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
QUATRE VINGT 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 QUATRE VINGT TREIZE it is the Revolution. Those
elements that only began to show themselves timidly, as
adjuncts, in the novels of Walter Scott, have usurped ever
more and more of the canvas; until we find the whole interest
of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that
Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being
out of the field of fiction. So we have elemental forces
occupying nearly as large a place, playing (so to speak)