“If they could not away with definite words in the verse, they endured very impatiently, too, epithets, metaphors, comparisons, poetic words—­lyricism, in short; those swift escapes into nature, those soarings of the soul above the situation, those openings of poetry athwart drama, so frequent in Shakspere, Calderon, and Goethe, so rare in our great authors of the eighteenth century.”  Gautier gives, as one reason for the adherence of so many artists to the romantic school, the circumstance that, being accustomed to a language freely intermixed with technical terms, the mot propre had nothing shocking for them; while their special education as artists having put them into intimate relation with nature, “they were prepared to feel the imagery and colours of the new poetry and were not at all repelled by the precise and picturesque details so disagreeable to the classicists. . . .  You cannot imagine the storms that broke out in the parterre of the Theatre Francais, when the ‘Moor of Venice,’ translated by Alfred de Vigny, grinding his teeth, reiterated his demands for that handkerchief (mouchoir) prudently denominated bandeau (head-band, fillet) in the vague Shakspere imitation of the excellent Ducis.  A bell was called ’the sounding brass’; the sea was ‘the humid element,’ or ‘the liquid element,’ and so on.  The professors of rhetoric were thunderstruck by the audacity of Racine, who in the ‘Dream of Athalie’ had spoken of dogs as dogs—­molossi would have been better—­and they advised young poets not to imitate this license of genius.  Accordingly the first poet who wrote bell (cloche) committed an enormity; he exposed himself to the risk of being cut by his friends and excluded from society.” [17]

As to the alexandrine, the recognised verse of French tragedy, Victor Hugo tells us,[18] that many of the reformers, wearied by its monotony, advocated the writing of plays in prose.  He makes a plea, however, for the retention of the alexandrine, giving it greater richness and suppleness by the displacement of the caesura, and the free use of enjambement or run-over lines; just as Leigh Hunt and Keats broke up the couplets of Pope into a freer and looser form of verse.  “Hernani” opened with an enjambement

  “Serait ce deja lui?  C’est bien a l’escalier
  Derobe.”

This was a signal of fight—­a challenge to the classicists—­and the battle began at once, with the very first lines of the play.[19] In his dramas Hugo used the alexandrine, but in his lyric poems, his wonderful resources as a metrist were exhibited to the utmost in the invention of the most bizarre, eccentric, and original verse forms.  An example of this is the poem entitled “The Djinns” included in “Les Orientales” (1829).  The coming and going of the flying cohort of spirits is indicated by the crescendo effect of the verse, beginning with a stanza in lines of two syllables, rising gradually to the middle stanza of the poem in lines of ten syllables, and then dying away by exactly graded diminutions to the final stanza: