The égendedesSièdefence of the weak by the strong is one of his constant themes, as witness _Éviradnus_, _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 and simple style of which is well suited to the sternness of the subject. The story of _Après la Bataille_ is related with telling conciseness, while in the highly finished work of _Booz endormi_ there are no redundant phrases. The many variations on the same theme in _Aymerillot_ may be criticized as tedious, but there underlies them the artistic purpose of intensifying the reader's sense of the cowardice of the nobles by an accumulation of examples. A like criticism and a like defence may be made of the long list of the crimes of Sultan Mourad, though here perhaps the poet's torrent of facts goes beyond the point at which the amassing of details is effective. On the other hand, the swiftness of the narrative of the _Mariage de Roland_, and the soldierly brevity of the _Cimetière d'Eylau_, a piece not included in this volume, are alike admirable, and show Hugo at his best as a story-teller.