in honour and success and fame. Born almost with the century, he
was a writer at fifteen, and at his death he was writing still; so that
the record of his career embraces a period of more than sixty years.
There is hardly a department of art to a foremost place in which he did
not prove his right. From first to last; from the time of Chateaubriand
to the time of Zola, he was a leader of men; and with his departure from
the scene the undivided sovereignty of literature became a thing of the
past like Alexander's empire.

Some Causes and Effects.

In 1826, in a second set of _Odes et Ballades_, he announced his vocation
in unmistakeable terms. He was a lyric poet and the captain of a new
emprise. His genius was too large and energetic to move at ease in the
narrow garment prescribed as the poet's wear by the dullards and the
pedants who had followed Boileau. He began to repeat the rhythms of
Ronsard and the Pleiad; to deal in the richest rhymes and in words and
verses tricked with new-spangled ore; to be curious in cadences, careless
of stereotyped rules, prodigal of invention and experiment, defiant of
much long recognised as good sense, contemptuous of much till then
applauded as good taste. In a word, he was the Hugo of the hundred
volumes we know: an artist, that is, endowed with a technical imagination
of the highest quality, the very genius of style, and a sense of the
plastic quality of words unequalled, perhaps, since Milton. The time was
ripe for him: within France and without it was big with revolution. In
verse there were the examples of Andre Chenier and Lamartine; in prose
the work of Rousseau and Diderot, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and
Chateaubriand; in war and politics the tremendous tradition of Napoleon.
Goethe and Schiller had recreated romance and established the foundations
of a new palace of art; their theory and practice had been popularised in
the novels of Walter Scott; and in the life and work of Byron the race
had such an example of revolt, such an incitement to liberty and change,
such a passionate and persuasive argument against authority and
convention, as had never before been felt in art. Hugo like all great
artists was essentially a child of his age: 'Rebellion lay in his way,
and he found it.' In 1827 he published his _Cromwell_, and came forth as
a rebel confessed and unashamed. It is an unapproachable production,
tedious in the closet, impossible upon the stage; and to