New-York tribune., 1902-02-24

he and his comrades in the great campaign
against classical precedent were stirred to the
depths. There is more of what we woulG ike
TO regard as the honest essence of the man IN
his verse than anywhere else; and while even
his pussant force was insufficient to humanize
and render concluSively elastic the AleXandrine
which has done so much TO weight the wings
of French poetry, it is impossible TO deny that
he often obtained a sinewy vitality by virtue
of which the reader is moved, though against
his viii. In his dramas this compelling fascina-
tion remains less potent. perhaps, and yet still
valid. Hermann" for all that it's appeal rests
largely on the basis of dramatic design. must
ever exert also the magic of rhetorical sonority.
Turning to the novels. by which his widest
popularity not only abroad but at home. has
been secured, we miss at once the sanely in
spiritng atmosphere which triumphs over the
occasionally rather overheated coIors of the
verse So much that is strong and fine is in
''Notre Dame de Paris" Les Miserables.' -
"Quatre-Vingt-Treize." "Travailleurs de la AIer''
and "LHOmme qui Rt" that criticism is at the
outset very nearly silenced. 1t is. indeed. one
Of the novelists merits that he seizes the reader
before the latter has turned half dozen pages,
and holds him thereafter in the grip of narra-
tive abounding in dramatic incident and thrill
ing with the energy that comes from creative
imagination and from nothing else. The mo-
ment the reader begins to reflect, however, he
sees that Hugo easily oversteps the line separat-
ing sentiment from sentimentality; that it was
natural for him TO exchange the sublimity of a
truly tragic conception for the specious bravery
of a melodramatic effect; that passages Of genu-
inc eloquence are constantly succeeded by pas
sages of tawdry rhetoric: that raw colors are
being flung upon the canvas with the prodi-
QaltV Of q naiDfar IN roIa Of tba bor
monous tones preferred by a subtle artist The
pure gold of these stories is mixed with base
metal
The elder Dumas, we all know, used TO
employ literary assistants. His son once de-
scribed him as adding In this way a certain
amount of alloy to the boiling constituents out
of which he fashioned his masterpieces as in
imperishable bronze. Victor Hugo provided
his own alloy, and in a proportion nimical to
the final integrity OF his work. The cool reader
and critic finds in 'Notre Dame de Paris" alone
one of the earliest Of his romances and by all
odds the best Of them, something of that bal
ance and that texture which belong to great
art Yet it must not be forgotten that it is
part of what we may call the convention of
Victor Hugo that the reader should not be too
COOL too critical. To genius the world makes
concessions. and 1t meets Victor Hugo half way
The romances we have named above fall far
short of the calm perfection typifed. say. by
Henry Esmond'; but they are crowded with
characters, drawn with extraordinary vivid
ness. and are rich in the elements of human
nature handled by a master of passion-and Of
literary stagecraft. Even while we recognize
the abnormalities and the crudities that keep
them out of the first rank. we are constrained
to go on reading them, a fact which might suffi-
ciently discount to a Frenchman, though not to
a foreigner, the criticism assigning them TO the
second