And
throughout, Notre Dame has been 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-tourists 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.
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