eighteenth century, had been almost entirely suppressed. The new spirit
had animated the prose of Chateaubriand and the poetry of Lamartine; but
it was the spirit only: the _form_ of both those writers retained most
of the important characteristics of the old tradition. It was new wine
in old bottles. The great achievement of the Romantic School was the
creation of new bottles--of a new conception of form, in which the vast
rhetorical impulse within them might find a suitable expression. Their
actual innovations, however, were by no means sweeping. For instance,
the numberless minute hard-and-fast metrical rules which, since the
days of Malherbe, had held French poetry in shackles, they only
interfered with to a very limited extent. They introduced a certain
number of new metres; they varied the rhythm of the Alexandrine; but a
great mass of petty and meaningless restrictions remained untouched, and
no real attempt was made to get rid of them until more than a generation
had passed. Yet here, as elsewhere, what they had done was of the
highest importance. They had touched the ark of the covenant and they
had not been destroyed. They had shown that it was possible to break a
'rule' and yet write good poetry. This explains the extraordinary
violence of the Romantic controversy over questions of the smallest
detail. When Victor Hugo, in the opening lines of _Hernani_, ventured to
refer to an 'escalier dérobé', and to put 'escalier' at the end of one
line, and 'dérobé' at the beginning of the next, he was assailed with
the kind of virulence which is usually reserved for the vilest of
criminals. And the abuse had a meaning in it: it was abuse of a
revolutionary. For in truth, by the disposition of those two words,
Victor Hugo had inaugurated a revolution. The whole theory of 'rules' in
literature--the whole conception that there were certain definite
traditional forms in existence which were, absolutely and inevitably,
the best--was shattered for ever. The new doctrine was triumphantly
vindicated--that the form of expression must depend ultimately, not upon