cusation. After reading all his
writings, no one could for a moment claim that Thackeray was the
biographer of heroes. He is a biographer of meanness, and times, and
sham aristocracy and folks, and can, when he cares to do so, portray
heroism lofty as tallest mountains. With Hugo all is different. He
will do nothing else than dream and depict heroism and heroes.

He loves them with a passion fervent as desert heats. His pages are
ablaze with them. Somebody lifting up the face, and facing God in some
mood or moment of briefer or longer duration--this is Hugo's method.
In "Toilers of the Sea," Galliatt, by almost superhuman effort, and
physical endurance and fortitude and fertility in resource, defeats
octopus and winds and rocks and seas, and in lonely triumph pilots the
wreck home--and all of this struggle and conquest for love! He is a
somber hero, but a hero still, with strength like the strength of ten,
since his love is as the love of a legion. The power to do is his, and
the nobility to surrender the woman of his love; and there his nobility
darkens into stoicism, and he waits for the rising tide, watching the
outgoing ship that bears his heart away unreservedly--waits, only eager
that the tide ingulf him.

In "Ninety-Three," the mother of the children in the burning tower is
heroine. In "By Order of the King," Dea is heroic, and spotless as
"Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat;" and Ursus, a vagabond, is
fatherhood in its sweet nobleness; and Gwynplaine, disfigured and
deserted--a little lad set ashore upon a night of hurricane and snow,
who, finding in his wanderings a babe on her dead mother's breast,
rescues this bit of winter storm-drift, plodding on through untracked
snows, freezing, but no more thinking to drop his burden than the
mother thought to desert it--Gwynplaine is a hero for whose deed an
epic is fitting. Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, found, after
long years, holding in his skeleton arms a bit of woman's drapery and a
woman's skeleton--Quasimodo, hideous, herculean, hungry-hearted,
tender, a hunchback, yet a lover and a man--who denies to Quasimodo a
hero's laurels? In "Les Miserables" are heroes not a few. Gavroche,
that green leaf blown about Paris streets; Fantine, the mother;
Eponine, the lover; Bishop Bienvenu, the Christian; Jean Valjean, the
man,--all are heroic folk. Our hearts throb as we look at them.
Gavroche, the lad, dances by as though blown past by the gale.
Fant