Читать книгу A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century - Saintsbury George - Страница 4

Limitations.

At the present day, and perhaps in all days hitherto, the greatest writer of the nineteenth century in France for length of practice, diversity of administration of genius, height of intention, and (for a long time at least) magnitude and altitude of fame, enjoys, and has enjoyed, more popular repute in England for his work in prose fiction than for any other part of it. With the comparative side of this estimate the present writer can indeed nowise agree; and the reasons of his disagreement should be made good in the present chapter. But this is the first opportunity he has had of considering, with fair room and verge, the justice of the latter part of Tennyson's compliment "Victor in Romance"; and it will pretty certainly be the last. As for a general judgment of the positive and relative value and qualities of the wonderful procession of work – certainly deserving that adjective whatever other or others may be added – which covers the space of a full half-century from Han d'Islande to Quatre-Vingt-Treize, it would, according to the notions of criticism here followed, be improper to attempt that till after the procession itself has been carefully surveyed.

Nor will it be necessary to preface, to follow, or, except very rarely and slightly, to accompany this survey with remarks on the non-literary characteristics of this French Titan of literature. The object often of frantic political and bitter personal abuse; for a long time of almost equally frantic and much sillier political and personal idolatry; himself the victim – in consequence partly of his own faults, partly of ignoble jealousy of greatness, but perhaps most of all of the inevitable reaction from this foolish cult – of the most unsparing rummage into those faults, and the weaknesses which accompany them, that any poet or prose writer, even Pope, has experienced – Victor Hugo still, though he has had many a vates in both senses of sacer, may almost be allowed carere critico sacro,93 in the best sense, on the whole of his life and work. I have no pretensions to fill or bridge the whole of the gap here. It will be quite task enough for the present, leaving the life almost alone, to attempt the part of the work which contains prose fiction. Nothing said of this will in the least affect what I have often said elsewhere, and shall hold to as long as I hold anything, in regard to the poetry – that its author is the greatest poet of France, and one of the great poets of the world.

Han d'Islande.

To deal with Hugo's first published, though not first written, novel requires, in almost the highest degree, what Mr. Matthew Arnold called "a purged considerate mind." There are, I believe, some people (I myself know at least one of great excellence) who, having had the good luck to read Han d'Islande as schoolboys, and finding its vein congenial to theirs, have, as in such cases is not impossible, kept it unscathed in their liking. But this does not happen to every one. I do not think, though I am not quite certain, that when I first read it myself I was exactly what may be called a schoolboy pure and simple (that is to say, under fifteen). But if I did not read it in upper school-boyhood (that is to say, before eighteen), I certainly did, not much later. I own that at that time, whatever my exact age was, I found it so uninteresting that I do not believe I read it through. Nor, except in the last respect, have I improved with it – for it would be presumptuous to say, "has it improved with me" – since. The author apologised for it in two successive prefaces shortly after its appearance, and in yet another after that of Notre-Dame de Paris, ten years later. None of them, it is to be feared, "touches the spot." The first, indeed, is hardly an apology at all, but a sort of goguenard "showing off" of the kind not uncommon with youth; the second, a little more serious, contains rather interesting hits94 of again youthful jealousy at the popularity of Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil; the third and much later one is a very early instance of the Victorian philosophising. "There must be," we are told with the solemnity which for some sixty years excited such a curious mixture of amazement and amusement, "in every work of the mind – drama or novel – there must be many things felt, many things observed, and many things divined," and while in Han there is only one thing felt – a young man's love – and one observed – a girl's ditto – the rest is all divined, is "the fantastic imagination of an adolescent."

One impeticoses the gratility of the explanation, and refrains, as far as may be, from saying, "Words! words!" Unluckily, the book does very little indeed to supply deeds to match. The feeling and the observation furnish forth a most unstimulating love-story; at least the present critic, who has an unabashed fondness for love-stories, has never been able to feel the slightest interest either in Ordener Guldenlew or in Ethel Schumacker, except in so far as the lady is probably the first of the since innumerable and sometimes agreeable heroines of her name in fiction. As for the "divining," the "intention," and the "imagination," they have been exerted to sadly little purpose. The absurd nomenclature, definitely excused in one of the prefaces, may have a slight historic interest as the first attempt, almost a hopeless failure, at that science des noms with which Hugo was later credited, and which he certainly sometimes displayed. It is hardly necessary to say much about Spladgest and Oglypiglaf, Musdaemon and Orugix. They are pure schoolboyisms. But it is perhaps fair to relieve the author from the reproach, which has been thrown on him by some of his English translators, of having metamorphosed "Hans" into "Han." He himself explains distinctly that the name was a nickname, taken from the grunt or growl (the word is in France applied to the well-known noise made by a paviour lifting and bringing down his rammer) of the monster.

But that monster himself! A more impossible improbability and a more improbable impossibility never conceived itself in the brain of even an as yet failure of an artist. Han appears to have done all sorts of nasty things, such as eating the insides of babies when they were alive and drinking the blood of enemies when they were not dead, out of the skulls of his own offspring, which he had extracted from their dead bodies by a process like peeling a banana: also to have achieved some terrible ones, such as burning cathedrals and barracks, upsetting rocks on whole battalions, and so forth. But the only chances we have of seeing him at real business show him to us as overcoming, with some trouble, an infirm old man, and not overcoming at all, after a struggle of long duration, a not portentously powerful young one. His white bear, and not he, seems to have had the chief merit of despatching six surely rather incompetent hunters who followed the rash "Kennybol": and of his two final achievements, that of poniarding two men in a court of justice might have been brought about by anybody who was careless enough of his own life, and that of setting his gaol on fire by any one who, with the same carelessness, had a corrupt gaoler to supply him with the means.

It would be equally tedious and superfluous to go through the minor characters and incidents. The virtuous and imprisoned statesman Schumacker, Ethel's father, excites no sympathy: his malignant and finally defeated enemy, the Chancellor Ahlefeld, no interest. That enemy's most unvirtuous wife and her paramour Musdaemon —the villain of the piece as Han is the monster – as to whom one wonders whether he could ever have been as attractive as a lover as he is unattractive as a villain, are both puppets. Indeed, one would hardly pay any attention to the book at all if it did not hold a position in the work of a man of the highest genius partly similar to, and partly contrasted with, that of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. But St. Irvyne and Zastrozzi are much shorter than Han d'Islande, and Shelley, whether by accident, wisdom (nemo omnibus horis insanit), or the direct intervention of Apollo, never resumed the task for which his genius was so obviously unsuited.

Still, it must be said for Hugo that, even at this time, he could have – in a manner actually had – put in evidence of not absolute incompetence for the task.

Bug-Jargal.

