For "Romanticism" read "French Romanticism", since this book-with-a-thesis begins with the painter Baron Gros and ends, rather oddly, with the novelist Zola. Romanticism in France had inherited the shattering collapse of Napoleon and his imperial system, as well as a sometimes corrosive scepticism which had been set in train by Voltaire, and an over-excited sensibility launched by Rousseau and taken further by such writers as Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael. It was, therefore, in essence very different from the contemporary Romantic schools in England and Germany, and its development was to be equally so.
The disillusionment and mal du siecle which runs like a ground-bass through the whole period, or rather periods, has become by now a commonplace of literary and art criticism. The poets were the most eloquent in defining it, notably Alfred de Musset and - in a rather more sombre and weighty manner - Alfred de Vigny. Vigny in fact is a microcosm of a whole generation, since he became a soldier just when Napoleonic gloire had gone into eclipse and France was sliding back in the hands of the stodgy Bourbon kings.
His military career was therefore an anticlimax and he soon abandoned it for literature and managing his estates - though at least it supplied him with much of the material for his book Servitude et grandeur militaire, one of the masterpieces of French prose. It speaks poignantly for a whole generation which had grown up with a patriotic thirst for glory and adventure, but instead had witnessed a humdrum, self-limiting epoch and the growing power of the commercial bourgeoisie. However, the book is primarily about painters, and Gros is a significant figure in the story since he began as a pupil of the great Jacques-Louis David, then turned against him; but after painting uninhibitedly romantic masterpieces such as The Battle of Eylau, Gros lost his bearings and his selfbelief, felt himself a traitor to his master's majestic Neo-Classicism, and suffered huge guilt and virtually a nervous collapse.
Gericault, his real successor, had more innate genius but did not live long enough to fulfil it and the candle passed to Delacroix. This enigmatic man was called the Victor Hugo of art when he painted The Death of Sardanapulus as a young man, but he vigorously rejected the label and declared that he was really a classicist. That huge, hectic, overcrowded painting (which was badly received at the time) gives the lie direct to that statement, though Delacroix's late works do have a true classical stateliness. As his marvellous Journals testify, he travelled a long way and in the end he stands above and apart from his age.
Inevitably, Baudelaire is a pivotal figure, as much for his aesthetic theories as for his verse, but Anita Brookner rather departs from the script by paying so much attention to Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire's master, yet a writer rather marginalised in recent valuations. Gautier was, among other things, an influential art critic - art criticism in France was generally written by literary men and dilettantes rather than by specialists. However, he is central to the overall thesis that heroism in war and politics was increasingly being replaced by the heroes and martyrs of art, leading more or less to the doctrine of art-for-art's-sake.
And it is convincingly argued throughout, though was it necessary to bring in the Brothers Goncourt, second-rate writers who live largely by their sedentary, narcissistic journals? From them we go to Zola, their self-proclaimed disciple, and finally to Huysmans, who recoiled from aestheticism into becoming a Catholic convert. (But again, is he really worth it?). Both men typify, in different ways, the close links existing then between visual art and literature. The gem of the whole book is the chapter on Ingres, usually thought of as a rather staid traditionalist (at least in later life) but in fact a "pure" artist through and through, as well as a considerable innovator. Though it is easy and convenient to describe his pictures as "timeless" - which, of course, they are in a sense - Anita Brookner shows him also to have been a man of his time and very much dependent on it.
She might profitably have ventured into music and considered Berlioz, who exemplifies the artist-as-martyr-saint more fully and interestingly than certain of the figures she discusses. But she has argued her brief eloquently and skilfully, and also with a good deal of erudition, so probably it was wiser to keep within the bounds of just under 200 pages. There are also numerous illustrations, both in colour and in black and white.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic