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even attempting such an appreciation as is possible, it is desirable to set forth clearly the grounds upon which that must rest. Hugo has passed among the immortals; of that there can be no word of doubt; and in so passing he has left behind him on earth the mere personal failings and qualities which made him friends and enemies here. Genius really means-it should never be forgotten-a spirit separate from the man himself, a sort of guardian angel or inspirer: and there is nothing more certain about great writers than that the permanent part of their utterances is by no means the same thing as are their mere opinions. It does not follow that themselves know which among their words are really 'winged,' nor in which direction they tend. When Horace sings,

'Jam Fides et Pax et Honos Pudorque
Priscus et neglecta redire Virtus
Audet, apparetque beata pleno
Copia cornu:

and when Leopardi,

'Valor vero e virtù, modestia e fede
E di giustizia amor, sempre in qualcunque
Publico stato, alieni in tutto e lungi
Da' comuni negozi, ovvero in tutti
Sfortunati saranno, afflitti e vinti; '

the opinions uttered by the two poets are in exact contradiction, but the sentiments and the carrying power of the lines are almost the same. The effect of both is to hold up the virtues to reverence-valour, modesty, and faith. It is not then an essential question whether Victor Hugo professed a boundless faith in human perfectibility, in Providence, or in the French people and the future of France. The essential is-What among his creations have the persuasive power of such opinions, to leave the belief in these things in our minds?

It is a common practice with critics, after they have filled a certain number of pages in praise of their subject, to turn the glass and end by fault-finding. Surely it is a more gracious way to begin with this negative side of criticism. and get rid of blame as soon as may be. There is one among our countrymen, it has been said, who hardly finds any fault in Hugo; and in a fine passage (it is at the beginning of his Essays and Studies') Mr. Swinburne expresses the effect which the master produces on his mind, by comparing Hugo to the vision of a storm which he once

had in mid-channel. Overhead, he tells us, hung an immense thunder-cloud; and on the horizon along the floor of the sea ran a race of lightnings like bacchanals;' but, on the other side, the sky was clear, 'too pure to be called blue,' while in it sat Dian (and now we quote verbally), 'watching 'with a serene splendour of scorn the battle of Titans and 'the revel of nymphs, from her stainless and Olympian 'summit of sublime indifferent light.' Both votaries and critics of Victor Hugo might accept this passage. For the latter would say that in the scene-if the poet has described it aright-Nature her very self showed too prodigal: as Swinburne's prose is most surely something overloaded. And the uncompromising admirers of Hugo would find no such defects for they would be used to them more frequent in their master.

Here then at once we put our fingers upon Hugo's great defect certainly to our English sense, to almost all Teuton sense, we doubt that his art is excessive, lacking restraint, and by this very excess fails of utter truthfulness. Of a piece with this criticism is Heine's famous phrase-fire without 'and ice within:' too harsh a judgement, but with its measure of truth. This is as much as to say that Hugo is touched at least by the greatest fault which genius can have, insincerity of sentiment. Insincerity of speech is a more venial matter, and over common among imaginative men to be visited very roughly. The difference lies between the insincerity in moments of inspiration and the same in other moments. Can we wholly acquit Victor Hugo of either? Through this great failing and certain others allied thereto, it is hardly possible to read the French poet for long without moments of exasperation supervening. It is one thing to commit faults. When Byron writes there let him lay,' or Shakespeare such a line as

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'What though he love your Hermia? Lord! what though?' we pass such over, as a kind of empty space in the artist's workmanship. But Hugo goes out of his way to be foolish. 'Why,' the reader asks in a sort of dull rage, does he write all these prefaces, with their pomp and their profession of learning and research (in one of them he makes Tibullus the lover of Lesbia, Catullus of Delia), when what follows ' is to show how utterly he has drawn on his imagination for his facts; yes, and a tolerably childish imagination to boot sometimes?' Why all that talk about the pronunciation of Southwark in L'Homme qui rit' as a preface to Lord

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Tom-Jim-Jack and to Gwynplaine-he who becomes 'Lord 'Clancharlie' as the reader remembers-to Govicum, the pot-boy, and the memorable Wapentake? And Waterloo in Les Misérables,' why drag in that pseudo-history, vigorous in places, but so absolutely false? And why that long discourse on the unsavoury mot de Cambronne '? Hugo has discovered the remarkable fact that Burgrave' (Burg-graf) does not, as most of us had supposed, mean the count of a town, just as 'Margrave' (Mark-graf) means the count of a march or county, but that the former word comes merely from 'burg,' a castle. The inspiration of Hugo's 'Burgraves' rests thereupon. And the inspiration, the ground idea, is very fine. We think it is in 'L'Homme qui rit' that our author explains that 'boulevard' is really boule verte, and another name for a bowling-green; one fancied it connected with bulwark, the Danish bolværk, a 'fossa '-mound and ditch. Indeed the list of these gaffes (as the French call such things) would be unending. And all put forward with such a parade of knowledge!

What touches more the reality of Hugo's inspiration is not these pompous discourses and these blunders, but a strain of vulgarity in the work itself. Above all stands conspicuous his love of antithesis, which is with him an affectation and an excess, and therefore a vulgarity. Of such is that long fanfare in his 'Eve' of the Légende des Siècles,' as a preparation for the line

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'Et, pâle, Ève sentit que son flanc remuait.'

