CHAPTER VII

THE AGE OF CRITICISM


With the generation of writers who rose to eminence after the death of
Balzac, we come within the reach of living memory, so that a just
estimate of their work is well-nigh impossible: it is so close to us
that it is bound to be out of focus. And there is an additional
difficulty in the extreme richness and variety of their accomplishment.
They explored so many fields of literature, and produced so much of
interest and importance, that a short account of their work can hardly
fail to give a false impression of it. Only its leading characteristics
and its most remarkable manifestations can be touched upon here.

The age was before all else an age of Criticism. A strong reaction set
in against the looseness of construction and the extravagance of thought
which had pervaded the work of the Romantics; and a new ideal was set
up--an ideal which was to combine the width and diversity of the latter
with the precision of form and the deliberate artistic purpose of the
Classical age. The movement affected the whole of French literature, but
its most important results were in the domain of Prose. Nowhere were the
defects of the Romantics more obvious than in their treatment of
history. With a very few exceptions they conceived of the past as a
picturesque pageant--a thing of contrasts and costumes, an excuse for
rhetorical descriptions, without inner significance or a real life of
its own. One historian of genius they did indeed produce--MICHELET; and