compare it to
such work as that which at some and twenty Keats had given to the
world--_Hyperion_, for instance, or the _Eve of St. Agnes_--is to glory
in the name of Briton. But it had its value then, and as an historical
document it has its value now. The preface was at once a profession of
faith and a proclamation of war. It is crude, it is limited, it is
mistaken, in places it is even absurd. But from the moment of its
appearance the old order was practically closed. It prepared the way for
_Albertus_ and for _Antony_, for _Rolla_ and the _Tour de Nesle_; and it
was also the '_fiat lux_' in deference to which the world has accepted
with more or less of resignation the partial eclipse of art and morals
effected in _Salammbo_ and _l'Education sentimentale_ and the Egyptian
darkness achieved in work like _la Terre_ and _une Vie_ and _les
Blasphemes_. In its ringing periods, its plangent antitheses and
aesthetic epigrams, it preluded and vindicated the excesses of whatsoever
manifestations of romanticism mankind and the arts have since been called
upon to consider and endure: from the humours of Petrus Borel to the
experiments of Claude Monet and the 'discoveries' of Richard Wagner.

Environment.

It is too often forgotten that from the first Hugo was associated with
men of pretensions and capacities not greatly inferior to his own, and
that in no direction was victory the work of his single arm. In painting
the initiative had been taken years before the publication of the
_Cromwell_ manifesto by Gericault with the famous _Radeau de la Meduse_,
and by Delacroix with the _Dante et Virgile_ (1822) and the _Massacre de
Scio_ (1823). In music Berlioz, at this time a student in the
Conservatoire, was fighting hard against Cherubini and the bewigged ones
for liberty of expression and leave to admire and imitate the audacities
of Weber and Beethoven, and three years hence, in the year of _Hernani_,
was to set his mark upon the art with the _Symphonie fantastique_. On
the stage as early as 1824 Frederick and Firmin had realised in the
personages of Macaire and Bertrand the grotesque ideal, the combination
of humour and terror, of which the character of Cromwell was put forward
as the earliest expression, and had realised it so completely that their
work has taken rank with the greater and the more lasting results of the
movement. In the literature of drama the old order was ruined and the
victory won on all es