th all the confusing and overbearing forces of life; of
poverty with the requirements and oppressions of wealth; of the small
with the great; of the people with tyrants; of Man with Fate--these
are his subjects, and he is never an impartial historian. He is on the
side of the weak in every combat, the partisan of the oppressed. But
this does not detract from his work when his opponents are the
oppressors of the past, or the still more subtle, veiled, and
unassailable forces of Destiny. The poet's region is there: he is
born, if not to set right the times which are out of joint, at least
to read to the world the high and often terrible lesson of the ages.
But it vulgarizes his work when he is seen, tooth and nail, in violent
personal conflict with foemen unworthy of his steel, embalming in
poetry the trivial or the uncompleted incidents of contemporary
warfare. It becomes almost ludicrous, indeed, when we find him pouring
forth page after page of vehement and burning complaint in respect to
the personal sufferings inflicted on himself, when we know that
throughout his career Hugo never knew what the cold shock of failure
was, and that, from the moment when Chateaubriand adopted him into the
ranks of the poets as _l'enfant sublime_, until the moment when all
Paris conducted him to his last resting-place, no man has had a more
enthusiastic following, or accomplished a more triumphant career.

Victor Hugo was a son of the Revolution. He was born, as it were,
between the two camps, at a moment when France was the theatre of the
greatest popular struggle in modern history, of a mother who was a
Breton and a Legitimist, and a father who was a Republican general--an
extraordinary combination. This does not seem, however, to have made,
as we might think, family life impossible, for Madame Hugo and her
children followed the drum, and, notwithstanding all differences of
opinion, found it possible to keep together. He was educated, it would
appear, under his mother's influence rather than that of the
soldier-father, and did not, till his mind was quite mature, throw
himself into the revolutionary opinions which afterward influenced him
so greatly. A Royalist in the Restoration period, an observant but not
excited spectator of public affairs from 1830 to 1848, it was not till
the _coup d'etat_ and the beginning of the reign of the third Napoleon
that he was seized with the passion of political life. That great
betrayal seems to have