Page:Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (tr. Shoberl, 1833).djvu/21

 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF VICTOR HUGO. xiii

passion, which gives life and energy to the conceptions of a writer, and which, acting upon ideas as fire does upon the parched woods of America, sets the whole scene in a flame, is in him readily roused. Hugo may be called an affected writer, a mannerist, or a horrorist ; but he can never be accused of the great vice, in modern times the most heinous of all -- dulness."--" Here," says another critic, " the author has brought his antiquarian learning to bear with effect, not overlaying his story with erudition, but vivifying the dry bones of history by the warmth and brilliancy of his fancy ; while an extraordinary effect of unity is given to the whole, by making the whole movement of the tale emanate from and revolve round the gipsy heroine, and concentrate itself round the venerable towers of Notre-Dame .... In power Hugo is never deficient ; but certainly nothing in any of his former works is to be compared to his description of Notre-Dame, and the mys- terious adaptation and pre-established harmony as it were which seemed to exist between it and its monstrous child Quasimodo ; -- to the attack of the Truands (the Alsatians of Paris) upon the cathedral, and their repulse by the superhuman exertions of the bell-ringer and finally to that awful scene where the archdeacon, gazing down from the square tower of Notre-Dame upon the execution of his victim in the square beneath, is hurled from a height of two hundred feet ' plumb down ' to the pavement below." But it would be useless to accumulate opinions upon a work now before the British public, which can of course form its own judgment upon it. The translator will there- fore merely add, that this version has been made with care ; that it has been his aim in the task to preserve as much as possible the peculiarities of the author's style and man- ner*; and that he has taken no further liberty with the original than here and there pruning away certain luxuri- ancies, or softening down expressions, which, though not

read the writings of Victor Hugo with facility in the original, for the author has not merely a style but a language of his own. The truth it, he has culled from all ages and all ranks, and from every era of French literature, words and expressions wherewith to embody forth the strange creations of his powerful imagination : and his language laughs to scorn the authority of the Académie, the Institut, and the lexicographers."
 * " Few Englishmen," observes a critic In the Atheruemn, " are able to