(Hernani) and Dona Sol is celebrated at his father's palace. The guests withdraw, the lovers are left alone, when suddenly and unexpectedly the fatal horn is heard summoning Hernani from happiness to death. In vain Hernani implores a short delay. The stern old man appears and, insisting upon his right, presents a vial of poison, which Dona Sol seizes, drinks half, and gives the rest to Hernani. Don Silva repents his hardness too late, and ends the play by killing himself. 66 Hernani" violates almost every rule of the old French stage. Cadence and arrangement of the classical Alexandrine are audaciously reconstructed-the whole balance and rhythm of the individual line is altered, The language and versification are nervous, pliant, poetical, resulting in terse and vigorous expression. In no play is Hugo's verse finer or firmer. Yet the beauties of the play are more lyrical than dramatic. Full of force and freshness, with rapid action the lyric fervor of its language is intoxicating; and only in sober second thought are its weak points seen. body sparing the life of somebody, until the last, wherein all except Charles V. die. Each act ends with some Hernani was read before the Committee of the Théâtre Français Oct. 1, 1829, and produced Feb. 25, 1830, precipitating the first battle between the classicists and the romanticists. The fight was renewed at every performance; every line was hissed. The play was continued before a crowded theater for five and forty nights, until June 18, 1830, when it was withdrawn. The triumph of "Hernani" accomplished a literary revolution. Every succeeding play of Hugo's aroused most violent discussion. "The King's Diversion" (1832) was prohibited by Louis Philippe, after the first performance. He declared it immoral. The real reason was that it represented Francis I. as immoral. Hugo vainly sought redress from the courts. The chief character of the play, Triboulet, is a most hideous and repulsive man, horribly misshapen physically and living on the lowest social plane, yet possessing a soul capable of the purest human sentiment-paternal love. Indifferent to the suffering of others, and hopelessly mean, he, however, arouses our sympathy as we behold his terrible anguish, when in his vengeance exulting over the body of a supposed enemy, he finds he has placed his own child into the hands of the murderer. The climax can hardly be called an exhibition of human nature; it is rather a horrible nightmare that haunts us in spite of all attempts to banish it. The play presents a mingling of the grotesque and tragic as striking as the crowding of imps and saints on a cathedral tower. It does not greatly differ in form and in spirit from “ Hernani," but reaches greater passion. The play was revived fifty years after its first performance. In the preface to "Cromwell" Hugo declared verse the fit vehicle for dramatic expression. Nevertheless in 1833-35 he produced three prose dramas, "Lucretia Bor"Marie Tudor," and gia,” Angelo." In the preface to "Lucretia Borgia" he declares that "the drama has, within the limits of art, a national, social, and human mission to fulfil. People when they leave the theater should carry along some profound moral." Lucretia Borgia," a melodrama, has for its chief character a mother paralleled only by the father Triboulet in "The King's Diversion." A most hideous, repulsive, and deformed soul is placed where it can best show its ugliness-in the person of a woman (Lucretia) endowed with great physical beauty and regal grandeur. Yet this monster of wickedness is capable of the holy sentiment of maternal love; and, in spite of her depravity, awakens our sympathy for her maternal anguish, and makes clear the sacredness of maternity. "Marie Tudor" (1833) is not even a good melodrama. Without unity, seldom interesting, entirely without humor, it is a caricature of history, passing over really dramatic events of that time to present vulgar impossibilities. 66 Angelo" (1835), one of Hugo's early attempts to clothe a commonplace person with wonderful attributes, is inferior to "Lucretia Borgia," but superior to "Marie Tudor." Without distorting history it tells a simple and pathetic story and aims to present universal femininity in two types: (1) The woman in society, and (2) the woman out of society. There are also two men, one regardless of conventionalities in his relations to women, the other obedient always to the laws imposed by society. The play moves rapidly and is full of exciting situations, intense passion, set forth in brilliant and sparkling language. The chaste patrician lady is contrasted with Tisbe, the lawless woman of the public, in affecting situa tions. Hugo, more freely in this than in previous plays, employs mysterious devices. "Esmeralda" (1836), a lyric dramatization of "Notre Dame de Paris," is a striking series of fantasies in black and white. "Ruy Blas," a beautiful tragedy laid in Spain and dealing with Spanish characters, shows more than other recent writings Hugo's earlier style. The continual strife between the aspirations of the nobility, and those of the people, is set forth in the dramatic story of a lackey, Ruy Blas, who, under an assumed name, rises to the highest state dignities finding requital for his pure and reverent love of the unhappy queen. The lovers are Hugo's invention, but the picture of the Spanish court in the reign of Charles II. is in many respects historical, except that what is ascribed to Charles II.'s second wife was not true of her but of his first wife, a French princess who died shortly after her marriage. Hugo uses contrasts to produce his effects. The chief characters are a queen, virtually a prisoner, a nobleman, a beggar, and a lackey. The villain, Don César de Bazan, a disgraced nobleman, plots to compromise the queen, who, however, is saved at the cost of his life by Ruy Blas. The first act is better dramatic structure than Hugo has yet shown; the second act is disappointing; the absurd climax of the third