Bug-Jargal was, as glanced at above, written, according to its author's own statement, two years before Han, when he was only sixteen; was partially printed (in the Constitutionnel) and (in fear of a piracy) rewritten in fifteen days and published, seven years after its composition, and almost as many before Notre-Dame de Paris appeared. Taking it as it stands, there is nothing of the sixteen years or of the fifteen days to be seen in it. It is altogether superior to Han, and though it has not the nightmare magnificence and the phantasmagoric variety of Notre-Dame, it is, not merely because it is much shorter, a far better told, more coherent, and more generally human story. The jester-obi Habibrah has indeed the caricature-grotesquery of Han himself, and of Quasimodo, and long afterwards of Gwynplaine, as well as the devilry of the first named and of Thénardier in Les Misérables; but we do not see too much of him, and nothing that he does is exactly absurd or utterly improbable. The heroine – so far as there is a heroine in Marie d'Auverney, wife of the part-hero-narrator, but separated from him on the very day of their marriage by the rebellion of San Domingo – is very slight; but then, according to the story, she is not wanted to be anything more. The cruelty, treachery, etc., of the half-caste Biassou are not overdone, nor is the tropical scenery, nor indeed anything else. Even the character of Bug-Jargal himself, a modernised Oroonoko (whom probably Hugo did not know) and a more direct descendant of persons and things in Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and to some extent the "sensibility" novelists generally (whom he certainly did know), is kept within bounds. And, what is perhaps most extraordinary of all, the half-comic interludes in the narrative where Auverney's comrades talk while he makes breaks in his story, contain few of Hugo's usually disastrous attempts at humour. It is impossible to say that the book is of any great importance or of any enthralling interest. But it is the most workmanlike of all Hugo's work in prose fiction, and, except Les Travailleurs de La Mer and Quatre-Vingt-Treize, which have greater faults as well as greater beauties, the most readable, if not, like them, the most likely to be re-read.

Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné.

Its merits are certainly not ill set off by the two shorter pieces, both of fairly early date, but the one a little before and the other a little after Notre-Dame de Paris, which usually accompany it in the collected editions. Of these Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné is, with its tedious preface, almost two-thirds as long as Bug-Jargal itself; the other, Claude Gueux, contents itself with thirty pages. Both are pieces with a purpose – manifestos of one of Hugo's most consistent and most irrational crazes – the objection to capital punishment.95 There is no need to argue against this, the immortal "Que MM. les assassins," etc., being, though in fact the weakest of a thousand refutations, sufficient, once for all, to explode it. But it is not irrelevant to point out that the two pieces themselves are very battering-rams against their own theory. We are not told – the objection to this omission was made at the time, of course, and Hugo's would-be lofty waving-off of this is one of the earliest of many such – what the condemned person's crime was. But the upshot of his lucubrations during these latest hours of his is this, that such hours are almost more uncomfortable than the minutes of the actual execution can possibly be. As this is exactly one of the points on which the advocates of the punishment, whether from the point of view of deterrence or from that of retribution, chiefly rely, it seems something of a blunder to bring it out with all the power of a poet and a rhetorician. We want "M. l'Assassin," in fact, to be made very uncomfortable – as uncomfortable as possible – and we want M. l'Assassin, in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he will be so made. "Serve him right" sums up the one view, "De te fabula" the other. In fact cheap copies of Le Dernier Jour, supplied to all about to commit murder, would be highly valuable. Putting aside its purpose, the mere literary power is of course considerable if not consummate; it hardly pretends to be a "furnished" story.

Claude Gueux.

The piece, however, is tragic enough: it could hardly fail to be so in the hands of such a master of tragedy, just as it could hardly fail to be illogical in the hands of such a paralogician. But Claude Gueux, though it ends with a murder and an attempt at suicide and an execution, is really, though far from intentionally, a farce. The hero, made (by the "fault of society," of course) a criminal, though not a serious one, thinks himself persecuted by the prison director, and murders that official. The reader who does not know the book will suppose that he has been treated as Charles Reade's wicked governor treated Josephs and Robinson and the other victims in It is Never too Late to Mend. Not at all. The redoubtable Claude had, like the great Victor himself and other quite respectable men, an equally redoubtable appetite, and the prison rations were not sufficient for him. As he was a sort of leader or prison shop-steward, and his fellow-convicts looked up to him, a young fellow who was not a great eater used to give Claude part of his allowance. The director, discovering this, removed the young man into another ward – an action possibly rather spiteful, possibly also only a slight excess, or no excess at all, of red-tapeism in discipline. Claude not merely asks reasons for this, – which, of course, even if respectfully done, was an act of clear insubordination on any but anarchist principles, – but repeats the enquiry. The director more than once puts the question by, but inflicts no penalty. Whereupon Claude makes a harangue to the shop (which appears, in some astounding fashion, to have been left without any supervision between the director's visits), repeats once more, on the director's entrance, his insubordinate enquiry, again has it put by, and thereupon splits the unfortunate official's skull with a hatchet, digging also a pair of scissors, which once belonged to his (left-handed) wife, into his own throat. And the wretches actually cure this hardly fallen angel, and then guillotine him, which he takes most sweetly, placing at the last moment in the hand of the attendant priest, with the words Pour les pauvres, a five-franc piece, which one of the Sisters of the prison hospital had given him! After this Hugo, not contented with the tragedy of the edacious murderer, gives us seven pages of his favourite rhetoric in saccadé paragraphs on the general question.

As so often with him, one hardly knows which particular question to ask first, "Did ever such a genius make such a fool of himself?" or "Was ever such an artist given to such hopeless slips in the most rudimentary processes of art?"

Notre-Dame de Paris.

But it is, of course, not till we come to Notre-Dame de Paris that any serious discussion of Hugo's claims as a novelist is possible. Hitherto, while in novel at least he has very doubtfully been an enfant sublime, he has most unquestionably been an enfant. Whatever faults may be chargeable on his third novel or romance proper, they include no more childishness than he displayed throughout his life, and not nearly so much as he often did later.

The book, moreover, to adopt and adapt the language of another matter, whether disputably or indisputably great in itself, is unquestionably so "by position." It is one of the chief manifestos – there are some who have held, and perhaps would still hold, that it is the chief manifesto and example – of one of the most remarkable and momentous of literary movements – the great French Romantic revolt of mil-huit-cent-trente. It had for a time enormous popularity, extending to many who had not the slightest interest in it as such a manifesto; it affected not merely its own literature, but others, and other arts besides literature, both in its own and other countries. To whatever extent this popularity may have been affected – first by the transference of interest from the author's "letters" to his politics and sociology, and secondly, by the reaction in general esteem which followed his death – it is not very necessary to enquire. One certainly sees fewer, indeed, positively few, references to it and to its contents now. But it was so bright a planet when it first came into ken; it exercised its influence so long and so largely; that even if it now glows fainter it is worth exploring, and the analysis of the composition of its light is worth putting on record.

The story easy to anticipate.

In the case of a book which, whether it has or has not undergone some occultation as suggested, is still kept on sale not merely in the original, but in cheap translations into every European tongue, there is probably no need to include an actual "argument" in this analysis. As a novel or at least romance, Notre-Dame de Paris contains a story of the late fifteenth century, the chief characters of which are the Spanish gipsy96 dancing-girl Esmeralda, with her goat Djali; Quasimodo, the hunchbacked dwarf and bell-ringer of the cathedral; one of its archdeacons, Claude Frollo, theologian, philosopher, expert in, but contemner of, physical and astrological science, and above all, alchemist, if not sorcerer; the handsome and gallant, but "not intelligent" and not very chivalrous soldier Phœbus de Chateaupers, with minors not a few, "supers" very many, and the dramatist Pierre Gringoire as a sort of half-chorus, half-actor throughout. The evolution of this story could not be very difficult to anticipate in any case; almost any one who had even a slight knowledge of its actual author's other work could make a guess at the scenario. The end must be tragic; the beau cavalier must be the rather unworthy object of Esmeralda's affection, and she herself that of the (one need hardly say very different) affections of Frollo and Quasimodo; a charge of sorcery, based on the tricks she has taught Djali, must be fatal to her; and poetic justice must overtake Frollo, who has instigated the persecution but has half exchanged it for, half-combined it with, later attempts of a different kind upon her. Although this scenario may not have been then quite so easy for any schoolboy to anticipate, as it has been later, the course of the romantic novel from Walpole to Scott in English, not to mention German and other things, had made it open enough to everybody to construct. The only thing to be done, and to do, now was, and is, to see, on the author's own famous critical principles,97 how he availed himself of the publica materies.

