Exaggerated as Hugo's language may be, his meaning is plain. What he asserts is the aesthetic value of the ugly. He maintains that the beautiful only comprehends form as absolute symmetry, form in its simplest relations and most intimate harmony with our being, whereas the ugly is a detail in a much greater, harmonious whole which we are unable fully to discern. He declares that the ugly has a thousand types, whereas the beautiful is poor, and has but one; which last theory we may be excused for calling one of the most absurd ever advanced by a poet. It was parodied by his opponents in the axiom: _Le Laid c'est le Beau_ ("Foul is fair," as the witches sing in _Macbeth_), and combated with the objections which the Romanticists themselves offered in the Seventies to extreme realism. Was not this French Romanticism, then, after all simply a thinly-veiled naturalism? What did Victor Hugo demand in the name of the young generation but nature--faithful reproduction, local and historical colour? Is not George Sand Rousseau's daughter? the preacher of a gospel of nature? And Beyle and Mérimée, are they not half-brutal, half-refined worshippers of nature? Is not Balzac nowadays actually honoured as the founder of a naturalistic school? The answer is simple. Hugo's watchword was, undoubtedly, nature and truth, but it was at the same time, and first and foremost, contrast, picturesque contrast, antithesis founded upon the medieval belief in the confliction between body and soul; that is, a dualistic Romanticism. "The salamander heightens the charm of the water-nymph, the gnome lends beauty to the sylph," he says. He desired truth to nature, but he believed it was to be arrived at by making nature's extremes meet, by placing opposites in juxtaposition--Beauty and the Beast, Esmeralda and Quasimodo, the courtesan's past and the purest love in Marion Delorme, bloodthirstiness and maternal tenderness in Lucrèce Borgia. In his early youth nature was to Victor Hugo a great Ariel-Caliban, the product of a superhuman ideality and an unnatural bestiality, the result obtained by the combination of two supernatural ingredients. But this conception of nature, which corresponded exactly with that of Germanic Romanticism, at times made way in Hugo's case for the magnificent pantheism which found typical expression in that profound and beautiful poem, "Le Satyre," in _La Légende des Siècles_.