The combination of love of nature with predilection for the unnatural, is to be traced far on into the new literature. All its authors chant the praises of nature. But what they detest and shun under the name of the prosaic and the commonplace is very often the simple nature that lies nearest them. Romantic nature alone is dear to them. George Sand escapes from the world of dreary, hard realities into that of beautiful dreams, Théophile Gautier into the world of art. George Sand in _Lelia_, Balzac in _Père Goriot_, make the ideal or the omnipotent galley-slave the judge of society; Balzac actually writes fantastic legends in Hoffmann's style. And they are even more inclined to shun the plain and simple in their language than in their characters. They soon evolved a pompous diction, which far outrivalled that of the classic periods. These were the golden days of the glowing, dazzling adjective. Picturesque, enthusiastic words, with which the narrative was inlaid as with so many transparent jewels, opened up endless vistas. In so far, therefore, it may be said that both the style and the predilections of these young authors were purely romantic. But only in so far. In Victor Hugo, the founder of the school, the dual love of the natural and the unnatural was the result of a personal peculiarity. His eye naturally sought and found contrasts; his mind had an innate tendency towards antithesis. In _Inez de Castro_, the melodrama of his earliest youth, and later in _Marie Tudor_, we have the throne on one side of the stage, the scaffold on the other, the monarch and the executioner face to face. About the time when the preface to _Cromwell_ was written, Hugo was, his wife tells us, in the habit of walking on the Boulevard Montparnasse. "There, just opposite the Cemetery, tight-rope dancers and jugglers had erected their booths. This contrast of shows and funerals confirmed him in his idea of a drama in which extremes meet; and it was there that the third act of _Marion Delorme_ occurred to him, the act in which the tragic, fruitless attempt of the Marquis de Nangis to save his brother from the scaffold forms the counterpart to the antics of the jester." In the preface to _Cromwell_, when he is asserting the necessity of representing an action in the place where it actually happened, he writes: "Could the poet dare to have Rizzio murdered anywhere but in Mary Stuart's chamber?... or to behead Charles I. or Louis XVI. anywhere but on these sorrowful spots within sight of Whitehall and the Tuileries, which seem as if they had been chosen in order that the scaffold might contrast with the palace?" In spite of all his asseverations this poet does not really see natural environments with an understanding eye. He does not see them act as formative influences upon the human soul; he employs them as great symbols of the tremendous reverses of fate; he arranges them like the stage scenery of a melodrama.