use our
affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our
profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are
few books in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much
calm and serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic
coarsenesses that disfigured "Notre Dame" are no longer present. There
is certainly much that is painfully improbable; and again, the story
itself is a little too well constructed; it produces on us the effect of
a puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find that every character fits
again and again into the plot, and is, like the child's cube,
serviceable on six faces; things are not so well arranged in life as all
that comes to. Some of the digressions, also, seem out of place, and do
nothing but interrupt and irritate. But when all is said, the book
remains of masterly conception and of masterly development, full of
pathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence.

Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the
first two members of the series, it remained for "Les Travailleurs de la
Mer" to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of
external force that is brought against him. And here once more the
artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are,
indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers
a type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forces
into the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labour"
in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown
into such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that
come wonderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once
the note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with
his indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the
clamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out
sharply against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation
is not to be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for
example; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to set side by
side than "Les Travailleurs" and this other of the old days before art
had learnt to occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoe
was one sole centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead
and utterly unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with
Gilliat; we feel th