"I know all about it. You're Mr. Greville. I introduce myself - Denis Phelim Finnerty, surgeon to the Phoul a Phouca Militia. We have the same business in hand. Let us settle the preliminaries," and Doctor Finnerty rubbed his hands briskly together, as if he was endeavoring to flatten a bullet between his palms.

"You must really enlighten me," I said.

"You are new to the business. Are you prepared to act, sir, without seeing your principal? I am."

"Before I reply to your question, I should wish to hear your version of the story."

This was to ascertain the exact state of things from his point of view.

"You are welcome to it, sir. Your man has been sent a message. No gentleman wearing the Queen's scarlet can refuse to meet another, when that other is his equal." "Granted. And may I ask who has sent him this message?"

The lady's father, sir, her natural and lawful'protector." "Father! Can it be possible that my cousin is going to fight an old man?"

"He is bound to fight her grandfather if necessary. He'll be horsewhipped in his barrack-square if he shows the white feather. Here's Leenawn, sir," and the doctor alighted from the car on to the steps of the hotel, with the agility that laughed in the teeth of gout or rheumatism.

Here was a pretty situation of affairs. My cousin Geoffry involved in a duel with some elderly gentleman, in whose ashes glowed their wonted fires. But why or wherefore? Geoffry, with all his careless ways, was incapable of doing a dishonorable act. Of this I felt thoroughly assured; yet that there must have been grave, painfully grave offense given to provoke this ultimatum there could be no possibility of doubt. Doctor Finnerty had evidently assumed that I was proceeding to Carrig na Golliogue for the purpose of acting as second to my cousin; and it was now painfully apparent to me that my kinsman required my services in this very unenviable capacity, and hence his telegram.

When the belligerent physician rejoined me, a strong aroma of whiskey punch emanating from his person, he instantly repeated his inquiry as to my power to act in the absence of my principal. I informed him that as yet I had not been informed by my cousin of the nature of the contretemps, and that I would be glad to be more fully posted up in the matter.

"Your cousin will post you up, sir, I'll go bail. Talk of the weather. There will be snow before morning," and rolling the collar of his cloak over his ears, he spoke no other word until we jerked up opposite a long straggling building, situated on the side of the road, which proved to be the hostelry to which I had been so mysteriously and unexpectedly summoned.

I was ushered into a dingy apartment, redolent of the perfume of damp turf. Upon inquiring for Mr. Greville, I was informed by a young lady in bare feet that he was "convaynient." This young lady commiserated my condition by such exclamations as "Och wirra! but ye must be kilt wud the cowld. What brought ye out, ye crayture, sich a cruel night? A sup o' sperrits 'ill save your life. Rowl off your coat, an' get foreninst the fire."

My gay and festive cousin greeted me with considerable warmth, and upon my gravely questioning him as to the dilemma into which he had plunged himself, to my irritation and astonishment he burst out laughing.

"This is no laughing matter, Geoffry," I exclaimed angrily.

"Pon my life I know it isn't, and yet it is so exquisitely absurd that I can only see it from the apex of its absurdity," and he burst out again.

"Will you be good enough to inform me why you brought me here, and if I have come upon a fool's errand?” I burst out angrily.

"Don't fizz up that way, old man," cried my cousin. "Have a liquor, and you shall hear it all."

I adopted his suggestion.

