Victor Hugo's Novels
second case, almost as devils—but these scenes are seldom presented in the happy stoical pages of Sir Walter. A favourite motive of Hugo's is the maternal passion of a woman otherwise socially lost—Paquerette or Fantine. Her child is taken from her, and we all weep, or nearly weep, with those unhappy ones. But the idea had also been handled by Scott, in the story of Madge Wildfire, distraught like Paquerette. "Naebody kens weel wha’s living, and wha's dead—or wha's gane to Fairyland—there's another question. Whiles I think my puir bairn's dead—ye ken very weel it's buried—but that signifies naething. I have had it on my knee a hundred times, and a hundred till that, since it was buried—and how could that be were it dead, ye ken" Madge with her wild chants is not less poetical than Fantine, to whose sorrows Hugo adds a poignancy and a grotesque horror which Scott had it not in his heart to inflict.
Hugo's novels, especially Les Misérables, L'Homme Qui Rit, and parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, are the shrill or thunderous ototototoi's of the tortured Titan. They are apocalyptic in grandeur, but they are grand with little relief, or with the relief of what may appear too conscious and extreme contrast. The charm, the gaiety, the innumerable moods that make music throughout his lyrics are less common in his novels. If there is relief, it is poignant in the pathos of childhood, or contemptible, as in the empty-headed Phœbus de Châteaupers, or the noisy students of Notre-Dame de Paris.
Scott sees the world of sunshine and of rain, green wood, and loch and moor, and blowing fields of corn. Hugo beholds the world as if in the flashes of lightning and the pauses of the tempest. He sees everything magnified "larger than human," and he is Titanically deficient in the sweet humour of Shakespeare and Fielding, Dumas,
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