Romanticism was not only heterogeneous and disunited. It also had to
face the hostile counter-movement of the Enlightenment and Augustan
Neoclassicism, still going strong at the time of and in the decades
following the French Revolution due to support from the ruling
Establishment (the ancien regime of the Crown and Church of England).
Neoclassicists regarded Romanticism as a heteretical amalgam of
dissenting new schools, which threatened the monopoly of the Classical
Tradition. The acrimonious debates in aesthetics and politics were
conducted with the traditional strategies of the classical ars
disputandi on both sides. Under the duress of the heaviest satirical
attacks, Romanticism began gradually to see itself as one movement,
giving rise to the problematic opposition of Classical and Romantic. The
construction of this rough divide, however, was indispensable for the
clarification of different positions in the hubbub of conflicting
voices, and has also proved critical in literary and cultural studies
which cannot do without such subsumptions. The Classical Tradition,
encompassing Christianity, emerges as an ongoing event from Greek and
Latin antiquity running through to our time.