His Critics.
To many Hugo was of the race of AEschylus and Shakespeare, a world-poet
in the sense that Dante was, an artist supreme alike in genius and in
accomplishment. To others he was but a great master of words and
cadences, with a gift of lyric utterance and inspiration rarely surpassed
but with a personality so vigorous and excessive as to reduce its
literary expression--in epic, drama, fiction, satire and ode and song--to
the level of work essentially subjective, in sentiment as in form, in
intention as in effect. The debate is one in which the only possible
arbiter is Time; and to Time the final judgment may be committed. What
is certain is that there is one point on which both dissidents and
devout--the heretics who deny with Matthew Arnold and the orthodox who
worship with Mr. Swinburne and M. de Banville--are absolutely agreed.
Plainly Hugo was the greatest man of letters of his day. It has been
given to few or none to live a life so full of effort and achievement, so
rich in honour and success and fame. Born almost with the century, he
was a writer at fifteen, and at his death he was writing still; so that
the record of his career embraces a period of more than sixty years.
There is hardly a department of art to a foremost place in which he did
not prove his right. From first to last; from the time of Chateaubriand
to the time of Zola, he was a leader of men; and with his departure from
the scene the undivided sovereignty of literature became a thing of the
past like Alexander's empire.
Some Causes and Effects.
In 1826, in a second set of _Odes et Ballades_, he announced his vocation
in unmistakeable terms. He was a lyric poet and the captain of a new
emprise. His genius was too large and energetic to move at ease in the
narrow garment prescribed as the poet's wear by the dullards and the
pedants who had followed Boileau. He began to repeat the rhythms of
Ronsard and the Pleiad; to deal in the richest rhymes and in words and
verses tricked with new-spangled ore; to be curious in cadences, careless
of stereotyped rules, prodigal of invention and experiment, defiant of
much long recognised as good sense, contemptuous of much till then
applauded as good taste. In a word, he was the Hugo of the hundred
volumes we know: an artist, that is, endowed with a technical imagination
of the highest quality, the very genius of style, and a sense of the
plastic quality of words unequalled, perhaps, since Milton. The time was
ripe for him: within France and without it was big with revolution. In
verse there were the examples of Andre Chenier and Lamartine; in prose
the work of Rousseau and Diderot, of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and
Chateaubriand; in war and politics the tremendous tradition of Napoleon.
Goethe and Schiller had recreated romance and established the foundations
of a new palace of art; their theory and practice had been popularised in
the novels of Walter Scott; and in the life and work of Byron the race
had such an example of revolt, such an incitement to liberty and change,
such a passionate and persuasive argument against authority and
convention, as had never before been felt in art. Hugo like all great
artists was essentially a child of his age: 'Rebellion lay in his way,
and he found it.' In 1827 he published his _Cromwell_, and came forth as
a rebel confessed and unashamed. It is an unapproachable production,
tedious in the closet, impossible upon the stage; and to compare it to
such work as that which at some and twenty Keats had given to the
world--_Hyperion_, for instance, or the _Eve of St. Agnes_--is to glory
in the name of Briton. But it had its value then, and as an historical
document it has its value now. The preface was at once a profession of
faith and a proclamation of war. It is crude, it is limited, it is
mistaken, in places it is even absurd. But from the moment of its
appearance the old order was practically closed. It prepared the way for
_Albertus_ and for _Antony_, for _Rolla_ and the _Tour de Nesle_; and it
was also the '_fiat lux_' in deference to which the world has accepted
with more or less of resignation the partial eclipse of art and morals
effected in _Salammbo_ and _l'Education sentimentale_ and the Egyptian
darkness achieved in work like _la Terre_ and _une Vie_ and _les
Blasphemes_. In its ringing periods, its plangent antitheses and
aesthetic epigrams, it preluded and vindicated the excesses of whatsoever
manifestations of romanticism mankind and the arts have since been called
upon to consider and endure: from the humours of Petrus Borel to the
experiments of Claude Monet and the 'discoveries' of Richard Wagner.
Environment.
