eans the literature of the nineteenth century, and all the anathemas
launched at the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to the
following method of argument. "We condemn the literature of the
nineteenth century because it is romantic. And why is it romantic?
Because it is the literature of the nineteenth century." As to the false
taste which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of Racine and
Boileau, he would prefer to distinguish that by the name _scholastic_, a
style which is to the truly classic what superstition and fanaticism are
to religion. The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partly
literary and partly political and religious: "The history of mankind
affords no poetry," he says, "except when judged from the vantage-ground
of monarchical ideas and religious beliefs. . . . He has thought
that . . . in substituting for the outworn and false colours of pagan
mythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian theogony, one
could inject into the ode something of the interest of the drama, and
could make it speak, besides, that austere, consoling, and religious
language which is needed by an old society that issues still trembling
from the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The literature of the
present, the actual literature, is the expression, by way of
anticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue,
doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recent
ruins. . . . If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had
invoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . the
triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been
much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . . But France had not
that good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, and
our literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic,
than of a monarchical and Christian society." The prevailing note,
accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of
1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the sceptical
Eclaircissement of the eighteenth century. The subjects are such as
these: "The Poet in the Times of Revolution"; "La Vendee"; "The Maidens
of Verdun," which chants the martyrdom of three young royalist sisters
who were put to death for sending money and supplies to the _emigres_;
"Quibiron," where a royalist detachment which had capitulated under
promise of being t