"Beware, there are terrible duties in life. Do not accuse what is
not responsible. Since when has the disorder been the fault of the
physician? Yes, what marks this tremendous year is being without
pity. Why? Because it is the great revolutionary year. This year
incarnates the revolution. The revolution has an enemy, the old
world, and to that it is pitiless, just as the surgeon has
an enemy, gangrene, and is pitiless to that. The revolution
extirpates kingship in the king, aristocracy in the noble,
despotism in the soldier, superstition in the priest, barbarity in
the judge, in a word whatever is tyranny in whatever is tyrant.
The operation is frightful, the revolution performs it with a sure
hand. As to the quantity of sound flesh that it requires, ask
Boerhave what he thinks of it. What tumour that has to be cut out
does not involve loss of blood?... The revolution devotes itself
to its fated task. It mutilates but it saves.... It has the past
in its grasp, it will not spare. It makes in civilisation a deep
incision whence shall come the safety of the human race. You
suffer? No doubt. How long will it last? The time needed for the
operation. Then you will live," etc. (ii. 65-66).
"One day," he adds, "the Revolution will justify the Terror." To which
Gauvain retorts thus:--
"Fear lest the Terror be the calumny of the Revolution. Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, are dogmas of peace and harmony. Why give
them an aspect of alarm? What do we seek? To win nations to the
universal public. Then why inspire fright? Of what avail is
intimidation? It is wrong to do ill in order to do good. You do
not pull down the throne to leave the scaffold standing. Let us
hurl away crowns, let us spare heads. The revolution is concord,
not affright. Mild ideas are ill-served by men who do not know
pity. Amnesty is for me the noblest word in human speech. I will
shed no blood save at hazard of my own.... In the fight let us be
the enemies of our foes, and after the victory their brothers"
(ii. 67).
These two together, Cimourdain and Gauvain, make an ideal pair of the
revolutionists of '93. Strip each of them of the beauty of character
with which the poet's imagination has endowed them, add instead
passion, violence, envy, egoism, malice; then you understand how in
the very face of the foreign enemy Girondins sharpened the knife
for the men of the Mountain, Hébertists screamed for the lives
of Robespierrists, Robespierre struck off the head of Danton,
Thermidorians crushed Robespierre.
Victor Hugo has given to this typic historical struggle of '93 the
qualities of nobleness and beauty which art requires in dealing with
real themes. Lantenac falls into the hands of the Blues, headed by
Cimourdain and Gauvain, but he does so in consequence of yielding to a
heroic and self-devoting impulse of humanity. Cimourdain, true to his
temperament, insists on his instant execution. Gauvain, true also to
his temperament, is seized with a thousand misgivings, and there is
no more ample, original, and masterly presentation of a case of
conscience, that in civil war is always common enough, than the
struggle through which Gauvain passes before he can resolve to deliver
Lantenac. This pathetic debate--"the stone of Sisyphus, which is only
the quarrel of man with himself"--turns on the loftiest, broadest,
most generous motives, touching the very bases of character, and
reaching far beyond the issue of '93. The political question is seen
to be no more than a superficial aspect of the deeper moral question.
Lantenac, the representative of the old order, had performed an
exploit of signal devotion. Was it not well that one who had faith in
the new order should show himself equally willing to cast away his
life to save one whom self-sacrifice had transformed from the infernal
Satan into the heavenly Lucifer?
"Gauvain saw in the shade the sinister smile of the sphinx. The
situation was a sort of dread crossway where the conflicting
truths issued and confronted one another, and where the three
supreme ideas of man stood face to face--humanity, the family, the
fatherland. Each of the voices spoke in turn, and each in turn
declared the truth. How choose? Each in turn seemed to hit the
mark of reason and justice, and said, Do that. Was that the thing
to be done? Yes. No. Reasoning counselled one thing; sentiment
another; the two counsels were contradictory. Reasoning is only
reason; sentiment is often conscience; the one comes from man,
the other from a loftier source. That is why sentiment has less
distinctness, and more might. Yet what strength in the severity
of reason! Gauvain hesitated. His perplexity was so fierce. Two
abysses opened before him: to destroy the marquis, or to save him.
