GENIUS AND CHARACTERISTICS.
Victor Hugo, though simple in nature, was many-sided in intellect. As I
approach the conclusion of my task, I feel how truly great the sum of
this man's work was, notwithstanding the flaws which disfigured it. And
in proportion to its greatness is the difficulty of appraising, or even
of approximately appraising, its value. This task belongs to a writer or
writers yet unborn; for neither in his own nor even in the next
generation does such a man of genius as Hugo--an author _sui generis_,
one utterly unlike all others--assume his distinctive niche in the
Walhalla of literature. But there are some suggestions of a general
character which may be offered respecting his work, and these will
naturally fall under four headings--political, social, moral or
religious, and literary.
It has been said that Hugo failed in politics; but as he never posed
for being a practical politician, the charge does not possess the
significance that would have attached to it had he come forward as a
political saviour--of whom France has had so many. For the sinuosities
and compromises of party politics, however wise and necessary at times,
he had no aptitude. He had no political creed; or, if he had, it might
be summed up in one article. He individualized humanity, and declared it
to be miserable. The whole of his creed, therefore, consisted in the
destruction of monopolies and abuses, and the uplifting of the masses.
But he was certainly unfitted for the debates of such a body as the
French Chamber, and it was probably one of the best things he ever did
in his life when he shook the dust from under his feet, and bade the
Assembly an indignant farewell. Yet he was more successful than scores
of other politicians who have set up a claim to superior political
wisdom. The French Chamber has been too frequently suggestive of a
_maison d'alienes_. The modern Gallic politician is about the most
impulsive creature of which we have any knowledge. He lacks the
phlegmatic nature of the German and the logical hardheadedness of the
Briton. He is hypersensitive and emotional, not argumentative and
judicial. He only knows that he has ideas, and that every man who
opposes those ideas is an enemy of the human species, and must be put
out of the way. This was proved again and again in that terrible year of
Revolution, 1793, when the friends of Reason sent each other to the
block as they successively gained the upper hand. One would think that
this was a sufficient baptism of blood; but it was not so; the tale has
been renewed at intervals, and the communistic horrors of 1871 added
another fearful page to the grim catalogue. French politics are a
succession of storms; the lightning breaks, the thunder rolls, and the
deluge follows; then, for a time, the sky clears and the sun shines
brilliantly: but the clouds return after the rain; the barometer becomes
demoralized; and electrical disturbance is once more the order of the
day.
But in the intervals of sanity in the French political world--I use the
word 'sanity' in its larger sense--great and noble work is done, work
worthy of the world's admiration. When the French mind conceives
projects of amelioration, it conceives them with boldness and
generosity. In this lies the safety-valve of the people, and also the
best hope for the future of the race. Men like Hugo are the men to
suggest and to push forward these great conceptions for the national
welfare. They may have few political principles as such, but the
political sympathies of such a man as Victor Hugo have more force and
weight than the most orthodox and irreproachable doctrines of a hundred
smaller men. While politicians may be struggling for unimportant
details, men of great sympathies are mighty to the moving of mountains.
As a practical politician, then, let it be frankly admitted that Hugo
was a failure; that in his speeches he was frequently rhapsodical; and
that he could take no initiative in practical legislation. All these are
matters in which lesser intellects might, could, should, would, and do
succeed. But in that higher region where the eternal principles of
justice come into play, where sublime benevolence holds her seat, where
by a quick and living sympathy universal humanity is made to feel a
universal brotherhood, then Victor Hugo had a political illumination to
which none other of his contemporaries could lay claim.
From the political to the social is but a step, and that a natural one.
