PROBLEMS OF ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY 431 



decidedly declining, French literature witnessed an era of remarkable 

 brilliancy: the age of Balzac, Victor Hugo, Me*rimee, Dumas, Sainte- 

 Beuve, Musset, Gautier, Augier, Baudelaire, Sardou, Zola, Daudet, 

 Maupassant, etc. It was also perhaps not without significance that 

 the French court under Napoleon III occupied a leading position in 

 Europe similar to that which it had had in the great age of Louis 

 Quatorze. Thus it seems natural enough that the interest of the 

 English public in French literature and life should have conquered 

 the position which in the first half of the century had been occupied 

 by the interest in Germany. 



The French influence manifests itself in different directions: it is 

 not restricted to the formal side, the elegance of the language and 

 terseness of expression, it is also conspicuous in the matter of tend- 

 ency, and in this respect both the romantic and the realistic schools 

 have fallen under the spell of French writers. Neo-Romanticists like 

 O'Shaughnessy (An Epic of Women, 1870, Lays of -France, 1872, 

 Music and Moonlight, 1874, Songs of a Worker, 1881), John Payne 

 (A Masque of Shadows, 1870, Intaglios, 1871, Songs of Life and Death, 

 1872, Lautrcc, 1878, New Poems, 1880), and Th. Marzials (A Gallery 

 of Pigeons, 1873), wrote under the influence of Victor Hugo, Gautier, 

 and the decadents, such as Banville, Baudelaire, and Bertrand. On 

 the other side, novels, like those by Thomas Hardy, George Moore, 

 and George Gissing (who, in spite of a recent utterance of Mr. Wells, 

 is after all essentially a realist), would be simply incomprehensible 

 without Guy de Maupassant, Zola, and other French authors. 



In criticism, too, French influence is very prominent. Since Ruskin 

 and Matthew Arnold most English critics, c. g. Swinburne, Saints- 

 bury, Gosse, and others, have shown a decided preference for the 

 French school of thinking and feeling. 



A further striking characteristic of English literature at the present 

 day is the almost entire lack of dramatic poetry of high standard. 

 The effects of the blow which the Puritans inflicted on the English 

 drama in 1042 have never been wholly overcome. The theatre is 

 still regarded in many quarters, even among the educated classes in 

 England and America, as an amusement of lower rank, or rather 

 people fail to recognize the educational value of good stage perform- 

 ances. There are no city or court theatres as in Germany, where the 

 stage has long since been officially acknowledged as a source of refine- 

 ment and higher education. Irvine's endeavors in this direction have 

 so far been unsuccessful. Private theatres, however, naturally favor 

 modern sensational pieces which insure full houses. 



But the lack of high-class dramatic poetry in England and America 

 may find a further explanation in the general growth of commercial 

 life, which causes a certain prosaic sobriety in the tastes and interests 

 of the people. There is no such lively sympathy with literary ques- 



