But Hugo, even when he doubts, has not yet reached this stage. He still styles his poetry "cavalier" poetry, stamping himself by a word which recalls the restoration of royalty in England as the poet of the restoration of royalty in France. The rock on which he splits is the impossibility of harmonising religious and literary tradition. This is especially felt in the ballads. Hugo revives memories of the Middle Ages and feudalism. What could be more royalist? But the literature of the age of Louis XIV. had utterly rejected the Middle Ages and their memories--so what could be less classical? One of the ballads (_La ronde du sabbat_) describes a witches' dance, another treats of sylphs and fairies; the motley superstitions of the old popular legends are revived--Romanticism is not far off. And the tone is anything but classic; in France, as in Germany and Denmark, the style of the popular ballad supplants the dignified, literary style. There is, moreover, in these poems a new patriotic element (_Le géant, Le pas d'armes du roi Jean_) which turns from classic antiquity to the France of the far-off past. Of this national movement, too, Chateaubriand had been the leader; his description of the ancient Gauls in _Les Martyrs_ was the first attempt in the new direction; it made a powerful impression (according to his own confession) on such a man as Augustin Thierry, the future author of _The Age of the Merovingians_; we may safely say that it gave the impulse generally to a more graphic and animated historical style. But even this patriotic element was new and foreign to French poetry, was consequently a rebellion against tradition. The revival of old French subjects was accompanied by a revival of old French metres. Here also Chateaubriand led the way with that charming exile's song beginning with the beautiful lines:
Combien j'ai douce souvenance Du joli lieu de ma naissance! Ma sœur, qu'ils étaient beaux, ces jours De France!
a song which was sung on the little rocky island in the Bay of St. Malo as he was laid to rest in the grave which he had hewn for himself there. And the tones of the days of Ronsard and the Pleiades are re-echoed simultaneously by Alfred de Vigny, the brothers Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, and Hugo.