Importance of the actual title.

Perhaps the first impression of any reader who is not merely not an expert in criticism, but who has not yet learnt its first, last, and hardest lesson, shirked by not a few who seem to be experts – to suspend judgment till the case is fully heard – may be unfavourable. It is true that the title Notre-Dame de Paris, so stupidly and unfairly disguised by the addition-substitution of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" in English translations – quite honestly and quite legitimately warns any intelligent reader what to expect. It is the cathedral itself, its visible appearance and its invisible aura, atmosphere, history, spirit, inspiration which gives the author – and is taken by him as giving – his real subject. Esmeralda and Quasimodo, Frollo and Gringoire are almost as much minors and supers in comparison with It or Her as Phœbus de Chateaupers and the younger Frollo and the rest are in relation to the four protagonists themselves. The most ambitious piece of dianoia– of thought as contrasted with incident, character, or description – is that embodied in the famous chapter, Ceci tuera cela, where the fatal effect of literature (at least printed literature) on architecture is inculcated. The situation, precincts, construction, constitution of the church form the centre of such action as there is, and supply by far the larger part of its scene. Therefore nobody has a right to complain of a very large proportion of purely architectural detail.

The working out of the one under the other.

But the question is whether, in the actual employment, and still more in what we may call the administration, of this and other diluents or obstruents of story, the artist has or has not made blunders in his art; and it is very difficult not to answer this in the affirmative. There were many excuses for him. The "guide-book novel" had already, and not so very long before, been triumphantly introduced by Corinne. It had been enormously popularised by Scott. The close alliance and almost assimilation of art and history with literature was one of the supremest articles of faith of Romanticism, and "the Gothic" was a sort of symbol, shibboleth, and sacrament at once of Romanticism itself. But Victor Hugo, like Falstaff, has, in this and other respects, abused his power of pressing subjects into service almost, if not quite, damnably. Whether out of pure wilfulness, out of mistaken theory, or out of a mixture98 of these and other influences, he has made the first volume almost as little of a story as it could possibly be, while remaining a story at all. Seventy mortal pages, pretty well packed in the standard two-volume edition, which in all contains less than six hundred, dawdle over the not particularly well-told business of Gringoire's interrupted mystery, the arrival of the Flemish ambassadors, and the election of the Pope of Unreason. The vision of Esmeralda lightens the darkness and quickens the movement, and this brightness and liveliness continue till she saves her unlucky dramatist from the murderous diversions of the Cour des Miracles. But the means by which she does this – the old privilege of matrimony – leads to nothing but a single scene, which might have been effective, but which Hugo only leaves flat, while it has no further importance in the story whatsoever. After it we hop or struggle full forty pages through the public street of architecture pure and simple.

The story recovers itself latterly.

At first sight "Coup d'œil impartial sur l'Ancienne Magistrature" may seem to give even more promise of November than of May. But there is action here, and it really has something to do with the story. Also, the subsequent treatment of the recluse or anchoress of the severest type in the Place Notre-Dame itself (or practically so), though it is much too long and is lengthened by matters with which Hugo knows least of all how to deal, has still more claim to attention, for it leads directly on not merely to the parentage of Esmeralda, but to the tragedy of her fate. And almost the whole of the second volume is, whether the best novel-matter or not, at any rate genuine novel-matter. If almost the whole of the first had been boiled down (as Scott at his best would have boiled it) into a preliminary chapter or two, the position of the book as qualified to stand in its kind could not have been questioned. But its faults and merits in that kind would still have remained matters of very considerable question.

But the characters?

In respect of one fault, the side of the defence can surely be taken only by generous, but hardly judicious or judicial devotees. Hugo's singular affection for the monster – he had Stephano to justify him, but unfortunately did not possess either the humour of that drunken Neapolitan butler or the power of his and Caliban's creator – had made a mere grotesque of Han, but had been reduced within more artistic limits in Bug. In Le Dernier Jour and Claude Gueux it was excluded by the subjects and objects alike.99 Here it is, if not an intellectus, at any rate sibi permissus; and, as it does not in the earlier cases, it takes the not extremely artistic form of violent contrast which was to be made more violent later in L'Homme Qui Rit. If any one will consider Caliban and Miranda as they are presented in The Tempest, with Quasimodo and Esmeralda as they are presented here, he will see at once the difference of great art and great failure of art.

Then, too, there emerges another of our author's persistent obsessions, the exaggeration of what we may call the individual combat. He had probably intended something of this kind in Han, but the mistake there in telling about it instead of telling it has been already pointed out. Neither Bug-Jargal nor Habibrah does anything glaringly and longwindedly impossible. But the one-man defence of Notre-Dame by Quasimodo against the truands is a tissue not so much of impossibilities – they, as it has been said of old, hardly matter – as of the foolish-incredible. Why did the numerous other denizens of the church and its cloisters do nothing during all this time? Why did the truands, who, though they were all scoundrels, were certainly not all fools, confine themselves to this frontal assault of so huge a building? Why did the little rascal Jean Frollo not take some one with him? These are not questions of mere dull common sense; it is only dull absence of common sense which will think them so. Scott, who, once more, was not too careful in stopping loose places, managed the attacks of Tillietudlem and Torquilstone without giving any scope for objections of this kind.

Hugo's strong point was never character, and it certainly is not so here. Esmeralda is beautiful, amiable, pathetic, and unfortunate; but the most uncharitable interpretation of Mr. Pope's famous libel never was more justified than in her case. Her salvage of Gringoire and its sequel give about the only situations in which she is a real person,100 and they are purely episodic. Gringoire himself is as much out of place as any literary man who ever went into Parliament. Some may think better of Claude Frollo, who may be said to be the Miltonic-Byronic-Satanic hero. I own I do not. His mere specification – that of the ascetic scholar assailed by physical temptation – will pass muster well enough, the working out of it hardly.

His brother, the vaurien Jean, has, I believe, been a favourite with others or the same, and certainly a Villonesque student is not out of place in the fifteenth century. Nor is a turned-up nose, even if it be artificially and prematurely reddened, unpardonable. But at the same time it is not in itself a passport, and Jean Frollo does not appear to have left even the smallest Testament or so much as a single line (though some snatches of song are assigned to him) reminding us of the "Dames des Temps Jadis" or the "Belle Heaulmière." Perhaps even Victor never presumed more unfortunately on victory than in bringing in Louis XI., especially in one scene, which directly challenges comparison with Quentin Durward. While, though Scott's jeunes premiers are not, as he himself well knew and frankly confessed, his greatest triumphs, he has never given us anything of the kind so personally impersonal as Phœbus de Chateaupers.

