the waves.  The revolution is an action of the Unknown....  It is a form of the abiding phenomenon that shuts us in on every side and that we call Necessity....  In presence of these climacteric catastrophes which waste and vivify civilisation, one is slow to judge detail.  To blame or praise men on account of the result, is as if one should blame or praise the figures on account of the total.  That which must pass passes, the storm that must rage rages.  The eternal serenity does not suffer from these boisterous winds.  Above revolutions truth and justice abide, as the starry heaven abides above the tempests” (i. 188-189).

As a lyric passage, full of the breath of inspiration; as history, superficial and untrue; as morality, enervating and antinomian.  The author is assuredly far nearer the mark in another place when he speaks of “that immense improvisation which is the French Revolution” (ii. 35)—­an improvisation of which every step can be rationally explained.

After all, this is no more than an interlude.  Victor Hugo only surveys the events of ’93 as a field for the growth of types of character.  His instinct as an artist takes him away from the Paris of ’93, where the confusion, uproar, human frenzy, leave him no background of nature, with nature’s fixity, sternness, indifference, sublimity.  This he found in La Vendee, whose vast forests grow under the pencil of this master of all the more terrible and majestic effects, into a picture hardly less sombre and mighty in its impressiveness than the memorable ocean pieces of the Toilers of the Sea.  If the waves are appalling in their agitation, their thunders, their sterility, the forest is appalling in its silence, its dimness, its rest, and the invisibleness of the thousand kinds of life to which it gives a shelter.  If the violence and calm and mercilessness of the sea penetrated the romance of eight years ago with transcendent fury, so does the stranger, more mysterious, and in a sense even the more inhuman life of the forest penetrate the romance of to-day.  From the opening chapter down to the very close, even while the interlude takes us for a little while to the Paris cafe where Danton, Robespierre, and Marat sit in angry counsel, even while we are on the sea with the royalist Marquis and Halmalo, the reader is subtly haunted by the great Vendean woods, their profundity, their mystery, their tragic and sinister beauties.

    “The forest is barbarous.

“The configuration of the land counsels man in many an act.  More than we suppose, it is his accomplice.  In the presence of certain savage landscapes, you are tempted to exonerate man and blame creation; you feel a silent challenge and incitement from nature; the desert is constantly unwholesome for conscience, especially for a conscience without light.  Conscience may be a giant; that makes a Socrates or a Jesus:  it may be a dwarf; that makes an Atreus or a Judas.