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It was, perhaps, unfortunate that the main struggle of the Romantic controversy should have been centred in the theatre.  The fact that this was so is an instance of the singular interest in purely literary questions which has so often been displayed by popular opinion in France.  The controversy was not simply an academic matter for connoisseurs and critics to decide upon in private; it was fought out in all the heat of popular excitement on the public stage.  But the wild enthusiasm aroused by the triumphs of Dumas and Hugo in the theatre shows, in a no less striking light, the incapacity of contemporaries to gauge the true significance of new tendencies in art.  On the whole, the dramatic achievement of the Romantic School was the least valuable part of their work. Hernani, the first performance of which marked the turning-point of the movement, is a piece of bombastic melodrama, full of the stagiest clap-trap and the most turgid declamation.  Victor Hugo imagined when he wrote it that he was inspired by Shakespeare; if he was inspired by anyone it was by Voltaire.  His drama is the old drama of the eighteenth century, repainted in picturesque colours; it resembles those grotesque country-houses that our forefathers were so fond of, where the sham-Gothic turrets and castellations ill conceal the stucco and the pilasters of a former age.  Of true character and true passion it has no trace.  The action, the incidents, the persons—­all alike are dominated by considerations of rhetoric, and of rhetoric alone.  The rhetoric has, indeed, this advantage over that of Zaire and Alzire—­it is bolder and more highly coloured; but then it is also more pretentious.  All the worst tendencies of the Romantic Movement may be seen completely displayed in the dramas of Victor Hugo.

For throughout his work that wonderful writer expressed in their extreme forms the qualities and the defects of his school.  Above all, he was the supreme lord of words.  In sheer facility, in sheer abundance of language, Shakespeare alone of all the writers of the world can be reckoned his superior.  The bulk of his work is very great, and the nature of it is very various; but every page bears the mark of the same tireless fecundity, the same absolute dominion over the resources of speech.  Words flowed from Victor Hugo like light from the sun.  Nor was his volubility a mere disordered mass of verbiage:  it was controlled, adorned, and inspired by an immense technical power.  When one has come under the spell of that great enchanter, one begins to believe that his art is without limits, that with such an instrument and such a science there is no miracle which he cannot perform.  He can conjure up the strangest visions of fancy; he can evoke the glamour and the mystery of the past; he can sing with exquisite lightness of the fugitive beauties of Nature; he can pour out, in tenderness or in passion, the melodies