But there was still another result of the suppression of political tendencies in French romantic literature. In looking to the outer world for inspiration (as every artist must) the writers of the time, turning from contemporary politics, inevitably saw before their eyes Napoleon the Great, now no longer Corsican adventurer and personal despot, but national hero and creator of magnificent epics. The young people of this time did not remember the miseries of the Napoleonic wars; they remembered only their largeness and glory. Fifteen years after the abdication of Napoleon the inspiration of Napoleon came to literary expression. It was a passion for bigness. Victor Hugo’s professed purpose was to bring the whole of life within the compass of a work of art. Every emotion was raised to its nth power. Hernani passes from one cataclysmic experience to another; the whole of life seems to depend on the blowing of a hunting horn. The painting of the time, under Géricault, Delacroix, and Delaroche, was grandiose and pompous. The stage of the theatre was filled with magnificent pictures. A nation comes to insurrection in _William Tell_; Catholicism and Protestantism grapple to the death in _Les Huguenots_. But not only extensively but intensively this cult of bigness was developed. Victor Hugo sums up the whole of life in a phrase. The musicians had caught the trick; Meyerbeer was of Victor Hugo’s stature in some things. He gets the epic clang in a single couplet, as in the ‘Blessing of the Poignards’ or in the G flat section of the fourth act duet from _Les Huguenots_. And this heroic quality came to its finest expression in Liszt, some of whose themes, like that of Tasso [Illustration: Music score] or that of _Les Préludes_ [Illustration: Music score] seem to say, _Arma virumque cano_. V