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half-century still waits for its equal as a romance of plot and incident.

"Monte Cristo" was followed, or rather accompanied, by the hardly less excellent "Three Guardsmen," perhaps in its construction the still unrivalled model of the romance of adventure. After such successes Dumas claimed the rights of a favorite, and became for some years a sort of chartered libertine of the press, certain that whatever he wrote or was supposed to write would bring him readers and large returns. He poured out volumes with astonishing speed, and his income from copyright during this heyday of his fame was not less than 200,000 francs a year. But he spent this and more in semi-barbarous luxury, and, that production might not slacken, he supplemented his own pen by a system of organized collaboration that is probably unique in literary history. In 1844, in the flush of his success, he had made contracts to furnish within a year more than the most skilled penman could possibly have written. Hence he was forced to the questionable resort of "inspiring" two secretaries, from whom there was developed a novel-bureau, where Dumas furnished little but the plot and the titlepage. Not content even with this, he ventured to offer to the public the most impudent compilations and plagiarisms. Thus he was able to produce fifty or sixty volumes a year, and some twelve hundred in all, while, in regard to the greater part of them, there is no certainty that he had so much as read their contents. But though, even as early as 1847, these methods were unsparingly exposed, yet his touch, whenever he did put his hand to the work, was so admirable that wherever it was felt the fame and life of the book were secure.

The years that preceded the Second Republic mark the summit of his genius. They count "La Reine Margot," "Vingt ans après," and "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne," all tales of seventeenth-century life with which his dramatic studies had given him superficial familiarity. But presently this popularity turned his head, and filled him with a notion of his importance, a megalomania that would be laughable if it were not sad. He built himself a huge theatre and a palatial castle. In 1846, when by dint of impudence he had secured from the government a commission to "write up" Algeria, then a new colony, he did not scruple to turn the transport that was to convey him there into a pleasure-yacht, and so to visit at the public expense Carthage, Tunis, and other places that he thought he could exploit with his pen. The government, however, was less long-suffering than the public; publishers too began to take umbrage; lawsuits multiplied in his path, and the Revolution of 1848 crowned his misfortunes with a partial eclipse of popularity. From this time on, his attempts to attract public attention, if not esteem, such as his association with Garibaldi in 1860, served only to draw on him the ridicule of the thoughtful, a ridicule that yielded to pity as it grew clear that his fertile brain was giving way as his moral nature had already done.

His friend the critic Jules Janin thus summarizes his genius: "A mind capable of learning all, forgetting all, comprehending all, neglecting all. Rare mind, rare attention, subtle spirit, gross talent. Quick comprehension, execution barely sufficient, an artisan rather than an artist. Skilful to forge, but poor to chisel, and awkward in working with the tools that he knew so Iwell how to make. An inexhaustible mingling of

dreams, falsehoods, truths, fancies, impudence, and propriety; of the vagabond and the seigneur, of rich and poor. Sparkling and noisy, the most wilful and the most facile of men; a mixture of the tricky lawyer and of the epic poet; of Achilles and Thersites; swaggering, boastful, vain and—a good fellow." Quite a unique figure even among the vagaries of Romantic genius, of which he is the supreme type, he left imitators but no successors. He died in 1870, poor, but relieved from want and tenderly cared for by his son, a man of equal talent and greater probity.

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All the novelists of this generation partook more or less of the Romantic spirit. Traces of it can be found in Mérimée, and it dominates a large section of the work of Sand and Balzac, though these must be ranked, with Stendhal, as the founders of Naturalistic fiction. It was in the nature of Romantic "individualism" and "liberty" that the limits of its sway should be illdefined, that even the same writer should seem at one time wholly under its influence, and at another quite independent of it, or, like Gautier, subtly undermining its power. For the two decades that preceded the Revolution of 1848 every writer that led, every reader that welcomed, the advent of literature in new fields, the opening of new paths, was a Romanticist. In the advance they had the cohesion of a common impulse and a common enthusiasm; but for constructive effort this cohesion failed. Each struck out on his own path, and all but the supreme genius of Hugo were pushed aside at last by the Naturalistic wave.

