A Short History of French Literature
varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost possible glow of
colour as opposed to the cold correctness of classical poetry, the
completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest reliance on
exotic terms and daring neologisms. Two romances in prose, more
fantastic in subject and audacious in treatment than the wildest of the
_Orientales_, had preceded the latter. The first, _Han d'Islande_, was
published anonymously in 1823. It handled with much extravagance, but
with extraordinary force and picturesqueness, the adventures of a bandit
in Norway. The second, _Bug Jargal_, an earlier form of which had
already appeared in the _Conservateur_, was published in 1826. But the
rebels, of whom Victor Hugo was by this time the acknowledged chief,
knew that the theatre was at once the stronghold of their enemies, and
the most important point of vantage for themselves. Victor Hugo's
theatrical, or at least dramatic, _debut_ was not altogether happy.
_Cromwell_, which was published in 1828, was not acted, and indeed, from
its great length and other peculiarities, could hardly have been acted.
It is rather a romance thrown into dramatic form than a play. In its
published shape, however, it was introduced by an elaborate preface,
containing a full exposition of the new views which served as a kind of
manifesto. Some minor works about this time need not be noticed. The
final strokes in verse and prose were struck, the one shortly before the
revolution of July, the other shortly after it, by the drama of
_Hernani, ou l'Honneur Castillan_, and the prose romance of _Notre Dame
de Paris_. The former, after great difficulties with the actors and with
outside influences--it is said that certain academicians of the old
school actually applied to Charles X. to forbid the representation--was
acted at the Theatre Francais on the 25th of February, 1830. The latter
was published in 1831. The reading of these two celebrated works,
despite nearly sixty years of subsequent and constant production with
unflagging powers on the part of their author, would suffice to give any
one a fair, though not a complete, idea of Victor Hugo, and of the
characteristics of the literary movement of which he has been the head.
The main subject of _Hernani_ is the point of honour which compels a
noble Spaniard to kill himself, in obedience to the blast of a horn
sounded by his mortal enemy, at the very moment of his marriage with his
beloved. _Notre Dame de Paris_ is a picture by turns brilliant and
sombre of the manners of the mediaeval capital. In both the author's
great failing, a deficient sense of humour and of proportion, which
occasionally makes him overstep the line between the sublime and the
ridiculous, is sometimes perceivable. In both, too, there is a certain
lack of technical neatness and completeness in construction. But the
extraordinary command of the tragic passions of pity, admiration, and
terror, the wonderful faculty of painting in words, the magnificence of
language, the power of indefinite poetical suggestion, the sweep and
rush of style which transports the reader, almost against his will and
judgment, are fully manifest in them. As a mere innovation, _Hernani_
is the most striking of the two. Almost every rule of the old French
stage is deliberately violated. Although the language is in parts ornate
to a degree, the old periphrases are wholly excluded; and when simple
things have to be said they are said with the utmost simplicity. The
cadence and arrangement of the classical Alexandrine are audaciously
reconstructed. Not merely is the practice of _enjambement_ (or
overlapping of lines and couplets, as distinct from the rigid separation
of them) frequent and daring, but the whole balance and rhythm of the
individual line is altered. Ever since Racine the one aim of the
dramatist had been to make the Alexandrine run as monotonously as
possible. The aim of Victor Hugo was to make it run with the greatest
possible variety. In short, the whole theory of the drama was altered.
The decade which followed the revolution of July was Victor Hugo's most
triumphant period. A series of dramas, _Marion de Lorme_, _Les Roi
s'Amuse_, _Lucrece Borgia_, _Marie Tudor_, _Angelo_, _Les Burgraves_,
succeeded each other at short intervals, and were accompanied by four
volumes of immortal verse, _Les Feuilles d'Automne_, _Chants du
Crepuscule_, _Les Voix Interieures_, _Les Rayons et les Ombres_. The
dramas continued to show Victor Hugo's command of tragic passion, his
wonderful faculty of verse, his fertility in moving situations, and in
incidents of horror and grandeur; but they did not indicate an increased
acquaintance with those minor arts of the playwright, which are
necessary to the success of acted dramas, and which many of Hugo's own
pupils possessed to perfection. Accordingly, towards the end of the
decade, some reaction took place against them, and their author ceased
to write for the stage. His purely poetical productions showed, however,
an increase at once of poetical and of critical power; and of the four
volumes mentioned, each one contains many pieces which have never been
excelled in French poetry, and which may be fairly compared with the
greatest poetical productions of the same kind in other literatures.
