VICTOR HUGO.

Photogravure after a Photograph by Nadary, Paris

NTO this face the fire of genius seared

The index of a soul so strong, so great That almost it had mastered Time and Fate,Learning to hope from all we most have feared, And from its labor having this sole gain: — The wage of sorrow paid it by our pain.

- B.

VICTOR HUGO

(1802-1885)

N LES MISERABLES' Victor Hugo has written what the reading world accepts almost without dissent as the greatest novel of the nineteenth century. By virtue of his lyrics and his dramas, he belongs to the first rank of French poets. As an orator, he is second among Frenchmen only to Mirabeau-and not, indeed, to Mirabeau himself in the field where the highest success depends on giving the fullest possible expression to the deepest and strongest emotion.

During his life, from his schooldays, when he wrote two tragedies and a melodrama, until he had passed his eightieth year, his mind was almost incredibly active and enormously productive. He wrote odes, ballads, tragedies, melodramas, novels, reviews, political diatribes, criticisms, travels, newspaper editorials—everything in fine that he thought calculated to inspire or to direct the intellect of France. He studied the literature of the world for the purposes of his own growth; but broad as he was in his range after food for his own intellect, he was the most typical of Parisians in all his methods of expression. To him France was the leader of civilization as Paris was of France. When he had become the intellectual dictator of Paris, he felt that he had conquered the world; and to this feeling is due no small part of his success. If it made him excessively egotistical, it made him absolutely fearless in expressing himself. When he speaks, he feels that his first duty is to satisfy his own sense of the artistic which is for him a synonym for the noble, the true, the sublime. Having satisfied himself and Paris, he feels that if the world does not approve, it is the world's misfortune always― never his fault. He was so absolutely fearless in the conviction of his own strength that he did not hesitate to match himself against "Napoleon the Little"; and since the time of Alcæus, genius has never done itself greater honor than in the struggle for French liberty, which ended for Hugo in defeat and exile.

The literary style which he made so celebrated in 'Les Miserables' is essentially oratorical. No writer of less genius than his own could have sustained it in so extensive a work; but no matter how high-pitched seems his mode of expression, his thought is always pitched above it, The secret of his success as a writer and as

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an orator lies chiefly in his deep religious feeling and his sensitiveness to human suffering. He had an intellect so extraordinary in its scope that he could stand one day before a Parisian audience and compel it to "intense emotion" by holding up the passion of Christ as the divine source of liberty and progress; while again before the same audience he could eulogize Voltaire as the instrument of heaven, appointed to redeem the world from the barbarism of the Dark Ages. In this he saw no inconsistency, nor in such antitheses as "Jesus wept-Voltaire smiled"-impossible outside of Paris-did it ever occur to him that there was the least savor of blasphemy. It would have seemed to him rather that he was honoring Christ in honoring the good done by Voltaire at the expense of the evil. He is governed by the same feeling in 'Les Miserables' when he regenerates a galley slave and makes of him the highest example of the Christ-type in literature. The supreme daring of such attempts required a supreme genius to prevent the result from being incoherent and repulsive. Undoubtedly, Hugo had supreme genius,—

"For to his hand, more tame

Than birds in winter, came

High thoughts and flying forms of power,

And from his table fed and sang,

Till with the tune men's ears took fire and rang!»

W. V. B.

ORATION ON HONORÉ DE BALZAC

(Delivered at the Funeral of Balzac, August 20th, 1850)

Gentlemen:

HE man who now goes down into this tomb is one of those to whom public grief pays homage.

THE

In our day all fictions have vanished. The eye is fixed not only on the heads that reign, but on heads that think, and the whole country is moved when one of those heads disappears. To-day we have a people in black because of the death of the man of talent; a nation in mourning for a man of genius.

Gentlemen, the name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace our epoch will leave across the future.

Balzac was one of that powerful generation of writers of the nineteenth century who came after Napoleon, as the illustrious Pleiad of the seventeenth century came after Richelieu,—as if in the development of civilization there were a law which gives conquerors by the intellect as successors to conquerors by the sword.