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Definition of the romanticism

One gave, in France, the name of romanticism to the large literary current which began around 1820 and continued to the neighborhoods of 1850, during the Restauration and the Monarchie of July. This name indicates an art where imagination and the sensitivity prevail on any other faculty of the spirit. More generally, it evokes formulas diametrically opposite with that of art known as traditional of 18th and 18th centuries.

But this very precise direction, the word romanticism took it only rather late. Indeed, the romantic crisis of the French literature is only one of the late aspects of a movement much more general, which was felt in the remainder of the Europe as in France: the England, the Germany, the Russia had their romantic, and the name of Hugo evokes those of Byron, Gœthe and Pouchkine. Art is less concerned than the literature: Delacroix, David of Angers, Berlioz, Wagner will be the allies of the innovators.

In addition, the origins of this movement are very former to 1820. The word even existed well before. As of 1737, one reads in a letter of the Abbé the White with the President Bouhier: “Mr. Pape tried to give to his garden this taste which the English call romantic and us picturesque . ” It goes without saying on this date the romantic word had a significance other than that which one him gave later. It passed, before arriving from there there, by various meanings of which it is essential to point out the history…

The definition of the romanticism according to Baudelaire

Baudelaire proposed its definition of the romanticism to the Salon of 1846 :

" The romanticism is precisely neither in the choice of the subjects nor in the exact truth, but in the manner of feeling.

They sought it outwards, and it is in inside that it was only possible to find it.

For me, the romanticism is the most recent expression, most current of beautiful.

There are as many beauties as there are usual manners to seek happiness.

the philosophy of progress explains this clearly; thus, as there were as many idéals that there was for the people in ways of including/understanding morals, the love, the religion, etc, the romanticism will not consist in a perfect execution, but in a design similar to the morals of the century.

It is because some placed it in the perfection of the trade which we had the rococo of the romanticism, most unbearable of all indisputably.

One thus needs, above all, to know the aspects of nature and situations of the man, that the artists of the past scorned or did not know.

Which says romanticism says modern art, - i.e. intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite one, expressed by all the means which the arts." contain;

First direction (etymological)

In its vastest direction, the word romanticism means design of the life relative to the “novel”, design of which we find the expression in the accounts epic of the Romance people. The romanticism thus included/understood is thus a mentality of Christian and north-Western inspiration, in opposition to ancient mentality and traditional, of pagan inspiration and graeco-latin origin. This mentality an art seeking left to represent the infinite one, going readily towards the inaccessible one, the marvellous one, the fantastic one, the mysterious one, while the Antique art sought the reason, the calm one, simplicity, the nobility, clearness. This romanticism would be especially the moyenâgeux spirit, with its feelings deeply religious, its enthusiasm for a chivalrous company , its love of the miraculous one; he would be concerned rather about faith, feeling and imagination that of criticism, reason, measurement; he would be in a word the expression of tendencies absolutely opposite to those of old, reasonable, moralists and pagan. the man is free; it does not depend any more but on its will and the divine grace, which can be lacking to him, but not to force it. The divinity from now on acts in the hearts, much more than it does not intervene in the physical order of the events. The man becomes a heart; the body loses its importance. The physical suffering is not any more one subject of tragedy: . The love is stripped so many direction which it becomes sometimes chimerical: it is the union and the mutual aspiration of two hearts through time, space, death. External nature changes aspect: it, like the man, is disturbed, more anxious; it sees a reflection of its heart there; it populates it, either occupied divinities each one of their small field, but of friendly powers or malfaisantes, good or bad geniuses, fairies, elves, sylphs, gnomes, etc, varied personifications of the good and bad principle who dispute the world. Thus, everywhere the heart instead of the directions, giving to the things their price, and everywhere of the free agents, substituted for fate: such is the great direction of this intellectual revolution resulting from the Christianity and the genius of the people celto-novels and Germanic.

Second direction (direction adopted by the literary history)

The methodical imitation of the old literatures, inaugurated in France at the 16th century, reached its apogee at the 17th century, and one can say that our writers then created a literature which became ours own good more than our literature of the Middle Ages that they had forgotten and disavowed. In their turn, the other nations imitated the French literature of the 17th century and, by this imitation of second hand, did nothing but irritate their genius for one more or less long period. The French literature had become, taking into consideration traditional literature, modern literature other new or, if one wants, the continuation of the traditional Antiquité. It is that the French spirit is only in the modern Europe for which the ancient spirit is not foreign: for him, the imitation of the Greek and Roman models was not servility or mode, it was a kind of tradition of found family.

But the day arrived where this new traditional literature became a yoke for the majority of the nations of Europe. Formed on the ancient models, but much more still on certain borrowed rules or than one believed borrowed from Antiquity, it was caught little by little for a type of perfection which was to be immutable. However, the immobility is repugnant to the human nature, and particularly to the literature, mirror of ideas in perpetual change. Let us add that each Nation has its own genius, which puts up malaisément with forms borrowed from foreign nations and, in spite of its character of universality, the new traditional literature worked by the French genius carried so well the clean seal of our spirit, which it became an embarrassment for the free development of a national genius among foreign people which had taken it one moment for model.

As it is not astonishing as the radiant influence of the French literature at the 18th century caused a reaction, and it is this reaction which one properly calls the romanticism . The movement started from Germany, where however the French literature reigned in the majority of the currents, and passed from there in England. It was very marked in these two countries and had in return a very important influence in France.

German romanticism

German Literature of the XVIIe century

The German literature of the 17th century had not missed names, but it had not had common and national inspiration. The writers seemed isolated the ones from the others; no general thought supported them. Germany seemed more to remember its past, to more know what it had been at the 13th century, at the time of Wolfram von Eschenbach, of Hartmann von Aue, of Walther von der Vogelweide; it seemed more to remember the energetic movement of ideas which, with Luther, Melanchton, Zwingli, Hans Sachs, had preceded and accompanied the Réforme. It had lost itself. Martin Opitz, Paul Fleming, Andreas Gryphius, Friedrich von Logau, Henri Buchholz imitated France of Louis XIII; Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau and Christian Hallmann copied false foil of the Italy. Leibniz (1646 - 1716) even wrote to him in Latin, leaving the history of the German literature consequently.

Reaction of the XVIIIe century

Gottsched

The reaction was not made a blow very. The first, Gottsched (1700 - 1766) took in heart to rejoin the dispersed forces of its country and to constitute, opposite France and Italy, a great German literature. But, cold writer, poet without imagination, it was impotent to satisfy the ideal which it had waked up.

Bodmer

The first effective push comes from the Suisse. Bodmer (1698 - 1783), poor poet like Gottsched, but critical superior, sends vehement calls to the Germanic genius, awakes the national feeling, opposes the poetry of North to the poetry of the Latin people and, seeking at the same time the naturalness and the size, fills with enthusiasm the spirits for boldnesses of the English poet Milton, at the same time as it clarifies the naive graces of the Minnesänger (cantors of love of the Moyen-âge). A pleiad of young poets quivers with its accents; a literary journal of avant-garde, the Collection of Bremen , is based, where in 1748 the first three songs of appear Messiade .

Klopstock

Messiade ! Bodmer found its poet; he proclaims it, he lavishes the encouragements to him and the homages, he preaches it like the reformer and the pontiff of poetry. It is a priesthood, indeed, which the career of Klopstock (1724 - 1803). Serious, austere, identified, so to speak, with its work, it raises all imaginations towards the heights which its thought lives; it revives the taste of the large things. The inspirations of the old woman Germanie awake with its voice. All these so German virtues (and not Prussians) - enthusiasm, religious enthusiasm, tenderness, virility - he sings them not only in his epopee of the Christ, actually much less “barbarian” and vehement that one did not believe it in the first enthusiasm, but also in its odes and its dramas. It glorifie Hermann and the Germanic one of the first ages, like it glorifie the Messiah and first days of the Gospel. Primitive Christianity and the Germany primitive, here are objects of its worship. One can say of all the life of Klopstock what Mrs. de Staël said only of Messiade : “When this poem is begun, one believes to enter a church in the middle of which a Orgue is made hear. ”

Lessing

Quite different is Lessing (1729 - 1781), the author of the Laocoon and the Dramaturgie of Hamburg . While Klopstock raises the hearts and purifies imaginations, Lessing sharpens and strengthens the intelligences. Poet, Philosopher, scholar, Journalist, innovator full with ideas, polemist of first order, it renews all that it touches, scholarship and criticism, the Théologie and the Théâtre. No man highly any more did not act on Germany. It is the large organizer of the public spirit at the 18th century. Either that he encourages his readers, or that he causes them with the fight, he causes the talents which are unaware of themselves: Gœthe will become poet by reading his Laocoon .

To return to the German genius the freedom of its movements, Lessing wanted to destroy what appeared a tyranny to him. It did it in two manners: by ruining the theories on which all the French dramatic art rested, and by proposing other models with the admiration of the Germans. The French theater was based mainly on the authority of Aristote: Lessing undertook to show that the French critics and poets did not include/understand the Poétique of Aristote, and that they had substituted arbitrary rules for the precepts of the Greek philosopher . In addition, he proposed to the Germans the theater Shakespeare, model much in conformity, he should it be recognized, with the Germanic spirit of the time and the freedom of the genius in general, that those for which one substituted it.

Germany, excited by Lessing, threw itself in new ways; the German spirit returned in possession of itself and produced its original literature, that which it called its traditional literature.

Wieland (1733 - 1813) tested well a flashback and its Obéron is a pure imitation of the French models, but the impulse given by Klopstock and Lessing was too strong, and the romantic reaction was only going to be accentuated.

Herder

It is then, indeed, which Herder rises (1744 - 1803), organizer with equal of Lessing. It destroys the prestige of the refined centuries definitively and awakes the taste of the primitive literatures. Nobody has like him it instinct of the first ages of the world, the love and the intelligence of the first inspirations of each people. A splendid source of poetry épanche in all its books ( Lieder , Voices of the people , Songs of love of the East , etc). Its images are new and surprising, such that which it finds to express the continuous progress of the friendship between people of good: “It grows, like the shade of the evening, until the sun of the life lies down. ” One can almost say less detail of his style than Edgar Quinet, his translator and his involuntary imitator called of the one of his works: “To speak, its language, it resembles this lotus crowned of Védas, which, balanced that and there on primitive water carries to far, in its frail chalice, a whole incipient universe. ” Less Net perhaps and less precis that Lessing, but more poet, it acts more on imagination.

