Hugo is a romantic who has never been divorced from the real society. Especially with the growth of age, he became more and more sensitive to the real society, and his involvement in the real society became deeper and deeper, which played an extremely important role in his novel creation.
Before Hugo entered the mature stage of novel creation, his early works clearly showed his dual tendencies, namely, romanticism and realism; At the same time, it also strongly confirms his dual talents, namely, the ability of subjective imagination, subjective exaggeration and subjective rendering, as well as the ability to observe, grasp and imitate reality. With the combination of these two tendencies and the coexistence of these two talents, the glory of novel creation is just around the corner. Hugo's mature novels, from Notre Dame de Paris to Les Miserables, Marine Labor, Smiling Man and 93, all have the characteristics of combining romanticism with realism.