IV. The Marriage of Quasimodo . 527

Appendix . . 531
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
VICTOR MARIE HUGO, the most dominating figure in French literature in the nineteenth century, was born at Besançon on February 26, 1802. His father was a general under Napoleon, and the demands of the mili¬ tary life kept the family wandering through the poet’s child¬ hood. After three years in Corsica, two in Paris, and some time in southern Italy, Hugo began his school days in Spain, whence he was driven with his parents by Wellington in 1812. His education, never very thorough, was continued at Paris; and by the age of seventeen he had entered on the profession of letters. His first publication of note was a volume of “Odes” issued when he was twenty, and written under the influence of the classical school ; and it was followed a year later by his first novel “Han d’Islande,” the story of a Norse robber. The romantic movement was now well under way in France, and Hugo stepped into the leadership of it by his second volume of “Odes” (1826) and by his drama of “Crom¬ well” (1827). The preface to this play formed the manifesto of French romanticism. The publication of his poems on eastern themes, “Orientales,” and the triumphant production of his play “Hernani” in 1829 confirmed him in the first place in the new school. The years from 1831 to 1841 were filled with writings which continually raised his reputation, until he reached the French Academy at the age of thirty- nine. In poetry the chief works were “Les Feuilles d’Au- tomne,” “Chants du Crépuscule,” “Les Voix Intérieures,” and “Les Rayons et les Ombres”; in fiction, “Notre Dame de Paris” (1831); in the drama, “Le Roi s’ Amuse,” “Lucrèce Borgia,” “Marie Tudor,” “Angelo,” and “Les Burgraves.”
During the next decade, 1841-1851, Hugo wrote little and became immersed in politics. He had begun as a Royalist, but on_abandoning classicism he had become a Liberal v. .h strong Napoleonic sentiments. He supported the consiitu-
v
vi
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
tional monarchy under Louis Philippe; and was created a Peer of France in 1845; but with the revolution of 1848 he turned Republican and favored the election of Louis Napo¬ leon as president. His opposition to the setting up of the empire led to his banishment, and for nearly twTenty years he lived in the Channel Islands, first in Jersey, and then in Guernsey. His years of exile were very productive. During this period were written his vast novel, “Les Misérables,” the work which has done most for his fame outside of France, “Les Travailleurs de la Mer,” an impressive picture of the struggle between the human will and the forces of nature; and “L’Homme Qui Rit”; “La Légende des Siècles,” a series of scenes from the various epochs in the history of the world, containing some of his most splendid poetry; some violent invectives in prose and verse against Napoleon III ; and “William Shakespeare,” ostensibly a criticism of the dramatist, but really a glorifying of the poet as prophet, with a fairly clear implication that he himself filled the rôle.
On the downfall of the empire, Hugo returned to France, went through the Siege of Paris, and made a final and un¬ successful attempt to take part in politics. The rest of his ___/Tife was spent in Paris. His last novel, “Quatre-Vingt- Treize,” appeared in 1874; ar\i “Les Quatre Vents d’Esprit,” 1881, showed that his poetical genius had suffered no dimi¬ nution. These last years brought him a rich reward of fame. He was elected a perpetual senator, and enjoyed a position of the highest distinction. When he died on May 22, 1885, he was buried with splendid ceremony in the Panthéon after lying in state under the Arc de Triomphe.
Hugo’s literary production falls into three main classes, drama, poetry, and fiction. Of these the first is likely to be the most short-lived. In the first heat of his revolt against classicism, he discarded all the old rules; and though his plays contain striking scenes and splendid declamation, he never brought himself to take the pains to acquire the technique necessary to insure a long acting life for a drama.
It is as a poet that Hugo is now chiefly esteemed by his own countrymen. Here also he threw over the classical
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
vii
rules, and both in versification and in language violated all that had been regarded as most essential in French poetry. But in place of the old conventions he brought an astonishing command of rich and varied rhythms, and a wealth of vo¬ cabulary almost unparalleled in literature. Further, he possessed, as no French poet had ever possessed, the power of rousing and transporting, and with all his strength and violence, a capacity for pathos and tenderness. The splendor of his epic style and the brilliance of his lyric are hardly to be surpassed, and he will remain one of the chief glories of French poetry.
