164 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS that had simulated quiet unawares, and clothed itself with vineyards and villages. In the tranquil days when Louis-Philippe plotted and pottered, and France lay dormant, amusing her restrained spirit with the outbreak of the romantic against the classical, and taking pleasure in the burst of genius which had arisen suddenly and unawares in her midst, the poet was so little dissatisfied with the bourgeois re- gime that he accepted the title of " pair de France." Montalembert had received it some time before. There must have been something soothing, not inharmoni- ous to the poetical mind, in the slumbrous reign which gradually became intol- erable to the commonalty and got itself into contempt with all the world. The young poets of the time were peaceful, not discontented. Full of energy as they were, they took no part in the gathering storm. Hugo, a peer, tranquil in the superior chamber ; young De Musset, a courtier of the Duke of Orleans, and hoping for the king's notice of his verses. The eruption was preparing, the sub- terranean fires alight ; but the sons of genius took no notice. When the tre- mendous awakening came, it must, in the case of Hugo at least, have gained additional force from the long restraint. He was in the height of life, a man of forty-six, the leader of the romantic school, which by that time had overcome opposition and won the freedom for which it contended, the author of " Her- nani " and the other great plays which form one of his chief titles to fame, and of volumes of lyrics which had taken the very heart of the French people, and given a new development to the language. And it was also during this peaceful period that he had taken in another direction a first step of unexampled power and brilliancy in the romance of " Notre Dame." Even among men of acknowl- edged genius, few have done so much in a lifetime as Victor Hugo had done up to this break in his career. We are so accustomed to the attitude of demagogue which he took afterward, to the violent revolutionary, the furious exile, the de- nunciatory prophet of the " Chatiments," that it is strange to realize that his later aspect was prefaced by a long, peaceful, and prosperous beginning. France had never seen a more magnificent band than that which surrounded him, and which has made the reign of the Rot-bourgeois illustrious in spite of itself ; and it is curi- ous to mark that these great intelligences did not object to their ruler nor to his ways, but lived like good citizens, with but an occasional fling at semi-sentimen- tal politics. Hugo was the champion of abstract right in all the discussions in which he took part. He it was who proposed, among other things, that the Bonaparte family should be permitted to return to France. Perhaps, had he been less abstract and logical, and more moved by the laws of expediency, it might have been better both for France and for himself. The plays which he produced in this time of prosperous calm and apparent peace are without question the most remarkable dramatic works of this century, and several of them will, we have no doubt, take their place permanently among the few of all ages and countries which the world will not willingly let die. While these plays were being written, and the mind of their author reaching its full development, the fountains of pure poetry, those outbursts of song which are often the most delightful and dear of all the utterances of the poet, were flow