Gœthe and Schiller

Gœthe (1749 - 1832), already waked up in a new world by the Laocoon , was still unaware of when Herder, having met it with Strasbourg, revealed all its genius to him. The first works of Gœthe, Götz von Berlichingen (1773), the Sufferings of the young person Werther (1774), etc, express the impetuous heat admirably that preachings of Herder had waked up in the heart of the young poet.

These years of enthusiasm where the Germanic genius clears new ways impetuously are called by the literary historians the period Sturm und Drang (Storm and Dash). This name even, borrowed from a drama of Maximilien Klinger, expresses well the disordered and almost savage spirit of this time. This exaltation is propagated of an end of Germany to the other. Young dreamers, Voss, Bürger, Hahn, Stolberg, meet in the bottom of a forest, close to Göttingen, to lend oath to poetry, révèrent Klopstock with equal of a supreme pontiff, burn works of Wieland, are thrown finally in the field of art like the factious ones in a conspiracy.

It is indeed a true anarchy which reigns then in the German literature; it is the Verwilderungsperiode (period of the return at the wild state), as the Germans themselves call it. The first dramas of Schiller (1759 - 1805), the Brigands (1782) and the Conspiracy of Fiesque (1784), are the last explosion and crowning.

Like if the modern spirit, to keep its originality, were to be always in childhood, the Poésie had endeavoured to be replaced in times of the Middle Ages, and to find at the same time violent, odd and naive inspiration of it. This resurrection was a great innovation, but it was the wrong to be a kind of play literary, a clever pastiche of disappeared feelings and beliefs. Also, after having dazzled one moment, was it rather quickly to fall into discredit, especially when the awkward neophytes started to exaggerate the bizarreries of the new school.

Fatally, a calmer inspiration succeeded these poetic enthusiasms. Gœthe, which went to see “the country where the lemon trees flower” (1786), fell in love with the antique beauty. All works which it reports of Italy are also pure, also majestic of form and thought which the productions of its youth were tumultuous. This research of an ideal serenity is exerted besides a little with the detriment of imagination. If, in the drama of Egmont (1787), still the young inspiration of the author of Gœtz quivered, which calm and which reserve in these so erudite and so major compositions: Iphigénie (1787) and Torquato Tasso (1790)!

Fortunately, Gœthe finds in Schiller a friend who will open to the richest fields of Article the two poets to him were admirably made to rectify itself and to be supplemented one the other. The enthusiasm of Schiller could involve it with the emphase; the Olympian serenity of Gœthe learns from Schiller the union of ideal and reality, the reason and enthusiasm, and in its turn, subjecting the passion and the ardor of his friend to the laws of the eternal beauty, it rises with him towards the perfection of Article Their correspondence shows them to us encouraging and correcting one the other, admirably plain in the same worship of the ideal.

There is a dozen years when the Germanic genius, after so much of efforts, so much of hard preparations, appears finally in its splendid blooming. It is the time when Gœthe written its more beautiful poetries, the King de Thulé , the King of the Alders (1795), and composes Hermann and Dorothée (1797), work of a very new order, at the same time noble and simple, the model of the familiar epopee. Lastly, its drama of Faust , this poetic and bold symbol of the human destiny, if it traced the first of it outlines at the time or it wrote Gœtz and Werther , it is now that it completes it under the eyes of his friend.

Schiller, supported by Gœthe, rises on its side to new heights. Most beautiful of its poems, the Bell (1797), most perfect of its dramas, Wallenstein (1800), the Maid of Orleans (1801), Marie Stuart (1802, Been engaged of the Metz-native one (1803), Guillaume Tell (1804), belong to this period.

The continuation of the romanticism in Germany

Herder, Gœthe and Schiller, succeed one second generation of romantic in Germany. This one counts great names like Hölderlin and J.P. Richter and is divided into two schools. The school of Iéna, very cosmopolitan, represented amongst other things by Novalis, Tieck, Schlegel, was claimed near to the thought of Fichte. It worked out the romantic doctrines. The school of Heidelberg, which counted the names of Brentano, Eichendorff, Arnim and the brothers Grimm, leant less towards the reflection than towards reality and turned finally to cultural nationalism.

English romanticism

From Germany, the romantic movement passed in England. But it was marked less there because the English literature had kept of advantage its independence. While in Germany the romanticism had been especially a movement of reaction against the French influence, - movement leading to the creation of a national art assagi, - in England it was especially characterized by the return to the Moyen-âge and Celtic antiquities .

New tendencies of poetry and the novel at the XVIIIe century

Already, of 1742 with 1746, Edward Young had published his Nuits which, if they do not breathe, like believed of the surface readers, the morbid melancholy of the 19th century, express the tearing painful of a tested heart and wounded by the life. Hervey had already given its Méditations among the tombs (1746). Thomas Gray had seen translating in all the languages its Élegie written in a cemetery of countryside (1749). MacPherson had acquired, under the name of Os, a popularity which it partly had with the mystery of which it surrounded its work, but which lasted in spite of the discovery of its trickery: its designs nebulas, the wave of which it had surrounded the ground of Morven and the palate of Selma acted strongly on imaginations; its monotonous descriptions had a charm which laid out with the daydream, and its imposing style agitated and raised the spirits.

The novel, on its side, had taken a dominating place. Samuel Richardson had been made the painter of the human heart to the catches with pathetic situations, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, speaking about her principal work, said: “One still made forever, in some language that it is, a novel equal to Clarisse Harlowe (1748), nor even similar.” Henry Fielding, less touching than Richardson, had more interested the spirits by the variety and the exactitude of the tables of sound Tom Jones (1750). Oliver Goldsmith in its Vicaire of Wakefield (1766) had given the model of the pleasant and moral novel whose whole Europe liked the tone of benevolence and soft philanthropy.

The literary Restoration

At this point in time the movement of the spirits which excited in Germany the criticism and works of Herder and Gœthe communicates in England. The Percy bishop publishes in 1765 the old national ballades which he sought with passion. Thomas Adhesive tape, child of an extraordinary precocity, dies in eighteen years, in 1770, after having given a whole series of poems imitated of the old English poetry and which it had allotted to the Rowley monk. Walton gives in 1781 his Histoire of the poetry where he proclaims the power and the native freedom of English poetry.

But the poet who gave the true signal of the transformation was William Cowper (1731 - 1800), whose existence occurred almost very whole in loneliness. Its worms carry the print of a religious melancholy which was the feature dominating of its character. It to some extent creates in England the new lyric poetry, which the very whole heart épanche with its more secret movements, and enters in communication with nature. The reception of a portrait of his/her mother, the aspect of the winter in the countryside, a walk in the middle of wood, are for him reasons for intimate poetry that the poets of the former school would have scorned.

Such is the character of the new school. They are the most sincere emotions at the man, and in nature the simplest scenes and most familiar which the Bloomfield paint, Graham and the Crabbe.

The school Lakiste mark the apogee of this return to nature, but by uniting the dash there towards the ideal. They are Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Southey, Wilson, Thomas Moore, poets who, the majority, sang the lakes of the Cumberland and of the Westmorland.

Then, also appears Byron, whose poetry ignited, deeply personal, has creates the superb lyric epopees of the Pèlerinage of Childe Harold (1812), of the Giaour , of Been engaged of Abydos , the Corsaire and Lara . Walter Scott finally (1771 - 1832), in its Popular songs of the Scottish border , in its Song of the last ménestrel , in its Lady of the lake , and in its novels of Waverley , Been engaged of Lamermoor , Ivanhoë , Quentin Durward , the Pretty girl of Perth , etc, ressuscite the Middle Ages hidden under the dust of the centuries and sings, like it says it itself, “the haubert, the scarf, the cimier, the fairy, the giant, the dragon, itrider and the dwarf.”

French romanticism

If the romanticism were in Germany a return to the funds primitive and indigenous, in France, it was on the contrary a reaction against the national literature. The literatures English and German had submitted only temporarily to the discipline of the Classicisme, under the prevalent influence of our great century; and what is called properly romanticism in addition to Handle and the Rhine it is the literary period where the septentrional genius, taking again conscience of itself, repudiates the French imitation. In France, on the contrary, country of graeco-latin culture and tradition, the literature was traditional since the Renaissance, and one calls romantic the writers who, at the beginning of the 19th century, freed themselves from the rules of thought, composition and style established by the traditional authors .

Not more than in Germany, this revolution was not achieved of only one blow in France. Because of its character of rupture with the national tradition, and not with momentary practices, of foreign importation, it was later and had more sorrow to be carried out. Actually started towards 1750, it reached its term only one century later. Prepared at the 18th century, contained and even driven back during the Revolution and the Empire, it became ripe only under the Restauration and its triumph continued towards 1830 only after burning and impassioned fights.

First Period: Préromantisme (1750 - 1800)

Quarrel of Old and the Modern ones - the dramas of Diderot

The revolt against the imitation of the Antiquité had started as of the end of the 17th century with the Querelle of Old and of Modern the . Perrault, La Motte, Fontenelle, had carried heavy blows to the traditional Tragédie. But the true demolition contracter of the rules on which it rested is Diderot. He rises against the regulations of Aristote and Horace and against the traditional models. Our tragedies are, with its eyes, artificial and false, opposites with nature and the truth. The subjects borrowed from the life of large, instead of the being with the middle-class life, are without interest for us. The action is incredible, because the painting of the enormous crimes and cruel manners is out of season in one century soft and civilized. Lastly, the language is bombastic and déclamatoire, the ridiculous costumes, absolutely null decoration. The dramatic poet will have to thus take his subjects in the domestic life; he will create the middle-class tragedy which will differ from the serious comedy only by one tragic exit, which will be either founded on the characters but the conditions, and which will put in scene the miserly one not, the conceited one or the hypocrite, but the merchant, the judge, the financier, the father. This change involved others of them: the prose substituted for the worms as being a more natural language, a larger variety in the costume and the decoration, more movement and of pathetic in the action. But Diderot too often confused nature with its puerile realism; under pretext of morals, it gave a sermon dialogs instead of an action; finally its sensitivity always in overflowing threw it in a kind larmoyant and ridiculous. The double failure of the Father (1757) and of the Fils naturalness (1758) was the judgment of these theories and the signal of died for its reforms.

It will be necessary, to bring in France a radical reaction against the Classicism, other stronger and major influences. One will need a complete transformation in the ways of thinking and to feel, which was yet only germinates about it in the middle of the 18th century.

