Gauvain is far less effective than that of Sydney Carton, which had
preceded it; and the enormous harangue of the Marquis to the nephew who
is about to liberate him, though it may be intended to heighten the
_peripeteia_, merely gives fresh evidence of Hugo's want of proportion
and of his flux of rhetoric.

All this and more is true; yet _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ is, "in its _fine_
wrong way," a great book, and with _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_,
completes the pillars, such as they are, which support Hugo's position
as a novelist. The rescue of the children by Lantenac is superb, though
you may find twenty cavils against it easily: and the whole presentation
of the Marquis, except perhaps the speech referred to, is one of the
best pictures of the _ancienne noblesse_ in literature, one which--to
reverse the contrast just made--annihilates Dickens's caricature thereof
in _A Tale of Two Cities_. The single-handed defence of La Tourgue by
"L'Imanus" has of course a good deal of the hyperbole which began with
Quasimodo's similar act in _Notre-Dame_; but the reader who cannot "let
himself go" with it is to be pitied. Nowhere is Hugo's child-worship
more agreeably shown than in the three first chapters of the third
volume. And, sinking particulars for a more general view, one may say
that through the whole book, to an extent surpassing even _Les
Travailleurs de la Mer_ as such, there is the great Victorian _souffle_
and surge, the rush as of mighty winds and mightier waters, which
carries the reader resistlessly through and over all obstacles.

[Sidenote: Final remarks.]

Yet although Hugo thus terminated his career as a novelist, if not in
the odour of sanctity, at any rate in a comfortable cloud of incense due
to a comparative success; although he had (it is true on a much smaller
scale) even transcended that success in _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_;
although, as a mere novice, he had proved himself a more than tolerable
tale-teller in _Bug-Jargal_, it is not possible, for any critical
historian of the novel as such, to pronounce him a great artist, or even
a tolerable craftsman, in the kind as a whole. It has already been
several times remarked in detail, and may now be repeated in general,
that the things which we enjoy in his books of this kind are seldom
things which it is the special business of the novelist to produce, and
practically never those which are his chief business. In no single
instance perhaps, with the doubtf