Theophile Gautier has told us that the fiery chiefs of the romantic school who suddenly conquered France at the close of the Restoration, divided the whole world into _flamboyant_ and _drab_.

In the literature of the past they counted Voltaire one of the Drab, and Diderot a Flamboyant.[290] If it be not too presumptuous in a foreigner to dissent, we cannot but think that they were mistaken.

Nothing could be farther removed at every part from Diderot's dramatic scheme, than _Faust_ or _Goetz von Berlichingen_ or _Hernani_.
The truth is that it was impossible for an effective antagonism to the classic school to rise in the mind of an Encyclopaedist, for the reason that the Encyclopaedists hated and ignored what they called the Dark Ages.

Yet it was exactly the Dark Ages from which the great romantic revival drew its very life-breath.

"In the eighteenth century," it has been said, "it was really the reminiscence of the classic spirit which was awakened in the newer life of Europe, and made prominent."[291] This is true in a certain historic sense of Rousseau's politics, and perhaps of Voltaire's rationalism.