only be quickly discovered and end in the ruin of those engaged in it, but it will at the same time strengthen and keep up the present excitement among the authorities, and make them act more energetically against those who have fallen into their hands. Is it

people. A popular rising has, therefore, no chance of success, and if such a thing did happen to succeed, the people in its present intellectual condition would gain nothing, and would simply fall into the hands of a dictator, or of capitalists, or of both. I do not deny the possibility of an insurrection as the result of a whole series of causes, but I am convinced that it can be produced and guided only by elemental forces independently of artificial influences. He who can raise the spirit of such a popular movement and take advantage of it will alone gain by it, and his success or failure, so far as the people are concerned, will depend on the degree of conscientiousness of the leaders; for a popular revolution is an elemental force, and not a principle, or a logical conclusion, or a mathematical programme. Hence to raise Revolutionarity (Revolutionnost) to the rank of a principle is in my opinion an absurdity. Revolutionarity can exist only in the feelings of an individual man or in the periodical outbursts of the masses. The masses as an element do not possess the criti cal faculty, and at certain moments act by instinct. The individual is obliged to act according to the critical faculty, and ought not to construct his principles on elemental impulsions of the masses. Regarding the latter as an historical and cultural' necessity, he ought to content himself with the following programme by the attentive study of the masses and of the separate units of which they are composed, he should inoculate the separate units with consciousness and the critical faculty, avoiding all bias and instigation, and introduce into the masses, in so far as it is possible, the elements of human culture. The rest should be left to the elaboration of this material by the people. Further than this the part of intelligent units cannot go. Every departure from this, so to say, natural programme, is as fatal to the intelligent units and to the people as every departure from the laws of nature must be. Revolutionarity as a principle is an anomaly-a transferring of instinct to the sphere of logic, that is to say, an unnatural union. But all that is general theory. There are no actors, and those who remain should spare themselves. Such a miserably small group cannot do anything more in the direction which I regard as the true one. It ought therefore to contract itself so as to form the nucleus of a future radical party, and in the meantime it ought to examine the surroundings in which it lives, study these surroundings and the people, investigate the conditions and organization of civilised life, elaborate the foundation of a programme, increase as much as possible the number of conscious and reflecting adepts -not of children-and wait. Every revolutionary pamphlet should be thrown into the fire. All that is nonsense and absurdity. Perhaps the time will soon come when it will be necessary to have a conscious-radicalpopular party, a genuine champion of popular interests not a mere phantom in the form of an anachronism; and such a party will not then be found. It is necessary to create it, and in the meantime to wait, working slowly

not, then, extremely egotistical to give way to personal feeling, and to disregard the fate of hundreds who will suffer in consequence? Besides this, it will greatly injure the people by calling forth a series of repressive measures which have a prejudicial influence on the national life. That is the more evident side of the question, but there is another side which may be called the principal one. Are all problems solved accurately so as to admit of no doubt? Surely experience is not altogether silent. What is the people? Not only are the problems not solved, but they are not accurately stated. Experience must lead to doubt. The thing is that Russian Radicalism is merely an abstract logical conclusion, founded on an untrustworthy basis of sentiment and an ignorance of the nature and wants of the Russian people-ignorance of the conditions of its historical life and of man in general. So long as that specially practical and partly theoretical information has not been obtained, it is impossible to arrive at any conclusion, and still more impossible to begin any activity. That Russian Radicalism does not know man in general and the Russian in particular-that is unquestionable. We know by experience that it wishes to impose on Russians foreign modes of thought and ideals which they are incapable of appropriating. It promises them a stork in heaven, when they would much prefer a sparrow on earth. By à priori reasoning and from general knowledge of human nature, we may conclude that every ignorant and 'undeveloped ' man values most of all his own life, that the sphere of his requirements is confined to food and a wife, and that anything higher than these is unintelligible for him until they are satisfied, and until you develop in him human dignity and thought. Besides this, various social misfortunes have brought down the wants of the Russian peasant to such a minimum, that firstly it requires very great want to make him protest, and secondly it requires very small concessions to make him be silent and tranquil. If the apparent emancipation of the serfs postponed popular insurrection for several decades, it is evident that when serious attempts at insurrection are made in the future, it will be sufficient to diminish the taxes and increase a little the amount of peasant land. Small material concessions will induce them the more readily to deliver up the leaders and intelligent propagandists, and that will continue until there have been created in the people a popular idea and more or less human culture, which must be created not by books imported from abroad, not by incitement to revolt, but by gradual human development, and by influence in those places where it is not completely excluded by unfavorable circumstances. The times of Pugatcheff are past. The State has succeeded in crushing the warlike, nomadic instincts of the

but surely in that direction. It is time to get rid of the charms of peasant surroundings, and to give up thinking about externals. These youthful outbursts without criticism lead to nothing but harm."

