CHAPTER III

VICTOR HUGO

[Sidenote: Limitations.]

At the present day, and perhaps in all days hitherto, the greatest

writer of the nineteenth century in France for length of practice,

diversity of administration of genius, height of intention, and (for a

long time at least) magnitude and altitude of fame, enjoys, and has

enjoyed, more popular repute in England for his work in prose fiction

than for any other part of it. With the comparative side of this

estimate the present writer can indeed nowise agree; and the reasons of

his disagreement should be made good in the present chapter. But this is

the first opportunity he has had of considering, with fair room and

verge, the justice of the latter part of Tennyson's compliment "Victor

_in Romance_"; and it will pretty certainly be the last. As for a

general judgment of the positive and relative value and qualities of the

wonderful procession of work--certainly deserving that adjective

whatever other or others may be added--which covers the space of a full

half-century from _Han d'Islande_ to _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, it would,

according to the notions of criticism here followed, be improper to

attempt that till after the procession itself has been carefully

surveyed.

Nor will it be necessary to preface, to follow, or, except very rarely

and slightly, to accompany this survey with remarks on the non-literary

characteristics of this French Titan of literature. The object often of

frantic political and bitter personal abuse; for a long time of almost

equally frantic and much sillier political and personal idolatry;

himself the victim--in consequence partly of his own faults, partly of

ignoble jealousy of greatness, but perhaps most of all of the inevitable

reaction from this foolish cult--of the most unsparing rummage into

those faults, and the weaknesses which accompany them, that any poet or

prose writer, even Pope, has experienced--Victor Hugo still, though he

has had many a _vates_ in both senses of _sacer_, may almost be allowed

_carere_ critico _sacro_,[93] in the best sense, on the whole of his

life and work. I have no pretensions to fill or bridge the whole of the

gap here. It will be quite task enough for the present, leaving the life

almost alone, to attempt the part of the work which contains prose

fiction. Nothing said of this will in the least affect what I have often

said elsewhere, and shall hold to as long as I hold anything, in regard

to the poetry--that its author is the greatest poet of France, and one

of the great poets of the world.

[Sidenote: _Han d'Islande._]

To deal with Hugo's first published, though not first written, novel

requires, in almost the highest degree, what Mr. Matthew Arnold called

"a purged considerate mind." There are, I believe, some people (I myself

know at least one of great excellence) who, having had the good luck to

read _Han d'Islande_ as schoolboys, and finding its vein congenial to

theirs, have, as in such cases is not impossible, kept it unscathed in

their liking. But this does not happen to every one. I do not think,

though I am not quite certain, that when I first read it myself I was

exactly what may be called a schoolboy pure and simple (that is to say,

under fifteen). But if I did not read it in upper school-boyhood (that

is to say, before eighteen), I certainly did, not much later. I own that

at that time, whatever my exact age was, I found it so uninteresting

that I do not believe I read it through. Nor, except in the last

respect, have I improved with it--for it would be presumptuous to say,

"has it improved with me"--since. The author apologised for it in two

successive prefaces shortly after its appearance, and in yet another

after that of _Notre-Dame de Paris_, ten years later. None of them, it

is to be feared, "touches the spot." The first, indeed, is hardly an

apology at all, but a sort of _goguenard_ "showing off" of the kind not

uncommon with youth; the second, a little more serious, contains rather

interesting hits[94] of again youthful jealousy at the popularity of

Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil; the third and much later one is a

very early instance of the Victorian philosophising. "There must be," we

are told with the solemnity which for some sixty years excited such a

curious mixture of amazement and amusement, "in every work of the

mind--drama or novel--there must be many things felt, many things

observed, and many things divined," and while in _Han_ there is only one

thing felt--a young man's love--and one observed--a girl's ditto--the

rest is all divined, is "the fantastic imagination of an adolescent."

One impeticoses the gratility of the explanation, and refrains, as far

as may be, from saying, "Words! words!" Unluckily, the book does very

little indeed to supply deeds to match. The feeling and the observation

furnish forth a most unstimulating love-story; at least the present

critic, who has an unabashed fondness for love-stories, has never been

able to feel the slightest interest either in Ordener Guldenlew or in

Ethel Schumacker, except in so far as the lady is probably the first of

the since innumerable and sometimes agreeable heroines of her name in

fiction. As for the "divining," the "intention," and the "imagination,"

they have been exerted to sadly little purpose. The absurd nomenclature,

definitely excused in one of the prefaces, may have a slight historic

interest as the first attempt, almost a hopeless failure, at that

_science des noms_ with which Hugo was later credited, and which he

certainly sometimes displayed. It is hardly necessary to say much about

Spladgest and Oglypiglaf, Musdaemon and Orugix. They are pure

schoolboyisms. But it is perhaps fair to relieve the author from the

reproach, which has been thrown on him by some of his English

translators, of having metamorphosed "Hans" into "Han." He himself

explains distinctly that the name was a nickname, taken from the grunt

or growl (the word is in France applied to the well-known noise made by

a paviour lifting and bringing down his rammer) of the monster.

But that monster himself! A more impossible improbability and a more

improbable impossibility never conceived itself in the brain of even an

as yet failure of an artist. Han appears to have done all sorts of nasty

things, such as eating the insides of babies when they were alive and

drinking the blood of enemies when they were not dead, out of the skulls

of his own offspring, which he had extracted from _their_ dead bodies by

a process like peeling a banana: also to have achieved some terrible

ones, such as burning cathedrals and barracks, upsetting rocks on whole

battalions, and so forth. But the only chances we have of seeing him at

real business show him to us as overcoming, with some trouble, an infirm

old man, and _not_ overcoming at all, after a struggle of long duration,

a not portentously powerful young one. His white bear, and not he, seems

to have had the chief merit of despatching six surely rather incompetent

hunters who followed the rash "Kennybol": and of his two final

achievements, that of poniarding two men in a court of justice might

have been brought about by anybody who was careless enough of his own

life, and that of setting his gaol on fire by any one who, with the same

carelessness, had a corrupt gaoler to supply him with the means.

It would be equally tedious and superfluous to go through the minor

characters and incidents. The virtuous and imprisoned statesman

Schumacker, Ethel's father, excites no sympathy: his malignant and

finally defeated enemy, the Chancellor Ahlefeld, no interest. That

enemy's most _un_virtuous wife and her paramour Musdaemon--_the_

villain of the piece as Han is the monster--as to whom one wonders

whether he could ever have been as attractive as a lover as he is

unattractive as a villain, are both puppets. Indeed, one would hardly

pay any attention to the book at all if it did not hold a position in

the work of a man of the highest genius partly similar to, and partly

contrasted with, that of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_. But _St. Irvyne_

and _Zastrozzi_ are much shorter than _Han d'Islande_, and Shelley,

whether by accident, wisdom (_nemo omnibus horis insanit_), or the

direct intervention of Apollo, never resumed the task for which his

genius was so obviously unsuited.

Still, it must be said for Hugo that, even at this time, he could

have--in a manner actually had--put in evidence of not absolute

incompetence for the task.

[Sidenote: _Bug-Jargal._]

_Bug-Jargal_ was, as glanced at above, written, according to its

author's own statement, two years before _Han_, when he was only

sixteen; was partially printed (in the _Constitutionnel_) and (in fear

of a piracy) rewritten in fifteen days and published, seven years after

its composition, and almost as many before _Notre-Dame de Paris_

appeared. Taking it as it stands, there is nothing of the sixteen years

or of the fifteen days to be seen in it. It is altogether superior to

_Han_, and though it has not the nightmare magnificence and the

phantasmagoric variety of _Notre-Dame_, it is, not merely because it is

much shorter, a far better told, more coherent, and more generally human

story. The jester-obi Habibrah has indeed the caricature-grotesquery of

Han himself, and of Quasimodo, and long afterwards of Gwynplaine, as

well as the devilry of the first named and of Thénardier in _Les

Misérables_; but we do not see too much of him, and nothing that he does

is exactly absurd or utterly improbable. The heroine--so far as there is

a heroine in Marie d'Auverney, wife of the part-hero-narrator, but

separated from him on the very day of their marriage by the rebellion of

San Domingo--is very slight; but then, according to the story, she is

not wanted to be anything more. The cruelty, treachery, etc., of the

half-caste Biassou are not overdone, nor is the tropical scenery, nor

indeed anything else. Even the character of Bug-Jargal himself, a

modernised Oroonoko (whom probably Hugo did not know) and a more direct

descendant of persons and things in Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,

and to some extent the "sensibility" novelists generally (whom he

certainly did know), is kept within bounds. And, what is perhaps most

extraordinary of all, the half-comic interludes in the narrative where

Auverney's comrades talk while he makes breaks in his story, contain few

of Hugo's usually disastrous attempts at humour. It is impossible to say

that the book is of any great importance or of any enthralling interest.

