imself.

No one but a child would have behaved as he did on certain
occasions. The grave naivete of his attitude to the whole spectacle of
life was like the solemnity of a child who takes very seriously every
movement of the game which he is playing. A child is solemn when
it is pretending to be an engine-driver or a pilot, and Victor Hugo
was solemn when he pretended to be a saviour of society. No one
but a person endowed with the perfect genius of childishness could
have acted toward his mistress and his wife in the way he did, or
have been so serenely blind to the irony of the world.

There is as little of the sensual in Victor Hugo's temperament as
there is in the temperament of a pure-minded child; but like a child
he finds a shuddering pleasure in approaching the edge of the
precipice; like a child he loves to loiter in melancholy fields where
the white moon-daisies are queerly stained with the old dark blood
of weird and abnormal memories.

Irony of any kind, worldly or otherwise, never crossed so much as
the margin of his consciousness. He is shamelessly, indecently,
monstrously lacking in the ironic sense.

"What are we going to do?" he dramatically asked his sons when
they had established themselves in their island home; and after they
had each replied according to their respective tastes, "I," he added,
"am going to contemplate the ocean!"

I am ready to confess that I feel a certain shame in thus joining the
company of the godless and making sport of my childhood's hero.
"He was a man, take him for all in all," and _we_ at any rate shall
not live to see his like again.

There was something genuinely large and innocent and elemental in
Victor Hugo. The austere simplicity of his life may have been
perhaps too self-consciously flung at the world's face; but it was a
natural instinct in him. I hesitate to call him a charlatan. Was it
Goethe who said "There is something of charlatanism in all genius"?
Victor Hugo hardly deserves to have Goethe quoted in his favour, so
ignorantly did he disparage, in his childish prejudice, the great
German's work; but what perhaps the world calls charlatanism in
him is really only the reaction of genius when it comes into conflict
with the brutal obstinacy of real life.

What is charlatanism? I am almost scared to look up the word in the
dictionary for fear of discovering that I am myself no better than that
opprobrious thing. But still, if Victor Hugo was really a charl