lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence
with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those who
are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of
mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again
and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to
pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There
is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The
terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can
hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad, between its formidable wheels
with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror
incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the
crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the
street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as when the lantern
of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or as
when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet
riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice
and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of
oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause of
oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of
Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the
throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the
admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made a
religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned
that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just creation,
over which the reader will do well to ponder.

With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light
and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable
things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of
the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can
forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water,
stands in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster
behind "lui faisait un peu l'effet d'etre le Pere eternel"? The pathos
of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of
the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is
nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of
Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot ref