and lifelong campaign or crusade against the principle of capital punishment. With all possible reverence and all possible reluctance, but remembering that without perfect straightforwardness and absolute sincerity I should be even unworthier than I am to speak of Victor Hugo at all, I must say that his reasoning on this subject seems to me insufficient and inconclusive; that his own radical principle, the absolute inviolability of human life, the absolute sinfulness of retributive bloodshedding, if not utterly illogical and untenable, is tenable or logical only on the ground assumed by those quaintest though not least pathetic among fanatics and heroes, the early disciples of George Fox. If a man tells you that supernatu

sodes of the second and third acts, so admirably welded into the structure or woven into the thread of the action, would suffice to prove this when collated with the seventeenth scene of the third act and the great speech of Cromwell in the fifth. The subtlety and variety of power displayed in the treatment of the chief character should be evident alike to those who look only on the upright side of it and those who can see only its more oblique aspect. The Cromwell of Hugo is as far from the faultless monster of Carlyle's creation and adoration as from the all but unredeemed villain of royalist and Hibernian tradition he is a great and terrible poetic figure, imbued throughout with active life and harmonized throughout by imaginative intuition; a patriot and a týral revelation has forbidden him to take rant, a dissembler and a believer, a practical humorist and a national hero.

The famous preface in which the batteries of pseudo-classic tradition were stormed and shattered at a charge has itself long since become a classic. That the greatest poet was also the greatest prose-writer of his generation there could no longer be any doubt among men of any intelligence; but not even yet was more than half the greatness of his multitudinous force revealed. Two years later, at the age of twenty-seven, he published the superb and entrancing "Orientales: " the most musical and many-colored volume of verse that ever had glorified the language. From "Le Feu du Ciel" to "Sara la Baigneuse," from the thunder-peals of exterminating judgment to the flute-notes of innocent girlish luxury in the sense of loveliness and life, the inexhaustible range of his triumph expands and culminates and extends. Shelley has left us no more exquisite and miraculous piece of lyrical craftsmanship than "Les Djinns;" none perhaps so rich in variety of modulation, so perfect in rise and growth and relapse and reiterance of music. And here, like Shelley, was Hugo already the poet of freedom, a champion of the sacred right and the holy duty of resistance. The husk of a royalist education, the crust of reactionary misconceptions, had already begun to drop off: not yet a pure republican, he was now ripe to receive and to understand the doctrine of human right, the conception of the common weal, as distinguished from imaginary duties and opposed to hereditary claims.

The twenty-eighth year of his life, which was illuminated by the issue of these passionate and radiant poems, witnessed also the opening of his generous

another man's life under all and any cir.
cumstances, he is above or beyond refuta-
tion; if he says that self-defence is justi-
fiable, and that righteous warfare is a
patriotic duty, but that to exact from the
very worst of murderers, a parricide or a
poisoner, a Philip the Second or a Na-
poleon the Third, the payment of a life
for a life-
-or even of one infamous ex-
istence for whole hecatombs of innocent
lives is an offence against civilization
and a sin against humanity, I am not
merely unable to accept but incompetent
to understand his argument. We may
most heartily agree with him that France
is degraded by the guillotine, and that
England is disgraced by the gallows, and
yet our abhorrence of these barbarous and
nauseous brutalities may not preclude us
from feeling that a dealer (for example)
in professional infanticide by starvation
might very properly be subjected to vivi-
section without anæsthetics, and that all
manly and womanly minds not distorted
or distracted by prepossessions or as-
sumptions might rationally and laudably
rejoice in the prospect of this legal and
equitable process. "The senseless old
law of retaliation” (la vieille et inepte loi
du talion) is inept or senseless only when
the application of it is false to the prin-
ciple: when justice in theory becomes
unjust in practice. Another stale old prin-
ciple or proverb-"abusus non tollit
usum"-suffices to confute some of the
arguments I am very far from saying,
all-adduced or alleged by the ardent
eloquence of Victor Hugo in his admira-
ble masterpiece of terrible and pathetic
invention, "Le dernier Jour d'un Con-
damné," and subsequently in the impres-
sive little history of Claude Gueux," in
the famous speech on behalf of Charles

