My first notions of Victor Hugo were associated with the sea. It was
from the old Weymouth harbour that as a child I used to watch those
Channel-Island steamers with red funnels setting forth on what
seemed to me in those days a wondrous voyage of mystery and peril.
I read "The Toilers of the Sea" at my inland school at Mr. Hardy's
Sherton Abbas; whither, it may be remembered, poor Giles
Winterbourne set off with such trembling anxiety to fetch home his
Grace.
I read it in what was probably a very quaint sort of translation. The
book was bound in that old-fashioned "yellow back" style which at
that time was considered in clergymen's families as a symbol of all
that was dissipated and dangerous; and on the outside of the yellow
cover was a positively terrifying picture of the monstrous devilfish
with which Gellert wrestled in that terrible sea-cavern.
Certain scenes in that romance lodged themselves in my brain with
diabolic intensity. That scene, for instance, when the successful
scoundrel, swimming in the water, "feels himself seized by one
foot," that scene where the man buys the revolver in the little
gunsmith's shop; that appalling scene at the end where Gellert
drowns himself, watching the ship that bears his love away to
happiness in the arms of another--all these held my imagination then,
as indeed they hold it still, with the vividness of personal experience.
It was long after this, not more than five or six years ago in fact, that
I read "Notre Dame de Paris." This book I secured from the ship's
library of some transatlantic liner and the fantastic horrors it
contains, carried to a point of almost intolerable melodrama,
harmonised well enough with the nightly thud of the engines and the
daylong staring at the heaving water.
"Notre Dame" is certainly an amazing book. If it were not for the
presence of genius in it, that ineffable all-redeeming quality, it
would be one of the most outrageous inventions of flagrant
sensationalism ever indulged in by the morbidity of man. But genius
pervades it from beginning to end; pervades even its most
impossible scenes; and on the whole I think it is a much more
arresting tale than, say, "The Count of Monte Cristo," or any of
Dumas' works except "The Three Musketeers."
I have never, even as a child, cared greatly for Dumas, and I discern
in the attitude of the persons who persist in preferring him to Victor
Hugo the presence of a temperamental cult so alien to my own that I
am tempted to regard it as no better than an affected pose.
Nowhere is Victor Hugo's genius more evident than in his invention
of names. Esmeralda, Quasimodo, Gellert, Cosette, Fantine--they all
have that indescribable ring of genuine romance about them which
more than anything else restores to us the "long, long thoughts" of
youth.
I think that Fantine is the most beautiful and imaginative name ever
given to any woman. It is far more suggestive of wild and delicate
mysteries than Fragoletta or Dolores or Charmian or Ianthe.
I am inclined to maintain that it is in the sphere of pure poetic
imagination that Victor Hugo is greatest; though, like so many other
foreigners, I find it difficult to read his formal poetry. It is, I fancy,
this poetic imagination of his which makes it possible for him to
throw his isolated scenes into such terrific relief that they lodge
themselves in one's brain with such crushing force. In all his books it
is the separate individual scenes of which one finds oneself thinking
as one recalls the progress of this narrative or the other. And when
he has struck out with a few vivid lightning-like flashes the original
lineaments of one of his superb creations, it is rather in separate and
detached scenes that he makes such a person's indelible
characteristics gleam forth from the surrounding darkness, than in
any continuous psychological process of development.
His psychology is the psychology of a child; but none the worse
perhaps for that; for it is remarkable how often the most exhaustive
psychological analysis misses the real mystery of human character.
Victor Hugo goes to work by illuminating flashes. He carries a
flaring torch in his hand; and every now and then he plunges it into
the caverns of the human heart, and one is conscious of vast
stupendous Shadows, moving from midnight to midnight.
His method is gnomic, laconic, oracular; never persuasive or
plausible. It is "Lo--here" and then again "Lo--there!" and we are
either with him or not with him. There are no half measures, no slow
evolutionary disclosures.
One of his most interesting literary devices, and it is an essentially
poetic one, is the diffusion through the story of some particular
background, a background which gathers to itself a sort of brooding
personality as the tale proceeds, and often becomes before the book
is finished far more arresting and important than any of the human
characters whose drama it dominates.
Such is the sea itself, for instance, in "The Toilers." Such is the
historic cathedral in "Notre Dame." Such is the great Revolution
--certainly a kind of natural cataclysm--in "Ninety-three." Such are the
great sewers of Paris in "Les Misérables." Such--though it is rather a
symbol than a background--is the terrible fixed smile of the
unfortunate hero in "L'Homme qui Rit."
It is one of the most curious and interesting phenomena in the
history of literature, this turning of a poet into a writer of romances,
romances which have at least as much if not more of the poetic
quality in them than the orthodox poetry of the same hand.
One is led to wonder what kind of stories Swinburne would have
written had he debouched into this territory, or what would have
been the novels conceived by Tennyson. Thomas Hardy began with
poetry and has returned to poetry; and one cannot help feeling that it
is more than anything else the absence of this quality in the
autobiographical studies of sex and character which the younger
writers of our day spin out that makes them after a time seem so
sour and flat.
