mitators, but Hugo had disciples.

One point in which the French movement differed from both the English and
the German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. It was
not so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. The
reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic tradition
had in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century classicism.
Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary convention
in asserting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life.
Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art.
The French, in political and social matters the most revolutionary people
of Europe, were the most conservative in matters of taste. The
Revolution even intensified the reigning classicism by giving it a
republican turn. The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to the examples
of the Greek and Roman democracies. The Goddess of Reason was enthroned
in place of God, Sunday was abolished, and the names of the months and of
the days of the week were changed. Dress under the Directory was
patterned on antique modes--the liberty cap was Phrygian--and children
born under the Republic were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Cassius,
etc. The great painter of the Revolution was David,[2] who painted his
subjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek temples. Voltaire's
classicism was monarchical and held to the Louis XIV. tradition; David's
was republican. And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticism
were the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675.

A second distinction of the French romanticism was its local
concentration at Paris. The centripetal forces have always been greater
in France than in England and Germany. The earlier group of German
_Romantiker_ was, indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena and
Berlin; and the _Spaetromantiker_ at Heidelberg. But this was dispersion
itself as compared with the intense focussing of intellectual rays from
every quarter of France upon the capital. In England, I hardly need
repeat, there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely scattered
men of letters whose work exhibited romantic traits.

In one particular the French movement resembled the English more nearly
than the German. It kept itself almost entirely within the domain of
art, and did not carry out its principles with German thoroughness and
consistency into politics and religion. It made no efforts towards