Realism, at once more unflinching and more profoundly poetic, and yet penetrated, especially in Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with an intensity of moral conviction beside which the ethical fervour of George Eliot seems an ineffectual fire, was one of the roots of the Russian Novel; which also reached its climax in the third quarter of the century. But though it concurred with analogous movements in the West, it drew little of moment from them; even Turgenjev, a greater Maupassant in artistry, drew his inner inspiration from wholly alien springs of Slavonic passion and thought. And it was chiefly through them that the Russian novel later helped to nourish the radically alien movement of Symbolism in France. In drama, Ibsen broke away from the Romantic tradition of his country with the iconoclastic energy of one who had spent his own unripe youth in offering it a half-reluctant homage. The man of actuality in him denounced the drama built upon the legends 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.