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 need not repeat the argument here.  It is already familiar, and some sentences[38] from this portion of the essay I have quoted elsewhere.

The preface also contained a plea for another peculiarity of the romantic drama, its mixture, viz., of tragedy and comedy.  According to Hugo, this is the characteristic trait, the fundamental difference, which separates modern from ancient art, romantic from classical literature.  Antique art, he says, rejected everything which was not purely beautiful, but the Christian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creation besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything which