about the pardon of Satan, when the demon finds
that it is impossible for him to live without the presence of the
Almighty. Man is endowed with liberty, this child of good and ill, and
his spirit hovers therefore ever between the exalted and the mean. So
humanity appears to the seer in _Dieu_:

Et je vis apparaitre une etrange figure;
Un etre tout seme de bouches, d'ailes, d'yeux,
Vivant, presque lugubre et presque radieux;
Vaste, il volait; plusieurs des ailes etaient chauves.
En s'agitant, les cils de ses prunelles fauves
Jetaient plus de rumeur qu'une troupe d'oiseaux,
Et ses plumes faisaient un bruit de grandes eaux.
Cauchemar de la chair ou vision d'apotre,
Selon qu'il se montrait d'une face ou de l'autre,
Il semblait une bete ou semblait un esprit.
Il paraissait, dans l'air ou mon vol le surprit,
Faire de la lumiere, et faire des tenebres.

To Hugo, therefore, evil is not an equal force with good, nor is it
eternal. It was created in time, it will end in time. It is a mistake to
suppose that he accepted any kind of Manichaeism as his solution of the
problem of the universe. In reality his thought is much more permeated
with Christian feeling than with Manichaeism. Though he rejected
dogmatic Catholicism, and indeed assailed it with Voltairian mockery,
yet his vision of the Eternal as the embodiment of that mercy and
goodness which is greater than justice is in its essence a Christian
conception. Inspired, in part at least, by Christian thought seems also
to be his conception of the eventual reconciliation of good and evil,
and that belief in the restoration of all things which finds expression
in the concluding lines of _L'Ane_:

Dieu ne veut pas que rien, meme l'obscurite,
Meme l'Erreur qui semble ou funeste ou futile,
Que rien puisse, en criant: Quoi, j'etais inutile!
Dans le gouffre a jamais retomber eperdu;
Et le lien sacre du service rendu,
A travers l'ombre affreuse et la celeste sphere,
Joint l'echelon de nuit aux marches de lumiere.

Hope is indeed the keynote of Hugo's poetry. In the darkest days
of 1871, when France was tearing out her own vitals and Paris was
destroying itself, he could write thus:

Les recits montrent l'un apres l'autre leurs tetes,
Car les evenements ont leur cap des Tempetes,
Derriere est la clarte. Ces flux et ces reflux,
Ces recommencements, ces combats sont voulus,
Au-dessus de la haine immense, quelqu'un aime.
Ayons f