POEMS ON RELIGION.
Victor Hugo's attitude on religion was the subject of frequent comment.
It is now known that so far from being a sceptic, as was frequently
declared, he had a firm belief in God and immortality. When a
rationalist on one occasion said to him that though he himself had a dim
belief in immortality, he doubted whether the outcasts of society could
have any belief in their own immortality, the poet replied, 'Perhaps
they believe in it more than you do.'
Arsene Houssaye has left an interesting sketch of certain religious
confidences with which Hugo favoured him some years before his last
illness. 'I am conscious within myself of the certainty of a future
life,' the poet expressly said. 'The nearer I approach my end the
clearer do I hear the immortal symphonies of worlds that call me to
themselves. For half a century I have been outpouring my volumes of
thought in prose and in verse, in history, philosophy, drama, romance,
ode, and ballad, yet I appear to myself not to have said a thousandth
part of what is within me; and when I am laid in the tomb I shall not
reckon that my life is finished; the grave is not a _cul-de-sac_, it is
an avenue; death is the sublime prolongation of life, not its dreary
finish; it closes in the twilight, it opens in the dawn. My work is only
begun; I yearn for it to become brighter and nobler; and this craving
for the infinite demonstrates that there is an infinity.' He denied that
there were any occult forces responsible for the creation of man and
nature; there was a luminous force, and that was God. Continuing the
thought as to his own future existence, he added, 'I am nothing, a
passing echo, an evanescent cloud; but let me only live on through my
future existences, let me continue the work I have begun, let me
surmount the perils, the passions, the agonies, that age after age may
be before me, and who shall tell whether I may not rise to have a place
in the council-chamber of the Ruler that controls all, and whom we own
as God?'
If his creed had not many doctrines, it was at least very clear upon
those which he did hold. He set against the God of the Papists, as he
conceived him, another being whom he regarded as the personification of
the true, the just, and the beautiful, who made his influence everywhere
felt, but nowhere more deeply or more permanently than in the human
conscience. In April, 1878, Hugo gave a concrete form to some of his
religious ideas in his poem entitled _Le Pape_. It represented the
Pope--though not the existing or any particular Pontiff--as having a
long dream. He finds himself treading in the steps of Christ, mixing
with and succouring the poor and the afflicted, eschewing all pomp,
interposing between two hostile armies and preventing bloodshed, saving
the malefactor from the scaffold, and finally leaving Rome for
Jerusalem. All this, of course, is a fearful mistake; his Holiness wakes
up, declares that he has had a frightful dream, and clings to the
Syllabus and worldly state more firmly than ever. The contrast was very
sharply drawn between the good, ideal pastor, and the worldly and
sensual father too often met with. Hugo's evolvement of his own ideas
led to much controversy, and his book was severely attacked. By way of
reply he issued _La Pitie Supreme_. For those who sinned through
ignorance and defective education, he inculcated pity and forgiveness;
and the work generally furnished but another illustration to many which
had gone before of the liberality of his mind, and his support of the
doctrine of universal toleration. At a still later date, in his _L'Ane_,
he once more denounced false teachers. Desiring, like Rabelais, to lash
his kind, the poet put his denunciations into the mouth of an ass, which
animal was taken to be the type of unsophisticated man. In the pages of
this satire, observed Louis Ulbach, 'the poet at the climax of his life,
dazzled though he is by the nearness of the dawn beyond, glances back at
those whom he has left behind, addresses them with raillery keen enough
to stimulate them, but not stern enough to discourage them, and from the
standpoint of his severity, puts a fool's cap upon all false science,
false wisdom, and false piety.' Nevertheless, the work was regarded as a
failure, in spite of its scintillations of genius, the satiric power of
Victor Hugo being one rather of fierce denunciation than that which
consists in the perception of the incongruous in humanity.
Another work in which Hugo endeavoured to place the false and the true
in religion side by side, was his _Religions et Religion_, issued in
1880. 'This book,' said the author in a prefatory note, 'was commenced
in 1870, and completed in 1880. The year 1870 gave infallibility to the
Papacy, and Sedan to the Empire. What is the year 1880 to bring forth?'
_Religions et Religion_ was an attack not only upon various systems of
religion, but also upon those who attack all religion. The writer made
an assault upon the system of Milton, and established a system of
religion of his own, which in its catholicity should embrace all spirits
who love the good. The work was regarded as part of the great epic _Le
Fin de Satan_, which had been foreshadowed many years before. But, as
one of his critics remarked, if Hugo had fallen into the mistake of
thinking that this book was not only a poem full of the loveliest
sayings and the noblest aspirations, but a valuable treatise on theology
and philosophy, it was but a mistake which he had been making ever since
he began to write. Hugo's new poem 'is an emphatic, not to say a
violent, answer to two different systems of poetic religion, each of
which is itself at war with the other--the system of Dante and the
system of Milton. Without Hell, Dante would never have been able to
write a line of the Inferno; and without the Devil, Milton would have
been in a condition equally forlorn. Yet M. Hugo's book is an attack
upon both these venerable beliefs, and also upon the positivists who are
trying to undermine them.' Hugo, in short, gave his support to the
unconscious humourist who complained of _Paradise Lost_ that it proved
nothing.
As a polemic in verse, the poet was not very successful; but no one
would turn to the poems of Victor Hugo in order to find the successful
controversial theologian. No doubt he made the mistake of believing that
he was eminently fitted for grappling with abstruse religious theories,
and he was not the first literary genius who has done so. But if he
failed in polemics in the work at which I have just glanced, there still
remained, in all his energy and fulness, Hugo the poet and the
philanthropist.