He warns against imitation of Shakespeare. The master should only be followed in his understanding observation of the society in which he lived, and his skill in giving his contemporaries exactly the kind of tragedy which they needed; for to-day too, in 1820, the desire for a certain kind of tragic drama exists, even though the public, intimidated by the fame of Racine, does not venture to demand it of the poet. It is only when an author studies and satisfies his age that he is truly Romantic. For "Romanticism" is the art of providing nations with the literary works which in the existing condition of their ideas and customs are fitted to give them the greatest possible amount of pleasure, whereas "Classicism" offers them the literature which gave their greatgrandfathers the greatest possible amount of pleasure. In his own day Racine was a Romanticist. Shakespeare is a Romanticist, in the first place because he depicted for the Englishmen of 1590 the bloody struggles and the results of their civil wars, and in the second place because he has painted a series of masterly, subtly shaded pictures of the impulses of the human mind and the passions of the human heart. The teaching of Romanticism is, not that men should imitate England or Germany, but that each nation should have its own literature, modelled upon its own character, just as we all wear clothes cut and sewn for ourselves alone. To Beyle, we observe, Romanticism is almost the exact equivalent of what we call modern art. Characteristic of that inveterate tendency of the Latin race to classicism which has already been alluded to, are his repeated assertions that the author should be "romantic" in all that concerns his subject-matter, this being "the requirement of the age," but that he should remain classic in his manner of presenting it, in vocabulary and style. For language is an established convention and therefore practically unchangeable. Men should try to write like Pascal, Voltaire, and La Bruyère.[2]