ttle of
style. From Dumas the artist of _Henri Trois_ and _Antony_, the language
of Boileau was safe enough; and his triumph, all-important and
significant as it was, seemed neither fatal nor abominable. It was
another matter with _Hernani_. Its success meant ruin for the Academy
and destruction for the idiom of Delille and M. de Jouy; and the
classicists mustered in force, and did their utmost to stay the coming
wrath and arrest the impending doom. They failed of course; for they
fought with a vague yet limited apprehension of the question at issue,
they had nothing to give in place of the thing they hated. And Victor
Hugo was made captain of the victorious host, while the men who might
have been in a certain sort his rivals took service as lieutenants, and
accepted his ensign for their own.

His Diary.

All his life long he was addicted to attitude; all his life long he was a
_poseur_ of the purest water. He seems to have considered the
affectation of superiority an essential quality in art; for just as the
cock in Mrs. Poyser's apothegm believed that the sun got up to hear him
crow, so to the poet of the _Legende_ and the _Contemplations_ it must
have seemed as if the human race existed but to consider the use he made
of his 'oracular tongue.' How tremendous his utterances sometimes
were--informed with what majesty yet with what brilliance--is one of the
things that every schoolboy knows. One no more needs to insist upon the
merits of his best manner than to emphasise the faults of his worst. At
his best as at his worst, however, he was always an artist in his way.
His speech was nothing if not artificial--in the good sense of the word
sometimes and sometimes in the bad. Simplicity (it seemed) was
impossible to him. In the quest of expression, the cult of antithesis,
the pursuit of effect, he sacrificed directness and plainness with not
less consistency than complacency. In that tissue of 'apocalyptic
epigram' which to him was style there was no room for truth and
soberness. His Patmos was a place of mirrors, and before them he draped
himself in his phrases like Frederick in the mantle of Ruy Blas. That
this grandiosity was unnatural and unreal was proved by the publication
of _Choses Vues_. When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply
and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub
your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober,
direct? H