Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

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 cathedral. 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 proportion—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 really 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.
Criticisms and Interpretations
I. By Frank T. Marzials
W. A. N.
A GREAT 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 realised 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 imagination, 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 hopefulness 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 deserve 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 his deformity and deafness, not entitled to