tumultuously interrupted by the
Right, sent in his resignation. Occupied at Brussels in the interests
of his orphaned grandchildren, he was requested to leave, on the
ground of his zeal on behalf of the fallen Communists; he returned
to Paris, and pleaded in the _Rappel_ for amnesty. In 1875 he was
elected a senator. His eightieth birthday was celebrated with
enthusiasm. Three years later, on May 23, 1885, Victor Hugo died.
His funeral pomps were such that one might suppose the genius of France
itself was about to be received at the Pantheon.

In Victor Hugo an enormous imagination and a vast force of will
operated amid inferior faculties. His character was less eminent than
his genius. If it is vanity to take a magnified Brocken-shadow for
one's self and to admire its superb gestures upon the mist, never
was vanity more complete or more completely satisfied than his. He
was to himself the hero of a Hugo legend, and did not perceive when
the sublime became the ridiculous. Generous to those beneath him,
charitable to universal humanity, he was capable of passionate
vindictiveness against individuals who had wounded his self-esteem;
and, since whatever opposed him was necessarily an embodiment of the
power of evil, the contest rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman.
His intellect, the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination.
Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, could pass
with him for ideas; but his visions are sometimes thoughts in images.
The voice of his passions was leonine, but his moral sensibility
wanted delicacy. His laughter was rather boisterous than fine. He
is a poet who seldom achieved a faultless rendering of the subtle
psychology of lovers' hearts; there was in him a vein of robust
sensuality. Children were dear to him, and he knew their pretty ways;
a cynical critic might allege that he exploited overmuch the tender
domesticities. His eye seized every form, vast or minute, defined
or vague; his feeling for colour was rather strong than delicate;
his vision was obsessed by the antithesis of light and shade; his
ear was awake to every utterance of wind or wave; phantoms of sound
attacked his imagination; he lent the vibrations of his nerves, his
own sentiments, to material objects; he took and gave back the soul
of things. Words for him were living powers; language was a moving
mass of significant myths, from which he chose and which he
aggrandised; sensations created images and