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. [Sidenote: _Capital position of this latter._]