CHAPTER III
VICTOR HUGO
[Sidenote: Limitations.]
At the present day, and perhaps in all days hitherto, the greatestwriter of the nineteenth century in France for length of practice,diversity of administration of genius, height of intention, and (for along time at least) magnitude and altitude of fame, enjoys, and hasenjoyed, more popular repute in England for his work in prose fictionthan for any other part of it. With the comparative side of thisestimate the present writer can indeed nowise agree; and the reasons ofhis disagreement should be made good in the present chapter. But this isthe first opportunity he has had of considering, with fair room andverge, the justice of the latter part of Tennyson's compliment "Victor_in Romance_"; and it will pretty certainly be the last. As for ageneral judgment of the positive and relative value and qualities of thewonderful procession of work--certainly deserving that adjectivewhatever other or others may be added--which covers the space of a fullhalf-century from _Han d'Islande_ to _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, it would,according to the notions of criticism here followed, be improper toattempt that till after the procession itself has been carefullysurveyed.
Nor will it be necessary to preface, to follow, or, except very rarelyand slightly, to accompany this survey with remarks on the non-literarycharacteristics of this French Titan of literature. The object often offrantic political and bitter personal abuse; for a long time of almostequally frantic and much sillier political and personal idolatry;himself the victim--in consequence partly of his own faults, partly ofignoble jealousy of greatness, but perhaps most of all of the inevitablereaction from this foolish cult--of the most unsparing rummage intothose faults, and the weaknesses which accompany them, that any poet orprose writer, even Pope, has experienced--Victor Hugo still, though hehas had many a _vates_ in both senses of _sacer_, may almost be allowed_carere_ critico _sacro_,[93] in the best sense, on the whole of hislife and work. I have no pretensions to fill or bridge the whole of thegap here. It will be quite task enough for the present, leaving the lifealmost alone, to attempt the part of the work which contains prosefiction. Nothing said of this will in the least affect what I have oftensaid elsewhere, and shall hold to as long as I hold anything, in regardto the poetry--that its author is the greatest poet of France, and oneof the great poets of the world.
[Sidenote: _Han d'Islande._]
To deal with Hugo's first published, though not first written, novelrequires, in almost the highest degree, what Mr. Matthew Arnold called"a purged considerate mind." There are, I believe, some people (I myselfknow at least one of great excellence) who, having had the good luck toread _Han d'Islande_ as schoolboys, and finding its vein congenial totheirs, have, as in such cases is not impossible, kept it unscathed intheir liking. But this does not happen to every one. I do not think,though I am not quite certain, that when I first read it myself I wasexactly what may be called a schoolboy pure and simple (that is to say,under fifteen). But if I did not read it in upper school-boyhood (thatis to say, before eighteen), I certainly did, not much later. I own thatat that time, whatever my exact age was, I found it so uninterestingthat I do not believe I read it through. Nor, except in the lastrespect, have I improved with it--for it would be presumptuous to say,"has it improved with me"--since. The author apologised for it in twosuccessive prefaces shortly after its appearance, and in yet anotherafter that of _Notre-Dame de Paris_, ten years later. None of them, itis to be feared, "touches the spot." The first, indeed, is hardly anapology at all, but a sort of _goguenard_ "showing off" of the kind notuncommon with youth; the second, a little more serious, contains ratherinteresting hits[94] of again youthful jealousy at the popularity ofPigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil; the third and much later one is avery early instance of the Victorian philosophising. "There must be," weare told with the solemnity which for some sixty years excited such acurious mixture of amazement and amusement, "in every work of themind--drama or novel--there must be many things felt, many thingsobserved, and many things divined," and while in _Han_ there is only onething felt--a young man's love--and one observed--a girl's ditto--therest is all divined, is "the fantastic imagination of an adolescent."
One impeticoses the gratility of the explanation, and refrains, as faras may be, from saying, "Words! words!" Unluckily, the book does verylittle indeed to supply deeds to match. The feeling and the observationfurnish forth a most unstimulating love-story; at least the presentcritic, who has an unabashed fondness for love-stories, has never beenable to feel the slightest interest either in Ordener Guldenlew or inEthel Schumacker, except in so far as the lady is probably the first ofthe since innumerable and sometimes agreeable heroines of her name infiction. As for the "divining," the "intention," and the "imagination,"they have been exerted to sadly little purpose. The absurd nomenclature,definitely excused in one of the prefaces, may have a slight historicinterest as the first attempt, almost a hopeless failure, at that_science des noms_ with which Hugo was later credited, and which hecertainly sometimes displayed. It is hardly necessary to say much aboutSpladgest and Oglypiglaf, Musdaemon and Orugix. They are pureschoolboyisms. But it is perhaps fair to relieve the author from thereproach, which has been thrown on him by some of his Englishtranslators, of having metamorphosed "Hans" into "Han." He himselfexplains distinctly that the name was a nickname, taken from the gruntor growl (the word is in France applied to the well-known noise made bya paviour lifting and bringing down his rammer) of the monster.
But that monster himself! A more impossible improbability and a moreimprobable impossibility never conceived itself in the brain of even anas yet failure of an artist. Han appears to have done all sorts of nastythings, such as eating the insides of babies when they were alive anddrinking the blood of enemies when they were not dead, out of the skullsof his own offspring, which he had extracted from _their_ dead bodies bya process like peeling a banana: also to have achieved some terribleones, such as burning cathedrals and barracks, upsetting rocks on wholebattalions, and so forth. But the only chances we have of seeing him atreal business show him to us as overcoming, with some trouble, an infirmold man, and _not_ overcoming at all, after a struggle of long duration,a not portentously powerful young one. His white bear, and not he, seemsto have had the chief merit of despatching six surely rather incompetenthunters who followed the rash "Kennybol": and of his two finalachievements, that of poniarding two men in a court of justice mighthave been brought about by anybody who was careless enough of his ownlife, and that of setting his gaol on fire by any one who, with the samecarelessness, had a corrupt gaoler to supply him with the means.
It would be equally tedious and superfluous to go through the minorcharacters and incidents. The virtuous and imprisoned statesmanSchumacker, Ethel's father, excites no sympathy: his malignant andfinally defeated enemy, the Chancellor Ahlefeld, no interest. Thatenemy's most _un_virtuous wife and her paramour Musdaemon--_the_villain of the piece as Han is the monster--as to whom one wonderswhether he could ever have been as attractive as a lover as he isunattractive as a villain, are both puppets. Indeed, one would hardlypay any attention to the book at all if it did not hold a position inthe work of a man of the highest genius partly similar to, and partlycontrasted with, that of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_. But _St. Irvyne_and _Zastrozzi_ are much shorter than _Han d'Islande_, and Shelley,whether by accident, wisdom (_nemo omnibus horis insanit_), or thedirect intervention of Apollo, never resumed the task for which hisgenius was so obviously unsuited.
Still, it must be said for Hugo that, even at this time, he couldhave--in a manner actually had--put in evidence of not absoluteincompetence for the task.
[Sidenote: _Bug-Jargal._]
_Bug-Jargal_ was, as glanced at above, written, according to itsauthor's own statement, two years before _Han_, when he was onlysixteen; was partially printed (in the _Constitutionnel_) and (in fearof a piracy) rewritten in fifteen days and published, seven years afterits composition, and almost as many before _Notre-Dame de Paris_appeared. Taking it as it stands, there
is nothing of the sixteen yearsor of the fifteen days to be seen in it. It is altogether superior to_Han_, and though it has not the nightmare magnificence and thephantasmagoric variety of _Notre-Dame_, it is, not merely because it ismuch shorter, a far better told, more coherent, and more generally humanstory. The jester-obi Habibrah has indeed the caricature-grotesquery ofHan himself, and of Quasimodo, and long afterwards of Gwynplaine, aswell as the devilry of the first named and of Thenardier in _LesMiserables_; but we do not see too much of him, and nothing that he doesis exactly absurd or utterly improbable. The heroine--so far as there isa heroine in Marie d'Auverney, wife of the part-hero-narrator, butseparated from him on the very day of their marriage by the rebellion ofSan Domingo--is very slight; but then, according to the story, she isnot wanted to be anything more. The cruelty, treachery, etc., of thehalf-caste Biassou are not overdone, nor is the tropical scenery, norindeed anything else. Even the character of Bug-Jargal himself, amodernised Oroonoko (whom probably Hugo did not know) and a more directdescendant of persons and things in Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,and to some extent the "sensibility" novelists generally (whom hecertainly did know), is kept within bounds. And, what is perhaps mostextraordinary of all, the half-comic interludes in the narrative whereAuverney's comrades talk while he makes breaks in his story, contain fewof Hugo's usually disastrous attempts at humour. It is impossible to saythat the book is of any great importance or of any enthralling interest.But it is the most workmanlike of all Hugo's work in prose fiction, and,except _Les Travailleurs de La Mer_ and _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, whichhave greater faults as well as greater beauties, the most readable, ifnot, like them, the most likely to be re-read.
