life. They suffered from an over-boiling copiousness, the wildest fulness of blood, and their poetic creation was written breath, shouting for joy or sobbing with woe ; but Victor Hugo, with all the honour which I grant him, I must confess has something dead, uncanny, ghostly, grave-risen, vampyre-like in him. He does not awaken inspiration in our hearts he sucks it out ; he does not win our feeling by poetic transfiguration, but terrifies it by repulsive grotesques. He suffers from death and horrors.
A young lady with whom I am very intimate expressed herself recently as to this craving for horrors by Hugo's muse in very apt words. She said, "The muse of Victor Hugo reminds me of the eccentric princess who was determined to marry only the ugliest man alive, and so sent forth through the land a summons that all young men who were remarkably misshapen should on a certain day repair to the royal castle as candidates for marriage. As may be supposed there was a fine collection of cripples and grotesques, and one might have supposed that he had before him all the caricatures I mean characters of one of Hugo's novels. But Quasimodo bore the bell and took the bride home."[1]
- ↑ Aber Quasimodo, führte die Braut nach Hause. A neat adaptation of the old proverb: Wer's gluck hat, der führet die Braut heim, und wer's Recht hat, der schläft bei ihr. Also English.—Translator.
