I
When we come to Scott after Fielding, says Mr. Stevenson, "we become
suddenly conscious of the background." The remark contains an admirable
characterization of romanticism; as distinguished from classicism,
romanticism is consciousness of the background. With Gros, Géricault,
Paul Huet, Michel, Delacroix, French painting ceased to be abstract and
impersonal. Instead of continuing the classic detachment, it became
interested, curious, and catholic. It broadened its range immensely, and
created its effect by observing the relations of its objects to their
environment, of its figures to the landscape, of its subjects to their
suggestions even in other spheres of thought; Delacroix, Marilhat,
Decamps, Fromentin, in painting the aspect of Orientalism, suggested,
one may almost say, its sociology. For the abstractions of classicism,
its formula, its fastidious system of arriving at perfection by
exclusions and sacrifices, it substituted an enthusiasm for the concrete
and the actual; it revelled in natural phenomena. Gautier was never
more definitely the exponent of romanticism than in saying "I am a man
for whom the visible world exists." To lines and curves and masses and
their relations in composition, succeeds as material for inspiration and
reproduction the varied spectacle of the external world. With the early
romanticists it may be said that for the first time the external world
"swims into" the painter's "ken." But, above all, in them the element of
personality first appears in French painting with anything like general
acceptance and as the characteristic of a group, a school, rather than
as an isolated exception here and there, such as Claude or Chardin. The
"point of view" takes the place of conformity to a standard. The painter
expresses himself instead of endeavoring to realize an extraneous and
impersonal ideal. What he himself personally thinks, how he himself
personally feels, is what we read in his works.
It is true that, rightly understood, the romantic epoch is a period of
evolution, and orderly evolution at that, if we look below the surface,
rather than of systematic defiance and revolt. It is true that it recast
rather than repudiated its inheritance of tradition. Nevertheless there
has never been a time when the individual felt himself so free, when
every man of any original genius felt so keenly the exhilaration of
independence, when the "schools" of painting exercised less tyranny
and, indeed, counted for so little. If it be exact to speak of the
"romantic school" at all, it should be borne in mind that its adherents
were men of the most marked and diverse individualities ever grouped
under one standard. The impressionists, perhaps, apart, individuality is
often spoken of as the essential characteristic of the painters of the
present day. But beside the outburst of individuality at the beginning
of the romantic epoch, much of the painting of the present day seems
both monotonous and eccentric--the variation of its essential monotony,
that is to say, being somewhat labored and express in comparison with
the spontaneous multifariousness of the epoch of Delacroix and Decamps.
In the decade between 1820 and 1830, at all events, notwithstanding the
strength of the academic tradition, painting was free from the thraldom
of system, and the imagination of its practitioners was not challenged
and circumscribed by the criticism that is based upon science. Not only
in the painter's freedom in his choice of subject, but in his way of
treating it, in the way in which he "takes it," is the revolution--or,
as I should be inclined to say, rather, the evolution--shown. And as
what we mean by personality is, in general, made up far more of emotion
than of mind--there being room for infinitely more variety in feeling
than in mental processes among intelligent agents--it is natural to
find the French romantic painters giving, by contrast with their
predecessors, such free swing to personal feeling that we may almost sum
up the origin of the romantic movement in French painting in saying that
it was an ebullition of emancipated emotion. And, to go a step farther,
we may say that, as nothing is so essential to poetry as feeling, we
meet now for the first time with the poetic element as an inspiring
motive and controlling force.
The romantic painters were, however, by no means merely emotional. They
were mainly imaginative. And in painting, as in literature, the great
change wrought by romanticism consisted in stimulating the imagination
instead of merely satisfying the sense and the intellect. The main idea
ceased to be as obviously accentuated, and its natural surroundings were
given their natural place; there was less direct statement and more
suggestion; the artist's effort was expended rather upon perfecting the
_ensemble_, noting relations, taking in a larger circle; a suggested
complexity of moral elements took the place of the old simplicity, whose
multifariousness was almost wholly pictorial. Instead of a landscape as
a tapestry background to a Holy Family, and having no pertinence but an
artistic one, we have Corot's "Orpheus."