VICTOR HUGO'S NOVELS
Perhaps only two great poets have been great novelists, Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo. If any one likes to say that Scott is a great novelist, but only a considerable poet, I fear I might be tempted to retort, quite unjustly, that Hugo is a great poet, but only a considerable novelist. However, I am unwilling to draw invidious distinctions. In all Hugo's vast volume of work, poetry, satire, fiction, the drama, I am inclined to think that his lyrics have most of the stuff of immortality: imperishable charm. In his lyrics he is most human, most "like a man of this world"; or, what is as good, an angel "singing out of heaven." In his dramas, and still more in his novels, on the other hand, he is less human than "Titanic." He is a good Titan, like Prometheus, tortured by the sense of human miseries, and uttering his laments as if from the crest of a gorge in Caucasus. Hugo's poignant sense of the wretchedness of men, above all of the poor, is not unfelt by Scott; but how does he express it? In the brief words of Sanders Mucklebackit, as he patches the "auld black bitch o' a boat," in which his son has just been drowned. Again, and more terribly, he gives voice to the degradation, the consuming envy, the hatred of the mauvais pauvre, in the talk of the ghoul-like attendants of the dead, the hags and the witch of The Bride of Lammermoor. Human beings speak as human beings—in the
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