Per contra there are of course to be set passages which are actually fine prose and some of which might have made magnificent poetry; a real or at least – what is as good as or better than a real – a fantastic resurrection of Old Paris; and, above all, an atmosphere of "sunset and eclipse," of night and thunder and levin-flashes, which no one of catholic taste would willingly surrender. Only, ungrateful as it may seem, uncritical as some may deem it, it is impossible not to sigh, "Oh! why were not the best things of this treated in verse, and why were not the other things left alone altogether?"

The thirty years' interval.

For a very long stretch of time – one that could hardly be paralleled except in a literary life so unusually extended as his – it might have seemed that one of those voix intérieures, which he was during its course to celebrate in undying verse, had whispered to Hugo some such warning as that conveyed in the words of the close of the last paragraph, and that he, usually the most indocile of men, had listened to it. For all but three decades he confined his production – at least in the sense of substantial publication101– to poetry almost invariably splendid, drama always grandiose and sometimes grand, and prose-writing of a chiefly political kind, which even sympathisers (one would suppose) can hardly regard as of much value now if they have any critical faculty. Even the tremendous shock of disappointment, discomfiture, and exile which resulted from the success of Napoleon the Third, though it started a new wave and gust of oceanic and cyclonic force, range, and volume in his soul, found little prose vent, except the wretched stuff of Napoléon le Petit, to chequer the fulgurant outburst of the Châtiments, the apocalyptic magnificence of the Contemplations, and the almost unmatched vigour, variety, and vividness of the Légende des Siècles.

At last, in 1862, a full decade after the cataclysm, his largest and probably his most popular work of fiction made its appearance in the return to romance-writing, entitled Les Misérables. I daresay biographies say when it was begun; it is at any rate clear that even Victor Hugo must have taken some years, especially in view of his other work, to produce such a mass of matter.102 Probably not very many people now living, at least in England, remember very clearly the immense effect it produced even with us, who were then apt to regard Hugo as at best a very chequered genius and at worst an almost charlatanish rhetorician.

Les Misérables.

It was no doubt lucky for its popularity that it fell in with a general movement, in England as well as elsewhere, which had with us been, if not brought about, aided by influences in literature as different as those of Dickens and Carlyle, through Kingsley and others downwards, – the movement which has been called perhaps more truly than sympathetically, "the cult of the lower [not to say the criminal] classes." In France, if not in England, this cult had been oddly combined with a dash of rather adulterated Romanticism, and long before Hugo, Sues and Sands, as will be seen later, had in their different manner been priests and priestesses of it. In his own case the adoption of the subject "keyed on" in no small degree to the mood in which he wrote the Dernier Jour and Claude Gueux, while a good deal of the "Old Paris" mania (I use the word nowise contumeliously) of Notre-Dame survived, and even the "Cour des Miracles" found itself modernised.

Whether the popularity above mentioned has kept itself up or not, I cannot say. Of one comparatively recent edition, not so far as I know published at intervals, I have been told that the first volume is out of print, but none of the others, a thing rather voiceful to the understanding. I know that, to me, it is the hardest book to read through of any that I know by a great writer. Le Grand Cyrus and Clélie are certainly longer, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison are probably so. Le Vicomte de Bragelonne is almost as long. There are finer things in it than in any of them, (except the deaths of Lovelace and Porthos and the kidnapping of General Monk) from the pure novel point of view, and not a few passages which ought to have been verse and, even prose as they are, soar far over anything that Mademoiselle de Scudéry or Samuel Richardson or Alexandre Dumas could possibly have written in either harmony. The Scudéry books are infinitely duller, and the Richardson ones much less varied.

But none of these others besets the path of the reader with things to which the obstacles interposed by Quilp in the way of Sampson Brass were down-pillows, as is the case with Les Misérables. It is as if Victor Hugo had said, "You shall read this at your peril," and had made good the threat by dint of every blunder in novel-writing which he could possibly commit. With his old and almost invariable fault (there is a little of it even in Les Travailleurs de la Mer, and only Quatre-Vingt-Treize avoids it entirely), he delays any real interest till the book, huge as it is, is almost half way through. Twenty pages on Bishop Myriel – that rather piebald angel who makes the way impossible for any successor by his fantastic and indecent "apostolicism" in living; who tells, not like St. Athanasius, an allowable equivocation to save his valuable self, but a downright lie to save a worthless rascal; and who admits defeat in argument by the stale sophisms of a moribund conventionnel– might have been tolerable. We have, in the compactest edition I know, about a hundred and fifty. The ruin and desertion of Fantine would have been worth twenty more. We have from fifty to a hundred to tell us the story of four rather impossibly beautiful grisettes, and as many, alas! too possible, but not interesting, rascals of students. It is difficult to say how much is wasted on the wildly improbable transformation of Jean Valjean, convict and pauper, into "M. Madeleine," maire and (nummis gallicis) millionaire, through making sham jet. All this, by any one who really knew his craft, would have been sketched rapidly in fluent preliminary, and subsequent piecemeal retrospect, so as to start with Valjean's escape from Thénardier and his adoption of Cosette.

The actual matter of this purely preliminary kind extends, as has been ascertained by rough but sufficient calculation of the sort previously employed, to at least three-quarters of an average novel of Sir Walter's: it would probably run to two or three times the length of a modern "six-shilling." But Hugo is not satisfied with it. A point, an important point, doubtless, but one that could have been despatched in a few lines, connects the novel proper with the Battle of Waterloo. To that battle itself, even the preliminary matter in its earliest part is some years posterior: the main action, of course, is still more so. But Victor must give us his account of this great engagement, and he gives it in about a hundred pages of the most succinct reproduction. For my part, I should be glad to have it "mixed with much wine," even if the wine were of that luscious and headachy south-of-France character which he himself is said to have preferred to Bordeaux or Champagne, Sauterne or even Burgundy. Nay, without this I like it well enough and quarrel with nothing in it, though it is in many respects (from the famous hollow way which nobody else ever heard of downwards) very much of a dream-battle. Victor does quite as much justice as any one could expect him to do – and, thank heaven, there are still some Englishmen who are perfectly indifferent whether justice is done to them or not in these matters, leaving it to poorer persons in such ways who may be glad of it – to English fighting; while if he represents Wellington as a mere calculator and Napoleon as a hero, we can murmur politely (like a Roman Catholic bishop, more real in many ways than His Greatness of Digue), "Perhaps so, my dear sir, perhaps so." But what has it all got to do here? Even when Montalais and her lover sat on the wall and talked for half a volume or so in the Vicomte de Bragelonne; even when His Majesty Louis XIV. and his (one regrets to use the good old English word) pimp, M. le Duc de Saint-Aignan, exhausted the resources of carpentry and the stores of printer's ink to gain access to the apartment of Mlle. de la Vallière, the superabundance, though trivial, was relevant: this is not. When Thénardier tried to rob and was no doubt quite ready to murder, but did, as a matter of fact, help to resuscitate, the gallant French Republican soldier, who was so glad to receive the title of baron from an emperor who had by abdication resigned any right to give it that he ever possessed, it might have been Malplaquet or Leipsic, Fontenoy or Vittoria, for any relevance the details of the battle possessed to the course of the story.

