Classical also were Joseph de Maistre, in his political considerations (_Evenings in St. Petersburg_), and, in fiction, Mérimée, accurate, precise, trenchant, and cultured; finally in criticism, Sainte-Beuve, who began, it is true, by being the theorist and literary counsellor of romanticism, but who was soon freed from the spell, almost from 1830, and became author of _Port Royal_. Though possessing a wide and receptive mind because he was personified intelligence, he was decisively classical in his preferences, sentiments, ideas, and even in his style. Stendhal, pure product of the eighteenth century, and even exaggerating the spirit of that century in the dryness of his soul and of his style, a pure materialist writing with precision and with natural yet intentional nakedness, possessed valuable gifts of observation, and in his famous novel, _Red and Black_, in the first part of the _Chartreuse of Parma_, and in his _Memoirs of a Tourist_, knew how to draw characters with exactness, sobriety, and power, and to set them in reliefs that were remarkably rare. THE STAGE.--The drama was very brilliant during this first half of the nineteenth century. The struggle was lively for thirty or thirty-five years between the classicists and the romanticists; the classics defending their citadel, the French stage, much more by their polemics in the newspapers than by the unimportant works which they brought to the _Comédie française_, the romantics here producing nearly all the plays of Hugo (_Hernani_, _Marion de Lorme_, _Ruy Blas_, _The Burghers_, etc.), and the works of Vigny(_Othello_, _Marshal d'Ancre_), as well as the dramas of Dumas (_Henry III and his Court_, etc.). Between the two schools, both of which were on the stage nearer to the modern than to the antique, the dexterous Casimir Delavigne, with almost invariable success, gave _Marino Faliero_, _Louis XI_, _The Children of Edward_, _Don Juan of Austria_, and _Princess Aurelia_, which was pretty, but without impassioned interest. A veritable dramatic genius, although destitute of style, of elevation of thought and of ideas, but a prodigious constructor of well-made plays, was Eugène Scribe, who, by his dramas and comedies, as well as the libretti of operas, was the chief purveyor to the French stage between 1830 and 1860. ROMANTICISM AND REALISM.--So far as pure literature was concerned, the second half of the nineteenth century was divided between enfeebled but persistent romanticism and realism. Théophile Gautier, in 1853, gave his _Enamels and Cameos_, his best poetic work, and later (1862) his _Captain Fracasse_. Hugo wrote his _Miserables_, the second and third _Legends of the Centuries_, _Songs of the Streets and the Woods_, etc.