VICTOR HUGO.

AREBEL in letters, the great dithyrambist to whom France is about to pay the last honours with forty thousand men to keep the peace, met with nothing but derision and detestation in the earlier stages of his career; a rebel in political and axial thought some twenty years later, he became and remained the idol of the great majority of his countrymen. Though an apparent paradox, it is the simple truth that the greatest of French poets is in France reverenced mainly as an impassioned tribune of the people. The explanation is not far to seek. There is nothing mysterious or incomprehensible in Victor Hugo's career, as there was nothing mysterious or incomprehensible in the man. Vague and vast as the sun's light, his thought was as clear. It was to the very immensity of his egoism that he owed his unparalleled popularity. He was before all things and always a citizen of France ; if his faith in himself was boundless, it was in himself as a Frenchman, and his faith in France was not less boundless than in himself. He loved humanity ; but on condition that it accepted France as sceur ainee in the fraternity of mankind. It was to the glorification of France, the ideal France of the average modern Frenchman, compounded of the military glories of the First Empire and the dazzling panorama of the Revolution, that he devoted the energies of a long life and the resources of a splendid genius. In his curious apologia, " Actes et Paroles," Victor Hugo uses the arts of a fantastic logic to explain the pkipilies of a career governed wholly by impulse ; but the claim, never-. theless, is not unjustifiable which is there put forward of a

certain unity in his life discoverable in his love of liberty, defined as reason in philosophy, inspiration in art, and justice in politics. Only the words ` reason ' and ` justice ' must be taken in a Hngoesque sense, which probably he vaguely understood, but has nowhere sought to define ; they were qualities apprehended rather by his emotional or imaginative, than by his intellectual, faculty.

On the other hand, neither the art nor the inspiration of Victor Hugo are French in quality ; and the opponents of the movement of 1830 understood the genius of the nation better than the author of "Hernani," a Kymric Kelt on the mother's side—as her name, Tr4buchet, sufficiently proves—and probably a Teuton on the father's. He has none of the gaiety of the Gaul, at least hardly a dozen wholly joyous poems are to be found among the productions of the last fifty years of his life—with the work of his preRomantic epoch the present writer is not familiar—nothing of the humour of Rabelais, nothing of the lightness of touch that so charmingly characterises the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His genius abhors equally the polish of Racine and the sweet cappou6vn of Ifolibre. He differs from his contemporaries almost as much as from his foregoers ; the name of Victor Hugo mast be written on a page of its own in the Golden Bork of the literature of France. He is never frivolous, though not seldom commonplace and trivial ; he cares nothing for elegance or correctness, and betrays no desire to amuse. He has no chit-chat, no bonhomie. Of the heartlessness, sneering scepticism, and noisome lubricity that infected his literary environment, he has no trace. In the search after novel and striking situations, he probed the lowest depths of vice; nor did he recoil from Rabelaisian crudity of expression where he deemed the occasion needed it. He is thus often repulsive in his choice of subject and in his treatment ; but from any kind of impurity of intention he is always and absolutely free. Whether, on the whole, his influence on French literature—his improvement of the technique of versification being excluded—has been beneficial may be doubted. His sombre genius, his weird vision, the disorderly and overwhelming rush of his ideas, the very wealth of his imagery and exuberance of his diction, stand in violent contrast with the definiteness, restraint, terseness, and elegance of the successors of Ronsard. His extravagances have found imitators enough; in his reverence of God, Man, and Nature he has had no followers ; while it is certain that French prose has degenerated daring the last half-century, and that little noteworthy French poetry has been produced during the same period, other than what has proceeded from Victor Hugo's own pen. "Rolla" and " Les Nuits," despite their power and grace, lack that sincerity which alone gives vitality, and are not more likely to live than the almost forgotten verses of Lamartine.

The fruits of the victory of 1830 seem to have fallen chiefly to the dramatists, who have known how to avail themselves of the liberty won for them by the author of "Hernani," without aping his extravagances. Victor Hugo, however, had no real dramatic power; his teeming fancy enabled him to stuff a single piece with plot and incident sufficient for a dozen; but there is no life in his personages, who are incarnated abstractions, conversing and soliloquising in magnificent language that excites admiration,—often indeed carries the reader off his feet,— but never in the least interests him, lacking as it does all spontaneity and naturalness. Of the innumerable plays his fertile genius produced, the most powerful is the celebrated "lie Roi s'Amuse "; but it is also the most repulsive in subject and treatment. The closing scene consummates an accumulation of horrors unparalleled in literature; but the strain is excessive, the reader or spectator is wearied and on the verge of being disgusted. With Victor Hugo inspiration is the whole of art, to be followed blindly whithersoever it may lead. The result is a vein of extravagance that runs through the whole of his work; he is always the servant, never the master, of his imagination. The satire too often degenerates into the lampoon, indignation into virulence, and where awe or pity is sought to be evoked, an over-magnificent diction raises a doubt as to sincerity.

