"Foscolo died in 1827, and Pellico, Manzoni,
Grossi, Berchet, had risen above the horizon. The Romantic School,'the
audacious boreal school,' had appeared. 1815 is a memorable date....
It marks the official manifestation of a reaction, not only political,
but philosophical and literary.... The reaction was as rapid and
violent as the revolution.... The white terror succeeded to the red."
Our critic says that there were at this time two enemies, materialism
and skepticism, and that there rose against them a spirituality
carried to idealism, to mysticism. "To the right of nature was opposed
the divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual
rights the State, to liberty authority or order. The middle ages
returned in triumph.... Christianity, hitherto the target of all
offense, became the center of every philosophical investigation, the
banner of all social and religious progress.... The criterions of art
were changed. There was a pagan art and a Christian art, whose highest
expression was sought in the Gothic, in the glooms, the mysteries, the
vague, the indefinite, in a beyond which was called the ideal, in an
aspiration towards the infinite, incapable of fruition and therefore
melancholy.... To Voltaire and Rousseau succeeded Chateaubriand, De
Stael, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Lamennais.
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