VICTOR
HUGO
MY first notions of Victor Hugo were associated with the sea. It was from the old
I
read it in what was probably a very quaint sort of translation. The book was bound in that old-fashioned
"yellow back" style which at that time was considered in clergymen's
families as a symbol of all that was dissipated and dangerous; and on the
outside of the yellow cover was a positively terrifying picture of the
monstrous devilfish with which Gellert wrestled in
that terrible sea-cavern.
Certain
scenes in that romance lodged themselves in my brain with diabolic
intensity. That scene, for instance,
when the successful scoundrel, swimming in the water, "feels himself
seized by one foot", that scene where the man buys the revolver in the
little gunsmith's shop; that appalling scene at the end where Gellert drowns himself, watching the ship that bears his
love away to happiness in the arms of another - all these held my imagination
then, as indeed they hold it still, with the vividness of personal experience.
It
was long after this, not more than five or six years ago in fact, that I read
"Notre Dame de Paris". This
book I secured from the ship's library of some transatlantic liner and the
fantastic horrors it contains, carried to a point of almost intolerable
melodrama, harmonised well enough with the nightly thud of the engines and the
day-long staring at the heaving water.
"Notre
Dame" is certainly an amazing book.
If it were not for the presence of genius in it, that ineffable
all-redeeming quality, it would be one of the most outrageous inventions of
flagrant sensationalism ever indulged in by the morbidity of man. But genius pervades it from beginning to end;
pervades even its most impossible scenes; and on the whole I think it is a much
more arresting tale than, say, "The Count of Monte Cristo",
or any of Dumas' works except "The Three
Musketeers".
I
have never, even as a child, cared greatly for Dumas, and I discern in the attitude
of the persons who persist in preferring him to Victor Hugo the presence of a
temperamental cult so alien to my own that I am tempted to regard it as no
better than an affected pose.
Nowhere
is Victor Hugo's genius more evident than in his invention of names. Esmeralda, Quasimodo, Gellert,
Cosette, Fantine
- they all have that indescribable ring of genuine romance about them which
more than anything else restores to us the "long, long thoughts" of
youth.
I
think that Fantine is the most beautiful and
imaginative name ever given to any woman.
It is far more suggestive of wild and delicate mysteries than Fragoletta or Dolores or Charmian
or Ianthe.
I
am inclined to maintain that it is in the sphere of pure poetic imagination
that Victor Hugo is greatest; though, like so many other foreigners, I find it
difficult to read his formal poetry. It
is, I fancy, this poetic imagination of his which makes it possible for him to
throw his isolated scenes into such terrific relief that they lodge themselves
in one's brain with such crushing force.
In all his books it is the separate individual scenes of which one finds
oneself thinking as one recalls the progress of this narrative or the other. And when he has struck out with a few vivid
lightning-like flashes the original lineaments of one of his superb creations,
it is rather in separate and detached scenes that he makes such a person's
indelible characteristics gleam forth from the surrounding darkness, than in
any continuous psychological process of development.
His
psychology is the psychology of a child; but none the worse perhaps for that;
for it is remarkable how often the most exhaustive psychological analysis
misses the real mystery of human character.
Victor Hugo goes to work by illuminating flashes. He carries a flaring torch in his hand; and
every now and then he plunges it into the caverns of the human heart, and one
is conscious of vast stupendous Shadows, moving from midnight to midnight.
His
method is gnomic, laconic, oracular; never persuasive or plausible. It is "Lo - here!" and then again
"Lo - there!" and we are either with him or not with him. There are no half measures, no slow evolutionary
disclosures.
One
of his most interesting literary devices, and it is an essentially poetic one,
is the diffusion through the story of some particular background, a background
which gathers to itself a sort of brooding personality as the tale proceeds,
and often becomes before the book is finished far more arresting and important
than any of the human characters whose drama it dominates.
Such
is the sea itself, for instance, in "The Toilers". Such is the historic cathedral in "Notre
Dame". Such is the great Revolution
- certainly a kind of natural cataclysm - in "Ninety-three". Such as the great sewers of
It
is one of the most curious and interesting phenomena in the history of
literature, this turning of a poet into a writer of romances, romances which
have at least as much if not more of the poetic quality in them than the
orthodox poetry of the same hand.
One
is led to wonder what kind of stories Swinburne would
have written had he debouched into this territory, or what would have been the
novels conceived by Tennyson. Thomas
Hardy began with poetry and has returned to poetry; and one cannot help feeling
that it is more than anything else the absence of this quality in the
autobiographical studies of sex and character which the younger writers of our
day spin out that makes them after a time seem so sour and flat.
