A Study of Victor Hugo/Preface
PREFACE.
If the title chosen for this book should be impeached on the score of inaccuracy and presumption, I must admit that it might not seem easy to confute the charge. A full and thorough study of the great master whose name is the crowning glory of the nineteenth century could scarcely be comprised in ten times the space here allotted to a rapid and imperfect survey of so sublime and inexhaustible a subject. My principal aim has been to bring into more prominent relief such aspects of the poet and the man as hitherto, for various worse or better reasons, have found least recognition or least acknowledgment in England. It is on this account, no less than on account of my own conscious inability to say anything unfamiliar to anybody in praise of his great romances, that only a few words have been given to works of world-wide fame, and of a popularity qualified only by the exceptional protests of malignant or obtuse eccentricity. Notre Dame de Paris and Les Misérables need little more introduction to foreign readers than to French: and as a dramatist Victor Hugo is probably far better known abroad than as a lyric or elegiac or epic or satiric poet. I have no further excuse and no better explanation to offer for such various and serious shortcomings as will probably be detected in a work which at least lays no claim to completeness and makes no pretence to adequacy; but which, if it should ever be found serviceable as an introduction to the study of the greatest writer whom the world has seen since Shakespeare, will have fulfilled the utmost hope and realized the utmost ambition of its author.