To write an account of the changes in French literature during the century is impossible within moderate space. The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were unfavorable to the literary art, and the head of so great a poet as André Chénier fell under the guillotine. Till about 1825–1830 the Restoration was accompanied by literature in the old classic style of Boileau and of the Augustan age, only enlivened by the romantic if somewhat affected style of that great rhetorician, Châteaubriand. The year 1830 is the sacred year of French romanticism, drawing its ideals partly from the German romantic movement, partly from Scott and Shakespeare, read, of course, only in translations. Everything was now to be mediæval, Spanish, and passionate: the drama was to be emancipated from Aristotle, also read in translations. As far as classicism went the young adventurers had no more Greek than Shakespeare or Scott. But they had the colossal and Titanic genius of Hugo, exquisitely sweet, rapid, strange, and versatile in lyric: potent, if inflated, in the drama and the novel. They had the charming humor and exquisite taste of Théophile Gautier; the feverish passion and mastery in verse of Alfred de Musset; the delicate, dreamy, and wandering spirit of Gérard de Nerval; and the manly, courageous, humorous, and unwearied vigor, in drama and in fiction, of Alexandre Dumas. This was, indeed, an extraordinary generation, by far the greatest since that of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Many others might be named: the reserved force and incisive irony of Mérimée; the learned and genial criticism of Sainte-Beuve; the inexhaustible talent of George Sand, and the mighty Balzac, the maker and founder of the modern work of introspection. Probably, of all these writers, Dumas and Balzac have exercised most influence on later fiction in England and America. Flaubert continued, with painful elaboration, the traditions of Balzac; from Flaubert, and round him, grew up Daudet and M. Zola, and the Goncourts. Poetry, after Lamartine, dwindled into the prettinesses of the Parnasse and the eccentricities, too obviously intentional, of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and the Symbolistes. Literary art, at the end of the century, became too self-conscious, too fond of argument about ideals and methods, the tattle of the studio. Great men have not thus dissipated their energy; they have done what they could do; they have not talked about how they did it. What English literature was borrowed from France, at this time, is more in the nature of words than work. Criticism has been a _chimaera bombinans in vacuo_, chattering about realism, naturalism, symbolism, the use of documents, and so forth. The defects, rather than the merits, of France have been imitated; a squalid pessimism is easily affected.