of love; he can fill his lines with the fire, the stress, the culminating fury, of prophetic denunciation; he can utter the sad and secret questionings of the human spirit, and give voice to the solemnity of Fate.  In the long roll and vast swell of his verse there is something of the ocean—­a moving profundity of power.  His sonorous music, with its absolute sureness of purpose, and its contrapuntal art, recalls the vision in Paradise Lost of him who—­

                                with volant touch
    Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.

What kind of mind, what kind of spirit, must that have been, one asks in amazement, which could animate with such a marvellous perfection the enormous organ of that voice?

But perhaps it would be best to leave the question unasked—­or at least unanswered.  For the more one searches, the clearer it becomes that the intellectual scope and the spiritual quality of Victor Hugo were very far from being equal to his gifts of expression and imagination.  He had the powers of a great genius and the soul of an ordinary man.  But that was not all.  There have been writers of the highest excellence—­Saint-Simon was one of them—­the value of whose productions have been unaffected, or indeed even increased, by their personal inferiority.  They could not have written better, one feels, if they had been ten times as noble and twenty times as wise as they actually were.  But unfortunately this is not so with Victor Hugo.  His faults—­his intellectual weakness, his commonplace outlook, his lack of humour, his vanity, his defective taste—­cannot be dismissed as irrelevant and unimportant, for they are indissolubly bound up with the very substance of his work.  It was not as a mere technician that he wished to be judged; he wrote with a very different intention; it was as a philosopher, as a moralist, as a prophet, as a sublime thinker, as a profound historian, as a sensitive and refined human being.  With a poet of such pretensions it is clearly most relevant to inquire whether his poetry does, in fact, reveal the high qualities he lays claim to, or whether, on the contrary, it is characterized by a windy inflation of sentiment, a showy superficiality of thought, and a ridiculous and petty egoism.  These are the unhappy questions which beset the mature and reflective reader of Victor Hugo’s works.  To the young and enthusiastic one the case is different.  For him it is easy to forget—­or even not to observe—­what there may be in that imposing figure that is unsatisfactory and second-rate. He may revel at will in the voluminous harmonies of that resounding voice; by turns thrilling with indignation, dreaming in ecstasy, plunging into abysses, and soaring upon unimaginable heights.  Between youth and age who shall judge?  Who decide between rapture and reflection, enthusiasm and analysis?  To determine the precise place of Victor Hugo in the hierarchy of poets would be difficult indeed.  But this much