more chivalrous and characteristic than the fact that Victor
Hugo refused to allow the play which had been prohibited by
the government of Charles X. to be instantly produced under
the government of his supersessor. Le Roi s’amuse (1832),
the next play which Hugo gave to the stage, was prohibited
by order of Louis Philippe after a tumultuous first night—to
reappear fifty years later on the very same day of the same
month, under the eyes of its author, with atoning acclamation
from a wider audience than the first. Terror and pity had never
found on the stage word or expression which so exactly realized
the ideal aim of tragic poetry among the countrymen of Aeschylus
and Sophocles since the time or since the passing of Shakespeare,
of Marlowe and of Webster. The tragedy of Lucrèce Borgia,
coequal in beauty and power with its three precursors, followed
next year in the humbler garb of prose; but the prose of Victor
Hugo stands higher on the record of poetry than the verse of
any lesser dramatist or poet. Marie Tudor (1833), his next
play, was hardly more daring in its Shakespearean defiance of
historic fact, and hardly more triumphant in its Shakespearean
loyalty to the everlasting truth of human character and passion.
Angelo, Tyran de Padoue (1835), the last of the tragic triad to
which their creator denied the transfiguration of tragic verse,
is inferior to neither in power of imagination and of style, in
skill of invention and construction, and in mastery over all
natural and noble sources of pity and of terror. La Esmeralda,
the libretto of an opera founded on his great tragic romance
of Notre-Dame de Paris, is a miracle of lyric melody and of
skilful adaptation. Ruy Blas (1838) was written in verse,
and in such verse as none but he could write. In command
and in expression of passion and of pathos, of noble and of evil
nature, it equals any other work of this great dramatic poet;
in the lifelike fusion of high comedy with deep tragedy it excels
them all. Les Burgraves, a tragic poem of transcendent beauty
in execution and imaginative audacity in conception, found
so little favour on the stage that the author refused to submit
his subsequent plays to the verdict of a public audience.
Victor Hugo’s first mature work in prose fiction, Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, has appeared thirteen years earlier (1829). As a tragic monodrama it is incomparable for sustained power and terrible beauty. The story of Claude Gueux, published five years later (1834), another fervent protest against the infliction of capital punishment, was followed by many other eloquent and passionate appeals to the same effect, written or spoken on various occasions which excited the pity or the indignation of the orator or the poet. In 1831 appeared the greatest of all tragic or historic or romantic poems in the form of prose narrative, Notre-Dame de Paris. Three years afterwards the author published, under the title of Littérature et philosophie mêlées, a compilation or selection of notes and essays ranging and varying in date and in style from his earliest effusions of religious royalism to the magnificent essay on Mirabeau which represents at once the historical opinion and the critical capacity of Victor Hugo at the age of thirty-two. Next year he published Le Rhin, a series of letters from Germany, brilliant and vivid beyond all comparison, containing one of the most splendid stories for children ever written, and followed by a political supplement rather pathetically unprophetic in its predictions.
At the age of thirty-eight he honoured the French Academy by taking his place among its members; the speech delivered on the occasion was characteristically generous in its tribute to an undeserving memory, and significantly enthusiastic in its glorification of Napoleon. Idolatry of his father’s hero and leader had now superseded the earlier superstition inculcated by his mother. In 1846 his first speech in the chamber of peers—Louis Philippe’s House of Lords—was delivered on behalf of Poland; his second, on the subject of coast defence, is memorable for the evidence it bears of careful research and practical suggestion. His pleading on behalf of the exiled family of Bonaparte induced Louis Philippe to cancel the sentence which excluded its members from France. After the fall and flight of the house of Orleans, his parliamentary eloquence was never less generous in aim and always as fervent in its constancy to patriotic and progressive principle. When the conspiring forces of clerical venality and political prostitution had placed a putative Bonaparte in power attained by perjury after perjury, and supported by massacre after massacre, Victor Hugo, in common with all honourable men who had ever taken part in political or public life under the government superseded by force of treason and murder, was driven from his country into an exile of well-nigh twenty years. Next year he published Napoléon le petit; twenty-five years afterwards, Histoire d’un crime. In these two books his experience and his opinion of the tactics which founded the second French empire stand registered for all time. In the deathless volume of Châtiments, which appeared in 1853, his indignation, his genius, and his faith found such utterance and such expression as must recall to the student alternately the lyric inspiration of Coleridge and Shelley, the prophetic inspiration of Dante and Isaiah, the satiric inspiration of Juvenal and Dryden. Three years after Les Châtiments, a book written in lightning, appeared Les Contemplations, a book written in sunlight and starlight. Of the six parts into which it is divided, the first translates into many-sided music the joys and sorrows, the thoughts and fancies, the studies and ardours and speculations of youth; the second, as full of light and colour, grows gradually deeper in tone of thought and music; the third is yet riper and more various in form of melody and in fervour of meditation; the fourth is the noblest of all tributes ever paid by song to sorrow—a series of poems consecrated to the memory of the poet’s eldest daughter, who was drowned, together with her husband, by the upsetting of a boat off the coast of Normandy, a few months after their wedding-day, in 1843; the fifth and the sixth books, written during his first four years of exile (all but one noble poem which bears date nine years earlier than its epilogue or postscript), contain more than a few poems unsurpassed and unsurpassable for depth and clarity and trenchancy of thought, for sublimity of inspiration, for intensity of faith, for loyalty in translation from nature, and for tenderness in devotion to truth; crowned and glorified and completed by their matchless dedication to the dead. Three years later again, in 1859, Victor Hugo gave to the world the first instalment of the greatest book published in the 19th century, La Légende des siècles. Opening with a vision of Eve in Paradise which eclipses Milton’s in beauty no less than in sublimity—a dream of the mother of mankind at the hour when she knew the first sense of dawning motherhood, it closes with a vision of the trumpet to be sounded on the day of judgment which transcends the imagination of Dante by right of a realized idea which was utterly impossible of conception to a believer in Dante’s creed: the idea of real and final equity; the concept of absolute and abstract righteousness. Between this opening and this close the pageant of history and of legend, marshalled and vivified by the will and the hand of the poet, ranges through an infinite variety of action and passion, of light and darkness, of terror and pity, of lyric rapture and of tragic triumph.
After yet another three years’ space the author of La Légende des siècles reappeared as the author of Les Misérables, the greatest epic and dramatic work of fiction ever created or conceived: the epic of a soul transfigured and redeemed, purified by heroism and glorified through suffering; the tragedy and the comedy of life at its darkest and its brightest, of humanity at its best and at its worst. Two years afterwards the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare paid homage to the greatest of his predecessors in a volume of magnificent and discursive eloquence which bore the title of William Shakespeare, and might, as its author admitted and suggested, more properly have been entitled À propos de Shakespeare. It was undertaken with the simple design of furnishing a preface to his younger son’s translation of Shakespeare; a monument of perfect scholarship, of indefatigable devotion, and of literary genius, which eclipses even Urquhart’s Rabelais—its only possible competitor; and to which the translator’s father prefixed a brief and admirable note of introduction in the year after the
