The leading literary form of the past fifty years has been the novel of real life.  The failure of “Les Burgraves” in 1843 not more surely signalised the end of French romanticism, than the appearance of “Vanity Fair” in 1848 announced that in England, too, the reign of romance was over.  Classicism had given way before romanticism, and now romanticism in turn was yielding to realism.  Realism sets itself against that desire of escape from actual conditions into an ideal world, which is a note of the romantic spirit in general; and consequently it refuses to find the past any more interesting than the present, and has no use for the Middle Ages.  The temperature, too, had cooled; not quite down to the Augustan grade, yet to a point considerably below the fever heat registered by the emotional thermometer of the late Georgian era.  Byron’s contemporaries were shocked by his wickedness and dazzled by his genius.  They remonstrated admiringly with him; young ladies wept over his poetry and prayed for the poet’s conversion.  But young university men of Thackeray’s time discovered that Byron was a poseur; Thackeray himself describes him as “a big, sulky dandy.”  “The Sorrows of Werther,” which made people cry in the eighteenth century, made Thackeray laugh; and he summed it up in a doggerel ballad: 

  “Charlotte was a married woman
    And a moral man was Werther,
  And for nothing in creation
    Would do anything to hurt her.”

* * * * *

  “Charlotte, having seen his body
    Borne before her on a shutter,
  Like a well-conducted woman,
    Went on cutting bread and butter.”

Mr. Howells in Venice sneers at Byron’s theatrical habit of riding horseback on the Lido in “conspicuous solitude,” as recorded in “Julian and Maddalo.”  He notices the local traditions about Byron—­a window from which one of his mistresses was said to have thrown herself into the canal, etc.—­and confesses that these matters interest him very little.

As to the Walter Scott kind of romance, we know what Mr. Howells thinks of it; and have read “Rebecca and Rowena,” Thackeray’s travesty of “Ivanhoe.”  Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; he passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift.  His masters were the English humourists of the eighteenth century.  He planned a literary history of that century, a design which was carried out on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen.  If he wrote historical novels, their period was that of the Georges, and not of Richard the Lion Heart.  It will not do, of course, to lay too much stress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and whose temper purely anti-romantic.  But if we turn to the leaders of the modern schools of fiction, we shall find that some of them, like George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, are even more closely realistic than Thackeray—­who, says Mr. Howells, is a caricaturist, not a true realist—­and of others such as Dickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever way they deviate from realism as strictly understood, it is not in the direction of romance.