Hitherto the people had only served as a background in literature--in Victor Hugo's dramas the passionate plebeian, the avenger and requiter, appeared on the scene as the hero. Hitherto the savage had talked like a Frenchman of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Voltaire)--Mérimée in _Colomba_ and _Carmen_ depicted savage emotions in all their wildness and freshness. Racine's child (in _Athalie_) had spoken like a miniature edition of a grown-up man--Nodier with a childlike heart put simple, innocent words into his children's mouths. In the French literature of an earlier period, woman had generally acted with full consciousness, arriving at conclusions like a man; see the works of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. Corneille paid homage to virtue, Crébillon the younger to frivolity and vice, but both the virtue and the vice were conscious and acquired. George Sand, on the contrary, depicted the innate nobility and natural goodness of a noble woman's heart. Madame de Staël in her _Corinne_ had represented the gifted woman as a being of great and commanding talent--George Sand, in _Lélia_, represented her as a great sibyl. In olden days the poet had been a courtier, like Racine and Molière, or a man of the world, like Voltaire and Beaumarchais, or simply an ordinary decent citizen, like Lafontaine. Now he became the neglected step-child of society, the high-priest of humanity, often poor and despised, but with the starry brow and the tongue of fire. Hugo hymned him as the shepherd of the people, Alfred de Vigny represented him in _Stello_ and _Chatterton_ as the sublime child who prefers dying of hunger to degrading his muse by common work, and dies blessing his fellow-men, who acknowledge his worth when it is too late. III ROMANTICISM