All the bric-a-brac
of history and of manners, so to speak, all the curiosities of soil, and
subsoil, are known and familiar to him. He seems to have turned his
Paris over and over, and to know it body and soul as one knows the
contents of one's pocket. What a prodigious memory and what a lurid
imagination! He is at once a visionary and yet master of his dreams; he
summons up and handles at will the hallucinations of opium or of
hasheesh, without ever becoming their dupe; he makes of madness one of
his tame animals, and bestrides, with equal coolness, Pegasus or
Nightmare, the Hippogriff or the Chimera. As a psychological phenomenon
he is of the deepest interest. Victor Hugo draws in sulphuric acid, he
lights his pictures with electric light. He deafens, blinds, and
bewilders his reader rather than he charms or persuades him. Strength
carried to such a point as this is a fascination; without seeming to
take you captive, it makes you its prisoner; it does not enchant you,
but it holds you spellbound. His ideal is the extraordinary, the
gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His most characteristic
words are _immense, colossal, enormous, huge, monstrous_. He finds a way
of making even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing
which seems impossible to him is to be natural.
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