But it is the most workmanlike of all Hugo's work in prose fiction, and,

except _Les Travailleurs de La Mer_ and _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, which

have greater faults as well as greater beauties, the most readable, if

not, like them, the most likely to be re-read.

[Sidenote: _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné._]

Its merits are certainly not ill set off by the two shorter pieces, both

of fairly early date, but the one a little before and the other a little

after _Notre-Dame de Paris_, which usually accompany it in the collected

editions. Of these _Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné_ is, with its tedious

preface, almost two-thirds as long as _Bug-Jargal_ itself; the other,

_Claude Gueux_, contents itself with thirty pages. Both are pieces with

a purpose--manifestos of one of Hugo's most consistent and most

irrational crazes--the objection to capital punishment.[95] There is no

need to argue against this, the immortal "Que MM. les assassins," etc.,

being, though in fact the weakest of a thousand refutations, sufficient,

once for all, to explode it. But it is not irrelevant to point out that

the two pieces themselves are very battering-rams against their own

theory. We are not told--the objection to this omission was made at the

time, of course, and Hugo's would-be lofty waving-off of this is one of

the earliest of many such--what the condemned person's crime was. But

the upshot of his lucubrations during these latest hours of his is this,

that such hours are almost more uncomfortable than the minutes of the

actual execution can possibly be. As this is exactly one of the points

on which the advocates of the punishment, whether from the point of view

of deterrence or from that of retribution, chiefly rely, it seems

something of a blunder to bring it out with all the power of a poet and

a rhetorician. We _want_ "M. l'Assassin," in fact, to be made very

uncomfortable--as uncomfortable as possible--and we want M. l'Assassin,

in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he will be so made.

"Serve him right" sums up the one view, "De te fabula" the other. In

fact cheap copies of _Le Dernier Jour_, supplied to all about to commit

murder, would be highly valuable. Putting aside its purpose, the mere

literary power is of course considerable if not consummate; it hardly

pretends to be a "furnished" _story_.

[Sidenote: _Claude Gueux._]

The piece, however, is tragic enough: it could hardly fail to be so in

the hands of such a master of tragedy, just as it could hardly fail to

be illogical in the hands of such a paralogician. But _Claude Gueux_,

though it ends with a murder and an attempt at suicide and an execution,

is really, though far from intentionally, a farce. The hero, made (by

the "fault of society," of course) a criminal, though not a serious one,

thinks himself persecuted by the prison director, and murders that

official. The reader who does not know the book will suppose that he has

been treated as Charles Reade's wicked governor treated Josephs and

Robinson and the other victims in _It is Never too Late to Mend_. Not at

all. The redoubtable Claude had, like the great Victor himself and other

quite respectable men, an equally redoubtable appetite, and the prison

rations were not sufficient for him. As he was a sort of leader or

prison shop-steward, and his fellow-convicts looked up to him, a young

fellow who was not a great eater used to give Claude part of his

allowance. The director, discovering this, removed the young man into

another ward--an action possibly rather spiteful, possibly also only a

slight excess, or no excess at all, of red-tapeism in discipline. Claude

not merely asks reasons for this,--which, of course, even if

respectfully done, was an act of clear insubordination on any but

anarchist principles,--but repeats the enquiry. The director more than

once puts the question by, but inflicts no penalty. Whereupon Claude

makes a harangue to the shop (which appears, in some astounding fashion,

to have been left without any supervision between the director's

visits), repeats once more, on the director's entrance, his

insubordinate enquiry, again has it put by, and thereupon splits the

unfortunate official's skull with a hatchet, digging also a pair of

scissors, which once belonged to his (left-handed) wife, into his own

throat. And the wretches actually cure this hardly fallen angel, and

then guillotine him, which he takes most sweetly, placing at the last

moment in the hand of the attendant priest, with the words _Pour les

pauvres_, a five-franc piece, which one of the Sisters of the prison

hospital had given him! After this Hugo, not contented with the tragedy

of the edacious murderer, gives us seven pages of his favourite rhetoric

in _saccadé_ paragraphs on the general question.

As so often with him, one hardly knows which particular question to ask

first, "Did ever such a genius make such a fool of himself?" or "Was

ever such an artist given to such hopeless slips in the most rudimentary

processes of art?"

[Sidenote: _Notre-Dame de Paris._]

But it is, of course, not till we come to _Notre-Dame de Paris_ that any

serious discussion of Hugo's claims as a novelist is possible. Hitherto,

while in novel at least he has very doubtfully been an _enfant sublime_,

he has most unquestionably been an _enfant_. Whatever faults may be

chargeable on his third novel or romance proper, they include no more

childishness than he displayed throughout his life, and not nearly so

much as he often did later.

The book, moreover, to adopt and adapt the language of another matter,

whether disputably or indisputably great in itself, is unquestionably so

"by position." It is one of the chief manifestos--there are some who

have held, and perhaps would still hold, that it is _the_ chief

manifesto and example--of one of the most remarkable and momentous of

literary movements--the great French Romantic revolt of

_mil-huit-cent-trente_. It had for a time enormous popularity, extending

to many who had not the slightest interest in it as such a manifesto; it

affected not merely its own literature, but others, and other arts

besides literature, both in its own and other countries. To whatever

extent this popularity may have been affected--first by the transference

of interest from the author's "letters" to his politics and sociology,

and secondly, by the reaction in general esteem which followed his

death--it is not very necessary to enquire. One certainly sees fewer,

indeed, positively few, references to it and to its contents now. But it

was so bright a planet when it first came into ken; it exercised its

influence so long and so largely; that even if it now glows fainter it

is worth exploring, and the analysis of the composition of its light is

worth putting on record.

[Sidenote: The story easy to anticipate.]

In the case of a book which, whether it has or has not undergone some

occultation as suggested, is still kept on sale not merely in the

original, but in cheap translations into every European tongue, there is

probably no need to include an actual "argument" in this analysis. As a

novel or at least romance, _Notre-Dame de Paris_ contains a story of the

late fifteenth century, the chief characters of which are the Spanish

gipsy[96] dancing-girl Esmeralda, with her goat Djali; Quasimodo, the

hunchbacked dwarf and bell-ringer of the cathedral; one of its

archdeacons, Claude Frollo, theologian, philosopher, expert in, but

contemner of, physical and astrological science, and above all,

alchemist, if not sorcerer; the handsome and gallant, but "not

intelligent" and not very chivalrous soldier Phoebus de Chateaupers,

with minors not a few, "supers" very many, and the dramatist Pierre

Gringoire as a sort of half-chorus, half-actor throughout. The evolution

of this story could not be very difficult to anticipate in any case;

almost any one who had even a slight knowledge of its actual author's

other work could make a guess at the _scenario_. The end must be tragic;

the _beau cavalier_ must be the rather unworthy object of Esmeralda's

affection, and she herself that of the (one need hardly say very

different) affections of Frollo and Quasimodo; a charge of sorcery,

based on the tricks she has taught Djali, must be fatal to her; and

poetic justice must overtake Frollo, who has instigated the persecution

but has half exchanged it for, half-combined it with, later attempts of

a different kind upon her. Although this _scenario_ may not have been

then quite so easy for any schoolboy to anticipate, as it has been

later, the course of the romantic novel from Walpole to Scott in

English, not to mention German and other things, had made it open enough

to everybody to construct. The only thing to be done, and to do, now

was, and is, to see, on the author's own famous critical principles,[97]

how he availed himself of the _publica materies_.

[Sidenote: Importance of the actual _title_.]

Perhaps the first impression of any reader who is not merely not an

expert in criticism, but who has not yet learnt its first, last, and

hardest lesson, shirked by not a few who seem to be experts--to suspend

judgment till the case is fully heard--may be unfavourable. It is true

that the title _Notre-Dame de Paris_, so stupidly and unfairly disguised

by the addition-substitution of "_The Hunchback_ of Notre Dame" in

English translations--quite honestly and quite legitimately warns any

intelligent reader what to expect. It is the cathedral itself, its

visible appearance and its invisible _aura_, atmosphere, history,

spirit, inspiration which gives the author--and is taken by him as

giving--his real subject. Esmeralda and Quasimodo, Frollo and Gringoire

are almost as much minors and supers in comparison with It or Her as

Phoebus de Chateaupers and the younger Frollo and the rest are in

relation to the four protagonists themselves. The most ambitious piece

of _dianoia_--of thought as contrasted with incident, character, or

description--is that embodied in the famous chapter, _Ceci tuera cela_,

where the fatal effect of literature (at least printed literature) on

architecture is inculcated. The situation, precincts, construction,

constitution of the church form the centre of such action as there is,

and supply by far the larger part of its scene. Therefore nobody has a

right to complain of a very large proportion of purely architectural

detail.

