y rule of the old French
stage is deliberately violated. Although the language is in parts ornate
to a degree, the old periphrases are wholly excluded; and when simple
things have to be said they are said with the utmost simplicity. The
cadence and arrangement of the classical Alexandrine are audaciously
reconstructed. Not merely is the practice of _enjambement_ (or
overlapping of lines and couplets, as distinct from the rigid separation
of them) frequent and daring, but the whole balance and rhythm of the
individual line is altered. Ever since Racine the one aim of the
dramatist had been to make the Alexandrine run as monotonously as
possible. The aim of Victor Hugo was to make it run with the greatest
possible variety. In short, the whole theory of the drama was altered.
The decade which followed the revolution of July was Victor Hugo's most
triumphant period. A series of dramas, _Marion de Lorme_, _Les Roi
s'Amuse_, _Lucrece Borgia_, _Marie Tudor_, _Angelo_, _Les Burgraves_,
succeeded each other at short intervals, and were accompanied by four
volumes of immortal verse, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_, _Chants du
Crepuscule_, _Les Voix Interieures_, _Les Rayons et les Ombres_. The
dramas continued to show Victor Hugo's command of tragic passion, his
wonderful faculty of verse, his fertility in moving situations, and in
incidents of horror and grandeur; but they did not indicate an increased
acquaintance with those minor arts of the playwright, which are
necessary to the success of acted dramas, and which many of Hugo's own
pupils possessed to perfection. Accordingly, towards the end of the
decade, some reaction took place against them, and their author ceased
to write for the stage. His purely poetical productions showed, however,
an increase at once of poetical and of critical power; and of the four
volumes mentioned, each one contains many pieces which have never been
excelled in French poetry, and which may be fairly compared with the
greatest poetical productions of the same kind in other literatures.
Meanwhile, Victor Hugo's political ideas (which never, in any of their
forms, brought him much luck, literary or other) had undergone a
remarkable change. During the reign of Louis Philippe, he, who had
recently been an ardent legitimist, became, first, a constitutional
royalist (in which capacity he accepted from the king a peerage), then
an extreme liberal, and at last, when the revolution of 1848 broke out,
a republican