Then came Chateaubriand; but Nature with him was not a mere background.
He sought from it an accompaniment, in the musical sense of the term, to
the movements of his soul; and being somewhat prone to melancholy, his
taste seems to have favoured sombre landscapes, stormy and tragical. The
entire romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand,
Theophile Gautier who draws from the French tongue resources unequalled
in wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after
all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, since
it would be difficult to discover in him any characteristic that did not
exist, as a germ at least, in Balzac.

I have just said that Chateaubriand sought in Nature an accompaniment to
the movements of his soul: this was the case with all the romanticists.
We do not find Rene, Manfred, Indiana, living in the midst of a tranquil
and monotonous Nature. The storms of heaven must respond to the storms
of their soul; and it is a fact that all these great writers, Byron as
well as Victor Hugo, have not so much contemplated and seen Nature as
they have interpreted it through the medium of their own passions;
and it is in this sense that the keen Amiel could justly remark that a
landscape is a condition or a state of the soul.



M. Loti does not merely interpret a landscape; though perhaps, to begin
with, he is unconscious of doing more. With him, the human being is a
part of Nature, one of its very expressions, like animals and plants,
mountain forms and sky tints. His characters are what they are only
because they issue forth from the medium in which they live. They are
truly creatures, and not gods inhabiting the earth. Hence their profound