[Sidenote: The working out of the one under the other.]

But the question is whether, in the actual employment, and still more in

what we may call the administration, of this and other diluents or

obstruents of story, the artist has or has not made blunders in his art;

and it is very difficult not to answer this in the affirmative. There

were many excuses for him. The "guide-book novel" had already, and not

so very long before, been triumphantly introduced by _Corinne_. It had

been enormously popularised by Scott. The close alliance and almost

assimilation of art and history with literature was one of the supremest

articles of faith of Romanticism, and "the Gothic" was a sort of symbol,

shibboleth, and sacrament at once of Romanticism itself. But Victor

Hugo, like Falstaff, has, in this and other respects, abused his power

of pressing subjects into service almost, if not quite, damnably.

Whether out of pure wilfulness, out of mistaken theory, or out of a

mixture[98] of these and other influences, he has made the first volume

almost as little of a story as it could possibly be, while remaining a

story at all. Seventy mortal pages, pretty well packed in the standard

two-volume edition, which in all contains less than six hundred, dawdle

over the not particularly well-told business of Gringoire's interrupted

mystery, the arrival of the Flemish ambassadors, and the election of the

Pope of Unreason. The vision of Esmeralda lightens the darkness and

quickens the movement, and this brightness and liveliness continue till

she saves her unlucky dramatist from the murderous diversions of the

Cour des Miracles. But the means by which she does this--the old

privilege of matrimony--leads to nothing but a single scene, which might

have been effective, but which Hugo only leaves flat, while it has no

further importance in the story whatsoever. After it we hop or struggle

full forty pages through the public street of architecture pure and

simple.

[Sidenote: The story recovers itself latterly.]

At first sight "Coup d'oeil impartial sur l'Ancienne Magistrature" may

seem to give even more promise of November than of May. But there _is_

action here, and it really has something to do with the story. Also, the

subsequent treatment of the recluse or anchoress of the severest type in

the Place Notre-Dame itself (or practically so), though it is much too

long and is lengthened by matters with which Hugo knows least of all how

to deal, has still more claim to attention, for it leads directly on not

merely to the parentage of Esmeralda, but to the tragedy of her fate.

And almost the whole of the second volume is, whether the best

novel-matter or not, at any rate genuine novel-matter. If almost the

whole of the first had been boiled down (as Scott at his best would have

boiled it) into a preliminary chapter or two, the position of the book

as qualified to stand in its kind could not have been questioned. But

its faults and merits in that kind would still have remained matters of

very considerable question.

[Sidenote: But the characters?]

In respect of one fault, the side of the defence can surely be taken

only by generous, but hardly judicious or judicial devotees. Hugo's

singular affection for the monster--he had Stephano to justify him, but

unfortunately did not possess either the humour of that drunken

Neapolitan butler or the power of his and Caliban's creator--had made a

mere grotesque of _Han_, but had been reduced within more artistic

limits in _Bug_. In _Le Dernier Jour_ and _Claude Gueux_ it was excluded

by the subjects and objects alike.[99] Here it is, if not an

_intellectus_, at any rate _sibi permissus_; and, as it does not in the

earlier cases, it takes the not extremely artistic form of violent

contrast which was to be made more violent later in _L'Homme Qui Rit_.

If any one will consider Caliban and Miranda as they are presented in

_The Tempest_, with Quasimodo and Esmeralda as _they_ are presented

here, he will see at once the difference of great art and great failure

of art.

Then, too, there emerges another of our author's persistent obsessions,

the exaggeration of what we may call the individual combat. He had

probably intended something of this kind in _Han_, but the mistake there

in telling about it instead of telling it has been already pointed out.

Neither Bug-Jargal nor Habibrah does anything glaringly and longwindedly

impossible. But the one-man defence of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo against

the _truands_ is a tissue not so much of impossibilities--they, as it

has been said of old, hardly matter--as of the foolish-incredible. Why

did the numerous other denizens of the church and its cloisters do

nothing during all this time? Why did the _truands_, who, though they

were all scoundrels, were certainly not all fools, confine themselves to

this frontal assault of so huge a building? Why did the little rascal

Jean Frollo not take some one with him? These are not questions of mere

dull common sense; it is only dull absence of common sense which will

think them so. Scott, who, once more, was not too careful in stopping

loose places, managed the attacks of Tillietudlem and Torquilstone

without giving any scope for objections of this kind.

Hugo's strong point was never character, and it certainly is not so

here. Esmeralda is beautiful, amiable, pathetic, and unfortunate; but

the most uncharitable interpretation of Mr. Pope's famous libel never

was more justified than in her case. Her salvage of Gringoire and its

sequel give about the only situations in which she is a real

person,[100] and they are purely episodic. Gringoire himself is as much

out of place as any literary man who ever went into Parliament. Some may

think better of Claude Frollo, who may be said to be the

Miltonic-Byronic-Satanic hero. I own I do not. His mere

specification--that of the ascetic scholar assailed by physical

temptation--will pass muster well enough, the working out of it hardly.

His brother, the _vaurien_ Jean, has, I believe, been a favourite with

others or the same, and certainly a Villonesque student is not out of

place in the fifteenth century. Nor is a turned-up nose, even if it be

artificially and prematurely reddened, unpardonable. But at the same

time it is not in itself a passport, and Jean Frollo does not appear to

have left even the smallest _Testament_ or so much as a single line

(though some snatches of song are assigned to him) reminding us of the

"Dames des Temps Jadis" or the "Belle Heaulmière." Perhaps even Victor

never presumed more unfortunately on victory than in bringing in Louis

XI., especially in one scene, which directly challenges comparison with

_Quentin Durward_. While, though Scott's _jeunes premiers_ are not, as

he himself well knew and frankly confessed, his greatest triumphs, he

has never given us anything of the kind so personally impersonal as

Phoebus de Chateaupers.

_Per contra_ there are of course to be set passages which are actually

fine prose and some of which might have made magnificent poetry; a real

or at least--what is as good as or better than a real--a fantastic

resurrection of Old Paris; and, above all, an atmosphere of "sunset and

eclipse," of night and thunder and levin-flashes, which no one of

catholic taste would willingly surrender. Only, ungrateful as it may

seem, uncritical as some may deem it, it is impossible not to sigh,

"Oh! why were not the best things of this treated in verse, and why were

not the other things left alone altogether?"

[Sidenote: The thirty years' interval.]

For a very long stretch of time--one that could hardly be paralleled

except in a literary life so unusually extended as his--it might have

seemed that one of those _voix intérieures_, which he was during its

course to celebrate in undying verse, had whispered to Hugo some such

warning as that conveyed in the words of the close of the last

paragraph, and that he, usually the most indocile of men, had listened

to it. For all but three decades he confined his production--at least in

the sense of substantial publication[101]--to poetry almost invariably

splendid, drama always grandiose and sometimes grand, and prose-writing

of a chiefly political kind, which even sympathisers (one would suppose)

can hardly regard as of much value now if they have any critical

faculty. Even the tremendous shock of disappointment, discomfiture, and

exile which resulted from the success of Napoleon the Third, though it

started a new wave and gust of oceanic and cyclonic force, range, and

volume in his soul, found little prose vent, except the wretched stuff

of _Napoléon le Petit_, to chequer the fulgurant outburst of the

_Châtiments_, the apocalyptic magnificence of the _Contemplations_, and

the almost unmatched vigour, variety, and vividness of the _Légende des

Siècles_.

At last, in 1862, a full decade after the cataclysm, his largest and

probably his most popular work of fiction made its appearance in the

return to romance-writing, entitled _Les Misérables_. I daresay

biographies say when it was begun; it is at any rate clear that even

Victor Hugo must have taken some years, especially in view of his other

work, to produce such a mass of matter.[102] Probably not very many

people now living, at least in England, remember very clearly the

immense effect it produced even with us, who were then apt to regard

Hugo as at best a very chequered genius and at worst an almost

charlatanish rhetorician.

[Sidenote: _Les Misérables._]

It was no doubt lucky for its popularity that it fell in with a general

movement, in England as well as elsewhere, which had with us been, if

not brought about, aided by influences in literature as different as

those of Dickens and Carlyle, through Kingsley and others

downwards,--the movement which has been called perhaps more truly than

sympathetically, "the cult of the lower [not to say the criminal]

classes." In France, if not in England, this cult had been oddly

combined with a dash of rather adulterated Romanticism, and long before

Hugo, Sues and Sands, as will be seen later, had in their different

manner been priests and priestesses of it. In his own case the adoption

of the subject "keyed on" in no small degree to the mood in which he

wrote the _Dernier Jour_ and _Claude Gueux_, while a good deal of the

"Old Paris" mania (I use the word nowise contumeliously) of _Notre-Dame_

survived, and even the "Cour des Miracles" found itself modernised.

