"History has its truth, Legend has its truth. Legendary truth is of
a different nature from historic truth. Legendary truth is invention
with reality for result. For the rest, history and legend have the
same aim--to paint under the man of a day eternal humanity." These
words from his new and latest work (ii. 4) are a repetition of what
Victor Hugo had already said in the introduction to his memorable
_Legend of the Ages_[1]. But the occasion of their application is far
more delicate. Poetry lends itself naturally to the spacious, distant,
vague, highly generalised way of present and real events. A prose
romance, on the other hand, is of necessity abundant in details, in
special circumstances, in particularities of time and place. This
leaves all the more room for historic error, and historic error in
a work of imagination dealing with actual and known occurrences is
obviously fatal, not only to legendary truth, but to legendary beauty
and poetic impressiveness. And then the pitfalls which lie about the
feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,--the terrible year
of the modern epoch! The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the
revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature
of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal
repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the
rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call
histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or that actor in it.
[Footnote 1: The references are to the "Édition Définitive" in two
volumes.]
It was hardly a breach, therefore, of one's allegiance to Hugo's
superb imaginative genius, if one had misgivings as to the result of
an attempt, even in his strong hands, to combine legend with truth on
a disastrous field, in which grave writers with academic solemnity had
confounded truth with the falsest kind of legend. The theme was so
likely to emphasise the defects incident to his mighty qualities; so
likely to provoke an exaggeration of those mannerisms of thought no
less than of phrase, which though never ignoble nor paltry, yet now
and then take something from the loftiness and sincerity of the
writer's work. Wisdom, however, is justified of her children, and M.
Hugo's genius has justified his choice of a difficult and perilous
subject. _Quatrevingt-treize_ is a monument of its author's finest
gifts; and while those who are happily endowed with the capacity of
taking delight in nobility and beauty of imaginative work will find
themselves in possession of a new treasure, the lover of historic
truth who hates to see abstractions passed off for actualities and
legend erected in the place of fact escapes with his sensibilities
almost unwounded.
The historic interlude at the beginning of the second volume is
undoubtedly open to criticism from the political student's point of
view. As a sketch of the Convention, the scene of its sittings, the
stormful dramas that were enacted there one after another for month
after month, the singular men who one after another rode triumphant
upon the whirlwind for a little space, and were then mercilessly in an
instant swept into outer darkness, the commoner men who cowered before
the fury of the storm, and were like "smoke driven hither and thither
by the wind," and laboured hard upon a thousand schemes for human
improvement, some admirable, others mere frenzy, while mobs filed in
and danced mad carmagnoles before them--all this is a magnificent
masterpiece of accurate, full, and vivid description. To the
philosophy of it we venture to demur. The mystic, supernatural view of
the French Revolution, which is so popular among French writers who
object to the supernatural and the mystical everywhere else, is to us
a thing most incredible, most puerile, most mischievous. People talk
of '93, as a Greek tragedian treats the Tale of Troy divine, or the
terrible fortunes of the house of Atreus, as the result of dark
invincible fate, as the unalterable decree of the immortal gods. Even
Victor Hugo's strong spirit does not quite overcome the demoralising
doctrine of a certain revolutionary school, though he has the poet's
excuse. Thus, of the Convention:--
"Minds all a prey to the wind. But this wind was a wind of miracle
and portent. To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave
of the ocean. And this was true of its greatest. The force of
impulsion came from on high. There was in the Convention a will,
which was the will of all, and yet was the will of no one. It was
an idea, an idea resistless and without measure, which breathed in
the shadow from the high heavens. We call that the Revolution. As
this idea passed, it threw down one and raised up another; it bore
away this man in the foam, and broke that man to pieces upon the
rocks. The idea knew whither it went, and drove the gulf of waters
before it. To impute the Revolution to men is as one who should
impute the tide to the waves. The revolution is an action of the
Unknown.... It is a form of the abiding phenomenon that shuts us
in on every side and that we call Necessity.... In presence
of these climacteric catastrophes which waste and vivify
civilisation, one is slow to judge detail. To blame or praise men
on account of the result, is as if one should blame or praise the
figures on account of the total. That which must pass passes, the
storm that must rage rages. The eternal serenity does not suffer
from these boisterous winds. Above revolutions truth and justice
abide, as the starry heaven abides above the tempests" (i.
188-189).
As a lyric passage, full of the breath of inspiration; as history,
superficial and untrue; as morality, enervating and antinomian. The
author is assuredly far nearer the mark in another place when
he speaks of "_that immense improvisation_ which is the French
Revolution" (ii. 35)--an improvisation of which every step can be
rationally explained.
