liberty with fact was
against the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of
sincerity in conception or workmanship.

In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure
from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one
would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any
theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of
"Quatrevingt-treize" has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a
doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,
we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is
at an end. It is a novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at
that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by
Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement
or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this:
"Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill
the sheep?" This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the
end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set
of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our
attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of
these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon
come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we
really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us.
We know how history continues through century after century; how this
king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole
generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if
we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in
the men, but in the country that they loved or hated, benefited or
injured. And so it is here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we
regard them no more than the lost armies of which we find the cold
statistics in military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it
is the principle that put these men where they were, that filled them
for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power, now that they
are fallen, to inspire others with the same courage. The interest of the
novel centres about revolutionary France: just as the plot is an
abstract ju