Apres le roman pittoresque mais prosaique de Walter Scott il
lestera un autre roman a creer, plus beau et plus complet
encore selon nous. C'est le roman, a la fois drame et
epopee, pittoresque mais poetique, reel mais ideal, vrai mais
grand, qui enchassera Walter Scott dans Homere. - Victor Hugo
on QUENTIN DURWARD.


VICTOR HUGO'S romances occupy an important position in the
history of literature; many innovations, timidly made
elsewhere, have in them been carried boldly out to their last
consequences; much that was indefinite in literary tendencies
has attained to definite maturity; many things have come to a
point and been distinguished one from the other; and it is
only in the last romance of all, QUATRE VINGT TREIZE, that
this culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of
things. Men who are in any way typical of a stage of
progress may be compared more justly to the hand upon the
dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it
indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only
the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested.
That significant something by which the work of such a man
differs from that of his predecessors, goes on disengaging
itself and becoming more and more articulate and cognisable.
The same principle of growth that carried his first book
beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book
beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production
of any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to