Apres le roman pittoresque mais prosaique de Walter Scott il restera
un autre roman a creer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous.
C'est le roman, a la fois drame et epopee, pittoresque mais poetique,
reel mais ideal, vrai mais grand, qui enchassera Walter Scott dans
Homere.--VICTOR HUGO on "Quentin Durward."
Victor Hugo's romances occupy an important position in the history of
literature; many innovations, timidly made elsewhere, have in them been
carried boldly out to their last consequences; much that was indefinite
in literary tendencies has attained to definite maturity; many things
have come to a point and been distinguished one from the other; and it
is only in the last romance of all, "Quatrevingt-treize," that this
culmination is most perfect. This is in the nature of things. Men who
are in any way typical of a stage of progress may be compared more
justly to the hand upon the dial of the clock, which continues to
advance as it indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only
the measure of what is past. The movement is not arrested. That
significant something by which the work of such a man differs from that
of his predecessors goes on disengaging itself and becoming more and
more articulate and cognisable. The same principle of growth that
carried his first book beyond the books of previous writers carries his
last book beyond his first. And just as the most imbecile production of
any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we
have sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces, so it may be
the very weakest of an author's books that, coming in the sequel of many
others, enables us at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of
them--of that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of his
life into something organic and rational. This is what has been done by
"Quatrevingt-treize" for the earlier romances of Victor Hugo, and,
through them, for a whole division of modern literature. We have here
the legitimate continuation of a long and living literary tradition; and
hence, so far, its explanation. When many lines diverge from each other
in direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we have
only to produce them to make the chaos plain: this is continually so in
literary history; and we shall best understand the importance of Victor
Hugo's romances if we think of them as some such prolongation of one of
the main lines of literary tendency.
When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the man of
genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to honour as a master in
the art--I mean Henry Fielding--we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the
first moment, to state the difference that there is between these two.
Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the
tiller of his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and
Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and
finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great
Scotsman. With all these points of resemblance between the men, it is
astonishing that their work should be so different. The fact is, that
the English novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in
the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was looking eagerly
in all ways and searching for all the effects that by any possibility it
could utilise. The difference between these two men marks a great
enfranchisement. With Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an
extended curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun. This is a
trite thing to say; but trite things are often very indefinitely
comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as far as it regards the
technical change that came over modern prose romance, has never perhaps
been explained with any clearness.
To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two sets of
conventions upon which plays and romances are respectively based. The
purposes of these two arts are so much alike, and they deal so much with
the same passions and interests, that we are apt to forget the
fundamental opposition of their methods. And yet such a fundamental
opposition exists. In the drama the action is developed in great measure
by means of things that remain outside of the art; by means of real
things, that is, and not artistic conventions for things. This is a sort
of realism that is not to be confounded with that realism in painting of
which we hear so much. The realism in painting is a thing of purposes;
this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an affair of method. We
have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in France who, when he wanted
to paint a sea-beach, carried realism from his ends to his means, and
plastered real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done
in the drama. The dramatic author has to paint his beaches with real
sand: real live men and women move about the stage; we hear real voices;
what is feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we do actually see a
woman go behind a screen as Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval,
we do actually see her very shamefully produced again. Now all these
things, that remain as they were in life, and are not transmuted into
any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn and difficult to deal
with; and hence there are for the dramatist many resultant limitations
in time and space. These limitations in some sort approximate towards
those of painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a
moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is confined to the
stage almost as the painter is confined within his frame. But the great
restriction is this, that a dramatic author must deal with his actors,
and with his actors alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain
significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical growth of
emotion,--these are the only means at the disposal of the playwright. It
is true that, with the assistance of the scene-painter, the costumier
and the conductor of the orchestra, he may add to this something of
pageant, something of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic
writer, beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of
his genius. When we turn to romance, we find this no longer. Here
nothing is reproduced to our senses directly. Not only the main
conception of the work, but the scenery, the appliances, the mechanism
by which this conception is brought home to us, have been put through
the crucible of another man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in
the form of written words. With the loss of every degree of such realism
as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of liberty and
largeness of competence. Thus, painting, in which the round outlines of
things are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture,
in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these
identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as
compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to
which the novelist throws everything. And from this there results for
him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his
power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to
another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail,
to a degree that was before impossible. He can render just as easily the
flourish of trumpets before a victorious emperor and the gossip of
country market women, the gradual decay of forty years of a man's life
and the gesture of a passionate moment. He finds himself equally
unable, if he looks at it from one point of view--equally able, if he
looks at it from another point of view--to reproduce a colour, a sound,
an outline, a logical argument, a physical action. He can show his
readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the
foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the
turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes,
dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the
stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all
this thrown upon the flat board--all this entering, naturally and
smoothly, into the texture of continuous intelligent narration.
