TWO BOOKS ON VICTOR HTJGO.*
A PRODIGY ere he attained his majority, Victor lingo was still under thirty when he was acknowledged as the leader of the greatest literary movement of the age. During the-next twenty years, comprising the prime of his middle life, he remained, in comparative obscurity, and it was only after repeated knocks at the door that he obtained admission. to the. Academy. The romantic movement; at no time quite cordially. accepted in France, had spent itself; and Hugo found himself in an isola- tion from which he never really emerged. Twenty years of exile succeeded, during which most of his best work. was produced ; and on his return to France in 1870, the crawd, impelled.by various motives which it would take too long.to,analyse here, placed him upon an unapproachable pedestal, bat rather as a sort of poetic politician than as a poet. For more than half a century he thus ran a course of his own, and alikain politics, philosophy, and literature, occupied a position which no one attempted—perhaps none oared—to dispute.
This singular aloofness, especially singular in France, is one of the most striking, characteristics of his career, and in great measure explains the meagreness of the materials which con- temporary memoirs furnish to his biographers. He had many qualities in common with the Balzacs, the De Mussets, the Lamartines, and the Gantiers of his age ; but one quality which all his contemporaries possessed he lacked utterly,—that fine self-mastery which is, or rather was, so distinguishing a feature of French literature, and the want of which caused him to be regarded with a certain distrust that forbade anything like literary fellowship. He excited a wondering rather than an appreciative admiration ; and contemporary writers were more inclined to follow the example of Ste. Beuve, who soon turned his back upon romanticism, than to associate themselves with Hugo, who never wavered in his adherence to it,—who, indeed, seems never to have troubled himself about any rules or canons of the literary art whatever.
Victor Hugo, directly and indirectly, has told the world alood deal about himself; and in its abundant production the evolu- tion of his genies may be easily traced. Bat of his relations with the great intellects of the day there exists no sufficient record ; and of his habits, conversation, and table-talk, only occasional and meagre notices have been published. His biographers have been rather panegyrists of his work than historians of his life, for any adequate account of which, the materials, though doubtless in existence, are not even yet avail- able ; and Mr. Barnard Smith is no exception to the rule. The dedication of his book to Mr. Swinburne is- ominous. He has, in fact, expanded an obituary notice into a volume, helping out a somewhat slovenly pr6eis of Barbou and Madame Hugo:— of Paul de St. Victor's memoir he appears not to be aware—with pages of conventional and undiscriminating panegyris of the Swinburnian kind, not seldom misleading, mainly unprofitable. Mr. Cappon's memoir is entitled to a much more respectful mention. It is disfigured by feeble metrical versions that too often neither scan nor rhyme, chiefly of lyrical passages; but it gives evidence of much earnest study, and displays considerable
• victor Hugo : his Life and Work. By G. Barnett Smith., With Portrait. London : Ward and Downey. 1885. —Victor Hugo : a Minnoir and a Study. By James Cappoe, M.A. London: Blackwood and Sons. 1885. critical acumen. The view presented of the political and social forces that formed the environment of the poet's middle period, in particular, goes far towards explaining the comparative unproductiveness of this stage of his career; and the literary evolution that culminated in the rebellion of which Hernani was to be the battle-cry is traced with great power and no less fulness of knowledge. The occasion ought not to be passed over of noting r the fact that the beginning of this evolution in France was almost contemporaneous with the revolt of Coleridge and Wordsworth against what may be termed Popeism and Johnsortism in our own country. But Mr. Cappon's estimate of Hugo's dramatic and lyrical work is, on the whole, a fair one. Of Les Burgraves, undoubtedly the most important of his dramas, over which Mr. Swinburne allows himself to go into such raptures, Ste. Heave wrote, in answer, as Mr. Cappon tells us, to Jules Janin's official praise in the D6ba1s, "in good French 'tis wearisome." It is never safe to differ from that cool, sagacious, and most erudite prince of critics, even when dealing with the leader of the movement upon which he had himself, with no small relief we may be sure, long turned his back. The truth is, despite the wealth of incident and exuberance of fancy they display, despite the striking situa- tions they present, and the many splendid lines and speeches scattered throughout them, Victor Hugo's dramas do not twice tempt reader or spectator. They are full of feverish movement, but devoid of life; their portraiture is inhuman, their tone too strained. Like Pore's pictures, they possess a certain ad capiandwrn quality which, under a close or long. continued scrutiny, turns out to be of a slightly vulgar, melo- dramatic character. Lastly, they are as utterly devoid of the wit that lends such a peculiar charm to the French literature of the eighteenth century as of the humour which makes us feel Shakespeare and Rabelais, Goethe, Moliere, and even Voltaire, to be of like clay with ourselves. Hugo is rather an incarnated idea than a mortal man to those who know him only by his writings.
