brilliantly restated Molière'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 _Poèmes 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 the stress of thought, and had filled
his poetry with light love and laughter and voluptuous despairs; the new
poets were to be no such gay triflers, but workers at a forge, beating
the glowing metal into shape, and singing as they toiled.[7] Carducci,
too, derisively contrasts the 'moonlight' of Romanticism--cold and
infructuous beams, proper for Gothic ruins and graveyards--with the
benignant and fertilizing sunshine he sought to restore; for him, too,
the poet is no indolent caroller, and no gardener to grow fragrant
flowers for ladies, but a forge-worker with muscles of steel.[8] Among
us, as usual, the divergence is less sharply marked; but when Browning
calls Byron a 'flat fish', and Arnold sees the poet of _Prometheus_
appropriately pinnacled in the 'intense inane', they are expressing a
kindred repugnance to a poetry wanting in intellectual substance and in
clear-cut form.

If we turn from the negations of the anti-romantic revolt to consider