In literature the counterpart of these phenomena was the revolt from Romanticism, a movement, in its origins, of poetic liberation and discovery, which had rejuvenated poetry in Germany and Italy, and yet more signally in England and in France, but was now petering out in emotional incoherence, deified impulse, and irresponsible caprice.

The revolt accordingly everywhere sought to bring literature into closer conformity with reality; with reality as interpreted by science; and to make art severe and precise.  In the novel, Flaubert founded modern naturalism with his enthralling picture of dull provincials, Mme Bovary (1857); two years later George Eliot tilted openly in Adam Bede against the romancers who put you off with marvellous pictures of dragons, but could not draw the real horses and cattle before their eyes.[3]

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.