For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of Remittances shostage. be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. Her sister, bringing wreaths of blooming gold To load the hedgerows and adorn the wold, With silver hawthorn vernal yet and sweet; The cuckoo's cry the echoing vales repeat, The sand-rose stars the shore, the ferns unfold Their curled stems, and in cool mantles stoled The woods repose beneath the noontide heat,— The guardian Worm behold, with full belief, In sunset ocean sleeping tranquilly. Spectator. HERBERT NEW. From The Contemporary Review. VICTOR HUGO. THE greatest of living Frenchmen, the greatest man of genius whom this century has known, the altissimo poeta, the most splendid romancist of his age, has accom plished his great career. He is the last survivor of a great period in French literature the last member of one of the greatest literary brotherhoods which has ever existed; and he has carried with him to the very portals of the grave a lamp of genius scarcely dimmed, and a personal power and influence which every year increased. Not very long ago all Europe gathered round him to offer congratulations on his hale and hearty old age; since then, with more than the hands full of flowers of the classic tradition, with honors and praises from every quarter of the earth, he has been carried to his grave. The very sight of a man so distinguished, the consciousness of his honored existence as the representative of the noblest and most all-embracing of the arts that which depends for its effects upon the simplest and most universal of instincts - was an advantage to the world. The extravagances of hero-worship are inevitable, and in nothing is the ridiculous so tremblingly near to the sublime; but allowing for all that, and for what is worse, the almost equally inevitable foolishness which adulation creates, the position of Victor Hugo was of itself an advantage to the world. In a soberer pose altogether, and with a noble modesty, which we may claim as belonging to our race, Walter Scott occupied a somewhat similar position, which would have been all the greater had he lived to Hugo's age, an element which must necessarily be taken into consideration; but, save in this one case, there has been no parallel to the eminence of the great Frenchman in the estimation of his country and of the world. It is not now that the critic requires to step forth to establish the foundations of this great fame, or decide upon its reality or lasting character. This has been done in the poet's lifetime by a hundred voices, favorable and otherwise: no need to wait for death to give the final decision, as in some cases has been necessary. It is scarcely possible to imagine that after so long a time any discovery can be made, or any change of taste occur, which would interfere with the supreme position of Victor Hugo. A new generation has been born in the faith which to their elders is a matter of assured and triumphant conviction. But the air is full of his name, and it is a grateful office to go over again some of the noblest productions which human genius has ever given forth, and to contemplate in their unity the many works of a life as much longer than that of ordinary men as its inspiration was above theirs. It seems sad and strange, as well as laughable and ludicrous, that the great poet should be regarded by a vast number of his countrymen, and perhaps by the majority of the Paris mob which paid him the last honors in so characteristic a way, as a revolutionary politician and a democratic leader. We will take the privilege of the foreigner to leave out that side of his life as much as may be practicable. "Napoleon le Petit" and the "Histoire d'un Crime" are works but little worthy of his genius. Political animosities, sharpened by personal grievances, have in many cases an immense immediate effect in literature, but they pay for this easy success by speedy collapse; and scarcely even the magnificent rhetoric and splendid vituperation of "Les Châtiments " will keep them living when the world has forgotten the lesser Napoleon, as it already begins to do. His patriotic fury, the impassioned utterances of his exile, the tremendous force of feeling with which he flung himself into the struggles of France, took up a large share of Victor Hugo's life, and will procure him a certain place in the historical records of his period. But when all the commotion and the din have died away, as indeed in a great measure they have already done, these fiery diatribes, these burning lava-streams, will be of little more importance than the dustiest mé moires pour servir materials from which the historian, with much smoothing down and apologies for the pyrotechnics of a past age, will take here and there a vivid touch to illustrate his theories or brighten his narrative. They will retain, too, a certain importance as autobiography. But fortu nately the great mass of the work which | He was educated, it would appear, under Victor Hugo has left behind him can be his mother's influence rather than that of separated from the polemics of his troubled the soldier father, and did not, till his age and fiery temper. It is not in any mind was quite mature, throw himself sense a peaceful literature. Conflict is its into the revolutionary opinions which af very inspiration. The struggle of human terwards influenced him so greatly. A misery with all the confusing and over- royalist in the Restoration period, an obbearing forces of life; of poverty with the servant but not excited spectator of public requirements and oppressions of wealth; affairs from 1830 to 1848, it was not till of the small with the great; of the people the coup d'état and the beginning of the with tyrants; of man with fate: these are reign of the third Napoleon that he was his subjects, and he is never an impartial seized with the passion of political life. historian. He is on the side of the weak That great betrayal seems to have stung in every combat, and partisan of the op- him to a frenzied resistance and put poipressed. But this does not detract from son in his veins. His country was cheated his work when his opponents are the op- and betrayed; the liberty for which she pressors of the past, or the still more had made so many exertions, both heroic subtle, veiled, and unassailable forces of and fantastical, taken from her; and his destiny. The poet's region is there: he own personal liberty and safety threatis born, if not to set right the times, which ened. Victor Hugo's soul then burst into are out of joint, at least to read to the feu et flamme. He caught fire like a volworld the high and often terrible lesson cano long silent, a burning mountain that of the ages. But it vulgarizes his work had simulated quiet unawares, and clothed when