French Classics Part 31

Victor Hugo's personality seems to have been a literary force almost as much as was his genius. As his quant.i.ty was immense, so his quality was vivific. Such a man was certain to be not only the master of a school but the center of a worship. Mr. Swinburne's late volume on Victor Hugo may be cited in extreme example of the deific ascription rendered by many at the shrine of this idolatry. Mr. Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, lost no opportunity to flout with indignity the claims of Victor Hugo to his supreme literary G.o.dship.

This great French writer has so recently died that, for the purposes of this book, he might almost be considered still living. At any rate, he has of late been so much talked about in current periodicals; he is, in some of his books, so freshly familiar to all, and, if we must say it, he offers a subject so perplexing to treat at this moment judicially, that we shall in some measure avoid responsibility by presenting him here with the utmost brevity--brevity, however, to be taken rather as a homage, than as a slight, to the unmanageable greatness by imminency of his merit and his fame.

Victor-Marie Hugo wrote verse very early, beginning as a cla.s.sicist. In later youth he was royalist and religious in spirit. At twenty he acquired the t.i.tle of "the sublime boy." How he acquired this t.i.tle seems a matter of doubt. It is generally supposed to have been given by Chateaubriand, in his quality of patriarch of French letters. But this origin of the sobriquet the present writer has seen seriously suggested to be, along with the sobriquet itself, the pure invention of Victor Hugo's own imaginative egotism; which fruitful source of autobiography is said also to have yielded the poet's n.o.ble pedigree--the process of production employed on his part being, in the latter case, the extremely simple one of adopting for ancestry the ancient line of a family, bearing the same name indeed with himself, but otherwise utterly unrelated to his own humble house. The really extraordinary independence of fact with which Victor Hugo undoubtedly made his a.s.sertions respecting himself renders any testimony that he bears on this point interesting as imagination rather than instructive as history. For three or four years now he was an irrepressible producer and publisher of verse. At twenty-five he put out his "Cromwell," a drama, with a belligerent preface in favor of romanticism. After this each play of his was a battle for that literary cause. His "Hernani" (1830) was at last more than a battle--it was a victory.

The royalist in due time became republican. When Louis Napoleon was president, Victor Hugo opposed him. When Louis Napoleon made himself emperor, Victor Hugo denounced him. Banished for this from France, the poet betook himself to Belgium. Repelled from Belgium, he found refuge in England. Here, or, more exactly, in the island of Jersey first, and longer, afterward, in the island of Guernsey, he remained till the second empire fell. He then returned to Paris, and shared the melancholy fortunes of that beleaguered capital during the Prussian siege and during the anarchy of the Commune. Here, finally, he died, and, by his own will and testament, in a quite other than the original meaning of that pregnant Scripture phrase, "was buried"--for his funeral was to be attended with peculiar obsequies. He signified his wish to be treated in burial exactly as one of those paupers of whose cause he had been in his works the life-long champion.

During his long exile, which, notwithstanding his pa.s.sionate love of Paris, he refused to shorten by any understanding arrived at with the emperor, he kept persecuting that usurper with printed diatribes, both in prose and in verse, which for mordant bitterness have probably never been surpa.s.sed in the literature of invective. One of these diatribes was a book ent.i.tled "The History of a Crime." To this he prefixed a kind of _imprimatur_ of his own, which may be quoted here as well exemplifying the high oracular style of expression characterized by short sentences and short paragraphs--these often of a single sentence only--that he habitually affected:

This work is more than opportune. It is imperative. I publish it.

V. H.

Victor Hugo's egotism was so vast that it was insane if it was not sublime. To exemplify adequately this statement by extracts would ask pages of room. The four lines about to follow, from one of his longer poems, present a modest and moderate example. The poet has been supposing the impossible case that the Supreme Being should take different views, in a certain matter, from his, the poet's, own--that he should outrage his, the poet's, sense of moral propriety. Here is how, in that case, Victor Hugo would, he declares, deal with offending Deity (we translate literally the original Alexandrines, line for line, without attempting to reproduce either meter or rhyme):

I would go, I would see him, and I would seize him, Amid the heavens, as one takes a wolf amid the woods, And, terrible, indignant, calm, extraordinary, I would denounce him with his own thunder.

To Victor Hugo himself, the foregoing was not blasphemy; it was simply sublimity of a sort suitable to the character of the poet. There was, it is said, fully developed mental unsoundness in his father's family and in his own. Victor Hugo's own genius had, we suspect, some trace of a real, though n.o.ble, insanity in it.

