hearts which were what Italian hearts were
about 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age _questi tempi della
virtu sconosciutta_." Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and
effeminate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere on
the Italians. The day will come, he hopes, when they will have a
national tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better to
follow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in the
footprints of Racine. In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germany
and England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schiller, and Lord
Byron will carry it over Racine and Boileau. He says that English poetry
since the French Revolution has become more enthusiastic, more serious,
more passionate. It needed other subjects than those required by the
witty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought its heroes in the
rude, primitive, inventive ages, or even among savages and barbarians.
It had to have recourse to time or countries when it was permitted to the
higher classes of society to have passions. The Greek and Latin classics
could give no help; since most of them belonged to an epoch as
artificial, and as far removed from the naive presentation of the
passions, as the eighteenth century itself. The court of Augustus was no
more natural than that of Louis XIV. Accordingly the most successful
poets in England, during the past twenty years, have not only sought
deeper emotions than those of the eighteenth century, but have treated
subjects which would have been scornfully rejected by the age of _bel
esprit_. The anti-romantics can't cheat us much longer. "Where, among
the works of our Italian pedants, are the books that go through seven
editions in two months, like the romantic poems that are coming out in
London at the present moment? Compare, _e.g._, the success of Moore's
'Lalla Rookh,' which appeared in June, 1817, and the eleventh edition of
which I have before me, with the success of the 'Camille' of the highly
classical Mr. Botta!'"

In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal's "Racine et
Shakspere," Victor Hugo had published his "Odes et Poesies Diverses," and
a second collection followed in 1824. In the prefaces to these two
volumes he protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, as
_mots de guerre_ and vague words which every one defines in accordance
with his own prejudices. If romanticism means anything, he says, it
m