It is interesting to trace the stages of this development in Victor Hugo's different prefaces to his _Odes_. In the first (of 1822), which consists of only a few lines, the young poet asserts that loyalty and Christian faith are the standards of true poetry. The nineteenth century, he declares, has first revealed to the world the truth that poetry _does not depend upon the form given to ideas, but upon the ideas themselves_. In his preface to the second edition (published the same year) he further observes that the poet's task now is to substitute for the faded, false colours of the heathen mythology those new and true ones which belong to the Christian conception of the origin of the universe. The ode ought now to speak the severe, the consolatory, the pious language of which an old society, quitting with trembling steps "the revels of atheism and anarchy" stands in such need.
He earnestly hopes that his readers will not think that he is so conceited as "to wish to strike out a new path or create a new literary style." In the preface of 1824 the same assurances are repeated, in very characteristic words; but we feel that the young poet is now the object of suspiciously observant criticism, and that the name "Romanticist," as synonymous with transgressor of the laws of classic art, is one which men will be very apt to apply to him. He is eager to prove his literary orthodoxy. What is needed, he says, is not novelty, but truth. It is this need which he aims at supplying. Taste, "which is neither more nor less than _authority_ in literature," shows him that works which are true as regards their matter ought also to be true as regards their style. This leads to the demand for "local colouring," a demand which the classic authors can hardly be said to have supplied. But it is an understood matter that the laws imposed upon the language by Boileau are to be _religiously_ observed. Of him Hugo writes: "Boileau shares with Racine the unique merit of having given its permanent form to the French language; this in itself is a sufficient proof that he too possessed _creative genius_!" Boileau a creative genius! With what derisive laughter will Victor Hugo, ere many years have passed, receive such an assertion!