CHAPTER X THE CONTEMPORARIES OF SCHUBERT AND SCHUMANN The spirit of the ‘thirties’ in France; the lyric poets of the French romantic period--Monpou and Berlioz--Song-writers of Italy; English song-writers--Robert Frans--Löwe and the art-ballad. In another volume[26] we have seen what a remarkable wave of literary romanticism swept over France in the late twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century. There has rarely been an age of more pronounced lyricism, rarely an age which created in a short time so many excellent lyrics. There were a number of fine talents working at this time. The purely literary virtuosity was remarkable. The radicalism of their method was marked, and the strangeness of their product revealed a movement in all the vigor of its early youth. In their insistence on the sensuous quality of words the romanticists of the thirties looked forward to the France of the early twentieth century, with its hazy, indefinite outlines. The early romanticists reduced the sound of words to a fine art. The later impressionists reduced it almost to an exact science. The central tenet of the romanticists was freedom--freedom from the old classic forms, freedom from a host of conventions which governed the French language in poetry, and freedom especially from the severity and reserve of the classic ideal. To the poet of the Napoleonic age any violence of manner was an error in taste. He shunned it as he would have shunned the smell of garlic on a peasant’s breath. To the poet of the age of Louis Philippe any conscious reserve of manner was a coldness, a lack of genuine human feeling, an artistic lie. The emotions as well as the artistic sense must be stirred. And they must be stirred both by the picturing of emotion and by the beauty of lovely sounds. We have occasion to notice throughout the art of the nineteenth century an increasing insistence on the sensuous (it cannot be too often repeated). It shows in every department of artistic life. In poetry it is shown in a development of the mellifluousness of rhythm and suggestiveness of word. The French romanticists did for French poetry what Shelley did for English and what Poe did for American. These three qualities--freedom, emotionalism, and sensuousness--we may accept as the dominant notes of French romantic poetry.