The Fame of Victor Hugo

THE purpose of this paper is to review the history of Victor Hugo’s fame. It may thus be possible to arrive at an opinion, that shall not be founded on individual taste or mere caprice, as to the quality and order of his genius. We shall do well to defer to the judgment of the most competent among his countrymen. It has always been impossible for his English and American critics to find common ground. Matthew Arnold, for example, could say of him, in that apparently casual and parenthetical manner which veils some of his most audacious assumptions, that if the French were more at home in the higher regions of poetry “they would perceive with us that M. Victor Hugo, for instance, or Sir Walter Scott, may be a great romance-writer, and may yet be by no means a great poet.” In the eyes of Mr. Swinburne, Hugo was “the greatest Frenchman of all time,” “the greatest poet of this century,” “the spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century, ” — no less! Mr. Dowden, in an eloquent and sympathetic essay, considers chiefly Victor Hugo’s public aspect,—his relation to politics, his patriotism, his character as a representative Frenchman. Throughout at least the early half of Hugo’s career a large part of our public knew him as a dramatist and romancer almost exclusively. And yet, of the eminent French writers who, in this hundredth year from his birth, are estimating his place and importance in their literature, it is unlikely that many will take his romances into very serious account, or treat his dramas as if they possessed much vital and intrinsic excellence. Already, too, as in the case of Coleridge, it is being said of Victor Hugo that his value lies in the innovations which he made and the impulse he gave to other writers as much as in the power or the beauty of his works.

One might have expected less temerity of judgment. Even in these swiftly moving times, when men learn and forget so soon, sixteen years are a short period for so turbid and so vast a manifestation of literary effort to settle into clarity. And, moreover, there has been with us, all this time, the disquieting spectacle of Victor Hugo’s spirit still stirring the waters; for, strong fighter that he was, even death did not silence him. A giant spectre of the man has projected itself, with grandiose and characteristic gesture, past the day that seemed to round off his earthly career. For sixteen years the enormous series of his volumes has kept on increasing, not by mere posthumous dribblings, but by substantial and characteristic books; and two of the most interesting contributions to literature in 1901 were from his hand.

Yet, in spite of his vigorous defense during a lifetime of amazing resourcefulness, — in spite, too, of a startling palingenesis, — time and the critics and the changing taste of the public have affected his reputation, and, on the whole, diminished it. It was, of course, inevitable that his mere popularity should thus dwindle, that his name should gradually become less frequent on men’slips. It must, indeed, have been easy to foresee that in his case the falling off would be very marked, because, for many reasons, only in part connected with the degree of his literary excellence, he was a man of extraordinary prominence in a period of rapid political and social change. But apart from this mere fading of the light of day, — his day of actual presence before the public, — apart from this, and more unexpected, has been the diminution, already sensible to every eye, of that light of glory which he, and most other men also, took for the radiance of eternal fame. It may be that this centenary of his birth will witness a rally; but if so, it will be a rearguard pause in a swift retreat. Already newcomers in realms where he once held sway deny his ever having been a rightful sovereign there, and trace their lineage and legitimacy farther back. Already the importance of his innovations is disputed. Already the public realizes that, if it is to continue reading him, competent judges must first winnow out the best of him, and present this in a compass that shall be to his whole production as perhaps one to twenty. Already critics have qualified and minimized their former praise, even of his best. Already literary artists have become attached to new methods, ideals, and tendencies, and many of his disciples themselves are no longer in a humble attitude toward their master.

Still, even if Victor Hugo’s fame were in ruins, which it is not likely to be within a time that can be predicted, enough might be saved from the wreckage of so colossal an edifice for posterity to erect therewith an imposing temple. Would the superscription on the frieze be to the Man of Letters in general, or to the Romancer, or to the Dramatist, or to the Epic Poet, or to the Lyric Poet, or to the Innovator in literary theory and practice ? Toward answering this question some progress has really been made by French critics, despite the popular tendency to confound all distinctions in undiscriminating’praise. But to discover the answer and appreciate its cogency, we shall do well to take a glance at the history of Hugo’s reputation. The stages of its development succeeded one another by sudden and strongly marked movements, although it is true (and baffling enough the fact is to the observer) that the advance was seldom made all along the front of his endeavor, but by detachments, like the charging of a modern line of battle. With respect to the general public, the advance was almost unchecked down to the year of Hugo’s death. But criticism has had much to say at every important point, especially between 1835 and 1840, and after 1885.