Whether the popularity above mentioned has kept itself up or not, I

cannot say. Of one comparatively recent edition, not so far as I know

published at intervals, I have been told that the first volume is out of

print, but none of the others, a thing rather voiceful to the

understanding. I know that, to me, it is the hardest book to read

through of any that I know by a great writer. _Le Grand Cyrus_ and

_Clélie_ are certainly longer, _Clarissa_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_

are probably so. _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_ is almost as long. There are

finer things in it than in any of them, (except the deaths of Lovelace

and Porthos and the kidnapping of General Monk) from the pure novel

point of view, and not a few passages which ought to have been verse

and, even prose as they are, soar far over anything that Mademoiselle de

Scudéry or Samuel Richardson or Alexandre Dumas could possibly have

written in either harmony. The Scudéry books are infinitely duller, and

the Richardson ones much less varied.

But none of these others besets the path of the reader with things to

which the obstacles interposed by Quilp in the way of Sampson Brass were

down-pillows, as is the case with _Les Misérables_. It is as if Victor

Hugo had said, "You shall read this at your peril," and had made good

the threat by dint of every blunder in novel-writing which he could

possibly commit. With his old and almost invariable fault (there is a

little of it even in _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, and only

_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ avoids it entirely), he delays any real interest

till the book, huge as it is, is almost half way through. Twenty pages

on Bishop Myriel--that rather piebald angel who makes the way impossible

for any successor by his fantastic and indecent "apostolicism" in

living; who tells, _not_ like St. Athanasius, an allowable equivocation

to save his valuable self, but a downright lie to save a worthless

rascal; and who admits defeat in argument by the stale sophisms of a

moribund _conventionnel_--might have been tolerable. We have, in the

compactest edition I know, about a hundred and fifty. The ruin and

desertion of Fantine would have been worth twenty more. We have from

fifty to a hundred to tell us the story of four rather impossibly

beautiful _grisettes_, and as many, alas! too possible, but not

interesting, rascals of students. It is difficult to say how much is

wasted on the wildly improbable transformation of Jean Valjean, convict

and pauper, into "M. Madeleine," _maire_ and (_nummis gallicis_)

millionaire, through making sham jet. All this, by any one who really

knew his craft, would have been sketched rapidly in fluent preliminary,

and subsequent piecemeal retrospect, so as to start with Valjean's

escape from Thénardier and his adoption of Cosette.

The actual matter of this purely preliminary kind extends, as has been

ascertained by rough but sufficient calculation of the sort previously

employed, to at least three-quarters of an average novel of Sir

Walter's: it would probably run to two or three times the length of a

modern "six-shilling." But Hugo is not satisfied with it. A point, an

important point, doubtless, but one that could have been despatched in a

few lines, connects the novel proper with the Battle of Waterloo. To

that battle itself, even the preliminary matter in its earliest part is

some years posterior: the main action, of course, is still more so. But

Victor must give us _his_ account of this great engagement, and he gives

it in about a hundred pages of the most succinct reproduction. For my

part, I should be glad to have it "mixed with much wine," even if the

wine were of that luscious and headachy south-of-France character which

he himself is said to have preferred to Bordeaux or Champagne, Sauterne

or even Burgundy. Nay, without this I like it well enough and quarrel

with nothing in it, though it is in many respects (from the famous

hollow way which nobody else ever heard of downwards) very much of a

dream-battle. Victor does quite as much justice as any one could expect

him to do--and, thank heaven, there are still some Englishmen who are

perfectly indifferent whether justice is done to them or not in these

matters, leaving it to poorer persons in such ways who may be glad of

it--to English fighting; while if he represents Wellington as a mere

calculator and Napoleon as a hero, we can murmur politely (like a Roman

Catholic bishop, more real in many ways than His Greatness of Digue),

"Perhaps so, my dear sir, perhaps so." But what has it all got to do

here? Even when Montalais and her lover sat on the wall and talked for

half a volume or so in the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_; even when His

Majesty Louis XIV. and his (one regrets to use the good old English

word) pimp, M. le Duc de Saint-Aignan, exhausted the resources of

carpentry and the stores of printer's ink to gain access to the

apartment of Mlle. de la Vallière, the superabundance, though trivial,

was relevant: this is not. When Thénardier tried to rob and was no doubt

quite ready to murder, but did, as a matter of fact, help to

resuscitate, the gallant French Republican soldier, who was so glad to

receive the title of baron from an emperor who had by abdication

resigned any right to give it that he ever possessed, it might have been

Malplaquet or Leipsic, Fontenoy or Vittoria, for any relevance the

details of the battle possessed to the course of the story.

Now relevance (to make a short paragraph of the kind Hugo himself loved)

is a mighty goddess in novelry.

And so it continues, though, to be absolutely just, the later parts are

not exposed to quite the same objections as the earlier. These

objections transform themselves, however, into other varieties, and are

reinforced by fresh faults. The most inexcusable digressions, on

subjects as remote from each other as convents and sewers, insist on

poking themselves in. The central, or what ought to be the central,

interest itself turns on the ridiculous _émeute_ of Saint-Merry, a thing

"without a purpose or an aim," a mere caricature of a revolution. The

_gamin_ Gavroche puts in a strong plea for mercy, and his sister

Eponine, if Hugo had chosen to take more trouble with her, might have

been a great, and is actually the most interesting, character. But

Cosette--the cosseted Cosette--Hugo did not know our word or he would

have seen the danger--is merely a pretty and rather selfish little doll,

and her precious lover Marius is almost ineffable.

Novel-heroes who are failures throng my mind like ghosts on the other

shore of the river whom Charon will not ferry over; but I can single out

none of them who is, without positively evil qualities, so absolutely

intolerable as Marius.[103] Others have more such qualities; but he has

no good ones. His very bravery is a sort of moral and intellectual

running amuck because he thinks he shall not get Cosette. Having,

apparently, for many years thought and cared nothing about his father,

he becomes frantically filial on discovering that he has inherited from

him, as above, a very doubtful and certainly most un-"citizen"-like

title of Baron. Thereupon (taking care, however, to have cards printed

with the title on them) he becomes a violent republican.

He then proceeds to be extremely rude to his indulgent but royalist

grandfather, retires to a mount of very peculiar sacredness, where he

comes in contact with the Thénardier family, discovers a plot against

Valjean, appeals to the civil arm to protect the victim, but, for

reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part,

and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story,

carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as

self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic

self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor

old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the _éclaircissement_

comes, it appears to me--as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola that he ought to

have consented to be damned--that Marius ought to have consented at

least to be kicked.

Of course it may be said, "You should not give judgments on things with

which you are evidently out of sympathy." But I do not acknowledge any

palpable hit. If certain purposes of the opposite kind were obtruded

here in the same fashion--if Victor (as he might have done in earlier

days) had hymned Royalism instead of Republicanism, or (as perhaps he

would never have done) had indulged in praise of severe laws and

restricted education,[104] and other things, I should be "in sympathy,"

but I hope and believe that I should not be "out of" criticism. Unless

strictly adjusted to the scale and degree suitable to a novel--as Sir

Walter has, I think, restricted his Mariolatry and his Jacobitism, and

so forth--I should bar them as I bar these.[105] And it is the fact that

they are not so restricted, with the concomitant faults which, again

purely from the point of view of novel-criticism as such, I have

ventured to find, that makes me consider _Les Misérables_ a failure as a

novel. Once again, too, I find few of the really good and great

things--which in so vast a book by such a writer are there, and could

not fail to be there--to be essentially and specially good and great

according to the novel standard. They are, with the rarest exceptions,

the stuff of drama or of poetry, not of novel. That there are such

exceptions--the treacherous feast of the students to the mistresses they

are about to desert; the escapes of Valjean from the ambushes laid for

him by Thénardier and Javert; some of the Saint-Merry fighting; the

guesting of the children by Gavroche in the elephant; and others--is

true. But they are oases in a desert; and, save when they would be

better done in poetry, they do not after all seem to me to be much

better done than they might have been by others--the comparative

weakness of Hugo in conversation of the kind suitable for prose fiction

making itself felt. That at least is what the present writer's notion of

criticism puts into his mouth to say; and he can say no other.

