From the dawn's tears is made
A perfume faint and strange,
Amber and honey sweet."
"And all the spirits fleet
Do suffer a sky-change
More strangely than the dew--
To God's own angels new,"
The Grave said to the Rose.
The majesty with which this great Frenchman would sometimes, in prose,
condescend to be an acrobat walking the tight-rope of grandiloquence
stretched over a bottomless abyss of the ridiculous, is well shown in
his monograph on Shakespeare. This is accessible in a scholarlike
English translation (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, publishers) by
Melville B. Anderson. The following sentences will indicate what it is.
No one familiar with Victor Hugo can doubt that the great presence of
HIMSELF, the writer, was really the chief thing in his musing eye, when,
in the latter part of this extract, he was ostensibly describing and
vindicating romanticist Shakespeare:
Shakespeare, shuddering, has within himself winds, spirits, magic
potions, vibrations; he sways in the passing breeze, obscure
effluences pervade him, he is filled with the unknown sap of life.
Thence his agitation, at the core of which is peace. It is this
agitation which is lacking in Goethe, wrongly praised for his
impassiveness, which is inferiority. All minds of the first order have
this agitation. It is in Job, in AEschylus, in Alighieri. This
agitation is humanity.... It seems at times as if Shakespeare
terrified Shakespeare. He shudders at his own depth. This is the sign
of supreme intelligence. It is his own vastness which shakes him and
imparts to him strange and mighty oscillations. There is no genius
without billows. An intoxicated savage, it may be. He has the savagery
of the virgin forest; he has the intoxication of the high sea.
"He shudders at his own depth"--hardly could we resist the temptation to
bracket in "[Victor Hugo]" after the pronoun "he." Every reader should
do this mentally for himself; he otherwise will miss that important part
of the true sense, which here is written between the lines. There never
was genius with more inseparable, unescapable, tyrannizing consciousness
of itself. You feel the personality even more than you feel the genius
in reading Victor Hugo.
A considerable part of Victor Hugo's prose production, mostly fiction,
has been translated into English. Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Co. publish
six portly volumes in a uniform edition. From "Les Miserables" in this
series we make extracts which will briefly represent Victor Hugo's prose
at its very best, alike in style, in thought, and in spirit. In the
first, the writer gives utterance to reflections inspired by the final
event of the battle of Waterloo:
This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest
bravery which ever astounded history--is that causeless? No. The
shadow of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the
day of destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that
day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great
souls surrendering their swords. Those who have conquered Europe have
fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say or to do, feeling
the present shadow of a terrible presence. _Hoc erat in fatis._ That
day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is
the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great
man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a
person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself.
The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there
is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God
has passed by.
In the second, Victor Hugo contrasts the two leaders, the conqueror and
the conquered, of that momentous day:
Waterloo is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and
Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,
who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more
extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,
prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of
the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of batallions,
carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,
nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,
absolute regularity; on the other intuition, divination, military
oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable
something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the
lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the
mysteries of a profound soul, association with destiny; the stream,
the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to
obey, the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of
battle; faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but
perturbing it. Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its
Michael Angelo; and on this occasion genius was vanquished by
calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact
calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did
not come. Wellington expected Bluecher; he came.
It remains only to exemplify, as best in small space we can, Victor
Hugo's portentous, his terrific, power in working up a tragic situation,
and displaying it as in a calcium-light of intense imaginative
description or narration. We shall then feel that this Titanic figure in
French literature is at least by suggestive partial glimpses fairly
before our readers. From "Les Miserables," we take the following
passage, introduced by the original author as a first step only in the
climax by which he represents the supreme agony of his hero in a great
crisis of his life:
It sometimes happens that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a
man, traveler or fisherman, while walking at low tide on the beach,
far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past he has
been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch;
his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is bird-lime....
The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns toward the land, endeavors
to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is
conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at
every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or
three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road: he halts to get
his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have
disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the
sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more
deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself
free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to
mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his
knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he
is caught in a quicksand....
