a
practical restoration of the Middle Ages. At the beginning, indeed,
French romanticism exhibited something analogous to the Toryism of Scott,
and the reactionary _Junkerism_ and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels.
Chateaubriand in his "Genie du Christianisme" attempted a sort of
aesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavily
by the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of the
Revolution. Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) as an
enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. "L'histoire des
hommes," he wrote, "ne presente de poesie que jugee du haut des idees
monarchiques et religieuses." But he advanced quite rapidly towards
liberalism both in politics and religion. And of the young men who
surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny,
and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist or
republican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and without
affecting their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school.[3]
The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic and
social. The Parisian _ateliers_ as well as the Parisian _salons_ were
nuclei of revolt against classical traditions. "This intermixture of art
with poetry," says Gautier,[4] "was and remains one of the characteristic
marks of the new school, and enables us to understand why its earliest
recruits were found more among artists than among men of letters. A
multitude of objects, images, comparisons, which were believed to be
irreducible to words, entered into the language and have stayed there.
The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now includes the sphere of art
in its measureless circle." "At that time painting and poetry
fraternised. The artists read the poets and the poets visited the
artists. Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were to
be found in the studio as in the study. There were as many splotches of
colour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were so
incessantly thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited by
themselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreign
writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong.
Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It seemed as if we had discovered
poetry, and that was indeed the truth. Now that this fine flame has
cooled and that the positive-minded generation which possesses the world
is preoccupied with other i