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~TRODUCTIO~
version, exhibit unmistakable traces of the influences
which, with the companions of his enthusiasm, he
underwent and courted. But the self·control which
never wholly deserted him, and the sense of beauty
which was part of his being, and which in Italy he only
refined, kept him back from a more than occasional
lapse into the savage licence of ideas and the grotesque
extravagance of form in which it was their common
pride to indulge, and by which some, though not all,
of them were ultimately submerged. Among the many
things which they made it part of their eccentric cult
to abhor or despise-including the demands of' honour '
and the less artificial restraints of decorum-were learning
and the sciences, together with the professions whose
rewards crowned their successful pur uit; literature
itself was in their esteem but a tinkling cymbJ.l; one
study alone was worth undertaking-that of man; one
criterion of truth and loveliness was alone admissiblethat
of the heart and the human feelings to which it
beat in response. Their literary models were writers
in whom they recognised, or thought they recognisedthe
triumph of the direct expression of human character
and human emotions over all rules and restraints-the
, divine' Shakespeare abo,e all, who 'breathed his
vital spirit into the mummies of his historic heroes '.
The subjects of their own works they professed to take
by preference direct from life-from the real life that
is around them, which they deemed emphatically real
in its' human' problems (often hovering on the confines
of incest and bigamy) and in its horrors-horrors
in the eyes of the law, in the truer judgement of the
human heart explicable and pardonable errors. 'There
is no species of crime,' writes one of these students of
life, , of which our century has not one or two specimens
to exhibit-regicides are quartered, parricides and
fratricides broken on the wheel, infanticide mothers
beheaded.' Infanticide in particular was a crime by
which the German poets of the age-from Biirger to
Schubarth and Schiller-were much exercised; as well
as, it must be said, the public conscience generally and
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