ordinary French prose has
lost some of its former graces--its lucidity, its proportion, its easy
march. From being the most childishly prudish of all writers about
neologisms and the _mot propre_, the French prose writer has become the
most clumsily promiscuous in his vocabulary. He is always using 'square'
instead of 'place,' 'le macadam' instead of 'le pave,' 'un caoutchouc'
when he means a waterproof overcoat. Much of this, no doubt, is due to
the singular inability which the language seems to experience in forming
genuine vernacular compounds; an inability from which a few more persons
like the much ridiculed Du Bartas might have rescued it. But, however
this may be, it must be admitted that, great as have been the benefits
of the Romantic movement, it has left the ordinary French prose style of
novel and newspaper in a condition of indigestion and disarray.

As for the movement itself, the most brilliant season of romantic
productiveness seems to have terminated, after being long represented
only by its greatest, earliest, and at the same time latest name. The
comparative disorganisation is all the more noticeable. It is in this
disorganisation that our history perforce leaves the magnificent
literature which we have traced from its source. Unsafe as all prophecy
is, there are few things less safe to prophesy about than the progress
of literary development. But it is not historically unreasonable to
expect, after the splendid harvest of the last half century, what is
called a dead season, of longer or shorter duration. There is nothing
really discouraging in such seasons either in nature or in art. In each
case there is the garnered wealth of the past to fall back upon, and in
each there is confidence that the seeming stagnation and death are in
truth only the necessary pause and period of gestation which precede and
bring about the life of the future.

BOOK V.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

[Sidenote: The Romantic Movement.]

The preceding chapter will at once have indicated the defects under
which the later classical literature of France laboured, and the
remedies which were necessary for them. Those remedies began to be
applied early in the reign of Charles X., and the literary revolution
which accompanied them is called the Romantic movement. Strictly
speaking, this movement did not affect, or rather was not supposed to
affect, any branch of letters except the Belles Lettres; really its
influence was