swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's
harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes
of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet
"statuesque" by their clear and trenchant outline; but the
tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately
pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears
with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we
come to the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under
the 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