Victor Hugo's Novels
and Moliere. 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. I used the comparison with Æschylus, while unaware that Hugo (who certainly knew his own merits fairly well) had used it himself. "It is no vain vaunt of the modern masters," says Mr. Swinburne, "that he has given us in another guise one of these Æschylean women, a monstrous goddess, whose tone of voice 'gave a sort of Promethean grandeur to her furious and amorous words,' who had in her the tragic and Titanic passion of the women of the Eleusinian feasts 'seeking the satyrs under the stars.'" All the mythologist awakes in me, to inquire on what ancient authority the women of Athens are said to have misconducted themselves with satyrs at Eleusis? Josiane, in Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit, is a lady of that sort, but I do not remember her Eleusinian prototypes in Lobeck's Aglaophanus, and I am inclined to think that Hugo invented this interesting detail.
Victor Hugo was the son of a revolutionary officer and a lady of a bourgeois royalist family. He wished to think himself "noble," and everybody who has looked into genealogy knows that we can easily persuade our-selves of our own noblesse. The world is less easily persuaded. King Joseph, at all events, made Hugo's father
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