Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera
un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous.
C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique,
réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans
Homère.—Victor Hugo on _Quentin Durward_.
VICTOR HUGO’S romances occupy an important position in the history of
literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been
carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite
in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things
have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it is
only in the last romance of all, _Quatre Vingt Treize_, that this
culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who
are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more justly
to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it
indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only the measure of
what is past. The movement is not arrested. That significant something
by which the work of such a man differs from that of his predecessors,
goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and more articulate and
cognisable. The same principle of growth that carried his first book
beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book beyond his
first. And just as the most imbecile production of any literary age
gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we have sought long and
vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an
author’s books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us at
last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them—of that spinal
marrow of significance that unites the work of his life into something
organic and rational. This is what has been done by _Quatre Vingt
Treize_ for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and, through them, for a
whole division of modern literature. We have here the legitimate
continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and hence, so far,
its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other in direction so
slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have only to produce them
to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in literary history; and
we shall best understand the importance of Victor Hugo’s romances if we
think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main lines of
literary tendency.
* * * * *
When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of
genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a master in
the art—I mean Henry Fielding—we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the first
moment, to state the difference that there is between these two.
Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller
of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and Scott
often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and
finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great
Scotchman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is
astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that
the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in
the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly
in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it
could utilise. The difference between these two men marks a great
enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an
extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a
trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely
comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the
technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps
been explained with any clearness.
To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of
conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. The
purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with
the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the
fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental
opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure
by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real
things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort
of realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of
which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes;
this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We
have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted to
paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and
plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done
in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real
sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices;
what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see a
woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval,
we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these
things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into any
artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal with;
and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations in time
and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of
painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a moment, but
to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the stage, almost
as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great restriction
is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his
actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain significant
dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of emotion, these
are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It is true that,
with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor
of the orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something of
sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the mark,
and do not come under the vivifying touch of his genius. When we turn to
romance, we find this no longer. Here nothing is reproduced to our
senses directly. Not only the main conception of the work, but the
scenery, the appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is
brought home to us, have been put through the crucible of another man’s
mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of written words.
With the loss of every degree of such realism as we have described, there
is for art a clear gain of liberty and largeness of competence. Thus,
painting, in which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat
board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is
preserved. It is by giving up these identities that art gains true
strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage.
Continuous narration is the flat board on to which the novelist throws
everything. And from this there results for him a great loss of
vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject;
so that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and
introduce all manner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was before
impossible. He can render just as easily the flourish of trumpets before
a victorious emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual
decay of forty years of a man’s life and the gesture of a passionate
moment. He finds himself equally unable, if he looks at it from one
point of view—equally able, if he looks at it from another point of
view—to reproduce a colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a
physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the
personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the
continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will
turn with it men’s lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon;
the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the
salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat
board—all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture of
continuous intelligent narration.
This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of
the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become
suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand,
although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic
in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is
not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a
regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with
regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard
the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that
Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel
possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop
them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them.
The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and
sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively
human interest. As for landscape, he was content to underline stage
directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire into
a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is
curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,
and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
soldiers into his hero’s way. It is most really important, however, to
remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of
character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent
introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding
tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of
his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed
on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force
in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown
to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the
spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally
and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott’s instinct, the
instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him otherwise;
and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a
comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manœuvre,
and great hills pile themselves upon each other’s shoulders. Fielding’s
characters were always great to the full stature of a perfectly arbitrary
will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense of the subtle influences
that moderate and qualify a man’s personality; that personality is no
longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its place
in the constitution of things.
It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions first
exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history. For
art precedes philosophy and even science. People must have noticed
things and interested themselves in them before they begin to debate upon
their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the pioneer
of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not why, those
irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that
we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner; and after the
facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have had time to
settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there will be found
the man of science to stand up and give the explanation. Scott took an
interest in many things in which Fielding took none; and for this reason,
and no other, he introduced them into his romances. If he had been told
what would be the nature of the movement that he was so lightly
initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little
scandalised. At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this new
manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, even now,
it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are enabled
to form any proper judgment in the matter. These books are not only
descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley novels, but it is in
them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of Scott
carried farther that we shall find Scott himself, in so far as regards
his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in his own
spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I said before, a
line of literary tendency produced, and by this production definitely
separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that the deviation,
which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott and
Fielding, is indeed such a great gulph in thought and sentiment as only
successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural that one of
the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in
self-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the one
went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation and
forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than Scott;
and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The passage at
the head of these pages shows how organically he had understood the
nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the five great
romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), two deliberate designs:
one artistic, the other consciously ethical and intellectual. This is a
man living in a different world from Scott, who professes sturdily (in
one of his introductions) that he does not believe in novels having any
moral influence at all; but still Hugo is too much of an artist to let
himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the truth is that the artistic
result seems, in at least one great instance, to have very little
connection with the other, or directly ethical result.