--

"The fact is, at a ball at Athlone last month I met one of the most piquant, exquisite, fascinating, bewildering little Irish girls that ever planted a dainty foot upon a four-leaved shamrock. She was stopping for a few days with some friends who resided near the town, and in these few days I saw as much of her as I possibly could, and in these few days I discovered that she possessed but one fault- - namely, a heap of romance laid on at the highest possible pressure. In fact she is a Lydia Languish, Anno Domini 187-. Eh bien, mon brave, I followed her to her mountain home, and put up at this sumptuous and palatial hostelry; I asked permission to make myself known to her father, a splendid Irish Sir Anthony Absolute, but she would not have me meet him for worlds. Our interviews were all mysteriously secret, and stolen, as if our respective lives were to pay the forfeit of discovery. One day we met under the shadow of a clump of turf- this is a very open country; another day behind the solitary tree in the barony - always accompanied though by an abigail — till one unlucky afternoon, last Thursday, by Jove! Sir Anthony, who was returning from shooting, dropped upon us just as I had asked her to be my wife, and was sealing the delicious Yes' in the stereotyped and orthodox manner; and then, mon cher, there was a shine. He wanted to shoot me then and there, but kindly postponed it until you arrived. He sent me a hostile message through a wiry little doctor, who seems anxious to have blood at any price, true to the instincts of his profession. This little gallipot warrior has departed for Westport, for his barking irons,' and this is the state of the poll for you, and isn't it an exquisite piece of fooling?"

"Is this gentleman a lunatic?" I asked. "Not quite."

"Is he a person of position?"

"As good as any in the County Galway, or any other county."

"Did you offer any explanation?"

"As long as the road from this to Westport. I could have sold it by mile. Of course I couldn't say that it was his daughter's fault."

"And he won't listen to reason?"

"He'll listen to nobody but his medical adviser, and that gentleman, as I have already told you, will have nothing short of blood."

And what is this hot-headed, foolish, unchristian-like old man's name?" I asked in thorough disgust.

"In the first place,” responded my kinsman, "he is not old, mark that! and in the second place, he is not unchristian-like, as he is the most charitable man in this or any other district."

"But his name what is his name?" "His name is Myles Maurice Carew."

"What!" I exclaimed, bounding to my feet; "is it Myles Carew formerly of the Blue Dragoons?" "The same man; but what is the meaning of this? Do you know him?"

"Do I know him! why, he was my father's most intimate friend, although much his junior."

By Jove! I often heard my father speak of him, now that you mention it. Hip! hooray!"

Of course I interviewed Myles Carew in his stronghold at Carrig na Golliogue.

Of course I arranged the preliminaries, not of a duel, but of a meeting between his romantic daughter and my kinsman.

Of course we enjoyed ourselves to our heart's content. I believe that I found the Irish whiskey too much for me, but this is irrelevant. Doctor Finnerty came out like a hero, and narrated his duelling experiences with all the gusto of a man who had stood his ground in the fifteen acres; but inside of this line of fire, his heart was big, and in the right place.

I did not leave Carrig na Golliogue for a fortnight - I wish that I was there now.

I have just received a note from Mr. Geoffry Greville, from Gibraltar. It refers to the sponsorship of a little lady in whose career I am supposed to take a special inter

Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère. Victor Hugo on Quentin Durward.

VICTOR HUGO's romances occupy an important position in the history of literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it is only in the last romance of all, “Quatre Vingt Treize," that this culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it indicates, than to the stationary mile-stone, which is only the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. That significant something by which the work of such a man differs from that of his predecessors goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and more articulate and cognizable. The same principle of growth, that carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them, — of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by Quatre Vingt Treize" for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and through them for a whole division of modern literature. We have here the legitimate continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and hence, so far, its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other in direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have only to produce them to make the chaos plain this is continually so in literary history; and we shall best understand the importance of Victor Hugo's romances if we think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main lines of literary tendency.

66

When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honor as a master in the art, I mean Henry Fielding, we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the first moment, to explain the difference that there is between these two. Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humored as

the great Scotchman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it could utilize. The difference between these two men marks a great enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps been explained with any clearness.

To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. The purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort of realism, that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes; this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted to paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means and plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real sand: real live man and women move about the stage; we hear real voices; what is feigned merely puts an edge upon what is; we do actually see a woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval, we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the stage, almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great restriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical advance of fable, these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier, and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius. When we turn to romance, we find this no longer. Here nothing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these childish identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to which the novelist throws everything. And from this, there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before impossible. He

can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man's life and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one point of view, equally able, if he looks at it from another point of view, to reproduce a color, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the grand salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat board — all this entering naturally and smoothly into the texture of continuous, intelligent narration.

