PUBLIC ADDRESSES, ETC.
Victor Hugo was unquestionably a great orator, or rather I ought perhaps
to say he exhibited the powers of a great orator on special occasions.
If eloquence is to be measured by the effect which it has upon the
audience, he had the electrical force of the orator in no small degree;
for in connection with certain persons and topics he was successful in
enkindling an enthusiasm in his hearers which was almost unparalleled.
But his oratory was not of that even kind which, if it never passes
beyond a given elevation, never sinks on the other hand into bathos or
commonplace. Hugo had a wonderful gift of language, and he was an orator
when his heart was thrown into his subject, and he pressed into its
service all the wealth of rhetoric he had at command. Nevertheless, some
of his public utterances were far from being successful--a result due
in some instances to extravagance of language and quixotism of idea, and
in others to the absence of that 'sweet reasonableness' which
dispassionately weighs and considers the opinions of others, and judges
righteous judgment.
At the celebration of the Voltaire centenary in Paris in May, 1878, Hugo
was the chief speaker. The great meeting was held in the Gaite Theatre,
which was crowded to suffocation. One who was present stated that while
all the speakers at the demonstration were warmly applauded, it was only
when Victor Hugo arose that the full tempest of acclamation burst forth.
'Can a grander, a more striking, a more exaggerated scene be conceived
than this association of Victor Hugo and Voltaire, of the most eloquent
and the most touching of French orators exhausting his mines of highly
coloured epithets and colossal antitheses on the ironical head of
Voltaire? A report of his speech does not suffice; the white head and
apostle's beard, the inspired eye, the solemn voice, rolling as if it
would sound in the ears of posterity; the involuntarily haughty attitude
in vain striving to seem modest; the imperturbable seriousness with
which he piles antithesis upon antithesis--all this must be realized.'
Hugo was enthusiastically cheered on taking the chair. Waving his arm he
exclaimed, '_Vive la Republique!_'--a cry which was then taken up with
equal fervour by every person in the audience. After the other speakers
had been heard, the distinguished chairman delivered his oration. He
rapidly sketched the work accomplished by Voltaire, and concluded thus:
'Alas! the present moment, worthy as it is of admiration and respect,
has still its dark side. There are still clouds on the horizon; the
tragedy of peoples is not played out; war still raises its head over
this august festival of peace; princes for two years have persisted in a
fatal misunderstanding; their discord is an obstacle to our concord, and
they are ill-inspired in condemning us to witness the contrast. This
contrast brings us back to Voltaire. Amid these threatening events let
us be more peaceful than ever. Let us bow before this great dead, this
great living spirit. Let us bend before the venerated sepulchre. Let us
ask counsel of him whose life, useful to men, expired a hundred years
ago, but whose work is immortal. Let us ask counsel of other mighty
thinkers and auxiliaries of this glorious Voltaire--of Jean Jacques,
Diderot, Montesquieu. Let us stop the shedding of human blood. Enough,
despots. Barbarism still exists. Let philosophy protest. Let the
eighteenth century succour the nineteenth. The philosophers, our
predecessors, are the apostles of truth. Let us invoke these illustrious
phantoms that, face to face with monarchies thinking of war, they may
proclaim the right of man to life, the right of conscience to liberty,
the sovereignty of reason, the sacredness of labour, the blessedness of
peace. And as night issues from thrones, let light emanate from the
tombs.' There are probably no two great French writers who present more
marked points of contrast than Voltaire and Victor Hugo; yet the latter,
not only in praising his predecessor, but on many other occasions,
gloried in being grandly inconsistent if he could thereby, as he
believed, advance the interests of humanity.
Victor Hugo presided at the International Literary Congress held in
Paris in June, 1878. His speech on that occasion, though by no means
confined to business details, was accepted by the Congress as forming
the basis of its decisions. The speaker urged that a book once published
becomes in part the property of society, and that after its author's
death his family have no right to prevent its reissue. He held that a
publisher should be required to declare the cost and the selling price
of any book he intended to bring out; that the author's heirs should be
entitled to 5 or 10 per cent. of the profit, and that in default of
heirs the profit should revert to the State, to be applied to the
encouragement of young writers.
