I
VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES
Apres le roman pittoresque mais prosaique de Walter Scott il restera 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 ofliterature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them beencarried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinitein literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many thingshave come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and itis only in the last romance of all, "Quatrevingt-treize," that thisculmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men whoare in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared morejustly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues toadvance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is onlythe measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. Thatsignificant something by which the work of such a man differs from thatof his predecessors goes on disengaging itself and becoming more andmore articulate and cognisable. The same principle of growth thatcarried his first book beyond the books of previous writers carries hislast book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production ofany literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension wehave sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may bethe very weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of manyothers, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole ofthem--of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of hislife into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by"Quatrevingt-treize" for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and,through them, for a whole division of modern literature. We have herethe legitimate continuation of a long and living literary tradition; andhence, so far, its explanation. When many lines diverge from each otherin direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we haveonly to produce them to make the chaos plain: this is continually so inliterary history; and we shall best understand the importance of VictorHugo's romances if we think of them as some such prolongation of one ofthe main lines of literary tendency.
When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man ofgenius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a master inthe art--I mean Henry Fielding--we shall be somewhat puzzled, at thefirst moment, to state the difference that there is between these two.Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon thetiller of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (andScott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; andfinally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the greatScotsman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it isastonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, thatthe English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects inthe hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerlyin all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility itcould utilise. The difference between these two men marks a greatenfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of anextended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is atrite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitelycomprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards thetechnical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhapsbeen explained with any clearness.
To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets ofconventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. Thepurposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much withthe same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget thefundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamentalopposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measureby means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of realthings, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sortof realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting ofwhich we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes;this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. Wehave heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wantedto paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, andplastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is donein the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with realsand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices;what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see awoman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval,we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all thesethings, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted intoany artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to dealwith; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitationsin time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towardsthose of painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to amoment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to thestage almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the greatrestriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors,and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certainsignificant dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth ofemotion,--these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. Itis true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumierand the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something ofpageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramaticwriter, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch ofhis genius. When we turn to romance, we find this no longer. Herenothing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the mainconception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanismby which this conception is brought home to us, have been put throughthe crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, inthe form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realismas we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty andlargeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines ofthings are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture,in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up theseidentities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels ascompared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on towhich the novelist throws everything. And from this there results forhim a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in hispower over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing toanother in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail,to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily theflourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip ofcountry market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man's lifeand the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equallyunable, if he looks at it from one point of view--equally able, if helooks at it from another point of view--to reproduce a colour, a sound,an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show hisreaders, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy theforeground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; theturn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes,dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, thestream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And allthis thrown upon the flat board--all this entering, naturally andsmoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration.
This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work ofthe latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we becomesuddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand,although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epicin prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This isnot, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of aregeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking withregard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guardthe reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, thatFielding remained i
gnorant of certain capabilities which the novelpossesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not developthem. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them.The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself andsought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusivelyhuman interest. As for landscape, he was content to under-line stagedirections, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retireinto a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it iscurious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop ofsoldiers into his hero's way. It is most really important, however, toremark the change which has been introduced into the conception ofcharacter by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequentintroduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fieldingtells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions ofhis creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposedon the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a forcein a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknownto him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or thespirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturallyand rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott's instinct, theinstinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught himotherwise; and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy acomparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armiesmanoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other'sshoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full statureof a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a senseof the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality;that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but isresumed into its place in the constitution of things.
It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions,first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history.For art precedes philosophy, and even science. People must have noticedthings and interested themselves in them before they begin to debateupon their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is thepioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows notwhy, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of theworld that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner;and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us and havehad time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day therewill be found the man of science to stand up and give the explanation.Scott took an interest in many things in which Fielding took none; andfor this reason, and no other, he introduced them into his romances. Ifhe had been told what would be the nature of the movement that he was solightly initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a littlescandalised. At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this newmanner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, evennow, it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we areenabled to form any proper judgment in the matter. These books are notonly descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley Novels, but itis in them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition ofScott carried further; that we shall find Scott himself, in so far asregards his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed inhis own spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I saidbefore, a line of literary tendency produced, and by this productiondefinitely separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that thedeviation, which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scottand Fielding, is indeed such a great gulf in thought and sentiment asonly successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural thatone of the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance inself-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the onewent blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberationand forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious thanScott; and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. Thepassage at the head of these pages shows how organically he hadunderstood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of thefive great romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), twodeliberate designs: one artistic, the other consciously ethical andintellectual. This is a man living in a different world from Scott, whoprofesses sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does notbelieve in novels having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo istoo much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and thetruth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance,to have very little connection with the other, or directly ethicalresult.