[Sidenote: _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne._]
Its merits are certainly not ill set off by the two shorter pieces, bothof fairly early date, but the one a little before and the other a littleafter _Notre-Dame de Paris_, which usually accompany it in the collectededitions. Of these _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamne_ is, with its tediouspreface, almost two-thirds as long as _Bug-Jargal_ itself; the other,_Claude Gueux_, contents itself with thirty pages. Both are pieces witha purpose--manifestos of one of Hugo's most consistent and mostirrational crazes--the objection to capital punishment.[95] There is noneed to argue against this, the immortal "Que MM. les assassins," etc.,being, though in fact the weakest of a thousand refutations, sufficient,once for all, to explode it. But it is not irrelevant to point out thatthe two pieces themselves are very battering-rams against their owntheory. We are not told--the objection to this omission was made at thetime, of course, and Hugo's would-be lofty waving-off of this is one ofthe earliest of many such--what the condemned person's crime was. Butthe upshot of his lucubrations during these latest hours of his is this,that such hours are almost more uncomfortable than the minutes of theactual execution can possibly be. As this is exactly one of the pointson which the advocates of the punishment, whether from the point of viewof deterrence or from that of retribution, chiefly rely, it seemssomething of a blunder to bring it out with all the power of a poet anda rhetorician. We _want_ "M. l'Assassin," in fact, to be made veryuncomfortable--as uncomfortable as possible--and we want M. l'Assassin,in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he will be so made."Serve him right" sums up the one view, "De te fabula" the other. Infact cheap copies of _Le Dernier Jour_, supplied to all about to commitmurder, would be highly valuable. Putting aside its purpose, the mereliterary power is of course considerable if not consummate; it hardlypretends to be a "furnished" _story_.
[Sidenote: _Claude Gueux._]
The piece, however, is tragic enough: it could hardly fail to be so inthe hands of such a master of tragedy, just as it could hardly fail tobe illogical in the hands of such a paralogician. But _Claude Gueux_,though it ends with a murder and an attempt at suicide and an execution,is really, though far from intentionally, a farce. The hero, made (bythe "fault of society," of course) a criminal, though not a serious one,thinks himself persecuted by the prison director, and murders thatofficial. The reader who does not know the book will suppose that he hasbeen treated as Charles Reade's wicked governor treated Josephs andRobinson and the other victims in _It is Never too Late to Mend_. Not atall. The redoubtable Claude had, like the great Victor himself and otherquite respectable men, an equally redoubtable appetite, and the prisonrations were not sufficient for him. As he was a sort of leader orprison shop-steward, and his fellow-convicts looked up to him, a youngfellow who was not a great eater used to give Claude part of hisallowance. The director, discovering this, removed the young man intoanother ward--an action possibly rather spiteful, possibly also only aslight excess, or no excess at all, of red-tapeism in discipline. Claudenot merely asks reasons for this,--which, of course, even ifrespectfully done, was an act of clear insubordination on any butanarchist principles,--but repeats the enquiry. The director more thanonce puts the question by, but inflicts no penalty. Whereupon Claudemakes a harangue to the shop (which appears, in some astounding fashion,to have been left without any supervision between the director'svisits), repeats once more, on the director's entrance, hisinsubordinate enquiry, again has it put by, and thereupon splits theunfortunate official's skull with a hatchet, digging also a pair ofscissors, which once belonged to his (left-handed) wife, into his ownthroat. And the wretches actually cure this hardly fallen angel, andthen guillotine him, which he takes most sweetly, placing at the lastmoment in the hand of the attendant priest, with the words _Pour lespauvres_, a five-franc piece, which one of the Sisters of the prisonhospital had given him! After this Hugo, not contented with the tragedyof the edacious murderer, gives us seven pages of his favourite rhetoricin _saccade_ paragraphs on the general question.
As so often with him, one hardly knows which particular question to askfirst, "Did ever such a genius make such a fool of himself?" or "Wasever such an artist given to such hopeless slips in the most rudimentaryprocesses of art?"
[Sidenote: _Notre-Dame de Paris._]
But it is, of course, not till we come to _Notre-Dame de Paris_ that anyserious discussion of Hugo's claims as a novelist is possible. Hitherto,while in novel at least he has very doubtfully been an _enfant sublime_,he has most unquestionably been an _enfant_. Whatever faults may bechargeable on his third novel or romance proper, they include no morechildishness than he displayed throughout his life, and not nearly somuch as he often did later.
The book, moreover, to adopt and adapt the language of another matter,whether disputably or indisputably great in itself, is unquestionably so"by position." It is one of the chief manifestos--there are some whohave held, and perhaps would still hold, that it is _the_ chiefmanifesto and example--of one of the most remarkable and momentous ofliterary movements--the great French Romantic revolt of_mil-huit-cent-trente_. It had for a time enormous popularity, extendingto many who had not the slightest interest in it as such a manifesto; itaffected not merely its own literature, but others, and other artsbesides literature, both in its own and other countries. To whateverextent this popularity may have been affected--first by the transferenceof interest from the author's "letters" to his politics and sociology,and secondly, by the reaction in general esteem which followed hisdeath--it is not very necessary to enquire. One certainly sees fewer,indeed, positively few, references to it and to its contents now. But itwas so bright a planet when it first came into ken; it exercised itsinfluence so long and so largely; that even if it now glows fainter itis worth exploring, and the analysis of the composition of its light isworth putting on record.
[Sidenote: The story easy to anticipate.]
In the case of a book which, whether it has or has not undergone someoccultation as suggested, is still kept on sale not merely in theoriginal, but in cheap translations into every European tongue, there isprobably no need to include an actual "argument" in this analysis. As anovel or at least romance, _Notre-Dame de Paris_ contains a story of thelate fifteenth century, the chief characters of which are the Spanishgipsy[96] dancing-girl Esmeralda, with her goat Djal
i; Quasimodo, thehunchbacked dwarf and bell-ringer of the cathedral; one of itsarchdeacons, Claude Frollo, theologian, philosopher, expert in, butcontemner of, physical and astrological science, and above all,alchemist, if not sorcerer; the handsome and gallant, but "notintelligent" and not very chivalrous soldier Phoebus de Chateaupers,with minors not a few, "supers" very many, and the dramatist PierreGringoire as a sort of half-chorus, half-actor throughout. The evolutionof this story could not be very difficult to anticipate in any case;almost any one who had even a slight knowledge of its actual author'sother work could make a guess at the _scenario_. The end must be tragic;the _beau cavalier_ must be the rather unworthy object of Esmeralda'saffection, and she herself that of the (one need hardly say verydifferent) affections of Frollo and Quasimodo; a charge of sorcery,based on the tricks she has taught Djali, must be fatal to her; andpoetic justice must overtake Frollo, who has instigated the persecutionbut has half exchanged it for, half-combined it with, later attempts ofa different kind upon her. Although this _scenario_ may not have beenthen quite so easy for any schoolboy to anticipate, as it has beenlater, the course of the romantic novel from Walpole to Scott inEnglish, not to mention German and other things, had made it open enoughto everybody to construct. The only thing to be done, and to do, nowwas, and is, to see, on the author's own famous critical principles,[97]how he availed himself of the _publica materies_.
[Sidenote: Importance of the actual _title_.]
Perhaps the first impression of any reader who is not merely not anexpert in criticism, but who has not yet learnt its first, last, andhardest lesson, shirked by not a few who seem to be experts--to suspendjudgment till the case is fully heard--may be unfavourable. It is truethat the title _Notre-Dame de Paris_, so stupidly and unfairly disguisedby the addition-substitution of "_The Hunchback_ of Notre Dame" inEnglish translations--quite honestly and quite legitimately warns anyintelligent reader what to expect. It is the cathedral itself, itsvisible appearance and its invisible _aura_, atmosphere, history,spirit, inspiration which gives the author--and is taken by him asgiving--his real subject. Esmeralda and Quasimodo, Frollo and Gringoireare almost as much minors and supers in comparison with It or Her asPhoebus de Chateaupers and the younger Frollo and the rest are inrelation to the four protagonists themselves. The most ambitious pieceof _dianoia_--of thought as contrasted with incident, character, ordescription--is that embodied in the famous chapter, _Ceci tuera cela_,where the fatal effect of literature (at least printed literature) onarchitecture is inculcated. The situation, precincts, construction,constitution of the church form the centre of such action as there is,and supply by far the larger part of its scene. Therefore nobody has aright to complain of a very large proportion of purely architecturaldetail.