It
is the extravagance of the poetic temper and its lack of proportion which leads
to some of the most glaring of Victor Hugo's faults; and it is the oracular,
prophetic, gnomic tone of his genius which causes those queer gaps and rents in
his work and that fantastic arbitrariness which makes it difficult for him to
evoke any rational or organic continuity.
It
is an aspect of the poetic temper too, the queer
tricks which the humour of Victor Hugo will condescend to play. I suppose he is by nature the least endowed
with a sense of humour of all the men of genius who have ever lived. The poet Wordsworth had more. But like so many poetic natures, whose vivid
imagination lends itself to every sort of human reaction, even to those not
really indigenous, Victor Hugo cannot resist in indulging in freakish sallies
of jocularity which sometimes become extraordinarily strained and forced, and
even remind one now and then of the horrible mechanical smile on the
countenance of the mutilated man in his own story.
Poet-like
too is the portentous pedantry of his archæological
vein; the stupendous air of authority with which he raps out his classical
quotations and his historic allusions.
He is capable sometimes of producing upon the mind the effect of a
hilarious schoolmaster cracking his learned jokes to an audience only too
willing to encourage him. At other
times, so bizarre and out of all human proportion are his fantasies, one
receives an impression as if one of the great granite effigies representing
Liberty or Equality or the Rights of Man, from the portico of some solemn Palais de Justice, had suddenly yielded to the temptation
of drink and was uttering the most amazing levities. Victor Hugo in his lighter vein is really, we
must honestly confess, a somewhat disconcerting companion. One has such respect for the sublime
imaginations which one knows are lurking behind "that cliff-like
brow" that one struggles to find some sort of congruity in these strange
gestures. It is as though when walking
by the side of some revered prophet, one were suddenly conscious that the man
was skipping or putting out his tongue.
It is as though we caught
There
are persons who interest themselves still in Victor Hugo's political attitudes,
in his orations on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville;
in his theatrical visits to the barricades where "he could be shot, but
could not shoot"; in his diatribes against Napoleon the Third; in his
defence of the Commune from the same remoteness of
I
must confess I find it difficult to share these emotions. I seem to smell the footlights of the opera
in these heroic declamations, and indeed poor Napoleon the Little was himself
so much of an operatic hero that to exalt him into a classic tyrant seems
little short of ridiculous.
We
derive a much truer picture of Victor Hugo's antagonist from Disraeli's "Endymion" than we do from the poet's torrential
invectives. I have a shrewd idea that
the Emperor was a good deal more amiable, if not more philosophical, than his
eloquent judge.
Victor
Hugo was an impassioned lover of children.
Who can forget those scenes in "Les Misérables"
about little Cosette and the great wonderful doll
which Valjean gave her? He loved children and - for all his lack of
humour; sometimes I think because of it - he thoroughly understood them. He loved children and he was a child himself.
No-one
but a child would have behaved as he did on certain occasions. The grave naïveté of his attitude to the
whole spectacle of life was like the solemnity of a child who takes very
seriously every movement of the game which he is playing. A child is solemn when it is pretending to be
an engine-driver or a pilot, and Victor Hugo was solemn when he pretended to be
a saviour of society. No-one but a person
endowed with the perfect genius of childishness could have acted toward his
mistress and his wife in the way he did, or have been so serenely blind to the
irony of the world.
There
is as little of the sensual in Victor Hugo's temperament as there is in the
temperament of a pure-minded child; but like a child he finds a shuddering
pleasure in approaching the edge of the precipice; like a child he loves to
loiter in melancholy fields where the white moon-daisies are queerly stained
with the old dark blood of weird and abnormal memories.
Irony
of any kind, worldly or otherwise, never crossed so much as the margin of his
consciousness. He is shamelessly,
indecently, monstrously lacking in the ironic sense.
"What
are we going to do?" he dramatically asked his sons when they had
established themselves in their island home; and after they had each replied
according to their respective tastes, "I," he replied, "am going
to contemplate the ocean!"
I
am ready to confess that I feel a certain shame in thus joining the company of
the godless and making sport of my childhood's hero. "He was a man, take
him for all in all", and we at any rate shall not live to
see his like again.
There
was something genuinely large and innocent and elemental in Victor Hugo. The austere simplicity of his life may have
been perhaps too self-consciously flung at the world's face; but it was a
natural instinct in him. I hesitate to
call him a charlatan. Was it Goethe who
said "There is something of charlatanism in all genius"? Victor Hugo hardly deserves to have Goethe
quoted in his favour, so ignorantly did he disparage, in his childish
prejudice, the great German's work; but what perhaps the world calls
charlatanism in him is really only the reaction of genius when it comes into conflict
with the brutal obstinacy of real life.
