their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school.[3] The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic and social.  The Parisian ateliers as well as the Parisian salons were nuclei of revolt against classical traditions.  “This intermixture of art with poetry,” says Gautier,[4] “was and remains one of the characteristic marks of the new school, and enables us to understand why its earliest recruits were found more among artists than among men of letters.  A multitude of objects, images, comparisons, which were believed to be irreducible to words, entered into the language and have stayed there.  The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now includes the sphere of art in its measureless circle.”  “At that time painting and poetry fraternised.  The artists read the poets and the poets visited the artists.  Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were to be found in the studio as in the study.  There were as many splotches of colour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were so incessantly thumbed.  Imaginations, already greatly excited by themselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreign writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong.  Enthusiasm mounted to delirium.  It seemed as if we had discovered poetry, and that was indeed the truth.  Now that this fine flame has cooled and that the positive-minded generation which possesses the world is preoccupied with other ideas, one cannot imagine what dizziness, what eblouissement was produced in us by such and such a picture or poem, which people nowadays are satisfied to approve by a slight nod of the head.  It was so new, so unexpected, so lively, so glowing!” [5]

The romantic school in France had not only its poets, dramatists, and critics, but its painters, architects, sculptors, musical composers, and actors.  The romantic artist par excellence was Eugene Delacroix, the painter of “The Crusaders Entering Jerusalem.”  “The Greeks and Romans had been so abused by the decadent school of David that they fell into complete disrepute at this time.  Delacroix’s first manner was purely romantic, that is to say, he borrowed nothing from the recollections or the forms of the antique.  The subjects that he treated were relatively modern, taken from the history of the Middle Ages, from Dante, Shakspere, Goethe, Lord Byron, or Walter Scott.”  He painted “Hamlet,” “The Boat of Dante,” “Tasso in Bedlam,” “Marino Faliero,” “The Death of Sardanapalus,” “The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha,” “The Massacre of the Bishop of Liege,” and similar subjects.  Goethe in his conversations with Eckerman expressed great admiration of Delacroix’s interpretations of scenes in “Faust” (the brawl in Auerbach’s cellar, and the midnight ride of Faust and Mephistopheles to deliver Margaret from prison).  Goethe hoped that the French artist would go on and reproduce the whole of “Faust,”