l
_Journal des Debats_ and its editor, M. Dussant, the general-in-chief of
the classical party. The romanticists, however, were not without organs
of their own; among which are especially mentioned _Le Conservateur
Litteraire_, begun in 1819, _Le Globe_ in 1824, and the _Annales
Romantiques_ in 1823, the last being "practically a kind of annual of the
Muse Francaise (1823-24), which had pretty nearly the same contributors."
All of these journals were Bourboniste, except _Le Globe_, which was
liberal in politics.[29] The Academy denounced the new literary doctrine
as a heresy and its followers as a sect, but it made head so rapidly that
as early as 1829, a year before "Hernani" was acted, a "Histoire du
Romantisme en France" appeared, written by a certain M. de Toreinx.[30]
It agrees with other authorities in dating the beginning of the movement
from Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du Christianisme" (1802).
"Chateaubriand," says Gautier, "may be regarded as the grandfather, or,
if you prefer it, the sachem of romanticism in France. In the 'Genius of
Christianity' he restored the Gothic cathedral, in the 'Natchez' he
reopened the sublimity of nature, which had been closed, in 'Rene' he
invented melancholy and modern passion."

Sprung from an ancient Breton family, Chateaubriand came to America in
1790 with the somewhat singular and very French idea of travelling
overland to the northwest passage. He was diverted from this enterprise,
however, fell in with an Indian tribe and wandered about with them in the
wilderness. He did not discover the north-west passage, but, according
to Lowell, he invented the forest primeval. Chateaubriand gave the first
full utterance to that romantic note which sounds so loudly in Byron's
verse; the restless dissatisfaction with life as it is, the longing for
something undefined and unattainable, the love for solitude and the
desert, the "passion incapable of being converted into action"--in short,
the _maladie du siecle_--since become familiar in "Childe Harold" and in
Senancour's "Obermann." In one of the chapters[31] of "Le Genie du
Christianisme" he gives an analysis of this modern melancholy, this
Byronic satiety and discontent, which he says was unknown to the
ancients. "The farther nations advance in civilization, the more this
unsettled state of the passions predominates, for then our imagination is
rich, abundant, and full of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid,
and destitut