A new people, a new art.  While admiring the literature of Louis XIV., so well adapted to his monarchy, France will know how to have its own literature, peculiar, personal, and national—­this actual France, this France of the nineteenth century to which Mirabeau has given its freedom and Napoleon its power.”  And again:[12] “What I have been pleading for is the liberty of art as against the despotism of systems, codes, and rules.  It is my habit to follow at all hazards what I take for inspiration, and to change the mould as often as I change the composition.  Dogmatism in the arts is what I avoid above all things.  God forbid that I should aspire to be of the number of those, either romantics or classics, who make works according to their system; who condemn themselves never to have more than one form in mind, to always be proving something, to follow any other laws than those of their organization and of their nature.  The artificial work of such men as those, whatever talents they may possess, does not exist for art.  It is a theory, not a poetry.”  It is manifest that a literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long consent to lend itself to the purposes of political or religious reaction, or to limit itself to any single influence like mediaevalism, but would strike out freely in a multitude of directions; would invent new forms and adapt old ones to its material, and would become more and more modern, various, and progressive.  And such, in fact, was the history of Victor Hugo’s intellectual development and of the whole literary movement in France which began with him and with De Stendhal (Henri Beyle).  This assertion of the freedom of the individual artist was naturally accompanied with certain extravagances.  “To develop freely all the caprices of thought,” says Gautier,[13] “even if they shocked taste, convention, and rule, to hate and repel to the utmost what Horace calls the profanum vulgus, and what the moustached and hairy rapins call grocers, philistines, or bourgeois; to celebrate love with warmth enough to burn the paper (that they wrote on); to set it up as the only end and only means of happiness; to sanctify and deify art, regarded as a second creator; such are the donnees of the programme which each sought to realise according to his strength; the ideal and the secret postulations of the young romanticists.”

Inasmuch as the French romantic school, even more than the English and the German, was a breach with tradition and an insurrection against existing conditions, it will be well to notice briefly what the particular situation was which the romanticists in France confronted.  “To understand what this movement was and what it did,” says Saintsbury,[14] “we must point out more precisely what were the faults of the older literature, and especially of the literature of the late eighteenth century.  They were, in the first place, an extremely impoverished vocabulary,