they all tended to remove the bolts and the bars, to antiquate the stipulations, to make the great question of criticism not “What have you proposed to do, and how have you proposed to do it?” but “What is this that you have _done_? and is it good?” But they never, in any instance, formulated the abolition of restrictions, as, for instance, we shall find Hugo doing in the Preface to the _Orientales_. They had almost invariably some special mediate or immediate object in view—in Hurd’s case to get rid of the disqualification of the “Gothic,” in Lessing’s to get rid of the domination of French. Even Diderot’s Impressionism—the most important