not socialistic sentiments; for it is sentiment rather than reason with Hugo that makes the poor and oppressed seem right, and the dominant and rich wrong. This emotional tone unites with directly autobiographical portions and a subjective style to give the whole a lyric character. The psychology is not based on observation, nor correlated with the actual conditions of life. Valjean is a Utopian who shows neither wisdom nor prudence. We feel that his visionary magnanimity would be neither natural nor profitable in life, and it threatens to be wearisome even in romance. But the minor characters show still more of that inevitable tendency of subjective fiction to the symbol and the type that we have noted already in Hugo's earlier drama and fiction. Enjolras poses persistently as the apostle and martyr of uncompromising democracy, Javert is at once more and less than human in his reverence for constituted authority, and the grisette Fantine is declared to be the symbol of joy and modesty, "innocence floating on error," and "still preserving the shade that separates Psyche from Venus." Marius is Hugo's youthful self,

mattype of young energy nursing democratic aspirations un imperial memories. But all of these together have

not the life of the charming little gamin Gavroche, the classical study of the Paris street-boy; for into this character Hugo put his poet's heart, and the touch of sympathy that makes the world kin. This and the epic descriptions familiar to every lover of French literature will carry "Les Misérables" through many generations of readers and revolutions of popular taste, although even in the year of its appearance Hugo's novel was of a type of fiction already discredited. Here, as throughout his second period, he barred the

current of a literary evolution that he did not avert or deflect.1

The epic and lyric elements in Hugo's fiction are even more strongly marked in "The Toilers of the Sea," inspired by the poet's life at Guernsey and his intimate daily contact with "the men who go down to the sea in ships and know the mystery of the great waters." An oracular preface tells us that Religion, Society, and Nature are the three struggles of mankind and also its three needs. "A triple necessity weighs on us, of dogmas, laws, and things." Former romances had dealt with the first and second; this should show how the fatality of things "is mingled with the supreme fatality, the human heart." But these highsounding phrases must not be taken too literally; for indeed the cause of all the tragic catastrophe is the heroine's lack of common honesty and the hero's lack of common-sense. Gilliat's emotions are as deep as the ocean. Deruchette is as treacherous and coquettish as the sea. But, once more, what we enjoy is not the psychology of character nor the story, but the long description of the perilous and solitary quest of Gilliat on the Douvres, where throughout prose has suffered a sea-change, and throbs and thrills with the far-resounding waves. Yet, as a whole, "The Toilers of the Sea" is inferior both in power and in interest to "Les Misérables" and to "Notre-Dame." The imagination may be more grandiose, but the subject is more petty. Hugo needs either a wider canvas or an historical perspective. The latter he provided for his next novel, "L'Homme qui rit;" but he saw fit, with strange perversity, to import into the English court of Elizabeth the extravagances of "Han d'Islande," and

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even the unparalleled efforts of his publishers could not avert its rejection by a public now in the fullblooded confidence of the Naturalistic spring.

The busy times of republican reconstruction were hardly passed, however, before Hugo, piqued by this check, returned to historical fiction. Taught by experience or guided by instinct, he now chose the period suited of all others to his genius and environment, and gave to the world in "Ninety-three" one of the most remarkable historical evocations of French literatyre. The time is the crucial year of the First Republic; the scene, the civil war in Vendée, to which Hugo was attracted both by his nature and nurture, for his parents united the blood of the contending factions. In this novel one notes indeed the growing mannerisms of old age, with the unevenness of style and looseness of construction common to all of Hugo's novels, but one finds also more intensity of action, more real palpitating life, and a truer tragic catastrophe than in any of his earlier romances. The Vendéan hero Lantenac is not too heroic for a Breton noble, nor is his nephew Gauvin too sentimental for a Republican of the "Feast of Pikes." The unique epoch justified and demanded a more than human heroism and magnanimity. In Cimourdain, to be sure, one recognizes with no special pleasure the Javert of "Les Misérables," the uncompromising pursuer of an ideal,- in this case the incarnate Republic, - who, like his prototype, ends his life by suicide, as if to teach that a life of law without sentiment seems to the Romantic mind impossible and selfdestructive.

But, as before, in "Ninety-three," what leaves the freshest impress on the mind are the minor characters

and incidents, the peasant woman with her three children that run like a golden thread through these scenes of fire and blood; the delightful old trooper, Radoub; pictures of political Paris suggesting the magic-lantern slides of Carlyle. The weird procession of the guillotine, the cannon aboard ship broken loose and spreading terror and destruction, the sieges of Dol and of La Torgue, take here the place of the fight with the devil-fish in the "Toilers," and of Waterloo and the Barricade in "Les Misérables;" and the climax, in spite of some rather rank flowers of rhetoric, is unusually effective and affecting. Indeed, "Ninety-three" is Hugo's best novel, though its place in literature is less unique and probably lower than that of "Notre-Dame" or of the redemption of Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean Kes mishables.)

But it is time to leave these lower walks and ascend to the heights of Hugo's genius. For in his poetry this second period is much more than a convenient division; it marks a distinctly new manner. Romantic it is still, but now rather in the nobler form of an idealist's protest against the cloud of skepticism in the mind and weariness in the will that characterized the Second Empire. So "Les Châtiments" of 1853 are as different from "Les Rayons et les ombres" of 1840. as tempered steel is from polished iron. His political experience, followed by the enforced calm and the bitter indignation of exile, gave his verses from this time an intensity of conviction that seems sometimes to echo the earnestness of a Hebrew prophet. While Gautier sought excuse and forgetfulness in his doctrine of art for art, and taught that impersonality was essential to the highest reaches of poetry, these "Scourgings," throbbing and aglow with passion, anger,

hatred, but burning too with a lofty and trustful patriotism, raised the protest of their ringing halt to the surrender of the noblest prerogative of literature. But it was only in exile that such lyrics were possible, only in exile that French thought was free. "Les Châtiments," printed in Belgium and smuggled across the frontier in countless incorrect and garbled editions, concealed sometimes, it is said, in plaster casts of the emperor they scourged, aroused a fearful joy in countless readers. But among the poets of France the currents of development, though divergent, were away from Hugo. Here, too, he barred but did not deflect the course of lyric evolution.

Nearly all the satires of "Les Châtiments" were written between December, 1851, and the end of the next year; a few are anterior to that date, a very few are a little later. Evidently he "sang because he must;" his wrath was absolutely sincere. And yet critics have not failed to observe that he had rather less reason than others had to feel it. He had contributed as much as any man save Béranger to the revival of the Napoleonic legend; and when De Vigny and Lamartine had tried to stem the tide whose consequences they foresaw, his second ode to the Vendôme Column had sought to cover them with contempt. He had actually printed a special cheap and popular edition of his Bonapartist odes, in which he talks about regilding the altar of Napoleon's memory, by whose death France is left a widow. Nor had he been wholly unwilling to co-operate with Louis himself, until he found Louis unwilling to co-operate with him by rewarding his efforts with a cabinet position.1

But Hugo had a happy faculty of forgetting

1 Cp. Biré, op. cit. ii. 192.