_,
the _Tour de Nesle_, and his other plays. The trade in horrors lost
its gallant freebooting airs and grew industriously commercial in
the hands of Frederic Soulie. When in 1843--the year of Hugo's
unsuccessful _Les Burgraves_--a pseudo-classical tragedy, the
_Lucrece_ of Ponsard, was presented on the stage, the enthusiasm was
great; youth and romance, if they had not vanished, were less militant
than in the days of _Hernani_; it seemed as if good sense had returned
to the theatre.[2]

[Footnote 2: The influence of the great actress Rachel helped to
restore to favour the classical theatre of Racine and Corneille.]

Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843) is remembered in lyric poetry by his
patriotic odes, _Les Messeniennes_, suggested by the military
disasters of France. His dramatic work is noteworthy, less for the
writer's talent than as indicating the influence of the romantic
movement in checking the development of classical art. Had he been
free to follow his natural tendencies, Delavigne would have remained
a creditable disciple of Racine; he yielded to the stream, and timidly
approached the romantic leaders in historical tragedy. Once in comedy
he achieved success; _L'Ecole des Vieillards_ has the originality
of presenting an old husband who is generous in heart, and a young
wife who is good-natured amid her frivolity. Comedy during the second
quarter of the century had a busy ephemeral life. The name of Eugene
Scribe, an incessant improvisator during forty years, from 1811
onwards, in comedy, vaudeville, and lyric drama, seems to recall that
of the seventeenth-century Hardy. His art was not all commerce; he
knew and he loved the stage; a philistine writing for philistines,
Scribe cared little for truth of character, for beauty of form; the
theatrical devices became for him ends in themselves; of these he
was as ingenious a master as is the juggler in another art when he
tosses his bewildering balls, or smiles at the triumph of his
inexplicable surprises.

CHAPTER IV
THE NOVEL

I

The novel in the nineteenth century has yielded itself to every
tendency of the age; it has endeavoured to revive the past, to paint
the present, to embody a social or political doctrine, to express
private and personal sentiment, to analyse the processes of the heart,
to idealise life in the magic mirror of the imagination. The
literature of prose fiction produced by writers who felt the influence
of the romantic movement ten