such word would inevitably produce a shock, introduce mean associations, and destroy the unity of the verse.  If the sense demanded the use of such a word, a periphrasis of ‘noble’ words must be employed instead.  Racine had not been afraid to use the word ‘chien’ in the most exalted of his tragedies; but his degenerate successors quailed before such an audacity.  If you must refer to such a creature as a dog, you had better call it ‘de la fidelite respectable soutien’; the phrase actually occurs in a tragedy of the eighteenth century.  It is clear that, with such a convention to struggle against, no poetry could survive.  Everything bold, everything vigorous, everything surprising became an impossibility with a diction limited to the vaguest, most general, and most feebly pompous terms.  The Romantics, in the face of violent opposition, threw the doors of poetry wide open to every word in the language.  How great the change was, and what was the nature of the public opinion against which the Romantics had to fight, may be judged from the fact that the use of the word ‘mouchoir’ during a performance of Othello a few years before 1830 produced a riot in the theatre.  To such a condition of narrowness and futility had the great Classical tradition sunk at last!

The enormous influx of words into the literary vocabulary which the Romantic Movement brought about had two important effects.  In the first place, the range of poetical expression was infinitely increased.  French literature came out of a little, ceremonious, antiquated drawing-room into the open air.  With the flood of new words, a thousand influences which had never been felt before came into operation.  Strangeness, contrast, complication, immensity, curiosity, grotesqueness, fantasy—­effects of this kind now for the first time became possible and common in verse.  But, one point must be noticed.  The abolition of the distinction between words that were ‘bas’ and ‘noble’ did not at first lead (as might have been expected) to an increase of realism.  Rather the opposite took place.  The Romantics loved the new words not because they made easier the expression of actual facts, but for their power of suggestion, for the effects of remoteness, contrast, and multiplicity which could be produced by them—­in fact, for their rhetorical force.  The new vocabulary came into existence as an engine of rhetoric, not as an engine of truth.  Nevertheless—­and this was the second effect of its introduction—­in the long run the realistic impulse in French literature was also immensely strengthened.  The vocabulary of prose widened at the same time as that of verse; and the prose of the first Romantics remained almost completely rhetorical.  But the realistic elements always latent in prose—­and especially in French prose—­soon asserted themselves; the vast opportunities for realistic description which the enlarged vocabulary opened out were eagerly seized upon; and it was not long before there arose in French literature a far more elaborate and searching realism than it had ever known before.