The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatrical
postures, was part of the romantic constitution. The desire to achieve
sensational effects, the tendency to externalize, to assume theatrical
postures and intend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the men
among whom you passed your youth. For they had suddenly, painfully
become aware that nature was supremely indifferent to their individual
fates and sorrows. So wounded were they in their _amour-propre_ that
they sought to restore their diminished sense of self-worth by
exaggerating the importance and intensity of their sufferings and
seeking to convince themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms.
Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and summoning
"Nature to her feud
With bile & buskin attitude,"
was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your own
insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings,
lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums,
subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under
frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.
But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance,
attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgive
that of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the
veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love
yours.
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