Among foreigners, he is chiefly known by his prose fiction. Here as elsewhere he is characteristically romantic. He chose picturesque and sometimes remote themes, but always such as gave opportunity for violent contrasts. His love for antithesis was such that it led him into exaggeration so gross as to become grotesque caricature. His creations are vivid and striking, but they are drawn from the outside, and there is often no attempt at a psychological explanation, expressed or implied, of their behavior. At times he over¬ loaded his novels with technical details, apparently the result of special reading undertaken to obtain local color. The terminology of oceanography and meteorology almost drowns* the story in some chapters of “Les Travailleurs de la Mer”; and the architecture and history of the middle ages intrude in “Notre Dame” far beyond what is necessary to give the required color and atmosphere. As a work of art this novel would only be improved by the omission of the chapters on the topography of Paris and the architecture of the cathe¬ dral. Yet it cannot be denied that in “Notre Dame” he has written a story of tremendous force and enthralling interest. Once started it carries the reader breathlessly on; and it abounds in scenes that stamp themselves on the imagination and in figures that haunt the memory.
. Victor Hugo’s great lack was the sense of measure and pro¬ portion — a lack of which appears equally in his tremendously exaggerated sense of his own importance as a thinker, and In the absence of restraint and of humor in his writing.’ For he was not in the first rank in point of intellectual power. Neither in politics nor in literary movements did he ically
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
viii
lead: the new idea had always made some headway before he adopted it; and the theories of social regeneration which he took so seriously have left little permanent mark. Yet he had a colossal imagination and a style of vast range and power, and by means of these he is likely always to rank high among the writers who can stir men’s souls.
W. A. N.
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
By Frank T. Marzials
AGREAT book, a magnificent book most unquestionably, a book before which the critic may fitly throw down - all his small artillery of carpings and quibblings, and stand disarmed and reverent. That Victor Hugo had re¬ alised his ambition of crowning with poetry the prose of Sir Walter Scott, I shall not affirm. But then it scarcely seems as if any such crowning were needed, or possible; for the good Sir Walter’s faults lay neither in lack of imagina¬ tion, nor lack of fervour, nor an absence of elevation of tone, nor, in short, in a deficiency of aught that goes to the making of poetry. "Quentin Durward” deals with the same period as “Notre Dame de Paris,” and if one places the two books side by side in one’s thoughts, such differences as there are will hardly seem to be differences in degree of poetical inspiration. Our own great novelist’s work is fresher, healthier perhaps, more of the open air. A spirit of hope¬ fulness and youth and high courage seems to circulate through his pages — a sort of pervading trust that the good things of this world come to those who deserve them, that merit has its prizes, and unworthiness its punishments. There is blood enough and to spare in the book, and a good deal of hanging and much villainy. But our feelings are not greatly harrowed thereby. We need not weep unless so minded. If a good tall fellow is lopped down here and there — like the worthy Gascon whom Dunois strikes through the unvisored face — the tragedy comes before we have known the man long enough to grow greatly interested in him. We are only affected as by the death of a very casual acquaintance.1 And such sufferers as the Wild Boar of the Ardennes d erve