It cannot be said of Hugo that he was liberal in his social theories and
aristocratic in his practice. He had a courteousness of nature that made
him equally esteemed, and had in reverence, by such an one as a king or
an emperor, and the meanest of his compatriots who called upon him for
advice or aid. If he endeavoured to teach the higher social life to
others, he at least led the way by setting before himself only such aims
as were noble and humane. He was the very soul of truth in all his
relations, and if he were not the equal of Rousseau as a great social
teacher, he far transcended the author of the _Contrat Social_ in his
irreproachable life and his deep personal sympathies. One writer has
said that 'Victor Hugo's own strongest influence is but a breath of the
influence of Rousseau.' This is a deliverance as unhappy as it is
dogmatic. There is neither necessity nor appositeness in placing the two
writers in such juxtaposition. France before Rousseau was not the France
of Victor Hugo; the former had work of an originative character to do in
the social sphere, as Victor Hugo had in that of literature. But while
Hugo was not the creator of a new social system, one of the primary
causes of his influence was of a social character. His intense and
genuine sympathy with the humble and the poor and the suffering gave him
a place in the affection of thousands who knew little of social
theories. The key, indeed, to Hugo's personal character and influence,
as distinguished from the literary, was that human sympathy which led to
his untiring efforts to protect the weak against the strong. He would
have no parleying with oppression and violence, and notwithstanding his
passionateness he really exercised a salutary and calming influence in
the main, and one which told for goodness. To him the orphan's rags, the
shame of woman, and the anguish of the toiler never appealed in vain. I
can imagine him doing what sturdy old Samuel Johnson did when he rescued
the outcast woman in the Strand, and himself bore her away to a place of
safety. Hugo had a clear enough insight into those social reforms which
are still a necessity even in this enlightened age. He did not believe
in the perfection of the poor, though he did believe in the absolute
imperfection of kings and priests. By setting the latter in the full
blaze of publicity, he believed he was doing a great social work, and
helping on that golden age of happiness for which he laboured. In his
earnestness and enthusiasm, he might commit, and doubtless did commit,
errors of judgment; but then without these very qualities of earnestness
and enthusiasm all the great things associated with his name could have
had no birth. Where we gain much, we can easily forgive a little. Victor
Hugo had a conscience, and as a man amongst men, pleading for men, he
threw it all into his social work. In Jean Valjean he will never cease
to plead, though he himself is dead. He has given to the sufferings of
humanity a voice which will continue to speak in tones of pathos and of
sadness until the last of those sufferings and social wrongs shall have
passed away. Of many devastating spirits has the world been called upon
to say that they made a solitude and called it peace; but of Victor Hugo
we may say that he found humanity a bleak and cheerless wilderness, and
endeavoured to make it blossom as the rose.
Yet loving the world and humanity as he did, and feeling that the earth
was 'bound by gold chains about the feet of God,' Hugo, as I have
before said, has been claimed by some as an unbeliever. As though any
great poet who had come to years of discretion could be a materialist or
an infidel. So far from seeing no God in the universe, the poet as a
rule is God-intoxicated. I shall be reminded, perhaps, of Lucretius and
Shelley, but even these, as the exceptions, would only serve to prove
the rule. The Roman, however, was philosopher first, and poet
afterwards; while as for the atheism of Shelley, it was a spasmodic
experience due to a revolt against authority--not a deep-settled
conviction--and an experience out of which he was rapidly growing at the
time of his death. No poet of the first order has ever been an atheist,
and Victor Hugo was no exception to the rule. While discarding religious
systems, he was, in fact, profoundly religious. He never swerved in this
matter from the position he held in 1850, and which he thus explained at
the close of a speech on public instruction, 'God will be found at the
end of all. Let us not forget Him; and let us teach Him to all. There
would otherwise be no dignity in living, and it would be better to die
entirely. What soothes suffering, what sanctifies labour, what makes
man good, strong, wise, patient, benevolent, just, and at the same time
humble and great, worthy of liberty, is to have before him the perpetual
vision of a better world throwing its rays through the darkness of this
life. As regards myself, I believe profoundly in this better world, and
I declare it in this place to be the supreme certainty of my soul. I
wish, then, sincerely, or, to speak more strongly, I wish ardently for
religious instruction.' There is surely nothing vague or nebulous about
this. No man could express himself more clearly or emphatically if
directly questioned upon the great and momentous topics of God and
immortality. As a religious teacher, then, Hugo may be justly claimed;
for the whole weight of his name and influence was thrown upon the side
of those profound religious convictions which have been the consolation
of the human race, and which have knit man in indissoluble bonds to the
Divine.