Neither is it in his lyrical work that we must look for...the noblest outpourings of Victor Hugo's genius. Exquisite and varied as is his versification, unrivalled his command of poetic _phrase, startlingly luminous his figurative language, there is a certain lack of natural grace and sweetness, of sobriety and spontaneity, that robs his music of much of its charm. The craftsmanship is superb ; but we seem to miss the genius. In many of his lyrical poems, too, a discordant note is struck that goes far to ruin their beauty. Thus the fine ode to the Arc de Triomphe ends in a manner that leaves an impres- sion of the whole poem having been composed merely out of resentment at the omission (since rectified) of his father's name from that monument of Napoleonic, rather than French, glory ; and in" Le Revenant," the expression of an exquisitely tender thought is spoiled by the needless interposition of a couple of coarse lines. Mr. Cappon puts the matter fairly and acutely. "Although we have," he says, "in these volumes fof lyrical poems] the work of a great poet, we have nothing that can be called a great poem—nothing that would outweigh the contri- butions of Lamartine and De Masset to poetical literature." We do not, however, agree with Mr. Cappon in putting Lamartine on a level with Hugo. The salutary influences of adversity prepared Victor Hugo's genius for its highest flights. He knew the miseries of defeat and exile. In his solitude his love for France grew into a passion, his love of humanity into an ecstasy. He looked upon the world through France, on France through himself, and the wrongs inflicted upon himself were magnified into wrongs inflicted upon France and mankind; while those under which France and mankind suffered were, after a quite unique fashion, concentrated into tyrannies of which he had personal cognisance. The triple straggle is the subject of his song henceforth, a struggle with various enemies often imaginary ; the writhing of France pros- trate,—first, under the Man of December, afterwards under the Germans ; the inarticulate revolt of Humanity against the oppres- sions of man and Nature; the vast, endless, primmval struggle of which the others are but episodes. He becomes an epic poet, as Mr. Cappon justly remarks, whether he writes verse or prose, but never learns to "take part with his Ambler reason against his fury." He is, by turns, almost -sublime, turgid, falsely senti- mental, commonplace. His visions are magnificent, but lack spirituality ; there is no soul or thought, as Mr. Cappon acutely observes, behind his phrase, and it is this want that prevents his ever attaining to absolute sublimity. His imagination is of a realistic kind ; he describes the wall of ages as if the gruesome structure were actually before him, and watches the archangel carefully wipe • his sword in the skies after acoomplishing the invisible execution of King Blithest. Bat in abundance and force of imagery, in wealth and colour of diction, in stormy rash of imagination, in delicacy and quaintness of fancy, he is un- surpassed—perhaps unequalled. His defects interrupt and some- times obscure the epic grandeur of La .Ugende des Sieeles and Les Miserables, but the sense of it is present in almost every page. Both works must always rank among the noblest productions of human genius. By them will Victor lingo's fame be carried down to posterity, and they will be read and admired long after Les Ohdtiatents or L'Annee Terrible shall have been forgotten, save by the curious student of literature and history. Despite the Bishop of Derry's translation, La Legend° des Si■.:eles is little known in England. Nor is it, we apprehend, much read in France. The subject is too vast, the treatment too discon- nected ; and it must be confessed that a few hundred lines of even the best French alexandrines are as much as any but an enthusiastic admirer can manage at a sitting. But it is by far the grandest poem that has appeared since the days of Milton ; it is, indeed, the only epic that the last two centuries have seen the production of, for Voltaire's performance is scarcely worthy of the -name. Nothing ever daunted Victor Hugo, the very vastness of a subject tempted him, and he undertook -without ado, probably without much reflection, a task of which the execution involved, among the least of its con- ditions, a profound knowledge of the whole history of man. Mr. Cappon's remarks on Victor Hugo as a novelist display an intimate knowledge of the principles that have guided the masters in a form of literature which he rightly regards as a comparatively inferior one. The novel requires something besides creative power ; proportions and tones must be observed in the choice, arrangement, and presentation of materials, requiring a peculiar kind of literary skill which Victor Hugo altogether lacked. But Les Ifiserables must not be regarded as a novel ; it is a prose poem, a sort of dithyrambic epic, portraying mainly the struggle of a righteous soul through a warped and distorted world. Jean Valjeaa is not the creation of a novelist, bat of a poet ; he is a sort of Lear, and immeasurably superior to Balzac's Pere Goriot. The second-hand learning and tedious preachments and sligres- sisals that encumber the action must be thrown aside; the poem remains, a pathetic and noble portrayal of a particular phase of man's ceaseless struggle with evil. Not with the evil in man's nature or in the universe, for with neither form of evil does Victor Hugo'any where, save incidentally, concern himself. The evil he loves to combat and denounce is that which he finds inherent in all human organisations, and which he seems to believe to increase with civilisation. It does not occur to him that the imperfections of social arrangements are due to the imperfections of men themselves, — their greed, im- patience, dishonesty, and want of self-control. He inculcates no self-culture ; but, a true Frenchman in this respect at least, contents himself with a general denunciation of all modes of Government and administration past and present. Yet he is no disciple either of Rousseau or of Baboauf ; he is not, in truth, of a revolutionary temperament at all,—he is far too good a man of business. He suggests no plan of reform, and does not pretend to be either a moral or a social physician. While he detests priests and legislators, he admires militarism, especially asi incarnated in Napoleon Buonaparte. But if Victor Hugo's panegyrists will only allow it, his politics and his philosophy will alike sink into a secondary place, and his splendid qualities, whatever may be the category to which they shall finally be assigned, will ever maintain him, if not exactly in a line with, yet only a step behind, the front rank of men of genius.
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