The genius of Victor Hugo is of too impetuous a character to be capable of long-sustained flights. His poems are all short, though commonly strung together in a loosely-connected series. His romances offer a succession of scenes and episodes, pictures, or rather visions of life, strained through his wonderful imagination, and distorted or idealised by his riotous fancy. In his command of language he is absolutely unequalled ; he wields even proper names after a fashion that gives them a strange, often a weird, significance. As a word-painter he is approached

by few; but the exuberance of his word-wealth tempts him, too frequently, to over-elaboration, or to a blaze of colouring in which all semblance of truth disappears. It were hardly an exaggeration to say that he has written but one long poem, of which his various works, in prose and verse, are the disconnected

parts. It is misleading to regard him under the separate aspects of poet, satirist, and romancier ; he was always all three

at once. He cannot write a few strophes on a sleeping child without a note of indignation at the oppressor ; whether he sings of the winds, or of the sea, or of the woods at night, the theme that Is always in his mind is murmured in the harmonies of his song. In his great satire, the terrible Chitiments," the scathing confrontation of the destroyer of the glories of France with the maker thereof is interrupted by narratives, descriptions, and lyrical interludes designed to add to the force of the situation by intensifying its vileness. Mere prose he hardly ever wrote ; his speeches even have a dithyrambic ring in them.

On the whole, the most connected in purpose and spirit of Victor Hugo's volumes of verse are the four constituting the first and second series of " La Legende des Siecles " (1859 and 1877). The theme is set forth with unexampled power in the terrible vision contained in the Introduction to the second series, beginning with the magnificent lines :

" Yens nn rave ; le mur des siecles m'apparnt, C'etait de la chair viva aveo du granit brut. Une immobilite faits d'inquietude,

Un edifice ayant no bruit de multitude, Des trona noire &Mies par de farouches yens, Des evolutions de groupes monstrueux," &c.

The subject is treated in a succession of visions of typical epochs in the history of man's endless struggle, from Adam to the poet's own times. The execution is very unequal ; the con ception was too vast a one to be susceptible of other than a most imperfect realisation ; but the grace, pathos, and horror of many of the poems is unsurpassed, and a truly Titanic might of imagination characterises the whole work,—the episode of Aymerillot," the singular story of " Rose l'Infante," in which Philip II. is represented watching a rose wind-blown, petal by petal, symbolising the destruction of the Armada, and the history of "Jean Chonan," are among the most admirable elements of this grand torso.

In his last published collection, "Les Quatre Vents de

TEsprit " (two volumes, 1881), Victor Hugo attains the zenith of his poetic power. His Schwanenlieder are freer from extravagances than any of his previous productions, and show an

increase rather than a diminution of power. The date of composition, however, of many of the poems is uncertain. Among the noblest is the one " Litterature," in which a note of joy and hope is struck, but seldom heard in Victor Hugo's poetry. Apostrophising the past, he cries

el bon vieux passe blame

je sale de mon siecle et je l'aime."

For now man is,—

" Ni tyran, ni fereat, ni maitre, ni valet, L'hnmanite se montre enfin tells qu'elle est, Chaque matin plus libre, et chaque soir plus sage : Et le viens masque use laisse voir le visage."

It is the task of the poet to be the voice of the age, attuned to Nature, the prophet of,

" Ces tours de roue

Won appelle lea lendemains."

The following is a beautiful description of Spring:— "Fanfare Des perfume et des couleurs, Tonto la plains s'effare Dana une emente de flours."

Here, too, are found the glorious ode, "Aux Oiseaux et aux Nuages," the splendid picture of a sunset

Le soir qui verse, 6 mystere, Le ciel noir sur le del bleu, Entre l'espace at la terse Pose one barre de fen;"

and in the singular dramatic poem, "Les Tronvailles de Gallus," the biting sarcasm :

" Qu'est-ce en somme qua la femme ? Beancoup de chair, un pen dame, Un Eden entre-bitille, Un masque, no rave, une fable, Un vaudeville du diable Auquel l'homme a travaille.

" L'Art d'être Gmndpere " (1877) is mainly an idolisation of childhood by a granclAre who confesses himself happiest when —vaincn par un petit enfant, above all, of that tender age when it

"N's presque pas de bras, ayant encore des ailes."

Here, too, are those perfect poems, " Choses do Soir " and " LEetitia reram," and the deliciously playful lines beginning,— "Jeanne etait an pain sec dans le cabinet noir."

Happy Jeanne and happy George, to be immortalised by the adoration of such a grandifere !

