[13] For Stolberg see also vol. i., pp. 376-77.

[14] “Ludwig Tieck”:  Introductions to “German Romance.”

[15] Brentano’s fragment “Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes,” begun in 1803, deals with the Tannhaeuser story.

[16] “Kinder and Hausmaehrchen” (1812-15).  “Deutsche Sagen” (1816).  “Deutsche Mythologie” (1835).

[17] See vol. i., pp. 375-76.

[18] “If Cervantes’ purpose,” says Heine, “was merely to describe the fools who sought to restore the chivalry of the Middle Ages, . . . then it is a peculiarly comic irony of accident that the romantic school should furnish the best translation of a book in which their own folly is most amusingly ridiculed.”

[19] F. Schlegel’s declamations against printing and gun powder in his Vienna lectures of 1810 foretoken Ruskin’s philippics against railways and factories.

[20] See vol. i., pp. 300, 337, 416.

[21] Vide supra, p. 88.  A. W. Schlegel was in England in 1823.  Tieck met Coleridge in England in 1818, having made his acquaintance in Italy some ten years before.

[22] Boyesen:  “Aspects of the Romantic School.”

[23] Ibid.

[24] “Ludwig Tieck,” in “German Romance.”

[25] “German Romance,” four vols., Edinburgh.

[26] A. W. Schlegel says that romantic poetry is the representation (Darstellung) of the infinite through symbols.

[27] “Novalis and the Blue Flower.”

[28] Carlyle.

[29] Selections from Novalis in an English translation were published at London in 1891.

CHAPTER V.

The Romantic Movement in France.[1]

French romanticism had aspects of its own which distinguished it from the English and the German alike.  It differed from the former and agreed with the latter in being organised.  In France, as in Germany, there was a romantic school, whose members were united by common literary principles and by personal association.  There were sharply defined and hostile factions of classics and romantics, with party cries, watchwords, and shibboleths; a propaganda carried on and a polemic waged in pamphlets, prefaces, and critical journals.  Above all there was a leader.  Walter Scott was the great romancer of Europe, but he was never the head of a school in his own country in the sense in which Victor Hugo was in France, or even in the sense in which the Schlegels were in Germany.  Scott had imitators, but Hugo had disciples.

One point in which the French movement differed from both the English and the German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak.  It was not so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion.  The reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic tradition had in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century classicism.  Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary convention