What
is charlatanism? I am almost scared to
look up the word in the dictionary for fear of discovering that I am myself no
better than that opprobrious thing. But
still, if Victor Hugo was really a charlatan, one can safely say one would
sooner be damned with the author of "L'Homme qui
Rit" than saved with many who have no
charlatanism in them.
But
what is charlatanism? Does it imply
false and extravagant claims in qualities we do not possess? Or is there the spirit of the Mountebank in
it? If one were a deliberate Machiavelli
of dissimulation, if one fooled the people thoroughly and consciously, would
one be a charlatan?
Or are charlatans simply harmless fools who are too embarrassed to
confess their ignorance and too childish to stop pretending?
There
is something nobly patriarchal about the idea of Victor Hugo in his old
age. The man's countenance has certainly
extraordinary genius "writ large" there for all men to see. His head is like something that has been
carved by Michelangelo. Looking at his
face one realises where the secret of his peculiar genius lay. It lay in a certain tragic abandonment to a
sublime struggle with the elements. When
in his imagination he wrested with the elements he forgot his politics, his
prejudices, his moral bravado.
Whatever
this mysterious weakness may have been which we call his
"charlatanism", it certainly dropped away from him like a mask when
he confronted the wind or sea or such primitive forms of human tragedy as are
elemental in their simple outlines.
Probably for all his rhetoric Victor Hugo would have made an obstinate
invincible sailor on the high seas. I
discern in the shape of his head something of the look of weather-beaten
mariners. I can fancy him holding fast
the rudder of a ship flying before the fury of an Atlantic storm.
The
sea-scenes in his books are unequalled in all prose literature. To match them you would have to go to the
poets - to Shakespeare - to Swinburne. A single line of Hugo has more of the spirit
of the sea, more of its savagery, its bitter strength, its tigerish
leap and bite, than pages of Pierre Loti.
Whether I am prejudiced by my childish associations I do not know, but
no other writer makes me smell the seaweed, catch the sharp salt tang, feel the
buffeting of the waves, as Victor Hugo does.
Yes, for all his panoramic evocations of sea-effects, Pierre Loti does
not touch the old eternal mystery of the deep, with its answer of terror and
strange yearning in the heart of man, in the way this other touches it. The great rhetorician found a rhetoric here
that put his eloquence to silence and he responded to it with sentences as
sharp, as brief, as broken, as abrupt, as stinging and wind-driven, as the rushing
waves themselves pouring over a half-drowned wreck.
And
just as he deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain and snow and
vapour and fire. Those who love Victor
Hugo will think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle
in "Ninety-three", to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland,
when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs"
escapes from the storm.
When
one tries to cast one's critical plummet into the secret motive forces of
Hugo's genius, one is continually being baffled by the presence there of
conflicting elements. For instance,
no-one who has read "Notre Dame" can deny the presence of a certain
savage delight in scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No-one who has read "Les Misérables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of
lovely tenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, would degenerate
into maudlin sentiment of the most lamentable kind.
The
performances of the diabolical "archdeacon" in "Notre Dame"
to the moment when Quasimodo watches him fall from the parapet,
are just what one might expect to enjoy in some old-fashioned melodramatic
theatre designed for such among the pure in heart as have a penchant for
ghastliness. But one forgets all this in
a moment when some extraordinary touch of illuminating imagination gets hold of
one by the throat.
I
do not think that Victor Hugo will go down to posterity honoured and applauded
because of his love for the human race.
I suspect those critics who hold him up as a grand example of democratic
principles and libertarian ideals of not being great lovers of his
stories. He is a name for them to
conjure with and that is all.
Victor
Hugo loved children and he loved the mothers of children, but he was too great
a soul to spoil his colossal romance with any blatant humanitarianism. I do not say he was the high, sad, lonely,
social exile he would have liked the world to believe him; for he was indeed of
kind, simple, honest domestic habits and a man who got much happiness from
quite little things. But when we come to
consider what will be left of him in the future, I feel sure that it will be
rather by his imagination than by his social eloquence that he will touch our
descendants. It is indeed not in the
remotest degree as a rhetorician that he arrests us in these unique tales. It is by means of something quite different
from eloquence.
His
best effects are achieved in sudden striking images which seem to have in them
a depth of fantastic diablerie worthy of the
wreck-strewn "humming waters" whose secrets he loved to penetrate.
It
is not sufficiently realised how much there was of the "macabre"
about Victor Hugo. Like the prophet
Ezekiel, he had strange visions from the power he served, and in the primordial
valleys of his imagination there lie, strewn to the bleaching winds, the bones
of men and of demons and of gods; and the breath that blows upon them and makes
them live - live their weird phantasmal life of mediæval
goblins in some while procession of madness - is the breath of the spirit of
childhood's fancies.