Let us hope that Young Russia will soon come to perceive clearly the truth contained in the last sentence of this curious document.-Fortnightly Review.

IF there is a contemporary writer whose language could do justice to Victor Hugo's genius, it is the great poet and novel-writer himself. For it is altogether impossible to define it, and exact definition is a thing of which Victor Hugo is incapable. But it might be appropriately indicated by those sonorous phrases often so magnificently eloquent, which may mean much or little, or nothing at all, according as it pleases you to interpret them. We can hardly doubt that Victor Hugo generally understands himself; or at least that he has a clear conception of the dominating idea which is firing his imagination for the moment. But it is rarely easy to follow his chain of reasoning or his line of thought; and the brain gets dazed and dazzled in the multiplication of his metaphors and illustrations. He is not content with expressing his idea in a single far-fetched epigram. He exults in the exuberance of his warm fancy, and seems to fetch his illustrations from the immensity of the Infinite in which his intellect is floating. His greatest source of power is fatal to the completeness and finish of his work. For his mind is far too fervid, and its action far too rapid and impulsive. Whatever his gifts and the virtues of his style, he has no strength of self-control, and no sense of proportion. When the spirit is moving in him it must have its say, no matter how unfortunately timed may be the utterance; so that his poems have seldom either consistency or sequence, and his fictions are marred by all manner of digressions. Victor Hugo has good reason to believe in himself, and we probably do him no injustice in fancying that he is his own most ardent worshipper. But it is a pity that he had not shown some little consideration for those simple rules of art which go so far to make the grandest reputations. He would occupy a very different position with his contemporaries, to say nothing of his standing in the temple of fame, had he taught him

self to submit to the practice of self-restraint instead of abandoning himself absolutely to the volition of his genius. In his latest poem he confesses the inspired independence which rejects all order or systematic relation, although he does not care to apologise for it, nor seen conscious that it has been his invariable habit. And we could wish too that he had condescended to be more intelligible. It is true that it may not be given to meaner mortals to plumb the depths in the mind of the Poet; and in the consciousness of his mission and his heaven-born gift it must sound to him like the profanity of ignorance, should we pray him to be more prosaic. But, after all, the noblest forms of poetry should surely come as a revelation which may be brought home to the mind of the many; not like the mystic mutterings of the oracle, which can only be vaguely interpreted by the initiated.

One must have a certain sense of presumption in calling attention to the shortcomings of an extraordinary genius; but, at least, in the case of Victor Hugo, we may be free from any strong feeling of the kind. These faults of his are too patent, and, we may add, too painful. For we admire him so much, and have so often been delighted by his works, that it is honest flattery rather than ingratitude, when we are indignant that he should not have delighted us more. And we are angry for his sake as much as for our own, that he should not have stooped to go to school in his youth, when he might have profited by the universal experience of his predecessors. dare not say that he has wasted, but he has certainly been reckless of opportunities such as rarely fall to the lot of writers. It is now five-and-fifty years since he published his first volume of poems; it was some ten years later that he wrote his 'Notre Dame de Paris,' which had been preceded by more than one remarkable novel; and here we have this veteran at the age of seventy-five giving

We

us a fresh instalment of the Légende des Siècles a magnificent poem when all is said and promising not merely its completion in due course, but the immediate publication of several other works. Victor Hugo is seventy-five, yet his mental eye is not dimmed, nor is his bodily strength greatly abated. He shows the same richness of fancy, the same powerful grasp of grand ideas, the same originality of thought, and the same susceptibility of feeling, as when he wrote in what would have been the maturity of men of feebler stamina. There is as much of youthful impetuosity, and as much of nervous vigor, as when he flashed out on the world in the 'Odes and Ballads.' And all the time he has been indefatigably occupied; ransacking strange store-houses of fantastic learning; tracing the mythology, the superstitions, the legends, and the semi-mythical history of every race and creed, till he has accumulated a store of the peculiar treasure which he of all men has the talent to use. But how much of it has been unhappily misapplied so far as his own immortality is concerned! Should he be spared, as we trust he may, to write those books which he promises, we know very nearly what we may expect. They will abound in beauties of no common order; they will be enriched by rare thoughts and sublime conceptions; they will show a generous sympathy with the sorrows of mankind, and breathe ideal aspirations as to human perfectibility. But they will be written in the style and shape that were formed thirty or forty years ago. They will show the tyro in practical politics; and possibly the melancholy spectacle of a Titan in intellect laying himself open to the ridicule of the premier-venu of the pigmies. We may enjoy them more or less than others that have gone before, but that will be all. For this noble Légende des Siècles' shows not the slightest advance in art on its predecessor or on the 'Châtiments'; and his latest novel but one-'L'Homme qui rit is more artistically faulty than anything he has composed.

It has been unfortunate for his fame that he has been so much of a Frenchman in more ways than one. It seems harsh to reproach a man with an excess of patriotism, especially when his much

loved country has fallen upon evil times. But Hugo's party escapades and democratic volubility have reacted on his literary career and his serious literary workmanship. Political opinions fly to the head with him; he has preached the principles of that pernicious gospel that the Communists of Paris translated into action. He has dreamed a perfection of institutions that presupposed a perfectibility of nature; and those of his countrymen who have followed him, or dragged him with them, have still a long way to go towards perfection. We cannot conceive that he has been blind to their shortcomings; and it is probable that their very faults or their crimes have tended to increase the exaltation of his language. If his doctrines in their legitimate application have sown the dragon's teeth, -if things turn out other than as they ought to do, the more that he is disappointed and disenchanted in his heart, the more fondly he clings to his illusions. It is touching, in spite of the unconscious self-satire of his writings, to see how firmly he has held to his fancies about his ideal Paris,—the salt of the earth, and the lamp of civilisation. We are far from desiring to deny the claims of France on the friends of civilisation and refinement; but Victor Hugo's jealous and excessive exaggeration is almost the only sign of senility about him. Not that there is anything really senile about that, for he felt and spoke equally extravagantly in the hot-headed fervor of his early youth. He is perfectly happy making a speech to the crowd on some subject that is touching every man of them closely; when each burning word falls like a firebrand on the heap of inflammable materials that is piled all ready to his hand. He is entirely in his element, writing a glorification of his darling Lutetia in such a handbook as was given to the world on the occasion of the last grand exhibition there. But it would have been well for him, and well for his readers, had he blown off his sentimental hallucinations by such occasional safety-valves, instead of leavening all his books with them; thus provoking our smiles when he would have had us most serious, by blending the sublime with the ludicrous and impossible.

At the same time, rather than be mis

understood, we must run the risk of repeating ourself. We admire and we respect him too much to do him unintentional injustice and the comprehensive ness and tenderness of his philanthropy; his habit of judging the world by himself; his rooted belief in his theories of virtue, only needed to have been modified by unbiassed observation, and chastened by his own melancholy experiences. It is that vast philanthropy of his, indiscriminate and ill-regulated though it be those feelings of chivalrous gentleness towards the helpless, with the affection he shows for the suffering and the miserable-that make the great charm of his books. And though his heart is as soft as a woman's, and although he is impulsively feminine in the quick transitions of his moods, yet the spirit of his genius is thoroughly masculine. He glorifies manhood wherever he meets with it, and his moral conceptions are invariably lofty. Not a few of his noblest characters are to be found among men whose opinions or prejudices are antipathetical to his own. And his teaching, if it is sometimes politically dangerous, is always morally pure. In spite of the écartades of his somewhat sickly sentimentality, the tone of his books is sound and invigorating: he preaches above everything man's duty to his neighbors; he inculcates charity and self-abnegation; he arouses you to the grave responsibilities of life, and bids you make the most of the powers and the talents that are given you in trust for your fellows. He reminds you that you are bound to bear your part in advancing the cause of humanity; and is never more indignantly eloquent than in denouncing the pharisaism that wraps itself in self-righteousness and despises others. Victor Hugo is French in every fibre, but he is a living reproof to the troops of his clever countrymen who have prostituted facile pens to pander to popular fashions. It is true that he handles delicate subjects with the force and the freedom of a strong and honest man. He calls a spade a spade on occasion, with the nervous bluntness of our sacred writers and old divines. Nay, he sometimes scandalises English taste, indulging in rhapsodies that had better have been omitted; as when he chants the "epithalamium" of Marius and New Series.—VOL. XXVI., No. 4

66

Cosette in the 'Misérables,' from his own very peculiar point of view; or when he indulges in his odd excursus" on the imaginary "mot" of Cambronne. It is his habit to analyse, rather than to gazer. But he only rests upon impurity to reprobate it; though, while holding the sin up to reprobation, he delights in offering opportunities of repentance to the sinner.

