Victor Hugo is more screamy than ever. In declining to
attend "the Congress of the League of Peace and Liberty," he renews the expression of his fear that peace must be postponed. "What France wants to make, is Europe. To make Germany, is to construct the Empire, that is to say, night. To make Europe is to give birth to democracy, that is to say, light. Between the two worlds—the one gloomy, the other radiant ; the one false, the other true—the choice of the future, be assured, is made." Again :—" To speak of an alliance of Kings is to speak of an alliance of vultures. This fratricidal fraternity will come to an end, and to the Europe of Coalition Kings will succeed the Europe of United Peoples. To-day? No. To-morrow ? Yes. Let us, then, have faith, and await the future. No peace till then." Probably nothing does more to cool the always vehement Euro- pean interest in France than these incoherent shrieks about " light " and "night," and " vultures " and "peoples,"—which are only the more vexatious, that no one can deny the extra- ordinary genius of the man who utters them, though no one could infer it from these excruciating pictures of France as an extatica, and Germany as a fiend, falling into cataleptic postures, and answering excited interrogations in monosyllabic exclamations. Never before was a really great genius so far from sane, so wanting in lucidity of judgment, as Victor liugo's.
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