It is too often forgotten that from the first Hugo was associated with
men of pretensions and capacities not greatly inferior to his own, and
that in no direction was victory the work of his single arm. In painting
the initiative had been taken years before the publication of the
_Cromwell_ manifesto by Gericault with the famous _Radeau de la Meduse_,
and by Delacroix with the _Dante et Virgile_ (1822) and the _Massacre de
Scio_ (1823). In music Berlioz, at this time a student in the
Conservatoire, was fighting hard against Cherubini and the bewigged ones
for liberty of expression and leave to admire and imitate the audacities
of Weber and Beethoven, and three years hence, in the year of _Hernani_,
was to set his mark upon the art with the _Symphonie fantastique_. On
the stage as early as 1824 Frederick and Firmin had realised in the
personages of Macaire and Bertrand the grotesque ideal, the combination
of humour and terror, of which the character of Cromwell was put forward
as the earliest expression, and had realised it so completely that their
work has taken rank with the greater and the more lasting results of the
movement. In the literature of drama the old order was ruined and the
victory won on all essential points not in 1830 with _Hernani_ but in
1829 with _Henri Trois et sa Cour_, the first of the innumerable
successes of Alexandre Dumas, who determined at a single stroke the
fundamental qualities of structure and form and material, and left his
chief no question to solve save that of diction and style. Musset's
earlier poems date from 1828, the year of _les Orientales_, Gautier's
from 1830; and these are also the dates of Balzac's _Chouans_ and _la
Peau de Chagrin_. Moreover, among the intimates of the young leader were
men like Sainte-Beuve, who was two years his junior, and the brothers
Deschamps: whose influence was doubtless exerted more frequently to
encourage than to repress. Towards the end we lost sight of all this,
and saw in Victor Hugo not so much the most glorious survival of
romanticism as romanticism itself, the movement in flesh and blood, the
revolution in general 'summed up and closed' in a single figure. This
agreeable view of things was Hugo's own. From the beginning he took
himself with perfect seriousness, and his followers, however enthusiastic
in admiration, had excellent warrant from above. 'Il _trone_ trop,' says
Berlioz of him somewhere; and M. Maxime du Camp has given an edifying
account of the means he was wont to use to make himself beloved and
honoured by the youth who came to him for counsel and encouragement. How
perfectly he succeeded in this the political part of his function is
matter of history. Gautier's first visit to him was that of a devotee to
his divinity; and years afterwards the good poet confessed that not even
in pitch darkness and in a cellar fathoms under ground should he dare to
whisper to himself that a verse of the Master's was bad. So far as
devotion went there were innumerable Gautiers. Sainte-Beuve was not long
a pillar of orthodoxy; Dumas was always conscious of his own pre-eminence
in certain qualities, and made light of Hugo's dramas as candidly as he
made much of the style in which they are written; and when some creature
of unwisdom saluted Delacroix as 'the Hugo of painting,' the artist of
the _Marino Faliero_ and the _Barque de Don Juan_ resented the compliment
with bitterness. But these were exceptions. The youth of 1830 were
Hugolaters almost to a man.
Equipment and Achievement.
Their enthusiasm was not all irrational. Hugo's supremacy was not that
he was the greatest artist in essentials, for here Dumas was immeasurably
his superior. It was not that he knew best the heart of man, or had
apprehended most thoroughly the conditions of life; for Balzac so far
surpassed him in these sciences that comparison was impossible. It was
not that he sang the truest song or uttered the deepest word, for Musset
is the poet of _Rolla_ and the _Nuits_ in verse and the poet of
_Fantasio_ and _Lorenzaccio_ and _Carmosine_ in prose. But the epoch
Hugo represented was interested in the manner rather than the substance
of things: the revolution at whose front he had been set and whose most
shining figure he became was largely a revolution of externals. With an
immense amount of enthusiasm there was, as Sainte-Beuve confessed, an
incredible amount of ignorance--so that _Cromwell_ was supposed to be
historical; and with a passionate delight in form there co-existed a
strangely imperfect understanding of material--so that _Hernani_ was
supposed to be Shakespearean. To this ignorance and to this imperfect
understanding Hugo owed a certain part of his authority; the other and
greater he got from his unrivalled mastery of style, from his
extraordinary skill as an artist in words. To the opposing faction his
innovations were horrible: his verse was poison, his example an outrage,
his prosody a violation of all laws, his rhymes and tropes and metaphors
so many offences against Heaven and the Muse. But to the ardent
youngsters who fought beneath his banner it was his to give a something
priceless and unique--a something glorious to France and never before
exampled in her literature. For the distichs of Boileau--'strong, heavy,
useful, like pairs of tongs,'--he found them alexandrines with the leap
and sparkle of sea waves and the sound of clashing swords and the colours
of sunset and the dawn. They were tired of whitewash and cold distemper;
and he gave them hangings of brocade and tapestries of price and tissues
stiff with gold and glowing with new dyes. He flung them handfuls of
jewels where his rivals scattered handfuls of marbles. And they paid him
for his gifts with an intemperance of worship, a fury of belief, a
rapture of admiration, such as no other man has known. The substance was
striking, was peculiar, was novel and full of charm; but the manner was
all this and something besides--was magnificent, was intoxicating, was
irresistible; and Victor Hugo by virtue of it became the foremost man of
literary France. The great battle of _Hernani_ was merely a battle of
style. From Dumas the artist of _Henri Trois_ and _Antony_, the language
of Boileau was safe enough; and his triumph, all-important and
significant as it was, seemed neither fatal nor abominable. It was
another matter with _Hernani_. Its success meant ruin for the Academy
and destruction for the idiom of Delille and M. de Jouy; and the
classicists mustered in force, and did their utmost to stay the coming
wrath and arrest the impending doom. They failed of course; for they
fought with a vague yet limited apprehension of the question at issue,
they had nothing to give in place of the thing they hated. And Victor
Hugo was made captain of the victorious host, while the men who might
have been in a certain sort his rivals took service as lieutenants, and
accepted his ensign for their own.
