Nature that could be traced in the "Autumn Leaves." Here is his first song of the sea, which no French poet has loved and rendered as he has done. Here, too, is that striking picture of Nature as a nursing mother, symbolized in "La Vache." Even where we might listen for the "brazen cord," as in "Sunt Lachrymæ Rerum" or "À l'Arc de Triomphe" we catch rather an elegiac than a Pindaric strain. And yet one must go back to the "Orientales" to find such vigor and grace of language, such pregnant and picturesque lines as are set like jewels in some of these descriptive lyrics.

One more volume, "Sunbeams and Shadows," completes the poetic output of the first period. Though published after the German journey, it bears little trace of a changed temper or broadened mind. Here, even more than in the "Inner Voices," one finds selfrestraint, delicacy of touch, less of the thunder, more of the murmuring brook and whispering breeze.1 The satire, too, is dominated by the generous warmth of universal sympathy, a little shallow in its breadth, that was to give the key-note to his political activity in the next decade. It was by this that his genius was diverted from the stage and the lyre to the tribune and to political agitation. The ten years from 1843 to 1853 are marked by no literary work of import. But when destiny, kind in its apparent harshness, sent Hugo into exile and so gave him back to literature, it was seen how essentially this experience had enriched and deepened his nature. Indeed, when he turned to politics, the best that was in him to give was not only ungiven but unsuspected and unrealized.

1 The most striking pieces of this type are "Tristesse d'Olympio," "La Statue," the verses on Palestrina, and the account of his boyhood at the Feuillantines (Les Rayons et les ombres, nos. 34, 36, 35, 19).

CHAPTER VII.

HUGO IN EXILE AND IN TRIUMPH.

THE decade that separates "Les Burgraves" from "Les Châtiments" marks a vital change in the mind of Victor Hugo and in the character of his work. Even the most superficial examination of the kind and amount of his production makes this obvious. In the first fifty years of his life drama takes the first place, there is more poetry than fiction, and nearly a quarter of the whole bulk is made up of miscellaneous travels, memoirs, and essays. In the second period fiction advances to the first place; poetry is immediately behind, and is closely followed by political satires and pamphlets, which are hardly literature in the highest sense, though they often contain pages of the greatest eloquence. Essays and the drama count but one volume each. The lyric was now recognized as the best field for the display of his powers, and even in the prose fiction it takes a much larger place than in "Notre-Dame" or "Bug-Jargal." 1

In all departments the work of the second period shows a new strength and earnestness. The causes . of this added depth and force are to be sought in his

1 The "édition définitive," from which all citations are here made, counts seventy volumes, including the autobiographical "V. Hugo raconté." Of these twenty-six are prior, thirty-four posterior, to 1852. Poetry counts, respectively, six and fourteen volumes; fiction, five and fifteen; drama, nine and one; political prose, two and ten; miscellaneous prose, four and four.

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MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE of Leopold

1849 Rea

domestic and political experiences. The death of his daughter Léopoldine, drowned with her young husband at Villequier in 1843, was the first great sorrow of his life, and left an impression as enduring and as fruitful as the loss of Hallam on Tennyson. It was perhaps to escape from these sorrowful meditations that he sought distraction in the struggles of the political arena, to which his untrained but generous mind was attracted by the socialism of Proudhon and Fourier, who had roused in the substratum of French thought a vague but intense enthusiasm that was presently to find expression in the Revolution of 1848. From 1835 one can trace an increasing democratic tendency in Hugo's writing. His interest in politics grows yearly more active; and when he is received into the Academy in 1841, his inaugural address is political rather than literary. That Louis Philippe made him a peer in 1845 did not change his sympathies, and the Revolutionists promptly elected him a member of their Constituent Assembly in 1848.

One cannot view Hugo's career as a practical politician with much satisfaction, though the Revolution was not so fatal to him as to Lamartine. At first, power or the presage of danger that lay in the incongruous composition of the Assembly itself caused in him a conservative reaction. He favored Louis Napoleon, and opposed all the economic schemes of the radicals, though he refused to sanction political prosecutions and pleaded eloquently for the abolition of the death penalty. Yet in the next year the caressing flattery of Girardin dexterously converted him into a radical orator and journalist, most vehement to adore what he had burned and burn what he had adored. But his bitter and eloquent attacks on Napoleon and Mon

talembert could be tellingly answered by quotations from his own speeches; and this made him distrusted by his new allies, while he seemed grieved at their suspicion, and quite unconscious of the deviousness of his course. 1

Thus the coup d'état of 1851 was a moral good fortune for Hugo. It saved him from himself, and made of one who seemed a political turn-coat and visionary a martyr and a hero whose voice penetrated from his island exile into every corner of France. His "Histoire d'un crime" is an eloquent account of those stirring days, but it shows how his efforts to organize resistance to the usurped authority of the false Bonaparte were distrusted by his fellow Republicans. He fled to Brussels, whence the Belgian government soon invited him to move to the more hospitable protection of England. He took up his residence as near France as possible, in the Channel Islands, first in Jersey, then, at the suggestion of the English government, in Guernsey, till the collapse of the Second Empire at

Sedan brought him back to his country to share the en

darkest days of the young Republic's "Terrible Year."England.

He had consistently scorned every offer of amnesty from the successful adventurer whose perjury he had branded, and he remained to the last true to the ringing words of his early exile: "Though but one remain unreconciled, that one shall be I." 2

These years of exile steeled his mind to greater hardness. The temper of his arms was first revealed by the presence of a powerful and despised enemy. His patriotism found new fire in his country's shame. Already in 1852 he had given a foretaste of his mor

1 See Biré, V. Hugo après 1830, ii. 116–204.

2 Et s'il n'en reste qu'un, je serai celui-là. (Les Châtiments, p. 349.)

Les

dant wrath both in justifying a joint appeal to insurrection that had been issued by the radical leaders, and in the pamphlet "Napoléon le petit," whose scurrilousness is excused both by its vigor and its subject. But these paled before "Les Châtiments," in which the lyric unites with the satiric to produce a classic that will long survive the Empire that evoked it.

This book, like Napoléon le petit," enjoyed the advertisement of police prohibition during the whole imperial period, and no doubt contributed materially

nurse the spirit that brought the Second Empire to the disaster that justified the poet's severity. But exile gave him calmer hours also, and to these we owe the "Contemplations," a collection of lyrics similar to "Les Rayons et les ombres," but closing in a nobler strain; while a little later, in 1857, Hugo is able to show, in his first "Legend of the Centuries," the highwater mark of his achievement in the lyrical epic. Then, in 1862, the long-expected romance "Les Misérables" justified the intent expectation of ten nations,for nine translations appeared on the same day as the

i original, an event unparalleled till then in the annals

of fiction. This interest was judiciously whetted in 1863 by the unavowed autobiography, and in 1864 he essayed once more what he called literary criticism in "William Shakespeare," an introduction to a translation of the English poet, and, as was to be anticipated, much more visionary and oracular than logical or precise.

Then follows the Indian summer of Hugo's muse, his "Chansons des rues et des bois," to be succeeded by another social and pseudo-philosophic novel, “The Toilers of the Sea." He was now so unquestionably the foremost of French writers that the Empire could not well get along without him, and visitors to the