l-heroes who are failures throng my mind like ghosts on the other
shore of the river whom Charon will not ferry over; but I can single out
none of them who is, without positively evil qualities, so absolutely
intolerable as Marius.[103] Others have more such qualities; but he has
no good ones. His very bravery is a sort of moral and intellectual
running amuck because he thinks he shall not get Cosette. Having,
apparently, for many years thought and cared nothing about his father,
he becomes frantically filial on discovering that he has inherited from
him, as above, a very doubtful and certainly most un-"citizen"-like
title of Baron. Thereupon (taking care, however, to have cards printed
with the title on them) he becomes a violent republican.

He then proceeds to be extremely rude to his indulgent but royalist
grandfather, retires to a mount of very peculiar sacredness, where he
comes in contact with the Thenardier family, discovers a plot against
Valjean, appeals to the civil arm to protect the victim, but, for
reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part,
and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story,
carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as
self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic
self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor
old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the _eclaircissement_
comes, it appears to me--as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola that he ought to
have consented to be damned--that Marius ought to have consented at
least to be kicked.

Of course it may be said, "You should not give judgments on things with
which you are evidently out of sympathy." But I do not acknowledge any
palpable hit. If certain purposes of the opposite kind were obtruded
here in the same fashion--if Victor (as he might have done in earlier
days) had hymned Royalism instead of Republicanism, or (as perhaps he
would never have done) had indulged in praise of severe laws and
restricted education,[104] and other things, I should be "in sympathy,"
but I hope and believe that I should not be "out of" criticism. Unless
strictly adjusted to the scale and degree suitable to a novel--as Sir
Walter has, I think, restricted his Mariolatry and his Jacobitism, and
so forth--I should bar them as I bar these.[105] And it is the fact that
they are not so restricted, with the concomitant faults which, again
purely from th