1 The murder of the Bishop of Liège is, I admit, an exception.
ix
X
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
their fate too thoroughly to cause us the most passing pang. So does Scott, in his genial kindliness, temper for us the horrors of the Middle Ages. He does not blink them, as M. Taine erroneously seems to hold. He presents them, with consummate art, so that they shall not cause unnecessary pain. Victor Hugo, in “Notre Dame,” was animated by a quite other spirit. After the manner of his nation — for French fiction tolerates an amount of unmerited misery to which the English reader would never submit— he looks upon life far more gloomily. Claude Frollo may perhaps deserve even the appalling agony of those eternal moments during which he hangs suspended from the leaden gutter at the top of the tower of Notre Dame, and has a hideous fore¬ taste of his imminent death. Quasimodo is at best but an animal with a turn for bell-ringing, and, apart" from Els' deformity and deafness, not entitled to much sympathy. But Esmeralda, poor Esmeralda, who through the deep mire of her surroundings has kept a soul so maidenly and pure, who is full of tender pity for all suffering, and possesses a heart that beats with such true woman’s love — what had she done that Victor Hugo should bestow the treasure of that love upon the worthless archer-coxcomb, Phœbus de Châteaupers, that he should make her frail harmless pretty life, a life of torture, and cause her to die literally in the hangman’s grasp? Was it worth while that Esmeralda’s mother, Pâquerette la Chantefleurie, should find her child again, after long years of anguish, only to relinquish her, after one brief moment of rapture, for that terrible end? Quentin’s courage and practical sagacity are crowned with success: he saves the woman he loves. But by what irony of fate does it happen that Quasimodo’s heroic efforts to defend Esmeralda have for only result to injure those who are trying to save her, and the hastening of her doom?
Gloom, gloom, a horror of darkness and evil deeds, _ of human ineptitude and wrong, such is the background of “Notre Dame.” If Scott gives us a poetry of sunshine and high emprise, Victor Hugo gives us, and here with a more than equal puissance, the poetry of cloud-wrack and un¬ governable passion. There is no piece of character-painting in “Quentin Durward” that, for tragic lurid power and in-
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
xi
sight, can be placed beside the portrait of Claude Frollo.’ Lucid and animated as are such scenes as the sacking of the bishop’s palace, and the attack on Liège, they are not executed with such striking effects of light and shade as the companion scene in “Notre Dame,” the attack of the beggars on the cathedral. Scott’s landscape is bright, pleasant, the reflection of a world seen by a healthy imagination and clear in the sunlight of a particularly sane nature. Victor Hugo’s world in “Notre Dame” is as a world seen in fever- vision, or suddenly illumined by great flashes of lightning. The mediaeval city is before us in all its picturesque huddle of irregular buildings. We are in it; we see it: the narrow streets with ' their glooms and gleams, their Rembrandt effects of shadow and light; the quaint overhanging houses each of which seems to have a face of its own ; the churches and convents flinging up to the sky their towers and spires ; and high above all, the city’s very soul, the majestic cathedral. And what a motley medley of human creatures throng the place ! Here i§ the great guild of beggar-thieves even more tatterdemalion and shamelessly grotesque than when Callot painted them for us two centuries later. Here is Gringoire, the out-at-elbows unsuccessful rhymer of the time. Anon Esmeralda passes accompanied by her goat. She lays down her little mat, and dances lightly, gracefully to her tam¬ bourine. See how the gossips whisper of witchcraft as the goat plays its pretty tricks. And who is that grave priest, lean from the long vigils of study, who stands watching the girl’s every motion with an eye of sombre flame? Close behind, in attendance on the priest, is a figure scarcely human, deformed, hideous, having but one Cyclops eye — also fastened on the girl. Among the bystanders may be seen the priest’s brother, Jehan, the Paris student of the town-sparrow type that has existed from the days of Villon even until now. Before the dancer has collected her spare harvest of small coins, a soldier troop rides roughly by, hustling the crowd, and in the captain the poor child re¬ cognises the man who has saved her from violence some days before — the man to whom, alas, she has given her
1 Brian de Bois Guilbert is the corresponding character in Scott, — f bar- acter equally passionate, but not, I think, analysed so powerfully.