[Sidenote: _Les Travailleurs de la Mer._]

_Les Travailleurs de la Mer_, on the other hand, is, according to some

persons, among whom that present writer desires to be included, the

summit of Victor Hugo's achievements in prose fiction. It has his

"signatures" of absurdity in fair measure. There is the celebrated

"Bug-Pipe" which a Highlander of the garrison of Guernsey sold (I am

afraid contrary to military law) to the hero, and on which that hero

performed the "_melancholy_ air" of "Bonny Dundee."[106] There is the

equally celebrated "First of the Fourth" (Première de la Quatrième),

which is believed to be Hugonic for the Firth of Forth. There are some

others. There is an elaborate presentation of a quite impossibly named

clergyman, who is, it seems, an anticipator of "le Puseysme" and an

actual high-churchman, who talks as never high-churchman talked from

Laud to Pusey himself, but rather like the Reverend Gabriel

Kettledrummle (with whom Hugo was probably acquainted "in translations,

Sir! in translations").[107] Gilliatt, the hero, is a not very human

prig outside those extraordinary performances, of which more later, and

his consummate end. Déruchette, the heroine, is, like Cosette, a pretty

nullity.[108] As always, the author _will_ not "get under way"; and

short as the book is, and valuable as is its shortness, it could be cut

down to two-thirds at least with advantage. Clubin and Rantaine, the

villains, are pure melodrama; Mess Lethierry, the good old man, is

rather an old fool, and not so very good. The real business of the

book--the salvage by Gilliatt of the steamer wrecked on the Douvres--is,

as a schoolboy would say, or would have said, "jolly impossible." But

the book as a whole is, despite or because of its tragic quality, almost

impossibly "jolly."

[Sidenote: The _genius loci._]

For here--as he did previously (by the help of the form that was more

his own and of Jersey) in the _Contemplations_--he had now got in prose,

by that of the smaller, more isolated, and less contaminated[109]

island, into his own proper country, the dominion of the Angel of the

Visions of the Sea. He has told us in his own grandiloquent way, which

so often led him wrong, that when he settled to exile in the Channel

Islands, his son François observed, "Je traduirai Shakespeare," and _he_

said, "Je contemplerai l'océan." He did; and good came of it. Students

of his biography may know that in the dwelling which he called

Hauteville House (a name which, I regret to say, already and properly

belonged to another) he slept and mainly lived in a high garret with

much glass window, overlooking the strait between Guernsey and Sark.

These "gazebos," as they used to be called, are common in St. Peter

Port, and I myself enjoyed the possession of a more modest and quite

unfamous one for some time. They are worth inhabiting and looking from,

be the weather fair or foul. Moreover, he was, I believe, a very good

walker, and in both the islands made the best of opportunities which are

unmatched elsewhere. Whether he boated much I do not know. The profusion

of nautical terms with which he "deaves" us (as the old Scotch word has

it) would rather lead me to think _not_. He was in this inferior to

Prospero; but I hope it is not blasphemy to say that, _mutatis

mutandis_, he had something of the banished Duke of Milan in him, and

that, in the one case as in the other, it was the island that brought it

out. And he acknowledged it in his Dedication to "Guernesey--_sevère et

douce_."

[Sidenote: Guernsey at the time.]

_Sevère et Douce!_ I lived in Guernsey as a Master at Elizabeth College

from 1868, two years after Victor Hugo wrote that dedication, to 1874,

when he still kept house there, but had not, since the "Année Terrible,"

occupied it much. I suppose the "severity" must be granted to an island

of solid granite and to the rocks and tides and sea-mists that surround

it. But in the ordinary life there in my time there was little to

"asperate" the _douceur_. Perhaps it does not require so very much to

sweeten things in general between the ages of twenty-three and

twenty-nine. But the things in general themselves were dulcet enough.

The beauty of the place--extraordinarily varied in its triangle of some

half-score miles or a little less on each side--was not then in the

least interfered with by the excessive commercial glass-housing which, I

believe, has come in since. For what my friend of many days, the late

Mr. Reynolds of Brasenose and East Ham, a constant visitor in summer,

used to call "necessary luxuries," it was still unique. When I went

there you could buy not undrinkable or poisonous Hollands at four

shillings a gallon, and brandy--not, of course, exactly cognac or _fine

champagne_, but deserving the same epithets--for six. If you were a

luxurious person, you paid half-a-crown a bottle for the genuine produce

of the Charente, little or not at all inferior to Martell or Hennessy,

and a florin for excellent Scotch or Irish whiskey.[110] Fourpence

half-penny gave you a quarter-pound slab of gold-leaf tobacco, than

which I never wish to smoke better.

But this easy supplying of the bodily needs of the "horse with wings"

and his "heavy rider" was as nothing to other things which strengthened

the wings of the spirit and lightened the weight of the burden it bore.

I have not been a great traveller outside the kingdom of England: and

you may doubtless, in the whole of Europe or of the globe, find more

magnificent things than you can possibly find in an island of the

dimensions given. But for a miniature and manageable assemblage of

amenities I do not think you can easily beat Guernsey. The town of St.

Peter Port, and its two castles, Fort George above and Castle Cornet

below, looking on the strait above mentioned, with the curiously

contrasted islets of Herm and Jethou in its midst; the wonderful coast,

first south- and then westward, set with tiny coves of perfection like

Bec-du-Nez, and larger bays, across the mouth of which, after a storm

and in calm sunny weather, you see lines of foam stretching from

headland to headland, out of the white clots of which the weakest

imagination can fancy Aphrodite rising and floating shorewards, to

vanish as she touches the beach; the great western promontory of

Pleinmont, a scarcely lessened Land's End, with the Hanois rocks beyond;

the tamer but still not tame western, northern, and north-eastern

coasts, with the Druid-haunted level of L'Ancresse and the minor port of

St. Samson--all these furnish, even to the well-girt man, an

extraordinary number[111] of walks, ranging from an hour's to a day's

and more there and back; while in the valleys of the interior you find

scenery which might be as far from the sea as Warwickshire, or on the

heights springs which tell you that they must have come from the

neighbourhood of the Mount of Dol or the Forest of Broceliande.

With such colour and form of locality to serve, not merely as

inspiration but as actual scene and setting, such genius as Hugo's could

hardly fail. The thing is sad and delightful and great. As life, you may

say, it could not have happened; as literature it could not but have

happened, and has happened, at its best, divinely well. The contrast of

the long agony of effort and its triumph on the Douvres, with the swift

collapse of any possible reward at St. Samson, is simply a windfall of

the Muses to this spoiled and, it must be confessed, often self-spoiling

child of theirs. There are, of course, absurdities still, and of a

different kind from the bug-pipe. I have always wished to know what the

experiences of the fortunate and reverend but sheepish Ebenezer had been

at Oxford--he must certainly have held a King Charles scholarship in his

day--during that full-blooded time of the Regency. The circumstances of

the marriage are almost purely Hugonian, though it does Hugo credit that

he admires the service which he travesties so remarkably. But the _Dieu_

(not _diable_) _au corps_ which he now enjoys enables him to change into

a beauty (in the wholly natural gabble of Mess Lethierry on the recovery

of the _la Durande_) those long speeches which have been already noted

as blots. And, beauty or blot, it would not have mattered. All is in the

contrast of the mighty but conquered Douvres and the comparatively

insignificant rocklet--there are hundreds like it on every granite

coast--where Death the Consoler sets on Gilliatt's head the only crown

possible for his impossible feat, and where the dislike of the ignorant

peasantry, the brute resistance of machinery and material, the violence

of the storm, the devilish ambush of the _pieuvre_, and all other evils

are terminated and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and the

euthanasia of the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or even

romance--in substance it is too abstract and elemental for either of the

less majestical branches of inventive literature. But it is great. "By

God! 'tis good," and, to lengthen somewhat Ben's famous challenge, "if

you like, you may" put it with, and not so far from, in whatever order

you please--the deaths of Cleopatra and of Colonel Newcome.

The book is therefore a success; but that success is an evident _tour de

force_, and it is nearly as evident to any student of the subject that

such a _tour de force_ was not likely to be repeated, and that the thing

owed its actual salvage to a rather strict limitation of subject and

treatment--a limitation hitherto unknown in the writer and itself

unlikely to recur. Also that there were certain things in it--especially

the travesties of names and subjects of which the author practically

knew nothing--the repetition and extension of which _was_ likely to be

damaging, if not fatal. In two or three years the "fatality" of which

Victor Hugo himself was dangerously fond of talking (the warning of

Herodotus in the dawn about things which it is not lawful to mention

has been too often neglected) had its revenge.

[Sidenote: _L'Homme Qui Rit._]

_L'Homme Qui Rit_ is probably the maddest book in recognised literature;

certainly the maddest written by an author of supreme genius without the

faintest notion that he was making himself ridiculous. The genius is

still there, and passage on passage shows us the real "prose-poetry,"

that is to say, the prose which ought to have been written in verse. The

scheme of the quartette--Ursus, the misanthrope-Good-Samaritan; Homo,

the amiable wolf; Gwynplaine, the tortured and guiltless child and

youth; Dea, the adorable maiden--is unexceptionable _per se_, and it

could have been worked out in verse or drama perfectly, though the

actual termination--Gwynplaine's suicide in the sea after Dea's

death--is perhaps too close and too easy a "variation of the same thing"

on Gilliatt's parallel self-immolation after Déruchette's marriage.[112]

Not a few opening or episodic parts--the picture of the caravan; the

struggle of the child Gwynplaine with the elements to save not so much

himself as the baby Dea; the revulsions of his temptations and

persecutions later; and yet others[113]--show the poet and the master.

