The Reception of French Literature in England, 1885–1914

Abstract

In their discussion of the aesthetic movement, the implications of ‘art for art’s sake’ , and the phenomenon of the 1890s, Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange focus on a curious occurrence: ‘Out-of-the-way and queer writers were sought out; the elaborate metres of medieval French and Italian poetry were revived. But most important was the sudden addiction to, and liberal borrowing from, the works of nineteenth-century Frenchmen.’¹ To explain how this addiction came to exist and indeed to endure through the first decade of the twentieth century one must look first to the writers who preceded the writers of the 1890s and influenced the course of their literary lives. Beginning in the 1860s, several writers and critics contributed to a newly developing sense of the importance of French literature and began to exercise a profound influence upon the course of English attitudes towards the literature, culture and intellectual history of France; chief among them were Matthew Arnold, Algernon Charles Swinburne and, above all, Walter Pater, although such writers as John Morley and Andrew Lang also set the stage for a growing appreciation of French literature.