LITERARY STUDIES IN NINETEENTH CENTURY 341 



the spontaneous and artistic characteristics of medieval lyricism, and 

 Christianized nature and man for the purposes of literature. 



During this season other forces, also, had been working to hasten 

 the advent of a romantic poetics and a comparative criticism. In 

 1801 Baour-Lormian conveyed to his countrymen by the Poesies 

 Ossianiques the flavor of Macpherson; and later (1812) Creuze de 

 Lesser added to the medievalist revival by the publication of his Table 

 ronde. In 1799 Se'nancour had produced his melancholy Reveries ; and 

 after the death of Joubert, 1825, appeared a collection of those lyric 

 rhapsodies in prose, the Pensees. In 1811, stirring the very pool of 

 romance, Ginguene" published the beginnings of his Histoire litteraire 

 de I'ltalie, begun in 1802. Historical and philological studies sub- 

 versive of tradition were meanwhile prosecuted by Fauriel and 

 Raynouard, and minor critics were feeling their way toward a com- 

 parative and psychological method. "Foreign life and literature," 

 says Dowden, by whom these phenomena of change are duly noted, 

 " lent their aid to the romantic movement in France the passion 

 and mystery of the East; the struggle for freedom in Greece; the old 

 ballads of Spain; the mists, the solitudes, the young heroes, the pallid 

 female forms of Ossian; the feudal splendors of Scott; the melan- 

 choly Harold; the mysterious Manfred; Goethe's champion of free- 

 dom, his victim of sensibility, his seeker for the fountain of living 

 knowledge; Schiller's revolters against social law, and his adventures 

 of court and camp." There were also changes in language and form, 

 "of which Hugo and Sainte-Beuve were the chief initiators." 



The way for the poetics of Hugo was still further prepared by 

 Henri Beyle (Stendhal, 1783-1842), whose chief contributions to 

 criticism were his Histoire de la peinture en Italie and the Racine et 

 Shakespeare. His method was both comparative and psychological, 

 and in his habit of characterizing the poet by his milieu he was the 

 precursor of Taine and Brunetiere. " In temperament," as Saintsbury 

 has pointed out, "religious views, and social ideas, he was a belated 

 philosopher of the Diderot school. But in literature he had improved 

 even on Diderot, and very nearly anticipated the full results of the 

 romantic movement. ... In his De I'amour and in his novels he 

 made himself the ancestor of what has been called successively 

 realism and naturalism in France." Stendhal merits the serious 

 attention of the literary historian. 



The history of criticism during the rest of the romantic period 

 may be conveniently treated under the following movements, 

 both contributory to the theory of poetics rather than to critical 

 method. 



(2) The Romantic Revolution in the Drama, effected by Victor 

 Hugo's Preface to Cromwell, 1828, and his Hernani, 1830. Hugo 

 definitely discards the "unities," declines all artificial limitations, 