Which of these two gulfs was duty?"
The whole scene (ii. 206-219) is a masterpiece of dramatic strength,
sustention, and flexibility--only equalled by the dramatic vivacity of
the scene in which Cimourdain, sitting as judge, orders the prisoner
to be brought forward, to his horror sees Gauvain instead of Lantenac,
and then proceeds to condemn the man whom he loves best on earth to be
taken to the guillotine.
* * * * *
The tragedy of the story, its sombre tone, the overhanging presence of
death in it, are prevented from being oppressive to us by the variety
of minor situation and subordinate character with which the writer has
surrounded the central figures. No writer living is so consummate a
master of landscape, and besides the forest we here have an elaborate
sea-piece, full of the weird, ineffable, menacing suggestion of the
sea in some of her unnumbered moods; and there is a scene of late
twilight on a high solitary down over the bay of Mont Saint-Michel, to
which a reader blessed with sensibility to the subtler impressions of
landscape will turn again and again, as one visits again and again
some actual prospect where the eye procures for the inner sense
a dream of beauty and the incommensurable. Perhaps the palm for
exquisite workmanship will be popularly given, and justly given, to
the episode humorously headed _The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew_,
at the opening of the third volume. It is the story of three little
children, barely out of infancy, awaking, playing, eating, wondering,
slumbering, in solitude through a summer day in an old tower. As a
rule the attempt to make infancy interesting in literature ends in
maudlin failure. But at length the painters have found an equal, or
more than an equal, in an artist whose medium lends itself less easily
than colour and form to the reproduction of the beauty and life of
childhood. In his poetry Victor Hugo had already shown his passing
sensibility to the pathos of the beginnings of our life; witness such
pieces as _Chose vue un Jour de Printemps, Les Pauvres Gens_, the
well-known pieces in _L'Année Terrible_, and a hundred other lively
touches and fragments of finished loveliness and penetrating sympathy.
In prose it is a more difficult feat to collect the trivial details
which make up the life of the tiny human animal into a whole that
shall be impressive, finished, and beautiful. And prose can only
describe by details enumerated one by one. This most arduous feat
is accomplished in the children's summer day in the tower, and with
enchanting success. Intensely realistic, yet the picture overflows
with emotion--not the emotion of the mother, but of the poet. There
is infinite tenderness, pathos, love, but all heightened at once and
strengthened by the self-control of masculine force. A man writing
about little ones seems able to place himself outside, and thus to
gain more calmness and freedom of vision than the more passionate
interest or yearning of women permits to them in this field of art.
Not a detail is spared, yet the whole is full of delight and pity and
humour. Only one lyric passage is allowed to poetise and accentuate
the realism of the description. Georgette, some twenty months old,
scrambles from her cradle and prattles to the sunbeam.
"What a bird says in its song, a child says in its prattle. 'Tis
the same hymn; a hymn indistinct, lisping, profound. The child has
what the bird has not, the sombre human destiny in front of it.
Hence the sadness of men as they listen, mingling with the joy of
the little one as it sings. The sublimest canticle to be heard on
earth is the stammering of the human soul on the lips of infancy.
That confused chirruping of a thought, that is as yet no more than
an instinct, has in it one knows not what sort of artless appeal
to the eternal justice; or is it a protest uttered on the
threshold before entering in, a protest meek and poignant? This
ignorance smiling at the Infinite compromises all creation in the
lot that shall fall to the weak defenceless being. Ill, if it
shall come, will be an abuse of confidence.
"The child's murmuring is more and is less than words; there are
no notes, and yet it is a song; there are no syllables, and yet it
is a language.... This poor stammering is a compound of what the
child said when it was an angel, and of what it will say when
it becomes a man. The cradle has a Yesterday as the grave has a
Morrow; the Morrow and the Yesterday mingle in that strange cooing
their twofold mystery...."
