There are neither rules nor models [says V. Hugo, the leader of the school, in the preface to his Cromwell (1827)], or rather there are no other rules than the general laws of nature which encompass the whole art, and the special laws which for every composition result from the conditions of existence peculiar to each subject.  The former are eternal, internal, and remain; the latter variable, external, and serve only once.

Hence theories, poetics, and systems were to be broken up, and the old plastering which covered the fagade of art was to be pulled down.  From rules and theories the romanticists appealed to nature and truth, without forgetting, however, that nature and art are two different things, and that the truth of art can never be absolute reality.  The drama, for instance, must be “a concentrating mirror which, so far from enfeebling, collects and condenses the colouring rays and transforms a glimmer into a light, a light into a flame.”  To pass from form to matter, the attention given by the romanticists to history is particularly to be noted.  Pierre Dubois, the director of the philosophical and literary journal “Le Globe,” the organ of romanticism (1824-1832), contrasts the poverty of invention in the works of the classicists with the inexhaustible wealth of reality, “the scenes of disorder, of passion, of fanaticism, of hypocrisy, and of intrigue,” recorded in history.  What the dramatist has to do is to perform the miracle “of reanimating the personages who appear dead on the pages of a chronicle, of discovering by analysis all the shades of the passions which caused these hearts to beat, of recreating their language and costume.”  It is a significant fact that Sainte-Beuve opened the campaign of romanticism in “Le Globe” with a “Tableau de la poesie francaise au seizieme siecle,” the century of the “Pleiade,” and of Rabelais and Montaigne.  It is a still more significant fact that the members of the “Cenacle,” the circle of kindred minds that gathered around Victor Hugo—­Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, David d’Angers, and others—­“studied and felt the real Middle Ages in their architecture, in their chronicles, and in their picturesque vivacity.”  Nor should we overlook in connection with romanticism Cousin’s aesthetic teaching, according to which, God being the source of all beauty as well as of all truth, religion, and morality, “the highest aim of art is to awaken in its own way the feeling of the infinite.”  Like all reformers the romanticists were stronger in destruction than in construction.  Their fundamental doctrines will hardly be questioned by anyone in our day, but the works of art which they reared on them only too often give just cause for objection and even rejection.  However, it is not surprising that, with the physical and spiritual world, with time and eternity at their arbitrary disposal, they made themselves sometimes guilty of misrule.  To “extract the invariable laws from the general