BOOKS.
VICTOR HUGO.* IT is unfortunate that M. Mabilleau's book upon Victor Hugo so far departs from the general law of the "Series of Great French Writers," in which it appears, as to be very little of a Life, and almost entirely a criticism. This is the more to be regretted, as where M. Mabilleau touches upon the poet's personal history, be does so with discrimination, but tenderly. Hugo's relations with the world of letters and with the political movements of his day throw a great deal of light upon his career ; and the absolute want of proportion in his measurements that often made him ridiculous, deserves illustration, as much as the capacity for noble feeling that dig- nified his private life as well as his style. If, however, M. Mabilleau had done more perfectly the work of criticism to which be has elected to confine himself, he might be pardoned omissions of another kind. Unhappily, though he gives us much that is excellent of its kind, he does not give us the secret of Hugo's success, or explain his weak points. When he says that Victor Hugo thought with the imagi- nation, or that he understood form but not colour, we get something that is really suggestive ; but there is too little of this kind of work. The facts about the
* Victor Ilugo. Tar ',Leopold Mabilleau. Paris: Hachette et Pio. 1E03.
great Frenchman are sufficiently curious. He achieved a remarkable success in lyrical poetry, in the drama, and in what M. Mabilleau calls "the epic," as exemplified in his Legende des Sii;cles. Some of his poems are exquisitely pathetic, and some are masterpieces of nervous satire. Nevertheless, a sane admirer would probably commit half that he has written to the flames, with the certainty of raising the value of the remainder. M. Mabilleau says happily of him, that he had passed into the ranks of the immortal& before death. His countrymen spoke of him "as of Dante and Shakespeare, almost as of Homer." Nevertheless, as M. de In Brunetiere remarks, he never founded a school. Gautier, who worshipped him, composed after classical models. De Musset shows not the faintest trace of the Master's in- fluence. The idols of young France at this moment are men very inferior to Hugo, but who have borrowed nothing from him. Again, it is probably true to say that Hugo's style is the least French among good French styles. It impresses the reader, especially the foreign reader, because it is full of life and action ; it arrests him by its very extravagances ; but it has neither the clearness and simplicity of the best French school, nor the epigrammatic brilliancy of the Voltairians. The mere fact that emotions and images are habitually exaggerated tells fatally against the writer's essen- tial power, and leads one to doubt, if his countrymen have not over-estimated his place even in their own Pantheon. Lastly, Victor Hugo by temperament was not a man who loved strongly ; and though he repeatedly deals with the pas- sion which neither poet nor novelist can disregard, it is commonly the self-abnegation of love that he paints. The feeling of Romeo for Juliet, of Antony for Cleopatra, are a little outside his horizon. So it is that his lyrics on this par- ticular subject have never passed into the popular repertory.
There are a great many main facts to be considered, if we would form a just estimate of so complex a nature as Victor Hugo's. In the first place, he deliberately wrote, and prided himself on writing, with a. political or moral purpose. This in itself differentiates him from almost all his contem- poraries, who wrote essentially for art, and considered the form more important than the thought. Then, again, this moral or political purpose was constantly varying. He began life as a Legitimist ; he associated himself with constitutional Monarchy under Louis Philippe ; and be became effusively Republican after the fall of the Monarchy, and, above all, after the coup d'etat. These changes, however, express less than they would in most men. Above all things, Victor Hugo was an optimist with a belief in the indefinite perfectibility of mankind, and a capacity for acquiescing in almost any form of government that the French people might adopt. That he did not become an Imperialist, though he joined in the wor- ship of the first Napoleon, was probably due to the accidents that he was by that time committed to Republicanism ; that the atrocities of the coup d'état horrified him ; and that, like every French man of letters, he recoiled from Louis Napoleon's surroundings as much as from his acts. He continued, fortunately, to persuade himself that the nation was no party to the Empire, and retained an uncritical faith in France and Paris. To the world at large, Paris, in 1871, was a city which redeemed the blunders of its leaders and the fatuity of its mob by the heroism and patient endurance of a large part of its popula- tion; to Victor Hugo it was "the sun-city" which had "conquered the universe by a mixture of force and goodness." To the mere poet these extravagances might be forgiven, but in the politician who affected above all to be a thinker and prophet and guide of his fellow-men, such language shows that the man who uses it cannot see facts. Now this was the most real flaw in Victor Hugo's genius. Had be been an. artist for art's sake, he would have studied life. Being an artist be- cause art was the best medium for his ideas, he was primarily in whatever he wrote, moralist, social innovator, or theorist, but remained secondary in all these capacities, because, after all, his real function was not to think, but to expreas thought. The limitations of his art were also derived from this tempera- ment. Victor Hugo's real power in poetry was his keen power of sympathy with human nature ; a faculty which sometimes carried him to high imaginative flights. Unfortunately, he perpetually aimed at the immediate and startling effects which an orator attains by a happy exaggeration, or by call- ing up pictures which would be doubtful as works of art, but are impressive as phantasmagoria. Accordingly, what Hugo intends to be grandiose or vigorous is very often only grotesque. Take, for instance, in the Lggende des Siecles—the poet's greatest work—the conception that Eblis created the grasshopper out of the neck of the antelope, the breast of the lion, and the wing of the eagle, to throw contempt upon God's work ; and that God turned the spider into the sun. The fancy displayed in this apologne is that of a Persian popular tale. Take, again, the purple patches of very doubtful learn- ing which are constantly introduced ; the motley allusions to Attila, and Cain, to Epicurus in India, to Loyola and Escobar. One can hardly wonder that a recent French critic has taken for the title of one of his chapters, "Ignorance and Absurdity of Victor Hugo."