In 1862, appeared "Les Miserables," which must be accounted, if not the greatest, at least the most popular work of its author. This book was issued simultaneously in eight different cities and in nine different languages--a circ.u.mstance probably not paralleled in the history of literature. The fame of "Les Miserables" does not fade, and it hardly will fade. It is a book of truly prodigious elemental power. That, however, Victor Hugo's genius in producing it worked with some disturbing consciousness of a theory of literary art to be exemplified and defended, the following curious note, inserted in the midst of the text, at a point of interest in the story, may serve to show:

Then the poor old man began sobbing and soliloquizing; _for it is a mistake to suppose that there is no soliloquy in nature. Powerful agitations often talk aloud._

"Les Miserables" is justly open to many strictures, both on literary grounds and on ethical; but it must be p.r.o.nounced, notwithstanding, a great, and, on the whole, a n.o.ble work.

Victor Hugo made this approach to the illimitable in power, that he was well-nigh equally able to do great things and to do small. To exhibit by specimen his achievement in verse we shall offer here a few of his small things, in the impossibility of representing his great. The small things that we offer may acquire a value extrinsic to themselves if thought of as the gentle play of a giant who could with the same ease have astonished you by exhibitions of strength.

Victor Hugo went a second time, having once failed, to intercede with King Louis Philippe on behalf of a political offender condemned to death. It was late at night, and the monarch could not be seen. The intercessor would not be baffled, and, bethinking himself to appeal by the tenderness of birth and of death to the king, wrote four lines of verse which he left on the table. The allusions in them are to a lovely daughter of the royal house just lost and to a little son just born. We give the French text, and follow it with a close English translation:

Par votre ange envolee ainsi qu'une colombe, Par ce royal enfant doux et frele roseau, Grace encore une fois! grace au nom de la tombe!

Grace au nom du berceau!

By your lost angel, dove-like from you flown, By this sweet royal babe, fair, fragile reed, Mercy once more! Be mercy, mercy shown, In the tomb's name, and cradle's, both, I plead.

The poet's plea availed.

Another little gem of Victor Hugo's is the following quatrain, which, though it may have had at first some particular occasion, is capable of the most general application. Again we give the French, for the French here almost translates itself:

Soyons comme l'oiseau pose pour un instant Sur des rameaux trop freles; Qui sent trembler la branche, mais qui chant pourtant, Sachant qu'il a des ailes.

This may be thus rendered, almost word for word:

Like the bird let us be, for one moment alight Upon branches too frail to uphold, Who feels tremble the bough, but who sings in despite, Knowing well she has wings to unfold.

One more little gem from Victor Hugo's treasury of such we are happily able to present in a version whose authorship will commend it; Mr.

Andrew Lang translates "The Grave and the Rose." The poet here affirms, as he is very fond of doing, that capital article in his creed, the immortality of the soul:

The Grave said to the Rose, "What of the dews of morn, Love's flower, what end is theirs?"

"And what of souls outworn, Of them whereon doth close The tomb's mouth unawares?"

The Rose said to the Grave.

The Rose said, "In the shade From the dawn's tears is made A perfume faint and strange, Amber and honey sweet."

"And all the spirits fleet Do suffer a sky-change More strangely than the dew-- To G.o.d's own angels new,"

The Grave said to the Rose.

The majesty with which this great Frenchman would sometimes, in prose, condescend to be an acrobat walking the tight-rope of grandiloquence stretched over a bottomless abyss of the ridiculous, is well shown in his monograph on Shakespeare. This is accessible in a scholarlike English translation (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, publishers) by Melville B. Anderson. The following sentences will indicate what it is.

No one familiar with Victor Hugo can doubt that the great presence of HIMSELF, the writer, was really the chief thing in his musing eye, when, in the latter part of this extract, he was ostensibly describing and vindicating romanticist Shakespeare:

Shakespeare, shuddering, has within himself winds, spirits, magic potions, vibrations; he sways in the pa.s.sing breeze, obscure effluences pervade him, he is filled with the unknown sap of life.

Thence his agitation, at the core of which is peace. It is this agitation which is lacking in Goethe, wrongly praised for his impa.s.siveness, which is inferiority. All minds of the first order have this agitation. It is in Job, in aeschylus, in Alighieri. This agitation is humanity.... It seems at times as if Shakespeare terrified Shakespeare. He shudders at his own depth. This is the sign of supreme intelligence. It is his own vastness which shakes him and imparts to him strange and mighty oscillations. There is no genius without billows. An intoxicated savage, it may be. He has the savagery of the virgin forest; he has the intoxication of the high sea.

