ugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to
be no gaudier than his neighbours? Hugo expressing himself in the
fearless old fashion of pre-romantic ages? A page of commonplace from
Mr. Meredith, a book for boarding-schools by M. Zola, were not more
startling.

For and Against.

Some primary qualities of his genius are pretty evenly balanced by some
primary faults. Thus, for breadth and brilliance of conception, for
energy and sweep of imagination, for the power of dealing as a master
with the greater forces of nature, he is unsurpassed among modern men.
But the conception is too often found to be empty as well as spacious;
the imagination is too often tainted with insincerity; in his dramas of
the elements there are too many such falsehoods as abound in his dramas
of the emotions. Again, he is sometimes grand and often grandiose; but
he has a trick of affecting the grandiose and the grand which is constant
and intolerable. He had the genius of style in such fulness as entitles
him to rank with the great artists in words of all time. His sense of
verbal colour and verbal music is beyond criticism; his rhythmical
capacity is something prodigious. He so revived and renewed the language
of France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy to
compete with Shakespeare's English and the German of Goethe and Heine;
and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical forms
he effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received the
orchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to have bequeathed his
heirs the orchestra of Berlioz. On the other hand; in much of his later
work his mannerisms in prose and in verse are discomfortably glaring; the
outcome of his unsurpassable literary faculty is often no more than a
parade or triumph of the vocables; there were times when his brain
appears to have become a mere machine for the production of antitheses
and sterile conceits. What is perhaps more damning than all, his work is
saturate in his own remarkable personality, and is objective only here
and there. His dramas are but five-act lyrics, his epics the romance of
an egoist, his history is confession, his criticism the opinions of
Victor Hugo. Even his lyrics, the 'fine flower' of his genius, the
loveliest expression of the language, have not escaped reproach as a
'Psalter of Subjectivity.' Even his essays in prose romance--a form of
art on which he has sta