I found it so uninteresting
that I do not believe I read it through. Nor, except in the last
respect, have I improved with it--for it would be presumptuous to say,
"has it improved with me"--since. The author apologised for it in two
successive prefaces shortly after its appearance, and in yet another
after that of _Notre-Dame de Paris_, ten years later. None of them, it
is to be feared, "touches the spot." The first, indeed, is hardly an
apology at all, but a sort of _goguenard_ "showing off" of the kind not
uncommon with youth; the second, a little more serious, contains rather
interesting hits[94] of again youthful jealousy at the popularity of
Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil; the third and much later one is a
very early instance of the Victorian philosophising. "There must be," we
are told with the solemnity which for some sixty years excited such a
curious mixture of amazement and amusement, "in every work of the
mind--drama or novel--there must be many things felt, many things
observed, and many things divined," and while in _Han_ there is only one
thing felt--a young man's love--and one observed--a girl's ditto--the
rest is all divined, is "the fantastic imagination of an adolescent."

One impeticoses the gratility of the explanation, and refrains, as far
as may be, from saying, "Words! words!" Unluckily, the book does very
little indeed to supply deeds to match. The feeling and the observation
furnish forth a most unstimulating love-story; at least the present
critic, who has an unabashed fondness for love-stories, has never been
able to feel the slightest interest either in Ordener Guldenlew or in
Ethel Schumacker, except in so far as the lady is probably the first of
the since innumerable and sometimes agreeable heroines of her name in
fiction. As for the "divining," the "intention," and the "imagination,"
they have been exerted to sadly little purpose. The absurd nomenclature,
definitely excused in one of the prefaces, may have a slight historic
interest as the first attempt, almost a hopeless failure, at that
_science des noms_ with which Hugo was later credited, and which he
certainly sometimes displayed. It is hardly necessary to say much about
Spladgest and Oglypiglaf, Musdaemon and Orugix. They are pure
schoolboyisms. But it is perhaps fair to relieve the author from the
reproach, which has been thrown on him by some of his English
translators, of having metamorphosed "Hans" into "Han." He himself
expl