Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

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 of a woman otherwise socially lost—Paquerette 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 Paquerette. “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 in his
novels. If there is relief, it is poignant in the pathos of childhood, or contemptible, as in the empty-headed
Phœbus 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 beholds 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 sufficiently
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 of a boiler-factory. 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, concentrated in the fiasco of his own play, while every
other person is more than indifferent, has humour and is sympathetic. 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 Phœbus; 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 published the first edition without them. Two of them were the studies of mediæval
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 conciseness. His excursus on architecture is admirable, but imprudent.