In France, as in all other countries, the end of the _ancien régime_, the tempest of the Revolution, and the consequent modification of the whole of life--of sentiments, habits, and ideas, of dress and social conditions--at first implied such a sudden change in the horizon that artists were necessarily thrown into confusion. When the monarchy entered laughingly upon its struggle of life and death, the survivors from the time of Louis XVI, charming "little masters" who had been great masters in that careless and graceful epoch, were suddenly made witnesses of a revolution more abrupt than the world had yet seen. Savage mobs forced their way into gardens, palaces, and reception-rooms, pike in hand, and with the red cap upon their heads. The walls echoed with their rude speech, and plebeian orators played the part of oracles of freedom and brotherhood like old Roman tribunes of the people. What was there yesterday was no longer to be seen; a thick powder-smoke hung between the past and the present. And the present itself had not yet assumed determinate shape; it hovered, as yet unready, between the old and the new forms of civilization. The storms of the Revolution put an end to the comfortable security of private life. Thus it was that the ready-made and more easily intelligible shapes and figures of a world long buried out of sight, with which men believed themselves to have an elective affinity, at first seemed to the artists to have an infinitely greater value than the new forms which were in the throes of birth. Painters became Classicists because they had not yet the courage to venture on the ground where the century itself was going through a process of fermentation. [Illustration: LEECH. FROM "CHILDREN OF THE MOBILITY."] [Illustration: _Magazine of Art._ SIR JOHN MILLAIS PINXT. GEORGE DU MAURIER.] The Romanticists despised it, for they thought the fermenting must had yielded flat lemonade instead of fiery wine. The artist must live in art before he can produce art. And the more the life of nations has been beautiful, rich, and splendid, the more nourishment and material has art been able to derive from it. But when they came the Romanticists found--in France as in Germany--everything, except a piece of reality which they could deem worthy of being painted. The whole of existence seemed to this generation so poor and bald, the costume so inartistic and so like a caricature, the situation so hopeless and petty, that they were unable to tolerate the portrayal of themselves either in poetry or art. It was the time of that wistfully sought phantom which, as they believed, was to be found only in the past. The powerful passions of the Middle Ages were set in opposition to a flaccid period that was barren of action. [Illustration: _L'Art._ DU MAURIER. THE DANCING LESSON.]