legitimist poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the two of
them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the
Middle Ages." The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived
the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into the service
of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism, "employing
the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante when it
chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette." Dupuis was tempted to
embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied. He
shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which he announced his
discovery that the true and only difference between the classic and the
romantic is that the latter uses a good many adjectives. He illustrates
his principle by giving passages from "Paul and Virginia" and the
"Portuguese Letters," written in the romantic style.

Thus Musset pricks a critical bubble with the point of his satire; and
yet the bubble declines to vanish. There must really be some more
substantial difference than this between classic and romantic, for the
terms persist and are found useful. It may be true that the romantic
temper, being subjective and excited, tends to an excess in adjectives;
the adjective being that part of speech which attributes qualities, and
is therefore most freely used by emotional persons. Still it would be
possible to cut out all the adjectives, not strictly necessary, from one
of Tieck's _Maerchen_ without in the slightest degree disturbing its
romantic character.

It remains to add that romanticism is a word which faces in two
directions. It is now opposed to realism, as it was once opposed to
classicism. As, in one way, its freedom and lawlessness, its love of
novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the
classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions;
so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism,
aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence
to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The Marble Faun" is
another.[20]

[1] Les definitions ne se posent pas _a priori_, si ce n'est peutetre en
mathematiques. En histoire, c'est de l'etude patiente de is la realite
qu'elles se degagent insensiblement. Si M. Deschanel ne nous a pas donne
du _romantisme_ la definition que nous reclamions tout a l'heure, c'est,
a vrai dire, que son en