So he carries the earnestness of his nature and the courage of his opinions into the choice of his subjects. Not unfrequently, according to our ideas, he provokingly fails in some magnificent theme, because he will persist in looking for far-fetched lessons in it, and will wrest it to the illustration of doctrines with which it is only connected by some shadowy train of association invisible to all but himself. Yet, on the other hand, we may have him selecting some subject where failure seems a foregone conclusion. Perhaps it even suggests at first sight nothing but what is ludicrous or degrading; and it is hard to attune the soul of the reader to sympathy and admiration when he is disposed beforehand to smile or mock. Yet it is precisely in some feat of the kind that Hugo is likely to be most successful. He accomplishes his tour de force without the slightest apparent effort; and before you are aware of it, the smile is dying on your lips, and possibly the moisture may be rising in your eyes.

Victor Hugo is essentially a poet, and he is a great poet; yet, as he is more likely to live in his novels than in his poems, it is as a novelist that we propose chiefly to regard him. But it would be an imperfect and one-sided criticism indeed that passed his poetry over in silence; and, as it happens, we can hardly give a better idea of it than by passing under rapid review his new 'Légende des Siècles.' There are passages and whole poems in his earlier volumes which we like at least as well as anything in this later work-" Boaz endormi," for example, in the former part of the 'Légende;' but, on the whole, this latest work does its author ample justice. Its theme is humanity. Its pervading idea is the άváyкn, or inexorable Fatality, whose imaginary influences on various orders of society he has elaborated in four of his most admirable novels. Here

26

we have the cycle of the sufferings of the whole human race, with the struggles waged by its heroes and martyrs against the powers that oppress it. The careless rule of the immortal gods who had crushed the sturdy children of the Earth, was succeeded by the tyranny of kings and priests, aggravating the inevitable miseries of mankind. The opening argument is the vision, "D'où est sorti ce livre." The poet's blindly devoted admirers will be delighted by it; and to us it seems that the grand and sublime greatly predominate over the fantastic. What is certain is, that in thought and style it is in Victor Hugo's most characteristic manner. He attributes life and sensation to inanimate objects. He revels in the most original and wildest conceptions. He brings the old and the new, the sacred and profane, mythology and history, facts and fancies, into strange yet often striking juxtaposition. The wall of the ages rises before him.

"C'était de la chair vive et du granit brut,
Une immobilité faite d'inquiétude,
Un édifice ayant un bruit de multitude,
Des tours noirs étoilés par de farouches yeux,
Des évolutions des groupes monstrueux,

"Suprématie;" but the finest of the fragments are those that follow, whose themes are the battles of the gods and the Titans. Even here, however, the writer will be political. Those Titans, whose strength and courage have succumbed to the supernal powers, are the prototypes of the people rising in its might to vindicate the rights of man against the monarchy and the privileged orders. In "Le Géant," the mighty Titan growls out his opening monologue with the voice of a man of the Parisian people; and in the turn of the sentences he launches at Olympus, you recognise the ring of a Danton's eloquence.

"Un mot; si par hasard il vous venait l'idée Que cette herbe ou je dors, de rosée inondée Est faite pour subir n'importe quel pied nu, Et que ma solitude est au premier venu, Si vous pensiez entrer, dans l'ombre où je séjourne, Sans que ma grosse tête au fond des bois se

tourne,

Si vous figuriez que je vous laisserais Tout déranger; percer des trous dans mes forêts,

Ployer mes vieux sapins et casser mes grands chênes,

sales."

It was a floating mass like a rolling cloud; at once a wall and a crowd of weeping dust and bleeding clay, where the falling stones took human forms, and all mankind, and existence, and the universe, interwoven by the threads of destiny, were palpitating in the face of this wall that lost itself in a vague immensity of darkness. There was a vision of everything, though in dire inextricable confusion-mind and matter, mud and sunlight, archangels, demigods, saints, heroes; the cities of the universe, from Thebes to Paris; the rivers, from the Nile to the Scheldt; "Hicétus preceding Newton; the Marseillaise, Eschylus, and the angel after the spectre."

"Et dans l'obscur taillis des êtres et des choses,

Le regardais rôder, noir, riant, l'œil en feu,
Satan, ce braconnier de la forêt de Dieu."

In charming contrast to the grotesque imagery of the prologue is the opening hymn to the Earth. Then comes a wild Veda of the Hindoo mythology, entitled