This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott. In the work of
the latter, true to his character of a modern and a romantic, we become
suddenly conscious of the background. Fielding, on the other hand,
although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic
in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama. This is
not, of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of a
regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now speaking with
regard to the novel. The notorious contrary fact is sufficient to guard
the reader against such a misconstruction. All that is meant is, that
Fielding remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel
possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not develop
them. To the end he continued to see things as a playwright sees them.
The world with which he dealt, the world he had realised for himself and
sought to realise and set before his readers, was a world of exclusively
human interest. As for landscape, he was content to under-line stage
directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire
into a practicable wood. As for nationality and public sentiment, it is
curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty-five,
and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of
soldiers into his hero's way. It is most really important, however, to
remark the change which has been introduced into the conception of
character by the beginning of the romantic movement and the consequent
introduction into fiction of a vast amount of new material. Fielding
tells us as much as he thought necessary to account for the actions of
his creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be decomposed
on the spot into a few simple personal elements, as we decompose a force
in a question of abstract dynamics. The larger motives are all unknown
to him; he had not understood that the nature of the landscape or the
spirit of the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally
and rightly, he said nothing about them. But Scott's instinct, the
instinct of the man of an age profoundly different, taught him
otherwise; and, in his work, the individual characters begin to occupy a
comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies
manoeuvre, and great hills pile themselves upon each other's
shoulders. Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature
of a perfectly arbitrary will. Already in Scott we begin to have a sense
of the subtle influences that moderate and qualify a man's personality;
that personality is no longer thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is
resumed into its place in the constitution of things.
It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their actions,
first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed and vivified history.
For art precedes philosophy, and even science. People must have noticed
things and interested themselves in them before they begin to debate
upon their causes or influence. And it is in this way that art is the
pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he knows not
why, those irrational acceptations and recognitions, reclaim, out of the
world that we have not yet realised, ever another and another corner;
and after the facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have
had time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day there
will be found the man of science to stand up and give the explanation.
Scott took an interest in many things in which Fielding took none; and
for this reason, and no other, he introduced them into his romances. If
he had been told what would be the nature of the movement that he was so
lightly initiating, he would have been very incredulous and not a little
scandalised. At the time when he wrote, the real drift of this new
manner of pleasing people in fiction was not yet apparent; and, even
now, it is only by looking at the romances of Victor Hugo that we are
enabled to form any proper judgment in the matter. These books are not
only descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley Novels, but it
is in them chiefly that we shall find the revolutionary tradition of
Scott carried further; that we shall find Scott himself, in so far as
regards his conception of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in
his own spirit, instead of tamely followed. We have here, as I said
before, a line of literary tendency produced, and by this production
definitely separated from others. When we come to Hugo, we see that the
deviation, which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott
and Fielding, is indeed such a great gulf in thought and sentiment as
only successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural that
one of the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in
self-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the one
went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation
and forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than
Scott; and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The
passage at the head of these pages shows how organically he had
understood the nature of his own changes. He has, underlying each of the
five great romances (which alone I purpose here to examine), two
deliberate designs: one artistic, the other consciously ethical and
intellectual. This is a man living in a different world from Scott, who
professes sturdily (in one of his introductions) that he does not
believe in novels having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is
too much of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and the
truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one great instance,
to have very little connection with the other, or directly ethical
result.
The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the memory by any
really powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and
refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it; and yet something as
simple as nature. These two propositions may seem mutually destructive,
but they are so only in appearance. The fact is, that art is working far
ahead of language as well as of science, realising for us, by all manner
of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no
direct name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name, for
the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the
necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that
often hangs about the purpose of a romance: it is clear enough to us in
thought; but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are
able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been
sufficiently shaped to that end. We all know this difficulty in the case
of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that it has
left with us; and it is only because language is the medium of romance
that we are prevented from seeing that the two cases are the same. It is
not that there is anything blurred or indefinite in the impression left
with us, it is just because the impression is so very definite after its
own kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the expressions of
our philosophical speech.