What, then, are the great powers in virtue of which Victor Hugo rose to a distinction that none of his actual contem- poraries attained ? We may probably take his real fame to date from his dramas ; for though he bad made a reputation by his lyrical pieces, he can hardly be said to have taken rank by these above Lamartine. In the dramas, the construction enlarging the bounds of the classical school—the " Roman- tioistn," in fact—had a good deal to do with the immediate success, but may now be disregarded. We may put aside also the fact that the opposition of the conservative school in literature to the new style, and the dislike of old.fashioned novelists and politicians to revolutionary ideas, gave the dramatist the best possible advertisement. The mere fact that the Government forbade Le Roi s'Aniuse to be played, was sufficient in a country like France to make every one wish to see it. With these deductions it remains clear that Victor Hugo had for the first time found a real field for his power, and that the wholesome tradi- tions of the French stage kept his language from being extravagant and his characters from being unnatural. His source of dramatic inspiration was not a wide knowledge of the human heart, but a great appreciation of certain moods and situations. The drama—precisely because it occupies itself with crowded events and a few hours of life—suited him better than the novel, in which character has to be traced line upon line. Having allowed this, we must admit also that we have to go back to Corneille for a comparison with Victor Hugo at his best, and that passages in his plays revealed a capacity of the first order for satire. On the whole, it seems right to regard the four or five best of his dramas as the most perfect work Victor Hugo did, though M. Mabilleau would apparently prefer the Legends des Si2cies. It may be admitted that the great series of poems, tied together by a slender thread of thought, which the poet regarded as an explanation of the development of humanity, contains many perfect pieces, and some examples of a simple style that could not be surpassed out of the satirical pieces. The idyll of Boaz asleep, the story of the Infanta, the story of the fisherman's wife who takes two orphans to her own overcrowded home, are familiar specimens of consummate work. Then, again, the plan of the work admits of enormous variety. M. Mabillean men- tions that Aymerillot is almost the exact copy of an episode in the old "Romance of Roland," but our poet has so manipulated it that it is undistinguish able from his ordinary work. Still, there is much in the "Legend of the Ages" that is either extravagant or mere padding, and that would not have been printed if Victor Hugo had had to submit it to persons interested in his success as the actors were in his dramas. The satires belong to the later period of his life. Some are simply unsurpassable, like the song that compares the two Napoleons; some are admirable for descriptive power, and others are lighted up here and there with a phrase that glows like a torch ; but the best parts are rarer than in his earlier works, and it is unfortunate that he followed the traditions of satire from Juvenal to Pope by gibbeting those who, like Veuillot and Sibour, were honest on the wrong side, with every circumstance of personal ferocity. The fact is, that by this time Victor Hugo's theory of poetry with a purpose was avenging itself upon its author, and the lyrist was lost in the moralist.' Comparing him with Englishmen of his own century who made a reputation in the same class of work, we may say that Victor Hugo was incomparably superior to Byron as a dramatist, and that the "Legend of the Ages" is more various than " Childe Harold;" but that Byron's lighter touch gives him the advantage in satire. It is fair to remember, however, that French is essentially the language of prose, and that Victor Hugo was severely tried by the medium through which he had to express his ideas.
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