Year: 1878

Mr.. Smalley. of the New York Tribune.
contributes the following vivid picture of this
greatest romancist of the age addressing the
International Literary Congress - When
Victor Hugo rose TO speak the five years Of
added age fell easily OIL his shoulders. lie
stood straight and square. The eyes, which
had been half masked beneath dropping lids,
began to dilate and glow. The fires which
you thought extinguished blazed up: the
Hugo who stood before you was the Hugo of
Herman" of Lies Orentales, " fresh vigor-
Gus, alert, in all the imperishable youthful
ness of genius. The first word he uttered
rang through the vast amphitheaire. grave,
sonorous and powerful. There was not a
trace of effort. From beginning to end. the
note first struck was maintained, but never
monotonous. | called him an orator Just
now, but orator he is not, in the large sense
of a word too often aud too carelcssly used.
His speech was written, every word, and read
from a manuscript; and what manuscript
Sheets of paper two feet square. covered
with writing so large and free that you could
almost read it from the balcony fifty feet Off
full of corrections, of erasures done as if
with painters brush, or with the pen of a
giant as he is. Two candelabya, each Of six
lights. stood on either side of him. He put
them together on his right, added two large
lamps from the table in front, and finally sent
to borrow a third from the secretary, who sat
hard by and thenceforward was in darkness.
He held his manuscript close under this clus-
ter of lights. When he wished to use his
right hand for a gesture. he dropped the paper
on the table or transferred it to his left. He
never parted company with it for two seuten-
ces in succession. Orator or not. no speaker
ever felt more strongly what he was saying,
or made it felt more strongly 10y his audience.
He read slowly with singular distinctness
and purity of articulation, and Victor Hugo's
is style which gains rather than loses by a
spoken delivery. Read the recurrence of
antithesis is too frequent, the ornament some
times overdone; the intense sincerity of the
man seems artificial because it is SO intense.
1t is only when you hear him. when he him
self adjusts and regulates his periods, that the
due effect of each is given in due succession.
He did what he liked with his hearers. but it
was not by the magnetic current which the
true orator establishes between himself and
his audience: not by sympathy, not by
action and reaction rather by the sheer su-
premacy of intellect, by force of will by
force of his own unquestioning and absolute
conviction, and by the large-hearted humani-
ty of the man. He took possession of you
whether you would or no; no personality, no
hostility was strong enough to stand up
against the torrent that swept down upon
you. l sat next an English friend, no admir-
er of Hugo, who heard him and saw him for
the first time in her life, whose associations
lie mostly among royalists and priests, who
came to see Hugo as a curiosity-to adopt one
of his own comparisons which most shocked
the classicists at the time-as a lion from the
desert, Gagged if not tanned. Before he had
spoken five minutes she was applauding be-
fore he had finished she pronounced him
magnificent.