ng characteristics, concerned mainly with the
content of Romantic literature, would naturally mean a corresponding
revolution in literary form and technique. Rules and conventions had
kept accumulating about literature, until by the middle of the
eighteenth century, when French Classicism dominated literary Europe,
they were so rigid that only a few of the many men of letters were able
to produce literature that was not wholly artificial and uninspired.
Each kind of literature was supposed to be written in a certain way;
narrative poetry had a certain prescribed meter; lyric poetry another;
tragedy and comedy should be carefully kept apart. The Romanticist
proceeded at once to throw overboard all these rules and
conventionalities. Each literary production was to be judged upon its
own merits as literature, not upon the closeness of its adherence to any
set of rules, and each author was to be at liberty to get his results in
any way that he might choose. Hence we find the mingling of literary
genres, the neglect of the dramatic unities, the invention of new meters
and the revival of old ones.

8. _Richness of language_. Because of the continual elimination of words
considered unsuitable for literary expression, the language of the
Classicists was becoming more and more impoverished, diction was
becoming more and more stereotyped and artificial. The Romanticists,
with their revolutionary ideas as to content, rebelled against any rule
or convention that would restrict their choice of words or diction;
seeking complete and effective self-expression, they turned to literary
use all the resources of the language of their own time and of any other
age as well. The result was a great enrichment of language through the
effective use of highly colored, picturesque words and diction, as fresh
and bright as newly coined pieces of gold.

Such are the general characteristics of the movement that had such a
profound effect upon the literatures of western Europe in the closing
years of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth.
All of them may be observed in the literature produced in Spain during
the twenty years from 1830 to 1850, although, naturally, they do not all
have the same importance there as in other countries. In a general way
it may be said that the movement was not so revolutionary as in France,
for example, where Classicism had taken deeper root. Moreover, in Spain,
Romanticism meant the revival of som