when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with.  This announces feminine depravities in my affections.  I am feminine, morbid, perverse.  But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me.  Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland year, can be called simple.  But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal.  Reading him was like being in church with a strident-voiced preacher shouting from out of a terribly sonorous pulpit.  “Les Orientales.”  An East of painted card-board, tin daggers, and a military band playing the Turkish patrol in the Palais Royal ...  The verse is grand, noble, tremendous; I liked it, I admired it, but it did not—­I repeat the phrase—­awake a voice of conscience within me; and even the structure of the verse was too much in the style of public buildings to please me.  Of “Les Feuilles d’Automne” and “Les Chants du Crepuscule” I remember nothing.  Ten lines, fifty lines of “La Legende des Siecles,” and I always think that it is the greatest poetry I have ever read, but after a few pages I invariably put the book down and forget it.  Having composed more verses than any man that ever lived, Hugo can only be taken in the smallest doses; if you repeat any passage to a friend across a cafe table, you are both appalled by the splendour of the imagery, by the thunder of the syllables.

    “Quel dieu, quel moissonneur dans l’eternel ete
    Avait s’en allant negligemment jete
    Cette faucille d’or dans les champs des etoiles.”

But if I read an entire poem I never escape that sensation of the ennui which is inherent in the gaud and the glitter of the Italian or Spanish improvisatore.  There never was anything French about Hugo’s genius.  Hugo was a cross between an Italian improvisatore and a metaphysical German student.  Take another verse—­

    “Le clair de lune bleu qui baigne l’horizon.”

Without a “like” or an “as,” by a mere statement of fact, the picture, nay more, the impression, is produced.  I confess I have a weakness for the poem which this line concludes—­“La fete chez Therese;” but admirable as it is with its picture of mediaeval life, there is in it, like in all Hugo’s work, a sense of fabrication that dries up emotion in my heart.  He shouts and raves over poor humanity, while he is gathering coppers for himself; he goes in for an all-round patronage of the Almighty in a last stanza; but of the two immortalities he evidently considers his own the most durable; he does not, however, become really intolerable until he gets on the subject of little children; he sings their innocence in great bombast, but he is watching them; the poetry over, the crowd dispersed, he will appear a veritable Mr. Hyde.

The first time I read of une bouche d’ombre I was astonished, nor the second nor third repetition produced a change in my mood of mind; but sooner or later it was impossible to avoid conviction, that of the two “the rosy fingers of the dawn,” although some three thousand years older was younger, truer, and more beautiful.  Homer’s similes can never grow old; une bouche d’ombre was old the first time it was said.  It is the birthplace and the grave of Hugo’s genius.