What shall I say of Victor Hugo from the literary point of view? His
true glory is that he revivified French literature--created it afresh,
as it were--and was himself the best representative of its new
excellences. But this subject is so great that I scarcely dare venture
upon it. The poet carried out in his own person and work the advice he
once gave to some younger spirits, 'Act so that your conscience will
approve, and your works praise you; and, like those great unknown, you
will leave the world better than you found it; while, in virtue of the
justice which I believe to be the law of the universe, you will rise
high elsewhere in the scale of creation. A man is splendidly praised
when he is praised by his works.' Of course, he had his detractors--such
men as Charles Maurice, who believed himself to be a greater writer than
Victor Hugo, and who only perceived in _Hernani_ the effects of 'an
intolerable system of style destructive of all poesy.' The world has
since regulated this matter adversely to Maurice. Then there were others
not so unjust as this writer, but men who were so strongly impressed by
the defects of Hugo that they scarcely gave him due credit for his
manifest powers of literary expression. Heine and Amiel may be taken to
represent this type. To set against these are the Hugolatres, as
Theophile Gautier called them. In England the most enthusiastic admirer
of the poet is undoubtedly Mr. Swinburne, and from his numerous
tributes I may select one passage that is a kind of triumphant summary
of the rest. It is the last stanza from his New-Year Ode to Hugo, in the
_Midsummer Holiday, and other Poems_:
'Life, everlasting while the worlds endure,
Death, self-abased before a power more high,
Shall bear one witness, and their word stand sure,
That not till time be dead shall this man die.
Love, like a bird, comes loyal to his lure;
Fame flies before him, wingless else to fly.
A child's heart toward his kind is not more pure,
An eagle's toward the sun no lordlier eye.
Awe sweet as love and proud
As fame, though hushed and bowed,
Yearns toward him silent as his face goes by;
All crowns before his crown
Triumphantly bow down,
For pride that one more great than all draws nigh:
All souls applaud, all hearts acclaim,
One heart benign, one soul supreme, one conquering name.'
Making allowance for the fervour which a peculiarly fervid singer throws
into his admiration, there is much truth in this metrical tribute to the
literary and personal worth of the great poet. Substantially the same
high view of Hugo is held by Lord Tennyson and other literary men in
this country. But, with regard to criticism in particular, the writer
from whom I have just quoted was even happier still in his prose
comparisons. He remarked in his essay on _La Legende des Siecles_ that
'Hugo, for all his dramatic and narrative mastery of effect, will always
probably remind men rather of such poets as Dante or Isaiah than of such
poets as Sophocles or Shakspeare. We cannot, of course, imagine the
Florentine or the Hebrew endowed with his infinite variety of
sympathies, of interests, and of powers; but as little can we imagine in
the Athenian such height and depth of passion, in the Englishman such
unquenchable and sleepless fire of moral and prophetic faith. And hardly
in any one of these, though Shakspeare perhaps may be excepted, can we
recognise the same buoyant and childlike exultation in such things as
are the delight of a high-hearted child--in free glory of adventure and
ideal daring, in the triumph and rapture of reinless imagination, which
gives now and then some excess of godlike empire and superhuman kinship
to their hands whom his hands have created, and the lips whose life is
breathed into them from his own.' And again, 'In his love of light and
freedom, reason and justice, he not of Jerusalem, but of Athens; but in
the bent of his imagination, in the form and colour of his dreams, in
the scope and sweep of his wide-winged spiritual flight, he is nearer
akin to the great insurgent prophets of deliverance and restoration than
to any poet of Athens, except only their kinsman AEschylus.' Even the
most superficial reading of Hugo must leave an impression of magnificent
powers, of powers which in given circumstances might have produced many
and different forms of greatness. He had that exaltation of the
intellect and imagination, that lofty range of mental force, which
moulds centuries and moves the world.