After all, this is no more than an interlude. Victor Hugo only surveys
the events of '93 as a field for the growth of types of character. His
instinct as an artist takes him away from the Paris of '93, where the
confusion, uproar, human frenzy, leave him no background of nature,
with nature's fixity, sternness, indifference, sublimity. This he
found in La Vendée, whose vast forests grow under the pencil of this
master of all the more terrible and majestic effects, into a picture
hardly less sombre and mighty in its impressiveness than the memorable
ocean pieces of the _Toilers of the Sea_. If the waves are appalling
in their agitation, their thunders, their sterility, the forest is
appalling in its silence, its dimness, its rest, and the invisibleness
of the thousand kinds of life to which it gives a shelter. If the
violence and calm and mercilessness of the sea penetrated the romance
of eight years ago with transcendent fury, so does the stranger, more
mysterious, and in a sense even the more inhuman life of the forest
penetrate the romance of to-day. From the opening chapter down to the
very close, even while the interlude takes us for a little while to
the Paris café where Danton, Robespierre, and Marat sit in angry
counsel, even while we are on the sea with the royalist Marquis and
Halmalo, the reader is subtly haunted by the great Vendean woods,
their profundity, their mystery, their tragic and sinister beauties.
"The forest is barbarous.
"The configuration of the land counsels man in many an act. More
than we suppose, it is his accomplice. In the presence of certain
savage landscapes, you are tempted to exonerate man and blame
creation; you feel a silent challenge and incitement from nature;
the desert is constantly unwholesome for conscience, especially
for a conscience without light. Conscience may be a giant; that
makes a Socrates or a Jesus: it may be a dwarf; that makes an
Atreus or a Judas. The puny conscience soon turns reptile; the
twilight thickets, the brambles, the thorns, the marsh waters
under branches, make for it a fatal haunting place; amid all this
it undergoes the mysterious infiltration of ill suggestions. The
optical illusions, the unexplained images, the scaring hour,
the scaring spot, all throw man into that kind of affright,
half-religious, half-brutal, which in ordinary times engenders
superstition, and in epochs of violence, savagery. Hallucinations
hold the torch that lights the path to murder. There is something
like vertigo in the brigand. Nature with her prodigies has a
double effect; she dazzles great minds, and blinds the duller
soul. When man is ignorant, when the desert offers visions,
the obscurity of the solitude is added to the obscurity of the
intelligence; thence in man comes the opening of abysses. Certain
rocks, certain ravines, certain thickets, certain wild openings
of the evening sky through the trees, drive man towards mad or
monstrous exploits. We might almost call some places criminal"
(ii. 21).
With La Vendée for background, and some savage incidents of the bloody
Vendean war for external machinery, Victor Hugo has realised his
conception of '93 in three types of character: Lantenac, the royalist
marquis; Cimourdain, the puritan turned Jacobin; and Gauvain, for whom
one can as yet find no short name, he belonging to the millenarian
times. Lantenac, though naturally a less original creation than the
other two, is still an extremely bold and striking figure, drawn with
marked firmness of hand, and presenting a thoroughly distinct and
coherent conception. It is a triumph of the poetic or artistic part
of the author's nature over the merely political part, that he should
have made even his type of the old feudal order which he execrates
so bitterly, a heroic, if ever so little also a diabolic, personage.
There is everything that is cruel, merciless, unflinching, in
Lantenac; there is nothing that is mean or insignificant. A gunner
at sea, by inattention to the lashing of his gun, causes an accident
which breaks the ship to pieces, and then he saves the lives of the
crew by hazarding his own life to secure the wandering monster.
Lantenac decorates him with the cross of Saint Lewis for his
gallantry, and instantly afterwards has him shot for his carelessness.
He burns homesteads and villages, fusillades men and women, and makes
the war a war without quarter or grace. Yet he is no swashbuckler of
the melodramatic stage. There is a fine reserve, a brief gravity,
in the delineation of him, his clear will, his quickness, his
intrepidity, his relentlessness, which make of him the incarnation
of aristocratic coldness, hatred, and pride. You might guillotine
Lantenac with exquisite satisfaction, and yet he does not make us
ashamed of mankind. Into his mouth, as he walks about his dungeon,
impatiently waiting to be led out to execution, Victor Hugo has put
the aristocratic view of the Revolution. Some portions of it (ii.
224-226) would fit amazingly well into M. Renan's notions about the
moral and intellectual reform of France.
If the Breton aristocrat of '93 was fearless, intrepid, and without
mercy in defence of God and the King--and his qualities were all
shared, the democrat may love to remember, by the Breton peasant,
whether peasant follower or peasant leader--the Jacobin was just as
vigorous, as intrepid, as merciless in defence of his Republic. "Pays,
Patrie," says Victor Hugo, in words which perhaps will serve to
describe many a future passage in French history, "ces deux mots
résument toute la guerre de Vendée; querelle de l'idée locale centre
l'idée universelle; paysans contre patriotes" (ii. 22).[1] Certainly
the Jacobins were the patriots of that era, the deliverers of France
from something like that process of partition which further east was
consummated in this very '93. We do not mean the handful of odious
miscreants who played fool and demon in turns in the insurrectionary
Commune and elsewhere: such men as Collot d'Herbois, or Carrier,
or Panis. The normal Jacobin was a remarkable type. He has been
excellently described by Louis Blanc as something powerful, original,
sombre; half agitator and half statesman; half puritan and half monk
half inquisitor and half tribune. These words of the historian are the
exact prose version of the figure of Cimourdain, the typical Jacobin
of the poet. "Cimourdain was a pure conscience, but sombre. He had in
him the absolute. He had been a priest and that is a serious thing.