If any excuse be required for considering with attention and even deference what the judgment of this higher court has been, it may be worth while to remember how very superior French criticism is. It has a substantive value of its own, — the best of it, — which rests both upon its formal excellence and upon its importance as a manifestation of human reason. In each of these elements it is at least equal to French poetry. Indeed, it would be difficult to point anywhere in the world, at present, to a more brilliant display of concerted literary talent than the writings of the French critics of our day. If in any large variety of intellectual success, any organization of the highest results of culture, France is distinctly a leader among the nations, it is in literary criticism ; it is in applying to the problems of civilization that stored-up wisdom which her literature contains. No other country has had a succession of critics comparable for combined effectiveness to the French critics of the last eighty years. With all the individual genius of our own critics, from Coleridge and De Quincey to Mr. Dowden and Mr. Henry James and Mr. Howells, English criticism presents less unity of purpose and has exerted less influence. The French critics possess much in common, and, in spite of wide differences of opinion among them, their influence, on the whole, moves in a definite direction. Their style, with all its infinite variety and the distinct personality which each of them has impressed upon it in turn, has unfailingly the quality of being perfectly adapted to the subjects which they treat. It is alive and intelligent on every page, — almost every word a picture, almost every phrase a figure of speech. And how our respect for the French people is intensified when we reflect that such a style, so full of reference and allusion, so full of symbol and trope, presupposes a public capable of appreciating its qualities! It is true, indeed, in a wider sense, that the best we get from France, not merely in this form, but in every form of literature, is criticism, after all. We read even her poetry less for its sensuous beauty than for what in it appeals to our reason.

Victor Marie Hugo was born on the 26th of February, 1802. In 1817, two years after the century had, for France at least, begun a second time with the fall of Napoleon, he had already found recognition as a poet. Between that date and his death, on May 22, 1885, amid many political revolutions and many changes of literary fashion, he was a constant and conspicuous presence in the intellectual life of his country. He was a great figurehead, prominent by virtue of his own qualities, and representing tendencies of forces at his back. That he was a pilot of the thought of France has been less commonly taken for granted; yet, notwithstanding early opposition and recent obscurement, he has probably meant more to the world at large for the past seventy years than any other French man of letters in the same period. To be a public character in this sense required an unusual combination of strong elements: Hugo was intensely serious, and applied his personal force in many directions, now here, now there, but never failing to impart his individual touch. His public career in the narrow sense, as an influence in politics, is not without significance : he was almost officially the poet laureate of the Restoration ; he was a member of the Assembly before the coup d’état ; he was the Exile from 1851 to 1870; he sat in the Assembly in 1871, and in the Senate after 1876. Moreover, he responded with ready sensibility to the spirit of the times, as it spoke in varied language at different epochs. In his early years he agonized between two ideals, — the dream of Napoleonic empire and the fiction of a permanently restored Bourbon kingship, — and for a while found safe common ground in Roman Catholicism as a basis of conservative government. Toward the middle of the century, when scientific research was establishing realms independent of political boundaries, he became more detached from politics and dogma, and gave himself up more to what he regarded as his function of prophecy. But when a usurper forced politics back upon his attention, Hugo shared the feeling of almost all the literary men around him, and excelled them all in promptitude and decisiveness of action. In the closing years of his life, on his return from exile, he flung himself into every movement for the aggrandizement of his country, with a leaning always toward socialism.

