Hugo has dramatised this imaginative sympathy and hatred in novels so mythical in substance that one might easily fall into the mistake of regarding them as false. We must think of Jean Valjean and Javert as figures in a morality play rather than in a psychological study if we are to appreciate the greatness of _Les Misérables_. They were created, not by God, but by Victor Hugo. But, if they have not at all points psychological reality, they have at least legendary reality. We can say the same of the characters in _Les Travailleurs de la mer_ and _L’Homme qui rit_. They all inhabit the world, not as it actually is, but as it is transmuted in a legendary imagination. Unfortunately, Hugo professes to write about real people and not about dragons, and we constantly find ourselves applying psychological tests as we read him. When Gilliatt drowns himself in _Les Travailleurs de la mer_ we complain not only of the dubious psychology but of the mechanical theatrical effect. Victor Hugo, we feel at such moments, was a great “producer” rather than a great artist. He would, undoubtedly, had he lived, have taken full advantage of the over-emphasis of the cinema. On the other hand, the over-emphasis of which his critics complain is not the over-emphasis of weakness straining after strength. It is rather an overflow of the Gothic imagination. “His flat foot,” he tells us, of a certain character, “was a vulture’s claw. His skull was low at the top and large about the temples. His ugly ears bristled with hair, and seemed to say: ‘Beware of speaking to the animal in this cave.’” His style is essentially the exaggerated style. His genius is the genius of exaggeration. Luckily, he exaggerates, not wholly in clouds, but in carved gnomes and all manner of fantastic detail. He omits not a comma from his dreams and nightmares. That is why his short sentences and paragraphs still startle us into attention when we open one of his novels. His imagination at least teems on every page--teems with absurdities, perhaps, as well as with truth and beauty, but teems always with interest. Madame Duclaux’s excellent biography should send many readers back to the work of this magnificent and preposterous legend-maker and lover of his fellow-men. III MOLIÈRE