It has a high value. It is a careful attempt to find a definition for the two terms _classical_ and _romantic_. Pater sees with perspicuous clearness that one of the difficulties of finding a precise formula for large terms, expressive of tendency, is the disentangling them from the loose, conventional, and conversational sense that they come to bear. Thus he says of the word _classical_, that “it has often been used in a hard, and merely scholastic sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about it—people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and tame.” He says that the charm of classical literature is the charm 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 artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity.” “It comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as the measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never displease us.” But the romantic spirit is that which craves for new motives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of style: its essence is the addition of strangeness to beauty; its danger is to value what is after all inartistic—anything that is bizarre, strained, exaggerated. Pater contrasts Pope and Balzac as instances of the defects of the two styles,—Pope’s lack of curiosity producing insipidity, and Balzac’s excess of curiosity not being duly tempered with the desire of beauty; and with singular felicity he selects the _Philoctetes_ of Sophocles as a typically romantic book, but yet with all the tranquillity of the classical spirit. Pater shows that romanticism generally arises, as in France with Rousseau, after a long period of stagnation and ennui. But after all the essence of the situation lies in the fact that, as Stendhal says, all good art was romantic in its day; and thus the charm of romanticism is the charm of the spring, of the unfolding of new forms, and strangely shaped flowers, and scented fruits; the charm of classicism is the charm that creeps over the same landscape with the mellow richness of autumn; and Pater sums up the whole subject by saying that “in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.”