There Grace again caught Leslie's eye; and Jack, who intercepted the look, was far from liking it. He could make his cousin's eye to dance and sparkle, but Leslie was telegraphing dangerous sym-ables burst out laughing. pathy. However, he was resolved to expiate his fault in having crowed over he is sure to do, I don't know whether he Leslie when he got his appointment; will be gratified or owe you a grudge. and chivalrously, although considerably You have hit his foibles off to a hair, and against the grain, he went on singing in yet you have touched his good points so solo at second hand the praises that had prettily that he might be a saint or a her. resounded round the Berkeley Square mit instead of a Highland keeper. The dinner table. Grace listened with an at-portraiture is inimitable, and yet it is

hardly Donald. It is Donald as he might | erous, just, and reasonable gratitude for appear in Paradise with some lingering taint of the flesh, and with as strong a smell of the hunting-field still about him as if he were an Esau just come home from the chase. The poet's pen, with a discreet use of a fanciful imagination, leaves the painter with his brushes leagues behind. Do you remember, Grace, how I tried to touch off your friend Donald for you? but only put my daub alongside of Ralph Leslie's verses, and then tell me how you should place the two."

the very highest of all benefits that man
can confer on mankind. For the greatest
poet of this century has been more than
such a force of indirect and gradual benefi-
cence as every great writer must needs
be. His spiritual service has been in its
inmost essence, in its highest develop-
ment, the service of a healer and a com-
forter, the work of a redeemer and a
prophet. Above all other apostles who
have brought us each the glad tidings of
his peculiar gospel, the free gifts of his
special inspiration, has this one deserved
to be called by the most beautiful and
tender of all human titles
the son
of consolation. His burning wrath and
scorn unquenchable were fed with light
and heat from the inexhaustible day-
spring of his love- - a fountain of ever-
lasting and unconsuming fire. We know
of no such great poet so good, of no such
good man so great in genius; not though
Milton and Shelley, our greatest lyric
singer and our single epic poet, remain
with us for signs and examples of devo-

Now this was exceedingly generous of Jack, - far more generous than any one, except perhaps Grace, suspected. The praises of the poems were gall and wormwood to his more worldly nature. Grace's undisguised admiration for them was fresh fuel with a blast of the bellows to the smouldering fires of his jealousy. But the self-reproaches, before Ralph had come forward in this new character, had given him timely warning to stand on his guard. So with a manly effort he pulled himself together, bringing his will to the succor of his better feelings. It is a question as heroic and self-sacrifice as pure. tion for casuists how far he had conquered, seeing that his heart was at variance with his lips. But Grace, who had not been unconscious of the strife, gave him all credit for his victory; and it was apparently destined that when either of the rivals made a start, the other was to come closely treading upon his heels.

From The Nineteenth Century.
THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO.
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

IN the spring of 1616 the greatest Englishman of all time passed away with no public homage or notice, and the first tributes paid to his memory were prefixed to the miserably garbled and inaccurate edition of his works which was issued seven years later by a brace of players under patronage of a brace of peers. In the spring of 1885 the greatest Frenchman of all time has passed away amid such universal anguish and passion of regret as never before accompanied the death of the greatest among poets. The contrast is of course not wholly due to the incalculable progress of humanity during the two hundred and sixty-nine years which divide the date of our mourning from the date of Shakespeare's death; nor even to the vast superiority of French men to Englishmen in the quality of gen

And therefore it is but simply reasonable that not those alone should mourn for him who have been reared and nurtured on the fruits of his creative spirit; that those also whom he wrought and fought for, but who knew him only as their champion and their friend- they that cannot even read him, but remember how he labored in their cause, that their children might fare otherwise than they should bear no unequal part in the burden of this infinite and worldwide sorrow.

For us, who from childhood upwards have fostered and fortified whatever of good was born in us-all capacity of spiritual work, all seed of human sympathy, all powers of hope and faith, all passions and aspirations found loyal to the service of duty and of love- with the bread of his deathless word and the wine of his immortal song, the one thing possible to do in this first hour of bitterness and stupefaction at the sense of a loss not possible yet to realize, is not to declaim his praise or parade our lamentation in modulated effects or efforts of panegyric or of dirge: it is to reckon up once more the standing account of our all but incal. culable debt. A brief and simple summary of his published works may probably lay before the student some points and some details not generally familiar to the run of English readers; and I know not what better service might be done them than to bring into their sight such aspects

of martial adventure comes in among the more fantastic excursions of adolescent inventiveness. But it is in the ballads

