the beginning
of the romantic epoch, much of the painting of the present day seems
both monotonous and eccentric--the variation of its essential monotony,
that is to say, being somewhat labored and express in comparison with
the spontaneous multifariousness of the epoch of Delacroix and Decamps.
In the decade between 1820 and 1830, at all events, notwithstanding the
strength of the academic tradition, painting was free from the thraldom
of system, and the imagination of its practitioners was not challenged
and circumscribed by the criticism that is based upon science. Not only
in the painter's freedom in his choice of subject, but in his way of
treating it, in the way in which he "takes it," is the revolution--or,
as I should be inclined to say, rather, the evolution--shown. And as
what we mean by personality is, in general, made up far more of emotion
than of mind--there being room for infinitely more variety in feeling
than in mental processes among intelligent agents--it is natural to
find the French romantic painters giving, by contrast with their
predecessors, such free swing to personal feeling that we may almost sum
up the origin of the romantic movement in French painting in saying that
it was an ebullition of emancipated emotion. And, to go a step farther,
we may say that, as nothing is so essential to poetry as feeling, we
meet now for the first time with the poetic element as an inspiring
motive and controlling force.

The romantic painters were, however, by no means merely emotional. They
were mainly imaginative. And in painting, as in literature, the great
change wrought by romanticism consisted in stimulating the imagination
instead of merely satisfying the sense and the intellect. The main idea
ceased to be as obviously accentuated, and its natural surroundings were
given their natural place; there was less direct statement and more
suggestion; the artist's effort was expended rather upon perfecting the
_ensemble_, noting relations, taking in a larger circle; a suggested
complexity of moral elements took the place of the old simplicity, whose
multifariousness was almost wholly pictorial. Instead of a landscape as
a tapestry background to a Holy Family, and having no pertinence but an
artistic one, we have Corot's "Orpheus."

II

Gericault and Delacroix are the great names inscribed at the head of the
romantic roll. They will remain there. And the distinction is theirs not
as awarded by the historica