classic detachment, it became
interested, curious, and catholic. It broadened its range immensely, and
created its effect by observing the relations of its objects to their
environment, of its figures to the landscape, of its subjects to their
suggestions even in other spheres of thought; Delacroix, Marilhat,
Decamps, Fromentin, in painting the aspect of Orientalism, suggested,
one may almost say, its sociology. For the abstractions of classicism,
its formula, its fastidious system of arriving at perfection by
exclusions and sacrifices, it substituted an enthusiasm for the concrete
and the actual; it revelled in natural phenomena. Gautier was never
more definitely the exponent of romanticism than in saying "I am a man
for whom the visible world exists." To lines and curves and masses and
their relations in composition, succeeds as material for inspiration and
reproduction the varied spectacle of the external world. With the early
romanticists it may be said that for the first time the external world
"swims into" the painter's "ken." But, above all, in them the element of
personality first appears in French painting with anything like general
acceptance and as the characteristic of a group, a school, rather than
as an isolated exception here and there, such as Claude or Chardin. The
"point of view" takes the place of conformity to a standard. The painter
expresses himself instead of endeavoring to realize an extraneous and
impersonal ideal. What he himself personally thinks, how he himself
personally feels, is what we read in his works.

It is true that, rightly understood, the romantic epoch is a period of
evolution, and orderly evolution at that, if we look below the surface,
rather than of systematic defiance and revolt. It is true that it recast
rather than repudiated its inheritance of tradition. Nevertheless there
has never been a time when the individual felt himself so free, when
every man of any original genius felt so keenly the exhilaration of
independence, when the "schools" of painting exercised less tyranny
and, indeed, counted for so little. If it be exact to speak of the
"romantic school" at all, it should be borne in mind that its adherents
were men of the most marked and diverse individualities ever grouped
under one standard. The impressionists, perhaps, apart, individuality is
often spoken of as the essential characteristic of the painters of the
present day. But beside the outburst of individuality at