Hugo when impeached on a charge of in- | rect affront to the majesty of King Charles sult to the laws in an article on the pun- the Tenth. After that luckless dotard had ishment of death, and in the fervent elo- been driven off his throne, it was at once quence of his appeal on the case of a proposed to produce the hitherto intercriminal executed in Guernsey, and of his dicted play before an audience yet palpiprotest addressed to Lord Palmerston tating with the thrill of revolution and against the horrible result of its rejection. resentment. But the chivalrous loyalty That certain surviving methods of execu- of Victor Hugo refused to accept a facile tion are execrable scandals to the country and factitious triumph at the expense of which maintains them, he has proved be an exiled old man, over the ruins of a yond all humane or reasonable question; shattered old cause. The play was not and that all murderers are not alike inex- permitted by its author to enter till the cusable is no less indisputable a propo- spring of the following year on its inevisition but beyond these two points the table course of glory. It is a curious and most earnest and exuberant advocacy can memorable fact that the most tenderadvance nothing likely to convince any hearted of all great poets had originally but those already converted to the prin made the hero of this tragedy leave the ciple that human life must never be taken heroine unforgiven for the momentary and in punishment of crime that there are reluctant relapse into shame by which she not criminals whose existence insults hu- had endeavored to repurchase his forfeited manity, and cries aloud on justice for life; and that Prosper Mérimée should mercy's very sake to cut it off. have been the first, Marie Dorval the second, to reclaim a little mercy for the penitent. It is to their pleading that we owe the sublime pathos of the final parting between Marion and Didier.

:

In one point it seems to me that this immortal masterpiece may perhaps be reasonably placed, with "Le Roi s'amuse" and "Ruy Blas," in triune supremacy at the head of Victor Hugo's plays. The wide range of poetic abilities, the harmonious variety of congregated powers, displayed in these three great tragedies through almost infinite variations of terror and pity and humor and sublime surprise, will seem to some readers, whose reverence is no less grateful for other gifts of the same great hand, unequalled at least till the advent in his eighty-first year of "Torquemada."

The next year (1830) is famous forever beyond all others in the history of French literature it was the year of "Hernani," the date of liberation and transfiguration for the tragic stage of France. The battle which raged round the first acted play of Hugo's and the triumph which crowned the struggles of its champions, are not these things written in too many chronicles to be for the thousandth time related here? And of its dramatic and poetic quality what praise could be uttered that must not before this have been repeated at least some myriads of times? But if there be any mortal to whom the heroic scene of the portraits, the majestic and august monologue of Charles the Fifth at the tomb of Charles the Great, the terrible beauty, the vivid pathos, the bitter" sweetness of the close, convey no sense of genius and utter no message of delight, we can only say that it would simply be natural, consistent, and proper for such a critic to recognize in Shakespeare a barbarian, and a Philistine in Milton.

Nevertheless, if we are to obey the perhaps rather childish impulse of preference and selection among the highest works of the highest among poets, I will avow that to my personal instinct or apprehension "Marion de Lorme" seems a yet more perfect and pathetic masterpiece than even "Hernani" itself. The always gen erous and loyal Dumas placed it at the very head of his friend's dramatic works. Written, as most readers (I presume) will remember, before its predecessor on the stage, it was prohibited on the insanely fatuous pretext that the presentation of King Louis the Thirteenth was an indiVOL. LI. 2627

LIVING AGE.

Victor Hugo was not yet thirty when all these triumphs lay behind him. In the twenty-ninth year of a life which would seem fabulous and incredible in the record of its achievements if divided by lapse of time from all possible proof of its possibility by the attestation of dates and facts, he published in February "NotreDame de Paris," in November "Les Feuilles d'Automne: " that the two dreariest months of the year might not only "smell April and May," but outshine July and August. The greatest of all tragic romances has a Grecian perfection of structure, with a Gothic intensity of pathos. To attempt the praise of such a work would be only less idle than to refuse it. Terror and pity, with eternal fate for keynote to the strain of story, never struck deeper to men's hearts through more faultless evolution of combining cir