xii CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
heart. Jin such a group as this what elements of tragedy lie lurking and ready to outleap ? That priest in his guilty pas¬ sion will forswear his priestly vows, stab the soldier, and, failing to compass his guilty ends, give over the poor child dancer to torture and death. The deformed Cyclops, seeing the priest’s fiendish laughter as they both stand on the top of Notre Dame tower, watching the girl’s execution, will guess that he is the cause of her doom, and hurl him over the parapet. And the student too will be entangled in the tragic chains by which these human creatures are bound together. His shattered carcase will lie hanging from one of the sculptured ornaments on the front of the cathedral. v^Mving, living — yes, the book is unmistakably palpitatingly alive. It does not live, perhaps, with the life of prose and everyday experience. But it lives the better life of imagi¬ nation. The novelist, by force of genius, compels our accep¬ tance of the world he has created. Esmeralda, like Oliver Twist, and even more than Oliver Twist, is an improbable, almost impossible being. No one, we conceive, writing now¬ adays, with Darwinism in the air, would venture to disre¬ gard the laws of inherited tendency so far as to evoke such a character from the cloudland of fancy. If he did, Mr. Francis Galton would laugh him to scorn. The girl’s mother — one does not want to press heavily upon the poor creature, and it must therefore suffice to say that she was far from being a model to her sex. The father was anybody you like. From such parentage of vice and chance what superior virtue was to be expected? And, failing birth-gifts, had there been anything in education or surroundings to account for so dainty a product? Far from it. The girl from her infancy had been dragged through the ditches that lie along the broad highway of life, and is dwelling, when we came across her, in one of the foulest dens of the foul old city. She is almost as impossible as Eugene Sue’s Fleur de Marie in the “Mysteries of Paris.” And yet, impossible as she may be, we still believe in her. She is a real person in a real world. That Paris of gloom and gleam may never have existed in history exactly as Victor Hugo paints it for us. It exists for all time notwithstanding. And Claude Frollo exists too, and Jehan, and Gringoire, and Coppenole, the
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS xiii
jolly Flemish burgher, and Phoebus, and the beggars — all the personages of this old-world drama. I should myself as soon think of doubting the truth of the pitiful story told by Damoiselle Mahiette, of how poor Pâquerette loved and lost her little child, as I should think of doubting that Portia did, in actual fact, visit Venice, disguised as a learned judge from Padua, and, after escaping her husband’s recognition, confound Shylock by her superior interpretation of the law.
In the “Orientales” and “Hernani” Victor Hugo had shown himself an artist in verse. In “Notre Dame de Paris” he showed himself a magnificent artist in prose. The writ¬ ing throughout is superb. Scene after scene is depicted with a graphic force of language, a power, as it were, of con¬ centrating and flashing light, that are beyond promise. Some of the word-pictures are indelibly bitten into the memory as when an etcher has bitten into copper with his acid. Hence¬ forward there could be no question as to the place which the author of the three works just named was entitled to take in the world of literature. Byron was dead, and Scott dying. Chateaubriand had ceased to be a living producing force. Goethe’s long day of life was drawing to its serene close. Failing these, Victor Hugo stepped into the first place in European literature, and that place he occupied till his death.1 — From ‘‘Life of Victor Hugo” (1888).
II
By Andrew Lang
PERHAPS only two great poets have been great novel¬ ists, Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo. If any one likes to say that Scott is a great novelist, but only a considerable poet, I fear I might be tempted to retort, quite unjustly, that Hugo is a great poet, but only a considerable novelist. However, I am unwilling to draw invidious dis¬ tinctions. In all Hugo’s vast volume of work, poetry, satire,
1 1 am not here, of course, arguing any question as to the relative great¬ ness of Byron as compared with Wordsworth or Coleridge, who were then still alive. But neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge had, like B> n, a European name.
