[VI]
RETROSPECT—INDIGENOUS SOURCES
But the renascence of literature in France was not due chiefly to foreign influences. It was upon the soil of their native country that the new men built.
The work accomplished by a great literary school such as the Romantic School in France may be compared to the building of a town, only that the town of literature is invariably built upon land which is protected merely by slight and leaky embankments from the waters of forgetfulness. Water at the foundations is soon discovered; it rises slowly but steadily; at last the lower buildings disappear, and only the loftiest monuments remain towering, eternally visible, above the level of the Lethean stream.
What gives these highest literary monuments their proud position is partly the profundity of the thoughts which support them, partly the exact conformity of the perfect artistic expression to the idea; but, unless the author is really a creative thinker, what is of conclusive importance is that his mind should, consciously or unconsciously, be permeated by the most advanced ideas of his age; for it is the spirit which "maketh alive" and preserves from destruction.
Romanticism in France displays three main tendencies:
1. The endeavour to reproduce faithfully either some real piece of past history or some phase of modern life—the tendency towards the true.
2. The endeavour after perfection of form, whether apprehended as plasticity and picturesqueness of expression, as severe metrical harmony, or as a prose style imperishable from its concise simplicity—the tendency towards the beautiful.
3. Enthusiasm for great religious or social reformatory ideas, an ethic aim in art—the tendency towards the good.
These three main tendencies define the nature of this vigorous and talented school as the three dimensions define space; and each of them produced works of great and enduring value.