His Diary.
All his life long he was addicted to attitude; all his life long he was a
_poseur_ of the purest water. He seems to have considered the
affectation of superiority an essential quality in art; for just as the
cock in Mrs. Poyser's apothegm believed that the sun got up to hear him
crow, so to the poet of the _Legende_ and the _Contemplations_ it must
have seemed as if the human race existed but to consider the use he made
of his 'oracular tongue.' How tremendous his utterances sometimes
were--informed with what majesty yet with what brilliance--is one of the
things that every schoolboy knows. One no more needs to insist upon the
merits of his best manner than to emphasise the faults of his worst. At
his best as at his worst, however, he was always an artist in his way.
His speech was nothing if not artificial--in the good sense of the word
sometimes and sometimes in the bad. Simplicity (it seemed) was
impossible to him. In the quest of expression, the cult of antithesis,
the pursuit of effect, he sacrificed directness and plainness with not
less consistency than complacency. In that tissue of 'apocalyptic
epigram' which to him was style there was no room for truth and
soberness. His Patmos was a place of mirrors, and before them he draped
himself in his phrases like Frederick in the mantle of Ruy Blas. That
this grandiosity was unnatural and unreal was proved by the publication
of _Choses Vues_. When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply
and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub
your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober,
direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to
be no gaudier than his neighbours? Hugo expressing himself in the
fearless old fashion of pre-romantic ages? A page of commonplace from
Mr. Meredith, a book for boarding-schools by M. Zola, were not more
startling.
For and Against.
Some primary qualities of his genius are pretty evenly balanced by some
primary faults. Thus, for breadth and brilliance of conception, for
energy and sweep of imagination, for the power of dealing as a master
with the greater forces of nature, he is unsurpassed among modern men.
But the conception is too often found to be empty as well as spacious;
the imagination is too often tainted with insincerity; in his dramas of
the elements there are too many such falsehoods as abound in his dramas
of the emotions. Again, he is sometimes grand and often grandiose; but
he has a trick of affecting the grandiose and the grand which is constant
and intolerable. He had the genius of style in such fulness as entitles
him to rank with the great artists in words of all time. His sense of
verbal colour and verbal music is beyond criticism; his rhythmical
capacity is something prodigious. He so revived and renewed the language
of France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy to
compete with Shakespeare's English and the German of Goethe and Heine;
and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical forms
he effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received the
orchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to have bequeathed his
heirs the orchestra of Berlioz. On the other hand; in much of his later
work his mannerisms in prose and in verse are discomfortably glaring; the
outcome of his unsurpassable literary faculty is often no more than a
parade or triumph of the vocables; there were times when his brain
appears to have become a mere machine for the production of antitheses
and sterile conceits. What is perhaps more damning than all, his work is
saturate in his own remarkable personality, and is objective only here
and there. His dramas are but five-act lyrics, his epics the romance of
an egoist, his history is confession, his criticism the opinions of
Victor Hugo. Even his lyrics, the 'fine flower' of his genius, the
loveliest expression of the language, have not escaped reproach as a
'Psalter of Subjectivity.' Even his essays in prose romance--a form of
art on which he has stamped his image and superscription in a manner all
his own, the work by which he is best known to humanity at large--are
vitiated by the same defect. For one that believes in Bishop Myriel as
Bishop Myriel there are a hundred who see in him only a pose of Victor
Hugo; it is the same with Ursel and Javert, with Cimourdain and Lantenac
and Josiane; the very _pieuvre_ of _les Travailleurs_ is a Hugolater at
heart. It is a proof of his commanding personality, that in spite of
these objections he held in enchantment the hearts and minds of men for
over sixty years. He is almost a literature in himself; and if it be
true that his work is as wholly lacking in the radiant sanity of
Shakespeare's as it is in the exquisite good sense of Voltaire's, it is
also true that he left the world far richer than he found it.
