A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century | Page 8

_vers brisé_ (run-over lines,
_enjambement_) that they are making so much noise about. "From
1830 to 1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic
style (_genre historique_) or, if you please, this mania which has lately
seized our authors for calling the characters of their novels and
melodramas Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis,
Oronte, or saint-Albin. . . From 1831 to the year following we thought
it was the _genre intime,_ about which there was much talk. But with
all the pains that we took we never could discover what the genre
intime was. The 'intimate' novels are just like the others. They are in
two volume octavo, with a great deal of margin. . . They have yellow
covers and they cost fifteen francs." From 1832 to 1833 they
conjectured that romanticism might be a system of philosophy and
political economy. From 1833 to 1834 they believed that it consisted in
not shaving one's self, and in wearing a waistcoat with wide facings
very much starched.
At last they bethink themselves of a certain lawyer's clerk, who had
first imported these literary disputes into the village, in 1824. To him,
they expose their difficulties and ask for an answer to the question,
What is romanticism? After a long conversation, they receive this final
definition. "Romanticism, my dear sir! No, of a surety, it is neither the
disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic and tragic, nor
anything in the world expressible by words. In vain you grasp the
butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left upon your
fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind that wails, it
is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the flower that breathes
perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown faint, the cistern
beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves, the angel and the
pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the infinite and the starry,"
etc., etc.
Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the department, gives his theory of
romanticism, which he considers to be an effect of the religious and
political reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII,
and Charles X. "The mania for ballads, arriving from Germany, met the
legitimist poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the two of

them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the
Middle Ages." The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has
survived the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into
the service of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism,
"employing the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating
Dante when it chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette." Dupuis
was tempted to embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was
not satisfied. He shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which
he announced his discovery that the true and only difference between
the classic and the romantic is that the latter uses a good many
adjectives. He illustrates his principle by giving passages from "Paul
and Virginia" and the "Portuguese Letters," written in the romantic
style.
Thus Musset pricks a critical bubble with the point of his satire; and yet
the bubble declines to vanish. There must really be some more
substantial difference than this between classic and romantic, for the
terms persist and are found useful. It may be true that the romantic
temper, being subjective and excited, tends to an excess in adjectives;
the adjective being that part of speech which attributes qualities, and is
therefore most freely used by emotional persons. Still it would be
possible to cut out all the adjectives, not strictly necessary, from one of
Tieck's _Märchen_ without in the slightest degree disturbing its
romantic character.
It remains to add that romanticism is a word which faces in two
directions. It is now opposed to realism, as it was once opposed to
classicism. As, in one way, its freedom and lawlessness, its love of
novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the
classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions;
so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism,
aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence
to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The Marble Faun" is
another.[20]
[1] Les définitions ne se posent pas a priori, si ce n'est peutêtre en
mathématiques. En histoire, c'est de l'étude patiente de is la réalité

qu'elles se dégagent insensiblement. Si M. Deschanel ne nous a pas
donné du romantisme la définition que nous réclamions tout à l'heure,
c'est, à vrai dire, que son enseignement a pour objet de préparer cette
définition même. Nous la trouverons où elle doit être, à la fin du