In the romans of Victor Hugo, which are in reality prose-poems, the same strangely blended antithetical qualities that distinguish his verse create a series of visions, of typical situations, where the personages are lay-figures, and the incidents the mere scaffolding to support the display. It is not his business to tell stories ; he is a prophet whose narratives are parables. He has dealt with but one theme (exclusive of France, himself, and the enemies—whom he almost considers impious—of both), vast as humanity, on the infinitely varied but narrow treatment of which he has lavished all the resources of a splendid imagination, as fiery, restless, and puissant in the last as in the earlier decades of his life. That theme is the predestined fate, the anankel of human existence ; not probed by the intellect, nor sought to be comprehended or met, but contemplated with the tenderest compassion and the deepest indignation,—the dire threefold struggle, as he tells the world in his wonderful preface to " Les Travailleurs do la Mer," of man with Religion, Society, Nature; with dogmas, codes, things; with superstition, prejudice, elemental force. Victor Hugo abhors logic ; he is no philosopher, his learning is not erudition. His premisses must be accepted without cavil, which only leads to a cheap and irrelevant criticism, not as elements of any syllogism, but as the materials, real to him, however unreal in themselves, with which his imagination deals. It is only under these conditions that his genius can be appreciated, otherwise one is continually shocked by the obvious misconception that runs through his work and vitiates his message to mankind. In " Notre Dame de Paris" (1831), the keynote is the battle of innocence with the guilt of superstition ; the antitheses are ugliness and beauty, physical and moral, celibacy and unchastity, the depravation of woman and maternal love, wealth of imagination and poverty of. existence. The scene is the huddled masa of mediaeval Paris, swarming with a debased populace under the rule of a ferocious and double despotism, the whole grouped around a kind of biography of the great cathedral, the architectural features of which, grand, graceful, or grotesque, seem incarnated in the figures of the various crowd. The canvas of " Les Miserables " (1862) is ampler. Jean Valjean, Fantine, Cosette are the innocent victims of codes which Hugo hates even more than despotisms, Bibles, or Korans. Javert is their detestable incarnation ; " code fait homme," otherwise not ignoble or hateful. TIT story of Marine approaches the ordinary roman, and is specially interesting on account of the autobiographical details it contains, and the glimpse of history afforded by the " Fpopee de la Rue St. Denis." But it is the portrait of Valjean that engages the attention, of the righteous man growing tenderer to men the harder their usage of him. In " Les Travailleurs de la Mer " the anank4 is Nature, whose oppression, almost equally with man's, excites Victor Hugo's indignation. Ddruchette, " deux crepuscules melees, commencement d'une femme dans la fin de l'enfant," is a more charming creation even than " Cosette" ; while the figure of Clubin, type of the consummate hypocrite, whose one idea is, " passer pour un homme probe," is drawn with a power Moliere might envy. Victorious in the famous deathstruggle with the monstrous Cephalopod, " '11 mine bouches inffimes," Gilliat nevertheless succumbs to the fourth anankj, woman. " Quatre-Vingt-Treize " (published in 1873) is a Titanic presentment of what may be termed the guillotine epoch of the Revolution. It was to have been followed by two other works, completing a sort of Revolutionary trilogy; but the materials were probably found difficult to deal with in a manner satisfactory to Victor Hugo's political friends. M. Taine himself has not painted the Revolution in less attractive colours than its great apologist in " Quatre-Vingt.Treize."

Of the first forty years of Victor Hugo's life we have an admirable, if not wholly trustworthy, account in his wife's "Victor Hugo raconte par un Temoin de ea Vie" (1863). His own " Actes et Paroles " throw much interesting light on his political career ; but of the inner history of his literary development since he attained middle age, we know little, and of the man still less. He seems to have sown none but literary wild oats, and these he continued to sow almost to the last. He was an indefatigable worker—the mere mass of his production is stupendous—and a diligent archmalogist without ever attaining erudition. His tastes were simple, and he appears to have led the life of an honest bourgeois, passionately fond of his children and his children's children, and happiest when under the tyranny of some small miss of two or three. In a letter to Sainte-Beuve (June 12th, 1832) is to be found the germ of "Les Miserables" and the secret of the author's later career. Referring to the insurrection, described so powerfully in the novel, he wrote :—" J'espere qu'ils n'oseront pas jeter aux mars de Grenelle ces jeunes cervelles trop charades, mais si genereuses. Si les faiseurs d'ordre public essayaient d'une execution politique, et que quatre hommes de coeur voulussent faire une entente pour sauver les victimes, je semis le cinquierne." Like Shakespeare, he was a good man of business, amassing a fortune of some L200,000, most of which is said to be invested in the English funds,—an unconscious testimony, if such be the case, to a confidence he was chary of expressing in words. The Sturm and Drang of his inner existence must have been great. Like many men who have wielded a truculent pen, he was affable enough in ordinary intercourse, and would at the worst have scowled upon the Man of December himself.

In his splendid preface to Francois Hugo's translation of Shakespeare,—an eloge, or rather an apotheosis, not a criticism, — Homer, ./Eschylus, Job, Isaiah, Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, St. John, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, are enumerated as the mighty ones of literature, equal, but different, above and beyond criticism. It is noteworthy that but one Frenchman, Rabelais, to whom alone among Frenchmen Victor Hugo felt himself to be akin in genius, is enrolled in the great company. Will the author of " Les Miserables " be added to it P The answer of France is not doubtful, though the highest work of her greatest genius is probably better known and appreciated abroad than at home. But what will the world say ? Why should we ask ? The verdict will not much matter to the poet who has written :

" je seas an fond des cienx quelqu'un qui volt mon time ; Cela suffit."