to snatch it out of the midst of such bitter lines as those on the new President

'Donc, vieux partis, voilà votre homme consulaire !
Aux jours sereins, quand rien ne nous vient assiéger,
Dogue aboyant, dragon farouche, hydre en colère,
Taupe aux jours de danger'*.

to get the right effect; and then you will hardly think that any praise is over-praise.

Here is an example of another kind-taken from the 'Orientales'—of that gift which is specially needful in French verse, the sudden surprises which the rhyme may have in store for one :

'Chio, qui dans les flots reflétait ses grands bois,
Ses coteaux, ses palais, et le soir quelquefois
Un chœur dansant de jeunes filles.' +

And you pass on from such an example to the pure and absolute songs written for music, such as

'S'il est un charmant gazon

Que le ciel arrose.

to the incomparable Gastibelza' and to some of the songs in the plays: Fabiani's Quand tu dors' in Marie Tudor,' the Nargue à Dieu' of The Burgraves.' Words written for music, or with the idea of musical accompaniment present to the mind, rank in the lowest order of poetry. For true as it is that (as De Banville says) toute poésie est chant,' poetry must bring its own air with it, not receive it from outside. Yet is it a wondrous thing to note how also in this form of verse Hugo is unexcelled.

He has again the true poet's gift of being carried away by his verse and (often) saying things better than he intended-Carr in 'Cromwell' we took as an instance of this-or of saying them differently. His verse is in this sense as creative as the versification of Christabel' or of Kubla Khan. To find the best examples of these powers in Hugo one must go to the Légende des Siècles,' the earlier series: the series which follows the first by a long interval, after Hugo's return to Paris, is in quite a different vein.§ Certain among the poems of this Légende' are *L'autre President.

+ L'Enfant.

Chants du Crépuscule.'

The two series were not kept in the order of their appearance, but confounded in later editions by Hugo himself. In the stereotyped edition, therefore, they are mixed up also.

probably known to the reader: Booz' for example (we call him Boaz), which has caught so strangely the atmosphere of an Eastern evening:

'Comme dormait Jacob, comme dormait Judith,
Booz, les yeux fermés, gisait sous la feuillée;
Or, la porte du ciel s'étant entrebâillée
Au-dessus de sa tête, un songe en descendit; '
and has such a splendid and peaceful close:
'Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jérimadeth;
Les astres émaillaient le ciel profond et sombre;
Le croissant fin et clair parmi ces fleurs de l'ombre
Brillait à l'occident, et Ruth se demandait,

'Immobile, ouvrant l'œil à moitié sous ses voiles,
Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de l'éternel été
Avait, en s'en allant, négligemment jeté

Cette faucille d'or dans le champ des étoiles.'

Of course there is a shade of over-emphasis here, as so often in Victor Hugo's work. Ces fleurs de l'ombre' is perfect alone but when you have again 'le champ des étoiles,' its mystery and beauty are half ravished from the phrase. Throughout even these early 'légendes' you detect Hugo's reiteration of the more grandiose ideas and words. It occurred to the present writer to count how many times in the first dozen or so of the poems in the original volume occurred the word 'ombre' alone. It was forty times: and there were' ténèbres' and 'profondeur' and 'immensité,' and all the other abstractions to be reckoned with.

When, long years after, Hugo wrote the second part of this Légende' and the third part later still, and had learnt (it must be confessed) to pose before the world as a prophet with a mission and nothing less than a prophet, he imagined a tremendous purpose in the whole work. Large as it is in the sum, the whole 'Légende des Siècles' was to be only one third of a vaster trilogy. (The other parts remained unfinished, but begun, at Hugo's death.) But in the earlier series of stories there is very little of this self-consciousness visible. The tales here picked up and put together seem to have been got by accident: the story of Cain pursued by the eye of God; the story of Boaz and Ruth; Canute's soul wandering wrapped in a shroud of snow on which drops of blood begin to fall; of Mohammed's last speech; of the Cid

* Stevenson, of course, drew on this for a well-known passage in his 'Dynamiter.'

grooming his horse; the horrible Jour des Rois;' the knight-errant series. There is nothing in all such of oversystematisation, over-logic, Hugo's and the Frenchman's usual failing. It is the verse in which they are told that gives to these legends their force: verse by no means equal in merit (like the verse of Milton for example), but so full of excellences that it is almost impossible to make a choice for quotation. Take this passage, for example, on the knightserrant as a class :

'Leur seigneurie était tutrice des chaumières;
Ils étaient justes, bons, lugubres, ténébreux;
Quoique gardé par eux, quoique vengé par eux,

Le peuple en leur présence avait l'inquiétude
De la foule devant la pâle solitude;

Car on a peur de ceux qui marchent en songeant.'

Would it be possible to give more finely what in cant phrase one is constrained to call the psychology of such beings and of their times? La foule devant la pâle solitude' is not less than magnificent; so is the final line. And take the beggar on the bridge of Crassus in the Jour des Rois,' him first (but all that passage is too long for quotation) and next what he sees

'Flamme au septentrion. C'est Vich incendiée.

