atan,
one can safely say one would sooner be damned with the author of
"L'Homme qui Rit" than saved with many who have no charlatanism
in them.

But what is charlatanism? Does it imply false and extravagant
claims to qualities we do not possess? Or is there the spirit of the
Mountebank in it? If one were a deliberate Machiavel of
dissimulation, if one fooled the people thoroughly and consciously,
would one be a charlatan? Or are charlatans simply harmless fools
who are too embarrassed to confess their ignorance and too childish
to stop pretending?

There is something nobly patriarchal about the idea of Victor Hugo
in his old age. The man's countenance has certainly extraordinary
genius "writ large" there for all men to see. His head is like
something that has been carved by Michelangelo. Looking at his
face one realises where the secret of his peculiar genius lay. It lay in
a certain tragic abandonment to a sublime struggle with the elements.
When in his imagination he wrestled with the elements he forgot his
politics, his prejudices, his moral bravado.

Whatever this mysterious weakness may have been which we call
his "charlatanism," it certainly dropped away from him like a mask
when he confronted the wind or sea or such primitive forms of
human tragedy as are elemental in their simple outlines. Probably
for all his rhetoric Victor Hugo would have made an obstinate
invincible sailor on the high seas. I discern in the shape of his head
something of the look of weather-beaten mariners. I can fancy him
holding fast the rudder of a ship flying before the fury of an Atlantic
storm.

The sea-scenes in his books are unequalled in all prose literature. To
match them you would have to go to the poets--to Shakespeare--to
Swinburne. A single line of Hugo has more of the spirit of the sea,
more of its savagery, its bitter strength, its tigerish leap and bite,
than pages of Pierre Loti. Whether I am prejudiced by my childish
associations I do not know, but no other writer makes me smell the
sea-weed, catch the sharp salt tang, feel the buffeting of the waves,
as Victor Hugo does. Yes, for all his panoramic evocations of
sea-effects, Pierre Loti does not touch the old eternal mystery of the
deep, with its answer of terror and strange yearning in the heart of
man, in the way this other touches it. The great rhetorician found a
rhetoric here that put his eloquence to silence and he responded to it
with sentences as sharp, as b