he is seen, tooth and nail, in violent itself with vineyards and villages. In the personal conflict with foemen unworthy of tranquil days, when Louis Philippe plotted his steel, embalming in poetry the trivial and pottered, and France lay dormant, or the uncompleted incidents of contem- amusing her restrained spirit with the outporary warfare. It becomes almost ludi- break of the romantic against the classicrous, indeed, when we find him pouring cal, and taking pleasure in the burst of forth page after page of vehement and genius which had arisen suddenly and unburning complaint in respect to the per- awares in her midst, the poet was so little sonal sufferings inflicted on himself, when dissatisfied with the bourgeois régime that we know that throughout his career Hugo he accepted the title of pair de France. never knew what the cold shock of failure Montalembert had received it some time was, and that, from the moment when before. There must have been something Chateaubriand adopted him into the ranks soothing, not inharmonious to the poetiof the poets as l'enfant sublime until the cal mind, in the slumbrous reign which moment when all Paris conducted him to gradually became intolerable to the comhis last resting-place, no man has had a monalty and got itself into contempt with more enthusiastic following, or accom- all the world. The young poets of the plished a more triumphant career. time were peaceful, not discontented. Full of energy as they were, they took no part in the gathering storm: Hugo, a peer, tranquil in the superior chamber; young De Musset a courtier of the Duke of Orleans, and hoping for the king's notice of his verses. The eruption was preparing, the subterranean fires alight; but the sons of genius took no notice. When the tremendous awakening came, it must, in the case of Hugo at least, have gained additional force from the long restraint. He was in the height of life, a man of forty-six, the leader of the roman Victor Hugo was a son of the Revolution. He was born as it were between the two camps, at a moment when France was the theatre of the greatest popular struggle in modern history, of a mother who was a Breton and a Legitimist, and a father who was a republican general, an extraordinary combination. This does not seem, however, to have made, as we might think, family life impossible, for Madame Hugo and her children followed the drum, and, notwithstanding all differences of opinion, found it possible to keep together. tic school, which by that time had overcome opposition and won the freedom for which it contended, the author of "Her nani" and the other great plays which form one of his chief titles to fame, and of volumes of lyrics which had taken the very heart of the French people, and given a new development to the language. And it was also during this peaceful period that he had taken in another direction a first step of unexampled power and brilliancy in the romance of "Notre Dame." Even among men of acknowledged genius, few have done so much in a lifetime as Victor Hugo had done up to this break in his career. We are so accustomed to the attitude of demagogue which he took afterwards, to the violent revolutionary, the furious exile, the denunciatory prophet of the "Châtiments," that it is strange to realize that his later aspect was prefaced by a long, peaceful, and prosperous beginning. France has never seen a more magnificent band than that which surrounded him, and which has made the reign of the roi bourgeois illustrious in spite of itself; and it is curious to mark that these great intelligences did not object to their ruler nor to his ways, but lived like good citizens, with but an occasional fling at semi-sentimental politics. Hugo was the champion of abstract right in all the discussions in which he took part. He it was who proposed, among other things, that the Bonaparte family should be permitted to return to France. Perhaps had he here been less abstract and logical, and more moved by the laws of expediency, it might have been better both for France and for himself. The plays which he produced in this time of prosperous calm and apparent peace are without question the most remarkable dramatic works of this century, and several of them will, we have no doubt, take their place permanently among the few of all ages and countries which the world will not willingly let die. They are all profoundly tragic, dark with that fate which smites at the moment when desire seems accomplished and the wishedfor issue gained. Hernani, at the crisis of his happy love, when all clouds seem to have vanished; Triboulet, in the mad climax of his vengeance, when he has tracked his enemy to the murderer's den, and left him without possibility of escape; and Lucrezia Borgia, when she thinks she has saved the unfortunate young man who does not know that he is her son each at the moment of fruition is struck by the inevitable, the blow which has been in reserve from the beginning, against which no precaution could have been of any service, which no foresight could have avoided. In the case of "Hernani," which is perhaps the most popular, as it is the most purely poetical, of the series, the catastrophe is less horrible, though not less tragic- the fatal cloud which descends upon the innocent being necessarily different in character and compli cation from that which overwhelms the guilty. Few effects that have ever been produced on the stage exceed in power and pathos that of Hernani's marriage night, when the bridegroom and bride, in the delicious calm and silence, after all the fatigues and triumphs of the day, at last left to themselves in the bliss of perfect happiness and security, suddenly hear ascending from the soft darkness into which they have been gazing the sound of the fatal horn. The breaking in of this tragic note into the impassioned yet tranquil rapture of the lovers has in it a jar of sudden and terrible surprise which rends the heart. The unexpectedness of that which we have been expecting all along, which we knew was coming, has a pang in it which the calmest spectator can scarcely resist, and this although Hernani and his bride are but types of youthful love and fidelity, fair poetical creations, without identity of their own to awake in us a warm sympathy. Triboulet in his frenzy, in his very baseness, in the horror of the outrage to which he has been subjected, has a very different kind of power. Our abhorrence of him, our pity, the frightful force of the catastrophe, all together rise to a height of passion which is almost more than human nerves can bear. It was perhaps well that this terrible play was suppressed par ordre. Louis Philippe, domestic and respectable, could have been affected but little, we may suppose, by the odium thrown upon Francis the First: |