Still, it must be said for Hugo that, even at this time, he could
have--in a manner actually had--put in evidence of not absolute
incompetence for the task.

[Sidenote: _Bug-Jargal._]

_Bug-Jargal_ was, as glanced at above, written, according to its
author's own statement, two years before _Han_, when he was only
sixteen; was partially printed (in the _Constitutionnel_) and (in fear
of a piracy) rewritten in fifteen days and published, seven years after
its composition, and almost as many before _Notre-Dame de Paris_
appeared. Taking it as it stands, there is nothing of the sixteen years
or of the fifteen days to be seen in it. It is altogether superior to
_Han_, and though it has not the nightmare magnificence and the
phantasmagoric variety of _Notre-Dame_, it is, not merely because it is
much shorter, a far better told, more coherent, and more generally human
story. The jester-obi Habibrah has indeed the caricature-grotesquery of
Han himself, and of Quasimodo, and long afterwards of Gwynplaine, as
well as the devilry of the first named and of Thenardier in _Les
Miserables_; but we do not see too much of him, and nothing that he does
is exactly absurd or utterly improbable. The heroine--so far as there is
a heroine in Marie d'Auverney, wife of the part-hero-narrator, but
separated from him on the very day of their marriage by the rebellion of
San Domingo--is very slight; but then, according to the story, she is
not wanted to be anything more. The cruelty, treachery, etc., of the
half-caste Biassou are not overdone, nor is the tropical scenery, nor
indeed anything else. Even the character of Bug-Jargal himself, a
modernised Oroonoko (whom probably Hugo did not know) and a more direct
descendant of persons and things in Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,
and to some extent the "sensibility" novelists generally (whom he
certainly did know), is kept within bounds. And, what is perhaps most
extraordinary of all, the half-comic interludes in the narrative where
Auverney's comrades talk while he makes breaks in his story, contain few
of Hugo's usually disastrous attempts at humour. It is impossible to say
that the book is of any great importance or of any enthralling interest.
But it is the most workmanlike of all Hugo's work in prose fiction, and,
except _Les Travailleurs de La Mer_ and _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, which
have greater faults as well as greater beauties, the most readable, if
not, like them, the most likely to