To return to the principle of contrast: Hugo dilates upon his puniness as an infant (“abandoned by everybody, even by his mother”) in order to make his later achievement seem still more stupendous.[45] The use of the antithesis as the auxiliary of surprise, the abrupt and thrilling passage from light to shade or the contrary, finds perhaps its culminating expression in Hugo. A study of this one figure as it appears in his words and ideas, in his characters and situations and subjects, would show that he is the most melodramatic genius for whom high rank has ever been claimed in literature. The suddenness of Jean Valjean’s transformation from a convict into a saint may serve as a single instance of Hugo’s readiness to sacrifice verisimilitude to surprise in his treatment of character. Closely allied to the desire to break up the monotonous surface of “good form” by the pointed and picturesque style in writing is the rise of the pointed and picturesque style in dress. A man may advertise his genius and originality (in the romantic sense of these terms) by departing from the accepted modes of costume as well as from the accepted modes of speech. Gautier’s scarlet waistcoat at the first performance of Hernani is of the same order as his flamboyant epithets, his riot of local color, and was at least as effective in achieving the main end of his life--to be, in his own phrase, the “terror of the sleek, baldheaded bourgeois.” In assuming the Armenian garb to the astonishment of the rustics of Motiers-Travers, Rousseau anticipates not merely Gautier but innumerable other violators of conventional correctness: here as elsewhere he deserves to rank as the classic instance, one is tempted to say, of romantic eccentricity. La Bruyère, an exponent of the traditional good-breeding against which Rousseauism is a protest, says that the gentleman allows himself to be dressed by his tailor. He wishes to be neither ahead of the mode nor behind it, being reluctant as he is in all things to oppose his private sense to the general sense. His point of view in the matter of dress is not so very remote from that of a genuine classicism, whereas the enthusiast who recently went about the streets of New York (until taken in by the police) garbed as a contemporary of Pericles is no less plainly a product of Rousseauistic revolt.