[Sidenote: The working out of the one under the other.]
But the question is whether, in the actual employment, and still more inwhat we may call the administration, of this and other diluents orobstruents of story, the artist has or has not made blunders in his art;and it is very difficult not to answer this in the affirmative. Therewere many excuses for him. The "guide-book novel" had already, and notso very long before, been triumphantly introduced by _Corinne_. It hadbeen enormously popularised by Scott. The close alliance and almostassimilation of art and history with literature was one of the supremestarticles of faith of Romanticism, and "the Gothic" was a sort of symbol,shibboleth, and sacrament at once of Romanticism itself. But VictorHugo, like Falstaff, has, in this and other respects, abused his powerof pressing subjects into service almost, if not quite, damnably.Whether out of pure wilfulness, out of mistaken theory, or out of amixture[98] of these and other influences, he has made the first volumealmost as little of a story as it could possibly be, while remaining astory at all. Seventy mortal pages, pretty well packed in the standardtwo-volume edition, which in all contains less than six hundred, dawdleover the not particularly well-told business of Gringoire's interruptedmystery, the arrival of the Flemish ambassadors, and the election of thePope of Unreason. The vision of Esmeralda lightens the darkness andquickens the movement, and this brightness and liveliness continue tillshe saves her unlucky dramatist from the murderous diversions of theCour des Miracles. But the means by which she does this--the oldprivilege of matrimony--leads to nothing but a single scene, which mighthave been effective, but which Hugo only leaves flat, while it has nofurther importance in the story whatsoever. After it we hop or strugglefull forty pages through the public street of architecture pure andsimple.
[Sidenote: The story recovers itself latterly.]
At first sight "Coup d'oeil impartial sur l'Ancienne Magistrature" mayseem to give even more promise of November than of May. But there _is_action here, and it really has something to do with the story. Also, thesubsequent treatment of the recluse or anchoress of the severest type inthe Place Notre-Dame itself (or practically so), though it is much toolong and is lengthened by matters with which Hugo knows least of all howto deal, has still more claim to attention, for it leads directly on notmerely to the parentage of Esmeralda, but to the tragedy of her fate.And almost the whole of the second volume is, whether the bestnovel-matter or not, at any rate genuine novel-matter. If almost thewhole of the first had been boiled down (as Scott at his best would haveboiled it) into a preliminary chapter or two, the position of the bookas qualified to stand in its kind could not have been questioned. Butits faults and merits in that kind would still have remained matters ofvery considerable question.
[Sidenote: But the characters?]
In respect of one fault, the side of the defence can surely be takenonly by generous, but hardly judicious or judicial devotees. Hugo'ssingular affection for the monster--he had Stephano to justify him, butunfortunately did not possess either the humour of that drunkenNeapolitan butler or the power of his and Caliban's creator--had made amere grotesque of _Han_, but had been reduced within more artisticlimits in _Bug_. In _Le Dernier Jour_ and _Claude Gueux_ it was excludedby the subjects and objects alike.[99] Here it is, if not an_intellectus_, at any rate _sibi permissus_; and, as it does not in theearlier cases, it takes the not extremely artistic form of violentcontrast which was to be made more violent later in _L'Homme Qui Rit_.If any one will consider Caliban and Miranda as they are presented in_The Tempest_, with Quasimodo and Esmeralda as _they_ are presentedhere, he will see at once the difference of great art and great failureof art.
Then, too, there emerges another of our author's persistent obsessions,the exaggeration of what we may call the individual combat. He hadprobably intended something of this kind in _Han_, but the mistake therein telling about it instead of telling it has been already pointed out.Neither Bug-Jargal nor Habibrah does anything glaringly and longwindedlyimpossible. But the one-man defence of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo againstthe _truands_ is a tissue not so much of impossibilities--they, as ithas been said of old, hardly matter--as of the foolish-incredible. Whydid the numerous other denizens of the church and its cloisters donothing during all this time? Why did the _truands_, who, though theywere all scoundrels, were certainly not all fools, confine themselves tothis frontal assault of so huge a building? Why did the little rascalJean Frollo not take some one with him? These are not questions of meredull common sense; it is only dull absence of common sense which willthink them so. Scott, who, once more, was not too careful in stoppingloose places, managed the attacks of Tillietudlem and Torquilstonewithout giving any scope for objections of this kind.
Hugo's strong point was never character, and it certainly is not sohere. Esmeralda is beautiful, amiable, pathetic, and unfortunate; butthe most uncharitable interpretation of Mr. Pope's famous libel neverwas more justified than in her case. Her salvage of Gringoire and itssequel give about the only situations in which she is a realperson,[100] and they are purely episodic. Gringoire himself is as muchout of place as any literary man who ever went into Parliament. Some maythink better of Claude Frollo, who may be said to be theMiltonic-Byronic-Satanic hero. I own I do not. His merespecification--that of th
e ascetic scholar assailed by physicaltemptation--will pass muster well enough, the working out of it hardly.
His brother, the _vaurien_ Jean, has, I believe, been a favourite withothers or the same, and certainly a Villonesque student is not out ofplace in the fifteenth century. Nor is a turned-up nose, even if it beartificially and prematurely reddened, unpardonable. But at the sametime it is not in itself a passport, and Jean Frollo does not appear tohave left even the smallest _Testament_ or so much as a single line(though some snatches of song are assigned to him) reminding us of the"Dames des Temps Jadis" or the "Belle Heaulmiere." Perhaps even Victornever presumed more unfortunately on victory than in bringing in LouisXI., especially in one scene, which directly challenges comparison with_Quentin Durward_. While, though Scott's _jeunes premiers_ are not, ashe himself well knew and frankly confessed, his greatest triumphs, hehas never given us anything of the kind so personally impersonal asPhoebus de Chateaupers.
_Per contra_ there are of course to be set passages which are actuallyfine prose and some of which might have made magnificent poetry; a realor at least--what is as good as or better than a real--a fantasticresurrection of Old Paris; and, above all, an atmosphere of "sunset andeclipse," of night and thunder and levin-flashes, which no one ofcatholic taste would willingly surrender. Only, ungrateful as it mayseem, uncritical as some may deem it, it is impossible not to sigh,"Oh! why were not the best things of this treated in verse, and why werenot the other things left alone altogether?"
[Sidenote: The thirty years' interval.]
For a very long stretch of time--one that could hardly be paralleledexcept in a literary life so unusually extended as his--it might haveseemed that one of those _voix interieures_, which he was during itscourse to celebrate in undying verse, had whispered to Hugo some suchwarning as that conveyed in the words of the close of the lastparagraph, and that he, usually the most indocile of men, had listenedto it. For all but three decades he confined his production--at least inthe sense of substantial publication[101]--to poetry almost invariablysplendid, drama always grandiose and sometimes grand, and prose-writingof a chiefly political kind, which even sympathisers (one would suppose)can hardly regard as of much value now if they have any criticalfaculty. Even the tremendous shock of disappointment, discomfiture, andexile which resulted from the success of Napoleon the Third, though itstarted a new wave and gust of oceanic and cyclonic force, range, andvolume in his soul, found little prose vent, except the wretched stuffof _Napoleon le Petit_, to chequer the fulgurant outburst of the_Chatiments_, the apocalyptic magnificence of the _Contemplations_, andthe almost unmatched vigour, variety, and vividness of the _Legende desSiecles_.
At last, in 1862, a full decade after the cataclysm, his largest andprobably his most popular work of fiction made its appearance in thereturn to romance-writing, entitled _Les Miserables_. I daresaybiographies say when it was begun; it is at any rate clear that evenVictor Hugo must have taken some years, especially in view of his otherwork, to produce such a mass of matter.[102] Probably not very manypeople now living, at least in England, remember very clearly theimmense effect it produced even with us, who were then apt to regardHugo as at best a very chequered genius and at worst an almostcharlatanish rhetorician.
[Sidenote: _Les Miserables._]
It was no doubt lucky for its popularity that it fell in with a generalmovement, in England as well as elsewhere, which had with us been, ifnot brought about, aided by influences in literature as different asthose of Dickens and Carlyle, through Kingsley and othersdownwards,--the movement which has been called perhaps more truly thansympathetically, "the cult of the lower [not to say the criminal]classes." In France, if not in England, this cult had been oddlycombined with a dash of rather adulterated Romanticism, and long beforeHugo, Sues and Sands, as will be seen later, had in their differentmanner been priests and priestesses of it. In his own case the adoptionof the subject "keyed on" in no small degree to the mood in which hewrote the _Dernier Jour_ and _Claude Gueux_, while a good deal of the"Old Paris" mania (I use the word nowise contumeliously) of _Notre-Dame_survived, and even the "Cour des Miracles" found itself modernised.