The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any
really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and
refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it and yet something as
simple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive,
but they are so only in appearance. The fact is that art is working far
ahead of language as well as of science, realising for us, by all manner
of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no
direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for
the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the
necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in
thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able
to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case
of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has left
with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romance, that
we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same. It is not
that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left with
us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its own
kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of our
philosophical speech.
It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this something
which it is the function of that form of art to create, this epical
value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to throw
into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that we shall
see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his
predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of
realising, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our
complicated lives.
This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every
so-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything but
a very secondary signification. One might almost number on one’s fingers
the works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any way
superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose
romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. At
the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it would
have been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and that man
is Hawthorne. There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose, about
some at least of Hawthorne’s romances, that impresses itself on the most
indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of the man
served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of his
works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains to
it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful power of
subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure of
his talent. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this,
could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must be
felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present
essay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each of the
five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will permit, and
rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.
* * * * *
The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of _Notre
Dame de Paris_ was (he tells us) to “denounce” the external fatality that
hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition. To
speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do with
the artistic conception; moreover it is very questionably handled, while
the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate success.
Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever before our eyes
the city cut into three by the two arms of the river, the boat-shaped
island “moored” by five bridges to the different shores, and the two
unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration of palaces
and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of admirable
description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude
from this, that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so: we
forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different
layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been
accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the “Gothic profile”
of the city, of the “surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and
belfries,” and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And
throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far
greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us from
the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and already
in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to that
central building by character after character. It is purely an effect of
mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and stand out
above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit of the
Scott-tourists to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost offended at
finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a corner. It
is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect that
permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency and
strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above all,
this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic than
their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen them
clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the
church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there is
that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the grotesque,
and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate contortion and
horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art. Esmeralda is somewhat
an exception; she and the goat traverse the story like two children who
have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the book is when these
two share with the two other leading characters, Dom Claude and
Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here that we
touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the romance: are
they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding, illustrative of the
Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly sins? What is
Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the whole book but the
reanimation of Gothic art?
It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,
there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have come
almost to identify with the author’s manner. Yet even here we are
distressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and
alienate the sympathies. The scene of the _in pace_, for example, in
spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
novelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should
as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again the following
two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass what
it has ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine (vol. ii.
p. 180): “Il souffrait tant que par instants il s’arrachait des poignées
de cheveux, _pour voir s’ils ne blanchissaient pas_.” And, p. 181: “Ses
pensées étaient si insupportables qu’il prenait sa tête à deux mains et
tâchait de l’arracher de ses épaules _pour la briser sur le pavé_.”
One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery
that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual
melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of
brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is
the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in _Notre
Dame_, the whole story of Esmeralda’s passion for the worthless archer is
unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last hiding-place,
herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this sordid hero who
has long since forgotten her—well, that is just one of those things that
readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and they are quite right;
life is hard enough for poor mortals, without having it indefinitely
embittered for them by bad art.
* * * * *
We look in vain for any similar blemish in _Les Misérables_. Here, on
the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary
restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest and
most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of this
great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be—for such awakenings are
unpleasant—to the great cost of this society that we enjoy and profit by,
to the labour and sweat of those who support the litter, civilisation, in
which we ourselves are so smoothly carried forward. People are all glad
to shut their eyes; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they
can forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices, to be
once roughly just in the general; that the bread that we eat, and the
quiet of the family, and all that embellishes life and makes it worth
having, have to be purchased by death—by the deaths of animals, and the
deaths of men wearied out with labour, and the deaths of those criminals
called tyrants and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those
revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something of all this that
Victor Hugo wishes to open men’s eyes in _Les Misérables_; and this moral
lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect.
The deadly weight of civilisation to those who are below presses sensibly
on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us
as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most
serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into
prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense
of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for
the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad
between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery,
human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps
horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean
Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognises the face of the
detective; as when the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the
darkness of the sewer; or as when the fugitive comes forth at last at
evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting
stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The
whole book is full of oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the
great cause of oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand,
the prejudices of Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the
barricade, and the throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then
we have the admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who
had made a religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when
he learned that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just
creation, over which the reader will do well to ponder.
With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light
and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable
things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of
the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can
forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water, stands
in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster behind “lui
faisait un peu l’effet d’être le Père éternel?” The pathos of the
forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of the Santa
Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is nothing in
Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of Cosette and
Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to
Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound
disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are few books
in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much calm and
serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic coarsenesses that
disfigured _Notre Dame_ are no longer present. There is certainly much
that is painfully improbable; and again, the story itself is a little too
well constructed; it produces on us the effect of a puzzle, and we grow
incredulous as we find that every character fits again and again into the
plot, and is, like the child’s cube, serviceable on six faces; things are
not so well arranged in life as all that comes to. Some of the
digressions, also, seem out of place, and do nothing but interrupt and
irritate. But when all is said, the book remains of masterly conception
and of masterly development, full of pathos, full of truth, full of a
high eloquence.
