teaupers,
with minors not a few, "supers" very many, and the dramatist Pierre
Gringoire as a sort of half-chorus, half-actor throughout. The evolution
of this story could not be very difficult to anticipate in any case;
almost any one who had even a slight knowledge of its actual author's
other work could make a guess at the _scenario_. The end must be tragic;
the _beau cavalier_ must be the rather unworthy object of Esmeralda's
affection, and she herself that of the (one need hardly say very
different) affections of Frollo and Quasimodo; a charge of sorcery,
based on the tricks she has taught Djali, must be fatal to her; and
poetic justice must overtake Frollo, who has instigated the persecution
but has half exchanged it for, half-combined it with, later attempts of
a different kind upon her. Although this _scenario_ may not have been
then quite so easy for any schoolboy to anticipate, as it has been
later, the course of the romantic novel from Walpole to Scott in
English, not to mention German and other things, had made it open enough
to everybody to construct. The only thing to be done, and to do, now
was, and is, to see, on the author's own famous critical principles,[97]
how he availed himself of the _publica materies_.

[Sidenote: Importance of the actual _title_.]

Perhaps the first impression of any reader who is not merely not an
expert in criticism, but who has not yet learnt its first, last, and
hardest lesson, shirked by not a few who seem to be experts--to suspend
judgment till the case is fully heard--may be unfavourable. It is true
that the title _Notre-Dame de Paris_, so stupidly and unfairly disguised
by the addition-substitution of "_The Hunchback_ of Notre Dame" in
English translations--quite honestly and quite legitimately warns any
intelligent reader what to expect. It is the cathedral itself, its
visible appearance and its invisible _aura_, atmosphere, history,
spirit, inspiration which gives the author--and is taken by him as
giving--his real subject. Esmeralda and Quasimodo, Frollo and Gringoire
are almost as much minors and supers in comparison with It or Her as
Phoebus de Chateaupers and the younger Frollo and the rest are in
relation to the four protagonists themselves. The most ambitious piece
of _dianoia_--of thought as contrasted with incident, character, or
description--is that embodied in the famous chapter, _Ceci tuera cela_,
where the fatal effect of literature (at least printed litera