This is a man living in a different world from Scott, who
professes sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does not
believe in novels having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is
too much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the
truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance,
to have very little connection with the other, or directly ethical
result. The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any
really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and
refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it; and yet something as
simple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive,
but they are so only in appearance. The fact is, that art is working far
ahead of language as well as of science, realising for us, by all manner
of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no
direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for
the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the
necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in
thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are
able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case
of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has
left with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romance
that we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same. It is
not that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left
with us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its
own kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of
our philosophical speech. It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this
something which it is the function of that form of art to create, this
epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to
throw into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that we
shall see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his
predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of
realising, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our
complicated lives. This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every
so-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything but
a very secondary signification. One might almost number on one's fingers
the works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any way
superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose
romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. At
the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it would
have been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and that
man is Hawthorne. There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose,
about some at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on
the most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of
the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of
his works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains
to it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful power
of subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure
of his talent. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this,
could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must be
felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present
essay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each of
the five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will
permit, and rather as a suggestion than anything more complete. The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of "Notre
Dame de Paris" was (he tells us) to "denounce" the external fatality
that hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition. To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do
with the artistic conception; moreover, it is very questionably handled,
while the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate
success. Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever
before our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river,
the boat-shaped island "moored" by five bridges to the different shores,
and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration
of palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of
admirable description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to
conclude from this that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so:
we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different
layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been
accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the "Gothic profile"
of the city, of the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and
belfries," and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And
throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far
greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us
from the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and
already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to
that central building by character after character. It is purely an
effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and
stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit
of the Scott-tourist to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost
offended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a
corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect
that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency
and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above
all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic
than their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen
them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over
the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there
is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the
grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate
contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art. Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story
like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the
book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Dom
Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral.