in himself. If it be something to know how to write Comprachicos in Hindoo, it must be held a still greater accomplishment to have by heart those twelve names of devils which Hugo enumerates in "Toilers of the Sea," Book I., Chapter II., or to be able to quote Onkelos, a Chaldaic author strangely neglected by most novelists. Hugo renders him justice. His good Bishop Myriel was, so he says, something of a scholar (quelque peu savant), and to be that implies, in Hugo's estimation, familiarity with Onkelos. It is a pity that of the doubtlessly rich treasures stored in this eminent philosopher's tomes Hugo grants us but one glimpse, in the form of a line quoted by Monsignor Myriel:

A wind coming from God blew over the face of the water.

Some slight compensation, however, for this tantalizing reticence anent Onkelos is afforded through the statement on the same page that Victor Hugo himself had a great-granduncle who was bishop of Ptolemaïs and published not a few pamphlets signed Barley Court. It cannot reasonably be doubted that such information benefits humanity in general, more particularly those unfortunate classes for whose moral and social improvement" Wretches" was chiefly indited.

Possibly Hugo was a trifle vain of his knowledge of Latin. He certainly delighted in displaying it. Speaking of Quasimodo, he remarks:

"His strength, so extraordinarily developed, was a cause of still greater malevolence: Malus puer robustus," says Hobbes.

Aside from the consideration that Hobbes was wrong in making such a general assertion-there being as many goodnatured strong fellows as malicious ones, if not more-it is difficult to perceive the necessity for quoting the Englishman at all in a novel that purports to depict Parisian manners in the fifteenth century. Still more laughable is a Latin footnote to the name of Bishop Hugo of Besançon, of whom it is told in the text that he made the cell in which Claude Frollo pursued his gloomy ponderings. The footnote contains just. these pithy words:

Hugo II. de Bisancio, 1326–1332.

Even Wretches" bristles with scraps of Latin.

III.

And yet, when all is told, there remains the incontrovertible fact that over and over again Hugo proved himself a past master in forcing his readers to see and hear the things that he wished them to see and hear. Only it should be clearly understood what these things were. Chateaubriand, Flaubert, and the Goncourts make their readers behold trees, houses, rivers, and other objects of actual existence, and the vision which they compel is one that could very well have an almost exact counterpart somewhere in nature. These writers describe what they have seen or might have seen, and even when they superadd an amount of lyrical sentiment of their own making this sentiment is not allowed to blur the color or confuse the lines.

But Hugo described best such things as he had never seen and could never have seen with his bodily eye. Not that his memory was not retentive of real, palpable traits—a description like that of Little Picpus in "Wretches" shows that it was-but the impression undeniably produced by the chapters about this famous convent is to a very considerable degree due to their accumulation of historical and technical items concerning conventual life heretofore zealously guarded behind the walls of the cloister or confined within the forbidden covers of Latin ecclesiastical treatises. The author's avowed and indubitable intention of dealing fairly with the subject raises these chapters high above the level of the greater part of what has been written on topics of this kindJulien's seminary life in Stendhal's "Red and Black," for instance. And although Hugo should by no manner of means be understood to have penetrated to the core of convent life, nor treated it with that unlimited understanding which proceeds from spontaneous sympathy alone, it is nevertheless certain that his Little Picpus has enough of the air of reality round it to justify the marked attention it has always attracted.

But-and this is the most important point by far-what Hugo attempted with fair success in Little Picpus others have attempted with fully as praiseworthy results. The fac

ulty that was his to a degree that it was no one else's is not here brought into play. That faculty we have to look for elsewhere, and we come upon one of its manifestations, though not, perhaps, one of the sublimest, in these lines from "Ninety-Three:"

A gun that breaks its moorings [on board ship] becomes suddenly some indescribable supernatural beast. It is a machine transforming itself into a monster. This mass turns upon its wheels with the rapid movements of a billiard ball, rolls with the rolling, pitches with the pitching; goes, comes, pauses, seems to meditate; resumes its course, rushes along the ship from end to end like an arrow, circles about, swings aside, evades, rears, breaks, kills, exterminates.

