words, and images and
words created ideas. He was a master of all harmonies of verse; now
a solitary breather through pipe or flute; more often the conductor
of an orchestra.

To say that Hugo was the greatest lyric poet of France is to say too
little; the claim that he was the greatest lyric poet of all literature
might be urged. The power and magnitude of his song result from the
fact that in it what is personal and what is impersonal are fused
in one; his soul echoed orchestrally the orchestrations of nature
and of humanity--

"_Son ame aux mille voix, que le Dieu qu'il adore
Mit au centre de tout comme un echo sonore._"

And thus if his poetry is not great by virtue of his own ideas, it
becomes great as a reverberation of the sensations, the passions,
and the thoughts of the world. He did not soar tranquilly aloft and
alone; he was always a combatant in the world and wave of men, or
borne joyously upon the flood. The evolution of his genius was a long
process. The _Odes_ of 1822 and 1824, the _Odes et Ballades_ of 1826,
Catholic and royalist in their feeling, show in their form a
struggling originality oppressed by the literary methods of his
predecessors--J.-B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Casimir Delavigne. This
originality asserts itself chiefly in the _Ballades_. His early prose
romances, _Han d'Islande_ (1823) and _Bug-Jargal_ (1826)--the one
a tale of the seventeenth-century man-beast of Norway, the other a
tale of the generous St. Domingo slave--are challenges of youthful
and extravagant romanticism. _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne_ (1829)
is a prose study in the pathology of passion. The same year which
saw the publication of the last of these is also the year of _Les
Orientales_. These poems are also studies--amazing studies in colour,
in form, in all the secrets of poetic art. The East was popular--Hugo
was ever passionate for popularity--and Spain, which he had seen,
is half-Oriental. But of what concern is the East? he had seen a sunset
last summer, and the fancy took him; the East becomes an occasion
for marvellous combinations of harmony and lustrous tinctures; art
for its own sake is precious.

From 1827, when _Cromwell_ appeared, to 1843, when the epic in drama
_Les Burgraves_ failed, Hugo was a writer for the stage, diverting
tragedy from its true direction towards lyrical melodrama.[1] In the
operatic libretto _La Esmeralda_ (1836) his lyrical virtuosity was
free to display itself in an appropria