But there are special literary qualities in Hugo which should be
noticed. First among them is his extreme conscientiousness. His natural
eloquence has sometimes been regarded as a snare to him, and yet in all
the details of his work he was rigidly exact, so far as the most minute
search could enable him to be. This was apparent in _Notre-Dame_, and
especially so in _Les Miserables_, where he devoted a volume to a
description of the battle of Waterloo, or Mont St. Jean, as the French
designate it. Before writing on this, he lived for some time in the
vicinity of the scene, and closely noted every item in connection with
the fight on that great battlefield. He wrote to a correspondent, 'I
have studied Waterloo profoundly; I am the only historian who has passed
two months on the field of battle.' This same feeling of
conscientiousness he also carried into other matters.
Another point which must be borne in mind in endeavouring to get at the
source of Victor Hugo's influence upon literature is the extent and
flexibility of his vocabulary. 'No one,' wrote M. Edmond About, shortly
after the appearance of _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, 'can fail to recognise
the power of Hugo's invention, the wealth of his ideas, the grandeur of
his oratorical flights, and that sublimity which is the mark of a man of
genius; but it is not known in Europe, nor even in France, that Victor
Hugo is the most learned of men of letters. He possesses an enormous
vocabulary. Out of the 27,000 words which the dictionary of the Academy
contains, and 6,000 of which have an individuality of their own, the
language of common life employs at most about a thousand. I could
mention illustrious publicists, popular dramatists, novelists, whose
books are much read and much liked, none of whom has more than 1,500
words at his disposal. Theophile Gautier, a studious man and a
dilettante, used to boast to his friends of possessing 3,000. "But," he
used to add, "I might toil to the last day of my life without attaining
to the vocabulary of Hugo." Genius apart, merely by his knowledge and
use of his mother-tongue, Hugo is the Rabelais of modern days. This is
the minor side of his glory, I allow; but critics ought not to neglect
it, or they will lead people to form false ideas.'
As to Hugo's human passion, it agonizes in almost every page of his
writings. He is nothing if not intensely human. And his weird and
powerful effects are heightened by that undertone, that minor chord of
music which he touches more often than the more jubilant major notes.
'The still sad music of humanity' is for ever beating in his ear, and he
translates its moving pathos into words. A mind of this stamp feels that
it can rarely turn to the humorous, and accordingly it is objected that
he has no sense of humour. The charge is true in the main, for the grim
humour of some of his situations may be better expressed by the epithet
of grotesque. He lacked just this saving sense of humour to place him
on a level with the greatest writers--or rather with those writers who
are greatest in the delineation of human nature and its passions; for we
have great writers, such as Dante and Milton, who are equal strangers
with Hugo to the humour which plays about the pages of Shakspeare.
But Hugo is pre-eminent in other qualities. He is firmly and
uncompromisingly veracious. No special correspondent who ever described
a battlefield could be more vivid and telling in his reminiscences.
There is the stamp of reality and truthfulness upon all that he has
written. With a gloomy magnificence of imagery he has described scenes
and events that are now immortal in literature. There is a grand
spontaneity in his utterances--an eloquence that springs from the heart
as much as from the head; while over all his poems and romances a noble
halo has been thrown which is the reflex of the innate nobility of the
man.
M. Emile Montegut has observed that Hugo is master of all that is
colossal and fearful. His imagination prefers sublime and terrible
spectacles: war, shipwreck, death, and primitive civilizations, with
their babels and convulsions--these attract him. How well, also, can he
imitate the plaintive cries of the ocean under the tempest which
torments it! Let him but paint a feudal ruin and you will be made to
feel all its imposing horrors; or a palace of Babylon, and you will
realize its massive splendours. He knows the secrets of the Sphinx, and
of the monstrous idols; he is familiar with the burning deserts of
Africa, and the horrors of hyperborean countries. In the domain of the
weird he is sovereign king, and no one will dispute with him. In other
fields he may have rivals, but in the region where the fantastic mingles
with the superhuman he has no equal.