He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually
gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long,
infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or
hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which
seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down
by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout
that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of
punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a
man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the
horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on
the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and
sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores,
cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in
sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a
bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his
nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports
himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath,
and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his
shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible
now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still
gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a
little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the
surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of
a man!
Victor Hugo's hero was involved thus in a quicksand--but the quicksand
in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand
composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool--he was
wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer.
All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man
unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom
he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his
glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony,
lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven.
This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in
hostile criticism of Victor Hugo's writings, when it is said that he is
always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric.
Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.
That Victor Hugo willed to be buried exactly like a pauper did not
prevent the occurrence of certain very important contrasts between his
obsequies and the rites of an ordinary pauper funeral; perhaps, indeed,
such a will on his part contributed to create the difference which at
all events existed. The funeral attendance was said to be the most
numerous ever seen in France. A million spectators were present. Three
large wagons headed the procession filled with floral gifts. A beautiful
diadem of Irish lilies was contributed by Tennyson, inscribed "To the
World's Greatest Poet."
The French apotheosis of a national idol would not be complete without
tribute from the theater. Accordingly, the Theatre Francais produced a
drama by M. Renan entitled "_Mort_," in which the shades of Corneille,
Racine, Boileau, Voltaire, and Diderot hold a dialogue about human
progress in the century to follow them, and, Corneille asking, "What
poet will sing in that era, as sweet and tender as Racine, as logical as
Boileau, as clear in style as Voltaire," the genius of the age lyrically
answers, "Hugo," at the same time placing a crown on Hugo's bust.
Victor Hugo the man, especially as he mellowed with old age, was a
sunny, sweet, benignant nature. He was a hearty, one might almost say a
partisan, believer in God--atheism was so offensive to him.
Unfortunately, however, Victor Hugo's theism was not such as to enforce
departure, in his own personal practice, from that deplorable tradition
of his country which has rendered so many distinguished French authors,
from the earliest to the latest, offenders against the laws of marriage
and of chastity.
2. SAINTE-BEUVE.
Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature
or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he
chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve's fame as a
critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that
he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen
higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is
admitted to be a critic of the first rank. Nay, in the opinion of many,
Sainte-Beuve constitutes a rank by himself, having no peers.
Sainte-Beuve's range of subjects was very wide. He exercised himself to
be equally open and fair toward all schools of taste and of opinion
alike. At the outset, he was of the coterie of the romanticists. But he
soon broke with these, either personally repelled by antipathies, or
else unconsciously attracted by a secret sympathy of his own, too strong
for his contrary will to resist, toward the classical standards
respesented in the seventeenth-century writers. He never seems to feel
himself more entirely in his element than when he is appreciating the
literature of the French golden age.
As to religion, Sainte-Beuve, having had his phase of pietism even,
ended by becoming a blank unbeliever. But his own antipathetic personal
attitude of intellect and of heart toward Christianity he would not in
the least allow to disturb the urbanity and serenity of his tolerance
for the most orthodox Christian writers. Such, at any rate, was his
standard and ideal.
But at this point, as at all points, the complaisance of Sainte-Beuve's
writing is a manner with him, rather than a spirit. It does not
penetrate deeply. He loves his "insinuations." That is his own word. He
is willing to write a whole essay in criticism for the sake of the
"insinuations" which his deceitful blandness will sheathe. Or, rather,
he would sooner give up the whole essay than forego a phrase, or perhaps
a single word, containing his insinuation. It was partly his critical
conscience, no doubt, instinctively nice about shades of opinion and of
expression; but then a something very like malice was mingled with his
critical conscience. With all that must be conceded to the value of
Sainte-Beuve's critical work, readers are conscious, in concluding the
perusal of almost any one of his essays, that the result to them is a
sapor remaining on their literary palate, rather than substance of
nutriment entered into their mental digestion. Their food has been
refined into a flavor.
For our illustration of Sainte-Beuve, we go to a paper of his on
Bossuet. But we need to prepare our readers. Sainte-Beuve is a writer
for the few, instead of for the many. To profit from him requires some
effort of attention. One must study a little, as well as simply read.
