Toilers of the Sea Part 1

Toilers of the Sea.

by Victor Hugo.

INTRODUCTION

Victor Hugo was thinking much of aeschylus and his Prometheus at the time he conceived the figure of Gilliatt, heroic warrer with the elements.

But it is to a creature of the Gothic mind like Byron's Manfred, and not to any earlier, or cla.s.sic, type of the eternal rebellion against fate or time or circ.u.mstance, that Hugo's readers will be tempted to turn for the fellow to his Guernsey hero:

"My joy was in the wilderness--to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top, Where the birds dare not build--nor insects wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or ocean, in their flow."

The island of Guernsey was Gilliatt's Alp and sea-solitude, where he, too, had his avalanches waiting to fall "like foam from the round ocean of old h.e.l.l." And as Byron figured his own revolt against the bonds in Manfred, so Hugo, being in exile, put himself with lyrical and rhetorical impetuosity into the island marcou and child of destiny that he concocted with "a little sand and a little blood and a deal of fantasy" in the years 1864 and 1865. There is a familiar glimpse of the Hugo household to be had in the first winter of its transference to the Channel Islands, years before _Les Travailleurs_ was written, which betrays the mood from which finally sprang this concrete fable of the man-at-odds. It was the end of November 1852, and a father and his younger son sat in a room of a house of Marine Terrace, Jersey--a plain, unpicturesque house; square, hard in outline, and newly whitewashed,--Methodism, said Hugo, in stones and mortar. Outside its windows the rain fell and the wind blew: the house was like a thing benumbed by the angry noise. The two inmates sat plunged in thought, possibly thinking of the sad significance of these beginnings of winter and of exile which had arrived together. At length the son (Francois Hugo) asked the father what he meant to do during their exile, which he had already predicted would be long? The father said, "I shall look at the sea." Then came a silence, broken by a question as to what the son would do? To which he replied that he would translate Shakespeare.

Victor Hugo's own study or eulogy of Shakespeare was written as a preamble to his son's translation of the plays. It is not too much to connect the new and ample creative work that followed, including his great novel of Revolution, _Les Miserables_, and his poems in _La Legende des Siecles_ (first series) with the double artistic stimulus gained from this conditioned solitude and his closer acquaintance with the dramatic mind of that "giant of the great art of the ages," as he termed our English poet in the book already quoted from.

The Shakespeare book is dated from Hauteville House, 1864. _Les Travailleurs_ from the same quarters, March 1866. The Hugos had perforce suddenly left Jersey for Guernsey in 1855, owing to the gibes and flouts of an unlucky revolutionary Jersey journal, _L'Homme_, at the two governments: Victor Hugo being already a marked man for his pains. The Guernsey house he inhabited for so many years had a s.p.a.cious study in its upper story, with a large window, free to the sun and to the sea.

Here he wrote, tirelessly, tremendously, as his custom was: beginning betimes in the early morning, and writing on till the time for his _dejeuner_: standing at a tall desk to write in his sea-tower. You must turn to certain of his poems and to the pages of _Les Miserables_ and _Les Travailleurs_ for the mental colours and phantasmagoria of those days and years.

It would be easy to point out, resuming an immense amount of criticism of his romances and of this story in particular, the defects on the side of dramatic and true life-likeness to be found in Hugo's prose-narrative. But it is more helpful in turning to a story-book to know what has been said unreservedly in its favour. Hugo's greatest appreciator was superlative in his praise, and it need hardly be explained that it was Swinburne who brought his tribute to the romance of Gilliatt also, after positing the parallel claims of Hugo's five chief romances. Of the five, they were not, he said, to be comparatively cla.s.sified in order of merit. "But I may perhaps be permitted to say without fear of deserved rebuke that none is to me personally a treasure of greater price than _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_. The splendid energy of the book makes the superhuman energy of the hero seem not only possible but natural, and his triumph over all physical impossibilities not only natural but inevitable." Swinburne's love for the Channel Islands, and his poems inspired by them, were mainly due as we know to Hugo's life and his books lived and written there.

E.R.

