Page:Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (tr. Shoberl, 1833).djvu/20

 xii LIFE AND WHITINGS OP VICTOR HUGO.

perfect of Victor Hugo's productions. Here, like Sterne, he has taken a single captive, shut him up in a dungeon, and " then looked through the twilight of the grated door to take his picture."--" It was written to show how deep an interest might be given to a mere chronicle of thoughts, a register of sensations ; what variety and even dramatic movement might be imparted to a monologue, in which the scene shifts only from the Bicêtre to the Conciergerie, the Hôtel-de-Ville and the Place de Grève; and such is the power of genius, that he has completely succeeded in enchaining the interest of the reader throughout, at the same time without pushing the subject beyond the verge of physical pain." *  This work was soon followed by Marion Delorme, a tragedy, which at first was not permitted to be repre- sented. The minister Labourdonnaye offered the author, by way of compensation, a considerable increase of his pension, which the poet rejected. In the same year he completed another tragedy, Hernani, which was brought out in the following February at the Théâtre Français. At the representations of this play, which abounds in individual beauties, but the general plot of which is ex- tremely defective, the theatre, pit and boxes, resembled a field of battle. Both parties claimed the victory. In March, 1831, appeared his Notre-Dame de Paris, of which this volume offers a translation -- a work justly yaid to be in a strain of a higher mood than any that he had previously attempted. Such was its success in Paris, that several editions were required in the course of a few months. An intelligent critic in the Foreign Quarterly Review, (No. XV.) in his remarks on it, has these ob- servations : --" As long as a taste remains for the extra- ordinary, or perhaps it should be called the tremendous, such works must be popular. They appeal to an appetite which is shared by the peer with the peasant. Victor Hugo is not a writer in whose hands the power of mould/- ing the human sympathies is likely to be idle. He is eloquent, his fancy is active, his imagination fertile ; and


 * Edinburgh Review.