Now relevance (to make a short paragraph of the kind Hugo himself loved) is a mighty goddess in novelry.

And so it continues, though, to be absolutely just, the later parts are not exposed to quite the same objections as the earlier. These objections transform themselves, however, into other varieties, and are reinforced by fresh faults. The most inexcusable digressions, on subjects as remote from each other as convents and sewers, insist on poking themselves in. The central, or what ought to be the central, interest itself turns on the ridiculous émeute of Saint-Merry, a thing "without a purpose or an aim," a mere caricature of a revolution. The gamin Gavroche puts in a strong plea for mercy, and his sister Eponine, if Hugo had chosen to take more trouble with her, might have been a great, and is actually the most interesting, character. But Cosette – the cosseted Cosette – Hugo did not know our word or he would have seen the danger – is merely a pretty and rather selfish little doll, and her precious lover Marius is almost ineffable.

Novel-heroes who are failures throng my mind like ghosts on the other shore of the river whom Charon will not ferry over; but I can single out none of them who is, without positively evil qualities, so absolutely intolerable as Marius.103 Others have more such qualities; but he has no good ones. His very bravery is a sort of moral and intellectual running amuck because he thinks he shall not get Cosette. Having, apparently, for many years thought and cared nothing about his father, he becomes frantically filial on discovering that he has inherited from him, as above, a very doubtful and certainly most un-"citizen" – like title of Baron. Thereupon (taking care, however, to have cards printed with the title on them) he becomes a violent republican.

He then proceeds to be extremely rude to his indulgent but royalist grandfather, retires to a mount of very peculiar sacredness, where he comes in contact with the Thénardier family, discovers a plot against Valjean, appeals to the civil arm to protect the victim, but, for reasons which seem good to him, turns tail, breaks his arranged part, and is very nearly accessory to a murder. At the other end of the story, carrying out his general character of prig-pedant, as selfish as self-righteous, he meets Valjean's rather foolish and fantastic self-sacrifice with illiberal suspicion, and practically kills the poor old creature by separating him from Cosette. When the éclaircissement comes, it appears to me – as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola that he ought to have consented to be damned – that Marius ought to have consented at least to be kicked.

Of course it may be said, "You should not give judgments on things with which you are evidently out of sympathy." But I do not acknowledge any palpable hit. If certain purposes of the opposite kind were obtruded here in the same fashion – if Victor (as he might have done in earlier days) had hymned Royalism instead of Republicanism, or (as perhaps he would never have done) had indulged in praise of severe laws and restricted education,104 and other things, I should be "in sympathy," but I hope and believe that I should not be "out of" criticism. Unless strictly adjusted to the scale and degree suitable to a novel – as Sir Walter has, I think, restricted his Mariolatry and his Jacobitism, and so forth – I should bar them as I bar these.105 And it is the fact that they are not so restricted, with the concomitant faults which, again purely from the point of view of novel-criticism as such, I have ventured to find, that makes me consider Les Misérables a failure as a novel. Once again, too, I find few of the really good and great things – which in so vast a book by such a writer are there, and could not fail to be there – to be essentially and specially good and great according to the novel standard. They are, with the rarest exceptions, the stuff of drama or of poetry, not of novel. That there are such exceptions – the treacherous feast of the students to the mistresses they are about to desert; the escapes of Valjean from the ambushes laid for him by Thénardier and Javert; some of the Saint-Merry fighting; the guesting of the children by Gavroche in the elephant; and others – is true. But they are oases in a desert; and, save when they would be better done in poetry, they do not after all seem to me to be much better done than they might have been by others – the comparative weakness of Hugo in conversation of the kind suitable for prose fiction making itself felt. That at least is what the present writer's notion of criticism puts into his mouth to say; and he can say no other.

Les Travailleurs de la Mer.

Les Travailleurs de la Mer, on the other hand, is, according to some persons, among whom that present writer desires to be included, the summit of Victor Hugo's achievements in prose fiction. It has his "signatures" of absurdity in fair measure. There is the celebrated "Bug-Pipe" which a Highlander of the garrison of Guernsey sold (I am afraid contrary to military law) to the hero, and on which that hero performed the "melancholy air" of "Bonny Dundee."106 There is the equally celebrated "First of the Fourth" (Première de la Quatrième), which is believed to be Hugonic for the Firth of Forth. There are some others. There is an elaborate presentation of a quite impossibly named clergyman, who is, it seems, an anticipator of "le Puseysme" and an actual high-churchman, who talks as never high-churchman talked from Laud to Pusey himself, but rather like the Reverend Gabriel Kettledrummle (with whom Hugo was probably acquainted "in translations, Sir! in translations").107 Gilliatt, the hero, is a not very human prig outside those extraordinary performances, of which more later, and his consummate end. Déruchette, the heroine, is, like Cosette, a pretty nullity.108 As always, the author will not "get under way"; and short as the book is, and valuable as is its shortness, it could be cut down to two-thirds at least with advantage. Clubin and Rantaine, the villains, are pure melodrama; Mess Lethierry, the good old man, is rather an old fool, and not so very good. The real business of the book – the salvage by Gilliatt of the steamer wrecked on the Douvres – is, as a schoolboy would say, or would have said, "jolly impossible." But the book as a whole is, despite or because of its tragic quality, almost impossibly "jolly."

The genius loci.

For here – as he did previously (by the help of the form that was more his own and of Jersey) in the Contemplations– he had now got in prose, by that of the smaller, more isolated, and less contaminated109 island, into his own proper country, the dominion of the Angel of the Visions of the Sea. He has told us in his own grandiloquent way, which so often led him wrong, that when he settled to exile in the Channel Islands, his son François observed, "Je traduirai Shakespeare," and he said, "Je contemplerai l'océan." He did; and good came of it. Students of his biography may know that in the dwelling which he called Hauteville House (a name which, I regret to say, already and properly belonged to another) he slept and mainly lived in a high garret with much glass window, overlooking the strait between Guernsey and Sark. These "gazebos," as they used to be called, are common in St. Peter Port, and I myself enjoyed the possession of a more modest and quite unfamous one for some time. They are worth inhabiting and looking from, be the weather fair or foul. Moreover, he was, I believe, a very good walker, and in both the islands made the best of opportunities which are unmatched elsewhere. Whether he boated much I do not know. The profusion of nautical terms with which he "deaves" us (as the old Scotch word has it) would rather lead me to think not. He was in this inferior to Prospero; but I hope it is not blasphemy to say that, mutatis mutandis, he had something of the banished Duke of Milan in him, and that, in the one case as in the other, it was the island that brought it out. And he acknowledged it in his Dedication to "Guernesey —sevère et douce."

Guernsey at the time.

