Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography. Translated by Lorenzo O'Rourke. (Funk and
Wagnalls. 5s. net.)—Mr. O'Rourke gives us here, together with his own appreciation of Victor Hugo's beliefs, ways of thought, and literary methods, a translation of various writings hitherto unpublished,—should not the word rather be " uncollected" ? The appreciation is con- cerned with what Mr. O'Rourke speaks of as "the last phase of Hugo's genius," and seems to us a performance of some value, though the reader will not find in it a genuinely critical temper. The great personality masters him, and he can do little else but express his admiration, sometimes rising to a very high note indeed. He pauses, it is true, for a moment when his hero says of himself: "There is only one classic—do you understand me well ?—only one. I mean myself. After me come Sainte-Beuve and Merime.e." This is "amazing." We cannot but feel, how- ever, that Mr. O'Rourke is not always qualified for his task. He is asserting the depth of Hugo's classical scholarship. Of Greek he was confessedly ignorant ; but as to Latin, it is not convincing
to be told that he could recite "whole pages from Justinius, Quintus, Cartius." The Latin quotations, too, are frequently incorrect. We find " insomnus" for "insomnia," "somnii" for " somnia," and in nineteen lines from the First Georgic there are three errors. The translation shows the translator mastered by his orig,inal. He must have known that "style is the entrails" (p. 200) was not English, but he could not help putting it because Victor Hugo wrote, presumably, les entrailles, a word more widely significant in French.
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