to reckon with himself in a preface--to draw, so
to speak, a map of the poetic voyage he had made, to take account of
the acquisitions, good or bad, that he had brought home, and of the
new aspects in which the domain of art had presented itself to his
mind Someone will take advantage of this admission, doubtless to
repeat the reproach already uttered by a critic in Germany, that
he has written "a treatise in defence of his poetry." What does it
matter? In the first place he was much more inclined to demolish
treatises on poetry than to write them. And then, would it not he
better always to write treatises 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 le