Sevère et Douce! I lived in Guernsey as a Master at Elizabeth College from 1868, two years after Victor Hugo wrote that dedication, to 1874, when he still kept house there, but had not, since the "Année Terrible," occupied it much. I suppose the "severity" must be granted to an island of solid granite and to the rocks and tides and sea-mists that surround it. But in the ordinary life there in my time there was little to "asperate" the douceur. Perhaps it does not require so very much to sweeten things in general between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-nine. But the things in general themselves were dulcet enough. The beauty of the place – extraordinarily varied in its triangle of some half-score miles or a little less on each side – was not then in the least interfered with by the excessive commercial glass-housing which, I believe, has come in since. For what my friend of many days, the late Mr. Reynolds of Brasenose and East Ham, a constant visitor in summer, used to call "necessary luxuries," it was still unique. When I went there you could buy not undrinkable or poisonous Hollands at four shillings a gallon, and brandy – not, of course, exactly cognac or fine champagne, but deserving the same epithets – for six. If you were a luxurious person, you paid half-a-crown a bottle for the genuine produce of the Charente, little or not at all inferior to Martell or Hennessy, and a florin for excellent Scotch or Irish whiskey.110 Fourpence half-penny gave you a quarter-pound slab of gold-leaf tobacco, than which I never wish to smoke better.

But this easy supplying of the bodily needs of the "horse with wings" and his "heavy rider" was as nothing to other things which strengthened the wings of the spirit and lightened the weight of the burden it bore. I have not been a great traveller outside the kingdom of England: and you may doubtless, in the whole of Europe or of the globe, find more magnificent things than you can possibly find in an island of the dimensions given. But for a miniature and manageable assemblage of amenities I do not think you can easily beat Guernsey. The town of St. Peter Port, and its two castles, Fort George above and Castle Cornet below, looking on the strait above mentioned, with the curiously contrasted islets of Herm and Jethou in its midst; the wonderful coast, first south- and then westward, set with tiny coves of perfection like Bec-du-Nez, and larger bays, across the mouth of which, after a storm and in calm sunny weather, you see lines of foam stretching from headland to headland, out of the white clots of which the weakest imagination can fancy Aphrodite rising and floating shorewards, to vanish as she touches the beach; the great western promontory of Pleinmont, a scarcely lessened Land's End, with the Hanois rocks beyond; the tamer but still not tame western, northern, and north-eastern coasts, with the Druid-haunted level of L'Ancresse and the minor port of St. Samson – all these furnish, even to the well-girt man, an extraordinary number111 of walks, ranging from an hour's to a day's and more there and back; while in the valleys of the interior you find scenery which might be as far from the sea as Warwickshire, or on the heights springs which tell you that they must have come from the neighbourhood of the Mount of Dol or the Forest of Broceliande.

With such colour and form of locality to serve, not merely as inspiration but as actual scene and setting, such genius as Hugo's could hardly fail. The thing is sad and delightful and great. As life, you may say, it could not have happened; as literature it could not but have happened, and has happened, at its best, divinely well. The contrast of the long agony of effort and its triumph on the Douvres, with the swift collapse of any possible reward at St. Samson, is simply a windfall of the Muses to this spoiled and, it must be confessed, often self-spoiling child of theirs. There are, of course, absurdities still, and of a different kind from the bug-pipe. I have always wished to know what the experiences of the fortunate and reverend but sheepish Ebenezer had been at Oxford – he must certainly have held a King Charles scholarship in his day – during that full-blooded time of the Regency. The circumstances of the marriage are almost purely Hugonian, though it does Hugo credit that he admires the service which he travesties so remarkably. But the Dieu (not diable) au corps which he now enjoys enables him to change into a beauty (in the wholly natural gabble of Mess Lethierry on the recovery of the la Durande) those long speeches which have been already noted as blots. And, beauty or blot, it would not have mattered. All is in the contrast of the mighty but conquered Douvres and the comparatively insignificant rocklet – there are hundreds like it on every granite coast – where Death the Consoler sets on Gilliatt's head the only crown possible for his impossible feat, and where the dislike of the ignorant peasantry, the brute resistance of machinery and material, the violence of the storm, the devilish ambush of the pieuvre, and all other evils are terminated and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and the euthanasia of the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or even romance – in substance it is too abstract and elemental for either of the less majestical branches of inventive literature. But it is great. "By God! 'tis good," and, to lengthen somewhat Ben's famous challenge, "if you like, you may" put it with, and not so far from, in whatever order you please – the deaths of Cleopatra and of Colonel Newcome.

The book is therefore a success; but that success is an evident tour de force, and it is nearly as evident to any student of the subject that such a tour de force was not likely to be repeated, and that the thing owed its actual salvage to a rather strict limitation of subject and treatment – a limitation hitherto unknown in the writer and itself unlikely to recur. Also that there were certain things in it – especially the travesties of names and subjects of which the author practically knew nothing – the repetition and extension of which was likely to be damaging, if not fatal. In two or three years the "fatality" of which Victor Hugo himself was dangerously fond of talking (the warning of Herodotus in the dawn about things which it is not lawful to mention has been too often neglected) had its revenge.

L'Homme Qui Rit.

L'Homme Qui Rit is probably the maddest book in recognised literature; certainly the maddest written by an author of supreme genius without the faintest notion that he was making himself ridiculous. The genius is still there, and passage on passage shows us the real "prose-poetry," that is to say, the prose which ought to have been written in verse. The scheme of the quartette – Ursus, the misanthrope-Good-Samaritan; Homo, the amiable wolf; Gwynplaine, the tortured and guiltless child and youth; Dea, the adorable maiden – is unexceptionable per se, and it could have been worked out in verse or drama perfectly, though the actual termination – Gwynplaine's suicide in the sea after Dea's death – is perhaps too close and too easy a "variation of the same thing" on Gilliatt's parallel self-immolation after Déruchette's marriage.112 Not a few opening or episodic parts – the picture of the caravan; the struggle of the child Gwynplaine with the elements to save not so much himself as the baby Dea; the revulsions of his temptations and persecutions later; and yet others113– show the poet and the master.

But the way in which these things are merged in and spoilt by a torrent of silliness, sciolism, and sheer nonsense is, even after one has known the book for forty years and more, still astounding.

One could laugh almost indulgently over the "bug-pipe" and the "First of the Fourth"; one could, being of those who win, laugh quite indulgently over the little outbursts of spite in Les Travailleurs at the institutions and ways of the country which had, despite some rather unpardonable liberties, given its regular and royal asylum to the exiled republican and almost anarchist author. Certainly, also, one can laugh over L'Homme Qui Rit and its picture of the English aristocracy. But of such laughter, as of all carnal pleasures (to steal from Kingsley), cometh satiety, and the satiety is rather early reached in this same book. One of the chief "persons of distinction" in many ways whom I have ever come across, the late Mr. G. S. Venables – a lawyer of no mean expertness; one of the earliest and one of the greatest of those "gentlemen of the Press" who at the middle of the nineteenth century lifted journalism out of the gutter; a familiar of every kind of the best society, and a person of infinite though somewhat saturnine wit – had a phrase of contempt for absurd utterances by persons who ought to have known better. "It was," he said, "like a drunk child." The major part of L'Homme Qui Rit is like the utterance of a drunk child who had something of the pseudo-Homeric Margites in him, who "knew a great many things and knew them all badly." I could fill fifty pages here easily enough, and with a kind of low amusement to myself and perhaps others, by enumerating the absurdities of L'Homme Qui Rit. As far as I remember, when the book appeared, divers good people (the bad people merely sneered) took immense pains to discover how and why this great man of letters made so much greater a fool of himself. This was quite lost labour; and without attempting the explanation at all, a very small selection of the facts, being in a manner indispensable, may be given.

