It is against this grey background, this foil of Legitimist cowls and Louis-Philippe umbrellas—in this society where the new-born power of capital, strong as Hercules, has, even in its cradle, strangled all the external romance of life—on this stage upon the grey walls of which an invisible finger has written in grey letters the word Juste-milieu—that a fiery, glowing, noisy literature, a literature enamoured of scarlet and of passion, suddenly makes its appearance. All the conditions were present in combination which were certain to impel young, restless minds towards romantic enthusiasm, towards ardent contempt for public opinion, towards worship of unbridled passion and unrestrained genius. Hatred of the bourgeoisie (as in Germany a generation earlier hatred of the Philistines) becomes the watchword of the day. But whereas the word "Philistine" conjures up a picture of the chimney-corner and the pipe, the word "bourgeois" at once suggests the omnipotence of economic interests. Its essential antipathy to utilitarianism and plutocracy turned the intellectual current of the day, in the case of the men of talent already before the public, and still more strongly in the case of the budding geniuses, in the direction of antagonism to everything existing and accepted, at the same time mightily increasing the force of the current. The religion of art, and enthusiasm for liberty in art, suddenly took possession of all hearts. Art was the highest, art was light, art was fire, art was all in all; its beauty and audacity alone imparted value to life.
The young generation had heard in their childhood of the great events of the Revolution, had known the Empire, and were the sons of heroes or of victims. Their mothers had conceived them between two battles, and the thunder of cannon had ushered them into the world. To the young poets and artists of the day there were only two kinds of human beings, the flaming and the grey. On the one side there was the art which meant blood, scarlet, movement, audacity; on the other, a strictly regular, timid, bourgeois, colourless art. Everything in the life of their day seemed to them unpoetic, utilitarian, devoid of genius, grey; they desired to show their contempt for such a day, their admiration of genius, and their hatred of the bourgeois spirit. For now, since the middle-class had become the influential one, this spirit had become a power.
Seen from the point of view of our own day, the young men of those days appear to have been younger than youth generally is—younger, fresher, more richly gifted, more ardent and hot-blooded. And we see the youth of France, who in the days of the Revolution had by their devotion changed the political and social conditions of the country, and in the days of the Empire had risked their lives on every battlefield in France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Egypt, now devoting themselves with the same ardour to the culture of literature and the arts. Here, too, there were revolutions to be made, victories to win, and countries to conquer. During the Revolution they had worshipped liberty, under Napoleon martial glory; now they worshipped art.
For the first time in France the word art came to be regularly applied to literature. In the eighteenth century literature had aimed at transforming itself into philosophy, and much was then included under this denomination to which we no longer apply the word; now it aimed at the name and dignity of art.
The explanation of the change is, that the analytical and reasoning tendency which distinguishes both the imaginative and reflective works of the classical period, had in the new century slowly made way for interest in the actually existing, in what is perceivable by the senses. And the deeper-lying reason of this new preference was that men now placed nature, original, unconscious, rustic, uncultivated nature, above all the culture of civilisation. Why? Because a historically minded age had succeeded to a rationalising one. A man no longer coveted the title of philosopher, for it was now considered a greater distinction to be original than to be a self-conscious thinker. The poetical literature of the eighteenth, nay, even that of the seventeenth century was despised, because it was purely intellectual; because, bloodless and elegant, it seemed to have been produced by attention to conventions and rules, not to have been born and to have grown. For whereas the eighteenth century had held thinking and acting to be the highest forms of activity, the children of the new age regarded origination, natural genesis, as the highest. It was a German idea, Herder's and Goethe's, by which men's minds were unconsciously occupied, and which produced in them an aversion for rules and academic principles. For how could art as unconscious, natural production be subjected to arbitrary external rules!
