Studies on romanticism are numerous and exhaustive, and yet one problem of this literary upheaval has scarcely been touched by scholars—the conflicting aesthetic theories of the period from 1800-1815. Marsan has given us the history of romanticism's battle; other historians have treated problems of style, rules, and foreign influences; but, as Souriau has pointed out, an important question has been neglected: the classic versus the new liberal theory of imitation in art, a question which strikes at the very core of the classic-romantic dispute.