Introduction

§274 “Critical Criticism" in its Szeliga-Vishnu incarnation provides an apotheosis of the Mystéres de Paris. Eugéne Sue is proclaimed a "Critical Critic". Hearing this, he may exclaim like Moliére's Bourgeois gentilhomme:

§275 "Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j'en susse rien: et je vous suis le plus obligé du monde de m'avoir appris cela."

§276 Herr Szeliga prefaces his criticism with an aesthetic prologue. "The aesthetic prologue" gives the following explanation of the general meaning of the "Critical" epic and in particular of the Mystéres de Paris:

§277 "The epic gives rise to the thought that the present in itself is nothing, and not only" (nothing and not only!) "the eternal boundary between past and future, but" (nothing, and not only, but) "but the gap that separates immortality from transience and must continually be filled.... Such is the general meaning of the Mystéres de Paris."

§278 The "aesthetic prologue" further asserts that "if the Critic wished he could also be a poet".

§279 The whole of Herr Szeliga's criticism will prove that assertion. It is "poetic fiction” in every respect.

§280 It is also a product of "free art" according to the definition of the latter given in the "aesthetic prologue" — it "invents something quite new, something that absolutely never existed before”.

§281 Finally, it is even a Critical epic, for it is "the gap that separates immortality" — Herr Szeliga's Critical Criticism — from "transience" — Eugéne Sue's novel — and "must continually be filled".