Whether the popularity above mentioned has kept itself up or not, Icannot say. Of one comparatively recent edition, not so far as I knowpublished at intervals, I have been told that the first volume is out ofprint, but none of the others, a thing rather voiceful to theunderstanding. I know that, to me, it is the hardest book to readthrough of any that I know by a great writer. _Le Grand Cyrus_ and_Clelie_ are certainly longer, _Clarissa_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_are probably so. _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_ is almost as long. There arefiner things in it than in any of them, (except the deaths of Lovelaceand Porthos and the kidnapping of General Monk) from the pure novelpoint of view, and not a few passages which ought to have been verseand, even prose as they are, soar far over anything that Mademoiselle deScudery or Samuel Richardson or Alexandre Dumas could possibly havewritten in either harmony. The Scudery books are infinitely duller, andthe Richardson ones much less varied.
But none of these others besets the path of the reader with things towhich the obstacles interposed by Quilp in the way of Sampson Brass weredown-pillows, as is the case with _Les Miserables_. It is as if VictorHugo had said, "You shall read this at your peril," and had made goodthe threat by dint of every blunder in novel-writing which he couldpossibly commit. With his old and almost invariable fault (there is alittle of it even in _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, and only_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ avoids it entirely), he delays any real interesttill the book, huge as it is, is almost half way through. Twenty pageson Bishop Myriel--that rather piebald angel who makes the way impossiblefor any successor by his fantastic and indecent "apostolicism" inliving; who tells, _not_ like St. Athanasius, an allowable equivocationto save his valuable self, but a downright lie to save a worthlessrascal; and who admits defeat in argument by the stale sophisms of amoribund _conventionnel_--might have been tolerable. We have, in thecompactest edition I know, about a hundred and fifty. The ruin anddesertion of Fantine would have been worth twenty more. We have fromfifty to a hundred to tell us the story of four rather impossiblybeautiful _grisettes_, and as many, alas! too possible, but notinteresting, rascals of students. It is difficult to say how much iswasted on the wildly improbable transformation of Jean Valjean, convictand pauper, into "M. Madeleine," _maire_ and (_nummis gallicis_)millionaire, through making sham jet. All this, by any one who reallyknew his craft, would have been sketched rapidly in fluent preliminary,and subsequent piecemeal retrospect, so as to start with Valjean'sescape from Thenardier and his adoption of Cosette.
The actual matter of this purely preliminary kind extends, as has beenascertained by rough but sufficient calculation of the sort previouslyemployed, to at least three-quarters of an average novel of SirWalter's: it would probably run to two or three times the length of amodern "six-shilling." But Hugo is not satisfied with it. A point, animportant point, doubtless, but one that could have been despatched in afew lines, connects the novel proper with the Battle of Waterloo. Tothat battle itself, even the preliminary matter in its earliest part issome years posterior: the main action, of course, is still more so. ButVictor must give us _his_ account of this great engagement, and he givesit in about a hundred pages of the most succinct reproduction. For mypart, I should be glad to have it "mixed with much wine," even if thewine were of that luscious and headachy south-of-France character whichhe himself is said to have preferred to Bordeaux or Champagne, Sauterneor even Burgundy. Nay, without this I like it well enough and quarrelwith nothing in it, though it is in many respects (from the famoushollow way which nobody else ever heard of downwards) very much of adream-battle. Victor does quite as much justice as any one could expecthim to do--and, thank heaven, there are still some Englishmen who areperfectly indifferent whether justice is done to them or not in thesematters, leaving it to poorer persons in such ways who may be glad ofit--to English fighting; while if he represents Wellington as a merecalculator and N
apoleon as a hero, we can murmur politely (like a RomanCatholic bishop, more real in many ways than His Greatness of Digue),"Perhaps so, my dear sir, perhaps so." But what has it all got to dohere? Even when Montalais and her lover sat on the wall and talked forhalf a volume or so in the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_; even when HisMajesty Louis XIV. and his (one regrets to use the good old Englishword) pimp, M. le Duc de Saint-Aignan, exhausted the resources ofcarpentry and the stores of printer's ink to gain access to theapartment of Mlle. de la Valliere, the superabundance, though trivial,was relevant: this is not. When Thenardier tried to rob and was no doubtquite ready to murder, but did, as a matter of fact, help toresuscitate, the gallant French Republican soldier, who was so glad toreceive the title of baron from an emperor who had by abdicationresigned any right to give it that he ever possessed, it might have beenMalplaquet or Leipsic, Fontenoy or Vittoria, for any relevance thedetails of the battle possessed to the course of the story.
Now relevance (to make a short paragraph of the kind Hugo himself loved)is a mighty goddess in novelry.
And so it continues, though, to be absolutely just, the later parts arenot exposed to quite the same objections as the earlier. Theseobjections transform themselves, however, into other varieties, and arereinforced by fresh faults. The most inexcusable digressions, onsubjects as remote from each other as convents and sewers, insist onpoking themselves in. The central, or what ought to be the central,interest itself turns on the ridiculous _emeute_ of Saint-Merry, a thing"without a purpose or an aim," a mere caricature of a revolution. The_gamin_ Gavroche puts in a strong plea for mercy, and his sisterEponine, if Hugo had chosen to take more trouble with her, might havebeen a great, and is actually the most interesting, character. ButCosette--the cosseted Cosette--Hugo did not know our word or he wouldhave seen the danger--is merely a pretty and rather selfish little doll,and her precious lover Marius is almost ineffable.
Novel-heroes who are failures throng my mind like ghosts on the othershore of the river whom Charon will not ferry over; but I can single outnone of them who is, without positively evil qualities, so absolutelyintolerable as Marius.[103] Others have more such qualities; but he hasno good ones. His very bravery is a sort of moral and intellectualrunning amuck because he thinks he shall not get Cosette. Having,apparently, for many years thought and cared nothing about his father,he becomes frantically filial on discovering that he has inherited fromhim, as above, a very doubtful and certainly most un-"citizen"-liketitle of Baron. Thereupon (taking care, however, to have cards printedwith the title on them) he becomes a violent republican.
He then proceeds to be extremely rude to his indulgent but royalistgrandfather, retires to a mount of very peculiar sacredness, where hecomes in contact with the Thenardier family, discovers a plot againstValjean, appeals to the civil arm to protect the victim, but, forreasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part,and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story,carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish asself-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantasticself-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poorold creature by separating him from Cosette. When the _eclaircissement_comes, it appears to me--as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola that he ought tohave consented to be damned--that Marius ought to have consented atleast to be kicked.
Of course it may be said, "You should not give judgments on things withwhich you are evidently out of sympathy." But I do not acknowledge anypalpable hit. If certain purposes of the opposite kind were obtrudedhere in the same fashion--if Victor (as he might have done in earlierdays) had hymned Royalism instead of Republicanism, or (as perhaps hewould never have done) had indulged in praise of severe laws andrestricted education,[104] and other things, I should be "in sympathy,"but I hope and believe that I should not be "out of" criticism. Unlessstrictly adjusted to the scale and degree suitable to a novel--as SirWalter has, I think, restricted his Mariolatry and his Jacobitism, andso forth--I should bar them as I bar these.[105] And it is the fact thatthey are not so restricted, with the concomitant faults which, againpurely from the point of view of novel-criticism as such, I haveventured to find, that makes me consider _Les Miserables_ a failure as anovel. Once again, too, I find few of the really good and greatthings--which in so vast a book by such a writer are there, and couldnot fail to be there--to be essentially and specially good and greataccording to the novel standard. They are, with the rarest exceptions,the stuff of drama or of poetry, not of novel. That there are suchexceptions--the treacherous feast of the students to the mistresses theyare about to desert; the escapes of Valjean from the ambushes laid forhim by Thenardier and Javert; some of the Saint-Merry fighting; theguesting of the children by Gavroche in the elephant; and others--istrue. But they are oases in a desert; and, save when they would bebetter done in poetry, they do not after all seem to me to be muchbetter done than they might have been by others--the comparativeweakness of Hugo in conversation of the kind suitable for prose fictionmaking itself felt. That at least is what the present writer's notion ofcriticism puts into his mouth to say; and he can say no other.