On the whole, his existence made for the maintenance in France of what is most admirable in her recent history, of what has been perhaps her principal contribution to the world, — a culture urbane, practical, and most conservative, but ready to kindle into radical idealism upon occasion. Yet it appears that his influence of this general character was much less profound than men used to imagine. These, however, are considerations which concern more particularly his own countrymen. They may well be more interested than we can be in estimating his influence upon domestic life, upon public regard for religion and morality, upon the spirit of nationalism, upon social progress. Still, it may be worth while to observe that his reputation as the poet par excellence of domestic life became a subject of mirth to his detractors when he published Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois, in 1865; and that his humanitarian ideals have been termed naïve and hollow; and that he is declared to have been in general behind the spirit of the age, rather than its guide, in matters of religious and ethical thought, while, as to his political influence, he is held responsible more than any other man for the creation of the Napoleonic legend. Really, critics of the first order in France have come to regard Victor Hugo’s mark upon the culture of his age as the impress of only a human hand, and not the compelling touch of a god, and they have almost ceased to discuss the matter.

What engages their attention still is the delimitation of his qualities as a literary artist, and the question of the permanency of his fame. It would be interesting to know how many times on the 26th of February of this year the words, “ Ce siècle avait deux ans, ” will be quoted and these subjects opened for debate. It is an impressive thought that,although Victor Hugo’s latest publication appeared in 1901, his place in French literature began to be warmly discussed more than seventy years ago. William IV. was not yet King of England, nor Andrew Jackson yet President of the United States, when Victor Hugo’s rank and influence in literature were already matters of animated interest to French critics.

At that time — let us say in 1828 — it was almost generally conceded that the Odes et Ballades, notwithstanding the reactionary tone of their political ideas, were poetry of considerable merit. In versification they were just bold enough to give a sense of originality, though not so audacious as to excite alarm. But the drama Cromwell, published in 1827, with its preface challenging the sacred traditions of the French theatre, had awakened a storm of protest, and for many years to come, years that witnessed the publication of Hernani, Marion Delorme, Le Roi s’amuse, Lucrèce Borgia, Marie Tudor, Angelo, and finally Ruy Blas in 1838, his principles of dramatic composition and his methods of versifying in dramatic form were objects of much hostile criticism and, in equal measure, of enthusiastic praise. It was not till about 1840 that it became clear how large a field was really in dispute between classicism and romanticism, — not the drama, merely, but every form of imaginative composition, and indeed every one of the fine arts. Victor Hugo, more than any other writer, had blown the spirit of romanticism wide over the dry grass in every quarter of the plain, throwing Notre Dame de Paris as a firebrand into the region of prose fiction, and four astonishing handfuls of sparks into the thirstier levels of lyric poetry. It was not till some time after the publication of these four volumes — Les Orientales, 1829, Les Feuilles d’Automne, 1831, Les Chants du Crépuscule, 1835, and Les Voix Intérieures, 1837 — that the public realized their import as contributions to the general struggle between the schools. When this realization came, and men began to look back upon the large and varied work of the poet, dramatist, and romancer, Hugo was recognized on all hands as a great force in contemporary literature, as perhaps the greatest living French writer, and certainly as a man of whom it was safe to predict that he would have a remarkable career. In and about 1840 the world came around to him, and his election to the Academy, early in 1841, only sealed and confirmed the popular admission of his extraordinary claims to honor.

