180 INDOOR STUDIES 



meditating upon Victor Hugo. Here, I said, is a 

 great man, unquestionably a great man, who shows 

 to least advantage in his dealings with nature. He 

 seems to feel something of the Koman dread and 

 horror in the presence of the ocean. Great in deal- 

 ing with social problems or historical events, great 

 in describing Waterloo, or the sewers of Paris, or 

 Paris itself, tremendous in the realism of his char- 

 acters, in the presence of storms or tempests, or of 

 any phase of elemental nature, his imagination runs 

 away with him. His nature is a kind of mad-dog 

 nature, and the physical universe, in his handling 

 of it, seems smitten with hydrophobia. The con- 

 tinence, the moderation, the self-denial which the 

 Anglo-Saxon temperament loves, and which charac- 

 terizes nearly all first-class poets and artists, are 

 nowhere to be found. If he mentions the song of 

 the skylark, he must call upon the infinite and the 

 immensities to bear witness. One fully understands 

 what Heine means when he speaks of Hugo's "huge 

 and tasteless excrescences." Yet it is impossible 

 not to feel the man's power even in the poorest 

 translation of his books. He is about the only 

 writer of his country who impresses one as a man 

 who rises above the literature, whose love of letters 

 is dominated by his love of country, his love of 

 man, his love of liberty and right, — a fact which 

 makes him a great moral and political force aside 

 from his influence in the region of letters. There 

 is somewhat aboriginal and elemental in him, as in 

 all first-class men. The bare conception of "The 



