* May 31,1885.
Two years and a half ago France was mourning the death of Gambetta.
Every hostile voice was hushed, and the whole nation bent tearfully over
the bier, where a once mighty heart and fervent brain lay cold and still
in death. Never, perhaps, since Mirabeau burned out the last of his
great life had Paris been so profoundly moved. Gambetta was carried to
his grave by a million of men, and in all that tremendous procession no
priest figured, nor in all the funeral ceremony was there a word of God.
For the first time in history a nation buried her hero without a shred
of religious rites or a whisper of any other immortality than the
immortality of fame.
France now mourns the death of Victor Hugo, the great poet of the
Republic, as Gambetta was its great orator and statesman. These two,
in their several ways, did the most to demolish the empire. Gambetta
organised and led the Republican opposition, and when the _déchéance_
came, he played deep for the Republic in the game of life and death,
making the restoration of the empire an impossibility. But long before
the young orator challenged the empire, it was arraigned before the bar
of liberty and humanity by the great poet. From his lonely channel rock,
in the bitter grandeur of exile, Victor Hugo hurled the lightnings and
thunders of his denunciation at the political burglar of France and his
parasitical minions. Practical people laughed at him, not knowing that
he was more practical than they. They saw nothing but the petty present,
and judged everything by its immediate success. He was nourished by
sovereign principles, rooted in the depths of the human heart and
blossoming in its loftiest aspirations. He was a prophet who chanted his
own inspiration to the world, knowing that few would listen at first,
but assured that the message would kindle some hearts, and that the
living flame would leap from breast to breast till all were wrapt in
its divine blaze. He scorned the base successful lie and reverenced the
noble outcast truth, and he had unfaltering faith in the response which
mankind would ultimately make to the voice of their rightful lord. Great
he was as a poet, a romancer and a dramatist, but he was greatest as
a prophet. He lived to see his message justified and his principles
triumphant, and died at the ripe old age of eighty-three, amid the love
and reverence of the civilised world. We are not blind to his failings;
he had, as the French say, the defects of his qualities. But they do not
obscure his glory. His failings were those of other men; his greatness
was his own.
Victor Hugo, like Gambetta, was a Freethinker. We know he professed a
belief in God, but he had no theology. His God was Nature, suffused with
passion and ideality; and his conviction of "Some far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves," was only his faith in progress,
extended into the remotest future. He was a true Freethinker in his
grand assertion of the majesty of reason and conscience. He appealed
to the native dignity of the individual, and hated priestcraft with a
perfect hatred. Lacking humor himself, and brilliant without wit, he
could recognise these qualities in others, and he thought them as valid
as his own weapons against the dogmas of superstition. How fine was
his great word about Voltaire--"Irony incarnate for the salvation of
mankind." Like Gambetta, Victor Hugo is to be buried without religious
rites, according to his will. No priest is to profane the sanctity of
death by mumbling idle words over his grave concerning what he is
as ignorant of as the corpse at his feet. In death, as in life, the
Freethinker would confront the universe alone from the impregnable rock
of his manhood, convinced that
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is: there's not any law
Exceeds his knowledge: neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.
Not only did Victor Hugo will that no priest should officiate at his
burial, he ordered that none should approach his bed. But the carrion
crows of the death-chamber were not to be deterred by his well-known
wishes. The Archbishop of Paris offered to visit the dying heretic
and administer to him the supreme unction on behalf of the Church.
M. Lockroy, the poet's son-in-law, politely declined the offer. Our
newspapers, especially the orthodox ones, regard the Archbishop's
message as a compliment. In our opinion it was a brazen insult. Suppose
Mr. Bradlaugh wrote to say that he would gladly attend the sickbed
of Canon Wilberforce for the purpose of receiving his confession of
Atheism; would the orthodox regard it as a compliment or an insult?
We fail to see any difference in the two cases, and we know not why
impertinence in an Atheist becomes civility in a Christian. Fortunately,
Victor Hugo's death-chamber was not intruded upon by impudent
priests. His relatives respected his convictions the more as they were
Freethinkers themselves. No priest will consecrate his grave, but it
will be hallowed by his greatness; and what pilgrim, as he bends over
the master's tomb, will hear in the breeze, or see in the grass and
flowers, any sign that a priest's benison is wanting to his repose?