Passing to more general questions, and dwelling on the memorableness of
the year 1878, Hugo defined the Exhibition as the alliance of industry,
the Voltaire Centenary as the alliance of philosophy, and the Congress
then sitting as the alliance of literature. 'Industry seeks the useful,
philosophy seeks the true, literature seeks the beautiful--the triple
aim of all human forces.' He welcomed the foreign delegates as the
ambassadors of the human mind, citizens of a universal city, the
constituent assembly of literature. Peoples, he remarked, were estimated
by their literature; Greece, small in territory, thereby earning
greatness, the name of England suggesting that of Shakespeare, and
France being at a certain period personified in Voltaire. He next showed
that copyright was in the interest of the public, by securing the
independence of the writer; and, glancing at the former dependent
position of men of letters, he remarked that paternal government
resulted in this--the people without bread and Corneille without a sou.
Deriding the alleged dangerousness of books, and urging the real dangers
of ignorance, he described schools as the luminous points of
civilization. He ridiculed as harmless archaeological curiosities those
who wished mankind to be kept in perpetual leading-strings, and who
anathematized 1789, liberty of conscience, free speech, and a free
tribune. He exhorted men of letters to recognise as their mission
conciliation for ideas and reconciliation for men. They should war
against war. 'Love one another' signified universal disarmament, the
restoration to health of the human race, the true redemption of mankind.
An enemy was better disarmed by offering him your hand than by shaking
your fist. In lieu of _Delenda est Carthago_, he proposed the
destruction of hatred, which was best effected by pardon. After showing
her industry and hospitality, France should show her clemency, for a
festival should be fraternal, and a festival which did not forgive
somebody was not a real festival. The symbol of public joy was the
Amnesty, and let this be the crowning of the Paris Exhibition.
In the August following this Congress, a great working-men's conference
was held in the French capital in favour of International Arbitration.
Victor Hugo being unable to attend and preside at the gathering, as
originally announced, sent a communication expressing his approbation of
the objects of the meeting. 'I demand what you demand,' he wrote. 'I
want what you want. Our alliance is the commencement of unity. Let us be
calm; without us, Governments attempt something, but nothing of what
they try to do will succeed against your decision, against your liberty,
against your sovereignty. Look on at what they do without uneasiness,
always with serenity, sometimes with a smile. The supreme future is with
you. All that is done, even against you, will serve you. Continue to
march, labour, and think. You are a single people; Europe and you want a
single thing--peace.' Two or three months subsequent to this meeting,
the English Working-men's Peace Association waited upon Victor Hugo in
Paris, and presented him with an address, magnificently illuminated and
framed, as a token of admiration for the services he had rendered to the
cause of humanity and peace. In reply, Hugo said: 'As long as I live I
shall oppose war, and defend the cause which is dear and common to us
all--the cause of labour and peace.'
As honorary president of a secular education congress in 1879, Victor
Hugo thus addressed that body: 'Youth is the future. You teach youth,
you prepare the future. This preparation is useful, this teaching is
necessary to make the man of to-morrow. The man of to-morrow is the
universal Republic. The Republic is unity, harmony, light, industry,
creating comfort; it is the abolition of conflicts between man and man,
nation and nation, the abolition of the law of death, and establishment
of the law of life. The time of sanguinary and terrible revolutionary
necessities is past. For what remains to be done the unconquerable law
of progress suffices. Great battles we have still to fight--battles the
evident necessity of which does not disturb the serenity of thinkers;
battles in which revolutionary energy will equal monarchical obstinacy;
battles in which force joined with right will overthrow violence allied
with usurpation--superb, glorious, enthusiastic, decisive battles, the
issue of which is not doubtful, and which will be the Hastings and the
Austerlitz of humanity. Citizens, the time of the dissolution of the old
world has arrived. The old despotisms are condemned by the Providential
law. Every day which passes buries them still deeper in annihilation.
The Republic is the future.'
Another address, in which Hugo expounded his views of the future of
humanity, of labour and progress, etc., was delivered at Chateau d'Eau,
on behalf of the Workmen's Congress at Marseilles. Differentiating the
achievements of the centuries, he remarked that 'for four hundred years
the human race has not made a step but what has left its plain vestige
behind. We enter now upon great centuries. The sixteenth century will be
known as the age of painters; the seventeenth will be termed the age of
writers; the eighteenth, the age of philosophers; the nineteenth, the
age of apostles and prophets. To satisfy the nineteenth century it is
necessary to be the painter of the sixteenth, the writer of the
seventeenth, the philosopher of the eighteenth; and it is also
necessary, like Louis Blanc, to have the innate and holy love of
humanity which constitutes an apostolate, and opens up a prophetic vista
into the future. In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold
will be dead, animosity will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas
will be dead; but man will live. For all there will be but one
country--that country the whole earth; for all there will be but one
hope--that hope the whole heaven.'
