The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-11-04
From the New York Times.

From the New York Times.
 N MONG the monuments of megalo-
 e/A\ mania and autophily Victor 0 IA Hugo is the most precious. ln-
 deed. he is perfect. Henry Adams has
 preserved for us an anecdote of Lord
 Houghtons who had the good fortune
 to hear Hugo break the silence wherein
 q little knot of his worshppers was
 rapt by saying condescendingly As Tor
 ne. believe in God Whereat Hugo-
 later murmurs happily: sublime 'hing'
 a god who believes in God" More
 crudely, Lowell said that Hugo thought
 if necessary to issue g bulletin to the
 universe every time he changed his
 shirt. Tn La Revue Uniyerselle. Leon
 Daudet writes with enjoyable. 1T mot
 always fully Just, visor and comic force
 about the illtstrious poet and great
 comedian The primary and sut atHn-
 tiai thing about Hugo is the predonri-
 nance in him of gift for words, real
 ly extraordinary and almost monst~ons.
 over reason and even imagination. He
 ..never thought five minutes on any
 subject in his life says this saturniae
 member of the Goncourt academy.
 MT. Daudet paints the demifsoa in his little room enclosed in glass at sheNop of his Guernsey house covering page after page. from o'clock a. m. till
 room with an explosion of words, syl-
 lables and rhymes, and then coming
 into the dining room to eat voraciously ..with his 12s teeth. sound to the last" every hing on the table, eading his gigantic repast with an ollapotifida of "hors -d'oeuvres, of vegetables salads and desert" At bottom he felt that genius, collecting and pillagiag everything. doesn't need to classify anything He passed fifty years in draping with love Of the people his i, love of confusion, of every confusion, provided it was rhythmical:' He was bounclessly rich in words. poor in the highest Kind of imaginative faculty. None of his works has the characterts- tic of masterpiece; that is the
 harmonious development of powerful i, initial central image which lights up all the passages. compartments and
 perspectives of a masierpieee.' Thns ..Rob;ns5n Crusoe" is tIfe image. pro- excessively diminishing, of terror and solitude" Don Quixote" is the image of the disproportion between reality and dream" Whereas the imaginative substance of Les Miserabies" is the fact that a convict be worthy man and a hero. So can a non-convict. sThe man who laughs rests entirely on a muscular grimace.' "Notre Dame Gle !, Paris" is an unsuccessful engraving. l sRuy Blas'' has no subject. And so on l Hugo has the secondary iragination' {; that which creates episodes. more 1 robust and varied. but is far from reaching "the power and wealth of the 1 Shakespearean episodes. to take an ] authentic genius as point of>Rm- : parison" He wrote a book about | shakespeare, though>he never took the troubie to read him. He discoursed
 about Beethoven though he didn't know thing about music He was merely putting himself. he thought in ! the company of his equals.
 1, So rudely does Mir. Daudet throw ], bricks at what Swinburne called
 ..earth's loftiest head found upright to
 the end." He was a>arieious. He. was
 mean and brutal in his relations with
 women He spent his life in creating