act is redeemed by a most eloquent declamation, comparable only to that spoken by Charles at the tomb of Charlemagne, in the fourth act Hugo attempts a farcical interlude, but his wit is elephantine; the pathos of the lyrical passages of the fifth act entrances, many of the lines being of Corneillian force. The light and wholesome humor which kept Hugo's metrical dramas from the exaggerations and extravagances of his prose plays runs throughout "Ruy Blas" in the fourth act, and in one or two of "Marion Delorme's " scenes. After these efforts Hugo made no other attempt at any form of comedy. Comparing "Ruy Blas" and "Hernani," to which it stands second in popularity, one finds, notwithstanding the beautifully poetic love-passages of "Ruy Blas," impossible situations that must always prevent its equaling "Hernani's" hold on the public. "Les Burgraves," the most ambitious of Hugo's dramas, uses the family as the symbol of expiation. By taking four generations, living a strange and almost royal life in a moldering castle, Hugo endeavors to set forth the degradation of races, and to construct out of this philosophic abstraction a palpable, impressive dramatic reality. The result is Hugo's noblest poem, but poorest play, with uninteresting plot and undramatic ending. The characters are too colossal to be accepted in a mere play as flesh and blood. They might be accepted in a Wagnerian opera. They are on a plane so different from that on which we move and have our being that we can not accept them as portraying a humanity common with our Still the drama compels admiration, some of its parts being exquisite. Though a favorite with many of Hugo's admirers, it has never been revived. Every year, however, scenes from it are enacted in Paris by persons preparing for the stage. own. For the ten years following "Les Burgraves," Hugo, stung by its failure, wrote no more plays, but occupied himself with politics. Hugo's final legacy to the world, "Torquemada" (1882), he overestimated. It is unsuited for the stage, and should be classed with his philosophic rather than with his dramatic writings. III. Hugo's Prose. Hugo's prose may be classified under two heads: I. Novels. II. Political and Oratorical Writings. I. Novels. Hugo's novels may be divided into two periods: Period I.-1818-1862. To Period I. (1818-1862) belongs one masterpiece, "Notre Dame de Paris," which, with Bug Jargal' (1818, 1826) and "Hans of Iceland" (1823), founded a new school in descriptive, grotesque, humorous, architectural style of fiction. Necromancy and astrology wreathe fantastic figures around the great doorway of Notre Dame, the center of the scenes so vividly portrayed in "Notre Dame de Paris." Hugo sees and causes us to see the mediæval city,-a picturesque huddle of irregular buildings, its narrow streets all Rembrandt glooms and gleams; the quaint overhanging houses each with its own face; the churches and convents upflinging their spires and towers, and chief of, and above all, the mighty cathedral. "Notre Dame de Paris" is a wonderfully . imaginative and original work, at its best when Hugo, leaving the thread of narrative, tells of ancient Paris, of the cathedral, of the wily and perverse Louis XI., or of the relations of medieval architecture to the invention of printing. According to Hugo, the printing of books superseded the building of cathedrals. His theory is that the printing-press gave vent to expression till then, resulting in architecture embellished with marvelously complicated and grotesque carvings, whereby people gave form to ideas and passions and emotions, good and bad, uplifting and down-pulling. To select this grand structure for the scene of his story is a master-stroke of originality. To us of the present day the world Hugo gathered about Notre Dame was a miniature world only, but to those then living it was a real world, for to them the world was France, France was Paris, and Paris was the Cathedral. We of the New World can hardly realize how Europeans focus their entire nations into their capitals. "Notre Dame de Paris," an eloquent condemnation of capital punishment, a sermon against celibacy, an effort to inspire people with a love for their national monuments, and a fine 15th century guide-book of Paris, deals with the workings of fate, in whose toils the chief characters are inextricably caught. With the exception of the deaf, one-eyed hunchback bell-ringer, all of the characters are fictitious. The book contains no tenderness; love itself is a delirium, and pity is so qualified with horror that there is no softness in it. The story is of Esmeralda -a foundling-brought up within the walls of Notre Dame, that mighty building dating from the 11th century, enriched with 13th century glass, and around whose portals Hugo weaves a phantasmagoria in which a trained goat plays an important part, everywhere accompanying Esmeralda, the beautiful, innocent, and incorruptible gipsy of sixteen, a singer and dancer, loved by a priest fiercely, by a soldier gaily, by a hunchback monster passionately, and finally executed as sorceress through the unwitting intervention of her own mother. What a motley medley of human creatures throng the place! Here is the great guild of beggar-thieves tatterdemalion and shamelessly grotesque; here is Gringoire, the outat-elbows unsuccessful rhymer of the time. Esmeralda, accompanied by her goat, lays down her mat, and dances lightly, grace fully, to her tambourine. See how the gossips whisper of witchcraft as the goat plays its pretty tricks. Who is that grave priest, lean from long vigils of study, who stands watching the girl's every motion with eye of somber flame? Close behind, in attendance on the priest, is a figure scarcely human, deformed, hideous, whose one cyclops eye is fastened on the girl. Among the bystanders may be seen the priest's brother, Jehan, the Paris student of the town-sparrow type that has existed from the days of Villon even until now. Before the dancer has collected