The mysterious society of "Comprachicos" (Spanish for "child-buyers"), on whose malpractices the whole book is founded; the entirely false conception of the English House of Lords, which gives much of the superstructure; the confusion of English and French times and seasons, manners and customs, which enables the writer to muddle up Henri-Trois and Louis-Quinze, Good Queen Bess and Good Queen Anne: these and other things of the kind can be passed over. For things like some of them occur in much saner novelists than Hugo; and Sir Walter himself is notoriously not free from indisputable anachronisms.114 But you have barely reached the fiftieth page when you come to a "Lord Linnæus Clancharlie, Baron Clancharlie et Hunkerville, Marquis de Corleone en Sicile," whose English peerage dates from Edward the Elder (the origin of his Sicilian title is not stated, but it was probably conferred by Hiero or Dionysius), and whose name "Clancharlie" has nothing whatever to do with Scotland or Ireland. This worthy peer (who, as a Cromwellian, exiled himself after the Restoration) had, like others of the godly, a bastard son, enjoying at "temp. of tale" the remarkable courtesy title of "Lord David Dirry-Moir," but called by the rabble, with whom his sporting tastes make him a great favourite, "Tom-Jim-Jack." Most "love-children" of peers would be contented (if they ever had them) with courtesy titles; but Lord David has been further favoured by Fortune and King James II., who has first induced the comprachicos to trepan and mutilate Clancharlie's real heir (afterwards Gwynplaine, the eponymous hero of the book), and has then made Lord David a "pair substitué"115 on condition that he marries one of the king's natural daughters, the Duchess Josiane, a duchess with no duchy ever mentioned. In regard to her Hugo proceeds to exhibit his etymological powers, ignoring entirely the agreeable heroine of Bevis of Hampton, and suggesting either an abbreviation of "Josefa y Ana" (at this time, we are gravely informed, there was a prevalent English fashion of taking Spanish names) or else a feminine of "Josias." Moreover, among dozens of other instances of this Bedlam nomenclature, we have a "combat of box" between the Irishman "Phelem-ghe-Madone" (because Irishmen are often Roman Catholics?) and the Scotchman "Helmsgail" (there is a place called Helmsdale in Scotland, and if "gael" why not "gail"?), to the latter of whom a knee is given by "Lord Desertum" (Desart? Dysart? what?).

And so it goes on. There is the immortal scene (or rather half-volume) in which, Hugo having heard or read of peine forte et dure, we find sheriffs who discharge the duty of Old Bailey judges, fragments of Law Latin (it is really a pity that he did not get hold of our inimitable Law French), and above all, and pervading all, that most fearful wildfowl the "wapentake," with his "iron weapon." He, with his satellite the justicier-quorum (but, one weeps to see, not "custalorum" or "rotalorum"), is concerned with the torture of Hardquanonne116– the original malefactor117 in Gwynplaine's case – and thereby restores Gwynplaine to his (unsubstituted) rank in the English peerage, when he himself is anticipating similar treatment. There is the presentation by the librarian of the House of Lords of a "little red book" which is the passport to the House itself: and the very unmannerly reception by his brother peers, from which he is in a manner rescued by the chivalrous Lord David Dirry-Moir at the price of a box on the ears for depriving him of his "substitution." There is the misconduct of the Duchess Josiane, divinely beautiful and diabolically wicked, who covets the monster Gwynplaine as a lover, and discards him when, on his peerification, he is commanded to her by Queen Anne as a husband. And then, after all this tedious insanity and a great deal more, there is the finale of the despair of Gwynplaine, of his recovery of the dying Dea in a ship just starting for Holland, of her own death, and of his suicide in the all-healing sea – a "reconciliation" not far short of the greatest things in literature.

Now I am not of those unhappy ones who cannot away with the mixture of tragedy and farce. I have not only read too much, but lived too long for that. But then the farce must be in life conceivable and in literature conscious. Shakespeare, and even men much inferior to Shakespeare, have been able to provide for this stipulation munificently.

With Victor Hugo, generally more or less and intensively here, it was unfortunately different. His irony was almost always his weakest point; or rather it was a kind of hit-or-miss weapon, with which he cut himself as often as he cut his inimical objects or persons. The intense absurdity of his personified wapentakes, of his Tom-Jim-Jacks, of his courtesy-title bastards, he deliberately declined (as in the anecdote above given) to see. But these things, done and evidently thought fine by the doer, almost put to rout the most determined and expert sifter of the faults and merits of genius. You cannot enjoy a Garden of Eden when at every other step you plunge into a morass of mire. You cannot drink a draught of nectar, arranged on the plan of certain glasses of liqueur, in superimposed layers of different savour and colour, when every other layer is "stummed" folly or nauseous bad taste. A novel is not like a book of poems, where, as you see that you have hit on a failure, you turn the page and find a success. To which it may be added finally that while erudition of any kind is a doubtful set-off to fiction, the presentation of ragbag erudition of this kind is, to speak moderately and in his own words of something else, "a rather hideous thing."118

Still, with readers of a certain quality, the good omens may to some extent shame the ill even here. The death of Dea, with its sequel, is very nearly perfect; it only wants the verse of which its author was such an absolute master, instead of the prose, where he alternately triumphed and bungled, to make it so. And one need not be a common paradoxer to take either side on the question whether on the whole the omen, if not the actuality, of L'Homme Qui Rit or that of Les Travailleurs de la Mer was the happier. For, while the earlier and better book showed how faults were hardening and might grow worse still, the later showed how these very faults, attaining their utmost possible development, could not entirely stifle the rarer gifts. I do not remember that anybody in 1869 took this apparently aleatory side of the argument. If he did he was justified in 1874.

Quatre-Vingt-Treize.

One enormous advantage of Quatre-Vingt-Treize over its immediate predecessor lay on the surface – an advantage enormous in all cases, but almost incalculable in this particular one. In L'Homme Qui Rit Victor Hugo had been dealing with a subject about which he knew practically nothing, and about which he was prepared to believe, or even practise, anything. Here, though he was still prepared to believe a great deal, he yet knew a very great deal more. A little room for his eccentricities remained, and long after the truth had become a matter of registered history, he could accept the legendary lies about the Vengeur; but there was no danger of his giving us French wapentakes brandishing iron-weapons, or calling a French noble by any appellation comparable to Lord Linnæus119 Clancharlie.

But, it may be said, is not the removal of these annoyances more than compensated, in the bad sense, by things inseparable from such a subject, as treated by such an author? – the glorification of "Quatre-Vingt-Treize" itself, and, in particular, of the Convention – that remarkable assembly which seems to have made up its mind to prove for all time that, in democracies, the scum comes to the top? – that assembly in which Fabre d'Eglantine stood for poetry, Marat for humanitarianism, Robespierre for justice, Hébert and Chaumette for decency, Siéyès and Chabot for different forms of religion, the composers of the Republican Calendar120 for common sense? where the only suggestion of a great man was Danton, and the only substitutes for an honest one were the prigs and pedants of the Gironde? To which the only critical answer must be, even when the critic does not contest the correctness of this description – "Why, no!"

