The Dramatic Unities

they proceeded from authorities which were not properly understood, and from principles which were entirely arbitrary. . . . Lastly, the rules render impossible many beauties, and produce many inconveniences." If, however, it required nearly a century for the unities to make their way from Italy into France, it was not so with the opposition to them. The rebellious spirit soon spread into the latter country, I and gave rise to those fierce literary conflicts known as the war of the" Classicists," and " Romanticists." Among the foremost champions of the " romantic " school, and who contended for liberty of composition as opposed to the bondage of the unities, were Madame de Stael, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Jules Janin, and Alexandre Dumas. In the year 1827 Victor Hugo published his " Cromwell," and in the preface to that play violently attacked the doctrines of the unities, "brushing them," as Janin says, "on one side like spiders' webs." He commences with a somewhat mysterious dissertation upon the "grotesque" in tte drama, and coming at length to the unities, thus proceeds? " The wonderful thing is, that the followers of routine profess to found their rule of the two unities upon probability, whereas it is precisely reality which kills it. What, for instance, more improbable, , what more absurd than this vestibule, this peristyle, this antechamber, this commonplace scene, where our tragedies condescend to come to upwind themselves ; where ...