of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that
it has left with us; and it is only because language is the
medium of romance, that we are prevented from seeing that the
two cases are the same. It is not that there is anything
blurred or indefinite in the impression left with us, it is
just because the impression is so very definite after its own
kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the
expressions of our philosophical speech.

It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance,
this something which it is the function of that form of art
to create, this epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek
and, as far as may be, to throw into relief, in the present
study. It is thus, I believe, that we shall see most clearly
the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his predecessors,
and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself
the task of realising, in the language of romance, much of
the involution of our complicated lives.

This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood,
in every so-called novel. The great majority are not works
of art in anything but a very secondary signification. One
might almost number on one's fingers the works in which such
a supreme artistic intention has been in any way superior to
the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of
prose romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most
novels, paramount. At the present moment we can recall one
man only, for whose works it would have been equally possible