The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by anyreally powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated andrefined that it is difficult to put a name upon it; and yet something assimple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive,but they are so only in appearance. The fact is, that art is working farahead of language as well as of science, realising for us, by all mannerof suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have nodirect name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, forthe reason that these effects do not enter very largely into thenecessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness thatoften hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us inthought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we areable to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not beensufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the caseof a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it hasleft with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romancethat we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same. It isnot that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression leftwith us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after itsown kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions ofour philosophical speech.
It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, thissomething which it is the function of that form of art to create, thisepical value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, tothrow into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that weshall see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond hispredecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or lessabstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task ofrealising, in the language of romance, much of the involution of ourcomplicated lives.
This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in everyso-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything buta very secondary signification. One might almost number on one's fingersthe works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any waysuperior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of proseromance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. Atthe present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it wouldhave been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and thatman is Hawthorne. There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose,about some at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself onthe most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses ofthe man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression ofhis works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attainsto it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful powerof subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measureof his talent. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this,could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must befelt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the presentessay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each ofthe five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space willpermit, and rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.
The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of "NotreDame de Paris" was (he tells us) to "denounce" the external fatalitythat hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition.To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to dowith the artistic
conception; moreover, it is very questionably handled,while the artistic conception is developed with the most consummatesuccess. Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have everbefore our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river,the boat-shaped island "moored" by five bridges to the different shores,and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumerationof palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages ofadmirable description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined toconclude from this that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so:we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the differentlayers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has beenaccomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the "Gothic profile"of the city, of the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers andbelfries," and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. Andthroughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height fargreater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to usfrom the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, andalready in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself tothat central building by character after character. It is purely aneffect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate andstand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spiritof the Scott-tourist to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almostoffended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into acorner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effectthat permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistencyand strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, aboveall, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothicthan their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seenthem clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth overthe church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all thereis that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of thegrotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionatecontortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art.Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the storylike two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of thebook is when these two share with the two other leading characters, DomClaude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is herethat we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of theromance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint mouldingIllustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the sevendeadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is thewhole book but the reanimation of Gothic art?
It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we havecome almost to identify with the author's manner. Yet even here we aredistressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief andalienate the sympathies. The scene of the _in pace_, for example, inspite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the pennynovelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I shouldas soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again, the followingtwo sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpasswhat it had ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine(vol. ii. p. 180): "Il souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachaitdes poignees de cheveux, _pour voir s'ils ne blanchissaient pas_." And,p. 181: "Ses pensees etaient si insupportables qu'il prenait sa tete adeux mains et tatchait de l'arracher de ses epaules _pour la briser surle pave_."
One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and miserythat pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actualmelodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort ofbrutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which isthe last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in "NotreDame," the whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archeris unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her lasthiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to thissordid hero who has long since forgotten her--well, that is just one ofthose things that readers will not forgive; they do not like it, andthey are quite right; life is hard enough for poor mortals withouthaving it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art.
We look in vain for any similar blemish in "Les Miserables." Here, onthe other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literaryrestraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripestand most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention ofthis great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be--for suchawakenings are unpleasant--to the great cost of the society that weenjoy and profit by, to the labour and sweat of those who support thelitter, civilisation, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carriedforward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them avery simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a millionindividual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that thebread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellisheslife and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death--by thedeaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labour, andthe deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, andthe deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to somethingof all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in "LesMiserables"; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidencewith the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those whoare below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort ofmocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, againand again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean topick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. Thereis a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. Theterror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we canhear tearing, in the dark, good and bad, between its formidable wheelswith the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terrorincarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when thecrouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of thestreet lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as when the lanternof the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or aswhen the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quietriverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for viceand stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full ofoppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause ofoppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices ofMarius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and thethroned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have theadmirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made areligion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learnedthat there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just creation,over which the reader will do well to ponder.
With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and lightand love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeablethings in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full ofthe charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who canforget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water,stands in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the hucksterbehind "lui faisait un peu l'effet d'etre le Pere eternel"? The pathosof the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation ofthe Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there isnothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves ofCosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse ouraffection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of ourprofound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there arefew books in the world that can be compared with it. There is as muchcalm and serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramaticcoarsenesses that disfigured "Notre Dame" are no longer present. Thereis certainly much that is painfully improbable; and again, the storyitself is a little too well constructed; it produces on us the effect ofa puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find that every character fitsagain and again into the plot, and is, like the child's cube,serviceable on six faces; things ar
e not so well arranged in life as allthat comes to. Some of the digressions, also, seem out of place, and donothing but interrupt and irritate. But when all is said, the bookremains of masterly conception and of masterly development, full ofpathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence.
Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in thefirst two members of the series, it remained for "Les Travailleurs de laMer" to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form ofexternal force that is brought against him. And here once more theartistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are,indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offersa type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forcesinto the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labour"in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever throwninto such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds thatcome wonderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at oncethe note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef withhis indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with theclamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown outsharply against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolationis not to be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, forexample; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to set side byside than "Les Travailleurs" and this other of the old days before arthad learnt to occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoewas one sole centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly deadand utterly unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel withGilliat; we feel that he is opposed by a "dark coalition of forces,"that an "immense animosity" surrounds him; we are the witnesses of theterrible warfare that he wages with "the silent inclemency of phenomenagoing their own way, and the great general law, implacable and passive":"a conspiracy of the indifferency of things" is against him. There isnot one interest on the reef, but two. Just as we recognise Gilliat forthe hero, we recognise, as implied by this indifferency of things, thisdirection of forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet anothercharacter who may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and thetwo face up to one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in thestorm, they fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor;--avictor, however, who has still to encounter the octopus. I need saynothing of the gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; itwill be enough to remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crabwhen he is himself assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in itsway, is the last touch to the inner significance of the book; here,indeed, is the true position of man in the universe.
But in "Les Travailleurs," with all its strength, with all itseloquence, with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, wecannot conceal from ourselves that there is a thread of something thatwill not bear calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about thestorm, admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful whether it would bepossible to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by anyamount of breakwater and broken rock. I do not understand the way inwhich the waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose wayof speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the seawas quite calm next day? Is this great hurricane a piece ofscene-painting after all? And when we have forgiven Gilliat's prodigiesof strength (although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos inthe "Vicomte de Bragelonne" than is quite desirable), what is to be saidto his suicide, and how are we to condemn in adequate terms thatunprincipled avidity after effect, which tells us that the sloopdisappeared over the horizon, and the head under the water, at one andthe same moment? Monsieur Hugo may say what he will, but we know better;we know very well that they did not; a thing like that raises up adespairing spirit of opposition in a man's readers; they give him thelie fiercely as they read. Lastly, we have here already some beginningof that curious series of English blunders, that makes us wonder ifthere are neither proof-sheets nor judicious friends in the whole ofFrance, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to whatmay be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreigntongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth,"and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. Itis here that we learn that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as"lord" in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier'sequipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun.
In "L'Homme qui Rit," it was Hugo's object to "denounce" (as he wouldsay himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England;and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of thetwo last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. Therepulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it isbound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader atthe outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as itdeserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. Theconstructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothingcould be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of thearistocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerantmountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, andinstalled without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of agreat country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on whichall this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind andtide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from thepeople heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment ofthe pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horriblelaughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of thisstrange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice tothe scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I amvile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughtergives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness runningthrough the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girlDea, for the monster. It is a most benignant providence that thusharmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of thosecompensations, one of those after-thoughts of a relenting destiny, thatreconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; theatmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this patheticlove; it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the fullmoon over the night of some foul and feverish city.
There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particularthan is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, thatthe book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus andhis wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly asmuch an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of anabuse of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable inthe drama where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance.Lastly, I suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points ofthis not immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish atonce. The large family of English blunders, to which we have alludedalready in speaking of "Les Travailleurs," are of a sort that is reallyindifferent in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by someseaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Jim-Jack to be a likelynickname for an English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, orScott, for that matter, be guilty of "figments enough to confuse themarch of a whole history--anachronisms enough to overset allchronology,"[2] the life of their creations, the artistic truth andaccuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised. But when we comeupon a passage like the sinking of the _Ourque_ in this romance, we cando nothing but cover our face with our hands: the conscientious readerfeels a sort of disgrace in the very reading. For such artisticfalsehoods, springing from what I have called already an unprincipledavidity after effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated; and aboveall, when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo. We cannot forgivein him what we might have passed over in a third-rate sensationnovelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and nautical af
fairs, hemust have known very well that vessels do not go down as he makes the_Ourque_ go down; he must have known that such a liberty with fact wasagainst the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance ofsincerity in conception or workmanship.