The transformation of the ideas and manners

Before knowing the Clarisse Harlowe of the English Richardson and the Werther of the German Gœthe, one had written in France, at the 18th century, of the novels, for the majority extremely poor and well quickly forgotten, but which testify that to live and paint the life it was not only as the 17th century had seemed to believe it, analyze and reason; it was also “to listen to the voice of the heart”, “to taste the delights of the feeling”, to test “the sensitivity of a heart as violent as to tend”, cherish “the poison of passions which devour”, or their “sad pains which have their charm”, to let themselves take with “the dark melancholy of a wild stay”, to deliver to the “attractions despair”, and “to even seek the tragedy rest of nothing”. The Sidney of Gresset (1745), like the Cleveland of the Abbot Prévost or its Senior of Killerine (1735), walk to the length of their adventurous destiny of incurable diseases of the heart without reason nor remedy, a secret bottom of melancholy and concern, a “devouring need”, a “absence of an unknown good”, a vacuum, a despair which trails them trouble with the melancholy and the lassitude of living.

Nature itself which one likes, it is not any more wise and arranged nature, without exubérance nor unforeseen. The taste develops true nature with its whims and even its brutality. The walkers are numerous at the 18th century, for the pleasure of the great outdoors initially, but also for poetic joys and moved contemplations. One tastes already the moonlight, the sound of the horn at the bottom of wood, the moors, the ponds and the ruins. Meudon, Montmorency, Fontainebleau becomes the asylum of the lovers, the refuge of the disappointed and despaired hearts. One starts to know another life that of the living rooms, and much from great hearts will seek in the nature “of the councils to live, of the forces to suffer, asylums to forget”. That one opens to be convinced the correspondence of it of Miss de Lespinasse, Mrs. d' Houdetot or the countess of Sabran.

Soon, even France of the plains and the hills, France of the Île-de-France is not enough any more. One will seek in Suisse and in the mountain of the stronger emotions and the new shivers. As of 1750, a poem of Switzerland To haul, the the Alps whose translation is extremely tasted, evokes ignored or ignored splendors. One starts with the lakes of Geneva, Bienne and Thoune and average altitudes; then one rises to the glaciers, one faces the eternal snow. One there will seek more the sublimes exaltations: “The words are not enough any more, writes a traveller, and the metaphors are impotent to return these upheavals. How the choruses of our cathedrals are deaf close to the noise of the torrents which fall and the winds which murmur in the valleys! Artist, which that you would be, will sail on the Lake Thoune. The day when I live for the first time this beautiful lake failed to be the last of my days; my existence escaped to me; I died to feel , to enjoy ; I fell into the destruction.”

Gained by these influences, the owners of parks or country houses want other decorations on their premises. Quite middle-class is the wise garden of Auteuil where the Antoine gardener “directs the yew and the Chèvrefeuille” of Boileau and aligns its rib stalls; quite cold the sumptuous order of Versailles and floors with the Frenchwoman of the pupils of Ours. What likes, it is, in the middle of the century, free grace and the capricious imagination of the pastoral decorations that Watteau and Lancret gives like melts in their tables, and, after 1750, tormented rocks, foaming torrents, storms, waves in furies, shipwrecks, all the “sublimes horrors” which one finds in the tables of Claude Joseph Vernet, and which orders to him its customers: “a quite horrible storm”, wishes one, and another: “of the cascades on turbid water, rocks, tree trunks and a dreadful and wild country. ”

Also sees one developing the fashion of the English gardens with the capricious alleys and the unforeseen scenes; one presses oneself with Ermenonville and Bagatelle, which is the models of the genre. With imagination, the whim and the disorder, one lavishes all there that can allure the “tender hearts” and feed the daydream: soft and pastoral emotions initially, thatched cottages, dairies, majestic and slow Cow S, bleating Sheep S, - decorations of the Idylles of Gessner and bergerades of Florian; but also of the invitations to the melancholy: deserts and accumulations of rocks, “thickets of the daydream” and hermitages, “bridges of the devil” and “caves of Young”, “factories” moving evoking poetry by last and carrying the hearts with “contemplations sublimes”, old castles, ruins of Abbey S, tombs of lovers, magic forests. “Voluptuous, solitary, wild, tender, melancholic persons, rural, rustic”, the gardens of time have already all the “small valleys” and all the “lakes”, all the “autumns” and all “insulations” of the Méditations of Lamartine. It failed to them only to have other cantors that Feutry and Colardeau.

The return to the Middle Ages

At the same time as the taste of true nature or clearing by ruins, the taste of the Moyen-âge and our national antiquities develops. Grace especially to the count de Tressan, which gives in 1782 its Extraits from the tales of chivalry , the fashion comes to the “troubadours” and the “Gallic” literature. The novels and the lovesongs of the “good old day” bring to the significant hearts their “courtesy”, their “naivety” and “the graces of the old language”. The Library of the novels and the blue Bibliothèque lavish on their readers extracts and adaptations of the Four wire Aymon , of Huon of Bordeaux , Amadis , of Genevieve of the Brabant and Jean of Paris . Villon and Charles of Orleans was already drawn from the lapse of memory, the first in 1723, the second in 1734. Marot, which forgotten forever, knows a renewal of favor. The Poem S, Tale S, Romance S and Nouvelle S fill up Chevaliers, tournaments, palfreys and the damoiselles ones, manors house and pages.

The English influence

The foreign influences were deep on this movement preromantic, especially that of the England.

The English had provided us, before 1760, via Voltaire and of Montesquieu, of the theories of political freedom and constitutional government. But D' Holbach, Helvétius and the Encyclopédistes had not been long in going further Addison and Pope, and, after 1760, the prestige of philosophy and the Libéralisme English had fallen. England is not any more, in the second part of the century, but the country of Richardson, Fielding, Young and Os. The two first especially make the conquest of the significant hearts, and when Diderot writes of only one breath and in is delirious of enthusiasm its Éloge of Richardson , it does nothing but say with eloquence what all the French think. “Undoubtedly neither Clarisse nor other English heroins are romantic heroins; they do not claim the rights of passion; they do not suffer from the evil of the century. But they are impassioned, even when they reason; and when they like or resist the love is of all the forces to be to them. They are those whose heart burns. The fire gained all the French hearts”. (Mornet).

One tasted the English theater with the same zeal as the novels. However Shakespeare was bitterly discussed, Voltaire treated it the insane one, and Rivarol and the Toothing-stone thought about like him. However the actor Garrick, very the mode, played as of 1751 of the fragments of Hamlet in the living rooms and made cry the spectators over the lovers of Vérone, over the King Lear “wandering in the center of the forests” and over “the broken heart of Ophélie”. The translations and the imitations multiplied; Romeo and Juliette and Othello especially became popular.

With the dramas of Shakespeare, it is the English heart itself which conquers the French hearts, heart dark and wild, very full with fog, mystery and spleen, but major, and which can discover what strongly shakes imagination and throws the heart in a species of vagueness obscure and threatening.

Some French had already liked before that the solemn peace of the tombs and deaths; but they had sung it only timidly or gauchement. They were the English Hervey, Gray and especially Young which reflect in this sepulchral poetry the pangs of despair and the dark pleasures of a heart wearied of all. The prolix Nights of Young, meditations oratories and monologs where rhetoric and the artifice abound, had a resounding success, when the Turner gave in 1769 of it, the translation in a emphatique prose even, but especially more lugubrious than the worms of the original. It was believed that Young had told his own history, and one poured tears on this father who, in the major night, with the dubious gleam of a lantern, had dug his hands the tomb of his beloved daughter.

Thanks to these influences and in spite of the mocking remarks of Voltaire, the “kind sinks” was created little by little. The héroïdes of Dorat and Colardeau, the novels and news of Baculard d' Arnaud ( the Tests of the feeling, Relaxations of the sensitive man, unhappy Husbands ), the Meditations and the wild man of Louis-Sebastien Mercier are filled of storms, funeral caves, craniums and skeletons; with the “chaos of the elements” “the furies mix with the insanity, the frenzy of the crimes and the abîmements of the repentance”. “But cries were howls, known as the hero of one of these novels; my sighs of the efforts of rage, my gestures of the attacks against my person…”

For this melancholy, for this dark kind, one needed a suitable decoration. It was Macpherson which brought it. In the Poems of OS , one found the horizons and the gods of North, the light and frozen fogs, the storms with which mix the voice of the torrents, the winds unchained and the phantoms. In OS opened out all that the literature of North contains of funeral visions and strange splendors. And we must note here that one did not distinguish then between the Gaulle, the Ireland, the Scotland, the Denmark, the Norway, between the Celtic countries and the Germanic countries, and that one admired all the “bards”, since the druids gaelic until those of the Scandinavian sagas .

This passion for the foreign literatures was often, hasten us to say it, extremely careful and mitigated. The taste of dark, the “lugubrious and sepulchral pure gibberish” and the same OS bards were discussed, at least until the Révolution, and if one engouait oneself of the “barbarian” and the “savage”, it was provided that they were licked a little. The translations of Shakespeare by the Turner, if they were faithful enough for the bottom, corrected what it called the “commonplaces” and “coarseness” of the style; and the “adaptations of Ducis which made fortune are often only the pale ones and untrue counterfeits. Nothing even remained in its adaptations of only the dramas of Diderot or of Baculard had dared; the handkerchief of Othello is nothing any more but one ticket, the pillow which chokes Desdémone is not more that one dagger, the action is held in twenty-four hours like wants it Aristote. The translations of Young, OS, Hervey by Touneur, which made its glory, were hardly, they also, which skilful lies. They are not satisfied to use of a too careful style; they cut, remove, transpose, recousent; so that the sublimes horrors and the beautiful disorders that one believes in it to find are nothing any more but the effects of a very traditional and penetrated art of French spirit.” (Mornet).

With truth, Shakespeare, Young and Os, the English, the Celtic , the Scandinavians, exerted in France an impression much major than in the Germanic countries. One on our premises tasted them only in edulcorated translations, and still they less were tasted than tender the idylles and the soft pastoral ones of Gessner, the “German Théocrite”.

The German influence

He could seem that the influence of the Germany, where the romantic movement was so early and so noisy, was felt early in France. He of it is nothing. Germany was generally ignored, where even scorned before 1760. For the majority of the French, it was the country of Candide, of the castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh, the marshes puants, the stupid barons, the heavy baronesses and Cunégondes naive. Voltaire, which had been able to know the Germans, and who believed to have reasons to complain some thought that they were only louts. Little by little, one realized that this country had produced “some great men”; one adopted initially Wieland, but its works hardly returned to the French but what the French had lent to him. One made then contact with Klopstock and his Messiade ; one knew Gellert and Hagedorn; it was found that the Germans were less “louts” that “rustic”; it was admitted that they were “naive”, and consequently sensitive and virtuous; one tasted the German good-naturedness and the peace of the villages in the shade of the Tilleul S and the bell-towers.

