Nothing that I have said, or shall say, is to be construed as implying contempt of the remaining critical works of Hugo. On the contrary, “Read all the Prefaces of _Dryden_,” which Swift said in scorn, may be adapted here in utter seriousness. And the student who wishes to know must read the whole of _Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées_—that curious collection of the poet’s critical and other work from the age of seventeen to the age of thirty-two. The gods do not grant to any man to be a good critic at seventeen; but they do grant to a Victor Hugo not to be a negligible writer at any time. In the “Journal of a Young Jacobite” of 1819; in the “Opinions of a Revolutionary” of 1830; in the _Idées au Hasard_; above all, when the poet-critic was a little over age, in the articles on Scott and Voltaire, on Lamennais and Byron, on Mirabeau and Dovalle, there is matter which might have made twenty critics; though it did not please the Fates that it should actually make one. These things are a very open allegory; there should not be any need, and there is certainly here no space, to interpret them.[615] [Sidenote: _The_ Cromwell _Preface,_] If Victor Hugo had written no criticism but _William Shakespeare_, I think I should have put him, as I have put Balzac, in a note, and left him otherwise alone, out of respect, not of persons, but of the divinity of poetry. The two Prefaces that I have selected—there are others, but these will suffice us—would have given him a substantive place here, if he had written no poetry at all. That to _Cromwell_ is the longer, the more elaborate, and much the more famous: but I do not think that it is really quite so important as the later and shorter to the _Orientales_. In the first, with a proud humility which retains a little more of the noun, if it has not much less of the adjective, than the undisguised arrogance of the later work, Hugo, while professing not to defend himself at all, and to regard the Classic _v._ Romantic debate as practically fought out and over, as a fact fights the whole battle once more. It is observable that the word “art,” without being made exactly the battle-cry, recurs again and again throughout the piece, and is, in fact, its dominant. But he has a theory of poetry, not so very different in outline from that of the “Goliaths classiques,” of whom he affects not so much as to take notice. Man and poetry woke in primitive times; when man is singing he is close to God; and the rest of it. The voice is unmistakably Hugo’s, but the forms of thought which it chooses might almost be eighteenth, or even seventeenth, century. They work out the conclusion that Epic + Lyric = Drama—the latter being largely dealt with to show the rise of Comedy and the dignity of the Grotesque. Already we get Hugo’s name-triads flung at us (to use one of his beloved Spanish comparisons) like _bolas_. There is a great deal about Shakespeare. The “Two” Unities—Hugo has extended his grace to the original one—of Time