[9] Gautier, 192.

[10] This is a distinction more French than English:  la tragedie vs. le drame.

[11] Preface to “Hernani.”

[12] Preface to “Cromwell.”

[13] “Histoire du Romantisme,” p. 64.

[14] “Primer of French Literature,” p. 115.

[15] One of the principles of the romanticists was the melange des genres, whereby the old lines between tragedy and comedy, e.g., were broken down, lyricism admitted into the drama, etc.

[16] Stendhal, writing in 1823 ("Racine et Shakspere"), complains that “it will soon be thought bad form to say, on the French stage, ’Fermez cette fenetre’ [window]:  we shall have to say, ‘Fermez cette croisee’ [casement].  Two-thirds of the words used in the parlours of the best people (du meilleur ton) cannot be reproduced in the theatre.  M. Legouve, in his tragedy ‘Henri IV.,’ could not make use of the patriot king’s finest saying, ’I could wish that the poorest peasant in my kingdom might, at the least, have a chicken in his pot of a Sunday.’  English and Italian verse allows the poet to say everything; and this good French word pot would have furnished a touching scene to Shakspere’s humblest pupil.  But la tragedie racinienne, with its style noble and its artificial dignity, has to put it thus,—­in four alexandrines: 

  “’Je veux enfin qu’au jour marque pour le repos,
  L’hote laborieux des modestes hameaux,
  Sur sa table moins humble, ait, par ma bienfaisance,
  Quelques-uns de ces mets reserves a l’aisance.’”

It was Stendhal (whose real name was Henri Beyle) who said that Paris needed a chain of mountains on its horizon.

[17] Gautier, 188.

[18] “Cromwell,” 1827,

[19] Gautier, 107.

[20] Musset’s fantastic “Ballade a la Lune,” exaggerates the romantic so decidedly as to seem ironical.  It is hard to say whether it is hyperbole or parody.  See Petit de Julleville, vol. vii., p. 652.

[21] See vol. i., pp. 372-73.

[22] Gautier, 163.

[23] “Des Knaben Wunderhorn.”

[24] Charles Nodier vindicated the literary claims of Perrault.

[25] Gautier, 93.

[26] Rue Jean-Gougon, where the cenacle met often.

[27] Nerval hanged himself at Paris, in January, 1855, in the rue de la Vielle Lanterne.

[28] Gautier, 167.

[29] The romanticism of the Globe was of a more conservative stripe than that of the Muse Francaise, which was the organ of the group of young poets who surrounded Hugo.  The motto of the latter was Jam nova progenies coelo demittitur alto.  The Globe defined romanticism as Protestantism in letters.  The critical battle was on as early as 1824.  On April 24, in that year, Auger, director of the Academy, read at the annual session of the Institute a discourse on romanticism, which he denounced