"He shudders at his own depth"--hardly could we resist the temptation to bracket in "[Victor Hugo]" after the p.r.o.noun "he." Every reader should do this mentally for himself; he otherwise will miss that important part of the true sense, which here is written between the lines. There never was genius with more inseparable, unescapable, tyrannizing consciousness of itself. You feel the personality even more than you feel the genius in reading Victor Hugo.

A considerable part of Victor Hugo's prose production, mostly fiction, has been translated into English. Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Co. publish six portly volumes in a uniform edition. From "Les Miserables" in this series we make extracts which will briefly represent Victor Hugo's prose at its very best, alike in style, in thought, and in spirit. In the first, the writer gives utterance to reflections inspired by the final event of the battle of Waterloo:

This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest bravery which ever astounded history--is that causeless? No. The shadow of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls surrendering their swords. Those who have conquered Europe have fallen p.r.o.ne on the earth, with nothing left to say or to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence. _Hoc erat in fatis._ That day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself.

The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. G.o.d has pa.s.sed by.

In the second, Victor Hugo contrasts the two leaders, the conqueror and the conquered, of that momentous day:

Waterloo is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did G.o.d, who is fond of ant.i.theses, make a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, an a.s.sured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of batallions, carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand, nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient cla.s.sic courage, absolute regularity; on the other intuition, divination, military oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul, a.s.sociation with destiny; the stream, the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it. Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo; and on this occasion genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected Blucher; he came.

It remains only to exemplify, as best in small s.p.a.ce we can, Victor Hugo's portentous, his terrific, power in working up a tragic situation, and displaying it as in a calcium-light of intense imaginative description or narration. We shall then feel that this t.i.tanic figure in French literature is at least by suggestive partial glimpses fairly before our readers. From "Les Miserables," we take the following pa.s.sage, introduced by the original author as a first step only in the climax by which he represents the supreme agony of his hero in a great crisis of his life:

It sometimes happens that on certain sh.o.r.es of Bretagne or Scotland a man, traveler or fisherman, while walking at low tide on the beach, far from sh.o.r.e, suddenly notices that for several minutes past he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is bird-lime....

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns toward the land, endeavors to approach the sh.o.r.e. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road: he halts to get his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand....

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either r.e.t.a.r.d or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man!

Victor Hugo's hero was involved thus in a quicksand--but the quicksand in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool--he was wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer.

All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven.

This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo's writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric.

Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.

That Victor Hugo willed to be buried exactly like a pauper did not prevent the occurrence of certain very important contrasts between his obsequies and the rites of an ordinary pauper funeral; perhaps, indeed, such a will on his part contributed to create the difference which at all events existed. The funeral attendance was said to be the most numerous ever seen in France. A million spectators were present. Three large wagons headed the procession filled with floral gifts. A beautiful diadem of Irish lilies was contributed by Tennyson, inscribed "To the World's Greatest Poet."

The French apotheosis of a national idol would not be complete without tribute from the theater. Accordingly, the Theatre Francais produced a drama by M. Renan ent.i.tled "_Mort_," in which the shades of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Voltaire, and Diderot hold a dialogue about human progress in the century to follow them, and, Corneille asking, "What poet will sing in that era, as sweet and tender as Racine, as logical as Boileau, as clear in style as Voltaire," the genius of the age lyrically answers, "Hugo," at the same time placing a crown on Hugo's bust.

Victor Hugo the man, especially as he mellowed with old age, was a sunny, sweet, benignant nature. He was a hearty, one might almost say a partisan, believer in G.o.d--atheism was so offensive to him.

Unfortunately, however, Victor Hugo's theism was not such as to enforce departure, in his own personal practice, from that deplorable tradition of his country which has rendered so many distinguished French authors, from the earliest to the latest, offenders against the laws of marriage and of chast.i.ty.

2. SAINTE-BEUVE.

Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve's fame as a critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is admitted to be a critic of the first rank. Nay, in the opinion of many, Sainte-Beuve const.i.tutes a rank by himself, having no peers.

Sainte-Beuve's range of subjects was very wide. He exercised himself to be equally open and fair toward all schools of taste and of opinion alike. At the outset, he was of the coterie of the romanticists. But he soon broke with these, either personally repelled by antipathies, or else unconsciously attracted by a secret sympathy of his own, too strong for his contrary will to resist, toward the cla.s.sical standards respesented in the seventeenth-century writers. He never seems to feel himself more entirely in his element than when he is appreciating the literature of the French golden age.