It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this
something which it is the function of that form of art to create, this
epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to
throw into relief, in the present study. It is thus, I believe, that we
shall see most clearly the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his
predecessors, and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself the task of
realising, in the language of romance, much of the involution of our
complicated lives.
This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every
so-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything but
a very secondary signification. One might almost number on one's fingers
the works in which such a supreme artistic intention has been in any way
superior to the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of prose
romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most novels, paramount. At
the present moment we can recall one man only, for whose works it would
have been equally possible to accomplish our present design: and that
man is Hawthorne. There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose,
about some at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on
the most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and weaknesses of
the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid and single impression of
his works. There is nothing of this kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains
to it, is indeed unity out of multitude; and it is the wonderful power
of subordination and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure
of his talent. No amount of mere discussion and statement, such as this,
could give a just conception of the greatness of this power. It must be
felt in the books themselves, and all that can be done in the present
essay is to recall to the reader the more general features of each of
the five great romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will
permit, and rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.
The moral end that the author had before him in the conception of "Notre
Dame de Paris" was (he tells us) to "denounce" the external fatality
that hangs over men in the form of foolish and inflexible superstition.
To speak plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do
with the artistic conception; moreover, it is very questionably handled,
while the artistic conception is developed with the most consummate
success. Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: we have ever
before our eyes the city cut into three by the two arms of the river,
the boat-shaped island "moored" by five bridges to the different shores,
and the two unequal towns on either hand. We forget all that enumeration
of palaces and churches and convents which occupies so many pages of
admirable description, and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to
conclude from this that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so:
we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see the different
layers of paint on a completed picture; but the thing desired has been
accomplished, and we carry away with us a sense of the "Gothic profile"
of the city, of the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and
belfries," and we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint. And
throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far
greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is present to us
from the first page to the last; the title has given us the clue, and
already in the Palace of Justice the story begins to attach itself to
that central building by character after character. It is purely an
effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus dominate and
stand out above the city; and any one who should visit it, in the spirit
of the Scott-tourist to Edinburgh or the Trossachs, would be almost
offended at finding nothing more than this old church thrust away into a
corner. It is purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect
that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing consistency
and strength. And then, Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and, above
all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even more distinctly Gothic
than their surroundings. We know this generation already: we have seen
them clustered about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over
the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there
is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the
grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate
contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art.
Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story
like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the
book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Dom
Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of the old cathedral. It is here
that we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the
romance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding
Illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven
deadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the
whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art?
It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,
there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have
come almost to identify with the author's manner. Yet even here we are
distressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and
alienate the sympathies. The scene of the _in pace_, for example, in
spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
novelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should
as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again, the following
two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass
what it had ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine
(vol. ii. p. 180): "Il souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachait
des poignees de cheveux, _pour voir s'ils ne blanchissaient pas_." And,
p. 181: "Ses pensees etaient si insupportables qu'il prenait sa tete a
deux mains et tatchait de l'arracher de ses epaules _pour la briser sur
le pave_."
One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery
that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual
melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of
brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is
the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in "Notre
Dame," the whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archer
is unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last
hiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this
sordid hero who has long since forgotten her--well, that is just one of
those things that readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and
they are quite right; life is hard enough for poor mortals without
having it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art.
We look in vain for any similar blemish in "Les Miserables." Here, on
the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary
restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest
and most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of
this great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be--for such
awakenings are unpleasant--to the great cost of the society that we
enjoy and profit by, to the labour and sweat of those who support the
litter, civilisation, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried
forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them a
very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million
individual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that the
bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes
life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death--by the
deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labour, and
the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and
the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something
of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in "Les
Miserables"; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence
with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those who
are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of
mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again
and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to
pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There
is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The
terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can
hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad, between its formidable wheels
with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror
incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the
crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the
street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as when the lantern
of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or as
when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet
riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice
and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of
oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause of
oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of
Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the
throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the
admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made a
religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned
that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just creation,
over which the reader will do well to ponder.
