Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES
ing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can
award to these romances. The author has shown
a power of just subordination hitherto unequalled ;
and as, in reaching forward to one class of effects,
he has not been forgetful or careless of the other,
his work is more nearly complete work, and his art,
with all its imperfections, deals more comprehensively
with the materials of Hfe, than that of any of his
otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors.
These five books would have made a very great
fame for any writer, and yet they are but one fa9ade
of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected to
his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same
greatness, somewhat the same infirmities. In his
poems and plays there are the same unaccountable
protervities that have already astonished us in the
romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength,
welding the fiery iron of his idea under forge-hammer
repetitions — an emphasis that is somehow akin to
weakness — a strength that is a little epileptic. He
stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so
incomparably excels them in richness, breadth,
variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost feel
as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more
heavily than others ; but this does not reconcile us
to seeing him profit by the privilege so freely. We
like to have, in our great men, something that is
above question ; we like to place an implicit faith in
them, and see them always on the platform of their
greatness ; and this, unhappily, cannot be with
Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius
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