he mingled fiction with his history, it was because he conceived of the fiction as being as true a representation of the facts of an era as annals and records.  It may be true that Hugo made imagination do duty for study, but it is also true that an imagination, such as Hugo’s, may be as sure an instrument as study in reconstructing the past.  He may have mistaken the date of Crassus by several centuries, but readers of Suetonius will hardly deny the faithfulness of his delineation of at least one side of the civilization of ancient Rome; he may have invented a Spanish princess, but his carefully stippled portrait of Philip II is true to the life, even if it be Philip in his darkest moods.  His inaccuracies are in truth of small account.  Who that reads Le Cimetiere d’Eylau cares whether there was a place of burial in the battlefield or not? or what lover of Booz endormi seeks to know how closely the flora of Palestine has been studied?  A more serious criticism than the charge of inaccuracy is that of partial vision, and from this Hugo cannot be entirely exculpated.  He saw with his heart, and seeing with the heart must always mean partial vision.  For at the root of Hugo’s nature lay an immense pity, pity not merely for the suffering, but for what is base or criminal, or what is ugly or degraded.  It was this pity which is the keynote of Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Miserables; it is this pity which inspired much of the Legende des Siecles.

The defence of the weak by the strong is one of his constant themes, as witness Eviradnus, Le Petit Roi de Galice, Les Pauvres Gens. The contrast of the weak and the strong is one of his favourite artistic effects, as witness Booz endormi, La Confiance du Marquis Falrice. An act of pity redeemed Sultan Mourad, an act of pity made the poor ass greater than all the philosophers.  It was this absorbing pity for the defenceless that made Hugo so merciless to the oppressor and so incapable of seeing anything but the deepest black in the picture of the tyrant.  One-sided the poet may be, but it is the one-sidedness of a generous nature; he may err, but his errors at least lean to the side of virtue.

It would be impossible in the brief space of an introduction such as this to discuss at any length the characteristics of Hugo as a literary artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume.  It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet’s extraordinary fecundity of words and images.  Occasionally, especially in his later works, this degenerates into diffuseness, and he exhibits a tendency to repetition and a fondness for long enumeration of names and details.  On the other hand, he constantly shows how well he understood the power of brevity and compression.  There is not a superfluous word nor a poetic image in La Conscience, the severe