Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,

O how that glittering taketh me.

This is no figmentary picture. The songs to Julia-most of all, the glorious Night Piece— are songs of experience. Herrick may not have loved Julia well enough to marry her, even if she had been willing, but he loved her well enough to write good verses. He could probably have said farewell to any woman as philosophically as he said farewell to sack. He was a cautious man, and a predestined bachelor. He was, indeed, a man of no very profound feeling. There is no deep tide of emotion making his verse musical. He knew love and he knew regret, but not tragically. If he wept to see the daffodils haste away so soon, we may be sure that he brushed away his tears at the sound of the dinnerbell and forgot the premature death of the flowers in cheerful conversation with his housekeeper, Prue. This does not mean that his mood was insincere; it does not mean that in To Daffodils he did not give immortal and touching expression to one of the universal sorrows of men. He comes nearer the grave music

of poetry here than in any of his other poems. But the Memento mori that runs through his verses is the Memento mori of a banqueter, not of a sufferer. It is the mournfulness of a heart that has no intention of breaking.

Herrick proved a true prophet in regard to the immortality of his verse, though Hesperides made no great stir when it was published in 1648 and seems to have made no friends among critics till the end of the eighteenth century. But he never gave a wiser estimate of the quality of his work than those lines, in When he would have his verses read, where he bids us:

In sober mornings do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;

....

But when that men have both well drank and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read ..
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointment shine,
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.

This is the muse at play. It is absurd to speak of Herrick as though he were a great lyric poet. He is not with Shakespeare. He is not with Campion. But he is a master of light poetry-of poetry under the rose.

II

VICTOR HUGO

It is easy to disparage Victor Hugo, but, in order to disparage him, it is necessary to abstain from reading him. Take down his books and begin to read, and, even if you do not agree with the verdict, you will understand before long how it was that a generation or so ago people used to regard Victor Hugo as one of the great names in literature. It was only Swinburne, perhaps, who could describe him as "the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare," but this did not seem an absurd exaggeration to the majority of readers at the time it was written, and even a crabbed critic like Henley accepted him as plainly the greatest man of letters of his day." His influence as well as his reputation was enormous and extended far beyond France. He was a great author for the great Russians. He was one of Dostoevsky's favourite writers, and Notre Dame was one of the books that influenced Tolstoy; even in his censorious old age

Tolstoy admitted Les Misérables through the strait gate of the best literature in What is Art? and it seems likely, as Madame Duclaux suggests, that it was at the back of his mind when he wrote Resurrection.

His greatest contemporaries, however, realised that Hugo was a charlatan as well as a man of genius. Madame Duclaux quotes Baudelaire's comment, "Victor Hugo-an inspired donkey!" and his assertion that the Almighty, "in a mood of impenetrable mystification," had taken genius and silliness in equal parts in order to compound the brain of Victor Hugo. She also quotes Balzac's criticism of the first night of Les Burgraves:

The story simply does not exist, the invention is beneath contempt. But the poetry-ah, the poetry goes to your head. It's Titian painting his fresco on a wall of mud. Yet there is in Victor Hugo's plays an absence of heart, which was never so conspicuous. Victor Hugo is not true.

"Victor Hugo is not true." That is the suspicion that constantly trips one up whether one reads his books or his life. In literature, in public life, in private life, he was not only amazing but an amazing humbug. We see evidence of this in the story of his relations with his wife and Juliette Drouet, his mistress, which Madame

Duclaux tells again so fairly and so well. Even while he was pursuing the mistress across France, he would write fervently home to the wife: "Je t'aime! Tu es la joie et l'honneur de ma vie!" Hugo possibly meant this when he wrote it. He may have been lying to himself rather than to his wife. His falseness lay in his readiness to whisper at each shrine at which he worshipped that this was his only shrine. At the same time, no sooner do we admit that Hugo was an impostor in love and in literature than we begin to compare him with other impostors and to note certain differences in him. His early idealism was not merely an idealism of words. He was, until his marriage, as chaste as his nature was passionate. He was after marriage a faithful husband till his wife told him that she could no longer live with him as his wife. After he fell in love with Juliette Drouet in 1833, we might describe him as a high-minded bigamist, though he did not remain perfectly faithful even in his bigamy. One thing, at least, is certain: both women loved him till the end of their long lives. His dying wife wrote to him in 1868: “The end of my dream is to die in your arms." And, when Juliette Drouet was slowly dying of cancer, and both she and Hugo were between seventy and eighty, she still insisted on nursing him at the