en held up over Paris by a height far
greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us
from the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and
already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to
that central building by character after character. It is purely an
effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and
stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit
of the Scott-tourist to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost
offended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a
corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect
that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency
and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above
all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic
than their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen
them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over
the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there
is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the
grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate
contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art.
Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story
like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the
book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Dom
Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here
that we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the
romance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding
Illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven
deadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the
whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art?

It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,
there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have
come almost to identify with the author's manner. Yet even here we are
distressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and
alienate the sympathies. The scene of the _in pace_, for example, in
spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
novelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should
as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again, the following