In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departurefrom the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, onewould have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found anytheory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of"Quatrevingt-treize" has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like adoctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty isat an end. It is a novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was atthat date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented byHugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly toCimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clementor stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this:"Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf killthe sheep?" This question, as I say, meets with one answer after anotherduring the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to theend. And something in the same way, although one character, or one setof characters, after another comes to the front and occupies ourattention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any ofthese temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We sooncome to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what wereally care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us.We know how history continues through century after century; how thisking or that patriot disappears from its pages with his wholegeneration, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as ifwe had reached any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not inthe men, but in the country that they loved or hated, benefited orinjured. And so it is here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and weregard them no more than the lost armies of which we find the coldstatistics in military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; itis the principle that put these men where they were, that filled themfor a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power, now that theyare fallen, to inspire others with the same courage. The interest of thenovel centres about revolutionary France: just as the plot is anabstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force.And this has been done, not, as it would have been before, by the coldand cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforwardrealism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealingwith them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought comebefore us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young menand maidens of customary romance.
The episode of the mother and children in "Quatrevingt-treize" is equalto anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in thesecond volume, for instance, called "_Sein gueri, coeur saignant_,"that is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could bemore delightful than the humours of the three children on the day beforethe assault. The passage on La Vendee is really great, and the scenes inParis have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, ofpregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way ofpraise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment ofconventional dialogue than in "L'Homme qui Rit"; and much that shouldhave been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, hehas most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of hischaracters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of thetroop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in whichthe foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over awoman and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us atone place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we cansummon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks theyceased to steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter inwhich Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the lesssaid the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would havebeen swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue.Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitableworkmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear andtrenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsinunfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in ourears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come tothe place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he isgoing to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in thestage mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannotconceive any disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.
Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the fivegreat novels.
Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with acertain appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it toany practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves init. It has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination thatVictor Hugo occupies a high place among those few. He has always aperfect command over his stories; and we see that they are constructedwith a high regard to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation isinformed with moral significance and grandeur. Of no other man can thesame thing be said in the same degree. His romances are not to beconfused with "the novel with a purpose" as familiar to the Englishreader: this is generally the model of incompetence; and we see themoral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrownexternally over it like a carpet over a railing. Now the moralsignificance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance; it is theorganising principle. If you could somehow despoil "Les Miserables" or"Les Travailleurs" of their distinctive lesson, you would find that thestory had lost its interest and the book was dead.
Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his artspeak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. Ifyou look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposesof story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now thetwo lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley Novels,and all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimesthey are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a managainst the sea and sky, as in "Les Travailleurs"; sometimes, as in "LesMiserables," they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode inthe epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in"Quatrevingt-treize." There is no hero in "Notre Dame": in "LesMiserables" it is an old man: in "L'Homme qui Rit" it is a monster: in"Quatrevingt-treize" it is the Revolution. Those elements that onlybegan to show themselves timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of WalterScott, have usurped ever more and more of the canvas; until we find thewhole interest of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter thatFielding would have banished from his altogether, as being out of thefield of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as largea place, playing (so to speak) nearly as important a _role_, as the man,Gilliat, who opposes and overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of anation put upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before thefortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir; and the forces that opposeand corrupt a principle holding the attention quite as strongly as thewicked barons or dishonest attorneys of the past. Hence those individualinterests that were supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott stood outover everything else, and formed as it were the spine of the story,figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one forceamong many forces, one thing to be treated out of a whole world ofthings equally vivid and important. So that, for Hugo, man is no longeran isolated spirit without antecedent or relation here below, but abeing involved in the action and reaction of natural forces, himself acentre of such action and reaction; or an unit in a great multitude,chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and aspirations, and, inall seriousness, blown about by every wind of doctrine. This is a longway that we have travelled: between such work an
d the work of Fieldingis there not, indeed, a great gulf of thought and sentiment?
Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of life, and thatportion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and,besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personalinterests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousnessof those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to theaverage man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place innature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligentlythe responsibilities of his place in society. And in all thisgeneralisation of interest, we never miss those small humanities thatare at the opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire theintellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with anothersentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold intoCosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of herdress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity ofthe laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award tothese romances. The author has shown a power of just subordinationhitherto unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class ofeffects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other, his work ismore nearly complete work, and his art, with all its imperfections,deals more comprehensively with the materials of life, than that of anyof his otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors.
These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, andyet they are but one facade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erectedto his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhatthe same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the sameunaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in theromances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fieryiron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions--an emphasis that issomehow akin to weakness--a strength that is a little epileptic. Hestands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excelsthem in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that wealmost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and moreheavily than others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profitby the privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, somethingthat is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, andsee them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhatdeformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have thewisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice alsoto recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and,in many ways, one of the greatest artists of time. If we look back, yetonce, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay tothe charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to whatother man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new andsignificant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merelythink of the amount, of equally consummate performance?
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Prefatory letter to "Peveril of the Peak."
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 3 Page 2