A LITERARY CURIOSITY.
WE have received, under the title of A Study of Victor Hugo's "Lee Misembles," a pamphlet containing five trticles which were originally contributed to the Spectator by Algernon Charles Swinburne, and which have been reprinted for private circulation. A brief introduction explains how a long search was made for these missing articles—which are among the earliest example of Swinburne's prose—and how at length they were discovered in the Spectator of 1862. An extract from a letter of Swinburne's which provided the clue for the discovery informs us that Swinburne disapproved of the Spectator's methods of dealing with its contributors, and also of its principles, which offended his moral sense. On the first point we need say nothing, but as to the second it may be worth while to remark that in 1862 the Spectator wan risking ruin by unequivocally commending the cause of the North in the American Civil War— a cause which was unpopular with the richer classes and with London society at the beginning of the war, but eventually was almost universally recognized as standing for justice and truth. The first of the fire articles is comparatively formal and stilted, while the others are filled with the easy play of Swinburne's imagination and marked by his vigorous choice of words. It is suggested that we can here trace the development of his style, as he learned to write in prose. For our part, we suspect that the interval between the first and second articles was too short to account for such a highly appreciable change. It seems more likely that Swinbnrne in his first article supposed that he was writing in the manner in which the editors of the Spectator would wish him to write. It is a common experience for the character—or supposed character—of a journal to react upon the method and thought of a contributor, just as in published correspondence one may generally detect, how the individuality of the recipient determines the cast of a letter. Conceivably between the first and second articles some communication passed between the editors and Swinburne. In that case, the editors may have explained—if Swinburne had not reached this just conclusion of his own accord—that it was not desirable for any writer to curb and check his natural fancies in deference to some assumed standard of rigidity.
The discovery of the articles was well worth the pains spent on it. Swinburne's veneration of Victor Hugo; and hie penetrating analysis of • the great Frenchman's workmanship and philosophy, illuthinate for us the mind of the critic; while they give as one of the most just criticisms of the famous story that we have ever read. In his first paper Swinburne follows closely the movement of the story—describes with delight the character of the Bishop Myriel; retells the sacrifice of Fantine, who sells her hair and teeth and becomes an outcast of the streets in order to provide for her child; and sets-forth the nature of Jean Valjean's self-immolation when, rather than let an innocent man suffer, he steps down from his pinnacle of honoured philanthropist and confesses himself to be the ex-convict for whom the police are searching. Swinburne asks himself what purpose is served by all this narrative of human misery. Victor Hugo himself says that his story cannot fail to be of use "so king as there shall exist through laws and manners a social damnation creating artificial hells in the midst of civilization, and complicating destiny, which is divine, with a human fatality." Swinburne comments :- "No doubt much of this is true. Our imperfections do often reproduce themselves in a ghastly progeny of crime, with which we seem to bo unconnected, and which only God can father on its true parents. The philanthropy that teaches us to educate that we may not have to correct, and to make reform the great object of punishlent, can never be out of place. But surely it is false to infer that laws and manners do in any eminent degree create a social damnation. Allowing that Jean Vaijean was punished beyond his due, and so brutalized by punishment, we may yet fairly say that the era of Draconian legislation is passed, and that, after all, we must in this world look chiefly to acts, and leave the question of intention to heaven. The true preventive for all crimes that arise from necessity is the simple expedient of an efficient poor law, which M. Victor Hugo, like most Frenchmen not men of science, would probably regard with horror. For the man who, having the workhouse at hand, prefers stealing td breaking stones and a temporary separation from his family, we confess we have little pity. The case of Fantine's ruin and deser- tion is no doubt more difficult. The problem how to keep a young girl, who can earn a scanty but sufficient living by her needle, from preferring to live idly, expensively, and at the coat of her self-respect, with a young man whose dress and manners fascinate her, because they seem to indicate superiority, is one which no legislation can solve. But H. Victor Hugo is untrue to morality and to art when ho entitles the latter period of Fantine's career The Descent. He seems to imply that if her seducer had pensioned her, and she had been able to live on without selling herself; taking her old sin as matter of pleasant memory, she would have been a higher woman than she was as the street pariah. To our- selves, Fantine, mutilating herself, sacrificing life and shame for hor daughter, is on a higher moral level than Pontine dining happily at St. Cloud with her seducer and his friends. Nor can we see that matters would be much mended if the inequalities of social life could by any miracle be so far levelled that a woman's love of refinement and indolence should no longer be inducements to her to prefer corionbinage to marriage. Without reference to the fact that gieat disparity in the number of the sexes seems to lead under say mrennistanee to illicit oonnectiona-or to the argument that inequalities must always remain, and that a woman may an well sell herself for refinement or even for money as for physical boanty, we object absolutely to the idea that we can extirpate vice by removing fin opportunities. We want the morality of men, not the faultless -movements '-of puppets, and the feeble innocence of the boy unacquainted with evil or unattracted by it is of less value than the firm will that has learned in much suffering to be its own law. It is strange that an artist like M. Victor Hugo should believe that there is any fatality in men's manners which can overbear a resolute conception of morality. Prometheus never falters from his purpose, though the vulture gnaws his liver, and the earth is heaving around him. Is it reserved for our own century to proclaim that man, who seems to have conquered space, is yet powerless against his own appetites, and must bind himself that-he may not rush upon the swcrd ? If so , Oltristus nos iibarovit,' the text M. Victor Hugo mournfully quotes, has indeed lost its meaning, or has brought death into the world."
