New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1885-05-23

of liberty. "From that day forward as ne
himself eloquently exclaimed. "the union IN
his soul of the Republic with liberty was COM
plete."
patrician by birth, he was enfranehlSed IN
carly vouth from the prejudices OF privileged
cIasses. and long before the upheaval OF le4S'
bo claimed citizenship in the Republic OF the
future The man who despoiled Nation
~ ira liberties his soul abhorred with an
Intensity of passion that revived sense OF
public shame. He was the ideal Republican,
who denounced the foul crime OF the Coup
d'Etat. and while upbraiding his tellow-conn-
trvmen for their supineness and cowardlce,
oever lost fifth in the final triumph OF liberal
institutions and popular government.
nractical almost humdrum France cannot view
,yitbont emotion the departure OF this historic
8gure. It cannot help regarding his death as
catastrophe since it is an irreparaDie loss 10
National ideulism. Though he had Outllved the
generation which was so powerfully swayed by
his genius and his patriotism, ne reInalneu an
Eliminating "reminiscences or the heroic past
IN his death the Nation will momentarily renew
;ts vouth. and startled by the forgotten me-
MORALS of an earlier age, will cry out with one
voice that the noblest patriot has fallen.
This feeling of loyalty to the poets memory
will not be affected by the eccentricites of his
genius. A patrician and devout Catholic in
his youth. he was a Socialist and materiallst
in middle life and an embittered and queruous
idealist in his old age. The prophet of French
RenublicanisIn. he predicted also the triumph
of Atheism. Emerging from his island home,
where during twenty years of exile he had been
l. -; ooIf W "a n
fgnre. he gave himself mp in beleaguered Paris
to unworthy ambitions and did not hesi-
tate to defend the excuses of revolu-
tionary frenzy. At the moment when
France was PROSTATE in defeat he issued
a fantastic summons TO the Fatherand
10 rise against its tyrants and to found the
greatest free Republic IN Europe. Impatient OF
uolitical restraint, IMMERSED in parliamentary
tactics, ignorant of economic science, despisng
partisan ntrigues, he was not destined to order
or direct the policy of the Republic of which he
had been the prophet. He was child of
genius-not practical citizen.
The illusions of early idealism were shattered
long before the end. He shared the keen disap-
pointment of Republicans of a transcendental
type with the results of Republican progress.
He was ready to complain with Renan that
there are times when the world gives men OF
genius broad hint that il does not need their
services and on the whole gets on much better
without them. He became an erratic citizen of
the world the apologist Of assassins, the
patron of Socialists the prophet of anarchy.
But do what he would, say what he would, he
could not estrange a Nation that believed in the
genuineness of his convictions and was never
"a md ha
inspiration of his genius. IL took him at his
word when he declared that he had been
everything that the age had been; illogical
" and honest, Legitmist and VOltairian, lit
"erary Christian, liberal Bonapartist, a So
" cialIst cropping away from royaltyj but he
" had always acted in perfect good faith"
Even if the political commonwealth had re-
nounced its loyalty to him, there would have
remained republic in which his commanding
talents would have been honored. In the realm
of literature he has been for bali a century
towering figure. His earliest successes were
won IA poet under the Restoration princes, al
though he first acquired prominence IA the
pioneer of a new order of creative genius in the
romantic movement Of Louis Philippe's reign.
English readers have known him chiefly as the
anthOr of those great prose TOmances, " Notre
Dame de Paris and Les MisGIables,' works
which only family reveal his poetic genius al
though illuminated with all the splendors of
imaginative power, unrivalled pathos and vivid
colorng. In France he never ceased to be spoken
of as the creator of Hernanin and his dra-
matte power was generally recognized; but his
exquisitely finished poems, which defy the
translator's art, were esteemed by his own Ma
ton his choicest contribution to their htera-
ture. To the end of his life he was the ideal
poet "a well as patriot of the French people
His towering figure and his magnificent head
whitened with the SHOWS of eighty years were
never seen on platform or in the streets of Paris
without hearty and afiectionate manifestations
of hero-worship and patriotic idolalry.