rief, as broken, as abrupt, as stinging
and wind-driven, as the rushing waves themselves pouring over a
half drowned wreck.

And just as he deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain
and snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo will
think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle
in "Ninety-three," to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland,
when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs" escapes from the
storm.

When one tries to cast one's critical plummet into the secret motive
forces of Hugo's genius, one is continually being baffled by the
presence there of conflicting elements. For instance no one who has
read "Notre Dame" can deny the presence of a certain savage delight
in scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No one who has read
"Les Miserables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of lovely
tenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, would
degenerate into maudlin sentiment of the most lamentable kind.

The performances of the diabolical "archdeacon" in "Notre Dame"
to the moment when Quasimodo watches him fall from the parapet,
are just what one might expect to enjoy in some old-fashioned
melodramatic theatre designed for such among the pure in heart as
have a penchant for ghastliness. But one forgets all this in a moment
when some extraordinary touch of illuminating imagination gets
hold of one by the throat.

I do not think that Victor Hugo will go down to posterity honoured
and applauded because of his love for the human race. I suspect
those critics who hold him up as a grand example of democratic
principles and libertarian ideals of not being great lovers of his
stories. He is a name for them to conjure with and that is all.

Victor Hugo loved children and he loved the mothers of children,
but he was too great a soul to spoil his colossal romance with any
blatant humanitarianism. I do not say he was the high, sad, lonely,
social exile he would have liked the world to believe him; for he was
indeed of kind, simple, honest domestic habits and a man who got
much happiness from quite little things. But when we come to
consider what will be left of him in the future I feel sure that it will
be rather by his imagination than by his social eloquence that he will
touch our descendants. It is indeed not in the remotest degree as a
rhetorician that he arrests us in these unique tales. It is by means of
something quite different from eloquenc