their
extreme forms the qualities and the defects of his school. Above all, he
was the supreme lord of words. In sheer facility, in sheer abundance of
language, Shakespeare alone of all the writers of the world can be
reckoned his superior. The bulk of his work is very great, and the
nature of it is very various; but every page bears the mark of the same
tireless fecundity, the same absolute dominion over the resources of
speech. Words flowed from Victor Hugo like light from the sun. Nor was
his volubility a mere disordered mass of verbiage: it was controlled,
adorned, and inspired by an immense technical power. When one has come
under the spell of that great enchanter, one begins to believe that his
art is without limits, that with such an instrument and such a science
there is no miracle which he cannot perform. He can conjure up the
strangest visions of fancy; he can evoke the glamour and the mystery of
the past; he can sing with exquisite lightness of the fugitive beauties
of Nature; he can pour out, in tenderness or in passion, the melodies of
love; he can fill his lines with the fire, the stress, the culminating
fury, of prophetic denunciation; he can utter the sad and secret
questionings of the human spirit, and give voice to the solemnity of
Fate. In the long roll and vast swell of his verse there is something of
the ocean--a moving profundity of power. His sonorous music, with its
absolute sureness of purpose, and its contrapuntal art, recalls the
vision in _Paradise Lost_ of him who--

with volant touch
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.

What kind of mind, what kind of spirit, must that have been, one asks in
amazement, which could animate with such a marvellous perfection the
enormous organ of that voice?

But perhaps it would be best to leave the question unasked--or at least
unanswered. For the more one searches, the clearer it becomes that
the intellectual scope and the spiritual quality of Victor Hugo were
very far from being equal to his gifts of expression and imagination.
He had the powers of a great genius and the soul of an ordinary
man. But that was not all. There have been writers of the highest
excellence--Saint-Simon was one of them--the value of whose productions
have been unaffected, or indeed even increased, by their personal
inferiority. They could not have written better, one feels, if they had
been ten times as noble and twenty times as