Emportez-moi comme elle, orageux aquilons.
L’Isolement.
[218] Cf. Hettner, Romantische Schule, 156.
[219] See appendix on Chinese primitivism.
[220] G. Duval has written a Dictionnaire des métaphores de Victor Hugo, and G. Lucchetti a work on Les Images dans les œuvres de Victor Hugo. So far as the ethical values are concerned, the latter title is alone justified. Hugo is, next to Chateaubriand, the great imagist.
[221] The French like to think of the symbolists as having rendered certain services to their versification. Let us hope that they did, though few things are more perilous than this transfer of the idea of progress to the literary and artistic domain. Decadent Rome, as we learn from the younger Pliny and others, simply swarmed with poets who also no doubt indulged in many strange experiments. All this poetical activity, as we can see only too plainly at this distance, led nowhere.
[222] Grant Allen writes of the laws of nature in Magdalen Tower:
They care not any whit for pain or pleasure,
That seems to us the sum and end of all,
Dumb force and barren number are their measure,