Cromwell

First edition of Victor Hugo's drama Cromwell, accompanied by its celebrated preface, regarded as one of the founding texts of Romanticism.

Half-brown calf binding, marbled paper boards, smooth spine decorated with gilt fillets, gilt author, title and date, stone paper pastedowns, marbled edges. Binding lightly rubbed, wear to the joints and head of spine, crude repairs, a stain to the first leaves, some further soiling and foxing.

From the library of Louis Gillet, with his ex-libris.

Too long for any troupe to stage, Cromwell, written by Victor Hugo in 1827 and dedicated to his father, has never been performed in its entirety. It nonetheless remains the quintessence of Romantic theatre, whose principles were first set out in the preface.

In it, Victor Hugo first proposes a theory of the evolution of literature modelled on that of humanity, distinguishing three ages: the primitive age, lyric; the ancient age, epic, embodied by Homer; and the modern age, Christian, which he associates with the genre of drama. He argues that Christianity, by revealing the duality of man — at once soul and body, greatness and baseness — opened to art a truth unknown to Antiquity. From this springs his central theory of the grotesque and the sublime, according to which modern art must blend the misshapen, the comic and the trivial with the beautiful and the noble, rather than retaining, as classical art did, only perfection. On this basis, Victor Hugo rejects the unities of time and place inherited from classical tradition, as well as the strict separation of genres between tragedy and comedy, preserving only the unity of action; he calls for a new genre, drama, capable of fusing the tragic and the comic to restore the totality of reality, in keeping with his formula that "tout ce qui est dans la nature est dans l'art" [Everything that is in nature is in art]". Written in a deliberately provocative tone toward the champions of classicism and the Académie, this text crystallized the opposition between ancients and moderns, paving the way for the battle of Hernani three years later, in 1830.

A text of the first importance for the history of both literature and art, this copy fits perfectly within the library of Louis Gillet, a wide-ranging scholar whose career embraced medieval architecture, modern painting and English literature alike. In the preface to Cromwell, Victor Hugo illustrates his theory of the need to break the tedium of classical beauty in painting through the inclusion of the grotesque, praising Rubens's masterful use of this device:

"[...] as a means of contrast, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can open to art. Rubens no doubt understood it thus, when he delighted in mingling, amid the unfolding of royal pomp, coronations, and dazzling ceremonies, some hideous figure of a court dwarf. That universal beauty which antiquity solemnly cast over all things was not without monotony; the same impression, endlessly repeated, may in time grow wearisome."

Beyond its major interest for the analysis of the harmony between the sublime and the grotesque in art, this text also gives an important place to the figure of Shakespeare, whom Louis Gillet deeply admired. In the Preface to Cromwell, Hugo makes Shakespeare the supreme embodiment of modern drama:

"The moment has come when the balance between the two principles will be established. One man, a poet king, poeta soverano, as Dante says of Homer, will fix all things. The two rival geniuses unite their twin flame, and from that flame springs Shakespeare.

Here we have reached the poetic summit of modern times. Shakespeare is Drama; and drama, which fuses in a single breath the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the buffoonish, tragedy and comedy, drama is the very character of the third age of poetry, of literature today."

A century later, in 1931, Louis Gillet devoted to Shakespeare one of his major works, published by Grasset, drawn from a series of lectures he had given the previous winter at the Société des Conférences. It was this book that Georges Goyau praised on 11 June 1936, in his response to Gillet's reception speech at the Académie française, in terms that resonate directly with Hugo's theory of the union of opposites: "It pleases me [...] that you were able to present to our divided world the portrait of a Shakespeare in whom «a hundred diverse elements», often deemed incompatible, «merge into a vast harmony»". Goyau immediately adds, as if to place this book within a precise historical lineage: "A hundred years after the ferment of Romanticism, we see you, portraitist of Shakespeare, coming to take your seat in the chair of Jean Racine".

Manifesto of the new Romantic theatre uniting the sublime and the grotesque, from the library of Louis Gillet, art and literary historian who shared with Victor Hugo a fascination with Shakespeare.