"Her lips smiled, her eyes smiled, the dimples in her cheeks
smiled. There came forth in this smile a mysterious welcome of the
morning. The soul has faith in the ray. The heavens were blue,
warm was the air. The fragile creature, without knowing anything,
or recognising anything, or understanding anything, softly
floating in musings which are not thought, felt itself in safety
in the midst of nature, among those good trees and that guileless
greenery, in the pure and peaceful landscape, amid the rustle of
nests, of flowing springs, of insects, of leaves, while over all
there glowed the great innocency of the sun" (ii. 104).
As an eminent man has recently written about Wordsworth's most famous
Ode, there may be some bad philosophy here, but there is assuredly
some noble and touching poetry.
If the carelessness of infancy is caught with this perfection of
finish, there is a tragic companion piece in the horror and gnawing
anguish of the wretched woman from whom her young have been taken--her
rescue from death, her fierce yearnings for them like the yearnings of
a beast, her brute-like heedlessness of her life and her body in the
cruel search.
And so the poet conducts us along the strange excursive windings of
the life and passion of humanity. The same hand which draws such noble
figures as Gauvain--and the real Lanjuinais of history was fully as
heroic and as noble as the imaginary Gauvain of fiction--is equally
skilful in drawing the wild Breton beggar who dwells underground among
the branching tree-roots; and the monstrous Imânus, the barbarous
retainer of the Lord of the Seven Forests; and Radoub, the serjeant
from Paris, a man of hearty oaths, hideous, heroic, humoursome, of
a bloody ingenuity in combat. And the same hand which described the
silent sundown on the sandy shore of the bay, and the mysterious
darkness of the forests, and the blameless play of the little ones,
gives us the prodigious animation of the night surprise at Dôl, the
furious conflict at La Tourgue, and, perhaps most powerful of all, the
breaking loose of the gun on the deck of the _Claymore_. You may say
that this is only melodrama; but if we turn to the actual events of
'93, the melodrama of the romancer will seem tame compared with the
melodrama of the faithful chronicler. And so long as the narrative
of melodramatic action is filled with poetry and beauty, there is no
reproach in uncommon situation, in intense passion, in magnanimous or
subtle motives that are not of every day. Of Hugo's art we may say
what Dr. Newman has said of something else: _Such work is always open
to criticism and it is always above it_.
There is poetry and beauty, no doubt, in the common lives about us, if
we look at them with imaginative and sympathetic eye, and we owe much
to the art that reveals to us the tragedy of the parlour and the
frockcoat, and analyses the bitterness and sorrow and high passion
that may underlie a life of outer smoothness and decorum. Still,
criticism cannot accept this as the final and exclusive limitation of
imaginative work. Art is nothing if not catholic and many-sided, and
it is certainly not exhausted by mere domestic possibilities. Goethe's
fine and luminous feeling for practical life, which has given such
depth of richness and wisdom to his best prose writing, fills us with
a delightful sense of satisfaction and adequateness; and yet why
should it not leave us with a mind eagerly open for the larger and
more inventive romance, in which nature is clothed with some of that
awe and might and silent contemplation of the puny destinies of man,
that used to surround the conception of the supernatural? Victor Hugo
seeks strong and extraordinary effects; he is a master of terrible
image, profound emotion, audacious fancy; but then these are as real,
as natural, as true to fact, as the fairest reproduction of the moral
poverties and meannesses of the world. And let it be added that while
he is without a rival in the dark mysterious heights of imaginative
effect, he is equally a master in strokes of tenderness and the most
delicate human sympathy. His last book seems to contain pieces that
surpass every other book of Hugo's in the latter range of qualities,
and not to fall at all short in the former. And so, in the words of
the man of genius who last wrote on Victor Hugo in these pages,[1]
"As we pity ourselves for the loss of poems and pictures which have
perished, and left of Sappho but a fragment and of Zeuxis but a name,
so are we inclined to pity the dead who died too soon to enjoy the
great works we have enjoyed. At each new glory that 'swims into our
ken,' we surely feel that it is something to have lived to see that
too rise."
[Footnote 1: Mr. Swinburne.]