translate into action. More than any French lyric or epic poet that preceded him, and more than any that has yet followed, he continues to hold the great public. All schools of modern verse that have arisen in the last-half century may call him "father," and he will long continue to form the rhetorical and poetical taste of French youth. And it is well that it should be so; for, as one of the younger critics of our day has said, "While others have troubled, weakened, disenchanted the human heart, Hugo has reassured, established, encouraged it. He has communicated to it something of his own robust and obstinate virtue.” 1

1 Pellissier, p. 277.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE EVOLUTION OF HISTORY AND CRITICISM.

IT has been said that during the latter period of his life Hugo barred but did not deflect the current of literary evolution. We have now to examine what was the nature and direction of that current; and if, as seems certain, the predominating influence has been scientific, it is by studying those departments of literature that are most closely related to science that we shall gain the clew to the course of development in the regions of pure art. Never has literature been more under the influence of philosophy, never have critics been more frankly recognized as the guides and representatives of French culture. It is to these that the literature of our scientific age looks for guidance and inspiration, just as the Romantic period lent the intoxication of its imagination to history, which under the new spirit has almost ceased to belong to literature at all. The Romantic historians, then, will form the most suitable starting-point for an investigation of the general trend of poetry, drama, and fiction during the generation of Hugo's exile and triumph.1

One of the direct results of the impulse given to letters by De Staël and Chateaubriand was the enfran

1 Of course it is only with historians, philosophers, or critics, in their relation to literature, that we have to do; hence Cousin and Comte are passed over, while Taine and Renan take a prominent place; hence, too, Michelet occupies the chief place among historians, while Martin is not named.

chisement of historical curiosity, for one cannot yet call it science; and this curiosity was greatly stimulated by the political conditions that accompanied the rise of the Romantic School. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries history, even that of France, had been much neglected; but the children of the Revolution were eager to know the wrongs and struggles of their ancestors, and hailed with enthusiasm the romances of Walter Scott and Chateaubriand's brilliant "Martyrs." Signs of an historical revival multiply in the decade preceding the Revolution of 1830. Great collections of memoirs were printed;1 and these, with the accumulated treasures of the Benedictines, were philosophically and scientifically analyzed by Guizot and De Tocqueville, who belong rather to history than to literature, as do Thiers and Mignet, though the latter has much art in the luminous grouping of details.

Such part of the work of Augustin Thierry 2 as was inspired by his sympathy with the bourgeois monarchy of the Orleanists falls also outside our limits, but he was early diverted by the affectionate study of mediæval documents to a more artistic end. He who had spent his youth devouring the pages of Chateaubriand and his young manhood in the eager study of Walter Scott, in whom, as he himself tells us, "Ivanhoe caused transports of enthusiasm, was now to communicate that same enthusiasm to his countrymen by his "Stories of the Merovingians" and his "Conquest

1 Some two hundred and thirty volumes in all, among them the Mémoires de Saint-Simon.

2 Born 1795; died 1856. The "Lettres sur l'histoire de France," 1827. Études historiques,” 1834, and “ Histoire du tiers-état,” 1853, hardly belong to literature.

of England." It was his mission, he said, “to plant in France the banner of historical reform, to wage war alike on the writers without learning to see and the writers without imagination to reproduce," who "travestied facts, denaturalized characters, and overlaid all with a color as vague as it was false." The seventeenth century had treated history as literature, the eighteenth called it philosophical; Thierry made it scientific by a profound study of the sources, and literary by the life with which he infused the relics of a forgotten past. To Voltaire Merovingian history had been a "bear-garden." Thierry's imagination constructed from it a series of elaborate pictures to which every available document had contributed its detail of feature, dress, or manners; while to it all he added a sympathy with the people and with the popular cause that would have been impossible in pre-Revolutionary France.

The same picturesqueness is found in Barante, and the same sympathy with the oppressed; but the greatest evoker of the past that the Romantic School or indeed France ever produced is Michelet,1 who both by birth and sympathy represented the democratic and anti-clerical masses, as Guizot and Thiers did the Orleanist bourgeoisie. But in him more than in any other historian of France literary imagination inter

1 Born 1798; died 1874. He was the son of a printer of Paris, and began literary work by a summary, " Précis de l'histoire moderne, 1828." His most noteworthy historical works are. Procès des templiers, 18411852; La Sorcière, 1862; Histoire de France, 28 vols., 1833-1867; Histoire du xix. siècle, 1876; and outside the historical field, L'Oiseau, 1856; L'Insecte, 1857; L'Amour, 1858; La Femme, 1859; La Mer, 1861; La Montagne, 1868.

Criticism: Corread, Michelet (Classiques populaires); Faguet, xix. siècle; Saintsbury, in Encylopædia Britannica.

penetrates and vivifies vast erudition, till in the alembic of his mind documents become poetry and history intuition. At the rifled cathedral tombs of Saint Denis he feels and makes us feel the dead kings beneath the marble slabs, till like genii they rise before our fancy, — Dagobert, Chilperic, and "the fair, the blond, the terrible Fredegonde." His palpitating sympathy makes him contemporary of each epoch as he writes of it. He thrills now with the faith of Bernard, now with the patriotism of the Maid of Orleans; with the Reformation he becomes a Protestant, and a democratic iconoclast with the Revolution. Like Carlyle, he is always present in his history, explaining, animating, pleading. The rush of his narration so carries away the reader that serious omissions pass unheeded and inaccuracies of style are forgiven. The whole is delightful, stimulating, for all its obvious faults of proportion, and in spite of special pleading that would be disingenuous if one did not feel that with him, as with Carlyle, the prejudice and the hate are part of the man that it would change his whole nature to eliminate.

To him France is an entity, a living being. It is "a soul and a personality" of which he undertakes the history. Hence he is led to study with peculiar care those traces that climate and physical environment have left on racial character. He delights to paint the common people in their daily life, making the heroic natural and the sublime comprehensible by the minute reality of his sympathetic art, that from myriad documentary details could give past centuries new birth. Through his official position as guardian of the National Archives he found open to him an almost unexplored mine, rich in precious details of mediaval manners, which under another's hand might have re