Into this novel Hugo poured all his passionate devotion to liberty, equality and fraternity; likewise his blazing hatred of cruelty and tyranny. He tells the story of an escaped convict who reforms and makes a success of his life, but is pursued by the police and dragged back to prison. Incidentally the poet gives us a vast picture of the France of his own time, and the lives and struggles of the proletariat. The figure of Jean Valjean is one of the great achievements of the human imagination, and his story is a treasure of the revolutionary movement in every modern land. “Napoleon the Little” led his country to war with Germany and was overwhelmingly crushed. Hugo came home in this crisis, and took part in the defense of Paris. Then came the terrible uprising of the starved and tortured masses, the Paris Commune. By this time the bourgeois savages had machine-guns, so that they could wipe out wholesale the idealism and faith of the people; they stood some fifty thousand workers, men, women and children, against the walls of Paris and shot them down in cold blood. Victor Hugo defended these Communards, and once more had to flee for his life. After the peace with Germany, France was left a republic, and her great poet returned to live with his grandchildren, to labor for the working classes, and to pour out floods of eloquence in behalf of his social ideals. New movements arose, and the old man heard that he was theatrical, bombastic, unreal. All that is true to a considerable extent; for Hugo is like Shelley, having the defects of his great qualities. When the inspiration does not come to him, he learns to imitate it; he acquires mannerisms, he adopts poses. Following Milton’s suggestion of making an art work of his life, he sets his personality up as an embodiment of revolutionary idealism, he makes himself into a legend, a living monument, a literary shrine, one might say a literary cathedral. It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and we often take that step with Victor Hugo. But the masses of the people knew that the core of his being was a passionate devotion to liberty and justice; therefore they took him to their hearts, and his life is so blended with theirs that Victor Hugo and revolutionary France are two phrases with one meaning. CHAPTER LXII TYGER, TYGER! What would Victor Hugo have been if he had had no social conscience? What would the romantic movement have amounted to if it had confined itself to the field of art? These questions are answered for us by Théophile Gautier.