in asserting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life.  Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art.  The French, in political and social matters the most revolutionary people of Europe, were the most conservative in matters of taste.  The Revolution even intensified the reigning classicism by giving it a republican turn.  The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to the examples of the Greek and Roman democracies.  The Goddess of Reason was enthroned in place of God, Sunday was abolished, and the names of the months and of the days of the week were changed.  Dress under the Directory was patterned on antique modes—­the liberty cap was Phrygian—­and children born under the Republic were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Cassius, etc.  The great painter of the Revolution was David,[2] who painted his subjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek temples.  Voltaire’s classicism was monarchical and held to the Louis XIV. tradition; David’s was republican.  And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticism were the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675.

A second distinction of the French romanticism was its local concentration at Paris.  The centripetal forces have always been greater in France than in England and Germany.  The earlier group of German Romantiker was, indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena and Berlin; and the Spaetromantiker at Heidelberg.  But this was dispersion itself as compared with the intense focussing of intellectual rays from every quarter of France upon the capital.  In England, I hardly need repeat, there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely scattered men of letters whose work exhibited romantic traits.

In one particular the French movement resembled the English more nearly than the German.  It kept itself almost entirely within the domain of art, and did not carry out its principles with German thoroughness and consistency into politics and religion.  It made no efforts towards a practical restoration of the Middle Ages.  At the beginning, indeed, French romanticism exhibited something analogous to the Toryism of Scott, and the reactionary Junkerism and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels.  Chateaubriand in his “Genie du Christianisme” attempted a sort of aesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavily by the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of the Revolution.  Victor Hugo began in his “Odes et Ballades” (1822) as an enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church.  “L’histoire des hommes,” he wrote, “ne presente de poesie que jugee du haut des idees monarchiques et religieuses.”  But he advanced quite rapidly towards liberalism both in politics and religion.  And of the young men who surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny, and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist or republican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and without affecting