Page:R L Stevenson 1917 Familiar studies of men and books.djvu/61

 significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance; it is the organising principle. If you could somehow despoil Les Misérables 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 Misérables, 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 Misérables 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