It is better, no doubt, that a novelist, and that everybody else, should be a bien-pensant; but, as in the case of the poet, it will not necessarily affect his goodness in his art if he is not. He had, indeed, best not air his opinions, whatever they are, at too great length; but what they are matters little or nothing. A Tory critic who cannot admire Shelley or Swinburne, Dickens or Thackeray, because of their politics, is merely an ass, an animal unfortunately to be found in the stables or paddocks of every party. On the other hand, absurdities and faults of taste matter very much.

Now from these latter, which had nearly ruined L'Homme Qui Rit, Quatre-Vingt-Treize, if not entirely free, suffers comparatively little. The early and celebrated incident of the carronade running amuck shows characteristic neglect of burlesque possibilities (and, as I believe some experts have maintained, of actual ones), but it has the qualities of the Hugonian defects. An arm-chair critic may ask, Where was the English fleet in the Channel when a French one was allowed to come out and slowly mob the Claymore to destruction, without, as far as one sees, any interference or counter-effort, though the expedition of that remarkable corvette formed part of an elaborate and carefully prepared offensive?121 Undoubtedly, the Convention scenes must be allowed – even by sympathisers with the Revolution – to be clumsy stopgaps, unnecessary to the action and possessed of little intrinsic value in themselves. The old fault of verbosity and "watering out" recurs; and so does the reappearance, with very slight change, of figures and situations. Cimourdain in character is very much of a more respectable Claude Frollo; and in conduct, mutatis not so very many mutandis, almost as much of a less respectable Javert. The death of Gauvain is far less effective than that of Sydney Carton, which had preceded it; and the enormous harangue of the Marquis to the nephew who is about to liberate him, though it may be intended to heighten the peripeteia, merely gives fresh evidence of Hugo's want of proportion and of his flux of rhetoric.

All this and more is true; yet Quatre-Vingt-Treize is, "in its fine wrong way," a great book, and with Les Travailleurs de la Mer, completes the pillars, such as they are, which support Hugo's position as a novelist. The rescue of the children by Lantenac is superb, though you may find twenty cavils against it easily: and the whole presentation of the Marquis, except perhaps the speech referred to, is one of the best pictures of the ancienne noblesse in literature, one which – to reverse the contrast just made – annihilates Dickens's caricature thereof in A Tale of Two Cities. The single-handed defence of La Tourgue by "L'Imanus" has of course a good deal of the hyperbole which began with Quasimodo's similar act in Notre-Dame; but the reader who cannot "let himself go" with it is to be pitied. Nowhere is Hugo's child-worship more agreeably shown than in the three first chapters of the third volume. And, sinking particulars for a more general view, one may say that through the whole book, to an extent surpassing even Les Travailleurs de la Mer as such, there is the great Victorian souffle and surge, the rush as of mighty winds and mightier waters, which carries the reader resistlessly through and over all obstacles.

Final remarks.

Yet although Hugo thus terminated his career as a novelist, if not in the odour of sanctity, at any rate in a comfortable cloud of incense due to a comparative success; although he had (it is true on a much smaller scale) even transcended that success in Les Travailleurs de la Mer; although, as a mere novice, he had proved himself a more than tolerable tale-teller in Bug-Jargal, it is not possible, for any critical historian of the novel as such, to pronounce him a great artist, or even a tolerable craftsman, in the kind as a whole. It has already been several times remarked in detail, and may now be repeated in general, that the things which we enjoy in his books of this kind are seldom things which it is the special business of the novelist to produce, and practically never those which are his chief business. In no single instance perhaps, with the doubtful exception of Gilliatt's battle with brute matter and elemental forces, is "the tale the thing" purely as tale. Very seldom do we even want to know what is going to happen – the childishly simple, but also childishly genuine demand of the reader of romance as such, if not even of the novel also. Scarcely once do we – at least do I – take that interest in the development of character which is the special subject of appetite of readers of the novel, as such and by itself. The baits and the rewards are now splendour of style; now magnificence of imagery; sometimes grandeur of idea; often pathos; not seldom the delight of battle in this or that sense. These are all excellent seasonings of novelry; but they are not the root of the matter, the pièce de résistance of the feast.

Unfortunately, too, Hugo not merely cannot, or at any rate does not, give the hungry sheep their proper food – an interesting story worked out by interesting characters – but will persist in giving them things as suitable (granting them to be in the abstract nourishing) as turnips to the carnivora or legs of mutton to the sheep which walk on them. It would, of course, not be just to press too strongly the objections to the novel of purpose, though to the present writer they seem almost insuperable. But it is not merely purpose in the ordinary sense which leads Victor astray, or rather (for he was much too wilful a person to be led) which he invents for himself to follow, with his eyes open, and knowing perfectly well what he is doing. His digressions are not parabases of the kind which some people object to in Fielding and still more in Thackeray – addresses to the reader on points more or less intimately connected with the subject itself. A certain exception has been made in favour of some of the architectural parts of Notre-Dame de Paris, but it has been admitted that this will not cover "Ceci Tuera Cela" nor much else. For the presence of the history of the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables and any number of other things; for not a little of the first volume of Les Travailleurs itself; for about half, if not more, of L'Homme Qui Rit, starting from Ursus's Black-book of fancy pleasances, palaces, and estates belonging to the fellow-peers of Lord Linnæus Clancharlie and Hunkerville; for not a few chapters even of Quatre-Vingt-Treize, there is no excuse at all. They are simply repulsive or at least unwelcome "pledgets" of unsucculent matter stuck into the body of fiction, as (but with how different results!) lardons or pistachios or truffles are stuck into another kind of composition.

It is partly, but not wholly, due to this deplorable habit of irrelevant divagation that Hugo will never allow his stories to "march" (at least to begin with marching),122 Quatre-Vingt-Treize being here the only exception among the longer romances, for even Les Travailleurs de la Mer never gets into stride till nearly the whole of the first volume is passed. But the habit, however great a nuisance it may be to the reader, is of some interest to the student and the historian, for the very reason that it does not seem to be wholly an outcome of the other habit of digression. It would thus be, in part at least, a survival of that odd old "inability to begin" which we noticed several times in the last volume, aggravated by the irrepressible wilfulness of the writer, and by his determination not to do like other people, who had by this time mostly got over the difficulty.

If any further "dull moral" is wanted it may be the obvious lesson that overpowering popularity of a particular form is sometimes a misfortune, as that of allegory was in the Middle Ages and that of didactics in the eighteenth century. If it had not been almost incumbent on any Frenchman who aimed at achieving popularity in the mid-nineteenth century to attempt the novel, it is not very likely that Hugo would have attempted it. It may be doubted whether we should have lost any of the best things – we should only have had them in the compacter and higher shape of more Orientales, more Chants du Crépuscule, more Légendes, and so forth. We should have lost the easily losable laugh over bug-pipe and wapentake – for though Hugo sometimes thought sillily in verse he did not often let silliness touch his expression in the more majestical harmony – and we should have been spared an immensely greater body of matter which now provokes a yawn or a sigh.

This is, it may be said, after all a question of taste. Perhaps. But it can hardly be denied by any critical student of fiction that while Hugo's novel-work has added much splendid matter to literature, it has practically nowhere advanced, nor even satisfactorily exemplified, the art of the novel. It is here as an exception – marvellous, magnificent, and as such to be fully treated; actually an honour to the art of which it discards the requirements, but an exception merely and one which proves, inasmuch as it justifies, the cautions it defies.123