chools.
Yet, it is in the heart of this century, of Goldsmith and Stothard, of
Watteau and the Siecle de Louis XIV.--in one of its central, if not
most characteristic figures, in Rousseau--that the modern or French
romanticism really originates. But, what in the eighteenth century is
but an exceptional phenomenon, breaking through its fair reserve and
discretion only at rare intervals, is the habitual guise of the
nineteenth, breaking through it perpetually, with a feverishness, an
incomprehensible straining and excitement, which all experience to some
degree, but yearning also, in the genuine children of the romantic
school, to be energique, frais, et dispos--for those qualities of
energy, freshness, comely order; and often, in Murger, in Gautier, in
Victor Hugo, for instance, with singular felicity attaining them.

It is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in [252] fact, that French
romanticism, with much else, begins: reading his Confessions we seem
actually to assist at the birth of this new, strong spirit in the
French mind. The wildness which has shocked so many, and the
fascination which has influenced almost every one, in the squalid, yet
eloquent figure, we see and hear so clearly in that book, wandering
under the apple-blossoms and among the vines of Neuchatel or Vevey
actually give it the quality of a very successful romantic invention.
His strangeness or distortion, his profound subjectivity, his
passionateness--the cor laceratum--Rousseau makes all men in love with
these. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai sus. Mais si je
ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. "I am not made like any one
else I have ever known: yet, if I am not better, at least I am
different." These words, from the first page of the Confessions,
anticipate all the Werthers, Renes, Obermanns, of the last hundred
years. For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the spirit of the
whole world; and thirty years afterwards, what in him was a
peculiarity, became part of the general consciousness. A storm was
coming: Rousseau, with others, felt it in the air, and they helped to
bring it down: they introduced a disturbing element into French
literature, then so trim and formal, like our own literature of the age
of Queen Anne.

In 1815 the storm had come and gone, but had left, in the spirit of
"young France," the [253] ennui of an immense disillusion. In the last
chapter of Edgar Quinet's Revolution Francaise, a work i