But the way in which these things are merged in and spoilt by a torrent

of silliness, sciolism, and sheer nonsense is, even after one has known

the book for forty years and more, still astounding.

One could laugh almost indulgently over the "bug-pipe" and the "First of

the Fourth"; one could, being of those who win, laugh quite indulgently

over the little outbursts of spite in _Les Travailleurs_ at the

institutions and ways of the country which had, despite some rather

unpardonable liberties, given its regular and royal asylum to the

exiled republican and almost anarchist author. Certainly, also, one can

laugh over _L'Homme Qui Rit_ and its picture of the English aristocracy.

But of such laughter, as of all carnal pleasures (to steal from

Kingsley), cometh satiety, and the satiety is rather early reached in

this same book. One of the chief "persons of distinction" in many ways

whom I have ever come across, the late Mr. G. S. Venables--a lawyer of

no mean expertness; one of the earliest and one of the greatest of those

"gentlemen of the Press" who at the middle of the nineteenth century

lifted journalism out of the gutter; a familiar of every kind of the

best society, and a person of infinite though somewhat saturnine

wit--had a phrase of contempt for absurd utterances by persons who ought

to have known better. "It was," he said, "like a drunk child." The major

part of _L'Homme Qui Rit_ is like the utterance of a drunk child who had

something of the pseudo-Homeric Margites in him, who "knew a great many

things and knew them all badly." I could fill fifty pages here easily

enough, and with a kind of low amusement to myself and perhaps others,

by enumerating the absurdities of _L'Homme Qui Rit_. As far as I

remember, when the book appeared, divers good people (the bad people

merely sneered) took immense pains to discover how and why this great

man of letters made so much greater a fool of himself. This was quite

lost labour; and without attempting the explanation at all, a very small

selection of the facts, being in a manner indispensable, may be given.

The mysterious society of "Comprachicos" (Spanish for "child-buyers"),

on whose malpractices the whole book is founded; the entirely false

conception of the English House of Lords, which gives much of the

superstructure; the confusion of English and French times and seasons,

manners and customs, which enables the writer to muddle up Henri-Trois

and Louis-Quinze, Good Queen Bess and Good Queen Anne: these and other

things of the kind can be passed over. For things like some of them

occur in much saner novelists than Hugo; and Sir Walter himself is

notoriously not free from indisputable anachronisms.[114] But you have

barely reached the fiftieth page when you come to a "Lord Linnæus

Clancharlie, Baron Clancharlie et Hunkerville, Marquis de Corleone en

Sicile," whose English peerage dates from Edward _the Elder_ (the origin

of his Sicilian title is not stated, but it was probably conferred by

Hiero or Dionysius), and whose name "Clancharlie" has nothing whatever

to do with Scotland or Ireland. This worthy peer (who, as a Cromwellian,

exiled himself after the Restoration) had, like others of the godly, a

bastard son, enjoying at "_temp._ of tale" the remarkable courtesy title

of "Lord David Dirry-Moir," but called by the rabble, with whom his

sporting tastes make him a great favourite, "Tom-Jim-Jack." Most

"love-children" of peers would be contented (if they ever had them) with

courtesy titles; but Lord David has been further favoured by Fortune and

King James II., who has first induced the _comprachicos_ to trepan and

mutilate Clancharlie's real heir (afterwards Gwynplaine, the eponymous

hero of the book), and has then made Lord David a "_pair

substitué_"[115] on condition that he marries one of the king's natural

daughters, the Duchess Josiane, a duchess with no duchy ever mentioned.

In regard to her Hugo proceeds to exhibit his etymological powers,

ignoring entirely the agreeable heroine of _Bevis of Hampton_, and

suggesting either an abbreviation of "Josefa y Ana" (at this time, we

are gravely informed, there was a prevalent English fashion of taking

Spanish names) or else a feminine of "Josias." Moreover, among dozens of

other instances of this Bedlam nomenclature, we have a "combat of box"

between the Irishman "Phelem-ghe-Madone" (because Irishmen are often

Roman Catholics?) and the Scotchman "Helmsgail" (there is a place

called Helms_dale_ in Scotland, and if "gael" why not "gail"?), to the

latter of whom a knee is given by "Lord Desertum" (Desart? Dysart?

what?).

And so it goes on. There is the immortal scene (or rather half-volume)

in which, Hugo having heard or read of _peine forte et dure_, we find

sheriffs who discharge the duty of Old Bailey judges, fragments of Law

Latin (it is really a pity that he did not get hold of our inimitable

Law _French_), and above all, and pervading all, that most fearful

wildfowl the "wapentake," with his "iron weapon." He, with his satellite

the justicier-quorum (but, one weeps to see, not "custalorum" or

"rotalorum"), is concerned with the torture of Hardquanonne[116]--the

original malefactor[117] in Gwynplaine's case--and thereby restores

Gwynplaine to his (unsubstituted) rank in the English peerage, when he

himself is anticipating similar treatment. There is the presentation by

the librarian of the House of Lords of a "little red book" which is the

passport to the House itself: and the very unmannerly reception by his

brother peers, from which he is in a manner rescued by the chivalrous

Lord David Dirry-Moir at the price of a box on the ears for depriving

him of his "substitution." There is the misconduct of the Duchess

Josiane, divinely beautiful and diabolically wicked, who covets the

monster Gwynplaine as a lover, and discards him when, on his

peerification, he is commanded to her by Queen Anne as a husband. And

then, after all this tedious insanity and a great deal more, there is

the finale of the despair of Gwynplaine, of his recovery of the dying

Dea in a ship just starting for Holland, of her own death, and of his

suicide in the all-healing sea--a "reconciliation" not far short of the

greatest things in literature.

Now I am not of those unhappy ones who cannot away with the mixture of

tragedy and farce. I have not only read too much, but lived too long for

that. But then the farce must be in life conceivable and in literature

conscious. Shakespeare, and even men much inferior to Shakespeare, have

been able to provide for this stipulation munificently.

With Victor Hugo, generally more or less and intensively here, it was

unfortunately different. His irony was almost always his weakest point;

or rather it was a kind of hit-or-miss weapon, with which he cut himself

as often as he cut his inimical objects or persons. The intense

absurdity of his personified wapentakes, of his Tom-Jim-Jacks, of his

courtesy-title bastards, he deliberately declined (as in the anecdote

above given) to see. But these things, done and evidently thought fine

by the doer, almost put to rout the most determined and expert sifter of

the faults and merits of genius. You cannot enjoy a Garden of Eden when

at every other step you plunge into a morass of mire. You cannot drink a

draught of nectar, arranged on the plan of certain glasses of liqueur,

in superimposed layers of different savour and colour, when every other

layer is "stummed" folly or nauseous bad taste. A novel is not like a

book of poems, where, as you see that you have hit on a failure, you

turn the page and find a success. To which it may be added finally that

while erudition of _any_ kind is a doubtful set-off to fiction, the

presentation of ragbag erudition of this kind is, to speak moderately

and in his own words of something else, "a rather hideous thing."[118]

Still, with readers of a certain quality, the good omens may to some

extent shame the ill even here. The death of Dea, with its sequel, is

very nearly perfect; it only wants the verse of which its author was

such an absolute master, instead of the prose, where he alternately

triumphed and bungled, to make it so. And one need not be a common

paradoxer to take either side on the question whether on the whole the

omen, if not the actuality, of _L'Homme Qui Rit_ or that of _Les

Travailleurs de la Mer_ was the happier. For, while the earlier and

better book showed how faults were hardening and might grow worse still,

the later showed how these very faults, attaining their utmost possible

development, could not entirely stifle the rarer gifts. I do not

remember that anybody in 1869 took this apparently aleatory side of the

argument. If he did he was justified in 1874.

[Sidenote: _Quatre-Vingt-Treize._]

One enormous advantage of _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ over its immediate

predecessor lay on the surface--an advantage enormous in all cases, but

almost incalculable in this particular one. In _L'Homme Qui Rit_ Victor

Hugo had been dealing with a subject about which he knew practically

nothing, and about which he was prepared to believe, or even practise,

anything. Here, though he was still prepared to believe a great deal, he

yet knew a very great deal more. A little room for his eccentricities

remained, and long after the truth had become a matter of registered

history, he could accept the legendary lies about the _Vengeur_; but

there was no danger of his giving us French wapentakes brandishing

iron-weapons, or calling a French noble by any appellation comparable to

Lord Linnæus[119] Clancharlie.

