d valuable as is its shortness, it could be cut
down to two-thirds at least with advantage. Clubin and Rantaine, the
villains, are pure melodrama; Mess Lethierry, the good old man, is
rather an old fool, and not so very good. The real business of the
book--the salvage by Gilliatt of the steamer wrecked on the Douvres--is,
as a schoolboy would say, or would have said, "jolly impossible." But
the book as a whole is, despite or because of its tragic quality, almost
impossibly "jolly."

[Sidenote: The _genius loci._]

For here--as he did previously (by the help of the form that was more
his own and of Jersey) in the _Contemplations_--he had now got in prose,
by that of the smaller, more isolated, and less contaminated[109]
island, into his own proper country, the dominion of the Angel of the
Visions of the Sea. He has told us in his own grandiloquent way, which
so often led him wrong, that when he settled to exile in the Channel
Islands, his son Francois observed, "Je traduirai Shakespeare," and _he_
said, "Je contemplerai l'ocean." He did; and good came of it. Students
of his biography may know that in the dwelling which he called
Hauteville House (a name which, I regret to say, already and properly
belonged to another) he slept and mainly lived in a high garret with
much glass window, overlooking the strait between Guernsey and Sark.
These "gazebos," as they used to be called, are common in St. Peter
Port, and I myself enjoyed the possession of a more modest and quite
unfamous one for some time. They are worth inhabiting and looking from,
be the weather fair or foul. Moreover, he was, I believe, a very good
walker, and in both the islands made the best of opportunities which are
unmatched elsewhere. Whether he boated much I do not know. The profusion
of nautical terms with which he "deaves" us (as the old Scotch word has
it) would rather lead me to think _not_. He was in this inferior to
Prospero; but I hope it is not blasphemy to say that, _mutatis
mutandis_, he had something of the banished Duke of Milan in him, and
that, in the one case as in the other, it was the island that brought it
out. And he acknowledged it in his Dedication to "Guernesey--_severe et
douce_."

[Sidenote: Guernsey at the time.]

_Severe et Douce!_ I lived in Guernsey as a Master at Elizabeth College
from 1868, two years after Victor Hugo wrote that dedication, to 1874,
when he still kept house there, but had not, since the "Annee Terrible,"