rama. _Cromwell_, which departs little from
the old rules respecting time and place, is a flux and reflux of action,
or of speeches in place of action, with the question of the hero's
ambition for kingship as a centre; its personages are lay figures
draped in the costumes of historical romance.

The genius of Hugo was pre-eminently lyrical; the movement to which
he belonged was also essentially lyrical, a movement for the
emancipation of the personal element in art; it is by qualities which
are non-dramatic that his dramas are redeemed from dishonour. When,
in 1830, his _Hernani_ was presented at the Theatre Francais, a
strange, long-haired, bearded, fantastically-attired brigade of
young supporters engaged in a melee with those spectators who
represented the tyranny of tradition. "Kill him! he is an
Academician," was heard above the tumult. Gautier's truculent
waistcoat flamed in the thickest of the fight. The enthusiasm of
Gautier's party was justified by splendours of lyrism and of oratory;
but Hugo's play is ill-constructed, and the characters are beings
of a fantastic world. In _Marion Delorme_, in _Le Roi s'amuse_, in
the prose-tragedy _Lucrece Borgia_, Victor Hugo develops a favourite
theme by a favourite method--the moral antithesis of some purity of
passion surviving amid a life of corruption, the apotheosis of virtue
discovered in a soul abandoned to vice, and exhibited in violent
contrasts. Marion is ennobled by the sacrifice of whatever remains
to her of honour; the moral deformity of Lucrece is purified by her
instinct of maternal love; the hideous Triboulet is beautiful by
virtue of his devotion as a father. The dramatic study of character
is too often replaced by sentimental rhetoric. _Ruy Blas_, like
_Marion Delorme_ and _Hernani_, has extraordinary beauties; yet the
whole, with its tears and laughter, its lackey turned minister of
state, its amorous queen, is an incredible phantasmagoria. _Angelo_
is pure melodrama; _Marie Tudor_ is the melodrama of history. _Les
Burgraves_ rises from declamation to poetry, or sinks from poetry
to declamation; it is grandiose, epic, or, if the reader please,
symbolic; it is much that it ought not to be, much that is admirable
and out of place; failing in dramatic truth, it fails with a certain
sublimity. The logic of action, truth of characterisation, these in
tragic creation are essentials; no heights or depths of poetry which
is non-dramatic can entirely justify work