_Notre-Dame de Paris_, which was intended to give a picture of the life and manners of Paris in the fifteenth century, is the creation of a great constructive imagination. This was a fit subject for Hugo, with his leaning to the grand and colossal. He gives a soul to the building, breathes into it the breath of his spirit until it becomes a living being; and as the scientist reconstructs a whole animal from a single vertebra, so Hugo's brain, with the cathedral as starting-point, conjures up the whole of that long-vanished Paris. The faith and the superstition, the manners and the arts, the laws and the human emotions and passions of those old days, are drawn for us with a broad, strong touch--with no great precision, but with a kind of convincing magic. The characters in _Notre-Dame_ are the character sketches of a genius, drawn in the epic style, in more than life-size. Scott's honest, plain, human beings are superseded by the creatures of an artist intoxicated with colour; his gentle spirit makes way for grandiloquent passion pointing unresignedly to blind, iron necessity, that άνάγκη which is written on the church wall, and which crushes us all--gipsy and priest, beauty and beast, Phœbus and Quasimodo--century after century under its iron heel.
Even more powerful than Scott's influence was _Byron's_. It was the element of wild passion in his poems and its connection with the wildness of his life--it was Childe Harold and still more Lara, the being marked by the finger of fate, who, suffering from a mysterious melancholy, carries his pride and his anguish with him from land to land--it was this type in its Byronic forms, fantastically magnified by the element of myth and legend enveloping the poet's life, which enchanted the young men whom Hugo had awakened or gathered together. Few were the critics who maintained as Beyle did in spite of his great admiration for Byron, that "this author of deadly dull, conventional tragedies" was certainly not the leader of the Romanticists. Immediately after Byron's death the whole horde of French minor poets seized upon the two themes, Greece and Lord Byron, which they continued year after year to sing with so much ardour and so little comprehension of the dead man's character, that Sainte-Beuve was obliged to protest in the _Globe_ against the abuse of the words Byron, liberty, elegy, &c. In 1824 both Hugo and Lamartine gave expression to their feelings regarding Byron, the former in a newspaper article, the latter in a poem. In treating of him as a poet, both authors at this period lay most stress upon his spirit of doubt and his gloomy view of life; neither of them seems to have been at all deeply impressed by the works of his mature manhood; the bright and trenchant political and religious satire of _Don Juan_ was, in 1824, missed or misunderstood by them as by so many others. But whereas Hugo's chief endeavour is to show the difference between Byron's poetry and that of the eighteenth century ("The difference between Byron's and Voltaire's laughter is this, that Voltaire had not suffered"), to the sentimental and half orthodox Lamartine the English poet is still the fallen angel. Lamartine's _Fifth Canto of Childe Harold_, in which he endeavours to strike the Byronic note, shows in what he believed himself to resemble the English nobleman, namely, in his romantically heroic personality. Masking as Byron he gives expression to the doubts and rebellious feelings of which we only catch a rare glimpse in his _Meditations_, but to which he was soon to give utterance in his own name. It was probably Byron who lured both him and Hugo to the East; Hugo contented himself with imaginary excursions, but Lamartine made princely preparations and set off on a grand tour. And if Byron's last works made no profound political impression on these two authors, his last actions and his death did.