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CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
fiction, the drama, I am inclined to think that his lyrics have most of the stuff of immortality: imperishable charm. In his lyrics he is most human, most “like a man of this world’' ; or, what is as good, an angel “singing out of heaven.” In his dramas, and still more in his novels, on the other hand, he is less human than “Titanic.” He is a good Titan, like Prometheus, tortured by the sense of human miseries, and uttering his laments as if from the crest of a gorge in Caucasus. Hugo’s poignant sense of the wretchedness of men, above all of the poor, is not unfelt by Scott; but how does he express it? In the brief words of Sanders Muckle- backit, as he patches the “auld black bitch o’ a boat,” in which his son has just been drowned. Again, and more ter¬ ribly, he gives voice to the degradation, the consuming envy, the hatred of the mauvais pauvre, in the talk of the ghoul-like attendants of the dead, the hags and the witch of “The Bride of Lammermoor.” Human beings speak as human beings — in the second case, almost as devils — but these scenes are seldom presented in the happy stoical pages of Sir Walter. A favourite motive of Hugo’s is the maternal passion J)f_a woman otherwise socially lost — Pâquerette or Fantine. Her child is taken from her, and we all weep, or nearly weep, with those unhappy ones. But the idea had also been handled by Scott, in the story of Madge Wildfire, distraught like Pâquerette. “Naebody kens weel wha’s living, and wha’s dead — or wha’s gane to Fairyland — there’s another question. Whiles I think my puir bairn’s dead — ye ken very weel it’s buried — but that signifies naething. I have had it on my knee a hundred times, and a hundred till that, since it was buried — and how could that be were it dead, ye ken.” Madge with her wild chants is not less poetical than Fantine, to whose sorrows Hugo adds a poignancy and a grotesque horror which Scott had it not in his heart to inflict.
Hugo’s novels, especially “Les Misérables,” “L’Homme Qui Rit,” and parts of “Notre Dame de Paris,” are the shrill or thunderous ototototoi’s of the tortured Titan. They are apocalyptic in grandeur, but they are grand with little relief, or with the relief of what may appear too conscious and extreme contrast. The charm, the gaiety, the innumerable moods that make music throughout his lyrics are less common
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
xv
in his novels. If there is relief, it is poignant in the pathos of childhood, or contemptible, as in the empty-headed Phœ- bus de Châteaupers, or the noisy students of “Notre Dame de Paris.”
Scott sees the world of sunshine and of rain, green wood, and loch and moor, and blowing fields of corn. Hugo be¬ holds the world as if in the flashes of lightning and the pauses of the tempest. He sees everything magnified “larger than human,” and he is Titanically deficient in the sweet humour of Shakespeare and Fielding, Dumas, and Molière. Thus unfriendly critics, and of these he has had no lack, might style his novels gigantesque, rather than great. His humpbacked, bell-ringing dwarf is like a colossal statue of the cruel Dwarf-God, found in Yucatan or old Anahuac. Quasimodo is, in some regards, like Quilp seen through an enormous magnifying glass, and Quilp himself was suffi¬ ciently exaggerated. Had Æschylus written novels, they would have been tame and creeping compared to those of Hugo. Yet he is not a mere exaggerator, one of the popular demoniacs who work as if in the flare and roar oîaHioÏÏer- factorv. He is a great genius, full of tenderness and poetry. To be superhuman is his foible. . . .
Hugo began “Notre Dame” with dogged and gloomy desire to finish a task. This it may be which renders the initial chapters, the vast descriptions of people, crowds, street scenes, ambassadors, the Cardinal, and the rest, rather prolix. But when once Esmeralda, Claude Frollo, and Quasimodo appear, the story races on. Gringoire, the typical poet, con¬ centrated in the fiasco of his own play, while every other person is more than indifferent, has humour and is sympa¬ thetic. But Gringoire following Esmeralda and her goat; Quasimodo divinized in burlesque, a Pope of Unreason, yet tickled, for once, in his vanity; Esmeralda, a pearl on the dunghill, dancing and singing; the empty, easily conquering Phoebus; the mad and cruel love of the priest, Claude Frollo — when these are reached, the story lives, burns, and rushes to its awful portentous close. “Rushes,” I said, but the current is broken, and dammed into long pools, mirrors of a motionless past, in all editions except the first. Hugo, as she tells us, lost three of his chapters, and publishe'4 the
xvi
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
first edition without them. Two of them were the studies of mediaeval architecture, which interfere with the action. However excellent in themselves (intended, as they are, to raise a vision of the Paris of Louis XI), these chapters, introduced just where the author has warmed to his work and the tale is accumulating impetus, are possibly out of place. We grumble at Scott’s longueurs: the first chapter of “Quentin Durward” is an historical essay. But Hugo certainly had not mastered the art of selection and con¬ ciseness. His excursus on architecture is admirable, but imprudent.