With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light
and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable
things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of
the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can
forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water,
stands in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster
behind "lui faisait un peu l'effet d'etre le Pere eternel"? The pathos
of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of
the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is
nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of
Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our
affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our
profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are
few books in the world that can be compared with it. There is as much
calm and serenity as Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic
coarsenesses that disfigured "Notre Dame" are no longer present. There
is certainly much that is painfully improbable; and again, the story
itself is a little too well constructed; it produces on us the effect of
a puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find that every character fits
again and again into the plot, and is, like the child's cube,
serviceable on six faces; things are not so well arranged in life as all
that comes to. Some of the digressions, also, seem out of place, and do
nothing but interrupt and irritate. But when all is said, the book
remains of masterly conception and of masterly development, full of
pathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence.
Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the
first two members of the series, it remained for "Les Travailleurs de la
Mer" to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of
external force that is brought against him. And here once more the
artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are,
indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers
a type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forces
into the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labour"
in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown
into such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that
come wonderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once
the note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with
his indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the
clamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out
sharply against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation
is not to be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for
example; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to set side by
side than "Les Travailleurs" and this other of the old days before art
had learnt to occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoe
was one sole centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead
and utterly unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with
Gilliat; we feel that he is opposed by a "dark coalition of forces,"
that an "immense animosity" surrounds him; we are the witnesses of the
terrible warfare that he wages with "the silent inclemency of phenomena
going their own way, and the great general law, implacable and passive":
"a conspiracy of the indifferency of things" is against him. There is
not one interest on the reef, but two. Just as we recognise Gilliat for
the hero, we recognise, as implied by this indifferency of things, this
direction of forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another
character who may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the
two face up to one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the
storm, they fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor;--a
victor, however, who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say
nothing of the gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it
will be enough to remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab
when he is himself assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its
way, is the last touch to the inner significance of the book; here,
indeed, is the true position of man in the universe.
But in "Les Travailleurs," with all its strength, with all its
eloquence, with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we
cannot conceal from ourselves that there is a thread of something that
will not bear calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about the
storm, admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful whether it would be
possible to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any
amount of breakwater and broken rock. I do not understand the way in
which the waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way
of speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the sea
was quite calm next day? Is this great hurricane a piece of
scene-painting after all? And when we have forgiven Gilliat's prodigies
of strength (although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in
the "Vicomte de Bragelonne" than is quite desirable), what is to be said
to his suicide, and how are we to condemn in adequate terms that
unprincipled avidity after effect, which tells us that the sloop
disappeared over the horizon, and the head under the water, at one and
the same moment? Monsieur Hugo may say what he will, but we know better;
we know very well that they did not; a thing like that raises up a
despairing spirit of opposition in a man's readers; they give him the
lie fiercely as they read. Lastly, we have here already some beginning
of that curious series of English blunders, that makes us wonder if
there are neither proof-sheets nor judicious friends in the whole of
France, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what
may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign
tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth,"
and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It
is here that we learn that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as
"lord" in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's
equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun.
In "L'Homme qui Rit," it was Hugo's object to "denounce" (as he would
say himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England;
and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the
two last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The
repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at
the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it
deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,
here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The
constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing
could be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant
mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and
installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a
great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which
all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and
tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of
the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible
laughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of this
strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to
the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am
vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughter
gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running
through the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl
Dea, for the monster. It is a most benignant providence that thus
harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of those
compensations, one of those after-thoughts of a relenting destiny, that
reconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; the
atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic
love; it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full
moon over the night of some foul and feverish city.
There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particular
than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that
the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and
his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as
much an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an
abuse of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable in
the drama where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance.
Lastly, I suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of
this not immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at
once. The large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded
already in speaking of "Les Travailleurs," are of a sort that is really
indifferent in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some
seaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Jim-Jack to be a likely
nickname for an English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or
Scott, for that matter, be guilty of "figments enough to confuse the
march of a whole history--anachronisms enough to overset all
chronology,"[2] the life of their creations, the artistic truth and
accuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised. But when we come
upon a passage like the sinking of the _Ourque_ in this romance, we can
do nothing but cover our face with our hands: the conscientious reader
feels a sort of disgrace in the very reading. For such artistic
falsehoods, springing from what I have called already an unprincipled
avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated; and above
all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo. We cannot forgive
in him what we might have passed over in a third-rate sensation
novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and nautical affairs, he
must have known very well that vessels do not go down as he makes the
_Ourque_ go down; he must have known that such a liberty with fact was
against the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of
sincerity in conception or workmanship.
