e which will remind the reader of
similar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, and other
English romanticists of the eighteenth century. There is as much order,
he asserts, in the forest as in the garden, but it is a live order, not a
dead regularity. "Choose then," he exclaims, "between the masterpiece of
gardening and the work of nature; between that which is beautiful by
convention and that which is beautiful without rule; between an
artificial literature and an original poetry. . . . In two words--and we
shall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with this
observation on the two kinds of literature that are called _classic_ and
_romantic_,--regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste of
genius. . . . It will be objected to us that the virgin forest hides in
its magnificent solitudes a thousand dangerous animals, while the marshy
basins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures.
That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a
crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an
insipidity of Campistron." But above all things--such is the doctrine of
this preface--do not imitate anybody--not Shakspere any more than Racine.
"He who imitates a _romantic_ poet becomes thereby a _classic_, and just
because he imitates." In 1823 Hugo had published anonymously his first
prose romance, "Han d'Islande," the story of a Norwegian bandit. He got
up the local colour for this by a careful study of the Edda and the
Sagas, that "poesie sauvage" which was the admiration of the new school
and the horror of the old. But it was in the preface to "Cromwell,"
published in 1827, that Hugo issued the full and, as it were, official
manifesto of romanticism. The play itself is hardly actable. It is
modelled, in a sense, upon the historical plays of Shakspere, but its
Cromwell is a very melodramatic person, and its Puritans and Cavaliers
strike the English reader with the same sense of absurdity produced by
the pictures of English society in "L'Homme qui Rit." But of the famous
preface Gautier says: "The Bible among Protestants, the Koran among
Mahometans are not the object of a deeper veneration. It was, indeed,
for us the book of books, the book which contained the pure doctrine."
It consisted in great part of a triumphant attack upon the unities, and
upon the verse and style which classic usage had consecrated to French
tragedy. I n