A Chat About New Books [pp. 124-137]

A CHAT ABOUT NEw BOOKS.
carried it into France, and it progressed so quickly that it soon
became "a system of dogmatic atheism, and the advanced among
his disciples said of him,' Voltaire est bigot; il est ddiste.'" In
April, 1764, he wrote: " The young are very happy; they will
see fine things." They saw fine things; they saw Christianity,
law, order, divine and human rights, all that was best, submerged
in such a deluge of blood that Paris seems red with it yet. The
kings have gone, but the priests live, though his disciples still
clutch at their throats. Voltaire died in May, I778, "probably,"
Mr. Morley says, "from an over-dose of laudanum." Mr. Morley gently leaves his death-bed with that phrase, and by so doing
shows the discretion of an artist anxious to make the best of a
hideous subject.
Mr. Swinburne's adjectives pelt furiously on the big drum,
and his superlatives rush after one another like the notes from a
very sonorous brass instrument indeed. The mildest thing he
says of Victor Hugo is that he was "the greatest Frenchman of
all time." Swinburne exhausts language in his admiration for
Victor Hugo's poetry, which is commonplace enough. He may
be pardoned for praising, even extravagantly, those wonderful romances which seem to be the work of a giant with some of the
faults of a dwarf. Swinburne's frenzy over Victor Hugo's political hallucinations is almost comic. He apparently does not
know that this great master of melodramatic effect was almost as
changeable as the Vicar of Bray. In Les Rayons et les Ombres he
called Voltaire "that ape of genius sent by the devil on a mission to man," and in i867 eagerly subscribed to a statue of that
philosopher, with the words: "Voltaire is a forerunner, torchbearer of the eighteenth century; he preceded and announced
the French Revolution; he is the star of that grand morning."
The last words of Swinburne-writing of a great weaver of language, whose verse was thin and affected, except when he wrote
for the theatre-are almost burlesque. Think of comparing
Dante and Hugo!
"Meantime," cries Swinburne, " it is only in the phrase of one of his
own kindred, poet and exile and prophet of a darker age than his, that the
last word should here be spoken of the man by whose name our century
will be known for ever to all ages and nations that keep any record or
memory of what was highest and most memorable in the spiritual history
of the past:
'Onorate l'altissimo poeta!'"
This "study" of the poet of pretty sentiment and stage-thunder
[April,
126