This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand, although he had recognized that the novel was nothing else than an epic in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them. The world with which he dealt, the world he had realized for himself and sought to realize and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively human interest. As for landscape he was content to underline stage directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire into a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers into his hero's way. It is most really important, however, to notice the change which has been introduced into the conception of character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force in a question of perfectly abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown to him; he had not understood that the configuration of the landscape or the fashion of the times could be for anything in a story: and so, naturally and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott's instinct, the instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him otherwise; and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin. to have a sense of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality; that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place in the constitution of things.

It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions, first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history. For art precedes philosophy and even science. People must have noticed things and interested themselves in them, before they begin to debate upon their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that we have not yet realized, ever another and another corner; and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us, and have had time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds,

some day there will be found the man of science to stand up and give the explanation. Scott took an interest in many things in which Fielding took none; and for this reason, and no other, he introduced them into his romances. If he had been told what would be the nature of the movement that he was so lightly initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little scandalized. At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this new manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, even now, it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are enabled to form any proper judgment in the matter. These books are not only descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley novels, but it is in them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of Scott carried further; that we shall find Scott himself, in so far as regards his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in his own spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I said before, a line of literary tendency produced, and by this production definitely separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that the deviation, which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott and Fielding, is indeed such a great gulf in thought and sentiment as only successive generations can pass over; and it is but natural that one of the great advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in self-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the one went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation and forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than Scott; and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The passage at the head of these pages shows how organically he had understood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the five great romances (which alone we purpose here to examine), two deliberate designs: one artistic, the other consciously ethical and intellectual. This is a man living in a different world from Scott, who professes sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does not believe in novels having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is too much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance, to have very little connection with the other, or directly ethical result.

The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it; and yet something as simple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive, but they are so only in appearance. The fact is that art is working far ahead of language as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us in thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has left with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romance, that we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same. It is not that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left with us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its own kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of our philosophical speech.

It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this something which it is the function of that form of art to create, this epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek, and, as far as may be, to throw into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that we shall see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of realizing, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our complicated lives.

This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every so-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything but a very secondary signification. One might almost number on one's fingers the works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any way superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic, that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. At the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it would have been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and that man is Hawthorne. There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose, about some at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on the most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of his works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains to it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful power of subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure of his genius. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this, could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must be felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present essay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each of the five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will permit, and rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.

The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of Notre Dame de Paris" was (he tells us) to "denounce" the external fatality that hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition. To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do with the artistic conception: moreover it is very questionably handled, while the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate success. Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever before our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river, the boat-shaped island" moored by five bridges to the different shores, and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration of palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of admirable description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude from this that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so: we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the "Gothic profile" of the city, of the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and belfries," and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us from The first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to that central building by character after character. It is purely an effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit of the Scott-tourists to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost affronted at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctively Gothic than their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the church leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all, there is that sort of stiff, quaint unreality, that conjunction of the grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness with passionate contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art. Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the book is when these two share with the two other leading charac

ters, Dom Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here that we touch most intimately the generative, artistic idea of the romance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding, illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art? It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances, there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have come almost to identify with the author's manner. There is much melodrama indeed. The scene of the in-pace, for example, in spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny novelist. But for all that, there is little of the wilfully impossible. Still, even here, there are false notes. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again, the following two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass what it has ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine: "Il souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachait des poignées de cheveux, pour voir s'ils ne blanchissaient pas" (vol. ii. p. 180). And, "Ses pensées étaient si insupportables qu'il prenait sa tête à deux mains et tâchait de l'arracher de ses épaules pour la briser sur le pavé" (p. 181).

