different lesson. They teach us that the way to reunion with the best and dearest lies not through defection and despair, but through work and hope, and that those alone can expect the reward of great hearts who have borne with constancy all that great hearts can bear. "Tis better that our griefs should not spread far.'

IV.

Before we close our survey of this puissant and many-gifted nature, it is natural to ask ourselves whether we can discern any guiding conception which has regulated the exercise of all these powers-any individual and consistent view of the sum of things which reveals itself from time to time amid these labyrinths of song. Certain principles we can plainly discern: a belief in France, a belief in democracy, a true sympathy with the weak, the outcast, the oppressed. To some of us the exaggeration of his patriotism may seem to fit it rather for boys than men. To some of us an admiration for republics as such may seem rather fanciful than sublime, unless it be, as in Mazzini, simply the form in which a profound craving for public virtue finds, from historical causes, its readiest channel. But at any rate these are living watchwords: France, the Republic, Childhood, the Oppressed-these are worthy themes for a great poet to sing. And here we would stop, but that it is plain that these are not all that he has aimed at singing. He claims to speak to us not only as a Frenchman and a philanthropist, but as a preacher and a seer. Vision, revelation, mission, apostolate-words like these are ever on his lips. He would have us believe that he has gazed deeply into the Infinite, that he has heard the words. which issue from the Mouth of Shade.' 6 As confidently as any

• God-intoxicated' mystic, he invokes as his authority and inspiration the Eternal Name.

Is there any reality in all this? Is there any harmonising truth about the universe, any illuminating conception of the Divine, which this great poet has received, and has been sent to teach us? With real, with deep regret I answer that I believe that there is not. Reluctantly I say that long study of his works has revealed only a wild and whirling chaos-a cloudland which reflects no figure grander than the poet's own.

Friends of M. Hugo's have indeed affirmed that he has given us the clue to his inner meaning-that he has in many ways indicated that the central point of his system, his true kernel of belief, is that religion within religions which we associate with the name of Pythagoras, which reappears under different semblances in many ages and many lands, and which, it is hinted, some mysterious revelation has impressed with special force on this poet's mind. But I cannot say that these visions of his seem to me to bring us any light, or that his VOL. V.-No. 28.

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mystical and transmigrational poems (from Ce que dit la bouche d'Ombre to Le Poëme du Jardin des Plantes) are written with a truer accent of conviction than a thousand other pages embodying a hundred other faiths. For all faiths are there. Theism, pantheism, atheism, every mood from a glowing optimism to a cynical despair-all these appear in turn and are used alike as the vehicle of the accustomed rhetoric, the old self-praise. Even when words are put into God's own mouth, we cannot help feeling that no alias is more transparent than M. Hugo's God.

How deep an irreverence is here! We are shocked by the Dieu des Bonnes Gens of Béranger, the Dieu devant qui l'on s'incline le verre en main, the vulgar patron of ignoble pleasures. But at least a God like Béranger's is hardly meant to be taken seriously; he is the offspring of an imagination bound and rooted in this world and amid the shows of things. M. Hugo has profaned a higher lighthas driven astray a chariot which might, in Plato's words, have. followed with the company of gods across the vault of heaven. He has sought first his own glory, and the glory of the Invisible has been hid from his eyes. And thus it has come to pass that in this age of faith's formation and of faith's decay, which feels above all things its need of the sincere expression of all shades of reasoned belief and unbelief, of heartfelt confidence or despair-in this age, when a harmony as yet unknown is shaping itself, as it were, audibly from the cry and shock of souls, this great singer's strain has no part in that attuning choir; his voice that fain had filled infinity dies out into the void.

I might double the length of this essay with passages illustrative of my meaning here. I will quote one alone, a passage in which the Almighty does not escape the fate which befalls every one whose name M. Hugo mentions-the fate of being employed as a foil and contrast to the greatness and goodness of M. Hugo.

To understand the lines in question, a few words of introduction are required.

Most men who think at all, whatever their creed may be, have at one time or another faced the terrible possibility that after all there is no hope that there are no 'gods who prefer the just man to the unjust '-that our loves and aspirations do but mock us with an ever unattainable desire. And the poets who have been the voices of humanity have given utterance to this dark fear in many a passage which has sunk deeply into human hearts-from the stern realism of Achilles among the shades down to the visionary despair of the end of Alastor-from the bitterness of the Hebrew preacher down to the melodious complainings of the idle singer of an empty day.' Often, indeed, we measure the elevation of the poet or of the race to which he sings by noting the nature of the regret on which he chiefly dwells -whether it be, as often with the Greeks, mainly for the loss of our

own joy in life and sunlight, or, as in the sadder Psalms, resentment at the outrage of Death against Justice, or the still nobler agony of the thought that the claim of Love to its own continuance shall be made in vain.

