THE YELLOW PASSPORT.
VICTOR HUGO has bid hard for his fame,—he has written much and hastily, he has composed in many manners and on all subjects, he has (to use his own sublime kind of phraseology) soared high into the infinite Empyrean and plunged deep down into the Abyss ; but it is still doubtfull whether be is to rank among true poetical creators. His own list of sublimities runs thus : — Homer, Job, ZEschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, St. John, St. Paul, Tacitusi Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare ; and he is not afraid (in the course of the epileptic essay on " William Shakspere ") to hint that posterity will add "Hugo" to the incompleted scroll. It is clearly with this hope that he performs so many fantastic tricks before high heaven, and he has an easy answer to all those who charge him with being a pyrotech- nist. Genius, he says, is not circumscribed. The fault of genius, such as blasphemy or exaggeration, is the glory of genius. " Cela, c'est l'Incomm! Cela, c'est l'Infini ! Si Corneille avait
eels,' it serait l'e'gal d'Eschyle. Si Milton avait cela,' it serait
d'Homere. Si Moliere avait cela,' it serait legal de Shak- spere." We have here, in a nutshell, the whole secret of Hugo's follies. In his criticisms, as in his novels and dramas, he invari- ably confuses the hysterical with the tremendous,—the sense of excitement with the sense of power. It would be easy to show that, out of his long list of sublimities, not one
possessed " the Unknown " or " the Infinite " in Hugo's fashion,—not one was emotional for mere emotion's sake,— not one but exhibited tremendousness in precise proportion to the absence of hysteria. To be very brief, Hugo means no more by the Infinite than other people mean by Mumbo Jumbo, and his appeals to the unknown are only excusable on the plea that he really has done service in the region of the known. When he forgets himself, and is only emotional for his subject's sake, he writes admirably, often exquisitely. There is a noble heat of humanity in his best passages,—something finer and fresher than most of the preaching of this generation,—a beneficence which would perform miracles, if the possessor did not first require to be healed himself.
One point seems to us quite clear,—if Victor Hugo is to take rank as an artist, melodrama must rank once and for ever as art ; and we really see no reason why this should not be so. Melo- drama, properly so called, is that kind of dramatic pre- sentment where the poetry consists of emotional touches of intense interest, always culminating in picture, — where the evolution of character is subsidiary to the evolution of strong situations. Pure melodrama culminates where pure tragedy begins in the tableau ; Hugo would pause, if he wrote a " Prometheus," precisely where Aeschylus commences to speak ; but indeed, in nearly all great modern art, melodrama and tragedy are mixed together. Without going further into the discussion of what and what is not melodramatic, we may safely assume that Victor Hugo, whose plan is to incarnate great " qualities " and call them Javert, or Bishop Myriel, and who is most successful in grouping these figures at periods of intense emotion, is not an artist in the same sense that Walter Scott is an artist. Note, then, the epileptic tendency, and the sense of artistic balance is still lessened. No one denies that Hugo creates monsters, lets off fire- works, blasphemes, twaddles, affects, screams, and raves. No one denies, on the other hand, that he at times exhibits an intense felicity of verbal touch, and that amid his wildest melodrama we sometimes hear a lyric note appropriate as a Greek chorus and unaffected as a Scottish ballad. Some of his writing is the merest verbiage ; much of it would, if separated from the alloy, procure for him a reputation second only to those of the highest modern poets.
These remarks have been called forth by the Yellow Passport, a version of Les Miserables, just produced at the Olympic Theatre. The dramatist is Mr. Henry Neville, the well known feline premier, who plays the leading part of the piece, that of the convict Jean Valjean. Mr. Neville has done his work in a thoroughly English style, and succeeded, at a frightful expense to his original, in pro- ducing a very successful acting drama ; yet we cannot help think- ing that an equal and even a superior result might have been attained by a less humiliating process. Here is the case, as stated between dramatist and novelist. The Jean Valjean of Les Miserables is not so much a brutalized and terrible being, as a being in whom the moral life has been temporarily suspended ;—during nineteen years of the galleys that life has simply remained motion- less, like the works of an unwound watch. " 11 etait absorld en effet. A travers les perceptions maladives d'uue nature incomplete et d'une intelligence accablee,il sentait confusement qu'une chose monstreuse etait sur lei." Coming forth from prison with every human dour shut against him, he rests stupified—brutal. A hopeless case, most philosophers would say,—total anemia, owing to long inaction, and quite incurable. Not incurable, is the belief of Victor Hugo ; the man, like the watch, only wants fresh " winding-up " to go on as well as ever ;—and Bishop Myriel having wound him up, Jean is quite capable of being M. Madeleine. Mr. Neville, however, believ- ing that an English audience would consider the original Jean a monster, has given very little indication of the stupefaction and brutality, but has rather represented the liberated convict as a mild rough sort of fellow, with the affections still dominant. The splendid influence of mind over matter, as shown in the episode between Jean and Bishop Myriel, is totally lost from Mr. Neville's point of view ; but then, on the other hand, there arises a certain probability in favour of the conversion. Mr. Neville has clearly good reasons for making his Jean Valjean quite distinct from Victor Hugo's. He has no excuse, however, for tampering as he has done with Javert. Will our readers credit it ?—Javert, the stern incarnation of legality, the pitiless, the uncompromising, who, when he can no longer with conscience either persist in or desist from the persecution of Jean Valjean, commits suicide as a point of bonour,—Javert, in the drama, shakes bands quite friendlily with Jean Valjean, asks his forgiveness for having persecuted him, and lives happily ever afterwards. Again, Mr. Neville may retort that the original Javert, too, is a monster. 'Prue; but he is perfect,—aid the monster becomes unbearably monstrous after such a conversion. The alteration was bad as art and had as tact. Hugo's Javert, preserved in his integrity, would have been a much more effective stage figure.
It is not our purpose to go further into criticism. The Yellow Passport is, on the whole, a pretty piece Of the contemporary English school, with good common-place situations and strong theatrical characters. The dialogue is nearly all taken verbatim from the novel, and being lingo's dialogue, has lightness and a certain spasmodic strength. The acting, as a whole, was bad. Mr. Neville is very intelligent, but totally deficient in tremendous- ness. There is much even in his own Jean Valjean that is quite beyond his strength. Messrs. Vincent and Atkins were unpleasant, —one was coarse, the other foolish. But Miss Furtado, as Fantine, showed glimpses of a real dramatic faculty, and what is more, of true insight. She was at once delicate and strong. With cultivation and self-reverence, both of which are so scarce among modern performers, this young lady may develop into a true actress. In more than one touch she reminded us of Miss Kate Terry.
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