* * * * *
Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the first
two members of the series, it remained for _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_
to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of external
force that is brought against him. And here once more the artistic
effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed,
one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a type
of human industry in the midst of the vague “diffusion of forces into the
illimitable,” and the visionary development of “wasted labour” in the
sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown into
such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that come
wanderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once the
note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with his
indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the
clamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out sharply
against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation is not to
be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for example; indeed,
no two books could be more instructive to set side by side than _Les
Travailleurs_ and this other of the old days before art had learnt to
occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoe was one sole
centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead and utterly
unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with Gilliat; we
feel that he is opposed by a “dark coalition of forces,” that an “immense
animosity” surrounds him; we are the witnesses of the terrible warfare
that he wages with “the silent inclemency of phenomena going their own
way, and the great general law, implacable and passive:” “a conspiracy of
the indifferency of things” is against him. There is not one interest on
the reef, but two. Just as we recognise Gilliat for the hero, we
recognise, as implied by this indifferency of things, this direction of
forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another character who
may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the two face up to
one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the storm, they
fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor;—a victor, however,
who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say nothing of the
gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it will be enough to
remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab when he is himself
assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its way, is the last touch
to the inner significance of the book; here, indeed, is the true position
of man in the universe.
But in _Les Travailleurs_, with all its strength, with all its eloquence,
with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we cannot conceal
from ourselves that there is a thread of something that will not bear
calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about the storm,
admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful whether it would be possible
to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any amount of
breakwater and broken rock. I do not understand the way in which the
waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way of
speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the sea was
quite calm next day? Is this great hurricane a piece of scene-painting
after all? And when we have forgiven Gilliat’s prodigies of strength
(although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in the Vicomte de
Bragelonne than is quite desirable), what is to be said to his suicide,
and how are we to condemn in adequate terms that unprincipled avidity
after effect, which tells us that the sloop disappeared over the horizon,
and the head under the water, at one and the same moment? Monsieur Hugo
may say what he will, but we know better; we know very well that they did
not; a thing like that raises up a despairing spirit of opposition in a
man’s readers; they give him the lie fiercely, as they read. Lastly, we
have here already some beginning of that curious series of English
blunders, that makes us wonder if there are neither proof-sheets nor
judicious friends in the whole of France, and affects us sometimes with a
sickening uneasiness as to what may be our own exploits when we touch
upon foreign countries and foreign tongues. It is here that we shall
find the famous “first of the fourth,” and many English words that may be
comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It is here that we learn that “laird”
in Scotland is the same title as “lord” in England. Here, also, is an
account of a Highland soldier’s equipment, which we recommend to the
lovers of genuine fun.
* * * * *
In_ L’Homme qui Rit_, it was Hugo’s object to ‘denounce’ (as he would say
himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England; and
this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the two
last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The
repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at
the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it
deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,
here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The
constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing
could be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant
mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and
installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a
great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which
all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and
tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of the
pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible
laughter, stamped for ever “by order of the king” upon the face of this
strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to
the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: “If I am
vile, is it not your system that has made me so?” This ghastly laughter
gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running
through the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl Dea,
for the monster. It is a most benignant providence that thus
harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of those
compensations, one of those afterthoughts of a relenting destiny, that
reconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; the
atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic love;
it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full moon
over the night of some foul and feverish city.
There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particular
than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that
the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and
his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as much
an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an abuse
of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable in the
drama where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance. Lastly, I
suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of this not
immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at once. The
large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded already in
speaking of _Les Travailleurs_, are of a sort that is really indifferent
in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some seaport of
Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Tim-Jack to be a likely nickname for an
English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or Scott, for that
matter, be guilty of “figments enough to confuse the march of a whole
history—anachronisms enough to overset all, chronology,” {27} the life of
their creations, the artistic truth and accuracy of their work, is not so
much as compromised. But when we come upon a passage like the sinking of
the “Ourque” in this romance, we can do nothing but cover our face with
our hands: the conscientious reader feels a sort of disgrace in the very
reading. For such artistic falsehoods, springing from what I have called
already an unprincipled avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be
exaggerated; and above all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor
Hugo. We cannot forgive in him what we might have passed over in a
third-rate sensation novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and
nautical affairs, he must have known very well that vessels do not go
down as he makes the “Ourque” go down; he must have known that such a
liberty with fact was against the laws of the game, and incompatible with
all appearance of sincerity in conception or workmanship.
* * * * *
In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure
from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one
would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any
theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of
_Quatre Vingt Treize_ has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a
doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,
we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is
at an end. It is a novel built upon “a sort of enigma,” which was at
that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by
Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement
or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this:
“Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill
the sheep?” This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the
end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set
of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our
attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of
these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon
come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we
really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us.