The following is a list of the chief publications of Victor Hugo:--

POETICAL WORKS:--Nouvelles Odes, 1824; Odes et Poesies Diverses, 1822; Odes et Ballades, 1826; Les Orientales, 1829; Feuilles d'Automne, 1831; Les Chants du Crepuscule, 1835; Les Voix Interieures, 1837; Les Rayons et les...o...b..es, 1840; Odes sur Napoleon, 1840; Les Chatiments, 1853; Les Contemplations, 1856; La Legende des Siecles (1st part), 1859; Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois, 1865; L'Annee Terrible, 1872; La Legende des Siecles (2nd part), 1877; L'Art d'etre Grand-pere, 1877; Le Pape, 1878; La Pitie Supreme, 1879; L'ane, 1880; Religion et Religions, 1880; Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit, 1881; La Legende des Siecles (3rd part), 1883.

DRAMATIC WORKS:--Cromwell, 1827; Amy Robsart, 1828; Hernani, 1830; Marion Delorme, 1831; Le Roi s'amuse, 1832; Lucrece Borgia, 1833; Marie Tudor, 1833; Angelo, Tyran de Padoue, 1835; La Esmeralda (libretto for Opera), 1836; Ruy Blas, 1838; Burgraves, 1843; Torquemada, 1882.

NOVELS AND OTHER PROSE WORKS:--Hans d'Islande, 1823; Bug-Jargal (enlarged for book form), 1826; Le Dernier Jour d'un Cond.a.m.ne, 1829; Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831; etude sur Mirabeau, 1834; Claude Gueux, 1834; Le Rhin, 1842; Napoleon le Pet.i.t, 1852; Les Miserables, 1862; Litterature et Philosophie melees, 1864; William Shakespeare, 1864; Les Travailleurs de la Mer, 1866; L'Homme qui rit, 1869; Actes et Paroles, 1872; Quatre-Vingt-Treize, 1873; Histoire d'un Crime, 1877; Discours pour Voltaire, 1878; Le Domaine public payant, 1878; L'Archipel de la Manche, 1883.

Hugo left a ma.s.s of ma.n.u.scripts, of which some have been published since his death:--Le Theatre en Liberte, La Fin de Satan, Dieu, Choses Vues, Tonte la Lyre, Ocean, En Voyage, Postscriptum de ma Vie.

An Edition Definitive of his works in 48 volumes was published 1880-5.

TRANSLATIONS:--Of novels, 28 vols., 1895, 1899, etc.; of dramas, by I.G. Burnham, 1895. Separate translations of prose and poetical works.

LIFE:--Among the biographies and appreciations are:--Sainte-Beuve, Biographie des Contemporains, vol. iv., 1831; Portraits Contemporains, vol. i., 1846; Victor Hugo raconte par un temoin de sa vie (Madame Hugo), 1863; A. Barbou, 1880 (trans. 1881); E. Bire, Victor Hugo avant 1830, 1883; apres 1830, 1891; apres 1852, 1894; F.W.H. Myers, Essays, 1883; Paul de Saint Victor, 1885, 1892; Alfred a.s.seline, Victor Hugo intime, 1885; G.B. Smith, 1885; J. Cappon, A Memoir and a Study, 1885; A.C. Swinburne, A Study of Victor Hugo, 1886; E. Dupuy, Victor Hugo, l'homme et le poete, 1886; F.T.

Marzials (Great Writers), 1888; Charles Renouvier, Victor Hugo le Poete, 1892; L. Mabilleau, 1893; J.P. Nichol, 1893; C. Renouvier, Victor Hugo le Philosophe, 1900; E. Rigal, 1900; G.V. Hugo, Mon Grand-pere, 1902; Juana Lesclide, Victor Hugo intime, 1902; Theophile Gautier, 1902; F. Gregh, etude sur Victor Hugo, 1905; P.

Stapfers, Victor Hugo a Guernsey, 1905.

PREFACE

Religion, Society, and Nature! these are the three struggles of man.

