The temperament of Victor Hugo[610] was perhaps as uncritical a one as any man ever possessed, or as ever possessed any man: but the strength of his genius was such that it could hardly fail to confer mastery, at any rate for a time, on its various literary applications. When the sins of temperament had become besetting and habitual, and the genius was—in this respect, not others—a little failed, his criticism became scarcely more than a curiosity; when the genius was still in its prime, and the temperament had not broken through all control, it is sometimes of a very notable character. _William Shakespeare_[611] is the best text-book of the later and worse state; the _Prefaces_ to the _Cromwell_,[612] to the _Orientales_,[613] and the _Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées_[614] of the earlier and better. To take the worst first, though there are fine things in the _Shakespeare_ book,—there could not fail to be, seeing that it was written, _en regardant l’océan_, by Victor Hugo,—and though a sort of _aura_ of the right Romantic fury still breathes through it, it has nothing of criticism except a splendid concionatory harangue to admiration of the best things, and a great deal of Hugonism nearly at its worst. The colossal confidence in ignorance, which made the poet a laughing-stock to his enemies, permits him to observe (in arguing that England never knew her Shakespeare till Voltaire taught her better) that Dryden _parla de S. une fois pour le déclarer hors d’usage_. [Sidenote: William Shakespeare.] It would be a good examination question, “Translate into the French of Hugo ‘the largest and most universal soul,’ &c.,” and the dictionary resulting would be quite a useful cipher-code. Elsewhere you have the usual page-long strings of names, the usual staccato sentences, punctuated with _nons_ and _ouis_, and stripped of articles and particles, the usual abuse of England (whose life for one thing that she did, in giving Victor Hugo refuge, he will yet not wholly take), and also the usual bursts of verbal and imaginative inspiration which give us the _petite fièvre cérébrale_, and make us excuse, forget, welcome any nonsense, any bad taste, even any bad blood. [Sidenote: Littérature et Philosophie.]