to the light usually are.

Shortly after his arrival in Paris, in 1832, a new school was formed
both in literature and music, and youthful talent appeared, which
shook off with eclat the yoke of ancient formulas. The scarcely lulled
political effervescence of the first years of the revolution of
July, passed into questions upon art and letters, which attracted the
attention and interest of all minds. ROMANTICISM was the order of the
day; they fought with obstinacy for and against it. What truce could
there be between those who would not admit the possibility of writing
in any other than the already established manner, and those who thought
that the artist should be allowed to choose such forms as he deemed best
suited for the expression of his ideas; that the rule of form should
be found in the agreement of the chosen form with the sentiments to
be expressed, every different shade of feeling requiring of course a
different mode of expression? The former believed in the existence of
a permanent form, whose perfection represented absolute Beauty. But in
admitting that the great masters had attained the highest limits in art,
had reached supreme perfection, they left to the artists who succeeded
them no other glory than the hope of approaching these models, more or
less closely, by imitation, thus frustrating all hope of ever equalling
them, because the perfecting of any process can never rival the merit
of its invention. The latter denied that the immaterial Beautiful could
have a fixed and absolute form. The different forms which had appeared
in the history of art, seemed to them like tents spread in the
interminable route of the ideal; mere momentary halting places which
genius attains from epoch to epoch, and beyond which the inheritors of
the past should strive to advance. The former wished to restrict the
creations of times and natures the most dissimilar, within the limits
of the same symmetrical frame; the latter claimed for all writers the
liberty of creating their own mode, accepting no other rules than those
which result from the direct relation of sentiment and form, exacting
only that the form should be adequate to the expression of the
sentiment. However admirable the existing models might be, they did not
appear to them to have exhausted all the range of sentiments upon which
art might seize, or all the forms which it might advantageously use. Not
contented with the mere excellence of form, they sought it so