Sainte-Beuve does not deal in heavy strokes. His lines are most of them
fine, many of them hair-lines vanishing almost into invisibility. He
escapes you like Proteus. Very different is he, by this elusive quality
of his, from his countryman, M. Taine, whose bold crayon sketches are at
once appreciable to all.
In the choice indicated of specimen, we draw from a series of short
criticisms which the author called _Causeries du Lundi_; "Monday-Chats,"
Mr. William Matthews, who has a volume of select translations from them,
not unhappily renders the title. These were originally published as
Monday articles in the columns of two Paris journals, the
_Constitutionel_ and the _Moniteur_. Mr. Matthews's volume is introduced
by a most readable biographical sketch and literary appreciation of
Sainte-Beuve himself from the pen of the translator. M. Sainte-Beuve, we
ought to say, in addition to his very considerable body of criticism,
ranging, as we have intimated, over a wide field of literature, wrote an
extended historical monograph on Port Royal, which is constantly
referred to by writers as an authority on its subject.
The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding
traits:
The simple idea of order, of authority, of unity, of the continual
government of Providence, Bossuet, among the moderns, has grasped more
completely than any other man, and he applies it on all occasions
without effort, and, as it were, by an irrefutable deduction. Bossuet
is the Hebrew genius, expanded, fecundated by Christianity, and open
to all the gains of the human intelligence, but acknowledging
something of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon
precisely at the point where its light ceases. In mien and in tone he
resembles a Moses; there are mingled in his speech traits
characteristic of the Prophet-King, touches of a pathos ardent and
sublime; there sounds the voice eloquent by eminence, the simplest,
the strongest, the most abrupt, the most familiar, the most suddenly
outbursting in thunder. Even where he holds his course unbending, in
an imperious flood, he bears along with him treasures of eternal human
morality. And it is by all these qualities that he is for us a unique
man, and that, whatever may be the employment he makes of his speech,
he remains the model of eloquence the most exalted, and of language
the most beautiful.
Sainte-Beuve is so much a critic that he cannot help criticising by the
way, or even sometimes perhaps a little out of the way. But it will be
quite to our purpose if we admit here what Sainte-Beuve incidentally
says of Lamartine:
[Bossuet] was early distinguished for surprising gifts of memory and
of understanding. He knew Virgil by heart, as, a little later, he knew
Homer. "Less easy to understand is it," says M. de Lamartine, "_how
he was infatuated all his life_ with the Latin poet, Horace, spirit
exquisite, but the reverse of spontaneous and natural, who strings his
lyre with only the softest fibers of the heart; a careless
voluptuary," etc. M. de Lamartine, who has so well discerned the great
features of the eloquence and of the talent of Bossuet, has studied a
little too lightly his life, and he has here proposed to himself a
difficulty which does not exist; there is nowhere mention made in fact
of that _inexplicable predilection_ of Bossuet for Horace, _the least
divine of all the poets_. M. de Lamartine must have inadvertently read
"Horace" instead of "Homer." ... It was Fenelon (and not Bossuet) who
read and relished Horace more than any other poet, who knew him by
heart.... The great pagan preference of Bossuet (if one may use such
an expression) was quite naturally for Homer; after him for Virgil;
Horace, in his judgment and in his liking, came far behind them. But
the book by eminence which gave early direction to the genius and to
the entire career of Bossuet, and which dominated all within him, was
the Bible; it is said that the first time he read it he was
illuminated and transported by it. He had found in it the source
whence his own genius was destined to flow, like one of the four great
rivers in Genesis.
Sainte-Beuve speaks of the relation of the Hotel de Rambouillet to the
future great man:
The young Bossuet was conducted thither one evening to preach there an
improvised sermon. In lending himself to these singular exercises and
to these tournaments where his person and his gifts were challenged,
treated as an intellectual virtuoso in the salons of the Hotel de
Rambouillet and the Hotel de Nevers, it does not appear that Bossuet
was in consequence subjected to the slightest charge of vanity, and
there is no example of a precocious genius so praised, caressed by the
world, and remaining so perfectly exempt from all self-love and from
all coquetry.
