The anti-romantics can’t cheat us much longer.  “Where, among the works of our Italian pedants, are the books that go through seven editions in two months, like the romantic poems that are coming out in London at the present moment?  Compare, e.g., the success of Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh,’ which appeared in June, 1817, and the eleventh edition of which I have before me, with the success of the ‘Camille’ of the highly classical Mr. Botta!’”

In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal’s “Racine et Shakspere,” Victor Hugo had published his “Odes et Poesies Diverses,” and a second collection followed in 1824.  In the prefaces to these two volumes he protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, as mots de guerre and vague words which every one defines in accordance with his own prejudices.  If romanticism means anything, he says, it means the literature of the nineteenth century, and all the anathemas launched at the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to the following method of argument.  “We condemn the literature of the nineteenth century because it is romantic.  And why is it romantic?  Because it is the literature of the nineteenth century.”  As to the false taste which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of Racine and Boileau, he would prefer to distinguish that by the name scholastic, a style which is to the truly classic what superstition and fanaticism are to religion.  The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partly literary and partly political and religious:  “The history of mankind affords no poetry,” he says, “except when judged from the vantage-ground of monarchical ideas and religious beliefs. . . .  He has thought that . . . in substituting for the outworn and false colours of pagan mythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian theogony, one could inject into the ode something of the interest of the drama, and could make it speak, besides, that austere, consoling, and religious language which is needed by an old society that issues still trembling from the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . .  The literature of the present, the actual literature, is the expression, by way of anticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue, doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recent ruins. . . .  If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had invoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . the triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . .  But France had not that good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, and our literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic, than of a monarchical and Christian society.”  The prevailing note, accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of 1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the sceptical Eclaircissement of the eighteenth century.