After the party

ROMANTICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS.

By Anita Brookner.

Viking; 198 pages; £25.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October); $35

THE abrupt ending of France's European supremacy early in the 19th century was a cultural as well as a political shock. With the flair of a Booker-prize novelist, Anita Brookner traces how a group of celebrated French painters and writers struggled to press forward in their art beyond the shipwrecked hopes of revolution and empire. She has studied many of these artists closely as a scholar—from the domineering, neo-classical Jacques-Louis David to his two utterly different artistic heirs, J.A.D. Ingres and Eugène Delacroix—and she writes about them with easy knowledge and admiration.

Historical forces weighed heavily on this Romantic generation, in two ways. The twin failures of Robespierre and Napoleon, fallen heroes both of them to whom artists had once rallied, left the new generation with a choice of basking in past glories or finding intensity in other ways. Secondly, the grip of their artistic masters was also hard to escape. Antoine-Jean Gros, for example, suffered all his career under the legacy of David, his teacher, despite his desire to abandon classical forms. At the same time, a new middle-class public for art was creating its own demands. Violent flashes of colour and line swept across Delacroix's mind, but he strove to contain them in works that were comprehensible to his viewers.

Writers preoccupied with art, including Alfred de Musset, J.K. Huysmans and Emile Zola, are all part of the story. But the best sections of this short book turn on the person of Charles Baudelaire, through whose singular eyes the reader is given telling glimpses of his artistic times. The workings of Baudelaire's strange temperament—constant but unreturned expressions of affinity for Delacroix, an actual physical revulsion at the beautiful surfaces of Ingres—remind us how visceral a business art criticism can be. Sex, death and, odd as it sounds, repression itself are never far from view with the Romantics, and Ms Brookner refers more than once to Baudelaire's dark pronouncement, “Nous célébrons tous quelque enterrement” (We're all attending some funeral or other).

As a polished writer with 19 novels behind her, Ms Brookner makes the most of her cast. Their personal interplay alone makes this book worthwhile. But the challenge of writing on Romanticism is to avoid the fate that befell the movement itself: a magnificent storm ending in a tepid drizzle. Perhaps unavoidably, “Romanticism and Its Discontents” reaches a climax too soon. After Baudelaire and Delacroix, Ms Brookner offers a sympathetic portrait of Ingres—something of a man out of his time, with his classical ideals and quietly subversive agenda—and then moves dutifully on to the dimmer lights. In ten short chapters, she manages her theme—the search for a new artistic framework—with aplomb. But there is more looking than finding. Many allusions may escape the general reader and not all the French is translated. This book will probably be enjoyed most by people who are captivated by its topic to begin with.