In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure
from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one
would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any
theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of
"Quatrevingt-treize" has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a
doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,
we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is
at an end. It is a novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at
that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by
Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement
or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this:
"Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill
the sheep?" This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the
end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set
of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our
attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of
these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon
come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we
really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us.
We know how history continues through century after century; how this
king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole
generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if
we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in
the men, but in the country that they loved or hated, benefited or
injured. And so it is here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we
regard them no more than the lost armies of which we find the cold
statistics in military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it
is the principle that put these men where they were, that filled them
for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power, now that they
are fallen, to inspire others with the same courage. The interest of the
novel centres about revolutionary France: just as the plot is an
abstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force.
And this has been done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold
and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward
realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealing
with them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come
before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men
and maidens of customary romance.
The episode of the mother and children in "Quatrevingt-treize" is equal
to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the
second volume, for instance, called "_Sein gueri, coeur saignant_,"
that is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be
more delightful than the humours of the three children on the day before
the assault. The passage on La Vendee is really great, and the scenes in
Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of
pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of
praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,
somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment of
conventional dialogue than in "L'Homme qui Rit"; and much that should
have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he
has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his
characters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the
troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which
the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a
woman and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at
one place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can
summon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they
ceased to steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter in
which Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less
said the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have
been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue.
Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable
workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and
trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin
unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our
ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to
the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is
going to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the
stage mechanism. I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot
conceive any disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated.
Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five
great novels.
Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a
certain appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to
any practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in
it. It has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that
Victor Hugo occupies a high place among those few. He has always a
perfect command over his stories; and we see that they are constructed
with a high regard to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is
informed with moral significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the
same thing be said in the same degree. His romances are not to be
confused with "the novel with a purpose" as familiar to the English
reader: this is generally the model of incompetence; and we see the
moral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrown
externally over it like a carpet over a railing. Now the moral
significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance; it is the
organising principle. If you could somehow despoil "Les Miserables" or
"Les Travailleurs" of their distinctive lesson, you would find that the
story had lost its interest and the book was dead.
Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art
speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If
you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,
you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes
of story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the
two lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley Novels,
and all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimes
they are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man
against the sea and sky, as in "Les Travailleurs"; sometimes, as in "Les
Miserables," they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in
the epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in
"Quatrevingt-treize." There is no hero in "Notre Dame": in "Les
Miserables" it is an old man: in "L'Homme qui Rit" it is a monster: in
"Quatrevingt-treize" it is the Revolution. Those elements that only
began to show themselves timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter
Scott, have usurped ever more and more of the canvas; until we find the
whole interest of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that
Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being out of the
field of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as large
a place, playing (so to speak) nearly as important a _role_, as the man,
Gilliat, who opposes and overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a
nation put upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before the
fortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir; and the forces that oppose
and corrupt a principle holding the attention quite as strongly as the
wicked barons or dishonest attorneys of the past. Hence those individual
interests that were supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott stood out
over everything else, and formed as it were the spine of the story,
figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one force
among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a whole world of
things equally vivid and important. So that, for Hugo, man is no longer
an isolated spirit without antecedent or relation here below, but a
being involved in the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a
centre of such action and reaction; or an unit in a great multitude,
chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and aspirations, and, in
all seriousness, blown about by every wind of doctrine. This is a long
way that we have travelled: between such work and the work of Fielding
is there not, indeed, a great gulf of thought and sentiment?
Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of life, and that
portion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and,
besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal
interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness
of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place in
nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently
the responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this
generalisation of interest, we never miss those small humanities that
are at the opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the
intellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another
sentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into
Cosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her
dress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of
the laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award to
these romances. The author has shown a power of just subordination
hitherto unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class of
effects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other, his work is
more nearly complete work, and his art, with all its imperfections,
deals more comprehensively with the materials of life, than that of any
of his otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors.
These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and
yet they are but one facade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected
to his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat
the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same
unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the
romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions--an emphasis that is
somehow akin to weakness--a strength that is a little epileptic. He
stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels
them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we
almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more
heavily than others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit
by the privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something
that is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, and
see them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,
cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the
wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also
to recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and,
in many ways, one of the greatest artists of time. If we look back, yet
once, upon these five romances, we see blemishes such as we can lay to
the charge of no other man in the number of the famous; but to what
other man can we attribute such sweeping innovations, such a new and
significant presentment of the life of man, such an amount, if we merely
think of the amount, of equally consummate performance?