reformer. But, when all this has been said, there
remains a sum total of purely literary merits which suffices to place
him on a level with the greatest in literature. The mere fact that he is
equally remarkable for the exquisite grace of his smaller lyrics, and
for the rhetorical magnificence of his declamatory passages, argues some
peculiar and masterly idiosyncrasy in him. No poet has a rarer and more
delicate touch of pathos, none a more masculine or a fuller tone of
indignation. The great peculiarity of Victor Hugo is that his poetry
always transports. No one who cares for poetry at all, and who has
mastered the preliminary necessity of acquaintance with the French
language and French prosody, can read any of his better works without
gradually rising to a condition of enthusiasm in which the possible
defects of the matter are altogether lost sight of in the unsurpassed
and dazzling excellence of the manner. This is the special test of
poetry, and there is none other. The technical means by which Victor
Hugo produces these effects have been already hinted at. They consist in
a mastery of varied versification, in an extraordinary command of
pictorial language, dealing at once with physical and mental phenomena,
and, above all, in a certain irresistible habit of never allowing the
iron to grow cold. Stroke follows stroke in the exciting and
transporting process in a manner not easily paralleled in other writers.
Other poets are often best exhibited by very short extracts, by jewels
five words long. This is not so with Victor Hugo. He has such jewels,
but they are not his chief titles to admiration. The ardour and flow, as
of molten metal, which characterise him are felt only in the mass, and
must be sought there. What has been said of his verse is true, with but
slight modifications, of his prose, which is however on the whole
inferior. His unequalled versification is a weapon which he could not
exchange for the less pointed tool of prose without losing much of his
power. His defects emerge as his merits subside. But taking him
altogether, it may be asserted, without the least fear of
contradiction, that Victor Hugo deserves the title of the greatest poet
hitherto, and of one of the greatest prose writers of France. Such a
faculty, thrown into almost any cause, must have gone far to make it
triumph. But in a cause of such merits, and so stoutly seconded by
others, as that of the destruction of the classical tradition w