Three men, however, whose suffrage really counted for almost as much as the favor of all the rest of France, held back in a manner that, as was afterwards made only too evident, embittered for Hugo the wine of success. One of them, Sainte-Beuve, offended by silence. Considering his interest in the points at issue, and how many contemporary celebrities were among the subjects of his discourse, we may well be surprised that the name of Victor Hugo occurs so seldom in his Causeries and Portraits after 1835. SainteBeuve was, ostensibly at least, among the romanticists, though we know now that in reality he was a very uncertain convert and his heart was in the other camp. Many years later he “wrote of himself: “I am a man most thoroughly suppled and broken in to metamorphoses. I began frankly and crudely with what was most advanced in the eighteenth century, — with Tracy, Daunou, Lamarck, and physiology: there is the real basis of my intellectual character, after all. Thence I passed through the doctrinaire and psychological school of the Globe newspaper, but with mental reservations and without adhering to it. From that stage I went on to poetic romanticism and into the circle of Victor Hugo, and there I appeared to make a complete surrender of myself. ... In all these voyages of my spirit I never alienated my will and my judgment, except for a brief time in the circle of Victor Hugo and under the influence of a charm.” These last words are said to be at once an explanation and a confession, and to allude to Madame Hugo. In 1868, on reediting his Portraits Contemporains, which contained flattering reviews of Hugo’s work between 1831 and 1835, Sainte-Beuve appended a footnote which explains his silence after that period: “On reading them over again to-day, I admit that these articles on Victor Hugo satisfy me very imperfectly. And yet they are (if we add to them two old articles, the first of all, on the Odes et Ballades, inserted in the Globe of the 2d and 9th of January, 1827) the only pieces of criticism which I have written expressly about his works. I have not treated of his dramas or his later romances or any of his collections of poetry subsequent to 1835; or if I have perchance written anything for my private view, I have suppressed it. ” And he goes on to say that, dazzled though he has often been by Hugo’s genius, he has never, since those early days, yielded him complete admiration: “Always, in praising or blaming him, I have wished him to be a little different from what he was or could be; always I have drawn him more or less toward me, according to my tastes and individual preferences; always I have set up, instead of the puissant reality before which I found myself, a softened or embellished ideal, which I detached from the reality to suit myself.”

Sainte - Beuve has had enemies enough, who have insinuated that jealousy, either literary or private and very personal, was the real cause of his negative attitude toward Hugo after 1835. But knowing, in the light of his whole career, that his delicate and after all classical taste could not have surrendered to Ruy Bias or La Légende des Siècles, we may easily now admit that, whatever the temptation to unfairness may have been, he really was perfectly true to himself in refusing further homage to Hugo. If he rejected Balzac, who thrashed about like leviathan in the sea of prose fiction, which to Sainte-Beuve was comparatively remote and uninteresting, by how much the more must the great critic have turned his eyes away from the monstrous ébats of Hugo in the home waters of drama and lyric poetry! If to bring the public back from its temporary infatuations to what has always been pleasing and elevating, if to dispel engouements by recalling attention to classic beauty and eternal truth, — if this be, as Sainte-Beuve declared it was, the properest function of criticism, he was never more truly fulfilling his mission, according to his light, than in maintaining with regard to Hugo a disquieting and piquant reserve.

But Nebuchadnezzar - Hugo could never forgive. And as the three stanch men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, refused, what time they heard “the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music, ” to fall down and worship the image which the king had set up, so not only Sainte-Beuve, but two other critics of firm judgment and cultivated even if somewhat old-fashioned taste were cast into the fiery furnace of Hugo’s rage and fury, and “the form of his visage was changed against ” Désiré Nisard and Gustave Planche.

The music of Babylon was not more varied and captivating than the harmonies which Hugo’s orchestra was at this time performing. Between the publication of Les Orientales in 1829 and Les Rayons et les Ombres in 1840 three other notable collections of lyric poetry appeared, — Les Feuilles d’Automne, Les Chants du Crépuscule, and Les Voix Intérieures.

Here were enough, if quantity, variety of form, novelty of matter, and personality of tone suffice to make a poet great, — here were surely enough, we might suppose, to compel the adhesion of every reader. Indeed, if Hugo had died in mid-career, these volumes would go far to establish a very considerable fame for him. Nisard and Planche, with what now seems perfect impartiality and good temper, with seriousness and deference and a high sense of responsibility, wrote discriminatingly, and incurred Hugo’s lasting hatred, though they really gave enthusiastic acknowledgment of his lyric genius. Nisard, indeed, was at first wholly favorable to Hugo. In reviewing Notre Dame de Paris and Les Feuilles d’Automne, in 1831, his praise was without reserve; and from him, a most conservative critic, it meant much, and was of great service to the poet. Why, then, does Hugo, thirty years later, in the time of his apotheosis, when mildness might have been expected from the god, go out of his way to vent his rancor on Nisard, with grotesque ingenuity of insult ? It is because Nisard, admirer of his poetry though he was, yet ventured to qualify and to offer suggestions.