It is only at the end of the century that Schiller and Gœthe reveals another Germany, burning and more romantic. For the Brigands are translated; Werther immediately holds the French under the charm. The translations and the adaptations follow one another of 1775 to 1795; twenty novels carry out the love until the suicide, or at least until the despair of living, the horror of the destiny. The young girls even dream to read Werther , read it and have the turned head of it. The depression becomes with the mode; one gives oneself death by weariness of the life, such this young man who committed suicide out of a blow from gun in the park out of Ermenonville, in front of the tomb of Rousseau.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Neither the English and German influence, nor the influence of the Middle Ages, are enough to explain the French romanticism. The another eclipse, that of a genius which, by collecting them, their added the richnesses of its powerful personality and irresistibly involved our literature in new ways. This man, it is Rousseau (1712 - 1778).

He did not discover the septentrional literatures; one knew them before him. But, more than whoever, he accustomed the French hearts to to feel a little with the manner of the Germans and the English, thus widening the still restricted field of our imagination.

And especially, it imposed on our literature the seal of its extraordinary temperament. By there, it made with him only a revolution. It reinstalled from the start the feeling where since more than one half-century only the intelligence reigned. With him, the literature becomes heart épanchement, it which for a long time was nothing any more but expression of the spirit. Poetry, eloquence, lyricism, even penetrate in prose, whereas they did not have any more place, even in the worms. It is a great widening of the horizon.

Sons of a Calviniste of Geneva, high apart from the monarchical and catholic influences, Rousseau believes of instinct in freedom and the equality natural. Of nature independent, impatient of any discipline, enemy of any tradition, it is exaggeratedly individualistic. In perpetual revolt against the company of its time, it reverses all the barriers which force its me . And it all the more defends this me , that its temperament requires all freedoms and all the pleasures.

It extends, according to its own expressions, “its expansive heart” with all the objects which surround it, and projects its me on all material and moral nature. It is itself the substance, the occasion and the end of its writings. What tells especially its Nouvelle Héloïse (1760), its Emile (1762), his Confessions and its Rêveries (1782), it is the interior drama of its personality which is built and is affirmed, exalte or is lost through the tumult of its passions and its reasoning, its temptations and its ideas, its dreams and its experiments, always anxious besides, always tyrannized by “the feeling prompter than the flash”. The reason is at his place the humble maidservant of the sensitivity, because it is sensitive with a rare degree, and it is by there especially that it is distinguished from its contemporaries: “In the middle of people occupied to think, it is occupied to enjoy and suffer… Others had arrived by the analysis at the idea of the feeling; Rousseau, by its temperament, with the reality of the feeling; these develop, it saw. (Lanson).”

The supreme expression of this personality and this sensitivity quite naturally led it to lyricism, and it is especially by the eloquence of this lyricism that Rousseau cooperated with the revolution of the literature. “It so much shook and rocked at the same time the old world which it seems to have killed it without ceasing cherishing it. It proved to him that it was absurd and enivré it theories, dreams, tempting declamations and sentences which were stanzas. This writer who was a musician, this philosopher who was a poet, this magus who was a magician, was especially an enchanter whose ideas had on the men the force that usually passions have, because they all were, indeed, frays of feeling and burning and impetuous passion. The ideas of Rousseau are like sensual ideas.” (Faguet).

By all that, it is him the true father of the romanticism, much more than those which one will seek beyond the the Rhine and of the Manche. All the melancholy of Rene, Obermann and Lamartine rises from his, and Musset will do nothing but translate it in the cries of its passion.

Rousseau did not only reopen the source of the tears; it dessillé the eyes of its contemporaries. Crystallizing the tendencies which start to appear, it forced the French of the 18th century to see nature better than they did it; he learned how to them to look at the landscape with all his accidents, his prospects and its values of let us tons, to feel it, and to frame, so to speak, their feelings in the universe. Consequently the drama of the human life had its decoration, and it is there one of the greatest discoveries of the lyric sensitivity.

It detailed in their picturesque familiarity the pastoral houses with their dairy, their farmyard, their noisy and merry life, the cocks which sing, the oxen which mugissent, the carriages which one harnesses. He often dreamed of a white small house with the green wind-braces with cows, a kitchen garden, a source.

He said magnificiently to his century the “splendor of the sunrises, the serenity penetrating of the nights of summer, the pleasure of the fatty meadows, the mystery of large quiet and dark wood, all this festival of the eyes and the ears for which join the light, the foliages, the flowers, the birds, the insects, air blasts. He found to paint the landscapes that he had seen a precision of terms which is of an artist in love with the reality of the things.” (Lanson).

He discovered with the French the Suisse and the the Alps, the deep valleys and the high mountains. The success of the Nouvelle Héloïse does that of the Lac of Geneva; one there will seek the traces of Julie and Saint-Valiant knight, and one follows those of Rousseau itself to Clarens, with Meillerie, Yverdon, Môtiers - Through and with the Lac of Bienne.

One should not be mistaken on the disciples in Rousseau. It had of it immediately: Saint-Lambert and its Seasons , Roucher and its Month , Delille with its Gardens , its Man of the fields , his Three Reigns of Nature , Bernardin of Saint-Pierre especially with the Indian Thatched cottage , Paul and Virginia and the Harmony of nature , gave, as of the end of the century, the variations on some of the topics launched by the Master. But the true posterity of Rousseau will appear only forty years later: it will be the romantic full orchestra. The concerns of last the years of the 18th century will indeed give the step to the philosophical and political ideas, and the great glare of the Révolution will leave in the shade the literary speculations. Rousseau ideologist will control with Robespierre, but Rousseau musician will not sing at the time of the Guillotine.

Second period: Chateaubriant and Mrs. De Staël (1800 - 1820)

Literature of the Revolution

The revolutionary age is not, one conceives it without sorrow, a great literary time; the concerns of the spirits went then another share that to the literature; the action choked the dream.

Moreover, if the revolutionary period, because of the multiplicity of the events and of their importance, appears immense, it was actually only twelve years, and it is not in twelve years that a literature is renewed, even when it already gave signs of transformation.

Except for Marie-Joseph Chénier, the author of Charles IX , the Révolution does not have a name of poet to quote (works of André Chénier will be known only in 1819).

Literature of the Empire

Under the Empire, Napoleon, which regarded the poets only as accessories of its glory, necessary to sing it, charged the large Master with the University, Mr. of Fontanes ( faciunt asinos , it make asses, said the practical joker), to discover Corneille to him; but one discovered only Luce de Lancival, correct author of Hector .

While Gœthe and Schiller illuminated the Germany, that Byron revolutionized the England literally, that so many new horizons opened at the close nations, the France could show only delayed of one former time and pale transfers of the Masters: in poetry, storytellers, anecdotiers, theelegiac ones like Fontanes ( the Day of Died in the countryside ), Andrieux ( the Miller of Without-Concern ), Arnault ( Fables ): with the theater, pseudo-traditional tragedies of Népomucène Lemercier, Etienne de Jouy or Raynouard.

Chateaubriant

Fortunately, in margin of the official literature another literature lived. The current resulting from Rousseau was not dried up, and its gushings, not to be intermittent, were only more impetuous.

Chateaubriand (1768 - 1848) made appear back-to-back Atala (1801), the Genius of Christianity (1802), Rene (1802), Natchez , the Martyrs (1809) the translation of the Paradis lost of Milton, and it was a marvellous explosion of imagination and lyricism. “Impassioned Lover of any kind of beauty, delighted by lonelinesses of the New-World, the the East, the Greece, Rome, Italy, very versed admiror in the Antiquity Greek and Latin, reading Homère with delights, Virgile with charm, including/understanding instinct and like intuition the the Middle Ages with Dante and the Rebirth with Pétrarque, especially, better than the person, the true one and solid beauty of traditional of the 17th century, it came as to reveal with his compatriots a new world which was the whole world” (Faguet). For its example, it invites them in the Natchez (America), in the Itinéraire from Paris to Jerusalem (Orient), in the Martyrs (ancient world, Celtic world, Germanie primitive), to penetrate the poetry of the places and times the most moved away and to express it, introducing a cosmopolitan art in the place of an art too exclusively national. For its example still, it invites them, in Atala , Rene , to draw with the major sources of the heart the true emotion, melancholic persons generally, because “to go until the bottom of all, as Mrs. de Staël, it will say is to go until the sorrow”, but especially personal, individual, original, i.e. really alive. By its lessons finally and its theories exposed in the Genius of Christianity , it said to the 19th century which opened something which can be summarized as follows: In spite of excellent geniuses and admirable works, which I can taste more than anybody, your fathers were mistaken on the literary art during nearly three hundred years. They believed that the literature was to be impersonal and that the author was not to appear in his work. They made large things, but they would have made some of much larger without this singular discretion which removes with the work of art half at least that of which it is necessary than it is made. Moreover, they fell into strange contradictions which led them to serious errors. Christian and French, that of which they the most abstained from, they are the Christian subjects and the national subjects, and what they sought most greedily they are the mythological subjects and the ancient subjects. True aberration which ended up desiccating the literature, for lack of solids food. Such an amount of better besides. An immense matter remains intact and an immense way is open. Consult your heart, it is there that can be the genius: in any case, it is the EC what there is in you of deeper and of more fertile; express your religious feelings, and initially do not believe with Boileau and Voltaire then, that Christianity is without beauty; express your patriotic feelings; repress neither your sensitivity, nor your imagination, which made your fathers; you will thus create a personal literature and an art nouveau.

It was the truth, except some reserves, and it was a new light. Épanchement was extraordinary; not immediately, because, to tell the truth, the influence of Chateaubriant is sensitive only towards 1820; but it was prolonged and had immense consequences. Poetry was renewed, and for the first time in France there were true lyric poets; the study of the history was renewed, and it was by reading in the Martyrs the wild and strong poetry of Velléda and the combat of the Francs that Augustin Thierry had the idea of the Récits mérovingiens ; the religious feeling was renewed, in the sense that it was not ridiculous any more to be a monk and was elegant to be it; criticism finally was renewed, in the sense that it did not consist in any more raising the faults but rendering comprehensible the beauties (cf Faguet).

