O

My first notions of Victor Hugo were associated with the sea. It was
from the old Weymouth harbour that as a child I used to watch those
Channel-Island steamers with red funnels setting forth on what
seemed to me in those days a wondrous voyage of mystery and peril.
I read "The Toilers of the Sea" at my inland school at Mr. Hardy's
Sherton Abbas; whither, it may be remembered, poor Giles
Winterbourne set off with such trembling anxiety to fetch home his
Grace.

I read it in what was probably a very quaint sort of translation. The
book was bound in that old-fashioned "yellow back" style which at
that time was considered in clergymen's families as a symbol of all
that was dissipated and dangerous; and on the outside of the yellow
cover was a positively terrifying picture of the monstrous devilfish
with which Gellert wrestled in that terrible sea-cavern.

Certain scenes in that romance lodged themselves in my brain with
diabolic intensity. That scene, for instance, when the successful
scoundrel, swimming in the water, "feels himself seized by one
foot," that scene where the man buys the revolver in the little
gunsmith's shop; that appalling scene at the end where Gellert
drowns himself, watching the ship that bears his love away to
happiness in the arms of another--all these held my imagination then,
as indeed they hold it still, with the vividness of personal experience.

It was long after this, not more than five or six years ago in fact, that
I read "Notre Dame de Paris." This book I secured from the ship's
library of some transatlantic liner and the fantastic horrors it
contains, carried to a point of almost intolerable melodrama,
harmonised well enough with the nightly thud of the engines and the
daylong staring at the heaving water.

"Notre Dame" is certainly an amazing book. If it were not for the
presence of genius in it, that ineffable all-redeeming quality, it
would be one of the most outrageous inventions of flagrant
sensationalism ever indulged in by the morbidity of man. But genius
pervades it from beginning to end; pervades even its most
impossible scenes; and on the whole I think it is a much more
arresting tale than, say, "The Count of Monte Cristo," or any of
Dumas' works except "The Three Musketeers."

I have never, even as a child, cared greatly for Dumas, and I discern
in the attitude of the persons who persist in preferring him to Victor
Hugo the presence of a temperamental cult so alien to