It will be seen that there was a sweeping breadth and magnificence about
Victor Hugo's prophecies for the twentieth century. But that epoch is so
near that we may well doubt whether the seer's extensive programme will
so speedily be realized. Still, the prophecy is lofty, generous, noble,
and I will not attempt to destroy the horoscope. Passing on to the great
question of the day, that of labour, the orator observed: 'The political
question is solved. The Republic is made, and nothing can unmake it. The
social question remains; terrible as it is, it is quite simple; it is a
question between those who have, and those who have not. The latter of
these two classes must disappear, and for this there is work enough.
Think a moment! Man is beginning to be master of the earth. If you want
to cut through an isthmus, you have Lesseps; if you want to create a
sea, you have Roudaire. Look you; there is a people and there is a
world; and yet the people have no inheritance, and the world is a
desert. Give them to each other, and you make them happy at once.
Astonish the universe by heroic deeds that are better than wars. Does
the world want conquering? No, it is yours already; it is the property
of civilization; it is already waiting for you; no one disputes your
title. Go on, then, and colonize.'
This is no doubt grand, but it is vague. However, the men of highest
aspiration have frequently proved themselves ill-fitted for the
practical development of their own theories. It is the penalty which the
brain has to pay for being stronger than the hand that it must often
call in the services and co-operation of the latter. Hugo was
exceedingly happy in dealing with cavillers at material progress. He
showed that those who make the worst mistakes are those who ought to be
the least mistaken. 'Forty-five years ago M. Thiers declared that the
railway would be a mere toy between Paris and St. Germain; another
distinguished man, M. Pouillet, confidently predicted that the apparatus
of the electric telegraph would be consigned to a cabinet of
curiosities. And yet these two playthings have changed the course of the
world. Have faith, then; and let us realize our equality as citizens,
our fraternity as men, our liberty in intellectual power. Let us love
not only those who love us, but those who love us not. Let us learn to
wish to benefit all men. Then everything will be changed; truth will
reveal itself; the beautiful will arise; the supreme law will be
fulfilled, and the world shall enter upon a perpetual fete-day. I say,
therefore, have faith! Look down at your feet, and you see the insect
moving in the grass; look upwards, and you will see the star resplendent
in the firmament: yet what are they doing? They are both at their work;
the insect is doing its work upon the ground, and the star is doing its
work in the sky. It is an infinite distance that separates them, and yet
while it separates, unites. They follow their law. And why should not
their law be ours? Man, too, has to submit to universal force, and
inasmuch as he submits in body and in soul, he submits doubly. His hand
grasps the earth, but his soul embraces heaven; like the insect he is a
thing of dust, but like the star he partakes of the empyrean. He labours
and he thinks. Labour is life, and thought is light!'
Some idea of Victor Hugo's social and humanitarian ideas may be gained
from these addresses. In the course of a conversation with M. Barbou,
however, he supplemented these views and theories by explicit statements
upon various questions. France, he said, was in possession of a
_bourgeoise_ Republic, which was not an ideal one, but which would
undergo a slow and gradual transformation. He regarded himself and his
contemporaries as having been pioneers and monitors, whose advice was
worth obtaining, because they had gained their knowledge by experience,
having lived through the struggles of the past; but whose theories could
not be put into practice by themselves. The future solution of the
social question belonged to younger men, and to the twentieth century.
That solution, he maintained, would be found in nothing less than the
universal spread of instruction; it would follow the formation of
schools where salutary knowledge should be imparted. By educating the
child they would endow the man, and when that had been accomplished,
society might proceed to exercise severe repression upon anyone who
resisted what was right, because he would have been already so trained
that he could not plead ignorance in his own behalf.
But Hugo was careful to add that he did not expect a Utopia to follow
this universal dissemination of knowledge. When man had proceeded well
on the path of advancement, he would require land to cultivate. He would
go out and colonize, and the whole interior of Africa was destined, he
believed, before long to be conquered by civilization. Frontiers would
disappear, for the idea of fraternity was making its way throughout the
world. As the whole earth belonged to man, men must go forth and reclaim
it. For the whole race he saw a brighter future, and his watchwords in
this respect would seem to have been--Labour, progress, peace,
happiness, and enlightenment.