One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of brutality, that useless, insufferable violence to the feelings, which is the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in “ Notre Dame," the whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archer is unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last hiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this sordid hero who has long since forgotten her- well, that is just one of these things that readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and they are quite right; life is hard enough for poor mortals, without having it indefinitely embittered for them by

art.

We look in vain for any similar blemish in "Les Misérables." Here, on the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary restraint that Hugo has ever made there is here certainly the ripest and most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of this great novel to waken us a little, if it may be, for such awakenings are unpleasant, to the great cost of this society that we enjoy and profit by, to the labor and sweat of those who support the litter, civilization, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that the bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death by the deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labor, and the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in "Les Misérables;" and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilization to those who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear in the dark, tearing good and bad between its formidable wheels with the blind stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognizes the face of the detective; as when

the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or as when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great means of oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the admirable conception of Javert, the man who had made a religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a melancholy and a very just creation, over which the reader will do well to ponder.

With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water, stands in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster behind "lui faisait un peu l'effet d'être le Père éternel"? The pathos of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney, in expectation of the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there is no book in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much calm and serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic coarsenesses that disfigured "Notre Dame" are no longer present. There is certainly much that is painfully improbable; and again, the story itself is a little too well constructed; it produces on us the effect of a puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find that every character fits in again and again into the plot, and is, like the child's cube, serviceable on six faces; things are not so well arranged in life as all that comes to. Some of the digressions also seem out of place, and do nothing but interrupt and irritate. But when all is said, the book remains of masterly conception and of masterly development, full of pathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence.

Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the first two members of the series, it remained for "Les Travailleurs de la Mer" to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of external force that is brought against him. And here once more the artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forces into the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labor" in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown into such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that come wonderingly around him on the night of his arrival strikes at once the note of his preeminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with his indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the clamor of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out sharply against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation is not to be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for example; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to set side by side than "Les Travailleurs" and this other of the old days before art had learned to occupy itself with aught that lies outside of human will. Crusoe was one sole centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead and utterly unrealized by the artist; but this is not how we feel with Gilliat; we feel that he is opposed by a "dark coalition of forces," that an "immense animosity" surrounds him; we are the witnesses of the terrible warfare that he wages with "the silent inclemency of phenomena going their own way, and the great general law, implacable and passive: "

is against

"a conspiracy of the indifferency of things him. There is not one interest on the reef, but two. Just as we recognize Gilliat for the hero, we recognize, as implied by this indifferency of things, this direction of forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another character who may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the two face up to one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the storm, they fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor; a victor, however, who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say nothing of the gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it will be enough to remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab when he is himself assaulted by the devilfish, and that this, in its way, is the last touch to the inner significance of the book; here, indeed, is the true position of man in the universe.

But in "Les Travailleurs," with all its strength, with all its eloquence, with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we cannot conceal from ourselves that there is a thread of something that will not bear calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about the storm, admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful if it would be possible to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any amount of break water and broken rock. I do not understand the way in which the waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way of speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the sea was quite calm next day? Is this great hurricane a piece of scene-painting after all? And when we have forgiven Gilliat's prodigies of strength (although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in the "Vicomte de Bragelonne" than is quite desirable) what is to be said to his suicide, and how are we to condemn in adequate terms that unprincipled avidity after effect, which tells us that the sloop disappeared over the horizon and the head under the water, at one and the same moment? Monsieur Hugo may say what he will, but we know better; we know very well that they did not; a thing like that raises up a despairing spirit of opposition in a man's readers; they give him the lie fiercely, as they read. Lastly, we have here, already, some beginning of that curious series of English blunders that makes us wonder if there are neither proof-sheets nor judicious friends in the whole of France, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth," and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It is here that we learn that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as "lord" in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun.

In "L'Homme qui Rit," it was Hugo's object to "denounce (as he would say himself) the aristocratic principle, as it was exhibited in England; and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the two last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that, here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing could be more happily imagined, as a reductio ad absurdum of the aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible laughter, stamped forever "by order of the king" upon the face of this strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet