Reading through volume 39 of the Harvard Series- Famous Prefaces, I’m in Victor Hugo’s preface to Cromwell, where he defines the Romanticist movement. He starts with an overview of poetry through history.

He defines history into three epochs: primitive, ancient, and modern.

In the primitive period, man is “still so close to God that his all his meditations are ecstatic….. he sings as he breathes…. His lyre has three strings: God, the soul, and creation.”

As man moves from a pastoral setting to civilization, the ancient period takes over, in which Homer dominates. Poetry is religion, religion is law, the virginity of the earlier age is succeeded by the chastity of the later. Civilization finds its one expression in the epic.  

As Christianity came, it supplanted the material and external paganism to embrace a spiritual and deep-rooted truth: man has two lives- one ephemeral, the other immortal.

The ancient gods were material, with heaven as a mountain. Heroes physically fought the gods and as such, divinity was minimized and man magnified.  

On the day when Christianity said to man: “Thou art twofold, thou art made up of two beings, one perishable, the other immortal, one carnal, the other ethereal, one enslaved by appetites, cravings and passions, the other born aloft on wings of enthusiasm and reverie –  in a word, the one always stooping toward the earth, it’s mother, the other always darting up toward heaven, its fatherland” – on that day the drama was created. Is it, in truth, anything other than that contrast of every day, that struggle of every moment between two opposing principles which are ever face to face in life, and which dispute possession of man from the cradle to the tomb?

Hugo sees this as a complete revolution in men’s minds. Man, withdrawing within himself, begins to take pity on mankind, and reflect on the bitter disillusionments of life. Melancholy was thus fashioned. And from this was born the spirit of scrutiny and curiosity.  

Poetically, a new form was birthed- comedy and the grotesque. The ancients only sculpted the beautiful. The modern muse sees beauty more clearly in the presence of the ugly.  

Hugo is clear that he doesn’t mean the grotesque or ugly, or melancholy, for that matter, didn’t exist prior, only that the general paradigm was to see things in a different way.  

I thought this was an interesting idea- that it may well have been the melancholy produced by recognizing this duality within us, a direct consequence of Christianity, that would lead us to a deeper scrutiny and curiosity about the world. Hugo’s topic is poetry and literature, not science and inquiry, but it seems that if the paradigm shift unleashes scrutiny and curiosity, it would unleash it over the one as well as the other.