cumstance on the tragic stage of Athens. | two succeeding volumes there is, among Louis the Eleventh has been painted by all their other things of price, a lyric many famous hands, but Hugo's presen- which may even yet be ranked with the tation of him, as compared for example highest subsequent work of its author for with Scott's, is as a portrait by Velasquez purity of perfection, for height and fulness to a portrait by Vandyke. The style was of note, for music and movement and ina new revelation of the supreme capaci- forming spirit of life. We ought to have ties of human speech: the touch of it on in English, but I fear or rather I am any subject of description or of passion is only too sure - we have not, a song in as the touch of the sun for penetrating which the sound of the sea is rendered as irradiation and vivid evocation of life. in that translation of the trumpet blast of the night wind, with all its wails and pauses and fluctuations and returns, done for once into human speech and interpreted into spiritual sense forever. For instinctive mastery of its means and absolute attainment of its end, for majesty of living music and fidelity of sensitive imagination, there is no lyric poem in any language more wonderful or more delightful. A yet sweeter and sadder and more magical sea song there was yet to come years after - but only from the lips of an exile. Of the ballad - so to call it, if any term of definition may suffice- which stands out as a crowning splendor among "Les Rayons et les Ombres," not even Hugo's own eloquence, had it been the work (which is impossible) of any other great poet in all time, could have said anything adequate at all. Not even Coleridge and Shelley, the sole twin sovereigns of English lyric poetry, could have produced this little piece of lyric work by combination and by fusion of their gifts. The pathetic truthfulness and the simple manfulness of the mountain shepherd's distraction and devotion might have been given in ruder phrase and tentative rendering by the nameless ballad-makers of the border; but here is a poem which unites something of the charm of "Clerk Saunders" and "The Wife of Usher's Well" with something of the magic of "Christabel" and the "Ode to the West Wind:" a thing, no doubt, impossible; but none the less obviously accomplished.*

From the "Autumn Leaves" to the "Songs of the Twilight," and again from the "Inner Voices" to the "Sunbeams and Shadows," the continuous jet of lyric song through a space of ten fertile years was so rich in serene and various beauty that the one thing notable in a flying review of its radiant course is the general equality of loveliness in form and color, which is relieved and heightened at intervals by some especial example of a beauty more profound or more sublime. The first volume of the four, if I mistake not, won a more immediate and universal hom age than the rest: its unsurpassed melody was so often the raiment of emotion which struck home to all hearts a sense of domestic tenderness too pure and sweet and simple for perfect expression by any less absolute and omnipotent lord of style, that it is no wonder if in many minds many mothers' minds especially there should at once have sprung up an all but ineradicable conviction that no subsequent verse must be allowed to equal or excel the vol ume which contained such flower-like jewels of song as the nineteenth and twentieth of these unwithering and imperishable "Leaves." But no error possible to a rational creature could be more serious or more complete than the assumption of any inferiority in the volume containing the two glorious poems addressed to Admiral Canaris, the friend (may I be forgiven the filial vanity or egotism which impels me to record it?) of the present writer's father in his youth; the two first in date of Hugo's finest satires, the lines In the winter of the year which in spring had seen that scourge a backbiter and the lines "Les Rayons et les Ombres" come forth to kindle and that brand a traitor (the resonant and refresh the hearts of readers, Victor Hugo published an ode in the same key as those "To the Column" radiant indignation of the latter stands and "To the Arch of Triumph," on the return and unsurpassed in the very "Châtiments" reinterment of the dead Napoleon. Full of noble feeling and sonorous eloquence, the place of this poem in themselves); the two most enchanting any collection of its author's works is distinctly and aubades or songs of sunrise that ever had unmistakably marked out by every quality it has and outsung the birds and outsweetened the in opinion and in rhythm, it is one with the national In style and in sentiment, by every quality it wants. flowers of the dawn; and for here I and political poems which had already been published can cite no more the closing tribute of by the author since the date of his "Orientales;" in other words, it is in every possible point utterly and lines more bright than the lilies whose absolutely unlike the poems long afterwards to be name they bear, offered by a husband's written by the author in exile. Its old place, therefore, in all former editions, at the end of the volume containlove at the sweet, still shrine of mother-ing the poems previously published in the same year, hood and wifehood. And in each of the is obviously the only right one, and rationally the only

