A MALFORMED GIANT 183 



sitting himself upon the shore to be drowned by the 

 tide, and his head disappearing under the water at 

 the moment the sloop he is watching drops behind 

 the horizon. Where the old writers are simple, he 

 is sensational. The Anglo-Saxon mind, and every 

 other normal and healthful type of mind, is classi- 

 cal in this : it loves proportion, restraint, self-denial, 

 and has a lively sense of the fitness of things; does 

 not like any trifling with the centre of gravity, and 

 keeps close to the simple truth. Let a man fire 

 hot shot if he will, but let him keep his own guns 

 cool. In nearly all Victor Hugo's political tracts 

 and manifestoes the gun is hotter than the shot 

 which it throws, and we are more concerned for the 

 writer than we are for his enemy. He will spur 

 his earnestness until it becomes frenzy, and his rhet- 

 oric until it becomes rodomontade. Note his mani- 

 festo to the Prussians during the siege of Paris. 

 To see him rending his flesh, livid with rage and 

 almost foaming at the mouth, read certain pages in 

 his "Napoleon the Little;" or to see him again, 

 under a different pressure, beating the air wildly, 

 and goading his imagination after his climax is 

 reached, like a rider burying his rowel into his 

 steed after the poor beast has long done its best, 

 read the concluding parts of his description of the 

 battle of Waterloo, or the last stages of the storm 

 that overtakes Gilliat in "The Toilers," or the 

 threefold agony of the rhetoric of a similar descrip- 

 tion in " The Man who Laughs " (the machine that 

 grins, a friend says). To be great in the presence 



