him upon the studies which issued in the "Récits Mérovingiens" and the "Conquéte d'Angleterre." Barante's "Ducs de Bourgogne" (1814-28) confessedly owes much of its inception to Scott. Michaud's "History of the Crusades" (1811-22) and the "History of France" (1833-67) by that most romantic of historians, Michelet, may also be credited to the romantic movement. The end of the movement, as a definite period in the history of French literature, is commonly dated from the failure upon the stage of Victor Hugo's "Les Burgraves" in 1843. The immediate influence of the French romantic school upon English poetry or prose was slight. Like the German school, it came too late. The first generation of English romantics was drawing to its close. Scott died two years after "Hernani" stormed the French theatre. Two years later still died Coleridge, long since fallen silent - as a poet and always deaf to Gallic charming. We shall find the first impress of French romance among younger men and in the latter half century.

In France itself the movement passed on into other phases. Many early adherents of Hugo's cénacle and entourage fell away from their allegiance and, like SainteBeuve and Musset, took up a critical or even antagonistic attitude. Musset's "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet" * turns the whole romantic contention into mockery. Yet no work more fantastically and gracefully romantic, more Shaksperian in quality, was produced by any member of the school than Musset produced in such dramas as "Fantasio" and "Lorenzaccio."

*See vol. i.. pp. 18-23.

CHAPTER VI.

Diffused Romanticism in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century.

MOST of the poetry of the century that has just closed has been romantic in the wider or looser acceptation of the term. Emotional stress, sensitiveness to the picturesque, love of natural scenery, interest in distant times and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious, subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of the limits of the genres, eager experiment with new forms of art-these and the like marks of the romantic spirit are as common in the verse literature of the nineteenth century as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The same is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of the century, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. In contrast with Addison, Swift, and Goldsmith, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin are romanticists. In contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete, pictorial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in line with Coleridge's. They praised the pre-Augustan writers, the Elizabethan dramatists, the seventeenth-century humorists and moralists, the Sidneian amourists and fanciful sonneteers, at the expense of their classical

successors.

But in the narrower sense of the word-the sense which controls in these inquiries-the great romantic generation

ended virtually with the death of Scott in 1832. Coleridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850. Both had long since ceased to contribute anything of value to imaginative literature. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died some years before Coleridge; Leigh Hunt survived until 1859. The mediævalism of Coleridge, Scott, and Keats lived on in dispersed fashion till it condensed itself a second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the last half of the century. The direct line of descent was from Keats to Rossetti; and the Pre-Raphaelites bear very much such a relation to the elder group, as the romantic school proper in Germany bears to Bürger and Herder, and to Goethe and Schiller in their younger days. That is to say, their mediævalism was more concentrated, more exclusive, and more final.

We have come to a point in the chronology of our subject where the material is so abundant that we must narrow the field of study to creative work, and to work which is romantic in the strictest meaning. Henceforth we may leave out of account all works of mere erudition as such; all those helps which the scholarship of the century has furnished to a knowledge of the Middle Ages: histories, collections, translations, reprints of old texts, critical editions, Middle English lexicons and grammars, studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or miracle plays or the Arthurian legends, and the like. Numerous and valuable as these publications have been, they concern us only indirectly. They have swelled the material available for the student; they have not necessarily stimulated the imagination of the poet; which sometimes-as in the case of Chatterton and of Keats—

goes off at a touch and carries but a light charge of learning. In literary history it is the beginnings that count. Child's great ballad collection is, beyond comparison, more important from the scholar's point of view than Percy's "Reliques." But in the history of romanticism it is of less importance, because it came a century later. Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" has been long since superseded, and the means now accessible in English for a study of Norse mythology are infinitely greater than when Gray read and Percy translated the "Northern Antiquities." But it is not the history of the revival of the knowledge of medieval life that we are following This boo here; it is rather the history of that part of our modern creative literature which has been kindled by contactperhaps a very slight and casual contact-with the transmitted image of mediæval life.

Nor need we concern ourselves further with literary criticism or the history of opinion. This was worth considering in the infancy of the movement, when Warton began to question the supremacy of Pope; when Hurd asserted the fitness for the poet's uses of the Gothic fictions and the institution of chivalry; and when Percy ventured to hope that cultivated readers would find something deserving attention in old English minstrelsy. It was still worth considering a half-century later, when Coleridge explained away the dramatic unities, and Byron once more took up the lost cause of Pope. by 1832 the literary revolution was complete. Romance was in no further need of vindication, when all Scott's library of prose and verse stood back of her, and

"High-piled books in charactery

Held, like rich garners, the full-ripened grain."

But

66

As to Scott's best invention, the historical romance, I shall not pursue its fortunes to the end. The formula once constituted, its application was easy, whether the period chosen was the Middle Ages or any old period B.C. or A.D. Here and there an individual stands forth from the class, either for its excellent conformity with the Waverley type or for its originality in deviation. Of the former kind is Charles Reade's "The Cloister and the Hearth" (1861); and of the latter Mr. Maurice Hewlett's "The Forest Lovers" (1898). The title page of Reade's novel describes the book as a matter-of-fact romance." It is as well documented as any of Scott's, and reposes especially upon the "Colloquies" of Erasmus, the betrothal of whose parents, with their subsequent separation by the monastic vow of celibacy, is the subject of the story. This is somewhat romanticised, but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. The period of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work is as far as possible from being a chivalry tale, like the diaphanous fictions of Fouqué. "In that rude age," writes the novelist, "body prevailing over mind, all sentiments took material forms. Man repented with scourges, prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put fish into the body to sanctify the soul, sojourned in cold water for empire over the emotions, and thanked God for returning health in 1 cwt., 2 stone, 7 lbs., 3 oz., 1 dwt. of bread and cheese." There is no lack in "The Cloister and the Hearth" of stirring incident and bold adventure; encounters with bears and with bandits, sieges, witch trials, gallows hung with thieves, archery with long bow and arbalest-everywhere fighting enough, as in Scott; and, also as in Scott, behind the private drama of