“One of the services that he [La Harpe] should render nowadays is to fortify young people against vain and gothic doctrines which would reduce the fine arts to childhood if they could ever gain credit in the land of Racine and Voltaire. La Harpe uttered a warning against these doctrines when he discovered the first germs of them in the books of Diderot, Mercier and some other innovators. Yet these writers were far from having professed fully the barbaric or childish system which has been taught and developed among us for a few years past; it is of foreign origin; it had no name in our language and the name that has been given to it is susceptible in fact of no precise meaning. Romanticism, for thus it is called, was imported into our midst along with Kantism, with mysticism and other doctrines of the same stamp which collectively might be named obscurantism. These are words which La Harpe was happy enough not to hear. He was accustomed to too much clearness in his ideas and expression to use such words or even to understand them. He did not distinguish two literatures. The literature that nature and society have created for us and which for three thousand years past has been established and preserved and reproduced by masterpieces appeared to him alone worthy of a Frenchman of the eighteenth century. He did not foresee that it would be reduced some day to being only a particular kind of literature, tolerated or reproved under the name of classic, and that its noblest productions would be put on the same level as the formless sketches of uncultivated genius and untried talents. Yet more than once decadence has thus been taken for an advance, and a retrograde movement for progress. Art is so difficult. It is quicker to abandon it and to owe everything to your genius. … Because perfection calls for austere toil you maintain that it is contrary to nature. This is a system that suits at once indolence and vanity. Is anything more needed to make it popular, especially when it has as auxiliary an obscure philosophy which is termed transcendent or transcendental? That is just the way sound literature fell into decline beginning with the end of the first century of the Christian era. It became extinct only to revive after a long period of darkness and barbarism; and that is how it will fall into decline again if great examples and sage lessons should ever lose their authority.” The general public in England became at least vaguely aware of the new movement with the translation of Madame de Staël’s “Germany” (1813) and A. W. Schlegel’s “Dramatic Art and Literature” (1815). Byron wrote in his reply to Bowles (1821): “Schlegel and Madame de Staël have endeavored to reduce poetry to _two_ systems, classical and romantic. The effect is only beginning.”