statuary
art do without the gods and heroes of mythology who furnish it with
plausible pretexts for the nude, and for such drapery as it needs; things
which romanticism prescribes, or did at least prescribe at that time of
its first fervour? Every sculptor is of necessity a classic." [8]
Nevertheless, he says that the romantic school was not quite unprovided
of sculptors. "In our inner circle (_cenacle_), Jehan du Seigneur
represented this art, austere and rebellious to the fancy. . . . Jehan
du Seigneur--let us leave in his name of Jean this mediaeval _h_ which
made him so happy and made him believe that he wore the apron of Ervein
of Steinbach at work on the sculptures of Strasburg minster." Gautier
mentions among the productions of this Gothic-minded statuary an "Orlando
Furioso," a bust of Victor Hugo, and a group from the latter's romance,
"Notre Dame de Paris," the gipsy girl Esmeralda giving a drink to the
humpback Quasimodo. It was the endeavour of the new school, in the arts
of design as well as in literature, to introduce colour, novelty,
picturesqueness, character. They studied the great Venetian and Flemish
colourists, neglected under the reign of David, and "in the first moments
of their fury against _le poncif classique_, they seemed to have adopted
the theory of art of the witches in 'Macbeth'--Fair is foul and foul is
fair",[9] _i.e._, they neglected a traditional beauty in favour of the
_characteristic_. "They sought the true, the new, the picturesque
perhaps more than the ideal; but this reaction was certainly permissible
after so many Ajaxes, Achilleses, and Philocteteses."

It is not quite so easy to understand what is meant by romanticism in
music as in literature. But Gautier names a number of composers as
adhering to the romantic school, among others, Hippolyte Monpon, who set
to music "the leaping metres, the echo-rimes, the Gothic counter-points
of Hugo's 'Odes et Ballades' and songs like Musset's 'L'Andalouse'--

"'Avez vous vu dans Barcelone,'

"He believed like us in serenades, alcaldes, mantillas, castinets; in all
that Italy and that Spain, a trifle conventional, which was brought into
fashion by the author of 'Don Paez,' of 'Portia,' and of the 'Marchioness
of Amalgui,' . . . 'Gastibelza, the Man with the Carabine,' and that
guitar, so profoundly Spanish, of Victor Hugo, had inspired Monpon with a
savage, plaintive air, of a strange character, which long remained
popular, and