G. K. Chesterton

“ But to misunderstand Hugo on this point is to misunderstand the whole idea of democracy as Hugo understood it.
If there be one thing more than another which is true of genuine democracy, it is that genuine democracy is opposed to the rule of the mob. For genuine democracy is based fundamentally on the existence of the citizen, and the best definition of a mob is a body of a thousand men in which there is no citizen. ”

“ Hugo represents the culmination of a revolution which almost in our own time shook the foundations of humanity, and already that revolution is old, and Hugo is a vague and remote figure, a doubtful and little discussed author. Yet he was, beyond question, one of the greatest men of letters that Europe has seen, and the day of his return into intellectual triumph is remote indeed, but certain. There can be little doubt that we are divided from the generations that immediately precede us by a gulf far more unfathomable than that which divides us from the darkest ages and the most distant lands. ”

“ This is the first and most admirable thing about Hugo as a novelist—that he is always interesting, and interesting for the best and most impressive reason, that in everything, however small, he is interested. Those parts of a novel, scenery, minutiæ, explanations, which in most novelists are the most tedious, in him are almost the most fascinating. He takes the details which the best authors alive are forced to make too tame and too long, and at the end our complaint against him is that they are too headlong and too brilliant and too overstrained. ”

“ The artistic revolution was that connected with the word romanticism: the political revolution was that connected with the word democracy. And the great difficulty involved in properly appreciating him lies in this, that both romanticism and democracy have conquered and therefore become commonplace. They have been so triumphant as to become invisible; just as existence itself is triumphant and invisible. And like existence itself they have become truisms: and while it is fatally easy to tum a truth into a truism, it is fatally difficult to turn a truism back into a truth. ”

“ In the presence of the mazy background of pious sculpture that runs like a pattern through the tale, we have something of the same sensation which we have sometimes in looking at such a façade as that of Rouen Cathedral; the network of stone is so rich and changing that we can almost believe it to be continually in motion, rippling underneath like a sea, with writhing serpents and fluttering birds. Hugo's backgrounds are never "set-pieces." ”

“ But so long as a man is healthily unconscious he is almost certain to be healthily vain. He will take a delight, without a moment's arrière pensée, in any of his own powers or characteristics. Hugo had, more than any other great man of modern times, this self-enjoying faculty. To him delight in himself was the first condition of all optimism, and faith in himself the first condition of all faith. If a man does not enjoy himself whom he has seen, how shall he enjoy God whom he has not seen? To the great poet, as to the child, there is no hard-and-fast line drawn between the Ego and the Cosmos. ”

“ To the ordinary eye of these days nothing can be more pitiable than the position of the unpopular democrat. There is nothing more contemptible, at the first glance, than the man who has appealed, as Hugo appealed, from the people to a tyrant, and who finds immediately that the people and the tyrant are indissolubly allied against him. ”

“ Until we have realised this fact about the Revolution, all criticism of Hugo must remain vain and superficial. Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent: thus the Hebrew songs appeared turgid to Voltaire and the critics of the eighteenth century, thus the epigrams of the French Revolution appear turgid to ourselves. The reason is not that the Hebrew psalmists or the French Revolutionists were affected, but that we are not so interested in religion as the Hebrew psalmists, nor so interested in democracy as the French Revolutionists. ”

“ Any one who has ever watched a child for the first five years of its life will know that when the human soul first awakens to the immensities of mere existence, the first thing it does is to begin to act a part. In that first movement of the child we see the great part of the literary and political history of Victor Hugo. ”

“ The story of the Revolution, indeed, gives an exceedingly good example of how misleading are many of the narrow English notions about sincerity and affectation, and how artificial is their idea of artificiality. If an Englishman read in a novel by Victor Hugo that a man about to be beheaded asked permission to take leave of a friend, and when forbidden exclaimed in a resonant voice, "Our two heads will seek each other in the sack," he would say that it was a monstrous example of Hugo's exaggeration. ”

“ The truth is that Hugo represents all the ultimate and fundamental things—love, fury, pity, worship, hatred, and consequently, among other things, vanity. Vanity is not only not the same thing as self-consciousness, it is very often the opposite of it. When a man becomes self-conscious he very often becomes painfully and abominably humble. ”

“ There are art-critics who maintain that the most archaic and Byzantine beginnings of Christian art are superior to everything that goes by the name of an Italian master. There are art-critics who maintain that a portion of a Persian carpet contains and eclipses everything that can be found in the National Galleries of Europe. It is, upon the whole, exceedingly probable that there are art-critics who maintain that the two idols from the Fiji Islands which used to stand outside the British Museum are artistically superior to all the Greek gods and goddesses which are to be found inside. ”

“ He realised the obvious and simple truth, so often neglected, that if the individual is nothing, then the race is nothing—for the plain mathematical reason that a hundred times nought is nought. Therefore his sublimest figure, his type of humanity, was not either a king or a republican, but a man on a desert island. ”

“ We think this although every one of us knows that savages are vainer than civilised men, and that even the bonnets of Bond Street are not more elaborately feathered than the headdresses of the Cannibal Islands. ”

“ Paris is almost the chief character of the novel. In "L'Homme Qui Rit" the best description is that of two very weird and fierce and inscrutable things—the sea, and the English aristocracy according to Victor Hugo. In "Les Travailleurs de la Mer" he spends a vast deal of trouble on the reality of the cuttle-fish and very little on the possibility or probability of the gentleman who fights with him. Hugo is not a successful novelist according to the conception that a novelist must understand human nature. He does not even pretend to understand human nature ”