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 hits[94] 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, "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 _un_virtuous 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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.
[Sidenote: _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 _Const.i.tutionnel_) 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 Thenardier in _Les Miserables_; 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 Bia.s.sou 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.
[Sidenote: _Le Dernier Jour d"un Cond.a.m.ne._]
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 Cond.a.m.ne_ 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 a.s.sa.s.sins," 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"a.s.sa.s.sin," in fact, to be made very uncomfortable--as uncomfortable as possible--and we want M. l"a.s.sa.s.sin, 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_.
[Sidenote: _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 appet.i.te, 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 _saccade_ 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?"
[Sidenote: _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 a.n.a.lysis of the composition of its light is worth putting on record.
[Sidenote: The story easy to antic.i.p.ate.]
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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 gipsy[96] 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 Phoebus 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 antic.i.p.ate, 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_.
[Sidenote: Importance of the actual _t.i.tle_.]
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 t.i.tle _Notre-Dame de Paris_, so stupidly and unfairly disguised by the addition-subst.i.tution 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 Phoebus 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, const.i.tution of the church form the centre of such action as there is, and supply by far the larger part of its scene. Therefore n.o.body has a right to complain of a very large proportion of purely architectural detail.
[Sidenote: 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 a.s.similation 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, d.a.m.nably.
Whether out of pure wilfulness, out of mistaken theory, or out of a mixture[98] 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 amba.s.sadors, 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.
[Sidenote: The story recovers itself latterly.]
At first sight "Coup d"oeil 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 anch.o.r.ess 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.
[Sidenote: 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 a.s.sault 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 a.s.sailed by physical temptation--will pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sport, and Jean Frollo does not appear to have left even the smallest _Testament_ or so much as a single line (though some s.n.a.t.c.hes of song are a.s.signed to him) reminding us of the "Dames des Temps Jadis" or the "Belle Heaulmiere." 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 Phoebus de Chateaupers.
_Per contra_ there are of course to be set pa.s.sages 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?"
[Sidenote: 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 interieures_, 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 publication[101]--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 _Napoleon le Pet.i.t_, to chequer the fulgurant outburst of the _Chatiments_, the apocalyptic magnificence of the _Contemplations_, and the almost unmatched vigour, variety, and vividness of the _Legende des Siecles_.
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, ent.i.tled _Les Miserables_. 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 ma.s.s 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.
[Sidenote: _Les Miserables._]
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 d.i.c.kens 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]
cla.s.ses." 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 _Clelie_ 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 pa.s.sages which ought to have been verse and, even prose as they are, soar far over anything that Mademoiselle de Scudery or Samuel Richardson or Alexandre Dumas could possibly have written in either harmony. The Scudery 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 Bra.s.s were down-pillows, as is the case with _Les Miserables_. 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 Thenardier 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 n.o.body 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 Valliere, the superabundance, though trivial, was relevant: this is not. When Thenardier 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 t.i.tle 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 G.o.ddess 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 _emeute_ 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 sh.o.r.e 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 t.i.tle of Baron. Thereupon (taking care, however, to have cards printed with the t.i.tle 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 Thenardier 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 _eclairciss.e.m.e.nt_ comes, it appears to me--as Mr. Carlyle said of Loyola that he ought to have consented to be d.a.m.ned--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 Miserables_ 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 Thenardier 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.
[Sidenote: _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" (Premiere de la Quatrieme), 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 antic.i.p.ator 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. Deruchette, 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."
[Sidenote: The _genius loci._]