tuck
into the body of fiction, as (but with how different results!) _lardons_
or pistachios or truffles are stuck into another kind of composition.

It is partly, but not wholly, due to this deplorable habit of irrelevant
divagation that Hugo will never allow his stories to "march" (at least
to begin with marching),[122] _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ being here the only
exception among the longer romances, for even _Les Travailleurs de la
Mer_ never gets into stride till nearly the whole of the first volume is
passed. But the habit, however great a nuisance it may be to the reader,
is of some interest to the student and the historian, for the very
reason that it does not seem to be wholly an outcome of the other habit
of digression. It would thus be, in part at least, a survival of that
odd old "inability to begin" which we noticed several times in the last
volume, aggravated by the irrepressible wilfulness of the writer, and by
his determination not to do like other people, who _had_ by this time
mostly got over the difficulty.

If any further "dull moral" is wanted it may be the obvious lesson that
overpowering popularity of a particular form is sometimes a misfortune,
as that of allegory was in the Middle Ages and that of didactics in the
eighteenth century. If it had not been almost incumbent on any Frenchman
who aimed at achieving popularity in the mid-nineteenth century to
attempt the novel, it is not very likely that Hugo would have attempted
it. It may be doubted whether we should have lost any of the best
things--we should only have had them in the compacter and higher shape
of more _Orientales_, more _Chants du Crepuscule_, more _Legendes_, and
so forth. We should have lost the easily losable laugh over bug-pipe and
wapentake--for though Hugo sometimes _thought_ sillily in verse he did
not often let silliness touch his expression in the more majestical
harmony--and we should have been spared an immensely greater body of
matter which now provokes a yawn or a sigh.

This is, it may be said, after all a question of taste. Perhaps. But it
can hardly be denied by any critical student of fiction that while
Hugo's novel-work has added much splendid matter to literature, it has
practically nowhere advanced, nor even satisfactorily exemplified, the
art of the novel. It is here as an exception--marvellous, magnificent,
and as such to be fully treated; actually an honour to the art of which
it discards the requirements, but an