“‘Avez vous vu dans Barcelone,’

“He believed like us in serenades, alcaldes, mantillas, castinets; in all that Italy and that Spain, a trifle conventional, which was brought into fashion by the author of ‘Don Paez,’ of ‘Portia,’ and of the ’Marchioness of Amalgui,’ . . .  ‘Gastibelza, the Man with the Carabine,’ and that guitar, so profoundly Spanish, of Victor Hugo, had inspired Monpon with a savage, plaintive air, of a strange character, which long remained popular, and which no romanticist—­if any such is left—­has forgotten.”  A greater name than Monpon was Hector Berlioz, the composer of “Romeo and Juliette” and “The Damnation of Faust.”  Gautier says that Berlioz represented the romantic idea in music, by virtue of his horror of common formulas, his breaking away from old models, the complex richness of his orchestration, his fidelity to local colour (whatever that may mean in music), his desire to make his art express what it had never expressed before, “the tumultuous and Shaksperian depth of the passions, reveries amorous or melancholy, the longings and demands of the soul, the indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render.”  Berlioz was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, and Scott.  He composed overtures to “Waverley,” “King Lear,” and “Rob Roy”; a cantata on “Sardanapalus,” and music for the ghost scene in “Hamlet” and for Goethe’s ballad, “The Fisher.”  He married an English actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia.  Berlioz en revanche was better appreciated in Germany than in France, where he was generally considered mad; where his “Symphonic fantastique” produced an effect analogous to that of the first pieces of Richard Wagner; and where “the symphonies of Beethoven were still thought barbarous, and pronounced by the classicists not to be music, any more than the verses of Victor Hugo were poetry, or the pictures of Delacroix painting.”  And finally there were actors and actresses who came to fill their roles in the new romantic dramas, of whom I need mention only Madame Dorval, who took the part of Hugo’s Marion Delorme.  What Gautier tells us of her is significant of the art that she interpreted, that her acting was by sympathy, rather than calculation; that it was intensely emotional; that she owed nothing to tradition; her tradition was essentially modern, dramatic rather than tragic.[10]

Romanticism in France was, in a more special sense than in Germany and England, an effort for freedom, passion, originality, as against rule, authority, convention.  “Romanticism,” says Victor Hugo,[11] “so many times poorly defined, is nothing else than liberalism in literature. . . .  Literary liberty is the child of political liberty. . . .  After so many great things which our fathers have done and which we have witnessed, here we are, issued forth from old forms of society; why should we not issue out of the old forms of poetry?