Hugo was now past seventy, but it is too early to speak of his decline. He could pose as old, in deed. in the poems of L'art d'etre grandpere (1677); but Quatre-vingt-trcize (1674) is the most virile of his novels, with more intensity of action and a truer tragic catastrophe than Notre Dame or Les Misi'rables. though by no means without their faults and its own. The second part of La legends des si,:eles, if inferior to the first. is still grand; there are passages of primary quality in Lis qualm runts de I', sprit (1851 La pink supreme, and even in the Philosophic Ptchis (be pope, Religions it religion, L'anc, 1S7S-80); the drama Torqueninda (1682) is vig orous at least by starts, and in the posthumous volumes (Le theatre en liberte, La fin de rcute la lyre) one comes constantly on verses that bear his unmistakable mint-stamp.
Ile died in Paris, 22. 1:885. His great age. reaching out into a new generation from an epoch that had passed away, and was indeed more foreign to that day than to our own, could not but impress popular imagination, the more so as his talent, his manner, and his personal physique had something of the monumental and grandiose.
Thus his death stirred an unparalleled wave of popular feeling. His body lay in state beneath the Arc de Triomphe. His funeral became a pageant that royalty might envy, and could not equal. The relics of Saint Genevieve. the patron saint of Paris. were removed from the Pantheon that it might receive the popular hero.
Despite his own belief. Victor Hugo had no new or deep theories of life. Ile was the confi dant of his century, "the sonorous echo in the middle of things." Personally he was vain. and rather ignorant, if we compare his knowledge with his pretensions. But he is Olympian in his defects—Zeus, Apollo, and Ilephastus turned into one. His convictions are not important. He thinks to proclaim an oracle and reiterates a commonplace. But be is perhaps the greatest compeller and gatherer of words. the greatest master of language that we know; a great writ er. rather than a great author, and therefore the more sure of an enduring democratic fame. lie has formed the rhetorical and poetic taste of three generations of French youth. All schools of French verse that have arisen in the last half century have united to call him their father.