her spare harvest of small coins, a soldier troop rides roughly by, hustling the crowd, and in the captain the poor child recognizes the man who had saved her from violence some days before -the man to whom alas! she has given her heart. In such a group as this what elements of tragedy lie lurking and ready to leap forth? That priest, in his guilty passion, will forswear his priestly vows, stab the soldier, and, failing to compass his guilty ends, give over the poor child-dancer to torture and death. The deformed cyclops, seeing the priest's fiendish laughter as they both stand on the top of Notre Dame tower, will guess him the cause of her doom, and hurl him over the parapet. The student, too, will be entangled in the tragic chains by which these human creatures are bound together. His shattered carcass will dangle from one of the sculptured ornaments on the front of the cathedral. "Les Misérables (1862)-divided into Part I. Fantine; Part II. Cosette; Part III. Marius; Part IV. Idyl of Rue Plumet and the Epic of Rue St. Denis; Part V. Jean Valjean-translated into twelve languages and published simultaneously at Paris, London, Brussels, New York, Madrid, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Turin, shows a change in Hugo's political and social views. Its theme is the rehabilitation of the human soul. Society is blamed that wretched women take to the streets, and that prisons are tolerated into which men enter innocent and unfortunate, to leave hardened ruffians. Jean Valjean, the central figure, a simple, hard-working peasant, steals bread for his sister's starving children and is sentenced to the galleys for five years, his term being lengthened to nineteen years owing to his attempts to escape. The story introduces him at the lowest point of hardened, brutal viciousness, just released from imprison ment and vainly begging. He startles the venerable Bishop Myriel, about to eat supper, by knocking and entering, crying loudly, "My name is Jean Valjean!" He tells his story, is invited to partake of food and to stay the night, but rewards his benefactor by stealing his silver. The bishop, when the police bring Jean before him next day, comprehending the man's condition, calmly offers him two candle-sticks, saying, "Why did you not take these too with the other things that I gave you?" Then, after the police go, he addresses Jean, "My brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I have bought. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God." Jean is not only saved from a life-sentence to the galleys, but a new era in his life dawns. His meditations, as he sits on a stone on the roadside, are interrupted by a happy little street-urchin, who, tossing coins, lets one fall near Jean, who covers it with his foot and meets the demand for the coin by asking the boy's name. The boy runs off in a fright. Jean suddenly shudders, seizes the money and runs off, calling the boy's name, and finally falls down and weeps bitterly, the first time in nineteen years. Henceforth he is a changed man, and he devotes himself to good works. Jean appears next as M. Madeleine, a wealthy manufacturer, philanthropist, and mayor of a town. He befriends Fantine, an abandoned grisette, who, trying to live an honest life and support her child, is discharged from the factory when her history is known. She vainly tries to get work, and is driven to sell her hair, her teeth, and finally herself. Jean interferes when she is about to be arrested, and sends her to the hospital to be treated for a fatal disease, doing all he can to give her comfort and cheer. With a prospect of a long and useful life, Jean is confronted by Javert, chief of police, his bitterest enemy, and a man of but two ideas-detection and retribution. Honest and upright, he is utterly pitiless toward the criminal classes. He suspects Jean, and watches him as he informs him of the arrest of a peasant for robbing an orchard. He declares the peasant to be the old offender Jean Valjean, and that he will receive life sentence. The real Jean faces a terrific temptation. Duty and self-preservation struggle for He escapes from the galleys after saving a sailor from drowning. He rescues Cosette from sordid innkeepers to whom her mother had entrusted her. He goes to Paris still pursued by fate-Javert discovers him. Chased through the streets, he jumps over a convent wall and is befriended by the gardener whose life he had saved. To this peaceful resort Jean brings Cosette to be cared for by the Sisters. The convent life and Jean's love for Cosette complete the work of regeneration; but years later, when, developed into a beautiful woman, she has become the solace of his life, he is called upon to make a supreme sacrifice and resign her to the man she loves. 66 66 99 66 In this complicated history is a thread on which are strung many-colored beadsantiquarian lore, political reminiscences, social vaticinations, realistic slumming. Hugo introduces us to the night side of humanity. We walk among convicts, courtesans, burglars, beggars, paupers, conspirators; we visit low taverns, prisons, cheap boarding-houses, barricades, hulks, and sewers. But we have welcome contrasts in "Gavroche, the Gamin of Paris," Argot," 'Nunneries," Sewers of Paris"; and in the political parts, "Waterloo," "All Nobility," and "Louis Philippe." The portrait of Bishop Myriel, who personifies charity, is a charming and well-shaded study. The bishop's tour among the mountain robbers displays a courage more saintly than masculine. The scene with the two lost children, and the night among the rats in the sides of the big elephant, are perfectly drawn. Historical personages pass along as living-Napoleon, Louis Philippe, and the nobility of France. The women characters are weak. Except Cosette, they attract little attention and still less admiration. Even Cosette scarcely gets beyond butterfly development. With men, however, Hugo is at home. In them he displays mastery in mental analy |