But, it may be said, is not the removal of these annoyances more than

compensated, in the bad sense, by things inseparable from such a

subject, as treated by such an author?--the glorification of

"Quatre-Vingt-Treize" itself, and, in particular, of the

Convention--that remarkable assembly which seems to have made up its

mind to prove for all time that, in democracies, the scum comes to the

top?--that assembly in which Fabre d'Eglantine stood for poetry, Marat

for humanitarianism, Robespierre for justice, Hébert and Chaumette for

decency, Siéyès and Chabot for different forms of religion, the

composers of the Republican Calendar[120] for common sense? where the

only suggestion of a great man was Danton, and the only substitutes for

an honest one were the prigs and pedants of the Gironde? To which the

only critical answer must be, even when the critic does not contest the

correctness of this description--"Why, no!"

It is better, no doubt, that a novelist, and that everybody else, should

be a _bien-pensant_; but, as in the case of the poet, it will not

necessarily affect his goodness in his art if he is not. He had, indeed,

best not air his opinions, whatever they are, at too great length; but

_what_ they are matters little or nothing. A Tory critic who cannot

admire Shelley or Swinburne, Dickens or Thackeray, because of their

politics, is merely an ass, an animal unfortunately to be found in the

stables or paddocks of every party. On the other hand, absurdities and

faults of taste matter very much.

Now from these latter, which had nearly ruined _L'Homme Qui Rit_,

_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, if not entirely free, suffers comparatively

little. The early and celebrated incident of the carronade running amuck

shows characteristic neglect of burlesque possibilities (and, as I

believe some experts have maintained, of actual ones), but it has the

qualities of the Hugonian defects. An arm-chair critic may ask, Where

was the English fleet in the Channel when a French one was allowed to

come out and slowly mob the _Claymore_ to destruction, without, as far

as one sees, any interference or counter-effort, though the expedition

of that remarkable corvette formed part of an elaborate and carefully

prepared offensive?[121] Undoubtedly, the Convention scenes must be

allowed--even by sympathisers with the Revolution--to be clumsy

stopgaps, unnecessary to the action and possessed of little intrinsic

value in themselves. The old fault of verbosity and "watering out"

recurs; and so does the reappearance, with very slight change, of

figures and situations. Cimourdain in character is very much of a more

respectable Claude Frollo; and in conduct, _mutatis_ not so very many

_mutandis_, almost as much of a less respectable Javert. The death of

Gauvain is far less effective than that of Sydney Carton, which had

preceded it; and the enormous harangue of the Marquis to the nephew who

is about to liberate him, though it may be intended to heighten the

_peripeteia_, merely gives fresh evidence of Hugo's want of proportion

and of his flux of rhetoric.

All this and more is true; yet _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ is, "in its _fine_

wrong way," a great book, and with _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_,

completes the pillars, such as they are, which support Hugo's position

as a novelist. The rescue of the children by Lantenac is superb, though

you may find twenty cavils against it easily: and the whole presentation

of the Marquis, except perhaps the speech referred to, is one of the

best pictures of the _ancienne noblesse_ in literature, one which--to

reverse the contrast just made--annihilates Dickens's caricature thereof

in _A Tale of Two Cities_. The single-handed defence of La Tourgue by

"L'Imanus" has of course a good deal of the hyperbole which began with

Quasimodo's similar act in _Notre-Dame_; but the reader who cannot "let

himself go" with it is to be pitied. Nowhere is Hugo's child-worship

more agreeably shown than in the three first chapters of the third

volume. And, sinking particulars for a more general view, one may say

that through the whole book, to an extent surpassing even _Les

Travailleurs de la Mer_ as such, there is the great Victorian _souffle_

and surge, the rush as of mighty winds and mightier waters, which

carries the reader resistlessly through and over all obstacles.

[Sidenote: Final remarks.]

Yet although Hugo thus terminated his career as a novelist, if not in

the odour of sanctity, at any rate in a comfortable cloud of incense due

to a comparative success; although he had (it is true on a much smaller

scale) even transcended that success in _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_;

although, as a mere novice, he had proved himself a more than tolerable

tale-teller in _Bug-Jargal_, it is not possible, for any critical

historian of the novel as such, to pronounce him a great artist, or even

a tolerable craftsman, in the kind as a whole. It has already been

several times remarked in detail, and may now be repeated in general,

that the things which we enjoy in his books of this kind are seldom

things which it is the special business of the novelist to produce, and

practically never those which are his chief business. In no single

instance perhaps, with the doubtful exception of Gilliatt's battle with

brute matter and elemental forces, is "the tale the thing" purely as

tale. Very seldom do we even want to know what is going to happen--the

childishly simple, but also childishly genuine demand of the reader of

romance as such, if not even of the novel also. Scarcely once do we--at

least do I--take that interest in the development of character which is

the special subject of appetite of readers of the novel, as such and by

itself. The baits and the rewards are now splendour of style; now

magnificence of imagery; sometimes grandeur of idea; often pathos; not

seldom the delight of battle in this or that sense. These are all

excellent seasonings of novelry; but they are not the root of the

matter, the _pièce de résistance_ of the feast.

Unfortunately, too, Hugo not merely cannot, or at any rate does not,

give the hungry sheep their proper food--an interesting story worked out

by interesting characters--but will persist in giving them things as

suitable (granting them to be in the abstract nourishing) as turnips to

the carnivora or legs of mutton to the sheep which walk on them. It

would, of course, not be just to press too strongly the objections to

the novel of purpose, though to the present writer they seem almost

insuperable. But it is not merely purpose in the ordinary sense which

leads Victor astray, or rather (for he was much too wilful a person to

be led) which he invents for himself to follow, with his eyes open, and

knowing perfectly well what he is doing. His digressions are not

_parabases_ of the kind which some people object to in Fielding and

still more in Thackeray--addresses to the reader on points more or less

intimately connected with the subject itself. A certain exception has

been made in favour of some of the architectural parts of _Notre-Dame de

Paris_, but it has been admitted that this will not cover "Ceci Tuera

Cela" nor much else. For the presence of the history of the sewers of

Paris in _Les Misérables_ and any number of other things; for not a

little of the first volume of _Les Travailleurs_ itself; for about half,

if not more, of _L'Homme Qui Rit_, starting from Ursus's Black-book of

fancy pleasances, palaces, and estates belonging to the fellow-peers of

Lord Linnæus Clancharlie and Hunkerville; for not a few chapters even of

_Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, there is no excuse at all. They are simply

repulsive or at least unwelcome "pledgets" of unsucculent matter stuck

into the body of fiction, as (but with how different results!) _lardons_

or pistachios or truffles are stuck into another kind of composition.

It is partly, but not wholly, due to this deplorable habit of irrelevant

divagation that Hugo will never allow his stories to "march" (at least

to begin with marching),[122] _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ being here the only

exception among the longer romances, for even _Les Travailleurs de la

Mer_ never gets into stride till nearly the whole of the first volume is

passed. But the habit, however great a nuisance it may be to the reader,

is of some interest to the student and the historian, for the very

reason that it does not seem to be wholly an outcome of the other habit

of digression. It would thus be, in part at least, a survival of that

odd old "inability to begin" which we noticed several times in the last

volume, aggravated by the irrepressible wilfulness of the writer, and by

his determination not to do like other people, who _had_ by this time

mostly got over the difficulty.

If any further "dull moral" is wanted it may be the obvious lesson that

overpowering popularity of a particular form is sometimes a misfortune,

as that of allegory was in the Middle Ages and that of didactics in the

eighteenth century. If it had not been almost incumbent on any Frenchman

who aimed at achieving popularity in the mid-nineteenth century to

attempt the novel, it is not very likely that Hugo would have attempted

it. It may be doubted whether we should have lost any of the best

things--we should only have had them in the compacter and higher shape

of more _Orientales_, more _Chants du Crépuscule_, more _Légendes_, and

so forth. We should have lost the easily losable laugh over bug-pipe and

wapentake--for though Hugo sometimes _thought_ sillily in verse he did

not often let silliness touch his expression in the more majestical

harmony--and we should have been spared an immensely greater body of

matter which now provokes a yawn or a sigh.

This is, it may be said, after all a question of taste. Perhaps. But it

can hardly be denied by any critical student of fiction that while

Hugo's novel-work has added much splendid matter to literature, it has

practically nowhere advanced, nor even satisfactorily exemplified, the

art of the novel. It is here as an exception--marvellous, magnificent,

and as such to be fully treated; actually an honour to the art of which

it discards the requirements, but an exception merely and one which

proves, inasmuch as it justifies, the cautions it defies.[123]

FOOTNOTES:

[93] Mr. Swinburne's magnificent pæans are "vatical" certainly, but

scarcely critical, save now and then. Mr. Stevenson wrote on the

Romances, but not on "the whole."

