Let my enchantments then be sung or read....

When the rose reigns, and locks with ointment shine,

Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.

This is the muse at play. It is absurd to speak of Herrick as though he were a great lyric poet. He is not with Shakespeare. He is not with Campion. But he is a master of light poetry—of poetry under the rose.

II
VICTOR HUGO

It is easy to disparage Victor Hugo, but, in order to disparage him, it is necessary to abstain from reading him. Take down his books and begin to read, and, even if you do not agree with the verdict, you will understand before long how it was that a generation or so ago people used to regard Victor Hugo as one of the great names in literature. It was only Swinburne, perhaps, who could describe him as “the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare,” but this did not seem an absurd exaggeration to the majority of readers at the time it was written, and even a crabbed critic like Henley accepted him as “plainly ... the greatest man of letters of his day.” His influence as well as his reputation was enormous and extended far beyond France. He was a great author for the great Russians. He was one of Dostoevsky’s favourite writers, and Notre Dame was one of the books that influenced Tolstoy; even in his censorious old age Tolstoy admitted Les Misérables through the strait gate of the best literature in What is Art? and it seems likely, as Madame Duclaux suggests, that it was at the back of his mind when he wrote Resurrection.

His greatest contemporaries, however, realised that Hugo was a charlatan as well as a man of genius. Madame Duclaux quotes Baudelaire’s comment, “Victor Hugo—an inspired donkey!” and his assertion that the Almighty, “in a mood of impenetrable mystification,” had taken genius and silliness in equal parts in order to compound the brain of Victor Hugo. She also quotes Balzac’s criticism of the first night of Les Burgraves:

The story simply does not exist, the invention is beneath contempt. But the poetry—ah, the poetry goes to your head. It’s Titian painting his fresco on a wall of mud. Yet there is in Victor Hugo’s plays an absence of heart, which was never so conspicuous. Victor Hugo is not true.

“Victor Hugo is not true.” That is the suspicion that constantly trips one up whether one reads his books or his life. In literature, in public life, in private life, he was not only amazing but an amazing humbug. We see evidence of this in the story of his relations with his wife and Juliette Drouet, his mistress, which Madame Duclaux tells again so fairly and so well. Even while he was pursuing the mistress across France, he would write fervently home to the wife: “Je t’aime! Tu es la joie et l’honneur de ma vie!” Hugo possibly meant this when he wrote it. He may have been lying to himself rather than to his wife. His falseness lay in his readiness to whisper at each shrine at which he worshipped that this was his only shrine. At the same time, no sooner do we admit that Hugo was an impostor in love and in literature than we begin to compare him with other impostors and to note certain differences in him. His early idealism was not merely an idealism of words. He was, until his marriage, as chaste as his nature was passionate. He was after marriage a faithful husband till his wife told him that she could no longer live with him as his wife. After he fell in love with Juliette Drouet in 1833, we might describe him as a high-minded bigamist, though he did not remain perfectly faithful even in his bigamy. One thing, at least, is certain: both women loved him till the end of their long lives. His dying wife wrote to him in 1868: “The end of my dream is to die in your arms.” And, when Juliette Drouet was slowly dying of cancer, and both she and Hugo were between seventy and eighty, she still insisted on nursing him at the hint of the slightest cough or headache. “Did he but stir, she was there with a warm drink or an extra covering. Every morning it was she who drew the curtains from Victor Hugo’s window, roused the old man with a kiss on the forehead, lit his fire, prepared the two fresh eggs that formed his breakfast, read him the papers.” Had he been all false, he could hardly have preserved the affection of these two rival and devoted women through years of danger and exile till the ultimate triumph of his fame. Madame Duclaux suggests, however, that he was a humbug even on that early occasion on which, seeing that Sainte-Beuve was in love with his wife, and that she in turn was attracted by Sainte-Beuve he offered with romantic generosity to let his wife choose between them and to abide by the result. Again, the fact that he insisted on remaining friends with Sainte-Beuve through the affair is regarded as evidence of his cunning determination to keep in with the reviewers at all costs. Victor Hugo would probably be suspected of having been a humbug, whatever he had done.

His self-importance is a continual challenge to our belief in him. Madame Duclaux quotes Heine’s sneer: “Hugo is worse than an egoist, he is a Hugoist,” and his device was the arrogant Ego Hugo. But at least he had the courage of his self-importance. In 1851, at the time of the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, when there was a price on his head, Hugo was driving across Paris to a meeting of the Insurrectionary Committee, and passed a group of officers on horseback: