he idea that he is
going to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the
stage mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot
conceive any disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.

Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five
great novels.

Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a
certain appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to
any practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in
it. It has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that
Victor Hugo occupies a high place among those few. He has always a
perfect command over his stories; and we see that they are constructed
with a high regard to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is
informed with moral significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the
same thing be said in the same degree. His romances are not to be
confused with "the novel with a purpose" as familiar to the English
reader: this is generally the model of incompetence; and we see the
moral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrown
externally over it like a carpet over a railing. Now the moral
significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance; it is the
organising principle. If you could somehow despoil "Les Miserables" or
"Les Travailleurs" of their distinctive lesson, you would find that the
story had lost its interest and the book was dead.

Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art
speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If
you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,
you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes
of story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the
two lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley Novels,
and all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimes
they are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man
against the sea and sky, as in "Les Travailleurs"; sometimes, as in "Les
Miserables," they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in
the epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in
"Quatrevingt-treize." There is no hero in "Notre Dame": in "Les
Miserables" it is an old man: in "L'Homme qui Rit" it is a monster: in
"Quatrevingt-treize" it is the Revolution. Those elements that only