ful
wildfowl the "wapentake," with his "iron weapon." He, with his satellite
the justicier-quorum (but, one weeps to see, not "custalorum" or
"rotalorum"), is concerned with the torture of Hardquanonne[116]--the
original malefactor[117] in Gwynplaine's case--and thereby restores
Gwynplaine to his (unsubstituted) rank in the English peerage, when he
himself is anticipating similar treatment. There is the presentation by
the librarian of the House of Lords of a "little red book" which is the
passport to the House itself: and the very unmannerly reception by his
brother peers, from which he is in a manner rescued by the chivalrous
Lord David Dirry-Moir at the price of a box on the ears for depriving
him of his "substitution." There is the misconduct of the Duchess
Josiane, divinely beautiful and diabolically wicked, who covets the
monster Gwynplaine as a lover, and discards him when, on his
peerification, he is commanded to her by Queen Anne as a husband. And
then, after all this tedious insanity and a great deal more, there is
the finale of the despair of Gwynplaine, of his recovery of the dying
Dea in a ship just starting for Holland, of her own death, and of his
suicide in the all-healing sea--a "reconciliation" not far short of the
greatest things in literature.

Now I am not of those unhappy ones who cannot away with the mixture of
tragedy and farce. I have not only read too much, but lived too long for
that. But then the farce must be in life conceivable and in literature
conscious. Shakespeare, and even men much inferior to Shakespeare, have
been able to provide for this stipulation munificently.

With Victor Hugo, generally more or less and intensively here, it was
unfortunately different. His irony was almost always his weakest point;
or rather it was a kind of hit-or-miss weapon, with which he cut himself
as often as he cut his inimical objects or persons. The intense
absurdity of his personified wapentakes, of his Tom-Jim-Jacks, of his
courtesy-title bastards, he deliberately declined (as in the anecdote
above given) to see. But these things, done and evidently thought fine
by the doer, almost put to rout the most determined and expert sifter of
the faults and merits of genius. You cannot enjoy a Garden of Eden when
at every other step you plunge into a morass of mire. You cannot drink a
draught of nectar, arranged on the plan of certain glasses of liqueur,
in superimposed layers of different savour and colour,