340 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



ventures, and insists upon the cessation of spectacles based upon 

 the afflictions of noble and royal characters, upon the introduction 

 of popular interests and individualities, and the manifestation of a 

 desire to teach, to moralize. 



An entirely different movement characterizes the poetics of an- 

 other precursor of the romantic school, Andre" Che"nier (1762-94). 

 His aesthetic was at once imaginative and traditional. Though pos- 

 sessed of a natural idealism, this did not lead him to disregard the 

 models of antiquity. He was a "humanist," but of the natural kind, 

 not the literary, like Ronsard. His principal contribution to poetics 

 proper was the Poeme de I'invention. It would appear that, all things 

 considered, the romantic movement was not without obligation to 

 him; but his influence is perhaps most evident in the refined or 

 rational romanticism of the Parnassiens of the latter part of the nine- 

 teenth century. 



2. To the Romantic Period of French poetics the transition was 

 made by Madame de Stae'l and Chateaubriand. 



(1) Madame de Stael's De la litterature consideree dans ses rapports 

 avec les institutions sodales (1800) reminds one of Gibbon's essay on 

 the History of Literature and of Shaftesbury's doctrine of cosmopolitan 

 culture. Like the former, the authoress attempts to show that litera- 

 ture is an affair of the spirit and can proceed only from conditions of 

 freedom and progress; and, like the latter, to encourage her fellow 

 countrymen to assimilate the best that is offered by other nations 

 and literatures. By her De I'Allemagne (1813) she introduced German 

 literature into France, as De Quincey and Carlyle were soon to intro- 

 duce it into England. Her influence over Wilhelm von Schlegel, who 

 " became the interpreter of Germany to her eager and apprehensive 

 mind," has been already noticed. Italy and England also were con- 

 quered by her; and it was in no slight degree that she prepared the 

 way for the romantic movement. "She advanced criticism," as 

 Professor Dowden has put it, "by her sense that art and literature 

 are relative to ages, races, governments, environments. She dreamed 

 of an European or cosmopolitan literature in which each nation, 

 while retaining its special characteristics, should be in fruitful com- 

 munication with its fellows." With her contemporary, Chateau- 

 briand, we enter upon a revival of medieval religious and aesthetic 

 sentiment, his most important critical work being the Genie du 

 christianisme (1802). In this he calls for a sentimental, romantic, but 

 spontaneous and modern, treatment of life. And with practical 

 result. It may, indeed, be said that together, these two, Madame 

 de Stael and Chateaubriand, effected the overthrow of the skeptical, 

 atheistic, and unscientific interpretation of literature and art; they 

 shattered the autocracy of classical models and abstract rules; they 

 introduced the appeal to the imagination and the senses; they revived 



