, in western Europe,
with a decided set-back for those who lived on dreams, and a
corresponding complacency among those who throve on facts. The political
and social revolution which swept the continent in 1848 and 1849, and
found ominous echoes here, was everywhere, for the time, defeated. The
discoveries of science in the third and fourth decades, resting on
calculation and experiment, were investing it with the formidable
prestige which it has never since lost; and both metaphysics and
theology reeled perceptibly under the blows delivered in its name. The
world exhibition of 1851 seemed to announce an age of settled
prosperity, peace, and progress.

In literature the counterpart of these phenomena was the revolt from
_Romanticism_, a movement, in its origins, of poetic liberation and
discovery, which had rejuvenated poetry in Germany and Italy, and yet
more signally in England and in France, but was now petering out in
emotional incoherence, deified impulse, and irresponsible caprice.

The revolt accordingly everywhere sought to bring literature into closer
conformity with reality; with reality as interpreted by science; and to
make art severe and precise. In the novel, Flaubert founded modern
naturalism with his enthralling picture of dull provincials, _Mme
Bovary_ (1857); two years later George Eliot tilted openly in _Adam
Bede_ against the romancers who put you off with marvellous pictures of
dragons, but could not draw the real horses and cattle before their
eyes.[3]

Realism, at once more unflinching and more profoundly poetic, and yet
penetrated, especially in Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with an intensity of
moral conviction beside which the ethical fervour of George Eliot seems
an ineffectual fire, was one of the roots of the Russian Novel; which
also reached its climax in the third quarter of the century. But though
it concurred with analogous movements in the West, it drew little of
moment from them; even Turgenjev, a greater Maupassant in artistry, drew
his inner inspiration from wholly alien springs of Slavonic passion and
thought. And it was chiefly through them that the Russian novel later
helped to nourish the radically alien movement of Symbolism in France.

In drama, Ibsen broke away from the Romantic tradition of his country
with the iconoclastic energy of one who had spent his own unripe youth
in offering it a half-reluctant homage. The man of actuality in him
denounced the drama built upon the leg