for a time that romanticism was the
imitation of the Germans, with, perhaps, the addition of the English and
Spanish. Then they were tempted to fancy that it might be merely a
matter of literary form, possibly this _vers brise_ (run-over lines,
_enjambement_) that they are making so much noise about. "From 1830 to
1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic style (_genre
historique_) or, if you please, this mania which has lately seized our
authors for calling the characters of their novels and melodramas
Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis, Oronte, or
saint-Albin. . . From 1831 to the year following we thought it was the
_genre intime,_ about which there was much talk. But with all the pains
that we took we never could discover what the _genre intime_ was. The
'intimate' novels are just like the others. They are in two volume
octavo, with a great deal of margin. . . They have yellow covers and
they cost fifteen francs." From 1832 to 1833 they conjectured that
romanticism might be a system of philosophy and political economy. From
1833 to 1834 they believed that it consisted in not shaving one's self,
and in wearing a waistcoat with wide facings very much starched.

At last they bethink themselves of a certain lawyer's clerk, who had
first imported these literary disputes into the village, in 1824. To
him, they expose their difficulties and ask for an answer to the
question, What is romanticism? After a long conversation, they receive
this final definition. "Romanticism, my dear sir! No, of a surety, it
is neither the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic
and tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words. In vain you
grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left
upon your fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind
that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the
flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown
faint, the cistern beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves,
the angel and the pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the
infinite and the starry," etc., etc.

Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the department, gives his theory of
romanticism, which he considers to be an effect of the religious and
political reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII,
and Charles X. "The mania for ballads, arriving from Germany, met the