unger and thirst after
practical Justice!--a justice which shall no longer wrong children, or
animals, for instance, by ignoring in a stupid, mere breadth of view,
minute facts about them. Yet the romanticists are antinomian, too,
sometimes, because the love of energy and beauty, of distinction in
passion, tended naturally to become a little bizarre, plunging into the
[255] Middle Age, into the secrets of old Italian story. Are we in the
Inferno?--we are tempted to ask, wondering at something malign in so
much beauty. For over all a care for the refreshment of the human
spirit by fine art manifests itself, a predominant sense of literary
charm, so that, in their search for the secret of exquisite expression,
the romantic school went back to the forgotten world of early French
poetry, and literature itself became the most delicate of the
arts--like "goldsmith's work," says Sainte-Beuve, of Bertrand's Gaspard
de la Nuit--and that peculiarly French gift, the gift of exquisite
speech, argute loqui, attained in them a perfection which it had never
seen before.

Stendhal, a writer whom I have already quoted, and of whom English
readers might well know much more than they do, stands between the
earlier and later growths of the romantic spirit. His novels are rich
in romantic quality; and his other writings--partly criticism, partly
personal reminiscences--are a very curious and interesting illustration
of the needs out of which romanticism arose. In his book on Racine and
Shakespeare, Stendhal argues that all good art was romantic in its day;
and this is perhaps true in Stendhal's sense. That little treatise,
full of "dry light" and fertile ideas, was published in the year 1823,
and its object is to defend an entire independence and liberty in the
choice and treatment of subject, both in [256] art and literature,
against those who upheld the exclusive authority of precedent. In
pleading the cause of romanticism, therefore, it is the novelty, both
of form and of motive, in writings like the Hernani of Victor Hugo
(which soon followed it, raising a storm of criticism) that he is
chiefly concerned to justify. To be interesting and really
stimulating, to keep us from yawning even, art and literature must
follow the subtle movements of that nimbly-shifting Time-Spirit, or
Zeit-Geist, understood by French not less than by German criticism,
which is always modifying men's taste, as it modifies their manners and
their pleasure