h as she touches the beach; the great western promontory of
Pleinmont, a scarcely lessened Land's End, with the Hanois rocks beyond;
the tamer but still not tame western, northern, and north-eastern
coasts, with the Druid-haunted level of L'Ancresse and the minor port of
St. Samson--all these furnish, even to the well-girt man, an
extraordinary number[111] of walks, ranging from an hour's to a day's
and more there and back; while in the valleys of the interior you find
scenery which might be as far from the sea as Warwickshire, or on the
heights springs which tell you that they must have come from the
neighbourhood of the Mount of Dol or the Forest of Broceliande.

With such colour and form of locality to serve, not merely as
inspiration but as actual scene and setting, such genius as Hugo's could
hardly fail. The thing is sad and delightful and great. As life, you may
say, it could not have happened; as literature it could not but have
happened, and has happened, at its best, divinely well. The contrast of
the long agony of effort and its triumph on the Douvres, with the swift
collapse of any possible reward at St. Samson, is simply a windfall of
the Muses to this spoiled and, it must be confessed, often self-spoiling
child of theirs. There are, of course, absurdities still, and of a
different kind from the bug-pipe. I have always wished to know what the
experiences of the fortunate and reverend but sheepish Ebenezer had been
at Oxford--he must certainly have held a King Charles scholarship in his
day--during that full-blooded time of the Regency. The circumstances of
the marriage are almost purely Hugonian, though it does Hugo credit that
he admires the service which he travesties so remarkably. But the _Dieu_
(not _diable_) _au corps_ which he now enjoys enables him to change into
a beauty (in the wholly natural gabble of Mess Lethierry on the recovery
of the _la Durande_) those long speeches which have been already noted
as blots. And, beauty or blot, it would not have mattered. All is in the
contrast of the mighty but conquered Douvres and the comparatively
insignificant rocklet--there are hundreds like it on every granite
coast--where Death the Consoler sets on Gilliatt's head the only crown
possible for his impossible feat, and where the dislike of the ignorant
peasantry, the brute resistance of machinery and material, the violence
of the storm, the devilish ambush of the _pieuvre_, and all other evils
are termina