These chapters, however, are the natural blossoms of the devotion to the mediaeval which inspired the Romantic movement. Every poetic Jean was then a Jehan. Rudolph carried his bonne dague de Tolède , and, when George Sand dined at a restaurant, her virtue was protected from tyrants by an elegant dagger. The architecture of the Middle Ages, the spires, and soaring roofs, and flying buttresses, and machicolations, were the passion of Hugo.
The interest, before the architectural interruption, lay in the chase of Esmeralda by Gringoire; in the beggar-world, with its king and gibbet, like the Alsatia of the “Fortunes of Nigel” vastly magnified. The underworld of Paris, that for centuries has risen as the foam on the wave of revolution, fascinated Hugo. The hideous and terrible aspect of these grotesques he could scarcely exaggerate. It is urged that Esmeralda, a finer Fenella — a success, not a failure — could not have been bred and blossomed in her loathsome environ¬ ment. The daughter of a woman utterly lost, till redeemed by the maternal passion, Esmeralda must have gone the way of her world. But it is Hugo’s method to place a mar¬ vellous flower of beauty, grace, and goodness on his fumier.
The method is not realism; it i^- a sacrifice to the love of contrast. In short, this is the "probable impossible”) 'which _ > Aristotle preferred to the “improbable po5"Stbîe” ; and the reader who yields himself to the author has no difficulty in accepting Esmeralda and the heart-breaking story of her mother. Claude Frollo demands and receives the same ac¬ ceptance, with his fraternal affection, his disbelief in all but the incredible promises of alchemy, his furious passion, and
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
xvii
fury of resistance to his passion. Whether Esmeralda is made more credible by her love of Phoebus, which proves her bane, is a question. That love strikes one as a touch of realism, an idea that Thackeray might have conceived, perhaps relent¬ ing, and rejecting the profanation. Whether the motive clashes or not with the romanticism of Esmeralda’s part, we may excuse it by the ruling and creative word of the ro¬ mance — ’A NA rKH — Doom.
On one essential point Hugo certainly does not exaggerate. The trial of Esmeralda is merely the common procedure in cases of witchcraft. With the evidence of the goat, the withered leaf, and the apparition of the mysterious monk against her, there was no escape. Thousands were doomed to a horrible death (in Scotland till the beginning of the eighteenth century) on evidence less damning. The torture applied to Esmeralda is that with which Jeanne d’Arc was threatened, escaping only by her courage and presence of mind. For the rest, the Maid endured more, and worse, and longer than Esmeralda, from the pedantic and cowardly cruelty of the French clergy of the age. One point might be perhaps urged against the conduct of the story. The In¬ quisition spared the life of the penitent sorceress, in Catholic countries, though Presbyterian judges were less merciful than the Inquisition. Esmeralda, who confessed to witcheries, under torture, would as readily have recanted her errors. It does not appear why she was hanged. If executed for witch¬ craft, it would have been by fire; and obviously she had not murdered Phœbus, who led the archers at the rescue of the Cathedral from the beggars. That scene is one of the most characteristic in the book, lit by flame and darkened by smoke. The ingenuity by which the mother of Esmeralda is made to help in causing her destruction, blinded as she is by 5 ANATKE is one of Hugo’s cruel strokes of stagecraft. The figure of such a mother, bankrupt of everything in life but the maternal passion, haunted Hugo, and recurs in Fantine. The most famous scene of all, vivid as with the vividness of a despairing dream, is the agony of the accursed priest as he swings from the leaden pipe on the roof of Notre Dame. Once read the retribution is never forgotten — the picture of the mad lover and murderer swaying in
xviii
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
air; death below; above, the one flaming eye of the mon¬ strous Quasimodo.