The excellent sense of these words is repeated in the fifth paper, where Swinburne returns to the question of punish- ment :—
"The main purpose of this book is, perhaps, to plead for a profound and limitless compassion as the basis of the criminal system which—if it could be really compassion of so divine a kind BA the Bishop of D—'s—would, no doubt, be in effect justice as well as compassion, because it would rend the conscience of the convict, and so bring with it the only penalty which is certain cure. But to base any system of criminal justice on the spurious compassion of ordinary administrators who, in their secret heart, see the guilt more in the social consequences than in itself, would assuredly be even less safe than to base it on the present rude but definite sense of law and social justice. We may improve on Sir Joshua Jebb, but a criminal system based on mere compassion would, we fear, be infinitely worse than his."
The main defects of Victor Hugo, in Swinburne's opinion, may be summarized as follows. First, his humour, though it exists, is unequal to the function of informing all his work and preserving what ought to be its true proportions. His humour is an isolated thing ; often a thing of delicacy, but not an agent which mingles and regulates his ingredients. The second defect (though really this is a repetition of the same defect, because all want of proportion comes from the lack of an operative humour) is the failure to modulate, to recognize gradations of light and shade. Victor Hugo's conception of God is that of what Swinburne calla an "antithetical God," who never dis- penses penalties or rewards in half-measures. All things ugly or beautiful, wretched or pleasant, are presented as violent contrasts of sordidness and radiance, of misery and ecstatic joy. LesMisdraldea is in forma drama, and, like other dramas, it has its villains. Oddly enough, Victor Hugo does justice to his villains—here, surely, is a moderation in a region where one least expects it. Swinburne's criticism is nevertheless true; minor accidents of method cannot be reckoned against an overwhelming tendency. Victor Hugo saw everything largely or not at all; he writes of a garden in a prolonged rhapsody of words which seems to exhaust all that could be said or thought about a garden ; he describes the main sewer of Paris as a thingimmense, menacing, and symbolic. There is always a conflict going on in all Victor Hugo's writings between the extremes of light and darkness, good and evil, strength and weakness, gloom and joy. Headers of Les Travailleurs de la lifer will remember, as an example, the fearful conflict between the man and the octopus—really a symbolic figure of the eternal struggle between men who win their living from the sea and the gigantic hostilities of Nature opposed to them. Row strange that Swinburne, having condemned the riots of antithesis in Victor Hugo, should himself in his later prose have fallen into a habit of pressing antithesis to the point of obvious disfiguration—true, a verbal antithesis, and so different in sort from Victor Hugo'e, but still equally open to objection!
For a translator the difficulties of Victor Hugo's style are most formidable. In very remarkable words Swinburne indicates them :— " This style of Victor Hugo's is not easy to catch and reproduce effectively. To find fault with it, lay a finger on the flaws and knots of it, set a mark against this or that phrase—even to seize on some salient point and hold it up in the way of parody—these are the easy things to do. It has singular alternations of fluent power and sharp condensed angular thought ; moves now softly and freely, now with a sort of abrupt military step, a tight-laced, short-breathed kind of march, as it were; a style broken and split up into bright, hard fragments of spar, that have a painful sparkle in them, and rough, jagged notches and angles ; then, again, it shifts into quite another likeness, becomes flexible, soft, sinuous, as the overgrowth of trees or grass ; with a passionate eager beauty in it that dilates every word and sentence to the full; a feverish excess of blood, a tremulous intensity of life. It is hard at times to keep np with the pace of it; the very written words seem to have a conscience and a vitality in them, to heave and beat with the fever of excited thought, to quiver with actual sensumarpassion. Moreover, the style expands and opens no into ,
strange people who love t/ tease. They are not cruel, but they do love to hurt others a little, partly to make themselves important, partly out of a less innocent wish to know more than their acquaintance warrants of the person they are talking to. Preliminaries bore them. They look for the joint in each vast paragraphs, coherent, indeed, but only as water coheres; man's social armour. They want to know what So-and-so `tumbling, weltering spaces of sea with no good anchorage for miles,' that drift the reader breathless out of reach of rope or But when Swinburne has said all, he remains a fervid wor- shipper of Victor Hugo's genius. He says of Lea Miserable, that this book, which is "enough of itself to cut six men's reputations out of—to serve as a quarry of metal for celebrities to be built with—is but as a single atone in his house ; one item out of the catalogue of his claims on the reverence and admiration of men as long as any books shall be read or written at all."
In conclusion, we must notice that Swinburne writes of Browning's " Sordello" as "our greatest modern English poem."
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