The purely imaginative character of this alleged reproduction of facts is patent, but its power is scarcely less indisputable. The impetus of the following is, however, still more irresistible:

The peal of the bell was the only speech which he [the deaf bell ringer, Quasimodo] understood, the only sound which broke for him the universal silence. He swelled out in it as a bird in the sun. All of a sudden the frenzy of the bell seized upon him; his look became extraordinary; he lay in wait for the great bell as it passed, as a spider lies in wait for a fly, and flung himself abruptly upon it with might and main. Then, suspended above the abyss, borne to and fro by the formidable swinging of the bell, he seized the brazen monster by the earlaps, pressed it between both knees, spurred it on with his heels, and redoubled the fury of the peal with the whole shock and weight of his body. Meanwhile the tower trembled, he shrieked and gnashed his teeth, his red hair rose erect, his breast heaved like a bellows, his eye flashed flames, the monstrous bell neighed panting beneath him, and then it was no longer the great bell of Notre Dame nor Quasimodo; it was a dream, a whirlwind, a tempest, dizziness astride of noise, a spirit clinging to a flying crupper, a strange centaur-half man, half bell-a sort of horrible Astolphus borne away upon a prodigious hippogriff of living bronze.

The reader will easily recall kindred revelries of a riotous fancy from Hugo's other novels-one such is the cheekto-jowl fight between the octopus and Gilliatt in "Toilers of the Sea." From the moment that "something, thin, rough, flat, slimy, sticky, and living," winds itself round Gilliatt's bare arm in the dark the reader is constrained to hasten along at breakneck speed, whether it pleases him or not. Meanwhile Hugo remains his own provoking self. Even in the sea monster's den with his hero clasped in those live thongs whose countless lips are fastened to his flesh, seeking

to suck his blood, even here he spares us neither "Denis Montfort, one of those observers whose strong gift of intuition causes them to descend or to ascend even to magic," nor "Bonnet of Geneva, that mysterious, exact mind who was opposed to Buffon as Geoffroy Saint Hilaire was to Cuvier," nor "a piece of Chinese silk stolen during the last war from the palace of the emperor of China, and representing a shark devouring a crocodile which is devouring a serpent,” etc. He drags us through innumerable paragraphs of such sham erudition and sham philosophy before he allows us more of the octopus, but we are willing to endure both Bonnet's mysterious, exact mind, Denis Montfort's gift of intuition, and the emperor of China's embroidered silk, so that we may at last get that more.

And it is the same whenever Hugo bestrides that strange Pegasus of his which he must have purloined from some nightmares' stable. He is never more royally at ease than when, starting from a point that might still be in some possible realm, he lashes himself on with his own frantic words, abandons the ordinary gait of prose narrative, rushes on in wild, uneven leaps, and finally launches into space, leaving deep beneath him all solid ground, all sense and reason.

IV.

It constituted Hugo's strength that in an age when to most people — particularly such as write things had become words, to him words remained things; things affecting his sight, hearing, smell, taste, every one of his senses. The sound of the syllable "cold" causes him to shiver, at the word "night" his heart quakes within him as it does in a child unexpectedly let into a dark room. When coming to relate that little Cosette is obliged to go to the woods after water, late in the evening, he is seized with dizziness.

Darkness [he exclaims] makes you giddy. Man needs brightness. Whosoever becomes ingulfed in the reverse of daylight feels his heart sink. When the eye sees black the spirit sees confusion. . . . No one walks alone in the nighttime through a forest without trembling.

In the midst of the deluge of abstract speculation that has

worked such irreparable havoc in nineteenth century literature and art this man remained totally incapable of pure reasoning, and averse to the use of abstractions except such as he could, as it were, make sing and glitter and roar. Even after he had made up his mind to be a philosopher and humanitarian his philosophy and humanitarianism were nothing but collocations of images. After having, for a while, amused himself by surrounding tiny white specks with oceans of black, or emphasizing the bulk of a giant by giving him a midget for a companion, he fell to pondering over what would be the result if the black submerged the white entirely, or the giant trampled on the dwarf. And the thought saddened him, forced tears from his eyes, impelled him to plead for the little white speck and the pitiable midget.

But this sentimental view of his art did not affect his artistic methods. It did not start him on a patient and thorough inquiry into human nature. He only henceforth pinned a label on the coat of his giant, informing the spectators that this was a wicked man engaged in wicked business.

In "Bug-Jargal," which was written when his sole aspirations were to bewilder and dazzle, he had placed a heroic negro in an attitude of love-stricken adoration at the feet of a frail lily of a white maiden, apparently satisfied to bring out the antithesis of color. Some years later he planted a priest with a livid, convulsed face opposite a gypsy girl of radiant beauty, turned his eyes upon her in devouring desire, and claimed to have demonstrated the absurdity of clerical celibacy. He sketched an ex-convict leading a little girl by the hand, with a scowling detective on their track, and felt satisfied that this picture doomed the entire social order. He threw a sailor into the arms of an octopus, whispered in the hollow voice of a prophet, "Mystery becomes concrete in monsters,' and immediately proceeded to descant, through a stream of grandiose and droll metaphors, on conscience, hell, the final cause, the Creator.

But a faculty for abstract reasoning, though not, if properly controlled, injurious to a novelist, is by no means indis