This Gargantuan appetite expresses itself everywhere in his writings. He was a Gargantua in regard to life as well as food. He devoured the past like the present. He devoured politics, religion, the stage, poetry, fiction, nature, grand-children. If he was a giant who devoured, however, he was also a giant who created. He may not have the accurate gift of observation on which we set so much store nowadays, and he may depart so far from reality as to call an English sailor in _L’Homme qui rit_ Tom-Jim-Jack. But, if he does not create for us a world as real as Clapham Junction, he does create for us a world as real as Æsop’s _Fables_. He is an inventor of myths and fables, indeed. He no more attempts to imitate the surface of life than a musician attempts to imitate the sounds of life. Like Dickens, he is a great Gothic writer, who demands the right to people the work of his hands with devil or imp or angel--with figures of pity or horror, of laughter or tears. He does not possess Dickens’s comic imagination; the fantastic and the ironic take the place of humour in his books. But his work, like that of Dickens, is a gigantically grotesque pile built on the ancient Christian affirmation of love. Literature in our time may observe or ask questions: it seldom affirms. But I doubt whether it even observes the essential heart of things with as sure an eye as that of Hugo or Dickens. It does not penetrate with its pity to that underworld of pain in which Cosette and Smike grow up, starved and loveless. Hugo and Dickens were at least rescuers. They were not mere sentimentalists: they had the imaginative sympathy that would not let them rest in the presence of the miseries of life. They hated the tyranny of men and the tyranny of institutions; they hated greed and cruelty, and the iron door shut on children and on the helpless and the suffering.