All that was, in Chateaubriand, expressed moreover in one language abundant, harmonious, flexible and picturesque, joining together all the charms, all the seductions and all the forces; in a language of poet of speaker and artist. As it is not astonishing as Chateaubriand, according to the word of Joubert, “enchanted” the century.

Senancour

In 1804 had appeared the Obermann of Senancour, novel by letters, of a vague and major, standard sadness perfect of the romantic novel. The author had represented itself in his hero, “who does not know what it is, which it likes, which it wants, which groans without cause which wishes without object, and which does not see anything, if not which it is not in his place, finally that it is trailed in the vacuum and an infinite disorder of troubles.” This book did not have any success when it appeared; it had to wait to be in vogue until the evil of Obermann had become the “evil of the century” and that the romantic ones were rained to find in the painting of this failing heart and this weak will the expression of the desperate inertia which they felt in them.

Mrs. De Staël

More immediate and more decisive on the work of started restoration was the influence of Mrs. de Staël (1766 - 1817).

Forced in consequence of the hostility of Napoleon of living out of France, it made a long stay in Germany, and there a particular art was revealed to him, of which it engoua too, but of which certain parts at least met the need well that France of a renewal of the literary art tested.

In France, the life of company had refined the talents and the feelings, but unobtrusive individuality. The authors wrote according to traditional rules, to be included/understood immediately by an accustomed public with these rules. Also, the French writers excelled only in the kinds which propose the imitation of manners of the company, or in those whose intelligence sharpened by the spirit of company can only taste the smoothness: descriptive or dialectical poetry, light poetry which smiles and which scoffs.

The Germans, on the contrary, have a personal poetry, intimates, which is the expression of affections sharp and deep. Nothing conventional nor glossy on their premises; but the feeling, poetry, the daydream, lyricism, the mysticism even, here which gives them an original literature, completely indigenous and personal, very philosophical, very major and very serious.

All that, of which it was charmed, it recommended it as being the literature of the future, sharing a little summarily all the empire of the letters in two provinces: on a side the Classicism, which is the Antiquité and the imitation of antiquity; other the romanticism, which is Christianisme, Moyen-âge and septentrional inspiration.

There was far from these a little vague and a little narrow ideas with the broad and luminous ideas of Chateaubriant; however they contributed to widen the horizon, they made turn the heads and the glances on other side of the the Rhine, as Chateaubriand had made them turn on other side of the Manche. “The literature must become European”, proclaimed it; and if the French writers had attended the Italian, the Spanish S and the English, it was a very new practice to have trade with the Germans, and they had to be informed that it was to be taken. It is especially this warning which Mrs. de Staël gives with insistence, fire, ardor, and an incomparable talent in her entitled book Of Germany (1810).

The romantic battle (1820 - 1830)

Causes of the final establishment of the romanticism in our literature

The literary revolution prepared at the 18th century, announced by Chateaubriant and Mrs. de Staël, brooded still long enough. The book of Mrs. de Staël in particular remained during several years buried by the care of the imperial police force. As long as the Empire lasted, the literature was official, like all the demonstrations of opinion. It seemed that traditional poetry was under the high protection of the government, and that orthodoxy belonged to the fidelity of a good citizen.

But the generation of 1815, more significant and more quivering that of Rene, tormented more cruelly by the trouble, because it did not have to be diverted any more, after the fall of Napoleon, the danger of the battles and enivrement of the victories, was less laid out to subject itself to the social laws and prompter to make to “ego” the measurement of the universe. It with this “me” is tormented and proud that it was going to seek to express. The artists, giving up the forms finally that the past had bequeathed to them, were going to translate its agitations into works of beauty; and consequently a new period was going to start in the history of our letters.

First Triumph: The “Meditations” of Lamartine

In 1820 appear the Méditations of Lamartine (1790 - 1869). It is like a clap of thunder. One did not know yet in France a so sincere sensitivity and if quivering; a so broad poetic breath had never been felt and if vivifying. “Worms of love and an unknown love in France since the imitateurs of Pétrarque; worms of serious and major melancholy, without any mixture of insipidity or languor, in an exquisite measurement of the taste; immortal things made with nothing, as are always made the things which come from the heart; rustic tables which seemed very new, though one had painted nature for sixty years, because it was the nature seen with the eyes of true rustic” (Faguet); these original and delicious inspirations, which reopened suddenly and magnificiently all the great sources of the human emotion, were for the contemporaries like the awakening of a new world.

the Lake , Insulation , the Fall , the Small valley , carried to perfection this poetry personal, sentimental and descriptive, elegiac and feverish, which was going to be one of the triumphs of the romanticism; the Temple and Immortality inaugurated a philosophical and religious poetry of a new sonority of which Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny was going to be inspired, and that Lamartine himself, ten years later, was to carry to his perfection in the Harmonies .

The romantic battle

Two years after the Meditations , a new collection of poetries appears, a volume of Odes . The author was twenty years old hardly and was called Victor Hugo.

This collection, as well as poetries which made appear in MUSE Frenchwoman young and sentimental writers like Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu, Sophie and Delphine Gay (future Mrs. de Girardin) redoubled the success which the new poetic form obtained in the general public.

But the academicians did not have the hor to like this new poetry. According to the example of the French Academy, the academies of province were carried with which better against these daring young people, and it is they which, by obstinacy, prevented the revolution from peacefully being achieved, and forced it to take an excessive character of reaction against the old doctrines. Sheltering their poverties and their absolute lack of imagination and style behind the great names of Crow and Root, which they claimed attacked in their person by the innovators, the last representatives of the tradition and the traditional processes started the fight resolutely.

It was a true war. With the heat of the literary principles united those of political principles; because it should be noticed that the romantic ones were Royaliste S, and traditional liberals; that those which preached freedom in art were absolutist in policy, and which on the other hand liberals did not want to suffer the least emancipation in the literary field. The imitation of the Antiquité having been one of the characters of the Révolution and the Empire, it was natural that the restored royalty turned the back on Antiquity. Thus made poetry. It becomes royalist and Catholique at the same time as romantic. The romanticism thus settled in France under an air of piety for the national past, for the old traditions of the French spirit violently stopped by the Revolution. Most innovative of the literary revolutions seemed to be caught itself for a restoration.

The Fight for Poetry

One came to the hands as of the publication from the first volume from worms from Victor Hugo, his Odes , increased soon Ballades . There were not yet quite great audacities in this very traditional poetry under its bright rhetoric, but the school of Delille and Luce de Lancival found it barbarian. Indeed, the November 25th 1824, Auger, director of the Academy, having to receive Subjects, congratulated it on its “literary orthodoxy”, and, blaming “poetic the incipient barbarian” of the “sect”, he added: “Not, it is not you, Sir, who believe impossible the alliance of the genius with the reason, of boldness with the taste, the originality with the compliance with the rules… It is not you who made causes common with these amateurs of beautiful nature… who of large heart would exchange Phèdre and Iphigénie against Faust and Goetz de Berlichingen”.

Soon the tone was raised, and the language of the Academy was nothing less than academic. Baour-Lormian, drew its Canon from alarm , treating romantic the pourceaux one, using a periphrasis:

It seems that the access of their stupid rage

metamorphosed their features and their language;

It seems, with the ouïr grognant on my way,

Which they saw Circé the rod in my hand.

Népomucène Lemercier called some with the courts, exclaiming:

With impunity Hugo make worms!

The Constitutional , newspaper rival of MUSE Frenchwoman , wondered whether it would not be finally, among the dramatic authors, a Molière or a Regnard to deliver the romantic ones to rized public in good a Comédie in five acts; and Duvergier de Hauranne, future fellow-member of Hugo to the Academy, answered: “The romanticism is not ridiculous, it is a disease, like the Somnambulisme and the epilepsy. Romantic is a man whose spirit starts to be alienated. It is necessary to feel sorry for it little by little, speak reason to him, to bring back it; but one cannot make the subject of a comedy of it; it is at most that of a thesis of Médecine.”

The Foreword of Cromwell

It is with these ineptitudes that the Foreword of Cromwell answered (1827). What Victor Hugo proclaims in this proclamation celebrates, it is liberalism in art, i.e. the right for the writer to accept other rules only that of its imagination; it is the return to the truth, the life, i.e. the right for the writer to make, if it likes it, coudoyer sublimates it by the grotesque one, and to consider any thing from its personal point of view. Summarizing the history of poetry rapidly, Victor Hugo expressed himself in these terms: “poetry has three ages, of which each one corresponds to one time of the company: the ode, the epopee, the drama. Primitive times are lyric, ancient times are epic, modern times are dramatic. The drama is complete poetry. It is with the drama that all comes to lead in modern poetry. The character of the drama is reality. Reality results from the very natural combination of two types, sublimates it and the grotesque one, which cross in the drama as they cross in the life and creation. Because true poetry, complete poetry is in the harmony of the opposites… All that is in nature is in Article”

Return to truth, expression of the integral life, freedom in art, were the formulas of the new school, whose followers held since 1824 their general headquarter, them “Cénacle”, as one called, in the living room of Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal, and whose Victor Hugo became from now on the uncontested chief.

The fight with the theater

While attacking itself as of the beginning with the Theater, Victor Hugo attacked the enemy of face. Uniting the skill in the talent, it had care to proclaim higher than its adversaries the wonders of the Masters passed, Corneille, Racine, Molière, than one opposed to him unceasingly. All that thought, all that still had concern of the size of the letters, included/understood the range of proclamation. In Victor Hugo told by a witness of his life , we find the account of a conversation which would have taken place at that time between the poet and Talma. What known as the tragic great author is characteristic there: “the actor, is nothing without the role, and I never had a true role. I never had part as it would have some was necessary to me. The tragedy it is beautiful, it is noble, it is large. I would have liked as much size with more reality, a character who had the variety and the movement of the life, which was not very of a part, which was tragic and familiar, a king who was a man… The truth, here what I sought in my life. But what do you want? I ask for Shakespeare, one gives me Ducis.”

Everyone was appropriate about it: the need for a renewed literature was felt. The eagerness with which the public was pressed in Odéon, where English authors came to give representations of the parts from Shakespeare, testifies some, because it was necessary that the opinion had clearly decided in favor of the novel ideas so that one ran to applaud the hard ones chief-of works of the English poet.