An intellectual movement had begun which recalled the Renaissance. It was as if the air which men breathed intoxicated them. In the long period during which France had been at an intellectual standstill her great neighbours, Germany and England, had hastened past her, had got a long start in the work of emancipation from old, hampering traditions. She felt this, felt it as a humiliation, and the feeling gave a sharp impulse to the new art enthusiasm. And now the works of foreign authors, both the new and the hitherto unknown older books, made their way into the country and revolutionised the minds of the young; every one read translations of Sir Walter Scott's novels, of Byron's Corsair and Lara, and devoured Goethe's Werther and Hoffmann's fantastic tales. All at once the votaries of the different arts felt that they were brothers. Musicians studied the literature both of their own country and of other nations; poets (such as Hugo, Gautier, Mérimée, Borel) drew and painted. Poems were read in painters' and sculptors' studios; Delacroix's and Devéria's pupils hummed Hugo's ballads as they stood at their easels. Certain of the great foreign authors, such as Scott and Byron, influenced poets (Hugo, Lamartine, Musset), musicians (Berlioz, Halévy, Félicien David), and painters (Delacroix, Delaroche, Scheffer). Artists attempt to overstep the limits of their own in order to embrace a kindred art. Berlioz writes Childe Harold and Faust symphonies, Félicien David a Desert symphony; music becomes descriptive. First Delacroix and then Ary Scheffer choose subjects from Dante, Shakespeare, and Byron; the art of the painter at times becomes illustration of poetry. But it was the art of painting which was most powerful in influencing the sister arts, especially poetry, and that distinctly for good. The lover no longer, as in the days of Racine, prayed his mistress "to crown his flame." The public demanded naturalness of the author, and refused to accept representations of impossibilities.
In 1824 Delacroix exhibits his Massacre of Scios, a picture with a Grecian subject and a reminiscence of Byron, in 1831 The Bishop of Liège, which illustrates Scott's Quentin Durward, in May 1831 Liberty at the Barricades. In February 1829, Auber's opera, La Muette de Portici, makes a great sensation; Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable follows in 1831. In February 1830 Victor Hugo's Hernani is played for the first time at the Théâtre Français; in 1831 Dumas' Antony is a grand success. The authors Dumas and Hugo, Delacroix the painter, the sculptor David d'Angers, the musical composers Berlioz and Auber, the critics Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, Frédéric Lemaître and Marie Dorval the scenic artists, and, corresponding to them, the two great dæmonic musical virtuosi Chopin and Liszt—all these make their appearance simultaneously. One and all proclaim the gospel of nature and of passion, and around them assemble groups of young men who apprehend and cultivate literature and art in a spirit akin to theirs.
These men did not always realise that in the eyes of posterity they would constitute a natural group. Some of the greatest of them felt as if they stood alone, and believed that the spirit and tendency of their work was different from that of their contemporaries', nay, actually antagonistic to it. Nor were they entirely wrong, for there are very essential points of difference between them. Yet common excellences, common prejudices, common aims, and common faults unite them and make of them a whole. And it happened much more frequently than is generally the case, that those whom reflection inclines us to class together actually did feel themselves drawn to each other; many of the best among them early joined hands and formed a league.
Seeking the connecting links we find, as it were, a chain which binds the group together.
When, after the lapse of many years, we dryly say or write the words, "they formed a school," we seldom take the trouble to conjure up any adequately vivid impression of what the formation of a school of literature and art signifies. There is a mysterious magic about the process. Some one remarkable man, after a long unconscious or half-conscious struggle, finally with full consciousness, frees himself from prejudices and attains to clearness of vision; then, everything being ready, the lightning of genius illuminates what he beholds. Such a man gives utterance (as did Hugo in a prose preface of some score of pages) to some thoughts which have never been thought or expressed in the same manner before. They may be only half true, they may be vague, but they have this remarkable quality that, in spite of more or less indefiniteness, they affront all traditional prejudices and wound the vanity of the day where it is most vulnerable, whilst they ring in the ears of the young generation like a call, like a new, audacious watchword.