In the following passage, Sainte-Beuve appreciates, not without
insinuated criticism, the younger eloquence of Bossuet the preacher.
Conceive this atheist critic, for such in effect Sainte-Beuve was,
entering into the spirit of the orthodox Christian, exclusively for the
purpose of justly judging and enjoying a strain of pulpit eloquence! But
that is Sainte-Beuve:
When he portrays to us Jesus purposing to clothe himself with a flesh
like our own, and when he sets forth the motives for this according to
the Scriptures, with what bold relief and what saliency he does it! He
exhibits that Saviour who above all seeks out misery and distress,
shunning to take on the angelic nature which would have exempted him
from this, leaping over, in some sense, and tasking himself to pursue,
to _apprehend_ wretched human nature, precisely because it is
wretched, clinging to it and running after it, although it flies from
him, although it recoils from being assumed by him; aiming to secure
for himself real human flesh, real human blood, with the qualities and
the weaknesses of our own, and that for what reason? _In order to be
compassionate._ Although in all this Bossuet only makes use of the
terms of the Apostle and perhaps of those of Chrysostom, he employs
them with a delight, a luxury, a gust for reduplication, which
bespeaks vivacious youth: "He has," says the apostle, "_apprehended_
human nature; it flew away, it would have nothing of the Saviour; what
did he do? He ran after it with headlong speed, leaping over the
mountains, that is to say, the ranks of the angels.... He ran like a
giant, with great strides and immeasurable, passing in a moment from
heaven to earth.... There he overtook that fugitive nature; he seized
it, he apprehended it, body and soul." Let us study the youthful
eloquence of Bossuet, even in his risks of taste, as one studies the
youthful poetry of the great Corneille.
Sainte-Beuve cannot let Lamartine alone. In the clause following,
italicized by us, our readers are to recognize an irony on the part of
the critic:
M. de Lamartine, who, _with that second sight which is granted to
poets_, knew how to see Bossuet distinctly as he was when young, etc.
Having quoted, with significant italics disposed here and there, a
highly realistic imaginary picture of the youthful Bossuet from the hand
of Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve says:
Here is a primitive Bossuet much toned down and mollified, so it seems
to me, a Bossuet drawn very much at will, to resemble Jocelyn and
Fenelon, in order that it may be said afterward [by Lamartine]: "The
soul evidently in this great man was of one temper, and the genius of
another. Nature had made him tender; dogma had made him hard." I do
not believe in this contradiction in Bossuet, a nature having the most
perfect harmony, and the least at war with itself, that we know. But
what for me is not less certain is, that the illustrious biographer
[Lamartine] here treats literary history absolutely as history is
treated in an historical romance; there you lightly invent your
character, where your information fails, or where dramatic interest
demands it. And without refusing the praise which certain ingenious
and delicate touches of this portrait merit, I will permit myself to
ask more seriously: Is it proper, is it becoming, thus to paint
Bossuet as a youth, to fondle thus with the brush, as one would a
Greek dancing-woman or a beautiful child of the English aristocracy,
him who never ceased to grow under the shadow of the temple, that
serious youth who gave promise of the simple great man, all genius and
all eloquence? Far, far from him [Bossuet] these fondlings and these
physiological feats of a brush which amuses itself with carmine and
with veins....
You feel, with regard to the foregoing criticism, that it is as just as
it is penetrative. Lamartine fairly provoked it.
Here is a trait of Bossuet's that pertained remarkably also to Daniel
Webster:
Bossuet is not one of those ingenious men of talent who have the art
of treating commonplace subjects excellently, and of introducing into
them foreign materials; but let the subject presented to him be vast,
lofty, majestic, he is at his ease, and, the higher the theme, the
more is he equal to its demands, on his proper plane, and in his
element.
The Abbe Maury is a critic belonging to the classical school of French
literature. His best-known work is a treatise on pulpit eloquence. La
Harpe is another critic of the same class with Maury, who has a
considerable work, historical and critical, devoted to French literature
in general. To these two writers Sainte-Beuve makes instructive allusion
in the following passage: