fill a larger canvas, and he succeeded. Unlike the majority of the
Romantics, Musset had a fine sense of psychology and a penetrating
historical vision. In this brilliant, vivacious, and yet subtle tragedy
he is truly great.


We must now glance at the effects which the Romantic Movement produced
upon the art which was destined to fill so great a place in the
literature of the nineteenth century--the art of prose fiction. With the
triumph of Classicism in the seventeenth century, the novel, like all
other forms of literature, grew simplified and compressed. The huge
romances of Mademoiselle de Scudéry were succeeded by the delicate
little stories of Madame de Lafayette, one of which--_La Princesse de
Clèves_--a masterpiece of charming psychology and exquisite art,
deserves to be considered as the earliest example of the modern novel.
All through the eighteenth century the same tendency is visible. _Manon
Lescaut_, the passionate and beautiful romance of l'Abbé Prévost, is a
very small book, concerned, like _La Princesse de Clèves_, with two
characters only--the lovers, whose varying fortunes make up the whole
action of the tale. Precisely the same description applies to the subtle
and brilliant _Adolphe_ of Benjamin Constant, produced in the early
years of the nineteenth century. Even when the framework was larger--as
in Le Sage's _Gil Blas_ and Marivaux's _Vie de Marianne_--the spirit was
the same; it was the spirit of selection, of simplification, of delicate
skill. Both the latter works are written in a prose style of deliberate
elegance, and both consist rather of a succession of small
incidents--almost of independent short stories--than of one large
developing whole. The culminating example of the eighteenth-century form
of fiction may be seen in the _Liaisons Dangereuses_ of Laclos, a witty,
scandalous and remarkably able novel, concerned with the interacting