the head of these pages shows how organically he had
understood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying
each of the five great romances (which alone I purpose here
to examine), two deliberate designs: one artistic, the other
consciously ethical and intellectual. This is a man living
in a different world from Scott, who professes sturdily (in
one of his introductions) that he does not believe in novels
having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is too much
of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and
the truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one
great instance, to have very little connection with the
other, or directly ethical result.

The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the
memory by any really powerful and artistic novel, is
something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to
put a name upon it and yet something as simple as nature.
These two propositions may seem mutually destructive, but
they are so only in appearance. The fact is that art is
working far ahead of language as well as of science,
realising for us, by all manner of suggestions and
exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct
name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name,
for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely
into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion
of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance:
it is clear enough to us in thought; but we are not used to
consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in
words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently
shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case