The portrait of Louis XI, as compared with Scott’s of the same King, has been likened to a Velasquez as vastly superior to a Vandyke, To myself, Scott’s Louis appears rather to resemble a Holbein; Hugo’s to be comparable to a miser by Rembrandt. But such comparisons and parallels are little better than fanciful. I find myself, as regards the whole book, sometimes rather in agreement with the extrava¬ gantly hostile verdict of Goethe — never, indeed, persuaded that “Notre Dame” is “the most odious book ever written,” but feeling that the agonies are too many, too prolonged, and too excruciating, the contrasts too violent. Strength alone, even when born of the Muses, has the defects which Keats notes in one of his earliest poems. — From “Victor Hugo’s Novels.”
Ill
By G. L. Strachey
~7^0R throughout his work that wonderful writer ex¬
pressed in their extreme forms the qualities and the
defects of his school. Above all, he was the supreme lord of words. In sheer facility, in sheer abundance of language, Shakespeare alone of all the writers of the world can be reckoned his superior. The bulk of his work is very great, and the nature of it is very various; but every page bears the mark of the same tireless fecundity, the same abso¬ lute dominion over the resources of speech. Words flowed from Victor Hugo like light from the sun. Nor was his volubility a mere disordered mass of verbiage; it was con¬ trolled, adorned, and inspired by an immense technical power. When one has come under the spell of that great enchanter, one begins to believe that his art is without limits, that with such an instrument and such a science there is no miracle which he cannot perform. He can conjure up the strangest visions of fancy; he can evoke the glamour and the mystery of the past; he can sing with exquisite lightness of the fugitive beauties of Nature; he can pour out, in ten-
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
xix
derness or in passion, the melodies of love; he can fill his lines with the fire, the stress, the culminating fury, of pro¬ phetic denunciation; he can utter the sad and secret ques¬ tionings of the human spirit, and give voice to the solemnity of Fate. In the long roll and vast swell of his verse there is something of the ocean — a moving profundity of power. His sonorous music, with its absolute sureness of purpose, and its contrapuntal art, recalls the vision in "Paradise Lost” of him who--
“with volant touch
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.”
What kind of mind, what kind of spirit must that have been, one asks in amazement, which could animate with such a marvellous perfection the enormous organ of that voice?
But perhaps it would be best to leave the question unasked — or at least unanswered. For the more one searches, the clearer it becomes that the intellectual scope and the spiritual quality of Victor Hugo were very far from being equal to his gifts of expression and imagination. He had the powers of a great genius and the soul of an ordinary man. But that was not all. There have been writers of the highest excel¬ lence — Saint-Simon was one of them — the value of whose productions have been unaffected, or indeed even increased, by their personal inferiority. They could not have written better, one feels, if they had been ten times as noble and twenty times as wise as they actually were. But unfortu¬ nately this is not so with Victor Hugo. His faults — his intellectual weakness, his commonplace outlook, his lack of humour, his vanity, his defective taste — cannot be dismissed as irrelevant and unimportant, for they are indissolubly bound up with the very substance of his work. It was not as a mere technician that he wished to be judged; he wrote with a very different intention ; it was as a philosopher, as a moralist, as a prophet, as a sublime thinker, as a profound his¬ torian, as a sensitive and refined human being. With a poet of such pretensions it is clearly most relevant to inquire whether his poetry does, in fact, reveal the high qualities he lays claim to, or whether, on the contrary, it is characterised by a windy inflation of a sentiment, a showy superficial py
XX
CRITICISMS AND INTERPRETATIONS
thought, and a ridiculous and petty egoism. These are the unhappy questions which beset the mature and reflective reader of Victor Hugo’s works. To the young and enthu¬ siastic one the case is different. For him it is easy to forget — or even not to observe — what there may be in that impos¬ ing figure that is unsatisfactory and second-rate. He may revel at will in the voluminous harmonies of that resounding voice; by turns thrilling with indignation, dreaming in ecstasy, plunging into abysses, and soaring upon unimaginable heights. Between youth and age who shall judge? Who de¬ cide between rapture and reflection, enthusiasm and analysis ? To determine the precise place of Victor Hugo in the hierarchy of poets would be difficult indeed. But this much is certain: that at times the splendid utterance does indeed grow transfused with a pure and inward beauty, when the human frailties vanish, and all is subdued and glorified by the high purposes of art. . . . — From “Landmarks in French Literature” (1912).
