The theatre was, in 1830, the scene of the most decisive battle between Romanticism and Classicism. The fight of the painters, of the poets, of the story-tellers, seemed concentrated in the more obvious combat of the dramatists, whose armies could see their enemies, and even come to blows with them. And in Hugo's preface to _Cromwell_, that preface which is now so much more interesting than the play that follows it, he claims several things for the dramatist that by act if not by argument he was later to claim for the artist in narrative. He demands that the sublime and ridiculous should be together in literature and, as in life, win their force from each other. The drama, and so the novel, which also attempts in some sort a reproduction of human existence, is not to be written on a single note. It is not to be wholly sublime or wholly ridiculous, but both at once. The general in his triumphal car is to be genuinely afraid of toppling over. And so, in _Les Misérables_, the student's frolic is whole-heartedly described, without in any way binding the author to make light of the sorrow of Fantine when she finds that her own desertion is the merry surprise at the end of it. The sublime will not be the less sublime for being mingled with the grotesque, and so, in _Notre Dame de Paris_, the deepest passion in the book is felt by a hideous and deformed dwarf, and by this same dwarf rather than by any more obvious impersonation of justice, the lascivious priest is flung from the tower. Looking up in his agony, as he clings to the bending cornice his desperate hands have clutched, he does not meet the eyes of some person of a grandeur matching the moment, but sees the grotesque face of Quasimodo, utterly indifferent to him, looking, like one of the gargoyles, over Paris, with tears on his distorted cheeks. In this same preface, too, Hugo justifies innovations in language, very necessary for an art whose new won freedom was to let it explore so much that was unknown. When the body changes, he asks, would you keep the coat the same? Triumphantly appealing to history, he points out that 'the language of Montaigne is no longer that of Rabelais, the language of Pascal is no longer that of Montaigne, and the language of Montesquieu is no longer that of Pascal.' He is justifying there the coloured prose of Chateaubriand, the opulent vocabulary of Gautier, and his own infinitely various effects in prose and verse. [Victor Hugo on Scott.]