We know how history continues through century after century; how this
king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole generation,
and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if we had reached
any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in the men, but in
the country that they loved or hated, benefited or injured. And so it is
here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we regard them no more than
the lost armies of which we find the cold statistics in military annals;
what we regard is what remains behind; it is the principle that put these
men where they were, that filled them for a while with heroic
inspiration, and has the power, now that they are fallen, to inspire
others with the same courage. The interest of the novel centres about
revolutionary France: just as the plot is an abstract judicial
difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force. And this has been
done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold and cumbersome
machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward realism, dealing
only with the objective materials of art, and dealing with them so
masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come before us, and
move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men and maidens of
customary romance.
The episode of the mother and children in _Quatre Vingt Treize_ is equal
to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the
second volume, for instance, called “_Sein guéri_, _cœur saignant_,” that
is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be more
delightful than the humours of the three children on the day before the
assault. The passage on La Vendée is really great, and the scenes in
Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of
pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of
praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,
somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment of
conventional dialogue than in _L’Homme qui Rit_; and much that should
have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he
has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his
characters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the
troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which
the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a woman
and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at one
place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can summon up
to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they ceased to
steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter in which
Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less said the
better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have been
swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac’s harangue.
Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable
workmanship that suggest the epithet “statuesque” by their clear and
trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin
unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears
with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the
place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is going
to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the stage
mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot conceive any
disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.
* * * * *
Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five
great novels.
Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a certain
appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to any
practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in it. It
has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that Victor Hugo
occupies a high place among those few. He has always a perfect command
over his stories; and we see that they are constructed with a high regard
to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is informed with moral
significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the same thing be said in
the same degree. His romances are not to be confused with “the novel
with a purpose” as familiar to the English reader: this is generally the
model of incompetence; and we see the moral clumsily forced into every
hole and corner of the story, or thrown externally over it like a carpet
over a railing. Now the moral significance, with Hugo, is of the essence
of the romance; it is the organising principle. If you could somehow
despoil _Les Misérables or Les Travailleurs_ of their distinctive lesson,
you would find that the story had lost its interest and the book was
dead.
Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art
speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If
you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,
you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes of
story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the two
lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley novels, and
all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimes they
are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man against the
sea and sky, as in _Les Travailleurs_; sometimes, as in _Les Misérables_,
they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in the epic of
oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in _Quatre Vingt
Treize_. There is no hero in _Notre Dame_: in _Les Misérables_ it is an
old man: in _L’Homme qui Rit_ it is a monster: in _Quatre Vingt Treize_
it is the Revolution. Those elements that only began to show themselves
timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter Scott, have usurped ever
more and more of the canvas; until we find the whole interest of one of
Hugo’s romances centring around matter that Fielding would have banished
from his altogether, as being out of the field of fiction. So we have
elemental forces occupying nearly as large a place, playing (so to speak)
nearly as important a _rôle_, as the man, Gilliat, who opposes and
overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a nation put upon the stage
with as much vividness as ever before the fortunes of a village maiden or
a lost heir; and the forces that oppose and corrupt a principle holding
the attention quite as strongly as the wicked barons or dishonest
attorneys of the past. Hence those individual interests that were
supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott, stood out over everything else
and formed as it were the spine of the story, figure here only as one set
of interests among many sets, one force among many forces, one thing to
be treated out of a whole world of things equally vivid and important.
So that, for Hugo, man is no longer an isolated spirit without antecedent
or relation here below, but a being involved in the action and reaction
of natural forces, himself a centre of such action and reaction or an
unit in a great multitude, chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors
and aspirations, and, in all seriousness, blown about by every wind of
doctrine. This is a long way that we have travelled: between such work
and the work of Fielding is there not, indeed, a great gulph in thought
and sentiment?
Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of life, and that
portion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and,
besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal
interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness
of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place in
nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently the
responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this generalisation
of interest, we never miss those small humanities that are at the
opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the intellect
that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another sentiment
for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into Cosette’s sabot,
that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her dress in the spring
wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of the laughing man.
This, then, is the last praise that we can award to these romances. The
author has shown a power of just subordination hitherto unequalled; and
as, in reaching forward to one class of effects, he has not been
forgetful or careless of the other, his work is more nearly complete
work, and his art, with all its imperfections, deals more comprehensively
with the materials of life than that of any of his otherwise more sure
and masterly predecessors.
These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and
yet they are but one façade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected
to his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat
the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same
unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the
romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions—an emphasis that is
somehow akin to weaknesses—strength that is a little epileptic. He
stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels
them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we almost
feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more heavily than
others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit by the
privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something that
is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, and see
them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,
cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the
wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also to
recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and, in
many ways, one of the greatest artists of time. If we look back, yet
once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to
the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what other
man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and
significant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely
think of the amount, of equally consummate performance?