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 appropriate dramatic form. The libretto was founded on his own romance _Notre-Dame de Paris_ (1831), an evocation, more imaginative than historical, of the old city of the fifteenth century, its tragic passions, its strangeness, its horrors, and its beauty; it is a marvellous series of fantasies in black and white; things live in it more truly than persons; the cathedral, by its tyrannous power and intenser life, seems to overshadow the other actors. The tale is a juxtaposition of violent contrasts, an antithesis of darkness and light. Through Quasimodo afflicted humanity appeals for pity. [Footnote 1: See section VII, this chapter.]