of his day. It has been given to few or none to live a life so full of effort and achievement, so rich in honour and success and fame. Born almost with the century, he was a writer at fifteen, and at his death he was writing still; so that the record of his career embraces a period of more than sixty years. There is hardly a department of art to a foremost place in which he did not prove his right. From first to last, from the time of Chateaubriand to the time of Zola, he was a leader of men; and with his departure from the scene the undivided sovereignty of literature became a thing of the past like Alexander's empire.

IN vocation

N 1826, in a second set of Odes et

Ballades, he announced his vocation in unmistakeable terms. He was a lyric poet and the captain of a new emprise. His genius was too large and energetic to move at ease in the narrow garment prescribed as the poet's wear by the dullards and the pedants who had followed Boileau. He began to repeat the rhythms of Ronsard and the Pleiad; to deal in the richest rhymes and in words and verses tricked

with new-spangled ore; to be curious in cadences, careless of stereotyped rules, prodigal of invention and experiment, defiant of much long recognised as good sense, contemptuous of much till then applauded as good taste. In a word, he was the Hugo of the hundred volumes we know: an artist, that is, endowed with a technical imagination of the highest quality, the very genius of style, and a sense of the plastic quality of words unequalled, perhaps, since Milton. The time was ripe for him: within France and without it was big with revolution. In verse there were the examples of André Chénier and Lamartine; in prose the work of Rousseau and Diderot, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand; in war and politics the tremendous tradition of Napoleon. Goethe and Schiller had recreated romance and established the foundations of a new palace of art; their theory and practice had been popularised in the novels of Walter Scott; and in the life and work of Byron the race had such an example of revolt, such an incitement to liberty and change, such a passionate and persuasive argument against authority and convention, as had never before been felt in art. Hugo

like all great artists was essentially a child of his age: 'Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.' In 1827 he published his Cromwell, and came forth as a rebel confessed and unashamed. It is an unapproachable production, tedious in the closet, impossible upon the stage; and to compare it to such work as that which at some and twenty Keats had given to the worldHyperion, for instance, or the Eve of St. Agnes-is to glory in the name of Briton. But it had its value then, and as an historical document it has its value now. The preface was at once a profession of faith and a proclamation of war. It is crude, it is limited, it is mistaken, in places it is even absurd. But from the moment of its appearance the old order was practically closed. It prepared the way for Albertus and for Antony, for Rolla and the Tour de Nesle; and it was also the fiat lux' in deference to which the world has accepted with more or less of resignation the partial eclipse of art and morals effected in Salammbố and l'Education sentimentale and the Egyptian darkness achieved in work like la Terre and une Vie and les Blasphèmes. In its ringing periods, its plangent antitheses and æsthetic

Environ

ment.

epigrams, it preluded and vindicated the excesses of whatsoever manifestations of romanticism mankind and the arts have since been called upon to consider and endure from the humours of Petrus Borel to the experiments of Claude Monet and the discoveries' of Richard Wagner.

IT

In

T is too often forgotten that from the first Hugo was associated with men of pretensions and capacities not greatly inferior to his own, and that in no direction was victory the work of his single arm. painting the initiative had been taken years before the publication of the Cromwell manifesto by Géricault with the famous Radeau de la Méduse, and by Delacroix with the Dante et Virgile (1822) and the Massacre de Scio (1823). In music Berlioz, at this time a student in the Conservatoire, was fighting hard against Cherubini and the bewigged ones for liberty of expression and leave to admire and imitate the audacities of Weber and Beethoven, and three years hence, in the year of Hernani, was to set his mark upon the art with the Symphonie fantastique. On the stage as early as 1824

Frédérick and Firmin had realised in the personages of Macaire and Bertrand the grotesque ideal, the combination of humour and terror, of which the character of Cromwell was put forward as the earliest expression, and had realised it so completely that their work has taken rank with the greater and the more lasting results of the movement. In the literature of drama the old order was ruined and the victory won on all essential points not in 1830 with Hernani but in 1829 with Henri Trois et sa Cour, the first of the innumerable successes of Alexandre Dumas, who determined at a single stroke the fundamental qualities of structure and form and material, and left his chief no question to solve save that of diction and style. Musset's earlier poems date from 1828, the year of les Orientales, Gautier's from 1830; and these are also the dates of Balzac's Chouans and la Peau de Chagrin. Moreover, among the intimates of the young leader were men like Sainte-Beuve, who was two years his junior, and the brothers Deschamps; whose influence was doubtless exerted more frequently to encourage than to repress. Towards the end we lost sight of all this, and saw in