Note 277 — SECTION IX. CATALOGUE-RAISONNÉ OF MODERN TRAVELS IN ICELAND—PREPARATIONS FOR TRAVEL.

In 1837 appeared the first southern attempt at a novel upon hyperborean subjects—“Han d’Islande,” which Jules Janin (Les Catacombes, i. 102) described as “Cette vive, passionée et grossière ébauche d’un homme qui avait Notre Dame de Paris dans la tête et les Orientales dans le cœur.” The great author’s mind must have been very young when he wrote it. This silly and childish farrago bears the same relation to “Notre Dame” as “Titus Andronicus” to the “Tempest” or to “Othello.” Han is an impossible savage, ever with a tempête sous un crâne. Ordener is a ridiculous Timon, and the sudden conversion of Schuhmacher to absurd benevolence is worthy of caricature-loving Dickens. With the exception of a few striking remarks, it shows more of fury and frenzy than of fine wit. It forcibly calls to mind the late Prosper Merimée’s harsh judgment of M. Victor Hugo as a poet: “He is all imagery. There is neither matter, nor solidity, nor common sense in his verse; he is a man who gets drunk on his own words, and who no longer takes the trouble of thinking.” And Han d’Islande explains how the austere old littérateur detected a vein of insanity in the greatest poet of the French Revival, the Romantic School which dates from 1830.

Nor amongst travellers can we reckon M. Jules Verne’s “Voyage au Centre de la Terre,” the least meritorious of the “terribly thrilling” and marvellously impossible series; its scene is chiefly below “Sneffles” (Snæfelljökull), a sniffling disguise, which seems to have been, but is not, invented in jest.