In Criticism, the showy generalizations of Villemain gave place to Sainte-Beuve’s series of essays towards a ’natural history of minds’[4] and Taine’s more sweeping attempt to explain literature by environment.[5] Among ourselves, Meredith’s Essay on Comedy (1872) brilliantly restated Moliere’s dictum that the comic is founded on the real, and not on a fantastic distortion of it, while Matthew Arnold applied alike to literature and to theology a critical insight fertilized by his master Sainte-Beuve’s delicate faculty for disengaging the native quality of minds from the incrustations of tradition and dogma.

In poetry the French Parnassians created the most brilliant poetry that has, since Milton, been built upon erudition and impeccable art.  Their leader, Leconte de Lisle, in the preface of his Poemes antiques (1853), scornfully dismissed Romanticism as a second-hand, incoherent, and hybrid art, compounded of German mysticism, reverie, and Byron’s stormy egoism.  Sully Prudhomme addressed a sterner criticism to the shade of Alfred de Musset—­the Oscar Wilde of the later Romantics[6]—­who had never known the stress of thought, and had filled his poetry with light love and laughter and voluptuous despairs; the new poets were to be no such gay triflers, but workers at a forge, beating the glowing metal into shape, and singing as they toiled.[7] Carducci, too, derisively contrasts the ‘moonlight’ of Romanticism—­cold and infructuous beams, proper for Gothic ruins and graveyards—­with the benignant and fertilizing sunshine he sought to restore; for him, too, the poet is no indolent caroller, and no gardener to grow fragrant flowers for ladies, but a forge-worker with muscles of steel.[8] Among us, as usual, the divergence is less sharply marked; but when Browning calls Byron a ‘flat fish’, and Arnold sees the poet of Prometheus appropriately pinnacled in the ‘intense inane’, they are expressing a kindred repugnance to a poetry wanting in intellectual substance and in clear-cut form.

If we turn from the negations of the anti-romantic revolt to consider what it actually sought and achieved in poetry, we find that its positive ideals, too, without being derived from science, reflect the temper of a scientific time.  Thus the supreme gift of all the greater poets of this group was a superb vision of beauty, and of beauty—­pace Hogarth—­there is no science.  But their view of beauty was partly limited, partly fertilized and enriched, by the sources they discovered and the conditions they imposed, and both the discoveries and the limitations added something to the traditions and resources of poetry.  Thus: