ends of the Scandinavian past--the
mark for him of a people of dreamers oblivious of the calls of the hour.
On the morrow of the disastrous (and for Norway in his view ignominious)
Danish war of 1864, his scorn rang out with prophetic intensity in the
fierce tirade of _Brand_. Happily for his art, revolt against romance in
him was united, more signally than in more than two or three of his
contemporaries, with the power of seizing and presenting contemporary
life. 'Realism' certainly expresses inadequately enough the genius of an
art like his, enormously alive rather than fundamentally like life, and
no less charged with purpose and idea than the work of the great
Russians, though under cover of reticences and irony little known to
them. The great series of prose dramas--from 1867 (_The League of
Youth_) onwards--with their experimental prelude _Love's Comedy_
(1863)--were to be for all Europe the most considerable literary event
of the fourth quarter of the century, and they generated affiliated
schools throughout the West. They did not indeed themselves remain
untouched by the general intellectual currents of the time, and it will
be noticed below that the later plays (from _The Lady of the Sea_
onward) betray affinities, like the Russian novel, with what is here
called the second phase of the European movement.

In Criticism, the showy generalizations of Villemain gave place to
Sainte-Beuve's series of essays towards a 'natural history of minds'[4]
and Taine's more sweeping attempt to explain literature by
environment.[5] Among ourselves, Meredith's _Essay on Comedy_ (1872)
brilliantly restated Moliere's dictum that the comic is founded on the
real, and not on a fantastic distortion of it, while Matthew Arnold
applied alike to literature and to theology a critical insight
fertilized by his master Sainte-Beuve's delicate faculty for disengaging
the native quality of minds from the incrustations of tradition and
dogma.

In poetry the French Parnassians created the most brilliant poetry that
has, since Milton, been built upon erudition and impeccable art. Their
leader, Leconte de Lisle, in the preface of his _Poemes antiques_
(1853), scornfully dismissed Romanticism as a second-hand, incoherent,
and hybrid art, compounded of German mysticism, reverie, and Byron's
stormy egoism. Sully Prudhomme addressed a sterner criticism to the
shade of Alfred de Musset--the Oscar Wilde of the later
Romantics[6]--who had never known