More important events were yet to take place before the signal of deliverance could be expected. It was the young men who had grown up amid the desolate associations of the Restoration who were to lead to victory the new movement of which Prudhon and Gros had been the forerunners. The dictatorship over art of that Classical school which had been taken over from the seventeenth century was limited to a single generation--from the birththroes of the Revolution to the fall of the Napoleonic Empire. For although many of David's pupils survived until the middle of the century, yet they were merely academic big-wigs, who, compared with the young men of genius who were storming their positions, represent that mediocrity which had indeed attained to external honours, but had remained stationary, fast bound to antiquated rules. The future belonged to the young, to a youth which from the standpoint of our own days seems even younger than youth commonly is, richer, fresher, more glowing and fiery--the Generation of 1830, the "_vaillants de dix-huit cent trente_," as Théophile Gautier called them in one of his poems. [Illustration: _Photo, Levi._ GROS. THE BATTLE OF EYLAU.] CHAPTER X THE GENERATION OF 1830 During the years which elapsed between 1820 and 1848 France produced a great and admirable school of art. After the convulsions of the Revolution and the wars of the Empire, that generation had arisen, daring and eager for action, which de Musset describes in his _Confessions d'un Enfan du Siècle_. And these young men, born between the thunders of one battle and another, who had grown up in the midst of greatness and glory, had to experience, as they ripened into manhood, the ignominy of Charles X's reign, the period of clerical reaction. They saw monasteries re-erected, laws of mediæval severity made against blasphemy and the desecration of churches and saints' days, and the doctrine of the divine origin of the monarchy proclaimed anew. "And when young men spoke of glory," says de Musset, "the answer was, 'Become priests!' And when they spoke of honour, the answer was, 'Become priests!' And when they spoke of hope, of love, of strength and life, ever the same answer, 'Become priests!'" The only result of this pressure was to intensify all the more the impulse towards freedom. The political and intellectual reaction could only have the effect of impelling the poetic and artistic emotions of young and unquiet spirits into opposition, on principle, to all that was established, into a fiery contempt for public opinion, into the apotheosis of unrestrained passion and unfettered genius. The French Romanticists were anti-Philistines who regarded the word "bourgeois" as an insult. For them Art was the one supreme consideration; it was to them a light and a flame, and its beauty and daring the only things worth living for. For those who put forward such demands as these, the "eunuchism of the Classical"--an