LIST OF CHARACTERS
Pierre Gringoire, a poet
Charles, Cardinal Bourbon, Archbishop of Lyons.
Guillaume Rym, councillor and pensionary of Ghent.
Jacques Coppenole, hosier, of Ghent.
Robin Poussepain, a student
Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre Dame, a hunchback.
Esmeralda, a gipsy.
Djali, her goat.
Dom Claude Frollo, archdeacon of Josas.
Phœbus de ChÂteaupers, captain of archers.
Clopin Trouillefou, king of Tunis. y
Mathias Hungadi Spicali, duke of Egypt and Bohemia, ^vagabonds. Guillaume Rousseau, emperor of Galilee, J
Agnès la Herme,
-widows of the Etienne-Haudry chapel.
Jehanne de la Tarme,
Henriette la Gaultière,
Gauchère la Violette,
Robert Mistricolle, prothonotary to Louis XI.
Damoiselle Guillemette la Mairesse, his wife.
Jehan Frollo du Moulin, brother of Don Claude Frollo ; a student. Jacques Coictier, physician to Louis XI.
Louis XI, king of France.
Father Tourangeau, ) . , T ...
The Abbot of Saint-Martin de Tours, f ' dlSgU,SeS of LoU1S XL Robert d’Estouteville, provost of Paris.
Florian Barbedienne, auditor of the Châtelet Damoiselle Mahiette, citizen of Rheims.
Eustasche, son of Damoiselle Mahiette.
Damoiselle Oudarde Musnier, > citizens of Paris.
Damoiselle Gervaise, )
Paquette la Chantefleurie, recluse of the Tour-Roland, called also Sister Gudule.
Madame Aloïse de Gondelaurier, a noble lady.
Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier, her daughter.
Diane de Christeuil,
Amelotte de Montmichel,
Colombe de Gaillefontaine, 5- her friends.
Berangère de Champchevrier,
XXI
XXII
LIST OF CHARACTERS
Jacques Charmolue, king’s proxy to the Ecclesiastical Court. Mother la Falourdel, a hag.
Philippe Lheulier, advocate extraordinary to the king. Pierrat Torterue, sworn torturer of the châtelet.
Olivier le Daim, barber and favourite of Louis XL Gieffroy Pincebourde, a vagabond.
Tristan l’Hermite, the king’s provost marshal.
Henriet Cousin, his hangman.
Students, citizens, gipsies, etc., etc.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
To the Edition of 1831
SOME years ago, when visiting, or, more properly speak- I ing, thoroughly exploring the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the writer came upon the word
* ANÂrKH 1
graven on the wall in a dim corner of one of the towers.
In the outline and slope of these Greek capitals, black with age and deeply scored into the stone, there were certain peculiarities characteristic of Gothic calligraphy which at once betrayed the hand of the mediæval scribe.
But most of all, the writer was struck by the dark and fateful significance of the word; and he pondered long and deeply over the identity of that anguished soul that would not quit the world without imprinting this stigma of crime or misfortune on the brow of the ancient edifice.
Since then the wall has been plastered over or scraped — I forget which— and the inscription has disappeared. For thus, during the past two hundred years, have the marvellous churches of the Middle Ages been treated. Defacement and mutilation have been their portion — both from within and from without. The priest plasters them over, the architect scrapes them ; finally the people come and demolish them altogether.
Hence, save only the perishable memento dedicated to it here by the author of this book, nothing remains of the mysterious word graven on the sombre tower of Notre Dame, nothing of the unknown destiny it so mournfully re¬ corded. The man who inscribed that word passed centuries ago from among men ; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the Cathedral ; soon, perhaps, the Cathedral itself will have vanished from the face of the earth.
This word, then, the writer has taken for the text of his book.
1Fate, destiny.
February, 1831.
xxm
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS