Promirrll was followed by a drama taken from Seott's t titheort 11—.1in y li'obsnet Is=9), a fail ure--and Iforion rig tor:::: which t he ship forbade the stage till Is31. In Is211 Ilugo published Lis tit it Waits, a collection of poem, containing some of the most striking pieces of metrical art in the world. They we followed by tloe long-contested triumph of //f ramii and of 1:omantieisin 1.11 the rrellell stage IS3111. :1 ter Ilugo had vainly tried to bring about tit: per formance of 11 a rion bor pearlNy a hun dred d:Q.s, from February 2fith to .lone 5th, the battle raged nightly at the Tli.%:itre Francais, but no further organized effort was made to the retrograde evolution of the llomantie drama till it vollapsed with S nary//J1N 111 1S13. 'I he ,1t11:1111,11 111 th filt//li i. ra hied 111111 11 r:1111:1t.. lea lly unreal, the Sell( 1111ellt 111:1XN•he ora tor.% grai 11 ; but a throbbing life and in tensely expre•.ed emotion maintain the interest, though this is .1 lyric rather thaii a dramatic one. The same qualities and the same defect., with more strained Ilt it of grotesque and silb lime, tragic and comic. foul and fair. character ize .1/arion loran . They characterize also /./• rot s'ainus.g• ( the prose dramas, /;oryia (1 S33 ; 1lurir 7',/dor ( 1S331 ; .Inge/o, tyrun 414. l'edone• (lti3.iI. They roach their height in Vitt/ hiss (1ti:th), and become most conspicuous in i.es 13). lingo's conceptions were too grandiose to be with 1 he limitation. of the drama. Ile gave up the effort and turned to politics. ltut these sixteen mainly dramatic years had pro duced work of great value in other fields, the novel A otre-Ilant, (14 Paris (18:31 1. with its (:othie intensity of pathos and its marvelous re production of the Paris of Louis Xl.; the (luixot i• but eloquent Cloud( t; ut u.n ( 1834 a plea against capital punishment; the i'cui//es Wm/ tom/lc I I s3 I) : 'lutists int 47.1'14w:rule ; •lair in te•rieures (15:ti 1 ; 1,es en yons et 1cs mu bees (1s-10) : four collections of poems, that chow growing democratic sympathies and sat irie power, a 11(41/V11111g with nature, ;11111 :1 gen emu, warmth of universal sympathy. a little shallow in its breadth, that was to give the key note to his political activity of the next decade.
The ten years from 1S13 to from Les Ituryror4 s to Les (•uint tio work of import, lint they marl: a vital eliange in the mind of Iliwo that affects all the weak to follow. Till 1M13 drama had taken the first place. From 1S53 fiction becomes more prom inent. poetry intermittent. with oceasional politi cal writings. Hugo sees that hi, power is essen tially lyric. and give, this a dominant place even in pros fiction. Through all there a new earnest ness, born in part of the death of daughter. Leopoldine, and her young. husband (1ti1:31, in part of a vague vet inten-e for the socialistic idea, of l'ourier and Proudlion which drew him into a political whirlpool and made him a revolutionary member of the Constituent As sembly 1)11S4s. As a iiraet ical pol it ician, t hen and always. lingo was a failure. Ile favored the :am bition of Louis Napoleon. till Louis ceased to favor his own advancement : he was an advocate of several hopele—ly unpractical and an uneonseinus eonvert to the en flattery of Emile de adrardin. 1apoleon's coup d'i•tat of IS51 saved Iluen from himself. It made a mar tyr and hero out of a visionary who vvaa as a turncoat. In his eloquent Ilistoi•e
Wan erotic (finished in 1,45'2 and published in I s771, he shows mieon•cignisly how his efforts to organize resistance to flit. usurper Were distrusted his fellow Ile fled to 1:russels. AN h•llee he urgentlt reque,tcd on England, and resided first in dewy, then in 1:11ernsey, as near France as possible. consistent 13 -corning NT till the col of the second Empire brought him back to sh ore the darkest days of the Terrible 'car (ls70 71i.
These of exile steeled his mind, and his genin- was find by 11 hat S01.1111'11 111, ,11a1110. 111 1N:12 appeared the tierce and scur rilous NopoIt un 14 1'4 tit, a foretaste 1)f the Les hatint4 tits I in which the satiric. unites NN ith the 1.% rie genius to proghig.t. a classic that. will surviNe for generation, the I•:mpire that tired lingo to a white heat. To calmer hours we owe S COO( //1/ibltiWIS I Iti51.), a collection of lyrics closing in a noble strain. and the first of four of La 1: p mic eft s so el,.s ( I ti:19, 1:477 , 1SS:t). the murk of his ncitieN cownt in is rieal epic. In Isfig the long-heralded Les Aim/whits appeared on the saute day in ten lan guages—an event till then unparalleled in the of letters. The ten volumes of this vast romance reveal Hugo, no hunger as in 'No/il l/aim., an evoker of the past, but with eyes on the present and heart in the future. It lacks con tinuity and proportion. It is a chaos of eloquent special pleading, political reminiscences, socialis tic iirophecies, had psychology, grulo.quc situa tions. false pathos, and descriptions wonde•fully Nivid and 111 the of this lyric epic novel we find most, of the virtue, and all the intellectual of lingo. Its value lie, not in its thought, but in its emotion, its lyric • and its epie power of deseription. 11u the thwelopment of fiction it had no influence. for it belonged to a type already outworn. same may be said of 1.4 s t ren.4014 nes (1e. In nice in which the descriptions are superb, ;Ind the subject petty. I:horn ni4 qui ell I an his torical phantasmagoria of the 1.:nglish Court of Elizabeth and an unmitigated failure. closes the fiction of the exile. Alcanwhile lingo's poetic muse had had her Indian summer in Iles riles- et 1teS bOiS 118651. lint as the Empire tottered to its fall, his inauspicious interest in polities became olive more dominant. Ile wrote much for Le /?appri, a radical journal, founded by hi, sons and min-in-law, but revealed once pore, in INTO, the hopelessly unpractical nature of his political ideas, alike as a prophet of the people and as a member of the National Assembly at Bordeaux in 1s71. Ile his seat in llarell and went to bfrussels. where lie barely g.seaped being mobbed, owing to his defense of the Paris Commune. lie was expelled from and soon after returned to Paris. Here lie failed signally in the eleetions of IS72, though he was elected life Senator in IS711. But if he might not be a tribune. he was already the poet laureate of the Third Ilepublic. Of the Les do': I ;tarn N 10000 •Opif, wen. sold within a year. several plays. notably 1:u y Was, were re vised with :lad lie ruse to the new °e rasion in L'annt'r terrible riti721, a noble vol ume of patriotic verse that made a French critic exclaim. with jii•t pride. that Oermany had no such poet to sing her victory as France to glorify even her ,raster.