It is the extravagance of the poetic temper and its lack of proportion
which leads to some of the most glaring of Victor Hugo's faults; and
it is the oracular, prophetic, gnomic tone of his genius which causes
those queer gaps and rents in his work and that fantastic arbitrariness
which makes it difficult for him to evoke any rational or organic
continuity.
It is an aspect of the poetic temper too, the queer tricks which the
humour of Victor Hugo will condescend to play. I suppose he is by
nature the least endowed with a sense of humour of all the men of
genius who have ever lived. The poet Wordsworth had more. But
like so many poetic natures, whose vivid imagination lends itself to
every sort of human reaction, even to those not really indigenous,
Victor Hugo cannot resist in indulging in freakish sallies of
jocularity which sometimes become extraordinarily strained and
forced, and even remind one now and then of the horrible
mechanical smile on the countenance of the mutilated man in his
own story.
Poet-like too is the portentous pedantry of his archaeological vein;
the stupendous air of authority with which he raps out his classical
quotations and his historic allusions. He is capable sometimes of
producing upon the mind the effect of a hilarious school-master
cracking his learned jokes to an audience only too willing to
encourage him. At other times, so bizarre and out of all human
proportion are his fantasies, one receives an impression as if one of
the great granite effigies representing Liberty or Equality or the
Rights of Man, from the portico of some solemn Palais de Justice,
had suddenly yielded to the temptation of drink and was uttering the
most amazing levities. Victor Hugo in his lighter vein is really, we
must honestly confess, a somewhat disconcerting companion. One
has such respect for the sublime imaginations which one knows are
lurking behind "that cliff-like brow" that one struggles to find some
sort of congruity in these strange gestures. It is as though when
walking by the side of some revered prophet, one were suddenly
conscious that the man was skipping or putting out his tongue.
It is as though we caught Ajax masquerading as a mummer, or
Aeschylus dressed up in cap and bells.
There are persons who interest themselves still in Victor Hugo's
political attitudes, in his orations on the balcony of the Hotel de
Ville; in his theatrical visits to the barricades where "he could be
shot, but could not shoot"; in his diatribes against Napoleon the
Third; in his defence of the Commune from the safe remoteness of
Brussels. There are persons who suffer real disillusion when they
discover how much of a conservative and a courtier he was in his
youth. There are persons who are thrilled to recall how he carried his
solemn vengeance against his imperial enemy so far as to rebuke in
stern language Queen Victoria for her friendliness towards the
Empress.
I must confess I find it difficult to share these emotions. I seem to
smell the foot-lights of the opera in these heroic declamations, and
indeed poor Napoleon the Little was himself so much of an operatic
hero that to exalt him into a classic tyrant seems little short of
ridiculous.
We derive a much truer picture of Victor Hugo's antagonist from
Disraeli's "Endymion" than we do from the poet's torrential
invectives. I have a shrewd idea that the Emperor was a good deal
more amiable, if not more philosophical, than his eloquent judge.
Victor Hugo was an impassioned lover of children. Who can forget
those scenes in "Les Misérables" about little Cosette and the great
wonderful doll which Valjean gave her? He loved children and--for
all his lack of humour; sometimes I think because of it--he
thoroughly understood them. He loved children and he was a child
himself.
No one but a child would have behaved as he did on certain
occasions. The grave naiveté of his attitude to the whole spectacle of
life was like the solemnity of a child who takes very seriously every
movement of the game which he is playing. A child is solemn when
it is pretending to be an engine-driver or a pilot, and Victor Hugo
was solemn when he pretended to be a saviour of society. No one
but a person endowed with the perfect genius of childishness could
have acted toward his mistress and his wife in the way he did, or
have been so serenely blind to the irony of the world.
There is as little of the sensual in Victor Hugo's temperament as
there is in the temperament of a pure-minded child; but like a child
he finds a shuddering pleasure in approaching the edge of the
precipice; like a child he loves to loiter in melancholy fields where
the white moon-daisies are queerly stained with the old dark blood
of weird and abnormal memories.
Irony of any kind, worldly or otherwise, never crossed so much as
the margin of his consciousness. He is shamelessly, indecently,
monstrously lacking in the ironic sense.
"What are we going to do?" he dramatically asked his sons when
they had established themselves in their island home; and after they
had each replied according to their respective tastes, "I," he added,
"am going to contemplate the ocean!"
I am ready to confess that I feel a certain shame in thus joining the
company of the godless and making sport of my childhood's hero.
"He was a man, take him for all in all," and _we_ at any rate shall
not live to see his like again.
There was something genuinely large and innocent and elemental in
Victor Hugo. The austere simplicity of his life may have been
perhaps too self-consciously flung at the world's face; but it was a
natural instinct in him. I hesitate to call him a charlatan. Was it
Goethe who said "There is something of charlatanism in all genius"?