[Sidenote: _Les Travailleurs de la Mer._]
_Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, on the other hand, is, according to somepersons, among whom that present writer desires to be included, thesummit of Victor Hugo's achievements in prose fiction. It has his"signatures" of absurdity in fair measure. There is the celebrated"Bug-Pipe" which a Highlander of the garrison of Guernsey sold (I amafraid contrary to military law) to the hero, and on which that heroperformed the "_melancholy_ air" of "Bonny Dundee."[106] There is theequally celebrated "First of the Fourth" (Premiere de la Quatrieme),which is believed to be Hugonic for the Firth of Forth. There are someothers. There is an elaborate presentation of a quite impossibly namedclergyman, who is, it seems, an anticipator of "le Puseysme" and anactual high-churchman, who talks as never high-churchman talked fromLaud to Pusey himself, but rather like the Reverend GabrielKettledrummle (with whom Hugo was probably acquainted "in translations,Sir! in translations").[107] Gilliatt, the hero, is a not very humanprig outside those extraordinary performances, of which more later, andhis consummate end. Deruchette, the heroine, is, like Cosette, a prettynullity.[108] As always, the author _will_ not "get under way"; andshort as the book is, and valuable as is its shortness, it could be cutdown to two-thirds at least with advantage. Clubin and Rantaine, thevillains, are pure melodrama; Mess Lethierry, the good old man, israther an old fool, and not so very good. The real business of thebook--the salvage by Gilliatt of the steamer wrecked on the Douvres--is,as a schoolboy would say, or would have said, "jolly impossible." Butthe book as a whole is, despite or because of its tragic quality, almostimpossibly "jolly."
[Sidenote: The _genius loci._]
For here--as he did previously (by the help of the form that was morehis own and of Jersey) in the _Contemplations_--he had now got in prose,by that of the smaller, more isolated, and less contaminated[109]island, into his own proper country, the dominion of the Angel of theVisions of the Sea. He has told us in his own grandiloquent way, whichso often led him wrong, that when he settled to exile in the ChannelIslands, his son Francois observed, "Je traduirai Shakespeare," and _he_said, "Je contemplerai l'ocean." He did; and good came of it. Studentsof his biography may know that in the dwelling which he calledHauteville House (a name which, I regret to say, already and properlybelonged to another) he slept and mainly lived in a high garret withmuch glass window, overlooking the strait between Guernsey and Sark.These "gazebos," as they used to be called, are common in St. PeterPort, and I myself enjoyed the possession of a more modest and quiteunfamous one for some time. They are worth inhabiting and looking from,be the weather fair or foul. Moreover, he was, I believe, a very goodwalker, and in both the islands made the best of opportunities which areunmatched elsewhere. Whether he boated much I do not know. The profusionof nautical terms with which he "deaves" us (as the old Scotch word hasit) would rather lead me to think _not_. He was in this
inferior toProspero; but I hope it is not blasphemy to say that, _mutatismutandis_, he had something of the banished Duke of Milan in him, andthat, in the one case as in the other, it was the island that brought itout. And he acknowledged it in his Dedication to "Guernesey--_severe etdouce_."
[Sidenote: Guernsey at the time.]
_Severe et Douce!_ I lived in Guernsey as a Master at Elizabeth Collegefrom 1868, two years after Victor Hugo wrote that dedication, to 1874,when he still kept house there, but had not, since the "Annee Terrible,"occupied it much. I suppose the "severity" must be granted to an islandof solid granite and to the rocks and tides and sea-mists that surroundit. But in the ordinary life there in my time there was little to"asperate" the _douceur_. Perhaps it does not require so very much tosweeten things in general between the ages of twenty-three andtwenty-nine. But the things in general themselves were dulcet enough.The beauty of the place--extraordinarily varied in its triangle of somehalf-score miles or a little less on each side--was not then in theleast interfered with by the excessive commercial glass-housing which, Ibelieve, has come in since. For what my friend of many days, the lateMr. Reynolds of Brasenose and East Ham, a constant visitor in summer,used to call "necessary luxuries," it was still unique. When I wentthere you could buy not undrinkable or poisonous Hollands at fourshillings a gallon, and brandy--not, of course, exactly cognac or _finechampagne_, but deserving the same epithets--for six. If you were aluxurious person, you paid half-a-crown a bottle for the genuine produceof the Charente, little or not at all inferior to Martell or Hennessy,and a florin for excellent Scotch or Irish whiskey.[110] Fourpencehalf-penny gave you a quarter-pound slab of gold-leaf tobacco, thanwhich I never wish to smoke better.
But this easy supplying of the bodily needs of the "horse with wings"and his "heavy rider" was as nothing to other things which strengthenedthe wings of the spirit and lightened the weight of the burden it bore.I have not been a great traveller outside the kingdom of England: andyou may doubtless, in the whole of Europe or of the globe, find moremagnificent things than you can possibly find in an island of thedimensions given. But for a miniature and manageable assemblage ofamenities I do not think you can easily beat Guernsey. The town of St.Peter Port, and its two castles, Fort George above and Castle Cornetbelow, looking on the strait above mentioned, with the curiouslycontrasted islets of Herm and Jethou in its midst; the wonderful coast,first south- and then westward, set with tiny coves of perfection likeBec-du-Nez, and larger bays, across the mouth of which, after a stormand in calm sunny weather, you see lines of foam stretching fromheadland to headland, out of the white clots of which the weakestimagination can fancy Aphrodite rising and floating shorewards, tovanish as she touches the beach; the great western promontory ofPleinmont, a scarcely lessened Land's End, with the Hanois rocks beyond;the tamer but still not tame western, northern, and north-easterncoasts, with the Druid-haunted level of L'Ancresse and the minor port ofSt. Samson--all these furnish, even to the well-girt man, anextraordinary number[111] of walks, ranging from an hour's to a day'sand more there and back; while in the valleys of the interior you findscenery which might be as far from the sea as Warwickshire, or on theheights springs which tell you that they must have come from theneighbourhood of the Mount of Dol or the Forest of Broceliande.
With such colour and form of locality to serve, not merely asinspiration but as actual scene and setting, such genius as Hugo's couldhardly fail. The thing is sad and delightful and great. As life, you maysay, it could not have happened; as literature it could not but havehappened, and has happened, at its best, divinely well. The contrast ofthe long agony of effort and its triumph on the Douvres, with the swiftcollapse of any possible reward at St. Samson, is simply a windfall ofthe Muses to this spoiled and, it must be confessed, often self-spoilingchild of theirs. There are, of course, absurdities still, and of adifferent kind from the bug-pipe. I have always wished to know what theexperiences of the fortunate and reverend but sheepish Ebenezer had beenat Oxford--he must certainly have held a King Charles scholarship in hisday--during that full-blooded time of the Regency. The circumstances ofthe marriage are almost purely Hugonian, though it does Hugo credit thathe admires the service which he travesties so remarkably. But the _Dieu_(not _diable_) _au corps_ which he now enjoys enables him to change intoa beauty (in the wholly natural gabble of Mess Lethierry on the recoveryof the _la Durande_) those long speeches which have been already notedas blots. And, beauty or blot, it would not have mattered. All is in thecontrast of the mighty but conquered Douvres and the comparativelyinsignificant rocklet--there are hundreds like it on every granitecoast--where Death the Consoler sets on Gilliatt's head the only crownpossible for his impossible feat, and where the dislike of the ignorantpeasantry, the brute resistance of machinery and material, the violenceof the storm, the devilish ambush of the _pieuvre_, and all other evilsare terminated and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and theeuthanasia of the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or evenromance--in substance it is too abstract and elemental for either of theless majestical branches of inventive literature. But it is great. "ByGod! 'tis good," and, to lengthen somewhat Ben's famous challenge, "ifyou like, you may" put it with, and not so far from, in whatever orderyou please--the deaths of Cleopatra and of Colonel Newcome.
The book is therefore a success; but that success is an evident _tour deforce_, and it is nearly as evident to any student of the subject thatsuch a _tour de force_ was not likely to be repeated, and that the thingowed its actual salvage to a rather strict limitation of subject andtreatment--a limitation hitherto unknown in the writer and itselfunlikely to recur. Also that there were certain things in it--especiallythe travesties of names and subjects of which the author practicallyknew nothing--the repetition and extension of which _was_ likely to bedamaging, if not fatal. In two or three years the "fatality" of whichVictor Hugo himself was dangerously fond of talking (the warning ofHerodotus in the dawn about things which it is not lawful to mentionhas been too often neglected) had its revenge.
[Sidenote: _L'Homme Qui Rit._]
_L'Homme Qui Rit_ is probably the maddest book in recognised literature;certainly the maddest written by an author of supreme genius without thefaintest notion that he was making himself ridiculous. The genius isstill there, and passage on passage shows us the real "prose-poetry,"that is to say, the prose which ought to have been written in verse. Thescheme of the quartette--Ursus, the misanthrope-Good-Samaritan; Homo,the amiable wolf; Gwynplaine, the tortured and guiltless child andyouth; Dea, the adorable maiden--is unexceptionable _per se_, and itcould have been worked out in verse or drama perfectly, though theactual termination--Gwynplaine's suicide in the sea after Dea'sdeath--is perhaps too close and too easy a "variation of the same thing"on Gilliatt's parallel self-immolation after Deruchette's marriage.[112]Not a few opening or episodic parts--the picture of the caravan; thestruggle of the child Gwynplaine with the elements to save not so muchhimself as the baby Dea; the revulsions of his temptations andpersecutions later; and yet others[113]--show the poet and the master.
