But not from this quarter could the health of a school which had become anæmic be in any way restored. French landscape had to draw a new power of vitality from the French soil itself. It was saved when its eyes were opened to the charms of home, and this revelation was brought about by Romanticism. In the Salon notices, from 1822 onwards, the complaints of critics are repeated with increasing violence--complaints that, instead of fair regions, noble character, and monumental lines, nothing but "malarious lakes, desolate wastes, and terrible cliffs" should be painted, which, in the language of Classicism, means that French landscape painting had taken firm hold of the soil in France. The day when Racine was declared by the young Romanticists to be a maker of fine phrases put an end to the whole school of David and to Classical landscape at the same time. It fell into oblivion, as, sooner or later, every artistic movement which does not rest on the nature and personality of the artist inevitably must. The young revolutionaries no longer believed that an alliance with mythological subjects and "grand composition" could compensate for the lack of air and light. They were tired of pompous, empty, and distant scenery. They only thought of nature, and that amid which they lived seemed the less to forego its charms the more Italy came under suspicion as the home of all these ugly, unpleasant, and academical pictures. That was the birthday of French landscape. At the very time when Delacroix renewed the _répertoire_ of grand painting, enriching art with a world of feeling which was not merely edited, a parallel movement began in landscape. "Dante's Bark" was painted in 1822, "The Massacre of Chios" in 1824. Almost at the same hour a tornado swept through the branches of the old French oaks, and bent the rustling corn; the sky was covered with clouds, and the waters, which had been hard-bound for so long, sped purling once more along their wonted course. The little paper temples, built on classic heights, toppled down, and there rose lowly rustic cottages, from the chimneys of which the smoke mounted wavering to the sky. Nature awoke from her wintry sleep, and the spring of modern landscape painting broke with its sadness and its smiles. [Illustration: _L'Art._ VICTOR HUGO. RUINS OF A MEDIÆVAL CASTLE ON THE RHINE.]