e point of view of novel-criticism as such, I have
ventured to find, that makes me consider _Les Miserables_ a failure as a
novel. Once again, too, I find few of the really good and great
things--which in so vast a book by such a writer are there, and could
not fail to be there--to be essentially and specially good and great
according to the novel standard. They are, with the rarest exceptions,
the stuff of drama or of poetry, not of novel. That there are such
exceptions--the treacherous feast of the students to the mistresses they
are about to desert; the escapes of Valjean from the ambushes laid for
him by Thenardier and Javert; some of the Saint-Merry fighting; the
guesting of the children by Gavroche in the elephant; and others--is
true. But they are oases in a desert; and, save when they would be
better done in poetry, they do not after all seem to me to be much
better done than they might have been by others--the comparative
weakness of Hugo in conversation of the kind suitable for prose fiction
making itself felt. That at least is what the present writer's notion of
criticism puts into his mouth to say; and he can say no other.

[Sidenote: _Les Travailleurs de la Mer._]

_Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, on the other hand, is, according to some
persons, among whom that present writer desires to be included, the
summit of Victor Hugo's achievements in prose fiction. It has his
"signatures" of absurdity in fair measure. There is the celebrated
"Bug-Pipe" which a Highlander of the garrison of Guernsey sold (I am
afraid contrary to military law) to the hero, and on which that hero
performed the "_melancholy_ air" of "Bonny Dundee."[106] There is the
equally celebrated "First of the Fourth" (Premiere de la Quatrieme),
which is believed to be Hugonic for the Firth of Forth. There are some
others. There is an elaborate presentation of a quite impossibly named
clergyman, who is, it seems, an anticipator of "le Puseysme" and an
actual high-churchman, who talks as never high-churchman talked from
Laud to Pusey himself, but rather like the Reverend Gabriel
Kettledrummle (with whom Hugo was probably acquainted "in translations,
Sir! in translations").[107] Gilliatt, the hero, is a not very human
prig outside those extraordinary performances, of which more later, and
his consummate end. Deruchette, the heroine, is, like Cosette, a pretty
nullity.[108] As always, the author _will_ not "get under way"; and
short as the book is, an