But another thing was the representation of chief-of works foreigners, and another thing that of new parts, designed by French in same the ideas. One does not whistle by a book, either that a foreword; it was with the theater that one awaited the newcomers. However Lamartine did not think of the theater, either that Prosper Mérimée, whose Théâtre of Clara Gazul was impossible with the scene, and which the author had taken care well not to carry there. It was thus with which would open fire. Vigny was going to be risked by the translation of Othello , when an young man of twenty-seven years, an unknown, the day before still obscure secretary of the duke of Orleans, obtained with the French theater a brilliant success. In one day, Alexandre Dumas had become famous; its drama was called Henri III and its court . The part is a little heavy and aged much, but it contained enough scenes dared to raise storms. The large scene of the third act, in particular, where the duke of Own way, crushing the wrists of his wife, the force to give an appointment to Saint-Mégrin, astounded the room, and, the astonishment passed, conquered it. Success was amazing, bright. Traditional the, surprised one had not been able to counter. One could say as of this day that the cause of the new school was gained.

The battle however was not finished. The Othello of Vigny appeared, and criticism with the barks as an interpreter thus in a newspaper of the time of the first representation: “One arrived at the representation of the More of Venice as at a battle whose success was to decide on a great literary question. It was a question of knowing if Shakespeare, Schiller and Gœthe were going to drive out French scene Corneille, Racine and Voltaire.” It was bad faith, but of the good strategy; the question thus moved gave reason to those which posed it. But actually it was not a question of driving out the Masters of the art of their secular Parnassus; it was simply asked, like said it ingeniously a writer, “that the freedom of the literary worships was proclaimed.” Othello succeeds in spite of an admirably organized opposition. The traditional ones landed in the corridors of the theater while being said: “Commen do you find Othello? It is beautiful! But Iago! it is much more beautiful!” And all to repeat on unmatched intonations of mewing: “Iago! Iago!” . Nothing made there, the room was subjugated in front of these dark howling the African jealousy whose Ducis shy person had made hear only attenuated echoes.

See also: romantic Theater

The battle of Hernani and final triumph

The way was not only opened, but almost cleared. Victor Hugo came to the rescue. Its drama of Cromwell was too much considerable to be played. The poet took again the feather and wrote Marion Delorme , that the censure stopped. Hugo, untiring, created Hernani and the decisive battle took place.

As soon as the reception of the part by the reading panel of the Comédie-Française was known, seven academicians addressed to the king a petition so that this theater was closed with the “playwrights”, Charles X drew some spiritually: “In fact of literature, he says, I have only my place with the floor”. Aggravation redoubled. One tries to make refuse Hernani by the censure. This one, which was not favorable to the poet, made the fault, if fault there is, of authorizing the representation of this part, under pretext which it was such “a fabric of extravangances” that the author and his friends would be definitively discredited near the public. “It is good, said the report/ratio, that the public sees up to which point of mislaying can go the human spirit freed from any rule and any propriety.” Others alert: Miss Mars, which played the part of doña Sol, could not be resigned to call Firmin, which played the part of Hernani, its “superb and generous lion”. The author threatened it to withdraw his role to him. It accepted then the lion with the repetitions, but with the back thought of disguising it in lord for the public, which it did. In addition, the snap was prepared to betray. The poet, who felt reluctant the paid applause, wanted freedom with the floor besides as he asserted it on scene. The snap was removed. Romantic youth, writers and artists, Bousingots and Young person-France , were offered to the Master to replace them. “Each one accepted for master key a red paper square, stamped of a mysterious claw registering with the corner of the ticket the Spanish word hierro , which wants to say iron . this currency, a height castillante appropriate to the character of Hernani, meant that it was necessary to be, in the fight, frankly, brave man and faithful like the sword.” One was it. The adventures of this epic fray were twenty told times.

“As of one hour of the afternoon (February 28th 1830), the passers by of the street Richelieu transfer to accumulate with the door of the theater a band to be savage and odd, bearded, hairy, equipped in any case, excluded with the mode: in jacket, in Spanish coat, waistcoat with the Robespierre, hat with the Henri III, having every century and all the countries on their shoulders and the head, into full Paris, full midday. The middle-class men stopped, amazed and made indignant. Mr. Théophile Gautier, especially, insulted the eyes by a scarlet satin waistcoat, fastened on pale green pants with band of black velvet, and by the thick hair which went down to him to the kidneys.”

The door did not open; the tribes obstructed circulation. The classic art could not quietly see these cruel hordes which were going to invade its asylum; it collected all balayures and all the refuse of the theater, and threw them roofs on besieging. Mr. de Balzac accepted a cabbage core for its part… The door opened at three hours and was closed again. Only in the room, they were organized. The regulated places, it was yet only three hours and half; what to make up to seven? One caused, one sang, but the conversation and the songs become exhausted. Fortunately that one had come too early to have dined: then one had brought saveloys, sausages, ham, bread, etc One thus dined. As one had only that to make, one dined so a long time that one was still with table when the public entered ( Victor Hugo told ). The sight of this restaurant, the public of the cabins wondered whether he dreamed; inconvenienced by the odor of garlic and sausage, the smart ladieies and the correct traditional ones protested, and it is in the middle of an indescribable hubbub that the curtain rose.

The victory was gained of brave fight; during between acts, to the scenes of pugilisms, breakings of benches and the smashed hats with punch testified, more still than excellence of the new literary doctrines, of the strength of their champions. “It would be difficult, forty-four writing years later Gautier in a style where still the heat of the combat vibrates, to describe the effect which on the audience these so singular worms produced, so male, so strong, of a so strange turn, a pace if cornélienne and if shakespearienne at the same time. Two systems, two parties, two armies, two civilizations even, it is not too much to say, were in presence, being hated cordially, as one hates oneself in hatreds arts person. Some worms were taken and taken again, as of fear disputed by each army with an equal obstinacy. One day, the romantic ones removed a tirade which the enemy took again the following day and from where it had to be dislodged. What a din! what cries! what a hooted! what whistles! what hurricanes of cheers! what thunders of applause! The heads of party insulted themselves like the heroes of Homère… For this generation, Hernani was what Cid for the contemporaries of Corneille was . All that was young, valiant, in love, poetic, accepted the breath from it… The charm still lasts for those which were captivated.”

See also: Battle of Hernani

The reign of the romanticism (1830 - 1843)

Poetry

While the revolution was done with the theater, a whole new, original and strong literature, developed in the book.
We quoted the First Meditations of Lamartine and the Odes and Ballades of Hugo. The first gave in 1823 the Nouvelles Meditations , in 1825 the Dernier song of the Pilgrimage of Childe Harold , continuation of the Pèlerinage of Childe Harolde of Byron, in 1830 the poetic Harmonies and nuns , where are some of its more beautiful pieces. The second, who gave in 1829 Eastern the , will give in 1831 the Feuilles of autumn , in 1835 the Chants of the twilight , in 1837 the Vois interior , in 1840 the Rays and the Shades . Alfred de Vigny publishes in 1826 its ancient and modern Poèmes , especially inspired by biblical antiquity and Homeric and by the medieval time.
Beside these three big bosses of chorus, a whole burning pleiad and young street with the battle for the Holy-Beuve independence of Article , the author of the Table of French poetry at the 16th century , after having ressuscity Ronsard, Of Bellay, old the Pleiad, becomes him also poet under the pseudonym of Joseph Delorme. Emile Deschamps turns to the Spain, his Hugo Master following the example of, and makes known with the France, in the Romance of the king Rodrigue , the beauties of the Spanish romancero. Théophile Gautier publishes, at the end of 1830, its first towards where it appears immediately like a Master of the form. Alfred de Musset especially publishes into 1829 its Contes of Spain and Italy , eminently romantic with theirs towards dislocated with the unforeseen rhymes and too rich person, and the accumulation of expensive processes to the drama and the novel of young school (wild jealousies, poisonings, duels, etc); but, of 1829 with 1841, changing in manner and tie of its own experience the matter of its poetry, it will shout the suffering which it felt to have liked and will give a series of immortal poems: four Nights of May , of December, of August, of October, the Hope as a God and the Memory .

See also: romantic Poetry

The novel

At the same time as poetry, the novel him also was affirmed victorious.
Victor Hugo had given in 1823 Han of Iceland and in 1826 Bug-Jargal , novels “terrible” whose imaginations abracadabrantes make today smile. but in 1831 it makes appear Notre-Dame de Paris , where it ressuscite, around a Cathédrale alive and almost hallucinatory, the Paris of the 15th century, with its black and repugnant streets and its grouillement of schoolboys, gueux and gangsters. In this way of the historical novel, it had been preceded by Vigny of which the Five-March had appeared in 1826.
Soon Alexandre Dumas, inexhaustible storyteller and always amusing, will impassion France by his novels pseudo-histories and his marvellous accounts of combat and adventures which are still in all the memories ( the Three Musketeers , Twenty years after , the Viscount of Bragelonne , the Count of Assembles-Cristo ); George Sand will give her novels of Lélia , Indiana , works of revolt and pain, and Consuelo ; Balzac will raise 1829 with 1850 its monumental human Comédie .

See also: Romance romantic

History

The love of the national past, which had inspired by philosopher's stones to the poets, the novelists, with the playwrights, caused a revival of the historical studies. “Pharamond! Pharamond! We fought with the sword…” The battle song of the Francs, like another Marseilles , had been a prelude to with the alarm clock of the disappeared generations. To like the past, to see it, reproduce it with the movement and the colors of the life, here is the ambition of the romantic historians. The documents of files will give to a Augustin Thierry (1795 - 1856) and to a Michelet (1798 - 1874) the facts, the dates, the actors; their imagination and their heart will return the life to them, will recreate their atmosphere, will reconstitute their framework. the History of the conquest of England by Norman the (1825) is well the talk of the facts relative to this conquest, but it is also “an immense clamor of wild joy in the camp of the winners, the choked murmur of the victims which the contemporaries had hardly heard and of which the echo, through the ages, reflects itself mysteriously to the writer” (De Crozals).

Traditional attempt at reaction

With the theater, the romantic drama reigns as a Master: Vigny makes play the Marshal's wife d' Ancre in July 1830 and Chatterton in 1835; Alexandre Dumas gives Antony in 1831; Hugo especially is inexhaustible: Marion Delorme , played with glare in 1831, the King succeeds has fun (1832), with the King has fun , Lucrèce Borgia , Marie Tudor , Angelo , Ruy Blas ; nothing seemed to have to stop so fertile and so brilliant career.
Suddenly, in 1843, a rather violent traditional reaction burst. An young man, François Ponsard, made receive with Odéon a traditional tragedy, Lucrèce , part solid, naive, written of a heavy, but frankly and healthy style. The author neither had weakened nor decorated his subject; he had affublé it of no picturesque forgery; he had preserved at his primitive Romans their white wool togas. Lucrèce was chosen by the adversaries of romantic to be opposite with the Burgraves that Victor Hugo made play Th3e4atre Fran1cais. A cabal went to whistle this last work and to applaud its rival, so that Burgraves knew a true failure.