CHAPTER VI.

THE YOUNG HUGO.

VICTOR HUGO is incomparably the greatest French writer of this century, and, except for Goethe, perhaps the greatest of our time. His first volume appeared in 1822; his literary activity continued till his death, in 1885, and has been prolonged beyond it by posthumous volumes. Thus for nearly two-thirds of the century he was a leader in French literature, and for the greater part of that time he was pre-eminently the leader. But since he represents the supreme effort of an egoistical, individualistic movement, it is only by examining in some detail the circumstances and changing fortunes of his career that his character or his work can be appreciated.1

1 Born in 1802. Poetry: Odes, 1822 and 1826'; Orientales, 1827; Feuilles d'automne, 1831; Chants du crépuscule, 1835; Voix intérieures, 1837; Les Rayons et les ombres, 1840; Les Châtiments, 1853; Les Contemplations, 1856; La Légende des siècles, I., 1859; Chansons des rues et des bois, 1865; L'Année terrible, 1872; La Légende des siècles, II. and III., 1877, 1883; L'Art d'être grand-père, 1877; Quatre vents de l'esprit, 1881. Drama: Cromwell, 1827; Hernani, 1830; Marion de Lorme, 1831 ; Le Roi s'amuse, 1832; Lucrèce Borgia, Marie Tudor, 1833; Angelo, 1835; Ruy Blas, 1838; Les Burgraves, 1843. Fiction: Han d'Islande, 1823; Bug-Jargal, 1825; Dernier jour d'un condamné, 1828; Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831; Les Misérables, 1862; Les Travailleurs de la mer, 1866; L'Homme qui rit, 1869; Quatrevingt-treize, 1874. Political: Napoléon le petit, 1852; Histoire d'un crime, 1877; Actes et paroles, 1875-1876.

Criticism: Brunetière, Poésie lyrique, i. 181, ii. 75; Faguet, xix. siècle, 153; Dupuy, V. Hugo, l'homme et le poète, and V. Hugo, son œuvre poétique; Renouvier, V. Hugo, le poète; Duval, Dictionnaire des métaphores de V. Hugo. See also the literature cited in Lanson, p. 1027.

He himself has summed up in familiar lines the condition of Europe and his own at the time of his birth. "Rome," he says, "was replacing Sparta" in the French Republic. "Napoleon was already appearing beneath Bonaparte; the forehead of the emperor was breaking in many a place the narrow mask of the First Consul. Then in Besançon, an ancient Spanish city, there was born, of Breton and of Lorraine blood, a child without color, sight, or voice; so weak that like some fairy thing he was abandoned by all save his mother. This child whom Life was effacing from her book, who had not even a to-morrow to live, is I."1 This climax is noteworthy and characteristic, for Hugo never doubted that it was a climax, nor that what was happening to him was of primary importance to humanity. Noteworthy, too, is the site of his birth. Spain finds an echo, not only in his early work, but in the whole character of his thought. And his parentage united significant elements. His father had been a soldier, and, as Hugo tells us, one of the first volunteers of the Republic; while his mother was a Vendéan, who, as her son tells us, "when a poor girl of fifteen, had

1 Ce siècle avait deux ans! Rome remplaçait Sparte,
Déjà Napoléon perçait sous Bonaparte,

Et du premier consul, déjà par maint endroit
Le front de l'empereur brisait le masque étroit.
Alors dans Besançon, vieille ville espagnole,
Jeté comme la graine au gré de l'air qui vole,
Naquit d'un sang breton et lorrain à la fois,
Un enfant sans couleur, sans regard et sans voix;
Si débile, qu'il fut, ainsi qu'une chimère,
Abandonné de tous, excepté de sa mère
Cet enfant que la vie effaçait de son livre,
Et qui n'avait pas même un lendemain à vivre,
C'est moi.

(Feuilles d'automne, I.)

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