No man was better fitted to do this, and it had been well for Hugo if he had lent a less credulous ear to adulation, and paid some attention to Nisard’s kindly advice. The immediate cause of Hugo’s bitterness was an article by Nisard, published in the Revue de Paris in 1836, which began inauspiciously as follows: “The last three productions of Victor Hugo have given some anxiety to his best friends.” The essay is, however, sufficiently impersonal, and deals with general principles. The following extract, for example, is criticism of the highest order, penetrating, illuminating, large, and based on exact knowledge: “An imagination fecundated by a powerful memory, — here is the whole of M. Hugo’s talent: it is by this that he is truly an innovator in our country, where we have no instance of a great writer who possessed nothing but imagination; it is by this that he has made a great stir, that he has aroused the younger generation, that he has acquired a tumultuous kind of glory. An imagination at once exact and abundant, with no element of feeling and without the balancing restraint of reason, but able sometimes to make a show of the former, and stumbling sometimes upon the sound and correct views of the latter, — this is all there is to M. Victor Hugo. And when we say that he has been an innovator, it is not meant as praise. In France, a country whose literature is essentially practical and full of sense, a writer who has only an imagination, even though it be of the rarest kind, cannot be a great writer. The honor of our great poets consists especially in having expressed in perfect language some of the verities of practical life, — in having created, in some sort, the poetry of reason. Genius, in France, is an admirable concourse of all the fitnesses at once.” And in the same article Nisard remarks : “If there is truth in what you have just read, you must conclude that what we appeared to fear at the beginning of this article as a thing possible is perhaps a thing close at hand and inevitable, — to wit, the literary death of M. Victor Hugo.”

It cannot have been agreeable for Hugo to read this prophecy, even though it was followed, two pages later, by the admission that a poet so richly though defectively endowed might die and rise again, purified and strengthened, to run a more glorious course. This resurrection, Nisard ventured to suggest, could come about only if the poet, turning a deaf ear to flatterers, should “tear himself away from his false glory, and dip his soul in the double source of eternal thoughts, — solitude and reason.” And this is what Hugo did, in part, difficult as it must have been for him; and to this retirement to deeper feelings and the solitude of grief he owed unquestionably the new birth of his genius which we observe in Les Contemplations.

It was not a voluntary retirement and Nisard had little enough to do with it. We must attribute Hugo’s nearest approach to genuine human sympathy, and, in the opinion of many readers, his most affecting poetry, to his daughter’s death, in 1843. Until then his life had been precociously progressive. He had reached the various stages of his domestic happiness and his public celebrity very early. His successes had been uninterrupted and cumulative. It is the general testimony of his contemporaries that this had spoiled his personal character; that he was self-willed, self-centred, and vain. His personality may be pertinent to our purpose if, as his critics began to observe about 1835, he was too egotistic to give up his literary mannerisms, fertilize the barren portions of his mind, enrich his individuality by going outside of himself in sympathetic projection, and strengthen his reason by exact discipline.

A few characteristic passages from Hugo’s poetry of that period will indicate what his critics had in mind. There is something of Shelley’s doctrine, though none of the poignant appealingness of Shelley’s pain, none of Shelley’s convincing seriousness, in the lines from the poem to the Greek hero Canaris, in Chants du Crépuscule: —

Again, from the poem Sunt Lacrymæ Rerum, in Les Voix Intérieures: —

And again, the amazing line in praise of poets: —

These assertions of the poet’s prerogative, these exaggerated statements of the poet’s function, are not the “sound and correct views ” which Nisard considered essential to great poetry. We have in Shelley many passages of the same import, but expressed plaintively rather than bombastically. What seems pompous in a man fed full on praises may have the dignity of a brave challenge to fate in one whom the world has treated ill, or who sincerely believes himself afflicted. Of the note of merely personal vanity instances are to be found on almost every page of the volumes to which Nisard referred. In the poem on the death of his brother Eugène, in Les Voix Intérieures, we have in one stanza several of the elements that gave offense: the eternal Moi, the consciousness of being a celebrated poet, and an unnecessary ostentation of grief, — grief without cause, often, and evidently a poetical “property: ” —

He was careful enough not to hide “the fox.” It was a “property.”

