f the weak by the strong is one of his constant themes, as
witness _Eviradnus_, _Le Petit Roi de Galice_, _Les Pauvres Gens._ The
contrast of the weak and the strong is one of his favourite artistic
effects, as witness _Booz endormi_, _La Confiance du Marquis Falrice._
An act of pity redeemed Sultan Mourad, an act of pity made the poor ass
greater than all the philosophers. It was this absorbing pity for
the defenceless that made Hugo so merciless to the oppressor and so
incapable of seeing anything but the deepest black in the picture of
the tyrant. One-sided the poet may be, but it is the one-sidedness of a
generous nature; he may err, but his errors at least lean to the side of
virtue.

It would be impossible in the brief space of an introduction such as
this to discuss at any length the characteristics of Hugo as a literary
artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art
which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume. It is
scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet's extraordinary fecundity of
words and images. Occasionally, especially in his later works, this
degenerates into diffuseness, and he exhibits a tendency to repetition
and a fondness for long enumeration of names and details. On the other
hand, he constantly shows how well he understood the power of brevity
and compression. There is not a superfluous word nor a poetic image in
_La Conscience_, the severe and simple style of which is well suited
to the sternness of the subject. The story of _Apres la Bataille_ is
related with telling conciseness, while in the highly finished work of
_Booz endormi_ there are no redundant phrases. The many variations on
the same theme in _Aymerillot_ may be criticized as tedious, but there
underlies them the artistic purpose of intensifying the reader's sense
of the cowardice of the nobles by an accumulation of examples. A like
criticism and a like defence may be made of the long list of the crimes
of Sultan Mourad, though here perhaps the poet's torrent of facts goes
beyond the point at which the amassing of details is effective. On the
other hand, the swiftness of the narrative of the _Mariage de Roland_,
and the soldierly brevity of the _Cimetiere d'Eylau_, a piece not
included in this volume, are alike admirable, and show Hugo at his best
as a story-teller.

One of the most marked features of Hugo's poetry is his custom of
attributing human desires and volition to inanimate obj