THE LETTERS OF VICTOR HUGO.* SINCE literature has become popular,
and all the world is learned in books, an insatiable curiosity too often takes the place of legitimate interest. We are seldom content with the poems and novels which a great man chooses to give us; we must look with prying eyes into his private career, and recon- struct from documents, which should long since have been destroyed, the secret episodes of his life. This mania of indiscretion, which has done its worst to the reputation of Shelley and a hundred others, has at last crossed the Channel, and Paris is busily engaged in belittling her heroes. No one is safe from the ingenuity of research, and the dead, even more helplessly than the living, are the prey of the inter- viewer.
First came the letters of Madame Valmore, a tardy con- fession of unrequited passion. Then the interminable trilogy of George Sand and Alfred de Musset was capped by the
• The Letters of Victor Hugo. Translated by F. Clarke, M.A. London: Idetb.len and Co.
satiric drama of Dr. Pagello, an octogenarian who thinks it no disgrace to boast publicly of an ancient conquest. Nor shall we easily be spared the mishaps of Madame Sand, since we are presented with a fresh record of her career, set forth with the aid of unpublished letters. Sainte-Benve and Prosper Merimee are also among the victims, but none has fared more desperately at the hand of the resurrectionist than Victor Hugo, the first volume of whose letters is now accessible both in French and English. What purpose is served by the publication of this book we know not. It reveals neither the great writer nor the tireless politician. Hugo's reputation, firmly established as it is, does not justify the stitching together of these poor shreds and patches ; nor can the most reckless enthusiast assert that the trivial pages now set before us are worth reading for their own sake. They are not scandalous, or rather the one scandal whereat they hint is left unexplained ; they are not unkind, for Hugo was senti- mental rather than violent in a quarrel ; they are merely dull, and not even the author of Les Miserables is permitted to be dull in print.
The letters tell us nothing that was not already evident. They do but confirm, what was never in doubt, the poet's boundless egotism. Even at twenty-one he was too deeply absorbed in self to be amiable, and his election to the head of a School while yet a boy neither increased his forbearance nor tempered his pride. He was prepared to patronise the whole world, even his own father, to whom he wrote in 1822 :—" I have no prejudice against your present wife, as I have not the honour of knowing her." Thus he addressed one who was not merely his father, but a gentleman and a distinguished soldier to boot ; and it is difficult to palliate or excuse this masterpiece of priggishness. But despite a youthful arro- gance, his success was never in doubt. His genius was recognised from the very first, and he had always a crowd of friends ready to support his triumphant romanticism against the frantic intolerance of the classical school. The King was his early patron. "The King has sent me word," he wrote in 1825, "that he has ordered some porcelain to be forwarded to me, in addition to all other marks of his favour. This is the climax." But it was not the climax, for presently he has further victories to chronicle. "The King appoints me Knight of the Legion of Honour," he tells his friend Soullie, "and does me the signal honour of inviting me to his Coronation." And so he goes off with a hastily improvised Court-snit and a borrowed sword to witness the gorgeous ceremony at Reims. He travelled in a post-chaise with Charles Nodier, and his account of the journey is the pleasantest chapter in the book. He was enthusiastically loyal, for Hugo reversed the common progression, and passed from an admiration of Kings and Emperors to that sturdy Republicanism which inspired his later eloquence and drove him to exile. In those days, too, there was a certain naïveté in his behaviour which is altogether unexpected. Once upon a time he visited the Castle of Chambord, and cut his name upon the top of the highest tower with all the gusto of a Cockney tourist. He committed an even worse folly than this ; for he took away from the tower "a little stone and moss, and a piece of the framework of the window on which Francis L wrote these two lines :—
Souvent femme vane, Bien fol qui s'y fie.'" And then he proceeds to tell his friend, Monsieur de Saint- Valry, how highly he values these two relics. Thus we recognise in the bud that romanticism which became in the flower Le Boi s'amuse.
The letters to Sainte-Benve are given without their key, though only one key will unlock this hitherto forgotten secret. The poet's complaints of the critic are for the most part peevish and unmanly, and it is difficult to understand his attitude. If Sainte-Bettye were guilty, there could in honour have been no more acquaintance. But the poet is still anxious for reviews, and is quick to detect in print a lack of friendship. "I have read your article," he writes in 1834, "which is one of the best you have ever written, and, like our conversation the other day at Giittingener's house, it has left a painful impression on me, which I must communicate to you. I find in it unbounded eulogy, magnifi- cent language, but underlying all—and this makes me very sad—an absence of kindly feeling. I should have preferred less praise and more sympathy." This lack of dignity is the more reprehensible when you remember the almost humble protestations of the preceding years. In brief, the corre- spondence puts in the mouth an unpleasant taste, for which its merit is no atonement. But, strangest defect of all, the letters are not the letters of a poet and dramatist who lived through the keen excitement of 1830, and himself held the banner of young France. You must seek elsewhere the history of the movement, which Hugo helped to inaugurate, and concerning which he has no new word to say. One page of Gautier's Souvenirs is worth (for vividness of impression) the whole solid volume of Hugo's letters. Perhaps the anther of Hernani was too near the battlefield to describe its incidents ; yet writing was his trade, and he was not afterwards thus reti- cent. One letter, however, has a consistent historical interest. A dignified impeachment of the censorship, it was meant for the world, and is (in effect) addressed to the Minister of the Interior. A serious charge of malice and bad faith is brought and proved ; and it is with this sentence of contempt that Hugo closes his indictment :—" Pirated copies of Hernani are being circulated. Where can they come from ? I ask once more. From the theatre, whose hopes they would blight, whose interests they would ruin, where the greatest caution is observed, where the thing is an impossibility,—or from the censors ? The censorship has one manuscript at its disposal, a manuscript with which it can do what it likes. The censor- ship is my literary and political enemy. It has the privilege of being dishonest and disloyal. I impeach the censorship." The censorship shrank from the attack, and the glorious triumph of Hernani made a new literature possible. But one such letter does not excuse the indiscretion of those who have perverted Victor Hugo the Great into Victor Hugo the Little. Yet who shall hope to check the indiscretion of biographers ? For the world hankers after revelations, and no man is a hero to the circulating library.
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