IIVICTOR HUGO

It is easy to disparage Victor Hugo, but, in order to disparage him, it is necessary to abstain from reading him. Take down his books and begin to read, and, even if you do not agree with the verdict, you will understand before long how it was that a generation or so ago people used to regard Victor Hugo as one of the great names in literature. It was only Swinburne, perhaps, who could describe him as “the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare,” but this did not seem an absurd exaggeration to the majority of readers at the time it was written, and even a crabbed critic like Henley accepted him as “plainly ... the greatest man of letters of his day.” His influence as well as his reputation was enormous and extended far beyond France. He was a great author for the great Russians. He was one of Dostoevsky’s favourite writers, andNotre Damewas one of the books that influenced Tolstoy; even in his censorious old ageTolstoy admittedLes Misérablesthrough the strait gate of the best literature inWhat is Art?and it seems likely, as Madame Duclaux suggests, that it was at the back of his mind when he wroteResurrection.

His greatest contemporaries, however, realised that Hugo was a charlatan as well as a man of genius. Madame Duclaux quotes Baudelaire’s comment, “Victor Hugo—an inspired donkey!” and his assertion that the Almighty, “in a mood of impenetrable mystification,” had taken genius and silliness in equal parts in order to compound the brain of Victor Hugo. She also quotes Balzac’s criticism of the first night ofLes Burgraves:

The story simply does not exist, the invention is beneath contempt. But the poetry—ah, the poetry goes to your head. It’s Titian painting his fresco on a wall of mud. Yet there is in Victor Hugo’s plays an absence ofheart, which was never so conspicuous. Victor Hugo is nottrue.

“Victor Hugo is nottrue.” That is the suspicion that constantly trips one up whether one reads his books or his life. In literature, in public life, in private life, he was not only amazing but an amazing humbug. We see evidence of this in the story of his relations with his wife and Juliette Drouet, his mistress, which MadameDuclaux tells again so fairly and so well. Even while he was pursuing the mistress across France, he would write fervently home to the wife: “Je t’aime! Tu es la joie et l’honneur de ma vie!” Hugo possibly meant this when he wrote it. He may have been lying to himself rather than to his wife. His falseness lay in his readiness to whisper at each shrine at which he worshipped that this was his only shrine. At the same time, no sooner do we admit that Hugo was an impostor in love and in literature than we begin to compare him with other impostors and to note certain differences in him. His early idealism was not merely an idealism of words. He was, until his marriage, as chaste as his nature was passionate. He was after marriage a faithful husband till his wife told him that she could no longer live with him as his wife. After he fell in love with Juliette Drouet in 1833, we might describe him as a high-minded bigamist, though he did not remain perfectly faithful even in his bigamy. One thing, at least, is certain: both women loved him till the end of their long lives. His dying wife wrote to him in 1868: “The end of my dream is to die in your arms.” And, when Juliette Drouet was slowly dying of cancer, and both she and Hugo were between seventy and eighty, she still insisted on nursing him at thehint of the slightest cough or headache. “Did he but stir, she was there with a warm drink or an extra covering. Every morning it was she who drew the curtains from Victor Hugo’s window, roused the old man with a kiss on the forehead, lit his fire, prepared the two fresh eggs that formed his breakfast, read him the papers.” Had he been all false, he could hardly have preserved the affection of these two rival and devoted women through years of danger and exile till the ultimate triumph of his fame. Madame Duclaux suggests, however, that he was a humbug even on that early occasion on which, seeing that Sainte-Beuve was in love with his wife, and that she in turn was attracted by Sainte-Beuve he offered with romantic generosity to let his wife choose between them and to abide by the result. Again, the fact that he insisted on remaining friends with Sainte-Beuve through the affair is regarded as evidence of his cunning determination to keep in with the reviewers at all costs. Victor Hugo would probably be suspected of having been a humbug, whatever he had done.

His self-importance is a continual challenge to our belief in him. Madame Duclaux quotes Heine’s sneer: “Hugo is worse than an egoist, he is a Hugoist,” and his device was the arrogantEgo Hugo. But at least he had the courage of his self-importance. In 1851, at the time of thecoup d’étatof Louis Napoleon, when there was a price on his head, Hugo was driving across Paris to a meeting of the Insurrectionary Committee, and passed a group of officers on horseback:

The blood rushed to his head. He flung down the window of the cab, tore his deputy’s scarf out of his pocket, and waving it wildly, began to harangue the General:“You, who are there, dressed in the uniform of a General, it is to you that I speak, sir. You know who I am; I am a representative of the nation: and I know who you are; you are a malefactor! And now do you wish to know my name! My name is Victor Hugo!”

The blood rushed to his head. He flung down the window of the cab, tore his deputy’s scarf out of his pocket, and waving it wildly, began to harangue the General:

“You, who are there, dressed in the uniform of a General, it is to you that I speak, sir. You know who I am; I am a representative of the nation: and I know who you are; you are a malefactor! And now do you wish to know my name! My name is Victor Hugo!”

