The greatest of the French writers of this century has passed away from
earth, after eighty-three years of a life which was, like Carlyle’s, full
of work to the very end. Victor Hugo’s greatness is difficult to measure
at this hour; we are too near to know whether this is an Alp or only a
hill. That it has attracted the attention, the admiration, the homage of
mankind for half a century would seem to mean that this was one of the
three or four great lives of the nineteenth century. Victor Hugo came of
a union of aristocratic and plebeian blood. His father’s tribe had been
of the nobles since 1531; his mother was the daughter of a seafaring
race. The current sketches of his father omit the most dramatic incident
of Colonel Hugo’s career. We refer to his long chase and final capture of
Fra Diavalo—the brigand hero of the opera which bears his name. In the
whole history of brigandage in South Italy, there is no more exciting and
romantic story than that of his hunt and capture of the “Friar-Devil” by
the father of Victor Hugo. In the blood of the poet the plebeian mother
triumphed at length over the Monarchist father, and Victor Hugo’s pen
has rendered the Republicanism of France more valuable service than his
father’s sword gave to the Napoleonic crown.
His genius was fortunate in the poverty which compelled him to work for
bread, and the banishment which in 1853 threw him into exile, and again
forced him to take up the severe literary labor which brought forth
“Les Miserables” in 1862. This son of the aristocracy might have lived
a life with out fruit if he had not abandoned the ideals of his father
for those popular sympathies which made him the most dangerous enemy of
Napoleon III. The change in his views came slowly. He was a Royalist
under Louis Phillippe, and that king created him a peer of France in
1845. It was not until 1849 that he changed his political attitude, and
he was then forty-seven years of age—so that he divided his life pretty
evenly between the aristocratic and popular causes. His works show the
influence of his political thoughts, and the differences between the
earlier and later are very marked. The earlier works gave him the ears
of the great world; the later won him the hearts of the people. Whether
in prose or in verse, all that he ever wrote was poetry. His later prose
is a collection of poems of human aspirations. It is idle to seek in
them any system, they are emotion rather than thought; but the emotion
is the throbbing of the universal human heart. He believed in God and
in man. He rejected the religion of his people less under the stress of
conviction than through the force of his hostility to the organized human
world in which he saw men suffering. It was not his office to resolve
the riddles of human pain; it was his to gather men’s tears into God’s
bottle. It may be called a one-sided life; but it was on that side where
great lives are too seldom found. It may be said that emotion is blind,
passionate, dangerous, as Frenchmen have abundantly proved; but it is
still true that the emotion which rouses men from lethargy is necessary
to beneficent change, and that even though the wail of human misery
must go up forever, we must honor the great souls who seek solutions of
the mystery of evil in a happier ordering of human society. We need not
become socialists to reverence Victor Hugo’s socialistic philanthropy.
Its aim was high, and it has its great uses. Though only God’s bottle
be large enough to hold the tears of his children, it is a noble poetry
which considers the sorrows of the earth and seeks to pour the sunshine
or hope into the low valleys of humanity. Hugo’s way may be the wrong
way—probably it is—but it is good for men to hold fast the hope that
there is _some_ way through the sea to the promised land. There is a
desert beyond the sea; but somehow we shall cross the desert into the
Canaan of humanity.
It is, therefore, as a poet of the sorrows and aspirations of our race
that we shall most profitably think of Victor Hugo. He was somewhat
too French in spirit to be a poet of mankind; he was too egotistic to
be on the heights of his human song; he would have been greater if his
knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth had been deeper, and his imitation of
him perfect in the measure of his great capacity; he would have left
something unsaid which wounded men whose purpose was as high as his own,
if he had been more Christian and less Hugoist. But why do we ask all
things of all men? Victor Hugo did a great work in his own great way.
A dangerous socialism has temporarily profited by his denunciations of
society, but in the end of the account it will probably appear that he
has advanced Christian socialism by the uplift he has given to human
aspirations. Men are not so willing to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt,
not so much in danger of leaving the bones of the whole race in the
desert, more anxious to move on to their promised land.