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Updated: July 18, 2025
Byronism, romanticism, reminiscences of the French Revolution, of the Dekabrists and the worship of Napoleon; faith in destiny, in one's star, in strength of will; pose and fine phrases and a miserable sense of the emptiness of life; uneasy pangs of petty vanity and genuine strength and daring; generous impulses and defective education, ignorance; aristocratic airs and delight in trivial foppery.... But enough of these general reflections.
Next Berlioz and romanticism fevered his brain, and then in 1831, the twenty-year-old Liszt and the twenty-one-year-old Chopin struck up their historic friendship, and the two men glittered and flashed in the most artistic salons of Paris.
The reaction against Symbolism and Romanticism happened to coincide with the reaction against muddy technique.
A pretty situation for a father of a family, for a man whose youth was past, compromising himself in a love affair, getting melancholy in the twilight, kissing a white hand like an enamored troubadour! Good God! How his friends would have laughed to see him in that posture! He must purge himself of that romanticism which sometimes mastered him.
If he obtained at all as an artist, it was because of his frenetic romanticism, his bizarreness, his Byronic postures, traits that were after all minor and secondary enough in him. For those were the only of his characteristics that his hour could understand. All others it ignored.
Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, is in its essential characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all times, in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and the amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one by one, than the peculiarity of a time or a school.
This last was the use to which the transcendental method was put by Kant himself, who first brought it into vogue, before the terrible weapon had got out of hand, and become the instrument of pure romanticism. Kant came, he himself said, to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith, which in his case meant faith in Calvinism.
It was to the clear and penetrating intellect of Grimm, with its vein of German romanticism, that Mme. d'Epinay was indebted for the finest appreciation and the most genuine sympathy. "Bon Dieu," he writes to Diderot, "how this woman is to be pitied! I should not be troubled about her if she were as strong as she is courageous.
The philosophic medley of Clair Lenoir was evident in this work which offered an unbelievable jumble of verbal and troubled observations, souvenirs of old melodramas, poniards and rope ladders all the romanticism which Villiers de L'Isle Adam could never rejuvenate in his Elen and Morgane, forgotten pieces published by an obscure man, Sieur Francisque Guyon.
While Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, and other romantic critics went back to early English literature for their inspiration, Landor shows a reaction from the prevailing Romanticism by his imitation of the ancient classic writers. His life was an extraordinary one and, like his work, abounded in sharp contrasts.
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