IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
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the need to retire and to be alone; the other side of Rousseau's nature,
the revolutionary and fighting side, they had lost. The outward cir–
cumstances which destroyed the unity of intellectual life and the
dominating influence of literature in France also contributed to this
development; from the outbreak of the Revolution to the fall of
Napoleon there is hardly a literary work of any consequence which
did not exhibit symptoms of this flight from contemporary reality, and
such symptoms are still very prevalent among the Romantic groups
after 1820. They appear most purely and most completely in Sen–
ancour. But in its very negativeness the attitude of the majority of
pre-Romantics to the historical reality of their time is far more
seriously problematic than is the attitude of the society of the En–
lightenment. The Rousseauist movement and the great disillusion–
ment it underwent was a prerequisite for the rise of the modem
conception of reality. Rousseau, by passionately contrasting the
natural condition of man with the existing facts of life determined by
history, made the latter a practical problem; now for the first time the
eighteenth-century style of historically unproblematic and unmoved
presentation of life became valueless.
Romanticism, which had taken shape much earlier in Germany
and England, and whose historical and individualistic trends had
long been in preparation in France, reached its full development
after 1820; and, as we know, it was precisely the principle of a
mixture of styles which Victor Hugo and his friends made the slogan
of their movement; in that principle the contrast to the classical
treatment of subjects and the classical literary language stood out
most obviously. Yet in Hugo's formula there is something too point–
edly antithetical; for him it is a matter of mixing the sublime and
the grotesque. These are both extremes of style which give no con–
sideration to reality. And in practice he did not
aim
at understandingly
bestowing form upon reality as given; rather, in dealing both with
historical and contemporary subjects, he elaborates the stylistic poles
of the sublime and the grotesque, or other ethical and aesthetic
antitheses, so that they clash; in this way very powerful effects are
produced, for Hugo's command of expression is powerful and sug–
gestive; but the effects are improbable and, as a reflection of human
life, untrue.