66

would

twenty-seventh year that Victor Hugo first
showed himself, beyond all question and
above all cavil, an original and a great
poet. La Chasse du Burgrave
" and
"Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean
suffice of themselves to establish that.
The fire, the music, the force, the tender-
ness, the spirit of these glorious little
poems must needs, one would think, im.
press even such readers as might be
impervious to the charm of their exqui-
sitely vigorous and dexterous execution.
It will of course, I should hope, be under-
stood once for all that when I venture to
select for special mention any special
poem of Hugo's I do not dream of ventur-
ing to suggest that others are not or may
not be fully as worthy of homage, or that
anything of this incomparable master's
work will not requite our study or does
not demand our admiration; I do but take
leave to indicate in passing some of those
which have been to me especially fruitful
of enduring delight, and still are cherished
in consequence with a peculiar gratitude.

of the most multiform and many-sided of daring, is evident whenever an episode genius that ever wrought in prose or verse as are least obvious and least notorious to the foreign world of letters. Poet, dramatist, novelist, historian, phil-written between his twenty-second and his osopher, and patriot, the spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century was before all things and above all things a poet. Throughout all the various and ambitious attempts of his marvellous boyhoodcriticism, drama, satire, elegy, epigram, and romance - the dominant vein is poetic. His example will stand forever as the crowning disproof of the doubtless more than plausible opinion that the most amazing precocity of power is a sign of ensuing impotence and premature decay. There was never a more brilliant boy than Victor Hugo; but there has never been a greater man. At any other than a time of mourning it might be neither unseasonable nor unprofitable to observe that the boy's early verse, moulded on the models of the eighteenth century, is an arsenal of satire on revolutionary principles or notions which might suffice to furnish forth with more than their natural equipment of epigram a whole army of reactionary rhymesters and pamphleteers. But from the first, without knowing it, he was on the road to Damascus: if not to be struck down by sudden miracle, yet by no less inevitable process to undergo a no less unquestionable conversion. At sixteen he wrote for a wager in the space of a fortnight the chivalrous and heroic story of "Bug-Jargal; " afterwards recast and reinformed with fresh vigor of vitality, when the author had attained the maturer age of twenty-three. His tenderness and manliness of spirit were here made nobly manifest: his originality and ardor of imagination, wild as yet and crude and violent, found vent two years later in "Han d'Islande." But no boyish work on record ever showed more singular force of hand, more brilliant variety of power; though the author's criticism ten years later admits that "il n'y a dans Han d'Islande' qu'une chose sentie, l'amour du jeune homme; qu'une chose observée, l'amour de la jeune fille." But as the work of a boy's fancy or invention, touched here and there with genuine humor, terror, and pathos, it is not less won derful than are the author's first odes for ease and force and freshness and fluency of verse imbued with simple and sincere feeling, with cordial and candid faith. And in both these boyish stories the hand of a soldier's son, a child of the camp, reared in the lap of war and cradled in traditions

At twenty-five the already celebrated lyric poet published his magnificent historic drama of " Cromwell: a work suffi. cient of itself to establish the author's fame for all ages in which poetry and thought, passion and humor, subtle truth of character, stately perfection of structure, facile force of dialogue, and splendid eloquence of style, continue to be admired and enjoyed. That the author has apparently confounded one Earl of Rochester with another more famous bearer of the same title must not be allowed to interfere with the credit due to him for wide and various research. Any dullard can point the finger at a slip here and there in the history, a change or an error of detail or of date: it needs more care to appre ciate the painstaking and ardent industry which has collected and fused together a great mass of historic and legendary material, the fervent energy of inspiration which has given life, order, and harmony to the vast and versatile design. As to the executive part of the poem, the least that can be said by any competent judge of that matter is that Molière was already equalled and Corneille was already excelled in their respective provinces of verse by the young conqueror whose rule was equal and imperial over every realm of song. The comic interludes or epi

and lifelong campaign or crusade against the principle of capital punishment. With all possible reverence and all possible reluctance, but remembering that with out 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 supernatural revelation has forbidden him to take

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 ty rant, a dissembler and a believer, a prac-another man's life under all and any cir. tical 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 resist ance. 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

cumstances, he is above or beyond refutation; if he says that self-defence is justifiable, 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 Napoleon the Third, the payment of a life for a life or even of one infamous existence 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 vivisection without anæsthetics, and that all manly and womanly minds not distorted or distracted by prepossessions or assumptions 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 principle 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 admirable masterpiece of terrible and pathetic invention, "Le dernier Jour d'un Condamné," 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 inevi sition 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.

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 pos

Nevertheless, if we are to obey the per-sibility by the attestation of dates and haps 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 generous 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.

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 pa thos. 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