ded on the one hand towards lyrism, the
passionate utterance of individual emotion--George Sand's early
tales are conspicuous examples; on the other hand it turned to history,
seeking to effect a living and coloured evocation of former ages.
The most impressive of these evocations was assuredly Hugo's
_Notre-Dame de Paris_. It was not the earliest; Vigny's _Cinq-Mars_
preceded _Notre-Dame_ by five years. The writer had laboriously
mastered those details which help to make up the romantic _mise en
scene_; but he sought less to interpret historical truth by the
imagination than to employ the material of history as a vehicle for
what he conceived to be ideal truth. In Merimee's _Chronique de
Charles IX._ (1829), which also preceded Hugo's romance, the
historical, or, if not this, the archaeological spirit is present;
it skilfully sets a tale of the imagination in a framework of history.

Hugo's narratives are eminent by virtue of his imagination as a poet;
they are lyrical, dramatic, epic; as a reconstitution of history their
value is little or is none. The historical novel fell into the hands
of Alexandre Dumas. No one can deny the brilliance, the animation,
the bustle, the audacity, the inexhaustible invention of _Les Trois
Mousquetaires_ and its high-spirited fellows. There were times when
no company was so inspiriting to us as that of the gallant Athos,
Porthos, and Aramis. Let the critics assure us that Dumas' history
is untrue, his characters superficial, his action incredible; we
admit it, and we are caught again by the flash of life, the fanfaronade
of adventure. We throw Eugene Sue to the critics that we may save
Alexandre Dumas. But Dumas' brain worked faster than his hand--or
any human hand--could obey its orders; the mine of his inventive
faculty needed a commercial company and an army of diggers for its
exploitation. He constituted himself the managing director of this
company; twelve hundred volumes are said to have been the output of
the chief and his subordinates; the work ceased to be literature,
and became mere commerce. The money that Dumas accumulated he
recklessly squandered. Half genius, half charlatan, his genius
decayed, and his charlatanry grew to enormous proportions. Protected
by his son, he died a poor man amid the disasters of the
Franco-Prussian war.

II

HENRI BEYLE, who wrote under the pseudonym of Stendhal, not popular
among his contemporaries, though winning the admiration of Merimee