and all the rest of
the picturesque furniture grew to be a burden. The artistic movement had
invaded dress and upholstery, and Pre-Raphaelitism tapered down into
aestheticism, domestic art, and the wearing of sunflowers. Du Maurier
became its satirist; Bunthorn and Postlethwaite presented it to the
philistine understanding in a grotesque mixture of caricature and
quackery.

THE REACTION.--Literary epochs overlap at the edges, and contrasting
literary modes coexist. There was some romantic poetry written in Pope's
time; and in the very heat and fury of romantic predominance, Landor kept
a cool chamber apart, where incense was burned to the ancient gods.[53]
But it is the master current which gives tinge and direction to lesser
confluents; and romanticism may be said to have had everything its own
way down to the middle of the century. Then reaction set in and the
stream of romantic tendency ceased to spread itself over the whole
literary territory, but flowed on in the narrower and deeper channels of
Pre-Raphaelitism and its allied movements. This reaction expressed
itself in different ways, of which it will be sufficient here to mention
three: realistic fiction, classical criticism, and the Queen Anne revival.

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