By what indeed are we to judge a man if not by the way in which he meets this problem? Be his speculative conclusions what they may, if there be any unselfishness in him, if any heroism, if any holiness, he will show them in the face of these extreme possibilities, this one hope worth hoping, this only formidable fear.

In one of the last poems of L'Année Terrible, M. Hugo paints at great length and with startling rhetoric the possibility that God may at last be found to have deceived us all along-that the moral cosmos may be reduced to a chaos,' and man, the sport of destiny, expire in a ruined universe. What then is the central point of this poem? what is the idea which stands out for our strength or solace from this profusion of rhetoric and metaphor? It is-I blush with shame for M. Hugo in writing it down-it is that M. Hugo himself may be relied upon to chase and catch the recalcitrant Deity, like a wolf in the forest, and to overawe Him by the majesty of his personal appearance and the eloquence of his rebuke:

J'irais, je le verrais, et je le saisirais

Dans les cieux, comme on prend un loup dans les forêts,
Et terrible, indigné, calme, extraordinaire,

Je le dénoncerais à son propre tonnerre.

M. Hugo, forsooth, would be terrible! M. Hugo would be calm! M. Hugo would be extraordinary! It seems likely that at the crack of doom even M. Hugo might see something more terrible and extraordinary than himself.

Can the force of egoism further go? Can we accept as a teacher or a prophet a man who sees on the whole vault of heaven only the Brocken-spectre of his own soul? Must not all our admiration for this man's talents enclose within itself an ineffaceable core of contempt ?

Or rather let us say that this, like all contempt, must ultimately resolve itself into a profound compassion. Must we not pity the man, however great his genius or his fame, who has not found in this or the other world one love or one worship which could teach him to forget himself? Let him call his works mountains, himself a Titan, if he will: the Titans with their heaped-up mountains could never scale the sky.

But we will not accept his metaphor. We will not part from him except with a comparison which has in it at once less of arrogance and more of hope. For when we ponder on that keen but troubled vision, that soaring but self-captive spirit, we recur to Plato's charioteer, who has indeed in times foregone driven upwards to feast and festival with the blessed gods-who has looked, indeed, for a moment on very Justice, very Beauty, very Truth, but in the midst.

of the thunder of rebellious horses and a storm and confusion of the soul, till he crashes downwards to the earth, and feeds upon the semblances of things, and half forgets and half remembers what that true world has shown. For him, in Plato's myth, there yet is a glorious hope; there remains for him some needful draught of selfforgetfulness, some purifying passage beneath the earth; and then again he may look with the gods on Truth, and stand with firmer footsteps upon the heavenly way.

FREDERIC W. H. MYERS.

FOOD AND FEEDING.

I THINK I shall not be far wrong if I say that there are few subjects more important to the well-being of man than the selection and preparation of his food. Our forefathers in their wisdom have provided, by ample and generously endowed organisations, for the dissemination of moral precepts in relation to human conduct, and for the constant supply of sustenance to meet the cravings of religious emotions common to all sorts and conditions of men. In these provisions no student of human nature can fail to recognise the spirit of wisdom and a lofty purpose. But it is not a sign of ancestral wisdom that so little thought has been bestowed on the teaching of what we should eat and drink; that the relations, not only between food and a healthy population, but between food and virtue, between the process of digestion and the state of mind which results from it, have occupied a subordinate place in the practical arrangements of life. No doubt there has long been some practical acknowledgment, on the part of a few educated persons, of the simple fact that a man's temper, and consequently many of his actions, depend on such an alternative as whether he habitually digests his food well or ill; whether the meals which he eats are properly converted into healthy material, suitable for the ceaseless work of building up both muscle and brain; or whether unhealthy products constantly pollute the course of nutritive supply. But the truth of that fact has never been generally admitted to an extent at all comparable with its exceeding importance. It produces no practical result on the habits of men in the least degree commensurate with the pregnant import it contains. For it is certain that an adequate recognition of the value of proper food to the individual in maintaining a high standard of health, in prolonging healthy life (the prolongation of unhealthy life being small gain either to the individual or to the community), and thus largely promoting cheerful temper, prevalent good nature, and improved moral tone, would require almost a revolution in the habits of a large part of the community.

The general outlines of a man's mental character and physical tendencies are doubtless largely determined by the impress of race