IDEA OF LAW IX POETRY 699 



powder when lie shivered, he makes the white sprinkling of snow 

 fly from the nape of his neck." 



But to confine the function of poetry, as Gautier did, to word- 

 painting is surely, in the first place, to form a meagre conception of the 

 art, and in the second place, this supposed invention of the Eomanti- 

 cists is really nothing more than an application of the old classic law 

 of Boileau, that the poet is bound to find for his verse the word 

 exactly corresponding with the image in his mind. Turn to the 

 Lutrln, and Boileau's picture of the Treasurer of La Chapelle in bed 

 will furnish you with a brilliant sample of the word-painting which 

 was Gautiers whole poetical stock-in-trade. "In the dark retirement 

 of a deep alcove is piled a costly feather-bed. Four pompous curtains 

 in a double circle defend it from the light of day. There, amid the 

 calm and peaceful silence, reigns over the swan-down a happy indo- 

 lence, and there the prelate, fortified by breakfast, and sleeping a light 

 sleep, waited for dinner. Youth in full flower beams in his coun- 

 tenance; his chin descends by t\vo storeys on to his breast, and his 

 body, thick-set in its short stature, makes the bed groan beneath its 

 lazy weight/'' 



Do not the instances I have given furnish in themselves an answer to 

 the reasoning of the Romanticists ? Had these children of the Revo- 

 lution possessed real self-knowledge they would have perceived that 

 their most successful work was conceived in accordance with the 

 old classical law, and they would have aimed only at such an amplifica- 

 tion of that law as would give free play to their own gifts and genius. 

 Unfortunately they were animated by a spirit not of comprehension 

 but exclusion. The party of the Romanticists had gained the upper 

 hand, and they were determined to proscribe and massacre the party 

 of the Classicists as ruthlessly as the Classicists of the seventeenth 

 century had proscribed and mas-acred the party of the Precieuses. 

 Romanticism under Louis XIV. and under Louis Philippe was equally 

 the protest of a faction against the inevitable tendency of things; but 

 in the one ca-c it was the struggle of a social caste against the princi- 

 ple of Absolutism, in the other of a literary coterie against the prin- 

 ciple of Equality. Just as Mile, de Rambouillei and her friends 

 sought to separate themselves from the vulgar world by the nicety 

 of their manners and language, so did Theophile Gautier and his fol- 

 lowers seek to shock the instincts of the bourgeoisie by their red waist- 

 coats and outrageous versos. " For us." says Gautier, in his account of 

 the Romantic movement, "the world divided itself into 'Flamboyants' 

 and 'Xcutral Tints.' the one the object of our love, the other of our 

 aversion. We wanted life, light, movement; audacity of thought and 

 execution, a return to the fair period of the Renaissance and true 

 antiquity; we rejected the tame coloring, the thin and dry design, 



