Romanticism is spilt religion.

Two views of Human nature:

1) Romanticism: Man, the individual, is an infinite resevoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get progress.         

2) Classicism: Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.

Man's primary need is not knowledge but action.

Intellect and perception select out--from the Kantian "sensuous manifold"--for presentation only that which is necessary to be understood in order that it may be acted upon.

The artist is the man who is born detached from the necessities of action.

The artist picks out of reality something which we have been unable to see ourselves.

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        Hulme hates Romanticism.
        Hulme defines Romanticism in this way: "Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite resevoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get progress." Classicism is precisely the opposite: "Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him."
        Hulme calls Romanticism "spilt religion." Romantics "must always be talking about the infinite." They get carried away with "metaphors of flight," and a "certain pitch of rhetoric which . . . [is] a little highfalutin." Classicism, on the other hand, "never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with the earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas."
        Hulme objects to the notion that one may view art in a manner detached from the spirit of the age: "Your opinion is almost entirely of the literary history that came just before you, and you are governed by that whatever you may think." He uses Spinoza's example of a stone falling to the ground. It might--if it had a mind--think it were falling of its own accord, but it isn't. We are in a similar position of determination by outside forces when it comes to our aesthetic judgements.
        While Hulme insists that "romanticism is dead in reality," he acknowledges that "the critical attitude appropriate to it still exists." The romantic spirit of Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is probably the spirit in which most non-academics read poetry (when they do) today.

Bergson's Theory of Art

        "Man's primary need is not knowledge but action." Therefore, his intellect and perception select out--from the Kantian "sensuous manifold"--for presentation only that which is necessary to be understood in order that it may be acted upon. This "veil which action interposes" prevents us from coming into "direct contact with sense and consciousness." "The artist is the man . . . who . . . is born detached from the necessities of action." The artist "picks out of reality something which we . . . . have been unable to see ourselves."