They const.i.tute at the same time his three needs. He has need of a faith; hence the temple. He must create; hence the city. He must live; hence the plough and the ship. But these three solutions comprise three perpetual conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life results from all three. Man strives with obstacles under the form of superst.i.tion, under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple [Greek: anagke] weighs upon us. There is the fatality of dogmas, the oppression of human laws, the inexorability of nature. In _Notre Dame de Paris_ the author denounced the first; in the _Miserables_ he exemplified the second; in this book he indicates the third. With these three fatalities mingles that inward fatality--the supreme [Greek: anagke], the human heart.

HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, _March, 1866_.

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THE ROCK OF HOSPITALITY AND LIBERTY TO THAT PORTION OF OLD NORMAN GROUND INHABITED BY THE n.o.bLE LITTLE NATION OF THE SEA TO THE ISLAND OF GUERNSEY SEVERE YET KIND, MY PRESENT ASYLUM PERHAPS MY TOMB

V.H.

TOILERS OF THE SEA

PART I.--SIEUR CLUBIN

BOOK I

THE HISTORY OF A BAD REPUTATION

I

A WORD WRITTEN ON A WHITE PAGE

Christmas Day in the year 182- was somewhat remarkable in the island of Guernsey. Snow fell on that day. In the Channel Islands a frosty winter is uncommon, and a fall of snow is an event.

On that Christmas morning, the road which skirts the seash.o.r.e from St.

Peter's Port to the Vale was clothed in white. From midnight till the break of day the snow had been falling. Towards nine o'clock, a little after the rising of the wintry sun, as it was too early yet for the Church of England folks to go to St. Sampson's, or for the Wesleyans to repair to Eldad Chapel, the road was almost deserted. Throughout that portion of the highway which separates the first from the second tower, only three foot-pa.s.sengers could be seen. These were a child, a man, and a woman. Walking at a distance from each other, these wayfarers had no visible connection. The child, a boy of about eight years old, had stopped, and was looking curiously at the wintry scene. The man walked behind the woman, at a distance of about a hundred paces. Like her he was coming from the direction of the church of St. Sampson. The appearance of the man, who was still young, was something between that of a workman and a sailor. He wore his working-day clothes--a kind of Guernsey shirt of coa.r.s.e brown stuff, and trousers partly concealed by tarpaulin leggings--a costume which seemed to indicate that, notwithstanding the holy day, he was going to no place of worship. His heavy shoes of rough leather, with their soles covered with large nails, left upon the snow, as he walked, a print more like that of a prison lock than the foot of a man. The woman, on the contrary, was evidently dressed for church. She wore a large mantle of black silk, wadded, under which she had coquettishly adjusted a dress of Irish poplin, trimmed alternately with white and pink; but for her red stockings, she might have been taken for a Parisian. She walked on with a light and free step, so little suggestive of the burden of life that it might easily be seen that she was young. Her movements possessed that subtle grace which indicates the most delicate of all transitions--that soft intermingling, as it were, of two twilights--the pa.s.sage from the condition of a child to that of womanhood. The man seemed to take no heed of her.

Suddenly, near a group of oaks at the corner of a field, and at the spot called the Ba.s.ses Maisons, she turned, and the movement seemed to attract the attention of the man. She stopped, seemed to reflect a moment, then stooped, and the man fancied that he could discern that she was tracing with her finger some letters in the snow. Then she rose again, went on her way at a quicker pace, turned once more, this time smiling, and disappeared to the left of the roadway, by the footpath under the hedges which leads to the Ivy Castle. When she had turned for the second time, the man had recognised her as Deruchette, a charming girl of that neighbourhood.

The man felt no need of quickening his pace; and some minutes later he found himself near the group of oaks. Already he had ceased to think of the vanished Deruchette; and if, at that moment, a porpoise had appeared above the water, or a robin had caught his eye in the hedges, it is probable that he would have pa.s.sed on his way. But it happened that his eyes were fixed upon the ground; his gaze fell mechanically upon the spot where the girl had stopped. Two little footprints were there plainly visible; and beside them he read this word, evidently written by her in the snow--

"GILLIATT."

It was his own name.

He lingered for awhile motionless, looking at the letters, the little footprints, and the snow; and then walked on, evidently in a thoughtful mood.

II

THE Bu DE LA RUE

Gilliatt lived in the parish of St. Sampson. He was not liked by his neighbours; and there were reasons for that fact.