o a flame." To pass from form
to matter, the attention given by the romanticists to history
is particularly to be noted. Pierre Dubois, the director of the
philosophical and literary journal "Le Globe," the organ of romanticism
(1824-1832), contrasts the poverty of invention in the works of the
classicists with the inexhaustible wealth of reality, "the scenes of
disorder, of passion, of fanaticism, of hypocrisy, and of intrigue,"
recorded in history. What the dramatist has to do is to perform the
miracle "of reanimating the personages who appear dead on the pages of
a chronicle, of discovering by analysis all the shades of the passions
which caused these hearts to beat, of recreating their language and
costume." It is a significant fact that Sainte-Beuve opened the campaign
of romanticism in "Le Globe" with a "Tableau de la poesie francaise
au seizieme siecle," the century of the "Pleiade," and of Rabelais and
Montaigne. It is a still more significant fact that the members of
the "Cenacle," the circle of kindred minds that gathered around Victor
Hugo--Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, David
d'Angers, and others--"studied and felt the real Middle Ages in their
architecture, in their chronicles, and in their picturesque vivacity."
Nor should we overlook in connection with romanticism Cousin's aesthetic
teaching, according to which, God being the source of all beauty as well
as of all truth, religion, and morality, "the highest aim of art is to
awaken in its own way the feeling of the infinite." Like all reformers
the romanticists were stronger in destruction than in construction.
Their fundamental doctrines will hardly be questioned by anyone in our
day, but the works of art which they reared on them only too often
give just cause for objection and even rejection. However, it is not
surprising that, with the physical and spiritual world, with time and
eternity at their arbitrary disposal, they made themselves sometimes
guilty of misrule. To "extract the invariable laws from the general
order of things, and the special from the subject under treatment," is
no easy matter. V. Hugo tells us that it is only for a man of genius to
undertake such a task, but he himself is an example that even a man so
gifted is fallible. In a letter written in the French capital on January
14, 1832, Mendelssohn says of the "so-called romantic school" that it
has infected all the Parisians, and that on the stage they think of
nothin