Victor Hugo was as yet almost equally cautious. "Granted that it is advantageous and at times necessary," he writes, "to renew a few worn-out expressions, to replace a few old phrases, and perhaps even to endeavour to improve our verse by increasing the sonority of its metre and the purity of its rhyme, it cannot be too often repeated that this must be the limit of all attempts at perfecting it. Every reform at variance with the natural accent and genius of our mother-tongue must be regarded as an attack on the first principles of taste."
Neither alteration of the rhythm, nor variability in the position of the cæsura, nor the continuation of the phrase from one line to another (changes all of which he afterwards vindicated), does he as yet consider permissible. In the _Odes_ he conforms to the old poetic court fashion (he does not, for instance, say _Convention_, but _Senate_, does not say _shawl_, but _drapery_ or _treasure of Kashmir_), only making a few cautious attempts at a change of metre, with the object of rendering the ode style less stiff and heavy.
That court fashion was of the following nature. A small collection had been made of refined expressions, of choice words--the elect, as it were, of language--which alone had admission into poetry. Poets did not say sword, but brand, did not say soldier, but warrior, and they never mentioned such things as guns or knives; just as Danish poetry for long acknowledged only roses, lilies, violets, woodruff, and at the outside a dozen other flowers as representatives of the whole floral world. The consequence of this was that the supply of words was extremely limited, that there were only a few hundred pairs of noble rhymes, and that the same expressions, which had to be constantly repeated, brought with them exactly the same thoughts and feelings. The poetic oratory of those days was very much on a par with the pulpit oratory of our own. Sublime was the adjective applied to the dignified flow of words in which things were spoken of as far as possible without ever calling them by their real names--and, be it observed, only things that reminded men as little as possible of their earthly nature, of the material side of their being. One result of this was that the direct, unambiguous mention of common things in any work which laid claim to the privilege of classic style at once produced a comic effect. When Lebrun's _Cid_ was acted, the word _chambre_ called forth a murmur of disapproval. It also explains how the attempt made about the time of the earliest experiments in the Romantic style to introduce Shakespeare into France created such consternation. Every one knows that _Othello_, acted in the translation of Alfred de Vigny at the Odéon--that is to say to an audience of students, the least prejudiced and least prudish of Parisian audiences--was hissed because of the occurrence in it of the word "pocket-handkerchief."