All this time, you understand, French art is still under the sway of the so-called “classical” ideals of Voltaire and Racine; tragic dramatists have to obey the “three unities,” or they cannot get produced. But by 1830 the French people are sick of reaction, and ready to make their revolution again. As part of the change comes a surge of “romanticism” in the arts. Shakespeare is played in Paris for the first time; and Victor Hugo publishes a drama on the theme of Cromwell, with a preface in which he commits the blasphemy of declaring that Racine is “not a dramatist”! In the midst of the new revolution he produces a romantic play, “Hernani,” dealing with a revolutionary Spaniard of the Byronic type, who declaims all over the stage and dies sublimely. The production of this play resulted in one continuous riot for forty-five nights. The leading lady protested, the hired claque revolted; so Victor Hugo called for help to the young artists of the studios, and they poured out of Montmartre and took possession of the theater. In those days the first purpose of romantic youth was to “shock the bourgeois” by strange costumes. Here was Théophile Gautier, nineteen years old, with long locks hanging over his shoulders, a scarlet satin waistcoat, pale sea-green trousers seamed with black, and a gray overcoat lined with green satin. Night after night the rival factions shouted and raged as long as the play lasted. All this in order to gain for dramatists the right to show more than one scene in a play, and more than twenty-four hours of their hero’s life! Victor Hugo also wrote fiction and prose, and in every field he became the new sun of France. But he was not content with literary laurels; he went on seeking a remedy for the bourgeois disease. He espoused the cause of a poor workingman, who, having been tortured in prison, had killed the governor of the prison. The young poet came upon a novel remedy--to sow the Bible all over France. “Let there be a Bible in every peasant’s hut.” Here in America the Gideonites have tried out the idea, sowing a Bible in every hotel room--but for some reason there are more crimes of violence in the United States than ever before in any civilized country!