Destinies of the romantic drama

After Burgraves , the romantic ones did not succeed in any more making live their drama. They at least succeeded in preventing the tragedy from living. Ponsard did not make school; even its other tragedies, Agnes de Méranie and Charlotte Corday , fell from a major fall. Despite everything its talent, Rachel did not manage to support with the French Théâtre only one tragedy new. When one returned to the tragedy, it was with that of Corneille and Racine; Voltaire itself had sunk in the romantic storm.
The middle-class comedy took the place of the historical drama. The movement started at the 18th century by the appearance of the comedy larmoyante and the middle-class drama of Diderot reproduced towards 1850, where Augier and Dumas wire, wrapping a moral thesis in an exact painting of contemporary manners, creates the dramatic comedy, only really alive form of the drama at the 19th century.

End of the romanticism

Towards 1850, it has there no more the traditional ones. The echoes of the romantic battle were keep silent for a long time already, Lamartine is condemned to give to live “copy” with the editors; Musset does not produce any more; Vigny did not publish of worms since its first collection. Without adversaries and rivals, Victor Hugo reign alone; it prolongs of a quarter century the romanticism. The Empire, which threw it out of France, provides him the matter of the Châtiments (1853), powerful explosion of lyric satire; the Contemplations (1856), copious épanchement of individualistic poetry, offer all the varieties of emotions and intimate thoughts; the Légende of the centuries finally (1859, 1877, 1883) collects and joins together all former work.
Behind this splendid deployment, poetry changes, and at the same time as it all the literature. The time of the impassioned exaltations is finished; poetry ceases being exclusively personal; it impregnates scientific spirit, and seeks to make the designs general of the intelligence, rather than the sentimental accidents of the individual life. The direction of the inspiration escapes in the middle; it is taken again by the spirit, which makes effort to leave oneself and to seize some stable form. Vigny reappears, but is precisely to teach to erase the me and the characteristic of the intimate experiment (the Destinies, 1864, posthumous work). The passion selfishness of the romanticism died; what replaces it, it is the naturalism.

Romanticism in French art

The quarrel of traditional and romantic was not only arts person; it also occurred in art, and parallelism is remarkable between the two fields, artistic and arts person.

Art Worsens

The literary romanticism had been announced, at the beginning of the century, by the Génie of Christianity (1802). Almost at the same time (1804), the Pestiférés of Jaffa of Gros had announced the artistic romanticism. But on both sides it had been only one blow of bugle without immediate echo; the true movement was to occur only fifteen years later, with a second call. In the interval, “art worsens” of Pierre Guerin and of Gerard was what in literature the poetry of Delille was, of the Fontanes and the Népomucène Lemercier. The esthetics of David, set up in narrow and troublesome pedagogy, carried as of the Consulat an official stamp, and art, like the literature, yielded more and more with the personal taste of Napoleon.
Initially the taste of Roman art dominated, and a whole generation endeavoured to build, carve and paint in the style of the arc-of-triumph of Septime Sévère and of the low-reliefs of the Colonne Trajane.
Later, when the Master had drawn up the Roman eagle above all the nations of the Europe, the field of this art already so restricted, still narrows, and the official art borrowed all its topics from the imperial cycle. From there these colder allegories still than those of the Old Mode, this prodigality of warlike attributes, this taste of dryness, roide and tended which, proclamations of the emperor, passed in all the decorative reasons. All is from now on with the trophies, the helmets and the swords, and until on the geometrical lines of the lines of the pieces of furniture of Acajou, copper gilded very military metal, glittered in sphinx, obelisks and Pyramidion S.

Harbingers of a nearest transformation

However art, like the literature, could not escape the influence from the new breaths. Among the pupils even of David, more one tested of a marriage between the ancient form and the modern feeling, between the traditional one and the romantic one; such Girodet in its Funeral of Atala (1808), such especially Prud' hon in its so dramatic fabric of Justice and divine Revenge continuing the crime (1808). Sink energy of the composition, gestures of the characters not having anything of agreed nor of waited, subordination of the drama of action to the drama of light, all the romanticism was in this fabric, followed soon Christ in cross of the most poignant expression.

The romantic revolution

The exposure of the Radeau of the Jellyfish of Géricault to the living room of 1819 was the signal of the romantic attack against cold and measured with compasses works of “heroic art”. This fabric of a young artist, unknown the day before, throws terror in the traditional camp. The Academicians are in desperate straits. Behind Géricault they feel to thunder a batailleuse, restive youth with the rule.
In 1822, indeed, Delacroix exposes Dante and Virgile , work full with ardor and a prestigious color, which carries to the roof the anger of traditional and affirms the success of new painting. In vain, Géricault will fall it at thirty-three years, in 1824; Delacroix will succeed to him like carry-flag of the new school, whose the battle of Nancy in is an excellent example.
Two dates will mark the last and triumphal stages, 1824 and 1827:
With the living room of 1824, beside the Massacre of Scio of Delacroix; run up against fabric, brushed by some Némésis furious, the phalange of the innovative artists was announced brilliant: Ary Scheffer with a national subject, the Death of Gaston de Foix ; Eugene Devéria with a romantic Madonna ; Champmartin with its Massacre of the innocent colourful; Léopold Robert with this Neapolitan Improviser which seems inspired of Corinne of Mrs. de Staël.

In 1827, the winners complete to crush “the tail of David”. Delacroix exposes its fulgurating Sardanapale , Louis Boulanger his Mazeppa , Ary Scheffer its painful Femmes souliotes , while Decamps, in its first exotic fabrics, prelude to the conquest of the East. On the other hand admittedly the Apothéose of Homère of Ingres appeared in this same living room; but the Apothéose revealed unexpected Ingres, effleuré by the art nouveau. As for the fabrics of the traditional last, Wattelet and the Turpin de Crissé, the comparison turned to their confusion. Thus romantic painting triumphed over all the line. In three strides it was with the goal. It outdistanced the literature, which still awaited its proclamation; but it helped with the blossoming of this proclamation, it prepared the public spirit there.

See also: romantic Painting

Report/ratio of romantic art and the literature

Romantic art, as the literature, took before all the opposite course to the classic art. It was a reaction against the former formula of art, and this reaction was the logical consequence of this individualism which, breaking the narrow moulds of the old doctrines, had created the modern thought. In art as in literature, it had well to be recognized that the old rules did not rest on any solid base, and that the only vital agent it was freedom. And the artistic romanticism, like the literary romanticism, proclaimed that “all that has life has right”.
For the first time, the natural life grayed and enfiévrait art; for the first time, art left the hot greenhouse of the workshop to live common atmosphere and to breathe the air of time. In search of renovation, he addressed himself to all that could infuse a new sap to him: with the history, coldly exhumed; with the new literature, avoided of its strange glare; in the fabulous worlds, real or imaginary; with the dreams of the East, the Germanic fictions.
The harmonious prose of Chateaubriant, its vision exotics, its America, its Germanic, its Celtic bards, its cathedrals, its “Christianity of bells”, awakes in the artists a heart which they did not know, and which they will endeavor to translate. Atala , Rene , the Genius of Christianity , the Martyrs , are for Girodet and its followers an inexhaustible mine of artistic topics.

On her side, Mrs. de Staël discovers enthusiasm, installs it as a king in the field of the spirit, and makes exaltation the synonym of the inspiration. In addition, pushing with end the idea of the Genius of Christianity , it invites our artist to be diverted Antiquité to seek subjects which belong to our own history or our own religion; it throws them in the life, the growth towards the Germany and the Italy.
Literature and art do only one at that time, so much cohesion is large then between the various forms of the thought, which was not seen on our premises since the Moyen-âge.
Victor Hugo, come later and launching its proclamation when Géricault and Delacroix already gained the decisive battle, ensures the positions of romantic art by reinforcing with an authority of doctrines the effects which the painters had found of instinct, and seals the final agreement of the literature and of art on the essential principle that all that is in nature is in Article.
To these French influences are added foreign influences. Faust , hardly translated by Albert Stapfer, finds in Delacroix a masterly illustrator. Same Delacroix draws with full hands in Shakespeare, in company of Chasseriau and good of others. As for Hoffmann, whose Tale of fantasies hallucinated a whole generation, its humor passes in the frontispieces grouillants of Nanteuil and in the compositions of Gigoux and from the Johannot.

The quarrel of the drawing and the color: Ingres and Delacroix

The misfortune of romantic art was that it fell quickly from the inspiration to the routine. Since 1827, Jal, in its report of the Living room, pushes the cry of alarm; more studies, painting is released, the soft composition, null science; “the color is not more, at the majority of the innovators, an intimate feeling, that the drawing was not it at the pupils of the school of the style.”

The artists did nothing but change conventions; they only adopted some easier. At this point in time the relaxation of the studies causes with the romanticism the useful adversary which will show the need for a solid teaching. Ingres (1781 - 1867) was indicated for this role with the Apothéose of Homère . “This work openly restored as of 1827 whole that the new school affected to scorn. It was not admittedly any more painting davidienne in style of low-relief, the false Greek, the academic emphase; it was the Roman school reinstated like example, Raphaël designated as the Master to follow, the laws of composition given into force, the drawing preached like the heart of painting, the color treated like an accessory, the rise in the assigned style and the thought as the supreme goal of art” (Rocheblave).

Then the famous quarrel of the drawing and the color bursts. Is art in the drawing? Is it in the color? Is the line more expressive than the effect? Is it more exact? It is the eternal disagreement of the draftsman and the painter, the observant cold and the impassioned colourist. Without trying to slice it here, we can say that the disagreement which separated Ingres and Delacroix comes less truth or error from the theories which they support that opposition of their temperaments. One cold, the other is impassioned; one methodical and considered, the other enthusiastic one and of first movement; one seeks the pure beauty, but force to purify it freezes it; the other does not seek so far, and if it does not reach the majestic and serene beauty, it makes some shine fulgurating it flash.
And during thirty years between these two men one striking antithesis continues, since the Apothéose of Homère opposed to the Catch of Constantinople by Crossings , until the Apothéose of Napoleon and with the Triomphe of the peaces , exposed at the same time in 1854! Each one of them reflects one of the large faces of Article However, if have it considers works more than the ideas, the power more than the doctrines, no doubt: the draftsman of Oedipus guessing the enigma of the Sphinx and the Source, with all his science and all his precision, is not worth the incomparable creator who was Delacroix. “Deep Thinker, tormented heart, Delacroix are with him only the romanticism makes Article Of the end of his brush, it stirs up humanity to the entrails. It really has, only in its time, the gift of magic, evocation to the Shakespeare, that is to say that it creates these painful forms, terrible, like its Médée , which tore off in Victor Hugo this cry: “, you Are proud are irresistibly ugly!” either that he writes the legend of the centuries to his way on pages such as the Battle of Taillebourg” (Rocheblave).

