and that to the Orientales.
The Preface to the Orientales escapes all these objections and, short as it is, is undoubtedly the most remarkable piece of criticism that Hugo has left, while it is also the boldest, the clearest, the least hampered with tricks and mannerisms, the most serious, the most really dignified. In it he “goes straight for the jugular.”[[616]] He questions, and denies point-blank, the right of the critic to interrogate the poet on his choice of subject or of treatment at all. “L’ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais: voilà tout le domaine de la critique.” Here we come again to one of the epoch-making sentences, one of the great jalons of critical history. No ancient had ever dared to say it. Patrizzi had said it, hardly knowing what he had said. The German and English Romantics had cast about it, implied it, made themselves responsible for it, or something like it; but never posed it plumply as the Charter of Literature. And Hugo does not leave it as if he were afraid of it, or half-ignorant what it means. He turns it over and over, so as at each turn to give a fresh blow to the Neo-classics. Never mind the means employed: ask how they are employed. There are no good or bad subjects in poetry: there are only good or bad poets. Everything is a subject. Poetry is a country of universal suffrage: examine how the artist has worked, not why. Art has nothing to do with gags, leading-strings, handcuffs: he may go where he list, believe as he list, do what he lists. Kind, story, space, time, fashion, all are at his choice.
And then, amplifying more particularly the phrase about the limits of art, Hugo has one of his most characteristic and finest passages of exuberant prose, expressing the wish to make his poetry like a Spanish city—half oriental, half mediæval—and finishes very briefly with some words on his actual book.
Capital position of this latter.
This is the real clou, the central decisive point of Hugonic, and indeed of all Romantic, criticism. “Never mind the subject, the kind, anything of that sort: is the treatment good?” is practically the gospel of modern as opposed to ancient, of Romantic as opposed to Classical, criticism. Of course, like all hard-and-fast propositions and prescriptions as to things that are not hard-and-fast, and especially like all controversial propositions and aggressive prescriptions of all kinds, it does not contain the whole truth, and it does not even contain nothing but the truth. If it be construed in the sense that one subject is as good as another, it may, and probably will, lead wrong. If it be taken to mean that even the experience of our two thousand five hundred years (or whatever it is) of literature does not show that some subjects are so much more difficult and thankless than others that they are practically impossible, it will entice the poet to useless and probably dangerous experiment. But then, with reasonable people, it does not mean either of these things. It is in reality a defensive much more than an offensive proposition,—a protest which must be allowed in any Court of Historical Criticism against the Classic and especially the Neo-classic notion of a priori classification of Subject and Kind, and of referring to this instead of considering the work first. The “work”.I have known objection taken to the use—at least the frequent use—of this word “work” in literature, and as to literature. It is, in fact, something of a shibboleth: but, I think, a valuable one. No one who uses it intelligently is likely to forget that it is the work, the working, the art, not the material, that he is to look to first. And Victor Hugo, in the document before us, was practically the first to enjoin this duty with authority and conviction.
We may pass appropriately to his most distinguished opponent and his most enthusiastic disciple in regard to this gospel.
Nisard: his Ægri Somnia.