This was no doubt theatrical, and both his deeds and his words during the reign of Napoleon the Little were those of a man consciously playing the leading part. But the fact remains that at this crisis he did risk everything and face twenty years’ exile for the sake of his convictions. The last stanza of “Ultima Verba” inLes Châtimentsmay be rhetoric, but it is not empty rhetoric:

Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si mêmeIls ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla:S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième;Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là.

Si l’on n’est plus que mille, eh bien, j’en suis! Si même

Ils ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla:

S’il en demeure dix, je serai le dixième;

Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-là.

There is an energy of fury in Hugo’s political verse that keeps it alive even to-day, when Louis Napoleon, a charlatan without this redeeming fury, has receded into such littleness that the eye scarcely any longer perceives him. Hugo at times seems a painfully vocative poet—the poet, not merely of the vocative singular, but of the vocative plural. But there is always coursing through his verse a great natural force, like that of the wind or the waves, that carries us along as we read.

Hugo’s work, like his life, indeed, was the expression of what Madame Duclaux calls “a powerful and a sensual nature, a prodigious temperament.”

His barber complained that Hugo’s beard took the edge off any razor. At forty he cracked the kernels of peaches with his teeth; even in his old age ... he ate his oranges with the peel on and his lobsters in their shell, “because he found them more digestible.” His appetite (which was hungry, not greedy) alarmed the good Théo. “You should see the fabulous medley he makes on his plate of all sorts and conditions of viands: cutlets, a salad of white beans, stewed beef and tomato sauce, and watch him devour them, very fast, and during a long time.”

“Hugo is one of the forces of Nature!” cried Flaubert, “and there circulates in his veins the sap of trees.”

This Gargantuan appetite expresses itself everywhere in his writings. He was a Gargantua in regard to life as well as food. He devoured the past like the present. He devoured politics, religion, the stage, poetry, fiction, nature, grand-children. If he was a giant who devoured, however, he was also a giant who created. He may not have the accurate gift of observation on which we set so much store nowadays, and he may depart so far from reality as to call an English sailor inL’Homme qui ritTom-Jim-Jack. But, if he does not create for us a world as real as Clapham Junction, he does create for us a world as real as Æsop’sFables. He is an inventor of myths and fables, indeed. He no more attempts to imitate the surface of life than a musician attempts to imitate the sounds of life. Like Dickens, he is a great Gothic writer, who demands the right to people the work of his hands with devil or imp or angel—with figures of pity or horror, of laughter or tears. He does not possess Dickens’s comic imagination; the fantastic and the ironic take the place of humour in his books. But his work, like that of Dickens, is a gigantically grotesque pile built on theancient Christian affirmation of love. Literature in our time may observe or ask questions: it seldom affirms. But I doubt whether it even observes the essential heart of things with as sure an eye as that of Hugo or Dickens. It does not penetrate with its pity to that underworld of pain in which Cosette and Smike grow up, starved and loveless. Hugo and Dickens were at least rescuers. They were not mere sentimentalists: they had the imaginative sympathy that would not let them rest in the presence of the miseries of life. They hated the tyranny of men and the tyranny of institutions; they hated greed and cruelty, and the iron door shut on children and on the helpless and the suffering.

Hugo has dramatised this imaginative sympathy and hatred in novels so mythical in substance that one might easily fall into the mistake of regarding them as false. We must think of Jean Valjean and Javert as figures in a morality play rather than in a psychological study if we are to appreciate the greatness ofLes Misérables. They were created, not by God, but by Victor Hugo. But, if they have not at all points psychological reality, they have at least legendary reality. We can say the same of the characters inLes Travailleurs de la merandL’Homme qui rit. They all inhabit the world, not as itactually is, but as it is transmuted in a legendary imagination. Unfortunately, Hugo professes to write about real people and not about dragons, and we constantly find ourselves applying psychological tests as we read him. When Gilliatt drowns himself inLes Travailleurs de la merwe complain not only of the dubious psychology but of the mechanical theatrical effect. Victor Hugo, we feel at such moments, was a great “producer” rather than a great artist. He would, undoubtedly, had he lived, have taken full advantage of the over-emphasis of the cinema. On the other hand, the over-emphasis of which his critics complain is not the over-emphasis of weakness straining after strength. It is rather an overflow of the Gothic imagination. “His flat foot,” he tells us, of a certain character, “was a vulture’s claw. His skull was low at the top and large about the temples. His ugly ears bristled with hair, and seemed to say: ‘Beware of speaking to the animal in this cave.’” His style is essentially the exaggerated style. His genius is the genius of exaggeration. Luckily, he exaggerates, not wholly in clouds, but in carved gnomes and all manner of fantastic detail. He omits not a comma from his dreams and nightmares. That is why his short sentences and paragraphs still startle us into attention when we open one of hisnovels. His imagination at least teems on every page—teems with absurdities, perhaps, as well as with truth and beauty, but teems always with interest. Madame Duclaux’s excellent biography should send many readers back to the work of this magnificent and preposterous legend-maker and lover of his fellow-men.

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