two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass
what it had ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine
(vol. ii. p. 180): "Il souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachait
des poignees de cheveux, _pour voir s'ils ne blanchissaient pas_." And,
p. 181: "Ses pensees etaient si insupportables qu'il prenait sa tete a
deux mains et tatchait de l'arracher de ses epaules _pour la briser sur
le pave_."

One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery
that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual
melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of
brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is
the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in "Notre
Dame," the whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archer
is unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last
hiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this
sordid hero who has long since forgotten her--well, that is just one of
those things that readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and
they are quite right; life is hard enough for poor mortals without
having it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art.

We look in vain for any similar blemish in "Les Miserables." Here, on
the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary
restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest
and most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of
this great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be--for such
awakenings are unpleasant--to the great cost of the society that we
enjoy and profit by, to the labour and sweat of those who support the
litter, civilisation, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried
forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them a
very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million
individual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that the
bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes
life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death--by the
deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labour, and
the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and
the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something
of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in "Les
Miserables"; and this moral