l Ramorino lodged.
But some of his remarks show also that the interest he felt was by no
means a pleasurable one, and probably from this day dates his fear
and horror of the mob. And now we will turn from politics, a theme so
distasteful to Chopin that he did not like to hear it discussed and
could not easily be induced to take part in its discussion, to a theme
more congenial, I doubt not, to all of us.

Literary romanticism, of which Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael were
the harbingers, owed its existence to a longing for a greater fulness of
thought, a greater intenseness of feeling, a greater appropriateness and
adequateness of expression, and, above all, a greater truth to life and
nature. It was felt that the degenerated classicists were "barren of
imagination and invention," offered in their insipid artificialities
nothing but "rhetoric, bombast, fleurs de college, and Latin-verse
poetry," clothed "borrowed ideas in trumpery imagery," and presented
themselves with a "conventional elegance and noblesse than which
there was nothing more common." On the other hand, the works of the
master-minds of England, Germany, Spain, and Italy, which were more and
more translated and read, opened new, undreamt-of vistas. The Bible,
Homer, and Shakespeare began now to be considered of all books the most
worthy to be studied. And thus it came to pass that in a short time a
most complete revolution was accomplished in literature, from abject
slavery to unlimited freedom.

There are neither rules nor models [says V. Hugo, the leader
of the school, in the preface to his Cromwell (1827)], or
rather there are no other rules than the general laws of
nature which encompass the whole art, and the special laws
which for every composition result from the conditions of
existence peculiar to each subject. The former are eternal,
internal, and remain; the latter variable, external, and
serve only once.

Hence theories, poetics, and systems were to be broken up, and the old
plastering which covered the fagade of art was to be pulled down.
From rules and theories the romanticists appealed to nature and truth,
without forgetting, however, that nature and art are two different
things, and that the truth of art can never be absolute reality. The
drama, for instance, must be "a concentrating mirror which, so far from
enfeebling, collects and condenses the colouring rays and transforms
a glimmer into a light, a light int