Romantic sculpture

While in painting the argument rose between the drawing and the color, in sculpture the question arose between the antique and the modern one. Our sculptors also sought a renovation.

But the romanticism in sculpture only appeared rather late, towards 1830, and lasted little. Up to that point the artists, not daring to break with the traditional gun, only tried to accentuate the movement of the lines or to give them more flexibility: the quadriga of the Carousel of Bossio, the Spartacus of Foyatier, the Coureur of Marathon of Cortot express yet only one shy person routing towards freedom.
The really romantic sculptors betray themselves on their subjects: the modern literature, the the Middle Ages and the Bible provide them almost all. Jehan Duseigneur exposes in 1831 a furious Roland naked and epileptic, and in 1833 a Quasimodo and Esméralda ; Étex gives in 1833 a Caïn hirsute, and a Francoise de Rimini ; Préault, the standard of the romantic sculptor, with the truculent chisel, has funeral lucky finds, like its famous Masque of silence , or the shakespeariens effects like the drowned Ophélie of the museum of Marseilles; Drouet carves in 1836 a Chactas curious by research about the ethnic characteristics; the same year, Rude makes burst on the Triumphal arch its Marseillaise howling the anthem of freedom, quivering sculpture of life, one of the largest sculptural pages of the century; at the same time, Barye creates an animal sculpture such as does not have any nation of it.
But the romantic sculptor, it is David of Angers (1788 - 1856) the artist exalté by Vigny, celebrated by Hugo, and so narrowly plain with the Cénacle which it left out of marble the effigy of all his members. Romantic, it was it of heart and warhead, him which, as of the living room of 1824, delivered beside Delacroix the romantic combat with its Mort of Bonchamp , conventional still by naked, the but romantic one by the accent and the gesture; he which drew up out of marble or ran out of bronze Hugo, Balzac, Gœthe, Géricault, Lamartine and Gautier.

Romantic architecture

The Architecture could not escape entirely the influences which had transformed painting and the sculpture. In this field, more rigid, and lending itself less to immediate transformations, the romanticism especially caused to show the dryness and the sterility of academic architecture, and to bring the resurrection of the French architecture of the Middle Ages, of art known as “Gothic”, which is the most logical art and most homogeneous that the world knew since the time of Périclès. What was in poetic Notre-Dame de Paris only instinct and romantic admiration, transformed itself into science, in fertile doctrines. Making of Notre-Dame a building site where it took again item by item all the wheels of a Cathédrale, Purple-the-Duke showed that work of architecture is organization complete, which must adapt to times, with the places, with manners, the needs, found the methods of our old builders, which were same logic and the perfection, and inaugurated this vast movement of restoration which allowed our large cathedrals and our old men Château X to take again all their imposing beauty.

Romantic music

At the same time as with our painters and our sculptors, Shakespeare, Gœthe, Schiller, Byron, Chateaubriant, Victor Hugo, opened with our musicians new horizons.
The Italian music had sunk by excess of virtuosity. Méhul and Cherubini had ceased liking. The quarrel of the Gluckistes and the Piccinnistes had turned to the profit of the Germans and their rich person harmonic and instrumental combinations: Beethoven, at the beginning of the 19th century, then Weber and Schubert, extended the power of the music ad infinitum.
In France, this new music was inaugurated by Berlioz (1803 - 1869), of which the fantastic Symphonie and the Damnation of Faust , with the rich person sonorities, the brilliant orchestration, the sometimes soft and poetic rates/rhythms, sometimes impetuous and tormented, created the French symphonic school.
Abroad, the romanticism coincided with the emergence of the national musics, nourished by the popular folklore: thus of Chopin and Liszt, but, later still, of Grieg and Rachmaninov.

See also: romantic Music

Romantic ballet
The romantic period is characterized by many innovations in the world of the Ballet:
The dancer is now ridden on points which lengthen the lines and transform the step. She is vêtue of a white Tutu, a narrow blouse and carries a crown of white pinks in the hair. The ballerina is light, air, supernatural and has an immaterial grace. The white ballet was born and of the dancers as famous as Carlotta Grisi, Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler envoûtent the spectators in immortal works such as the Sylphid (1832) and Gisele (1841). The romantic ballet will find a theorist in the person of Carlo Blasis which will write in 1830 its complete Manuel of the dance .
The success of the white ballet will however be relatively short and, like the literary current which gave birth to it, it becomes exhausted quickly about the middle of the 19th century.

See also: romantic Ballet

The transformation of romantic art
The year 1836 mark a stop in the fortune of romantic art: a Scène of Hamlet of Delacroix is refused with the Living room. Supported on the Academy of the Art schools, Ingres ended up putting the hand on the jury. Moreover the artistic romanticism, left earlier than the literary romanticism breaks up before him. It is that, like him, the artistic romanticism was composed of several elements, different until the hostility, and who, bound by meeting, but nonmolten unit, were to gain each one to be insulated, to be detached from the mass. Directions of the past, directions of the present, science, color, research of the characteristic, discovered “natural” nature, love of the “local color”, all these lucky finds of the romanticism in dissolution, will create in art of the new combinations: art “happy medium” of Paul Delaroche, Orientalism of Delacroix which, out of school, always continues its rise of a flight growing ( Femmes of Algiers , Jewish Noce , Convulsionnaires of Tangier ), naturism of Theodore Rousseau, Millet and Corot, which will lead to the realism Courbet and to the Impressionnisme of Manet.

Assessment

Deep sense of the romanticism

The study carried out above shows that the romanticism is anything else that a more or less sincere return to the Moyen-âge, as would seem to make it Actually believe the etymological direction of the mot., it is a great revolution of the thought and European mentality which, after having renewed all the philosophical ideas of the century, causes a renewal of the literature and arts. It is, after philosophy materialist and dry of the 18th century, a return impassioned towards the great sources of emotion, the religion of the heart, and enthusiastic sympathy to all that is sincere and deep. The critic of the 18th century, primarily destructive, had generated only the spirit of examination; the romanticism is the spirit of examination linked with imagination to include/understand the beauty of the past which one had destroyed; it is a generous effort to remake a new faith made up of criticism and enthusiasm; it is an energetic reaction of the feeling and intelligence which vivify against the reasoning and the abstraction which desiccate.

Individualism

The two essential demonstrations of this new spirit in literature and art are individualism and lyricism.
Whole and absolute emancipation of “ego”, such is the rallying cry. Each one of us is his only Master. The artist and the poet have not only the right, but the duty to be themselves, and not only the setters in work of certain formulas and certain processes. They have to recognize of another authority only that of their whim or their imagination. And if one could say that the romanticism had taken in all the opposite course to the classicism, it is that one often believed that the classicism had made impersonnality of work one of the conditions of its perfection.

Lyricism

By this freedom to be oneself and to refract in oneself the universe, are explained abundance, the richness and the glare of romantic lyricism.
There is nothing superior, we do not fear to affirm it, - and it is not to lower by there the classic art which can put on the same line of chief-of works of another kind, - there is nothing superior to the Werther or the Faust of Gœthe, to the Childe Harold or the Don Juan of Byron, with some Méditations of Lamartine, with the Nuits of Musset, with very the beautiful pieces of Hugo in the interior Voix or the Contemplations .
Undoubtedly, these large poets hardly spoke us but about themselves; but while speaking to us about themselves, they serve interpreters to us, they reveal us with ourselves, and the triumph of their art is to make us find, in what moved, our own reflected emotions, amplified and multiplied by the echo of their voice.

Causes of the transformation of the romantic one

The reaction against an individualism if overflowing was inevitable. What we indeed support of the author of the Méditations or that of the Nuits , and that we admire on their premises, quickly wearies us at a Amable Tastu or even a Joseph Delorme. We will find them quite impertinent to thus always maintain us their own businesses; how if we did not have ours, and as if they were the first or the only ones which had liked, which one had betrayed, which had suffered! The common direction revolts against this invasion of lyricism, and one finally dares to dispute with the poet the “sovereignty” which he claimed to assume. An art nouveau is then creates, simpler and more naturalness; but it could develop only thanks to the romanticism.
The romanticism is thus not the perfection even, but it has the undeniable merit to have seized and have fixed one of the aspects of the beauty.

Internal bonds

Demonstrations

romantic Music

romantic Theater

romantic Poetry

Romance romantic

romantic Painting

romantic Ballet

French Sculpture of the XIXe century

English Literature

German Literature

Spanish romantic Literature

Italian Romanticism

Broad Romantic Topics

Battle of frantic Hernani

Romanticism

Romantic, precursory and different artists

chronological Plank of the romantic authors

German Artists: Ludwig Achim von Arnim - Clemens Brentano - BETTINA von Arnim - Georg Büchner - Adelbert von Chamisso - Karl Wilhelm Salice-Contessa - Joseph von Eichendorff - Caspar David Friedrich - Goethe - Christian Dietrich Grabbe - E.T.A. Hoffmann - Friedrich Hölderlin - Heinrich von Kleist - Eduard Mörike - Friedrich of the Mound-Fouqué - Novalis - Jean Paul Richter - Friedrich von Schiller - Friedrich Schlegel and August Wilhelm Schlegel - Ludwig Tieck - Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder.

British Artists: William Blake - Lord Byron - John Keats - Walter Scott - Joseph Mallord William Turner

Spanish Artists: Goya

French Artists: Arlincourt - Balzac - Bernardin of Saint-Pierre - Aloysius Bertrand - Petrus Borel - Chateaubriant - Chénier - Constant - Delacroix - Diderot - Alphonse Esquiros - Xavier Forneret - Gautier - Géricault - Hugo - Lacenaire - Lamartine - Charles Lassailly - Lautréamont - Mérimée - Michelet - Musset - Nerval - Nodier - Philothée O' Neddy - Alphonse Rabbe - Rousseau - Senancour - Georges Sand - Mrs. de Staël - Stendhal - Vigny

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