The Romantic School—­of which the most important members were VICTOR HUGO, ALFRED DE VIGNY, THEOPHILE GAUTIER, ALEXANDRE DUMAS, and ALFRED DE MUSSET—­was, as we have said, inspired by that supremely French love of Rhetoric which, during the long reign of intellect and prose in the 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 derobe’, and to put ‘escalier’ at the end of one line, and ‘derobe’ 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 tradition nor yet upon a priori reasonings, but simply and solely on the thing expressed.

The most startling and the most complete of the Romantic innovations related to the poetic Vocabulary.  The number of words considered permissible in French poetry had been steadily diminishing since the days of Racine.  A distinction had grown up between words that were ‘noble’ and words that were ‘bas’; and only those in the former class were admitted into poetry.  No word could be ‘noble’ if it was one ordinarily used by common people, or if it was a technical term, or if, in short, it was peculiarly expressive; for any