Chesterton on Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, and Democracy

From Dale Ahlquist.  Excerpts:

...Have you seen Les Misérables yet? You probably don’t know that in 1902, G.K. Chesterton wrote an essay on a nearly-forgotten writer named Victor Hugo, predicting that he would become very popular again. Chesterton wrote,

“…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.”

“Every one of his great novels was in itself a small French Revolution. In Notre Dame de Paris he revealed to the modern world all the beauties and terrors of the old medieval order, and showed how pitilessly the individual was sacrificed to such an order. In Les Misérables he showed, with a far more sensational illumination, how our own modern order of law and judgment and criminal procedure was, as far as the sacrifice of individuals was concerned, as cruel as any medieval order. In Ninety-Three he showed that such a sacrifice of individuals became necessary, and in a strange, bitter manner, attractive, even in the modern age...”

For the whole essay, follow the link at the top of the page..