t adjective
whatever other or others may be added--which covers the space of a full
half-century from _Han d'Islande_ to _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, it would,
according to the notions of criticism here followed, be improper to
attempt that till after the procession itself has been carefully
surveyed.

Nor will it be necessary to preface, to follow, or, except very rarely
and slightly, to accompany this survey with remarks on the non-literary
characteristics of this French Titan of literature. The object often of
frantic political and bitter personal abuse; for a long time of almost
equally frantic and much sillier political and personal idolatry;
himself the victim--in consequence partly of his own faults, partly of
ignoble jealousy of greatness, but perhaps most of all of the inevitable
reaction from this foolish cult--of the most unsparing rummage into
those faults, and the weaknesses which accompany them, that any poet or
prose writer, even Pope, has experienced--Victor Hugo still, though he
has had many a _vates_ in both senses of _sacer_, may almost be allowed
_carere_ critico _sacro_,[93] in the best sense, on the whole of his
life and work. I have no pretensions to fill or bridge the whole of the
gap here. It will be quite task enough for the present, leaving the life
almost alone, to attempt the part of the work which contains prose
fiction. Nothing said of this will in the least affect what I have often
said elsewhere, and shall hold to as long as I hold anything, in regard
to the poetry--that its author is the greatest poet of France, and one
of the great poets of the world.

[Sidenote: _Han d'Islande._]

To deal with Hugo's first published, though not first written, novel
requires, in almost the highest degree, what Mr. Matthew Arnold called
"a purged considerate mind." There are, I believe, some people (I myself
know at least one of great excellence) who, having had the good luck to
read _Han d'Islande_ as schoolboys, and finding its vein congenial to
theirs, have, as in such cases is not impossible, kept it unscathed in
their liking. But this does not happen to every one. I do not think,
though I am not quite certain, that when I first read it myself I was
exactly what may be called a schoolboy pure and simple (that is to say,
under fifteen). But if I did not read it in upper school-boyhood (that
is to say, before eighteen), I certainly did, not much later. I own that
at that time, whatever my exact age was,