But the way in which these things are merged in and spoilt by a torrentof silliness, sciolism, and sheer nonsense is, even after one has knownthe book for forty years and more, still astounding.
One could laugh almost indulgently over the "bug-pipe" and the "First ofthe Fourth"; one could, being of those who win, laugh quite indulgentlyover the little outbursts of spite in _Les Travailleurs_ at theinstitutions and ways of the country which had, despite some ratherunpardonable liberties, given its regular and royal asylum to theexiled republican and almost anarchist author. Certainly, also, one canlaugh over _L'Homme Qui Rit_ and its picture of the English aristocracy.But of such laughter, as of all carnal pleasures (to steal fromKingsley), cometh satiety, and the satiety is rather early reached inthis same book. One of the chief "persons of distinction" in many wayswhom I have ever come across, the late Mr. G. S. Venables--a lawyer ofno mean expertness; one of the earliest and one of the greatest of those"gentleme
n of the Press" who at the middle of the nineteenth centurylifted journalism out of the gutter; a familiar of every kind of thebest society, and a person of infinite though somewhat saturninewit--had a phrase of contempt for absurd utterances by persons who oughtto have known better. "It was," he said, "like a drunk child." The majorpart of _L'Homme Qui Rit_ is like the utterance of a drunk child who hadsomething of the pseudo-Homeric Margites in him, who "knew a great manythings and knew them all badly." I could fill fifty pages here easilyenough, and with a kind of low amusement to myself and perhaps others,by enumerating the absurdities of _L'Homme Qui Rit_. As far as Iremember, when the book appeared, divers good people (the bad peoplemerely sneered) took immense pains to discover how and why this greatman of letters made so much greater a fool of himself. This was quitelost labour; and without attempting the explanation at all, a very smallselection of the facts, being in a manner indispensable, may be given.
The mysterious society of "Comprachicos" (Spanish for "child-buyers"),on whose malpractices the whole book is founded; the entirely falseconception of the English House of Lords, which gives much of thesuperstructure; the confusion of English and French times and seasons,manners and customs, which enables the writer to muddle up Henri-Troisand Louis-Quinze, Good Queen Bess and Good Queen Anne: these and otherthings of the kind can be passed over. For things like some of themoccur in much saner novelists than Hugo; and Sir Walter himself isnotoriously not free from indisputable anachronisms.[114] But you havebarely reached the fiftieth page when you come to a "Lord LinnaeusClancharlie, Baron Clancharlie et Hunkerville, Marquis de Corleone enSicile," whose English peerage dates from Edward _the Elder_ (the originof his Sicilian title is not stated, but it was probably conferred byHiero or Dionysius), and whose name "Clancharlie" has nothing whateverto do with Scotland or Ireland. This worthy peer (who, as a Cromwellian,exiled himself after the Restoration) had, like others of the godly, abastard son, enjoying at "_temp._ of tale" the remarkable courtesy titleof "Lord David Dirry-Moir," but called by the rabble, with whom hissporting tastes make him a great favourite, "Tom-Jim-Jack." Most"love-children" of peers would be contented (if they ever had them) withcourtesy titles; but Lord David has been further favoured by Fortune andKing James II., who has first induced the _comprachicos_ to trepan andmutilate Clancharlie's real heir (afterwards Gwynplaine, the eponymoushero of the book), and has then made Lord David a "_pairsubstitue_"[115] on condition that he marries one of the king's naturaldaughters, the Duchess Josiane, a duchess with no duchy ever mentioned.In regard to her Hugo proceeds to exhibit his etymological powers,ignoring entirely the agreeable heroine of _Bevis of Hampton_, andsuggesting either an abbreviation of "Josefa y Ana" (at this time, weare gravely informed, there was a prevalent English fashion of takingSpanish names) or else a feminine of "Josias." Moreover, among dozens ofother instances of this Bedlam nomenclature, we have a "combat of box"between the Irishman "Phelem-ghe-Madone" (because Irishmen are oftenRoman Catholics?) and the Scotchman "Helmsgail" (there is a placecalled Helms_dale_ in Scotland, and if "gael" why not "gail"?), to thelatter of whom a knee is given by "Lord Desertum" (Desart? Dysart?what?).
And so it goes on. There is the immortal scene (or rather half-volume)in which, Hugo having heard or read of _peine forte et dure_, we findsheriffs who discharge the duty of Old Bailey judges, fragments of LawLatin (it is really a pity that he did not get hold of our inimitableLaw _French_), and above all, and pervading all, that most fearfulwildfowl the "wapentake," with his "iron weapon." He, with his satellitethe justicier-quorum (but, one weeps to see, not "custalorum" or"rotalorum"), is concerned with the torture of Hardquanonne[116]--theoriginal malefactor[117] in Gwynplaine's case--and thereby restoresGwynplaine to his (unsubstituted) rank in the English peerage, when hehimself is anticipating similar treatment. There is the presentation bythe librarian of the House of Lords of a "little red book" which is thepassport to the House itself: and the very unmannerly reception by hisbrother peers, from which he is in a manner rescued by the chivalrousLord David Dirry-Moir at the price of a box on the ears for deprivinghim of his "substitution." There is the misconduct of the DuchessJosiane, divinely beautiful and diabolically wicked, who covets themonster Gwynplaine as a lover, and discards him when, on hispeerification, he is commanded to her by Queen Anne as a husband. Andthen, after all this tedious insanity and a great deal more, there isthe finale of the despair of Gwynplaine, of his recovery of the dyingDea in a ship just starting for Holland, of her own death, and of hissuicide in the all-healing sea--a "reconciliation" not far short of thegreatest things in literature.
Now I am not of those unhappy ones who cannot away with the mixture oftragedy and farce. I have not only read too much, but lived too long forthat. But then the farce must be in life conceivable and in literatureconscious. Shakespeare, and even men much inferior to Shakespeare, havebeen able to provide for this stipulation munificently.
With Victor Hugo, generally more or less and intensively here, it wasunfortunately different. His irony was almost always his weakest point;or rather it was a kind of hit-or-miss weapon, with which he cut himselfas often as he cut his inimical objects or persons. The intenseabsurdity of his personified wapentakes, of his Tom-Jim-Jacks, of hiscourtesy-title bastards, he deliberately declined (as in the anecdoteabove given) to see. But these things, done and evidently thought fineby the doer, almost put to rout the most determined and expert sifter ofthe faults and merits of genius. You cannot enjoy a Garden of Eden whenat every other step you plunge into a morass of mire. You cannot drink adraught of nectar, arranged on the plan of certain glasses of liqueur,in superimposed layers of different savour and colour, when every otherlayer is "stummed" folly or nauseous bad taste. A novel is not like abook of poems, where, as you see that you have hit on a failure, youturn the page and find a success. To which it may be added finally thatwhile erudition of _any_ kind is a doubtful set-off to fiction, thepresentation of ragbag erudition of this kind is, to speak moderatelyand in his own words of something else, "a rather hideous thing."[118]
Still, with readers of a certain quality, the good omens may to someextent shame the ill even here. The death of Dea, with its sequel, isvery nearly perfect; it only wants the verse of which its author wassuch an absolute master, instead of the prose, where he alternatelytriumphed and bungled, to make it so. And one need not be a commonparadoxer to take either side on the question whether on the whole theomen, if not the actuality, of _L'Homme Qui Rit_ or that of _LesTravailleurs de la Mer_ was the happier. For, while the earlier andbetter book showed how faults were hardening and might grow worse still,the later showed how these very faults, attaining their utmost possibledevelopment, could not entirely stifle the rarer gifts. I do notremember that anybody in 1869 took this apparently aleatory side of theargument. If he did he was justified in 1874.
[Sidenote: _Quatre-Vingt-Treize._]
One enormous advantage of _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ over its immediatepredecessor lay on the surface--an advantage enormous in all cases, butalmost incalculable in this particular one. In _L'Homme Qui Rit_ VictorHugo had been dealing with a subject about which he knew practicallynothing, and about which he was prepared to believe, or even practise,anything. Here, though he was still prepared to believe a great deal, heyet knew a very great deal more. A little room for his eccentricitiesremained, and long after the truth had become a matter of registeredhistory, he could accept the legendary lies about the _Vengeur_; butthere was no danger of his giving us French wapentakes brandishingiron-weapons, or calling a French noble by any appellation comparable toLord Linnaeus[119] Clancharlie.
