Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Memorial Catalogue of the French and Dutch Loan Collection, 1886
What, indeed, is called Romanticism - the change, that is to say, in the material, the treatment, and the technical methods and ideals of art which was operated in the France of Charles x. And louis-philippe - was the outcome of a generation rich, in strenuous and potent individualities. The great emotions of the Republic and the Empire had induced such an ef?orescence of temperament and genius as the world has not often seen. It were beside my purpose to speak of its impact upon war and politics and science; I have but to consider it in its relation to the arts. The fact is one that might easily be driven to death but I may begin by noting, that the inspiration of the time was wholly Napoleon's, and that it might be argued with some Show of reason, that Romanticism was as much a part of his legacy as the Code itself, or the memory of Austerlitz and Montmirail. It is at any rate certain that the period of his ascendancy was a time of intense and peculiar suffering, that it was also a time of enormous enterprise and achievement, and that it was under the pressure of these conditions that the men and women of the Romantic revival - cette grande generation de mille-huit-cent-trente, says Gautier, with honourable pride, qui marquera dans l'avenir, et dont on parlera comme d'une des epoques climateriques de l'esprit humain -were engendered and conceived. It is only the few who date from earlier days. Chateaubriand, le Sachem du Romantisme en France, its archetype in insincerity of sentiment and splendour of style, was born in 1768, three years before Walter Scott; Beranger.
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