"Classical" Romanticism

...the romanticism of Don Quixote is a madness, an accident; not like that of barbarians a beginning of experience that, with time, might lead to the discovery of nature and art. Goethe, if not Faust or Peer Gynt or Ibsen, made this discovery, and became "classical": but I am afraid a retrospective classicism is not genuine, but only a phase of romanticism: true classicism is the understanding that life is an art within natural limits.

--George Santayana, "Hellenism and Barbarism."

Santayana was only dimly aware of his own deep Romanticism; his Romanticism was not of the Don Quixote variety, but that of Goethe--in whom Romanticism became "classical." Classical Romanticism is sober (as in Goethe, Santayana, and Wordsworth); it values the Stoical virtues (as in Rousseau) and yet cultivates passionate attachments that avoid Quixotic madness by seasoning them with irony.

The mode of Classical Romanticism passes through a narrow gate; few find their way to it, fewer still through it.