austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland year, can be called simple. But
Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like being in
church with a strident-voiced preacher shouting from out of a terribly
sonorous pulpit. "Les Orientales." An East of painted card-board, tin
daggers, and a military band playing the Turkish patrol in the Palais Royal
... The verse is grand, noble, tremendous; I liked it, I admired it, but it
did not--I repeat the phrase--awake a voice of conscience within me; and
even the structure of the verse was too much in the style of public
buildings to please me. Of "Les Feuilles d'Automne" and "Les Chants du
Crepuscule" I remember nothing. Ten lines, fifty lines of "La Legende des
Siecles," and I always think that it is the greatest poetry I have ever
read, but after a few pages I invariably put the book down and forget it.
Having composed more verses than any man that ever lived, Hugo can only be
taken in the smallest doses; if you repeat any passage to a friend across a
cafe table, you are both appalled by the splendour of the imagery, by the
thunder of the syllables.

"Quel dieu, quel moissonneur dans l'eternel ete
Avait s'en allant negligemment jete
Cette faucille d'or dans les champs des etoiles."

But if I read an entire poem I never escape that sensation of the ennui
which is inherent in the gaud and the glitter of the Italian or Spanish
improvisatore. There never was anything French about Hugo's genius. Hugo
was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a metaphysical German
student. Take another verse--

"Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne l'horizon."

Without a "like" or an "as," by a mere statement of fact, the picture, nay
more, the impression, is produced. I confess I have a weakness for the poem
which this line concludes--"La fete chez Therese;" but admirable as it is
with its picture of mediaeval life, there is in it, like in all Hugo's
work, a sense of fabrication that dries up emotion in my heart. He shouts
and raves over poor humanity, while he is gathering coppers for himself; he
goes in for an all-round patronage of the Almighty in a last stanza; but of
the two immortalities he evidently considers his own the most durable; he
does not, however, become really intolerable until he gets on the subject
of little children; he sings their innocence in great bombast, but he is
watching them; the poetry over, the crowd dispersed, he will appear a
verit