But, it may be said, is not the removal of these annoyances more thancompensated, in the bad sense, by things inseparable from such asubject, as treated by such an author?--the glorification of"Quatre-Vingt-Treize" itself, and, in particular, of theConvention--that remarkable assembly which seems to have made up itsmind to prove for all time that, in democracies, the scum comes to thetop?--that assembly in which Fabre d'Eglantine stood for poetry,
Maratfor humanitarianism, Robespierre for justice, Hebert and Chaumette fordecency, Sieyes and Chabot for different forms of religion, thecomposers of the Republican Calendar[120] for common sense? where theonly suggestion of a great man was Danton, and the only substitutes foran honest one were the prigs and pedants of the Gironde? To which theonly critical answer must be, even when the critic does not contest thecorrectness of this description--"Why, no!"
It is better, no doubt, that a novelist, and that everybody else, shouldbe a _bien-pensant_; but, as in the case of the poet, it will notnecessarily affect his goodness in his art if he is not. He had, indeed,best not air his opinions, whatever they are, at too great length; but_what_ they are matters little or nothing. A Tory critic who cannotadmire Shelley or Swinburne, Dickens or Thackeray, because of theirpolitics, is merely an ass, an animal unfortunately to be found in thestables or paddocks of every party. On the other hand, absurdities andfaults of taste matter very much.
Now from these latter, which had nearly ruined _L'Homme Qui Rit_,_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, if not entirely free, suffers comparativelylittle. The early and celebrated incident of the carronade running amuckshows characteristic neglect of burlesque possibilities (and, as Ibelieve some experts have maintained, of actual ones), but it has thequalities of the Hugonian defects. An arm-chair critic may ask, Wherewas the English fleet in the Channel when a French one was allowed tocome out and slowly mob the _Claymore_ to destruction, without, as faras one sees, any interference or counter-effort, though the expeditionof that remarkable corvette formed part of an elaborate and carefullyprepared offensive?[121] Undoubtedly, the Convention scenes must beallowed--even by sympathisers with the Revolution--to be clumsystopgaps, unnecessary to the action and possessed of little intrinsicvalue in themselves. The old fault of verbosity and "watering out"recurs; and so does the reappearance, with very slight change, offigures and situations. Cimourdain in character is very much of a morerespectable Claude Frollo; and in conduct, _mutatis_ not so very many_mutandis_, almost as much of a less respectable Javert. The death ofGauvain is far less effective than that of Sydney Carton, which hadpreceded it; and the enormous harangue of the Marquis to the nephew whois about to liberate him, though it may be intended to heighten the_peripeteia_, merely gives fresh evidence of Hugo's want of proportionand of his flux of rhetoric.
All this and more is true; yet _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ is, "in its _fine_wrong way," a great book, and with _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_,completes the pillars, such as they are, which support Hugo's positionas a novelist. The rescue of the children by Lantenac is superb, thoughyou may find twenty cavils against it easily: and the whole presentationof the Marquis, except perhaps the speech referred to, is one of thebest pictures of the _ancienne noblesse_ in literature, one which--toreverse the contrast just made--annihilates Dickens's caricature thereofin _A Tale of Two Cities_. The single-handed defence of La Tourgue by"L'Imanus" has of course a good deal of the hyperbole which began withQuasimodo's similar act in _Notre-Dame_; but the reader who cannot "lethimself go" with it is to be pitied. Nowhere is Hugo's child-worshipmore agreeably shown than in the three first chapters of the thirdvolume. And, sinking particulars for a more general view, one may saythat through the whole book, to an extent surpassing even _LesTravailleurs de la Mer_ as such, there is the great Victorian _souffle_and surge, the rush as of mighty winds and mightier waters, whichcarries the reader resistlessly through and over all obstacles.
[Sidenote: Final remarks.]
Yet although Hugo thus terminated his career as a novelist, if not inthe odour of sanctity, at any rate in a comfortable cloud of incense dueto a comparative success; although he had (it is true on a much smallerscale) even transcended that success in _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_;although, as a mere novice, he had proved himself a more than tolerabletale-teller in _Bug-Jargal_, it is not possible, for any criticalhistorian of the novel as such, to pronounce him a great artist, or evena tolerable craftsman, in the kind as a whole. It has already beenseveral times remarked in detail, and may now be repeated in general,that the things which we enjoy in his books of this kind are seldomthings which it is the special business of the novelist to produce, andpractically never those which are his chief business. In no singleinstance perhaps, with the doubtful exception of Gilliatt's battle withbrute matter and elemental forces, is "the tale the thing" purely astale. Very seldom do we even want to know what is going to happen--thechildishly simple, but also childishly genuine demand of the reader ofromance as such, if not even of the novel also. Scarcely once do we--atleast do I--take that interest in the development of character which isthe special subject of appetite of readers of the novel, as such and byitself. The baits and the rewards are now splendour of style; nowmagnificence of imagery; sometimes grandeur of idea; often pathos; notseldom the delight of battle in this or that sense. These are allexcellent seasonings of novelry; but they are not the root of thematter, the _piece de resistance_ of the feast.
Unfortunately, too, Hugo not merely cannot, or at any rate does not,give the hungry sheep their proper food--an interesting story worked outby interesting characters--but will persist in giving them things assuitable (granting them to be in the abstract nourishing) as turnips tothe carnivora or legs of mutton to the sheep which walk on them. Itwould, of course, not be just to press too strongly the objections tothe novel of purpose, though to the present writer they seem almostinsuperable. But it is not merely purpose in the ordinary sense whichleads Victor astray, or rather (for he was much too wilful a person tobe led) which he invents for himself to follow, with his eyes open, andknowing perfectly well what he is doing. His digressions are not_parabases_ of the kind which some people object to in Fielding andstill more in Thackeray--addresses to the reader on points more or lessintimately connected with the subject itself. A certain exception hasbeen made in favour of some of the architectural parts of _Notre-Dame deParis_, but it has been admitted that this will not cover "Ceci TueraCela" nor much else. For the presence of the history of the sewers ofParis in _Les Miserables_ and any number of other things; for not alittle of the first volume of _Les Travailleurs_ itself; for about half,if not more, of _L'Homme Qui Rit_, starting from Ursus's Black-book offancy pleasances, palaces, and estates belonging to the fellow-peers ofLord Linnaeus Clancharlie and Hunkerville; for not a few chapters even of_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, there is no excuse at all. They are simplyrepulsive or at least unwelcome "pledgets" of unsucculent matter stuckinto the body of fiction, as (but with how different results!) _lardons_or pistachios or truffles are stuck into another kind of composition.
It is partly, but not wholly, due to this deplorable habit of irrelevantdivagation that Hugo will never allow his stories to "march" (at leastto begin with marching),[122] _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ being here the onlyexception among the longer romances, for even _Les Travailleurs de laMer_ never gets into stride till nearly the whole of the first volume ispassed. But the habit, however great a nuisance it may be to the reader,is of some interest to the student and the historian, for the veryreason that it does not seem to be wholly an outcome of the other habitof digression. It would thus be, in part at least, a survival of thatodd old "inability to begin" which we noticed several times in the lastvolume, aggravated by the irrepressible wilfulness of the writer, and byhis determination not to do like other people, who _had_ by this timemostly got over the difficulty.
If any further "dull moral" is wanted it may be the obvious lesson thatoverpowering popularity of a particular form is sometimes a misfortune,as that of allegory was in the Middle Ages and that of didactics in theeighteenth century. If it had not been almost incumbent on any Frenchmanwho aimed at achieving popularity in the mid-nineteenth century toattempt the novel, it is not very likely that Hugo would have attemptedit. It may be doubted whether we should have lost any of the bestthings--we should only have had them in the compacter and higher shapeof more _Orientales_, more _Chants du Crepuscule_, more _Legendes_, andso forth. We should have lost the easily losable laugh over bug-pipe and
wapentake--for though Hugo sometimes _thought_ sillily in verse he didnot often let silliness touch his expression in the more majesticalharmony--and we should have been spared an immensely greater body ofmatter which now provokes a yawn or a sigh.
This is, it may be said, after all a question of taste. Perhaps. But itcan hardly be denied by any critical student of fiction that whileHugo's novel-work has added much splendid matter to literature, it haspractically nowhere advanced, nor even satisfactorily exemplified, theart of the novel. It is here as an exception--marvellous, magnificent,and as such to be fully treated; actually an honour to the art of whichit discards the requirements, but an exception merely and one whichproves, inasmuch as it justifies, the cautions it defies.[123]
FOOTNOTES:
[93] Mr. Swinburne's magnificent paeans are "vatical" certainly, butscarcely critical, save now and then. Mr. Stevenson wrote on theRomances, but not on "the whole."
