ma it dominates.

Such is the sea itself, for instance, in "The Toilers." Such is the
historic cathedral in "Notre Dame." Such is the great Revolution
--certainly a kind of natural cataclysm--in "Ninety-three." Such are the
great sewers of Paris in "Les Miserables." Such--though it is rather a
symbol than a background--is the terrible fixed smile of the
unfortunate hero in "L'Homme qui Rit."

It is one of the most curious and interesting phenomena in the
history of literature, this turning of a poet into a writer of romances,
romances which have at least as much if not more of the poetic
quality in them than the orthodox poetry of the same hand.

One is led to wonder what kind of stories Swinburne would have
written had he debouched into this territory, or what would have
been the novels conceived by Tennyson. Thomas Hardy began with
poetry and has returned to poetry; and one cannot help feeling that it
is more than anything else the absence of this quality in the
autobiographical studies of sex and character which the younger
writers of our day spin out that makes them after a time seem so
sour and flat.

It is the extravagance of the poetic temper and its lack of proportion
which leads to some of the most glaring of Victor Hugo's faults; and
it is the oracular, prophetic, gnomic tone of his genius which causes
those queer gaps and rents in his work and that fantastic arbitrariness
which makes it difficult for him to evoke any rational or organic
continuity.

It is an aspect of the poetic temper too, the queer tricks which the
humour of Victor Hugo will condescend to play. I suppose he is by
nature the least endowed with a sense of humour of all the men of
genius who have ever lived. The poet Wordsworth had more. But
like so many poetic natures, whose vivid imagination lends itself to
every sort of human reaction, even to those not really indigenous,
Victor Hugo cannot resist in indulging in freakish sallies of
jocularity which sometimes become extraordinarily strained and
forced, and even remind one now and then of the horrible
mechanical smile on the countenance of the mutilated man in his
own story.

Poet-like too is the portentous pedantry of his archaeological vein;
the stupendous air of authority with which he raps out his classical
quotations and his historic allusions. He is capable sometimes of
producing upon the mind the effect of a hilarious school-master
cracking his learned jokes to an audience on