who take even more delight in "Les Bur- once seized and dwelt on by the orator in graves" than in some of the preceding a tone of earnest and cordial respect. plays which had been more regular in The fiery and rapturous eloquence with action, more plausible in story, less open which at the same time he celebrated the to the magnificent reproach of being too martial triumphs of the empire gave ample good for the stage as the "Hamlet" proof that he was now, as his father had which came finally from the recasting hand prophesied that his mother's royalist boy of Shakespeare was found to be, in the would become when he grew to be a man, judgment even of Shakespeare's fellows; a convert to the views of that father, a too rich in lyric beauty, too superb in epic distinguished though ill-requited soldier state. The previous year had seen the of the empire, and a faithful champion or publication of the marvellously eloquent, mourner of its cause. The stage of Nacopious, and vivid letters which gave to poleonic hero-worship, single-minded and the world the impressions received by its single-eyed if short-sighted and misdi. greatest poet in a tour on the Rhine made rected, through which Victor Hugo was five years earlier that is, in the year of still passing on towards the unseen pros"Ruy Blas." In this book, as Gautier at pect of a better faith, had been vividly once observed, the inspiration of "Les illustrated and vehemently proclaimed in Burgraves" is evidently and easily trace- his letters on the Rhine, and was hereable. Among numberless masterpieces after to be described with a fervent and of description, from which I have barely pathetic fidelity in a famous chapter of time to select for mention the view of "Les Misérables." The same phase of Bishop Hatto's tower by the appropriately patriotic prepossession inspired his no Dantesque light of a furnace at midnight less generous tribute to the not very ra - not as better than others, but as an diant memory of Casimir Delavigne, to example of the magic by which the writer whom he paid likewise the last and crownimbues and impregnates observation and ing honor of a funeral oration: an honor recollection with feeling and with fancy-afterwards conferred on Frédéric Soulié, the most enchanting legend of enchant- and far more deservedly bestowed on ment ever written for children of all ages, Honoré de Balzac. More generous his and sweet and strange enough to have first political speech in the chamber of grown up among the fairy tales of the past peers could not be, but there was more of whose only known authors are the winds reason and justice in its fruitless appeal and suns of their various climates, lurks for more than barren sympathy, for a like a flower in a crevice of a crumbling moral though not material intervention, fortress. The entrancing and haunting on behalf of Poland in 1846. His second beauty of Régina's words as she watches speech as a peer is an edifying commenthe departing swallows words which it tary on the vulgar English view of his may seem that any one might have said, character as defective in all the practibut to which none other could have given cal and rational qualities of a politician, the accent and the effect that Hugo has a statesman, or a patriot. The subject thrown into the simple sound of them was the consolidation and defence of the was as surely derived, we cannot but think, French coast-line: a poet, of course, acfrom some such milder and brighter vision cording to all reasonable tradition, if he of the remembered Rhineland solitudes, ventured to open his unserviceable lips at as were the sublime and all but Æschylean all on such a grave matter of public busiimprecations of Guanhumara from the im-ness, ought to have remembered what was pression of their darker and more savage memories or landscapes.

expected of him by the sagacity of blockheads, and carefully confined himself to Two years before the appearance of the clouds, leaving facts to take care of "Les Burgraves" Victor Hugo had be- themselves and proofs to hang floating in gun his long and glorious career as an the air, while his vague and verbose decla orator by a speech of characteristically mation wandered at its own sweet will generous enthusiasm, delivered on his re- about and about the matter in hand, and ception into the Academy. The forgotten never came close enough to grapple it. playwright and versifier whom he suc- This, I regret to say, is exactly what the ceeded had been a professional if not a greatest poet of his age was inconsiderate personal enemy; the one memorable thing enough to avoid, and most markedly to about the man was his high-minded oppo- abstain from doing; a course of conduct sition to the tyranny of Napoleon, his own which can only be attributed to his notopersonal friend before the epoch of that rious and deplorable love of paradox. tyranny began; and this was the point at | His speech, though not wanting in elo