[94] See note in Vol. I. p. 472 of this _History_, and in the present

volume, _sup._ p. 40.

[95] These crazes were not in origin, though they probably were in

influence, political: Hugo held more than one of them while he was still

a Royalist.

[96] She is of course not really Spanish or a gipsy, but is presented as

such at first.

[97] Stated in the Preface to _Cromwell_, the critical division of his

fourfold attack on neo-Classicism, as _Les Orientales_ were the

poetical, _Hernani_ was the dramatic, and _Notre-Dame_ itself the

prose-narrative.

[98] It is scarcely excessive to say that this mixture of wilful temper

and unbridled theorising was the Saturnian influence, or the "infortune

of Mart," in Hugo's horoscope throughout.

[99] Unless anybody chooses to say that the gallows and the guillotine

are Hugo's monsters here.

[100] The failure of the riskiest and most important scene of the whole

(where her surrender of herself to Phoebus is counteracted by Frollo's

stabbing the soldier, the act itself leading to Esmeralda's

incarceration) is glaring.

[101] _Le Beau Pécopin_ in his _Rhine_-book is, of course, fairly

substantial in one sense, but it is only an episode or inset-tale in

something else, which is neither novel or romance.

[102] It must be four or five times the length of Scott's average, more

than twice that of the longest books with which Dickens and Thackeray

used to occupy nearly two years in monthly instalments, and very nearly,

if not quite, that of Dumas' longest and most "spun-out" achievements in

_Monte Cristo_, the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_ and _La Comtesse de Charny_.

[103] I am not forgetting or contradicting what was said above (page 26)

of René. But René _does_ very little except when he kills the

she-beavers; Marius is always doing something, and doing it offensively.

[104] The "Je ne sais pas lire" argument has more than once suggested to

me a certain historical comparison. There have probably never been in

all history two more abominable scoundrels for cold-blooded cruelty, the

worst of all vices, than Eccelino da Romano and the late Mr. Broadhead,

patron saint and great exemplar of Trade-Unionism. Broadhead could

certainly read. Could Ezzelin? I do not know. But if he could not, the

Hugonic belief in the efficacy of reading is not strongly supported. If

he could, it is definitely damaged.

[105] _Vide_ what is said below on _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_.

[106] After the lapse of more than half a century some readers may have

forgotten, and more may never have heard, the anecdote connected with

this. It was rashly and somewhat foolishly pointed out to the

poet-romancer himself that the air of "Bonny Dundee" was the very

reverse of melancholy, and that he must have mistaken the name. His

reply was the most categoric declaration possible of his general

attitude, in such cases, "Et moi, je l'appelle 'Bonny Dundee.'" _Victor

locutus est: causa finita est_ (he liked tags of not recondite Latin

himself). And the leading case governs those of the bug-pipe and the

(later) wapentake and _justicier-quorum_, and all the other wondrous

things of which but a few can be mentioned here.

[107] I do not know whether any one has ever attempted to estimate his

actual debt to Scott. There are better classics of inquiry, but in the

class many worse subjects.

[108] In the opening scene she is something worse. If her writing

"Gilliatt" in the snow had been a sort of rustic challenge of the "malo

me petit, et fugit ad salices" kind, there might have been something

(not much) to say for her. But she did not know Gilliatt; she did not

want to know him; and the proceeding was either mere silly childishness,

or else one of those pieces of bad taste of which her great creator was

unluckily by no means incapable.

[109] I use this adjective in no contumelious sense, and certainly not

because I have lived in Guernsey and only visited Jersey. To the

impartial denizen of either, the rivalry of the two is as amusing as is

that of Edinburgh and Glasgow, of Liverpool and Manchester, or of

Bradford and Leeds. But, at any rate at the time of which I am speaking,

Jersey was much more haunted by outsiders (in several senses of that

word) than Guernsey. Residents--whether for the purposes unblushingly

avowed by that sometime favourite of the stage, Mr. Eccles, or for the

reasons less horrifying to the United Kingdom Alliance--found themselves

more at home in "Caesarea" than in "Sarnia," and the "five-pounder," as

the summer tripper was despiteously called by natives, liked to go as

far as he could for his money, and found St. Helier's "livelier" than

St. Peter Port.

[110] Really good wines were proportionally cheap; but the little isle

was not quite so good at beer, except some remarkable old ale, which one

small brewery had ventured on, and which my friends of the 22nd Regiment

discovered and (very wisely) drank up.--It may surprise honest fanatics

and annoy others to hear that, despite the cheapness and abundance of

their bugbear, there was no serious crime of any kind in Guernsey during

the six years I knew it, and no disorder worth speaking of, even among

sailors and newly arrived troops.

[111] The shape of the island; the position of its only "residential"

town of any size in the middle of one of the coasts, so that the roads

spread fan-wise from it; the absence of any large flat space except in

the northern parish of "The Vale"; the geological formation which tends,

as in Devonshire, to sink the roads into deep and sometimes "water"

lanes; lastly, perhaps, the extreme subdivision of property, which

multiplies the ways of communication--these things contribute to this

"_pedestrian_-paradise" character. There are many places where, with

plenty of good walking "objectives," you can get to none of them without

a disgusting repetition of the same initial grind. In Guernsey, except

as regards the sea, which never wearies, there is no such even partial

monotony.

[112] It is well known that even among great writers this habit of

duplication is often, though very far from always, present. Hugo is

specially liable to it. The oddest example I remember is that the

approach to the Dutch ship at the end of _L'Homme Qui Rit_ reproduces on

the Thames almost exactly the details of the iron gate of the sewers on

the Seine, where Thénardier treacherously exposes Valjean to the

clutches of Javert, in _Les Misérables_, though of course the use made

of it is quite different.

[113] It must be remembered that this also belongs to the Channel

Islands division: and the Angel of the Sea has still some part in it.

[114] Those of _Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ have enraged pedants and

amused the elect for a century. But I do not remember much notice being

taken of that jump of half a millennium and one year more in _The

Talisman_, where Count Henry of Champagne "smiles like a sparkling

goblet of his own wine." This was in 1192, while the ever-blessed Dom

Pérignon did not make champagne "sparkle" till 1693. Idolatry may

suggest that "sparkling" is a perpetual epithet of wine; but I fear this

will not do.

[115] _Substitué_ means "entailed" in technical French. But I know no

instance of this kind of "contingent remainder" in England.

[116] A compound (as Victor himself might suggest) of "Hardyknut" and

"Sine qua non"? Or "Hardbake"?

[117] He has been found out through the agency of one "Barkilphedro"

(Barkis-Phaedrus?), an Irishman of familiar sept, who is "Decanter of

the Bottles of the Sea," and who finds, in one of his trovers, a

derelict gourd of confession thrown overboard by the Comprachicos when

wrecked (in another half-volume earlier) all over the Channel from

Portland to Alderney.

[118] Perhaps there is no more conspicuous instance of irritating

futility in this way than the famous [Greek: anagkê] and [Greek:

anagneia] of _Notre-Dame_. Of course anybody who knows no Greek can see

that the first four letters of the two words are the same. But anybody

who knows some Greek knows that the similarity is purely _literal_, such

as exists between "Chateaubriand" and "Chat Botté" and that the [Greek:

an] has a different origin in the two cases. Moreover, [Greek:

anagneia], "uncleanness," is about the last word one would choose to

express the _liaison_ of thought--"The dread constraint of physical

passion" or "Lust is Fate"--which Hugo wishes to indicate. It is a mere

jingle, suggestive of a schoolboy turning over the dictionary.

[119] That the only person at all likely to be "name-father" of this

name was not born till a considerable time after his name-child's death

would perhaps be worth remarking in another writer. In Hugo it hardly

counts.

[120] Let me do even _them_ one justice in this connection. They did not

suppose that the only way to make people get up earlier was to make

these people's clocks and watches tell lies.

[121] There is a smaller point which might be taken up. Undoubtedly

there were many double traitors on both sides in the other Great War.

But, like all their kind, they had a knack for being found out. Dumas

would, I think, have given us something satisfactory as to the

"aristocrat" at Jersey who betrayed the _Claymore_ to the Revolutionary

authorities.

[122] It is impossible, with him, not to think of Baudelaire's great

line in _L'Albatros_ (which some may have read even before _Les

Travailleurs_)--

"Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de _marcher_,"

though the sense is not absolutely coextensive.

[123] If I have spoken above "so that the Congregation be thereby

offended," let me point out that there is no other way of dealing with

the subject critically, except perhaps by leaving a page blank save for

such words, in the middle of it, as "Victor Hugo is Victor Hugo; and he

is for each reader to take or to leave." _He_ would, I think, have

rather liked this; _I_ should not, as a person, dislike it; but I fear

it might not suit with my duty as a critic and a historian.