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
café table, you are both appalled by the splendour of the imagery, by the
thunder of the syllables.

"Quel dieu, quel moissonneur dans l'éternel été
Avait s'en allant négligemment jeté
Cette faucille d'or dans les champs des étoiles."

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 fête chez Thérèse;" 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.