One of the characteristics of romantic art is, that, in the religious sphere, the soul, finding for itself satisfaction in itself, has no need to develop itself in the external world. On the other hand, when the religious idea no longer makes itself felt, and when the free will is no longer dependent, except on itself, the dramatis personæ pursue aims wholly individual in a world where all appears arbitrary and accidental, and which seems abandoned to itself and delivered up to chance. In its irregular pace, it presents a complication of events, which intermingle without order and without cohesion.
Moreover, this is the form which events affect in romantic, in opposition to classic art, where the actions and events are bound to a common end, to a true and necessary principle which determines the form, the character, and the mode of development of external circumstances. In romantic art, also, we find general interests, moral ideas; but they do not ostensibly determine events; they are not the ordering and regulating principle. These events, on the contrary, preserve their free course, and affect an accidental form.
Such is the character of the greater part of the grand events in the middle ages, the crusades, for example, which the author names for this reason, and which were the grand adventures of the Christian world.
Whatever may be the judgment which one forms upon the crusades and the different motives which caused them to be undertaken, it cannot be denied, that with an elevated religious aim—the deliverance of the holy sepulchre—there were mingled other interested and material motives, and that the religious and the profane aim did not contradict nor corrupt the other. As to their general form, the crusades present utter absence of unity. They are undertaken by masses, by multitudes, who enter upon a particular expedition according to their good pleasure, and their individual caprice. The lack of unity, the absence of plan and direction, causes the enterprises to fail, and the efforts and endeavors are wasted in individual exploits.
In another domain, that of profane life, the road is open also to a crowd of adventurers, whose object is more or less imaginary, and whose principle is love, honor, or fidelity. To battle for the glory of a name, to fly to the succor of innocence, to accomplish the most marvellous things for the honor of one’s lady, such is the motive of the greater part of the beautiful exploits which the romances of chivalry or the poems of this epoch and subsequent epochs celebrate.
These vices of chivalry cause its ruin. We find the most faithful picture of it in the poems of Ariosto and Cervantes.
But what best marks the destruction of romantic art and of chivalry is the modern romance, that form of literature which takes their place. The romance is chivalry applied to real life; it is a protest against the real, it is the ideal in a society where all is fixed, regulated in advance by laws, by usages contrary to the free development of the natural longings and sentiments of the soul; it is the chivalry of common life. The same principle which caused a search for adventures throws the personages into the most diverse and the most extraordinary situations. The imagination, disgusted with that which is, cuts out for itself a world according to its fancy, and creates for itself an ideal wherein it can forget social customs, laws, positive interests. The young men and young women, above all, feel the want of such aliment for the heart, or of such distraction against ennui. Ripe age succeeds youth; the young man marries and enters upon positive interests. Such is also the dénoûement of the greater part of romances, where prose succeeds poetry, the real, the ideal.
The destruction of romantic art is announced by symptoms still more striking, by the imitation of the real, and the appearance of the humorous style, which occupies more and more space in art and literature. The artist and the poet can there display much talent, enthusiasm and spirit; but these two styles are no less striking indexes of an epoch of decadence.
It is, above all, the humorous style which marks this decadence, by the absence of all fixed principle and all rule. It is a pure play of the imagination which combines, according to its liking, the most different objects, alters and overturns relations, tortures itself to discover novel and extraordinary conceptions. The author places himself above the subject, regards himself as freed from all conditions imposed by the nature of the content as well as the form, and imagines that all depends on his wit and the power of his genius. It is to be observed, that what Hegel calls the downfall of art in general, and of romantic art in particular, is precisely what we call the romantic school in the art and literature of our time.
Such are the fundamental forms which art presents in its historic development. If the art of the renaissance, or modern art properly so called, finds no place in this sketch, it is because it does not constitute an original and fundamental form. The renaissance is a return to Greek art; and as to modern art, it is allied to both Greek and Christian.