Browning should have been attracted to Caliban.  Browning had little comic power, little real humour; in him the grotesque is an imperfect form of the comic.  The same criticism applies to Hugo.  He gave a capital example of the grotesque in the four fools in the third act of “Cromwell” and in Triboulet, the Shaksperian jester of “Le Roi s’Amuse.”  Their songs and dialogues are bizarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they are not funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns of Shakspere—­they are not comic, but merely queer.  Hugo’s defective sense of humour is shown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which, Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous—­exaggerating character and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodrama into absurdity.  This fault is felt in his great prose romance “Notre-Dame de Paris” (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meant by the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero of his later romance “L’Homme qui Rit.”

Gautier has left a number of sketches, written in a vein lovingly humorous, of some of the eccentrics—­the curiosites romantiques—­whose oddities are perhaps even more instructive as to the many directions which the movement took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the less extreme votaries.  There was the architect Jule Vabre, e.g., whose specialty was Shakspere.  Shakspere “was his god, his idol, his passion, a wonder to which he could never grow accustomed.”  Vabre’s life-project was a French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely true to the text, reproducing the exact turn and movement of the phrase, following the alternations of prose, rime, and blank verse in the original, and shunning neither its euphemistic subtleties nor its barbaric roughnesses.  To fit himself for this task, he went to London and lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmosphere and the milieu, and learning to think in English; and there Gautier encountered him about 1843, in a tavern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating rosbif and speaking French with an English accent.  Gautier told him that all he had to do now, to translate Shakspere, was to learn French.  “I am going to work at it,” he answered, more struck with the wisdom than the wit of the suggestion.  A few years later Vabre turned up in France with a project for a sort of international seminary.  “He wanted to explain ‘Hernani’ to the English and ‘Macbeth’ to the French.  It made him tired to see the English learning French in ‘Telemaque,’ and the French learning English in the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’” Poor Vabre’s great Shakspere translation never materialised; but Francois-Victor Hugo, the second son of the great romancer, carried out many of Vabre’s principles of translation in his version of Shakspere.