But there is yet another side to Hugo which English critics have been
just to note--it is that concerned with his human creations. While he
may revel in the scenes which M. Montegut depicts, his heart is mostly
in his human creations. And with regard to his treatment of these, it
has been observed that the spectator is put outside the scene, and can
do nothing but look on breathless, while amid mist and cloud, with
illuminations fiery or genial, as the case may be, the great picture
rises before him, each actor detached and separate, some in boldest
relief, with a force which is often tremendous, and always forcibly
dramatic. The giant and the child are treated with equal care and
conscientiousness. Though first in massive effects, in deep broad lines,
Hugo is also first in the most delicate shades of tenderness. 'The babes
are as distinct as the heroes, every pearly curve of them tender and
sweet as rose-leaves, yet complete creatures, nowhere blurred or
indefinite, even in the most delicious softness of execution.' I quote
from a writer in _Blackwood_, who had the candour (not always displayed
by critics) to acknowledge that neither in France nor upon our own side
of the Channel is there a contemporary writer who can with any show of
justice be placed by the side of Victor Hugo. 'His genius is too
national, his workmanship too characteristic, to be contrasted with the
calmer inspiration of any Englishman.... His subject, the character he
is unfolding, possesses the writer: he throws himself upon it with a
glow and fervour of knowledge, with a certainty of delineation which is
not the mere exercise of practised powers, but with that something
indescribable, something indefinable, added to it, swelling in every
line, and transforming every paragraph. The workmanship is often
wonderful; but it is not the workmanship which strikes us most--it is
the abundant, often wild, sometimes unguided and undisciplined touch of
genius which inspires and expands and exaggerates and dilates the words
it is constrained to make use of--almost forcing a new meaning upon them
by way of fiery compulsion, to blazon its own meaning upon brain and
sense, whether they will or not. We know no literary work of the age--we
had almost said no intellectual work of any kind--so possessed and
quivering with this indescribable but extraordinary power.'
Hugo's works are undoubtedly in parts eccentric, and all too frequently
extravagant; but this is the nodding of Homer. His conceptions are
gigantic, and his figures truly dramatic; and these are the chief things
with which we have to do. In his superb excellences he stands alone--he
is unique. His table is weighted with intellectual sustenance; so great
is his abundance that a myriad writers could be fed from the crumbs
which fall from his table. From the literary point of view we must not
forget his chief distinction--that he effected the most brilliant and
complete revolution that has been witnessed in the history of French
literature. He changed the whole face of art in French poetry, and
destroyed for ever the poetry of conventionality. He has endowed his
native language with new nerve and sensibility; he has given it a fresh
and vital force, and the effects of his influence upon the nation and
literature of which he was the brightest ornament must be radical and
abiding.
One quality only, or so it seems to me, Hugo lacked to place him on a
level with the few great master spirits of the world. He wanted the
universality of Homer and Shakspeare. Whenever the _Iliad_ is read, the
power of that mighty story is felt, and methinks that had I been born of
any other than that English nationality of which I can boast, there is
still something in Shakspeare which would have moved me as no other
writer does. It is that secret power which draws all hearts to
him--'that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin,' and unites
all men in admiration of his singular genius. Hugo is great also, but he
has not that Shakspearean greatness which compels the tribute of all
other peoples, as it receives the willing homage of his own. His noble
poems and romances, with their sonorous eloquence, their rapid changes,
their varied effects, remind me of Nature on an autumn day. The gloomy
cloud gathers in the heavens, the lurid lightning darts from its bosom,
the thunder rolls and reverberates in the mountains; but anon the
tempest passes, the heavens open, and the glorious and beneficent sun
once more smiles upon the world. So Hugo is a mixture of thunder and
sunshine; of smiles and tears. No man had ever a greater
heart--Shakspeare, and few others only, a more expansive intellect. He
lacks the grand impartiality and the majestic calm of the author of
_Hamlet_; but his soul is filled with the same love of his species, and
it is large enough to embrace all the sons of humanity. His is a name
which any nation, might well hold in everlasting honour. Though his life
be ended, the splendour of his fame has but just begun; for the works
infused and moulded by his genius, and into which he threw so much of
passionate energy, of a noble idealism, of radiant hope, of moral
fervour, and of human sympathy, will assuredly confer upon him glory and
immortality.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.