my own that I
am tempted to regard it as no better than an affected pose.

Nowhere is Victor Hugo's genius more evident than in his invention
of names. Esmeralda, Quasimodo, Gellert, Cosette, Fantine--they all
have that indescribable ring of genuine romance about them which
more than anything else restores to us the "long, long thoughts" of
youth.

I think that Fantine is the most beautiful and imaginative name ever
given to any woman. It is far more suggestive of wild and delicate
mysteries than Fragoletta or Dolores or Charmian or Ianthe.

I am inclined to maintain that it is in the sphere of pure poetic
imagination that Victor Hugo is greatest; though, like so many other
foreigners, I find it difficult to read his formal poetry. It is, I fancy,
this poetic imagination of his which makes it possible for him to
throw his isolated scenes into such terrific relief that they lodge
themselves in one's brain with such crushing force. In all his books it
is the separate individual scenes of which one finds oneself thinking
as one recalls the progress of this narrative or the other. And when
he has struck out with a few vivid lightning-like flashes the original
lineaments of one of his superb creations, it is rather in separate and
detached scenes that he makes such a person's indelible
characteristics gleam forth from the surrounding darkness, than in
any continuous psychological process of development.

His psychology is the psychology of a child; but none the worse
perhaps for that; for it is remarkable how often the most exhaustive
psychological analysis misses the real mystery of human character.
Victor Hugo goes to work by illuminating flashes. He carries a
flaring torch in his hand; and every now and then he plunges it into
the caverns of the human heart, and one is conscious of vast
stupendous Shadows, moving from midnight to midnight.

His method is gnomic, laconic, oracular; never persuasive or
plausible. It is "Lo--here" and then again "Lo--there!" and we are
either with him or not with him. There are no half measures, no slow
evolutionary disclosures.

One of his most interesting literary devices, and it is an essentially
poetic one, is the diffusion through the story of some particular
background, a background which gathers to itself a sort of brooding
personality as the tale proceeds, and often becomes before the book
is finished far more arresting and important than any of the human
characters whose dra