In search of world literature

Behind the flagship of Walter Scott appears a ghostly fleet of the most wondrous ships that ever sailed in literature, crowding in chaos into a crammed but previously well ordered harbour. The strangest of these vessels should be identified. We find the first horror novel Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, Mary Shelley’s wonderfully romantic Frankenstein, the highstrung sea novels of Captain Marryat with “The Phantom Ship” leading, the fantastic production of Ernst Theodor Hoffmann with madness prevalent everywhere in glorious ebullience with The Devil’s Elixir as a supreme masterpiece of its kind, all the horrible tales of the Grimm brothers and H.C.Andersen to frighten small children out of their wits with, the unbalanced Nikolai Gogol of Russia with his weird tales of witches and magicians, martyrs and heroes of Ukraine and St. Petersburg with Taras Bulba as an unforgettable masterpiece, and the most absurd of them all: Victor Hugo, with his poems, dramas and novels of monsters and hunchbacks, convicts and suicides, the expert on victims of fate and the supreme master of supreme exaggerations. His first novels are so ridiculous that his reputation was unfairly tainted with the mark of his first absurdities. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables, Workers of the Sea and The Laughing Man all belong to the most fascinating masterpieces of world literature, and the least consummate of these is actually the most popular, Les Misérables, while The Laughing Man, the most notorious, is his most intelligent and splendid composition. —Philosophy and Literature