on here, and it really has something to do with the story. Also, the
subsequent treatment of the recluse or anchoress of the severest type in
the Place Notre-Dame itself (or practically so), though it is much too
long and is lengthened by matters with which Hugo knows least of all how
to deal, has still more claim to attention, for it leads directly on not
merely to the parentage of Esmeralda, but to the tragedy of her fate.
And almost the whole of the second volume is, whether the best
novel-matter or not, at any rate genuine novel-matter. If almost the
whole of the first had been boiled down (as Scott at his best would have
boiled it) into a preliminary chapter or two, the position of the book
as qualified to stand in its kind could not have been questioned. But
its faults and merits in that kind would still have remained matters of
very considerable question.

[Sidenote: But the characters?]

In respect of one fault, the side of the defence can surely be taken
only by generous, but hardly judicious or judicial devotees. Hugo's
singular affection for the monster--he had Stephano to justify him, but
unfortunately did not possess either the humour of that drunken
Neapolitan butler or the power of his and Caliban's creator--had made a
mere grotesque of _Han_, but had been reduced within more artistic
limits in _Bug_. In _Le Dernier Jour_ and _Claude Gueux_ it was excluded
by the subjects and objects alike.[99] Here it is, if not an
_intellectus_, at any rate _sibi permissus_; and, as it does not in the
earlier cases, it takes the not extremely artistic form of violent
contrast which was to be made more violent later in _L'Homme Qui Rit_.
If any one will consider Caliban and Miranda as they are presented in
_The Tempest_, with Quasimodo and Esmeralda as _they_ are presented
here, he will see at once the difference of great art and great failure
of art.

Then, too, there emerges another of our author's persistent obsessions,
the exaggeration of what we may call the individual combat. He had
probably intended something of this kind in _Han_, but the mistake there
in telling about it instead of telling it has been already pointed out.
Neither Bug-Jargal nor Habibrah does anything glaringly and longwindedly
impossible. But the one-man defence of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo against
the _truands_ is a tissue not so much of impossibilities--they, as it
has been said of old, hardly matter--as of the foolish-incredible. Why
did the