The literary war of liberation began with an assault upon French classical tragedy, the weakest and most exposed point in literary tradition. Hugo knew very little about the attacks upon its authority which had been made in other countries; and to those who have read the utterances delivered on the same subject many years previously by Lessing, Wilhelm Schlegel, and the English Romantic writers, his manifesto offers little that is new. But it was, of course, an important step to carry the war into France itself. The vigorous arguments expended in proving the unnaturalness of compressing the action of every drama into twenty-four hours and a single pillared hall, seem to the reader of to-day almost as uninteresting as the absurdities attacked; but he must remember that Boileau's authority was then still supreme, still unshaken in France. Of interest as regards Hugo's own development are the passages in which he expounds his private theory of poetry; although he is so much of the poet and so little of the thinker that his arguments are, as a rule, sadly inconclusive. What he attacks is the idealistic, pseudo-classic tendency of tragedy. This he does, oddly enough, in the name of Christianity, and by means of a great historical survey, made on as false a system as any of those of his contemporary, Cousin, of whom it reminds us. He distinguishes three great periods--the primitive, when poetry is lyric; the period of ancient civilisation, when it is epic; and the age of Christianity, which is the period of the drama. The peculiar characteristic of the poetry of the Christian, which he treats as synonymous with the modern, period is that it (having learned from religion that man consists of two elements, an animal and a spiritual, body and soul) makes place in the same work for the two elements which in literature have hitherto excluded each other, the sublime and the grotesque. It is no longer imperative that tragedy should be solemn throughout; it may venture to develop into drama. If we pay less heed to what Hugo says than to what he really intends to say, we find that the sum and substance of this tolerably foolish argument is a naturalistic protest against pure beauty as the proper or highest subject of art. His idea is: We will renounce convention; we will not feel ourselves in duty bound to exclude everything from serious poetry which directly reminds us of the material world. We see this from the examples he gives. The judge is to be allowed to say: "Sentenced to death. And now let us dine." Queen Elizabeth is to be allowed to swear and speak Latin; Cromwell to say: "I have the Parliament in my bag and the King in my pocket." Cæsar in his triumphal car may be afraid of its upsetting. And Hugo calls Napoleon's exclamation: "There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous," the cry of anguish which is the summary of both drama and life.