that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her
dress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of
the laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award to
these romances. The author has shown a power of just subordination
hitherto unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class of
effects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other, his work is
more nearly complete work, and his art, with all its imperfections,
deals more comprehensively with the materials of life, than that of any
of his otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors.

These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and
yet they are but one facade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected
to his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat
the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same
unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the
romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions--an emphasis that is
somehow akin to weakness--a strength that is a little epileptic. He
stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels
them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we
almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more
heavily than others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit
by the privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something
that is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, and
see them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,
cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the
wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also
to recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and,
in many ways, one of the greatest artists of time. If we look back, yet
once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to
the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what
other man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and
significant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely
think of the amount, of equally consummate performance?

FOOTNOTE:

[2] Prefatory letter to "Peveril of the Peak."

II

SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS

To write w