[94] See note in Vol. I. p. 472 of this _History_, and in the presentvolume, _sup._ p. 40.
[95] These crazes were not in origin, though they probably were ininfluence, political: Hugo held more than one of them while he was stilla Royalist.
[96] She is of course not really Spanish or a gipsy, but is presented assuch at first.
[97] Stated in the Preface to _Cromwell_, the critical division of hisfourfold attack on neo-Classicism, as _Les Orientales_ were thepoetical, _Hernani_ was the dramatic, and _Notre-Dame_ itself theprose-narrative.
[98] It is scarcely excessive to say that this mixture of wilful temperand unbridled theorising was the Saturnian influence, or the "infortuneof Mart," in Hugo's horoscope throughout.
[99] Unless anybody chooses to say that the gallows and the guillotineare Hugo's monsters here.
[100] The failure of the riskiest and most important scene of the whole(where her surrender of herself to Phoebus is counteracted by Frollo'sstabbing the soldier, the act itself leading to Esmeralda'sincarceration) is glaring.
[101] _Le Beau Pecopin_ in his _Rhine_-book is, of course, fairlysubstantial in one sense, but it is only an episode or inset-tale insomething else, which is neither novel or romance.
[102] It must be four or five times the length of Scott's average, morethan twice that of the longest books with which Dickens and Thackerayused to occupy nearly two years in monthly instalments, and very nearly,if not quite, that of Dumas' longest and most "spun-out" achievements in_Monte Cristo_, the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_ and _La Comtesse de Charny_.
[103] I am not forgetting or contradicting what was said above (page 26)of Rene. But Rene _does_ very little except when he kills theshe-beavers; Marius is always doing something, and doing it offensively.
[104] The "Je ne sais pas lire" argument has more than once suggested tome a certain historical comparison. There have probably never been inall history two more abominable scoundrels for cold-blooded cruelty, theworst of all vices, than Eccelino da Romano and the late Mr. Broadhead,patron saint and great exemplar of Trade-Unionism. Broadhead couldcertainly read. Could Ezzelin? I do not know. But if he could not, theHugonic belief in the efficacy of reading is not strongly supported. Ifhe could, it is definitely damaged.
[105] _Vide_ what is said below on _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_.
[106] After the lapse of more than half a century some readers may haveforgotten, and more may never have heard, the anecdote connected withthis. It was rashly and somewhat foolishly pointed out to thepoet-romancer himself that the air of "Bonny Dundee" was the veryreverse of melancholy, and that he must have mistaken the name. Hisreply was the most categoric declaration possible of his generalattitude, in such cases, "Et moi, je l'appelle 'Bonny Dundee.'" _Victorlocutus est: causa finita est_ (he liked tags of not recondite Latinhimself). And the leading case governs those of the bug-pipe and the(later) wapentake and _justicier-quorum_, and all the other wondrousthings of which but a few can be mentioned here.
[107] I do not know whether any one has ever attempted to estimate hisactual debt to Scott. There are better classics of inquiry, but in theclass many worse subjects.
[108] In the opening scene she is something worse. If her writing"Gilliatt" in the snow had been a sort of rustic challenge of the "malome petit, et fugit ad salices" kind, there might have been something(not much) to say for her. But she did not know Gilliatt; she did notwant to know him; and the proceeding was either mere silly childishness,or else one of those pieces of bad taste of which her great creator wasunluckily by no means incapable.
[109] I use this adjective in no contumelious sense, and certainly notbecause I have lived in Guernsey and only visited Jersey. To theimpartial denizen of either, the rivalry of the two is as amusing as isthat of Edinburgh and Glasgow, of Liverpool and Manchester, or ofBradford and Leeds. But, at any rate at the time of which I am speaking,Jersey was much more haunted by outsiders (in several senses of thatword) than Guernsey. Residents--whether for the purposes unblushinglyavowed by that sometime favourite of the stage, Mr. Eccles, or for thereasons less horrifying to the United Kingdom Alliance--found themselvesmore at home in "Caesarea" than in "Sarnia," and the "five-pounder," asthe summer tripper was despiteously called by natives, liked to go asfar as he could for his money, and found St. Helier's "livelier" thanSt. Peter Port.
[110] Really good wines were proportionally cheap; but the little islewas not quite so good at beer, except some remarkable old ale, which onesmall brewery had ventured on, and which my friends of the 22nd Regimentdiscovered and (very wisely) drank up.--It may surprise honest fanaticsand annoy others to hear that, despite the cheapness and abundance oftheir bugbear, there was no serious crime of any kind in Guernsey duringthe six years I knew it, and no disorder worth speaking of, even amongsailors and newly arrived troops.
[111] The shape of the island; the position of its only "residential"town of any size in the middle of one of the coasts, so that the roadsspread fan-wise from it; the absence of any large flat space except inthe northern parish of "The Vale"; the geological formation which tends,as in Devonshire, to sink the roads into deep and sometimes "water"lanes; lastly, perhaps, the extreme subdivision of property, whichmultiplies the ways of communication--these things contribute to this"_pedestrian_-paradise" character. There are many places where, withplenty of good walking "objectives," you can get to none of them withouta disgusting repetition of the same initial grind. In Guernsey, exceptas regards the sea, which never wearies, there is no such even partialmonotony.
[112] It is well known that even among great writers this habit ofduplication is often, though very far from always, present. Hugo isspecially liable to it. The oddest example I remember is that theapproach to the Dutch ship at the end of _L'Homme Qui Rit_ reproduces onthe Thames almost exactly the details of the iron gate of the sewers onthe Seine, where Thenardier treacherously exposes Valjean to theclutches of Javert, in _Les Miserables_, though of course the use madeof it is quite different.
[113] It must be remembered that this also belongs to the ChannelIslands division: and the Angel of the Sea has still some part in it.
[114] Those of _Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ have enraged pedants andamused the elect for a century. But I do not remember much notice beingtaken of that jump of half a millennium and one year more in _TheTalisman_, where Count Henry of Champagne "smiles like a sparklinggoblet of his own wine." This was in 1192, while the ever-blessed DomPerignon did not make champagne "sparkle" till 1693. Idolatry maysuggest that "sparkling" is a perpetual epithet of wine; but I fear thiswill not do.
[115] _Substitue_ means "entailed" in technical French. But I know noinstance of this kind of "contingent remainder" in England.
[116] A compound (as Victor himself might suggest) of "Hardyknut" and"Sine qua non"? Or "Hardbake"?
[117] He has been found out through the agency of one "Barkilphedro"(Barkis-Phaedrus?), an Irishman of familiar sept, who is "Decanter ofthe Bottles of the Sea," and who finds, in one of his trovers, aderelict gourd of confession thrown overboard by the Comprachicos whenwrecked (in another ha
lf-volume earlier) all over the Channel fromPortland to Alderney.
[118] Perhaps there is no more conspicuous instance of irritatingfutility in this way than the famous [Greek: anagke] and [Greek:anagneia] of _Notre-Dame_. Of course anybody who knows no Greek can seethat the first four letters of the two words are the same. But anybodywho knows some Greek knows that the similarity is purely _literal_, suchas exists between "Chateaubriand" and "Chat Botte" and that the [Greek:an] has a different origin in the two cases. Moreover, [Greek:anagneia], "uncleanness," is about the last word one would choose toexpress the _liaison_ of thought--"The dread constraint of physicalpassion" or "Lust is Fate"--which Hugo wishes to indicate. It is a merejingle, suggestive of a schoolboy turning over the dictionary.
[119] That the only person at all likely to be "name-father" of thisname was not born till a considerable time after his name-child's deathwould perhaps be worth remarking in another writer. In Hugo it hardlycounts.
[120] Let me do even _them_ one justice in this connection. They did notsuppose that the only way to make people get up earlier was to makethese people's clocks and watches tell lies.
[121] There is a smaller point which might be taken up. Undoubtedlythere were many double traitors on both sides in the other Great War.But, like all their kind, they had a knack for being found out. Dumaswould, I think, have given us something satisfactory as to the"aristocrat" at Jersey who betrayed the _Claymore_ to the Revolutionaryauthorities.
[122] It is impossible, with him, not to think of Baudelaire's greatline in _L'Albatros_ (which some may have read even before _LesTravailleurs_)--
"Ses ailes de geant l'empechent de _marcher_,"
though the sense is not absolutely coextensive.
[123] If I have spoken above "so that the Congregation be therebyoffended," let me point out that there is no other way of dealing withthe subject critically, except perhaps by leaving a page blank save forsuch words, in the middle of it, as "Victor Hugo is Victor Hugo; and heis for each reader to take or to leave." _He_ would, I think, haverather liked this; _I_ should not, as a person, dislike it; but I fearit might not suit with my duty as a critic and a historian.
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