based on a poem, than to write poems based on a treatise?  But no, we repeat that he has neither the talent to create nor the presumption to put forth systems “Systems,” cleverly said Voltaire, “are like rats which pass through twenty holes, only to find at last two or three which will not let them through.”  It would have been, therefore, to undertake a useless task and one much beyond his strength What he has pleaded, on the contrary, is the freedom of art against the despotism of systems, codes and rules It is his habit to follow at all risks whatever he takes for his inspiration, and to change moulds as often as he changes metals.  Dogmatism in the arts is what he shuns before everything God forbid that he should aspire to be numbered among those men, be they romanticists or classicists, who compose works according to their own systems, who condemn themselves to have but one form in their minds, to be forever proving something, to follow other laws than those of their temperaments and then natures.  The artificial work of these men, however talented they may be, has no existence so far as art is concerned.  It is a theory, not poetry.

Having attempted, in all that has gone before, to point out what, in our opinion, was the origin of the drama, what its character is, and what its style should he, the time has come to descend from these exalted general considerations upon the art to the particular case which has led us to put them forth.  It remains for us to discourse to the reader of our work, of this Cromwell; and as it is not a subject in which we take pleasure, we will say very little about it in very few words.

Oliver Cromwell is one of those historical characters who are at once very famous and very little known.  Most of his biographers—­and among them there are some who are themselves historical—­have left that colossal figure incomplete.  It would seem that they dared not assemble all the characteristic features of that strange and gigantic prototype of the religious reformation, of the political revolution of England.  Almost all of them have confined themselves to reproducing on a larger scale the simple and ominous profile drawn by Bossuet from his Catholic and monarchical standpoint, from his episcopal pulpit supported by the throne of Louis XIV.

Like everybody else, the author of this book went no further than that.  The name of Oliver Cromwell suggested to him simply the bare conception of a fanatical regicide and a great captain.  Only on prowling among the chronicles of the times, which he did with delight, and on looking through the English memoirs of the seventeenth century, was he surprised to find that a wholly new Cromwell was gradually exposed to his gaze.  It was no longer simply Bossuet’s Cromwell the soldier, Cromwell the politician; it was a complex, heterogenous, multiple being, made up of all sorts of contraries—­a mixture of much that was evil and much that was good, of genius