Man, like the sky, may have a dark serenity; it is enough that
something should have brought night into his soul. Priesthood had
brought night into Cimourdain. He who has been a priest is one still.
What brings night upon us may leave the stars with us. Cimourdain
was full of virtues, full of truths, but they shone in the midst
of darkness" (i. 123). If the aristocrat had rigidity, so had the
Jacobin. "Cimourdain had the blind certitude of the arrow, which only
sees the mark and makes for it. In revolution, nothing so formidable
as the straight line. Cimourdain strode forward with fatality in his
step. He believed that in social genesis the very extreme point must
always be solid ground, an error peculiar to minds that for reason
substitute logic" (i. 127). And so forth, until the character of the
Jacobin lives for us with a precision, a fulness, a naturalness, such
as neither Carlyle nor Michelet nor Quinet has been able to clothe it
with, though these too have the sacred illumination of genius. Victor
Hugo's Jacobin is a poetic creation, yet the creation only lies in the
vivid completeness with which the imagination of a great master has
realised to itself the traits and life of an actual personality. It is
not that he has any special love for his Jacobin, but that he has the
poet's eye for types, politics apart. He sees how much the aristocrat,
slaying hip and thigh for the King, and the Jacobin, slaying hip and
thigh for the Republic, resembled one another. "Let us confess,"
he says, "these two men, the Marquis and the priest [Lantenac and
Cimourdain], were up to a certain point the self-same man. The bronze
mask of civil war has two profiles, one turned towards the past, the
other towards the future, but as tragic the one as the other. Lantenac
was the first of these profiles, Cimourdain was the second; only the
bitter rictus of Lantenac was covered with shadow and night, and on
the fatal brow of Cimourdain was a gleaming of the dawn" (ii. 91).
[Footnote 1: In corroboration of this view of the Vendean rising as
democratic, see Mortimer-Ternaux, _Hist. de la Terreur_, vol. vi. bk.
30.]
And let us mark Victor Hugo's signal distinction in his analysis
of character. It is not mere vigour of drawing, nor acuteness of
perception, nor fire of imagination, though he has all these gifts in
a singular degree, and truest of their kind. But then Scott had
them too, and yet we feel in Victor Hugo's work a seriousness, a
significance, a depth of tone, which never touches us in the work of
his famous predecessor in romance, delightful as the best of that work
is. Balfour of Burley is one of Scott's most commanding figures, and
the stern Covenanter is nearly in the same plane of character as the
stern heroic Jacobin. Yet Cimourdain impresses us more profoundly. He
is as natural, as human, as readily conceivable, and yet he produces
something of the subtle depth of effect which belongs to the actor in
a play of Aeschylus. Why is this? Because Hugo makes us conscious of
that tragedy of temperament, that sterner Necessity of character,
that resistless compulsion of circumstance, which is the modern and
positive expression for the old Destiny of the Greeks, and which in
some expression or other is now an essential element in the highest
presentation of human life. Here is not the Unknown. On the contrary,
we are in the very heart of science; tragedy to the modern is
not [Greek: tuchae], but a thing of cause and effect, invariable
antecedent and invariable consequent. It is the presence of this
tragic force underlying action that gives to all Hugo's work its lofty
quality, its breadth, and generality, and fills both it, and us who
read, with pity and gravity and an understanding awe.
The action is this. Cimourdain had the young Gauvain to train from his
earliest childhood, and the pupil grew up with the same rigid sense
of duty as the master, though temperament modified its form. When the
Revolution came, Gauvain, though a noble, took sides with the people,
but he was not of the same spirit as his teacher. "The Revolution,"
says Victor Hugo, "by the side of youthful figures of giants, such as
Danton, Saint-Just, and Robespierre, has young ideal figures, like
Hoche and Marceau. Gauvain was one of these figures" (ii. 34).
Cimourdain has himself named delegate from the Committee of Public
Safety to the expeditionary column of which Gauvain is in command. The
warmth of affection between them was undiminished, but difference in
temperament bred difference in their principles. They represented, as
the author says, with the candour of the poet, the two poles of
the truth; the two sides of the inarticulate, subterranean, fatal
contention of the year of the Terror. Their arguments with one another
make the situation more intelligible to the historic student, as they
make the characters of the speakers more transparent for the purposes
of the romance.