VICTOR MARIE HUGO was born at Besançon, France, February 26th, 1802. He died at Paris, May 22d, 1885, and into his eighty-three years he crowded so much of emotion and effort that the temptation to call him the most representative product of the nineteenth century is hard to resist. He was certainly the greatest Frenchman of the century. France has produced no greater poet in any age. As a political orator he was surpassed among Frenchmen only by Mirabeau,—if, indeed, it be true that Mirabeau himself surpassed him. As a dramatist, he ranks with Voltaire, and there is good ground for the claim of his admirers that his “Les Miserables” is the “greatest novel ever written.” As an essayist, he works chiefly through his novels. The greatness of idea which makes “Les Miserables” what it is is not developed wholly through the plot, but to a degree through essays with which it is interspersed. In some English translations these essays are nearly all omitted, without seeming to affect the value of the story. But Hugo wished to make the book something more than a mere story. To him it is an expression of the great tragedy of human life and, to develop it, he uses the art not merely of the novelist, but of the epic poet, the orator, and the philosopher.

  The essays of his “Choses Vues” take a wholly different form. They are graphic sketches in which he projects his ideas as objectively as if they were thrown on a screen by a magic lantern. The natural mode of expression always pleased him best. Like all great artists, he was repelled by the merely abstract. To him abstraction seemed to lead, not towards truth, but away from it. To escape negation he sought to reveal truth as it is revealed in nature,—in an infinite diversity of object lessons, each harmonized with the rest by a subtle law of all-pervading unity. He was vain and often theatrical, but he loved what was noble and hated what was base so deeply that when examples of heroic courage as a manifestation of the intellectual life are sought for, his name will not be forgotten while that of Alcæus is remembered.