Victor Hugo has, indeed, been called the incarnation of antithesis; and though at times that use is harmless, at others again, more rare, effective, it is enormously outside of its due place with him. In his stories it is the antithesis of character. This, indeed, is characteristically French. He is naturally a socialist, for, like Zola or the typical student of the quartier,' he hates the middle class. And yet St. Francis and Goethe were both typically of this bourgeois class, as were our Shakespeare and Victor Hugo himself. If Hugo wants a perfect character, such must be, like Jean Valjean, an ex-convict: the next most perfect in 'Les Misérables' is Gavroche, the little thief. Myriel is, perhaps, an exception to this general rule, but the only one that can be found. When we are allowed, in the person of Marius, a jeune premier of passable merit, he shall be on the other side-of noble birth.

Esmeralda of Notre-Dame,' the incarnation of simple

devotion, springs from the gutter. The Duchess Josiane in L'Homme qui rit,' suddenly enamoured of the defaced Gwynplaine all those are of a piece. On the same principle is Hugo's choice elsewhere of heroes and heroines, Hernani the bandit, Marion the courtesan. In situations it is the same. Who does not think at once of the feasters and the prisoners in Les Burgraves,' the drinking chorus of the one mingling with the clanking chains of the others ?

'Là le bruit de l'orgie, ici le bruit des fers.'

Nay, this antithesis accompanies Hugo to his tomb. For what else is that clause in his will desiring that a pauper hearse should carry him to his grave, at the same time that he omits to provide for a private funeral? To count the antithetic lines in Victor Hugo's verse would be like counting the sands of the sea

'Un roi chantait en bas, en haut mourait un dieu.'*

'Le jeune homme est beau, mais le vieillard est grand.' +

The couplet which follows soon after is one of the examples of success in this use

'Et l'on voit de la flamme aux yeux des jeunes gens,

Mais dans l'œil du vieillard on voit de la lumière.'

In the dramas, as one might expect, this play of antithesis or of epigram is continual

Don Carlos. Quand j'aurai le monde.

Hernani. Alors j'aurai la tombe.'.

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Savigny (to the gaoler). Vous m'ôtez mon sommeil.

Didier. Il n'est qu'interrompu.'

How terribly feeble is this

'Didier. On veut notre tête; eh! pour n'être pas en faute
Au bourreau qui l'attend, il faut la porter haute.'

For of course this love of antithesis at once runs into the love of epigram:

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Général, pour hochets il prit les pyramides: '+

the 'he' who performed this infantine feat is of course Napoleon. And what a detestable passage to follow :

'Empereur, il voulut dans ses vœux moins timides
Quelque chose de mieux.'

The bathoses into which our poet is led by this same effort

Légende des Siècles,' Booz.
Chants du Crépuscule,' La Colonne.

† Ibid.

to be epigrammatic and antithetical, these, too, are beyond numeration.

'Juillet vous a donné, pour sauver vos familles,

Trois de ces beaux soleils qui brûlent les bastilles :
Vos pères n'en ont eu qu'un seul.'*

And the inflating bellows are clearly audible sometimes when the poet insists on mounting his rostrum and writing on public events whether he be inspired or no:— 'Gloire à notre France éternelle !

Gloire à ceux qui sont morts pour elle !
Aux martyrs! aux vaillants! aux forts!
A ceux qu'enflamme leur exemple,
Qui veulent place dans le temple,

Et qui mourront comme ils sont morts.'

He is far too insensible to absurdities and the pretentious commonplace when in search of his rhymes :—

'Ces pentes de granit où saute le chamois

Et qui firent glisser Charles le Téméraire,

Le Mont Blane qui ne dit qu'à l'Himalaya: Frère.'

What an abominable line is this last! ‡

That which makes, we have suggested, these blots the blacker is that they are not slips but examples of predetermination, of volonté, such predetermination and volonté being in themselves at war with the sincerity of genius.

Nor can we look deep into the more moving passages in Hugo's writings without finding a somewhat of fictitious in his sentiments also, a certain confirmation, at least, of Heine's biting phrase. Take, for instance, L'Art d'être 'Grand-père,' which, without doubt, is largely simple and genuine, which more than anything else has won for Hugo the suffrages of that very middle class which every French artist affects to despise. Take even such charming passages as this wherein the grandfather confesses his over-indulgences:

'C'est terrible. Je règne

Mal, je ne veux pas que mon peuple me craigne ;

Or, mon peuple, c'est Jeanne et George; et moi, barbon,
Aïeul sans frein, ayant cette rage, être bon,

Je leur fais enjamber toutes les lois, et j'ose

Pousser aux attentats leur république rose.

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Certe, on passe au vieillard, qu'attend la froide nuit,
Son amour pour la grâce et le rire et l'aurore.' §

* Chants du Crepuscule,' Juillet 1830.
'Légende,' Régiment du Baron Madruce.
VOL. CXCVI. NO. CCCCI.

+ Ibid.
§ Les Enfants gâtés.

M

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