What Lives of Him.
To select an anthology from his work were surely the pleasantest of
tasks. One richer in grace and passion and sweetness might he chosen out
of Musset; one wrought more truly of the finer stuff of humanity as well
as more bountifully touched with tact and dignity and temper from the
work of Tennyson. But the Hugo selection would combine the rarest
technical merits with a set of interests all its own. It would give, for
instance, the _Stella_ of the _Chatiments_ and the _Pauvres Gens_ of the
_Legende_. On one page would be found that admirable _Souvenir de la
Nuit du Quatre_, which is at once the impeachment and the condemnation of
the Coup d'Etat; and on another the little epic of _Eviradnus_, with its
immortal serenade, a culmination of youth and romance and love:
'Si tu veux, faisons un reve.
Montons sur deux palefrois.
Tu m'emmenes, je t'enleve.
L'oiseau chante dans les bois.
. . . . .
Allons-nous-en par l'Autriche!
Nous aurons l'aube a nos fronts.
Je serai grand et toi riche,
Puisque nous nous aimerons.
. . . . .
Tu seras dame et moi comte.
Viens, mon oeeur s'epanouit.
Viens, nous conterons ce conte
Aux etoiles de la nuit.'
Here, a summary of all the interests of romanticism, would be the
complaint of Gastibelza:
'Un jour d'ete, ou tout etait lumiere,
Vie et douceur,
Elle s'en vint jouer dans la riviere
Avec sa soeur.
Je vis le pied de sa jeune compagne
Et son genou . . .--
Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
Me rendra fou!'--
here the adorable _Vieille Chanson du Jeune Temps_:
'Rose, droite sur ses hanches,
Leva son beau bras tremblant
Pour prendre une mure aux branches:
Je ne vis pas son bras blanc.
Une eau courait, fraiche et creuse,
Sur les mousses de velours;
Et la nature amoureuse
Dormait dans les grands bois sourds.'--
and here, not unworthy to be remembered with _Proud Maisie_, that
wonderful harmony of legend and superstition and the facts and dreams of
common life, the death-song of Fantine:
'Nous acheterons de bien belles choses,
En nous promenant le long de faubourgs.
La Vierge-Marie aupres de mon poele
Est venue hier, en manteau brode,
Et m'a dit: Voici, cache sous mon voile,
Le petit qu'un jour tu m'as demande.
Courez a la ville; ayez de la toile,
Achetez du fil, achetez un de.
Les bluets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,
Les bluets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.'
And from this masterpiece of simple and direct emotion, which to me has
always seemed the high-water mark of Hugo's lyrical achievement as well
as the most human of his utterances, one might pass on to masterpieces of
another inspiration: to the luxurious and charming graces of _Sara la
Baigneuse_; to the superb crescendo and diminuendo of _les Djinns_; to
'Si vous n'avez rien a me dire,' that daintiest of songlets; to the
ringing rhymes and gallant spirit of the _Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean_:
'Sus, ma bete,
De facon
Que je fete
Ce grison!
Je te baille
Pour ripaille
Plus de paille,
Plus de son,
Qu'un gros frere,
Gai, friand,
Ne peut faire,
Mendiant
Par les places
Ou tu passes,
De grimaces
En priant!'--
to the melodious tenderness of 'Si tu voulais, Madelaine'; to the gay
music of the _Stances a Jeanne_:
'Je ne me mets pas en peine
Du clocher ni du beffroi.
Je ne sais rien de la reine,
Et je ne sais rien du roi.'--
to the admirable song of the wind of the sea:
'Quels sont les bruits sourds?
Ecoutez vers l'onde
Cette voix profonde
Qui pleure toujours,
Et qui toujours gronde,
Quoiqu'un son plus claire
Parfois l'interrompe . . .
Le vent de la mer
Souffle dans sa trompe.'--
to the _Romance Mauresque_, to the barbaric fury of _les Reitres_, to the
magnificent rodomontade of the _Romancero du Cid_. 'J'en passe, et des
meilleurs,' as Ruy Gomez observes of his ancestors. Here at any rate are
jewels enough to furnish forth a casket that should be one of the richest
of its kind! The worst is, they are most of them not necessaries but
luxuries. It is impossible to conceive of life without Shakespeare and
Burns, without _Paradise Lost_ and the _Intimations_ ode and the immortal
pageant of the _Canterbury Tales_; but (the technical question apart) to
imagine it wanting Hugo's lyrics is easy enough. The largesse of which
he was so prodigal has but an arbitrary and conventional value. Like the
magician's money much has changed, almost in the act of distribution,
into withered leaves; and such of it as seems minted of good metal is not
for general circulation.