h had pervaded the work of the Romantics; and a new ideal was set
up--an ideal which was to combine the width and diversity of the latter
with the precision of form and the deliberate artistic purpose of the
Classical age. The movement affected the whole of French literature, but
its most important results were in the domain of Prose. Nowhere were the
defects of the Romantics more obvious than in their treatment of
history. With a very few exceptions they conceived of the past as a
picturesque pageant--a thing of contrasts and costumes, an excuse for
rhetorical descriptions, without inner significance or a real life of
its own. One historian of genius they did indeed produce--MICHELET; and
the contrast between his work and that of his successors, TAINE and
RENAN, is typical of the new departure. The great history of Michelet,
with its strange, convulsive style, its capricious and imaginative
treatment of facts, and its undisguised bias, shows us the spectacle of
the past in a series of lurid lightning-flashes--a spectacle at once
intensely vivid and singularly contorted; it is the history of a poet
rather than of a man of science. With Taine and Renan the personal
element which forms the very foundation of Michelet's work has been
carefully suppressed. It is replaced by an elaborate examination of
detail, a careful, sober, unprejudiced reconstruction of past
conditions, an infinitely conscientious endeavour to tell the truth and
nothing but the truth. Nor is their history merely the dead bones of
analysis and research; it is informed with an untiring sympathy; and--in
the case of Renan especially--a suave and lucid style adds the charm and
amenity which art alone can give.

The same tendencies appear to a still more remarkable degree in
Criticism. With SAINTE-BEUVE, in fact, one might almost say that
criticism, as we know it, came into existence for the first time. Before
him, all criticism had been one of two things: it had been either a
merely personal expression of opinion, or else an attempt to establish
universal literary canons and to judge of writers by the standards thus
set up. Sainte-Beuve realized that such methods--the slap-dash
pronouncements of a Johnson or the narrow generalizations of a
Boileau--were in reality not critical at all. He saw that the critic's
first duty was not to judge, but to understand; and with this object he
set himself to explore all the facts which could throw light on the
temperamen