Flamboiement au midi.

C'est Girone qui brûle.

Le roi Blas a jadis eu d'Inez la matrulle

Deux bâtards, ce qui fait qu'à cette heure l'on a
Gil, roi de Luz, avec Jean, duc de Cardona.'

'Rougeur à l'orient. C'est Lambier en feu;

Ariscat l'est venu piller pour se distraire;' &c.

-a passage which gives excellent example of Hugo's originality and boldness in rhyming.

For a tour de force take the description of the figures in armour in 'Eviradnus.' In themselves they were not, perhaps, much more miraculous-those hollow armours upon wooden horses-than what one may see any day in the Tower of London. But read Hugo's description, the things become sepulchral, monstrous. It is absolutely true, as De Banville says, that this Légende des Siècles' alone constitutes a revolution in French literature; the mixture in the whole of a lyrical and an epic element likewise forms a new departure altogether. The wondrous asides, the little

incidental images that slip from our poet almost unconsciously, who shall count them? Here is Balaam cursing vaguely :

'Sans savoir si des mains dans les ténèbres blêmes
S'ouvraient pour recevoir ses vagues anathèmes.'

This of Iblis the fire-god:

"... Le feu lui sortait des naseaux,

Avec un bruit pareil au bruit des grandes eaux,
Dans la saison livide où le cicogne émigre.'

The last line is splendid and Homeric,

'On entend dans les pins, que l'âge use et mutile,
Lutter le rocher hydre et le torrent reptile.'

There is nothing of the obvious in such a simile, which is
yet so utterly appropriate to the passage. Or again :-
'L'herbe en était émue et le nuage et l'ombre,

Et même le rocher, qui songe et qui se tait.'

In quite unexpected ways, in his prose as in his verse, Hugo springs upon you a trope or simile, which, simple in itself, is on the occasion immensely striking. There is a moment when Claude Frollo, seeking relief from his passion for Esmeralda, opens the Bible at a passage in Job,' and receives a shock such as that a blind man feels who finds 'his hand pricked by the stick he has picked up.' The image is curiously apt and quaint.

A chaque fois que l'heure sonne

Tout ici-bas nous dit adieu '*

6

is not strikingly original in sentiment, but the tout ici-bas' is a surprise. Unhappily, in the succeeding passage the poet overdoes his refrain of demain.' In mere narration Hugo can be though, it must be confessed, only in his more blessed moods as simple as Tennyson, yet without the affectation of simplicity which Tennyson inherited from Wordsworth, and without Tennyson's monotony. And this is a great achievement; for the alexandrine verse lends itself either to monotony or artificial fireworks to ward off that monotony. The description of Isara's toilette in Ratbert' in the 'Légende' is an example in point.

And what a library of other volumes there are to choose from, each having some great and special qualities of its

* Chants du Crépuscule,' Napoléon II.

own! The sad suavity of the Contemplations' and the earlier Feuilles d'Automne' (though this is not so good, not so sincere as the Contemplations'), the bitterness of the 'Châtiments,' and the more declamatory roll of the later Legendes,' of L'Année terrible,' and so on. The Chants 'des Bois et des Rues' are the only series which seems to us decidedly inferior. The poet fears no subject and no form of verse. As Swinburne has said, who before ever applied, as Hugo has done in one place, a mythopoeic gift to the mathematical sciences? At places he can be as realistic, and, yes, as much terre à terre as Coppée can be in his more realistic moods. The beginning of Noces et Festins' reads like a foretaste of those later Parnassians. And he can be, though rarely (for that was least in his nature), as severe and classical as the head and founder of the Parnassians, as Leconte de Lisle. No doubt Hugo's late verse-almost all of that written after his return to Paris in 1870-is too declamatory, too much spoken from a conscious rostrum. There is probably no need to insist on the many beauties of 'L'Année terrible,' such, for example, as the opening passage on Germany:

'Aucune nation n'est plus grande que toi;
Jadis, toute la terre étant un lieu d'effroi,
Parmi les peuples forts tu fus le peuple juste,
Une tiare d'ombre est sur ton front auguste;
Et pourtant, comme l'Inde, aux aspects fabuleux
Tu brilles; ô pays des hommes aux yeux bleus.'

But on the whole the poem does not impress one as perfectly genuine. The sense of a need and a desire to pose is visibly weighing on Hugo's genius. We miss the nimble flight of the early Légende' or of Contemplations.' We do not find perfect naturalness even in 'L'Art d'être Grand'père.' His vein now is to roll out immense and universal ideas in verse which is at times a bathos, at others greatly impressive.

So that here we come back to the primary and essential defect in Hugo's character and genius which we spoke of at the outset, and which, whether or no we are conscious of it the whole time we are reading him, must always affect our judgement and the impression we carry away. He cannot get rid of himself. In his dramas and his novels he cannot utterly lose himself in his creations. In almost all his poetry he has a subconsciousness of an expecting and admiring crowd, and he therefore never reaches the sim