Meanwhile, Victor Hugo's political ideas (which never, in any of their
forms, brought him much luck, literary or other) had undergone a
remarkable change. During the reign of Louis Philippe, he, who had
recently been an ardent legitimist, became, first, a constitutional
royalist (in which capacity he accepted from the king a peerage), then
an extreme liberal, and at last, when the revolution of 1848 broke out,
a republican democrat. He was banished for his opposition to Louis
Napoleon, and fled, first to Brussels, and then to the Channel Islands,
launching against his enemy a prose lampoon, _Napoleon le Petit_, and
then a volume of verse, _Les Chatiments_, of marvellous vigour and
brilliancy. During the ten years before this his literary work had been
for the most part suspended, at least as far as publication is
concerned. But his exile gave a fresh spur to his genius. After four
years' residence, first in Jersey, then in Guernsey, he published _Les
Contemplations_ (2 vols.), a collection of lyrical pieces, not different
in general form from the four volumes which had preceded them; and, in
1859, _La Legende des Siecles_, a marvellous series of narrative or
pictorial poems representing scenes from different epochs of the history
of the world. These three volumes together represent his poetical talent
at its highest. He, at other times before and since, equalled but never
surpassed them. In _La Legende des Siecles_ the variety of the music,
the majesty of some of the pieces and the pathos of others, the rapid
succession of brilliant dissolving views, and the complete mastery of
language and versification at which the poet arrived, combine to produce
an effect not easily paralleled elsewhere. The _Contemplations_, as
their name imports, are chiefly meditative. They are somewhat unequal,
and the tone of speculative pondering on the mysteries of life which
distinguishes them sometimes drops into what is called sermonising, but
their best pieces are admirable. During the whole of the Second Empire
Victor Hugo continued to reside in Guernsey, publishing, in 1862, a long
prose romance, _Les Miserables_, one of the most unequal of his books;
then another, the exquisite _Travailleurs de la Mer_, as well as a
volume of criticism on _William Shakespeare_, some passages in which
rank among the best pieces of ornate prose in French; and, in 1869,
_L'Homme qui Rit_, a historical romance of a somewhat extravagant
character, recalling his earliest attempts in this kind, but full of
power. A small collection of lyric verse, mostly light and pastoral in
character, had appeared under the title of _Chansons des Rues et des
Bois_. The Revolution which followed the troubles of France, in 1870,
restored Victor Hugo to his country only to inflict a bitter, though
passing, annoyance on him. He had somewhat mistaken the temper of the
National Assembly at Bordeaux to which he had been elected. He even
found himself laughed at, and he retired to Brussels in disgust. Here he
was identified by public opinion with the Communists, and subjected to
some manifestations of popular displeasure, which, unfortunately, his
sensitive temperament and vivid imagination magnified unreasonably.
Returning to France after the publication of nearly his weakest book,
_L'Annee Terrible_, he lived quietly, but as a kind of popular and
literary idol, till his death in 1885. Of his abundant later (including
not a little posthumous) work _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, another historical
romance, and two books of poetry (a second series of the _Legende des
Siecles_, 1877, and _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_, 1881) at their best,
equal anything he has ever done. The second _Legende_ is inferior to the
first in variety of tone and in vivid pictorial presentment, but equals
it in the declamatory vigour of its best passages. _Les Quatre Vents de
l'Esprit_ is, perhaps, the most striking single book that Victor Hugo
produced, containing as it does lyric and narrative work of the very
finest quality, and a drama of an entirely original character, which,
after more than sixty years of publicity, showed a new side of the
author's genius.
This somewhat minute account of Victor Hugo's work must be supplemented
by some general criticism of his literary characteristics. As will
probably have been observed, from what has already been said, there were
remarkable gaps in his ability. In purely intellectual characteristics,
the characteristics of the logician and the philosopher, he was weak. He
was also, as has been said, deficient in the sense of humorous contrast,
and in the perception of strict literary proportion. Long years of
solitary pre-eminence, and of the frequently unreasonable worship of
fools as well as of wise men, gave him, or encouraged in him, a tendency
to regard the universe too much from the point of view of France in the
first place, Paris in the second, and Victor Hugo in the third. His
unequalled skill in the management of proper names tempted him to abuse
them as instruments of sonority in his verse. He is often inaccurate in
fact, presenting in this respect a remarkable resemblance to his
counterpart and complement Voltaire. The one merit which swallowed up
almost all others in classical and pseudo-classical literature is
wanting in him--the sense of measure. He is a childish politician, a
visionary social reformer. But, when all this has been said, there
remains a sum total of purely literary merits which suffices to place
him on a level with the greatest in literature. The mere fact that he is
equally remarkable for the exquisite grace of his smaller lyrics, and
for the rhetorical magnificence of his declamatory passages, argues some
peculiar and masterly idiosyncrasy in him. No poet has a rarer and more
delicate touch of pathos, none a more masculine or a fuller tone of
indignation. The great peculiarity of Victor Hugo is that his poetry
always transports. No one who cares for poetry at all, and who has
mastered the preliminary necessity of acquaintance with the French
language and French prosody, can read any of his better works without
gradually rising to a condition of enthusiasm in which the possible
defects of the matter are altogether lost sight of in the unsurpassed
and dazzling excellence of the manner. This is the special test of
poetry, and there is none other. The technical means by which Victor
Hugo produces these effects have been already hinted at. They consist in
a mastery of varied versification, in an extraordinary command of