right to expression in Literature of each individual's inmost and most peculiar feelings, whether typical or not, whether rational or not, whether social or anti-social,—in short, the rights of the individual ego to complete independence and self-expression,—that is what the Romantic movement first of all stands for. So, very definitely, it is the French Revolution in Literature. Pascal had said, "the ego is hateful." Rousseau begins his "Confessions" by saying, "I am like no man that I have ever seen; I dare to believe I am unlike any man that exists." For this very reason he feels justified in writing his Confessions. That book, from the amazing address to the Supreme Being which we find on the first page, to the insanity of the end, is egotism run mad. Montaigne has been called an egotist; but he was a social egotist; he wrote for companionship; "if there be any person in need of good company, in France or elsewhere, who can like my humor, let him but whistle, and I will come running." Rousseau, on the other hand, is an unsocial and anti-social egotist. Yet this emphasis upon individual feeling and its expression, of which Rousseau is the extreme example, renewed Literature. It brought back the lyric mood, and it brought back sentiment, which had been banished for more than a century. At first sentiment and sentimentality were not distinguished from each other; we find sentimentality disagreeably predominating in the whole tribe of Rousseau's successors; but it was the return of sentiment which made possible Goethe's early lyric and all that followed in Germany; Musset, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and the rest in France; and English poetry from Burns to Tennyson.
The love of nature, or the return to nature, is usually, and rightly, spoken of as one of the chief characteristics of the Romantic movement. To follow nature had, however, been one of the chief precepts of the Classicists from Aristotle to Boileau and Pope. It might be better to say that the Romantic movement is characterized by a complete change