Victor Hugo hardly deserves to have Goethe quoted in his favour, so
ignorantly did he disparage, in his childish prejudice, the great
German's work; but what perhaps the world calls charlatanism in
him is really only the reaction of genius when it comes into conflict
with the brutal obstinacy of real life.
What is charlatanism? I am almost scared to look up the word in the
dictionary for fear of discovering that I am myself no better than that
opprobrious thing. But still, if Victor Hugo was really a charlatan,
one can safely say one would sooner be damned with the author of
"L'Homme qui Rit" than saved with many who have no charlatanism
in them.
But what is charlatanism? Does it imply false and extravagant
claims to qualities we do not possess? Or is there the spirit of the
Mountebank in it? If one were a deliberate Machiavel of
dissimulation, if one fooled the people thoroughly and consciously,
would one be a charlatan? Or are charlatans simply harmless fools
who are too embarrassed to confess their ignorance and too childish
to stop pretending?
There is something nobly patriarchal about the idea of Victor Hugo
in his old age. The man's countenance has certainly extraordinary
genius "writ large" there for all men to see. His head is like
something that has been carved by Michelangelo. Looking at his
face one realises where the secret of his peculiar genius lay. It lay in
a certain tragic abandonment to a sublime struggle with the elements.
When in his imagination he wrestled with the elements he forgot his
politics, his prejudices, his moral bravado.
Whatever this mysterious weakness may have been which we call
his "charlatanism," it certainly dropped away from him like a mask
when he confronted the wind or sea or such primitive forms of
human tragedy as are elemental in their simple outlines. Probably
for all his rhetoric Victor Hugo would have made an obstinate
invincible sailor on the high seas. I discern in the shape of his head
something of the look of weather-beaten mariners. I can fancy him
holding fast the rudder of a ship flying before the fury of an Atlantic
storm.
The sea-scenes in his books are unequalled in all prose literature. To
match them you would have to go to the poets--to Shakespeare--to
Swinburne. A single line of Hugo has more of the spirit of the sea,
more of its savagery, its bitter strength, its tigerish leap and bite,
than pages of Pierre Loti. Whether I am prejudiced by my childish
associations I do not know, but no other writer makes me smell the
sea-weed, catch the sharp salt tang, feel the buffeting of the waves,
as Victor Hugo does. Yes, for all his panoramic evocations of
sea-effects, Pierre Loti does not touch the old eternal mystery of the
deep, with its answer of terror and strange yearning in the heart of
man, in the way this other touches it. The great rhetorician found a
rhetoric here that put his eloquence to silence and he responded to it
with sentences as sharp, as brief, as broken, as abrupt, as stinging
and wind-driven, as the rushing waves themselves pouring over a
half drowned wreck.
And just as he deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain
and snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo will
think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle
in "Ninety-three," to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland,
when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs" escapes from the
storm.
When one tries to cast one's critical plummet into the secret motive
forces of Hugo's genius, one is continually being baffled by the
presence there of conflicting elements. For instance no one who has
read "Notre Dame" can deny the presence of a certain savage delight
in scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No one who has read
"Les Misérables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of lovely
tenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, would
degenerate into maudlin sentiment of the most lamentable kind.
The performances of the diabolical "archdeacon" in "Notre Dame"
to the moment when Quasimodo watches him fall from the parapet,
are just what one might expect to enjoy in some old-fashioned
melodramatic theatre designed for such among the pure in heart as
have a penchant for ghastliness. But one forgets all this in a moment
when some extraordinary touch of illuminating imagination gets
hold of one by the throat.
I do not think that Victor Hugo will go down to posterity honoured
and applauded because of his love for the human race. I suspect
those critics who hold him up as a grand example of democratic
principles and libertarian ideals of not being great lovers of his
stories. He is a name for them to conjure with and that is all.
Victor Hugo loved children and he loved the mothers of children,
but he was too great a soul to spoil his colossal romance with any
blatant humanitarianism. I do not say he was the high, sad, lonely,
social exile he would have liked the world to believe him; for he was
indeed of kind, simple, honest domestic habits and a man who got
much happiness from quite little things. But when we come to
consider what will be left of him in the future I feel sure that it will
be rather by his imagination than by his social eloquence that he will
touch our descendants. It is indeed not in the remotest degree as a
rhetorician that he arrests us in these unique tales. It is by means of
something quite different from eloquence.
His best effects are achieved in sudden striking images which seem
to have in them a depth of fantastic diablerie worthy of the
wreck-strewn "humming waters" whose secrets he loved to penetrate.
It is not sufficiently realised how much there was of the "macabre"
about Victor Hugo. Like the prophet Ezekiel, he had strange visions
from the power he served, and in the primordial valleys of his
imagination there lie, strewn to the bleaching winds, the bones of
men and of demons and of gods; and the breath that blows upon
them and makes them live--live their weird phantasmal life of
mediaeval goblins in some wild procession of madness--is the breath
of the spirit of childhood's fancies.