What he attacks is the idealistic, pseudo-classic tendency of tragedy. This he does, oddly enough, in the name of Christianity, and by means of a great historical survey, made on as false a system as any of those of his contemporary, Cousin, of whom it reminds us. He distinguishes three great periods—the primitive, when poetry is lyric; the period of ancient civilisation, when it is epic; and the age of Christianity, which is the period of the drama. The peculiar characteristic of the poetry of the Christian, which he treats as synonymous with the modern, period is that it (having learned from religion that man consists of two elements, an animal and a spiritual, body and soul) makes place in the same work for the two elements which in literature have hitherto excluded each other, the sublime and the grotesque. It is no longer imperative that tragedy should be solemn throughout; it may venture to develop into drama.
If we pay less heed to what Hugo says than to what he really intends to say, we find that the sum and substance of this tolerably foolish argument is a naturalistic protest against pure beauty as the proper or highest subject of art. His idea is: We will renounce convention; we will not feel ourselves in duty bound to exclude everything from serious poetry which directly reminds us of the material world. We see this from the examples he gives. The judge is to be allowed to say: "Sentenced to death. And now let us dine." Queen Elizabeth is to be allowed to swear and speak Latin; Cromwell to say: "I have the Parliament in my bag and the King in my pocket." Cæsar in his triumphal car may be afraid of its upsetting. And Hugo calls Napoleon's exclamation: "There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous," the cry of anguish which is the summary of both drama and life.
Exaggerated as Hugo's language may be, his meaning is plain. What he asserts is the aesthetic value of the ugly. He maintains that the beautiful only comprehends form as absolute symmetry, form in its simplest relations and most intimate harmony with our being, whereas the ugly is a detail in a much greater, harmonious whole which we are unable fully to discern. He declares that the ugly has a thousand types, whereas the beautiful is poor, and has but one; which last theory we may be excused for calling one of the most absurd ever advanced by a poet. It was parodied by his opponents in the axiom: Le Laid c'est le Beau ("Foul is fair," as the witches sing in Macbeth), and combated with the objections which the Romanticists themselves offered in the Seventies to extreme realism.
Was not this French Romanticism, then, after all simply a thinly-veiled naturalism? What did Victor Hugo demand in the name of the young generation but nature—faithful reproduction, local and historical colour? Is not George Sand Rousseau's daughter? the preacher of a gospel of nature? And Beyle and Mérimée, are they not half-brutal, half-refined worshippers of nature? Is not Balzac nowadays actually honoured as the founder of a naturalistic school?
The answer is simple. Hugo's watchword was, undoubtedly, nature and truth, but it was at the same time, and first and foremost, contrast, picturesque contrast, antithesis founded upon the medieval belief in the confliction between body and soul; that is, a dualistic Romanticism. "The salamander heightens the charm of the water-nymph, the gnome lends beauty to the sylph," he says. He desired truth to nature, but he believed it was to be arrived at by making nature's extremes meet, by placing opposites in juxtaposition—Beauty and the Beast, Esmeralda and Quasimodo, the courtesan's past and the purest love in Marion Delorme, bloodthirstiness and maternal tenderness in Lucrèce Borgia.
In his early youth nature was to Victor Hugo a great Ariel-Caliban, the product of a superhuman ideality and an unnatural bestiality, the result obtained by the combination of two supernatural ingredients. But this conception of nature, which corresponded exactly with that of Germanic Romanticism, at times made way in Hugo's case for the magnificent pantheism which found typical expression in that profound and beautiful poem, "Le Satyre," in La Légende des Siècles.
The combination of love of nature with predilection for the unnatural, is to be traced far on into the new literature. All its authors chant the praises of nature. But what they detest and shun under the name of the prosaic and the commonplace is very often the simple nature that lies nearest them. Romantic nature alone is dear to them. George Sand escapes from the world of dreary, hard realities into that of beautiful dreams, Théophile Gautier into the world of art. George Sand in Lelia, Balzac in Père Goriot, make the ideal or the omnipotent galley-slave the judge of society; Balzac actually writes fantastic legends in Hoffmann's style. And they are even more inclined to shun the plain and simple in their language than in their characters. They soon evolved a pompous diction, which far outrivalled that of the classic periods. These were the golden days of the glowing, dazzling adjective. Picturesque, enthusiastic words, with which the narrative was inlaid as with so many transparent jewels, opened up endless vistas. In so far, therefore, it may be said that both the style and the predilections of these young authors were purely romantic. But only in so far.
In Victor Hugo, the founder of the school, the dual love of the natural and the unnatural was the result of a personal peculiarity. His eye naturally sought and found contrasts; his mind had an innate tendency towards antithesis. In Inez de Castro, the melodrama of his earliest youth, and later in Marie Tudor, we have the throne on one side of the stage, the scaffold on the other, the monarch and the executioner face to face. About the time when the preface to Cromwell was written, Hugo was, his wife tells us, in the habit of walking on the Boulevard Montparnasse. "There, just opposite the Cemetery, tight-rope dancers and jugglers had erected their booths. This contrast of shows and funerals confirmed him in his idea of a drama in which extremes meet; and it was there that the third act of Marion Delorme occurred to him, the act in which the tragic, fruitless attempt of the Marquis de Nangis to save his brother from the scaffold forms the counterpart to the antics of the jester." In the preface to Cromwell, when he is asserting the necessity of representing an action in the place where it actually happened, he writes: "Could the poet dare to have Rizzio murdered anywhere but in Mary Stuart's chamber? ... or to behead Charles I. or Louis XVI. anywhere but on these sorrowful spots within sight of Whitehall and the Tuileries, which seem as if they had been chosen in order that the scaffold might contrast with the palace?" In spite of all his asseverations this poet does not really see natural environments with an understanding eye. He does not see them act as formative influences upon the human soul; he employs them as great symbols of the tremendous reverses of fate; he arranges them like the stage scenery of a melodrama.
If we look deeper, what reveals itself to us in this? A characteristic which is to a certain extent distinctive of many of the French Romanticists, and which may be most briefly expressed thus: French Romanticism, in spite of all the elements it has in common with general European Romanticism, is in many ways a classic phenomenon, a product of classic French rhetoric.
Words undergo strange vicissitudes in this world of ours. When the word romantic was introduced into Germany it signified almost the same as Romanesque; it meant Romanesque flourishes and conceits, sonnets and canzonets; the Romanticists were enthusiastic admirers of the Roman Catholic Church and of the great Romanesque poet Calderon, whose works they discovered and translated and lauded. When, a century later, Romanticism reached France, the same word meant exactly the opposite thing—it meant the German-English tendency as opposed to the Greco-Latin Romanesque tendency; it meant Teutonic. The simple explanation of this is, that whatever is strange and foreign produces a romantic impression. The art and literature of a people of a homogeneous civilisation and culture, like the ancient Greeks, are classic; but when one civilised, cultured nation discovers another civilisation and culture which seem to it strange and wonderful, it is at once impressed by it as romantic, is affected by it as by a landscape seen through coloured glass. The Romanticists of France despised their own national excellences, the perspicuity and rational transparency of their own literature, and extolled Shakespeare and Goethe because these poets did not, like Racine and, to a certain extent, Corneille, break up human life into its separate elements, did not represent isolated emotions and passions which offered dramatic contrasts, but, without any rhetorical recurrence to the fundamental elements, flung real human life on the stage in all its complex cohesion. The Frenchmen determined to follow this great example.