And Gustave Planche, to merit the insults which Hugo fastened to his name in after years, — what was the enormity of his offense ? Only that he followed Nisard, two years later, with a more thoroughgoing examination of the poet’s tendencies, and expressed dissatisfaction with the monotony and insignificance of his ideas, and amusement at his vanity, his jactance. He wrote with cruel courage as follows: “M. Hugo has reached a decisive hour: he is now thirty-six years old, and lo! the authority of his name is growing less and less. ... As for the works which he has signed with his name during the last twenty years, he must make up his mind to see them disappear soon under the invading flood of oblivion. This is a hard saying, I admit, and yet it expresses without exaggeration a thought to which many minds have already given admittance. However, the hard saying need not be taken in an absolute sense; if the works of M. Hugo seem to us to be condemned to speedy forgetfulness, the name of M. Hugo will find a place among those of the boldest, the most skillful, the most persevering innovators, and surely this incomplete glory is not without value. ... If he tries a new course, if he transforms himself, if he seeks a new birth, if he renounces the love of words for the love of ideas, in two years criticism will have to pronounce upon a man whom we do not yet know.” Admitting that Hugo’s original endowment had been well cultivated in one respect, and that he had wonderful command of words, Planche continues : “He says all he wishes to say, but I must add that he has nothing to say. . . . He forgets to feel and to think.” He dismisses Hugo’s dramas with something like disdain: “The dramas of M. Hugo are, in our opinion, the feeblest part of his works.”

The critics of that day were very little affected by Hugo’s romances, except as throwing light on the poet’s temperament and resources of mind and heart. In their view, the dramas, also, while extremely important as “ innovations, ” possessed far less intrinsic value than the poems. Indeed, as we shall see, the critics of our own day maintain essentially the same attitude.

These “hard sayings ” date from 1838. Within five years Hugo did much to make them seem unjustly severe by writing a large part of Les Contemplations and of Les Misérables. Yet as we read the works upon which Nisard and Planche based their criticism we must admit its cogency. Much as the poetry of those early volumes may stir us, we feel how unfortunate it would have been for Hugo and for the world if he had allowed himself to become more confirmed in his mannerisms, and had continued to be satisfied with his emotional and intellectual range. The poems of Les Contemplations show perhaps no very marked technical advance ; but that was not necessary. No one could ask for better technique than Hugo had already acquired; and if he afterwards made wonderful progress, it was simply heaping up the measure of perfection. But it is a new man speaking now. It is a man who has suffered. Varied as are the subjects in this collection, and great as is the advance in emotional and intellectual maturity shown by many of the poems, one series of pieces is the real heart of the whole, and their superior loveliness indicates what was no doubt the principal cause of the improvement. These are the poems which commemorate his daughter’s death. They fulfill the requirement of his critics, that he should make self subordinate, and write at the dictation of love or some other universal passion. Hence this dolce stil nuovo. Modern French poetry has nowhere expressed more touchingly the deep heart of man.

In 1841 Hugo was received into the Academy, and in 1845 he was made a peer of France. After the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, he left the country, and was formally banished. He sojourned at Brussels and on the island of Jersey, and finally settled in Guernsey, where he made his home till September, 1870. When offered amnesty he declined it, and returned to France only when the empire had dissolved. In 1853 he published a volume of poetical satire against Louis Napoleon and his adherents, called Les Châtiments. Three years later he published Les Contemplations, a large part of which, however, had been written before his exile. The first series of La Légende des Siècles appeared in 1859, Les Misérables in 1862, Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois in 1865, Les Travailleurs de la Mer in 1866.

The romances being, after all, of inferior importance as compared either with the novels of the best French writers of fiction — Balzac, let us say, or George Sand — or with the poetry of Hugo himself, we may, in this brief sketch, leave them out of consideration. Their most striking qualities, perhaps, are a vague but emphatic humanitarianism and an inconsecutive style, which set them apart from the writings of other men, in a place honorable or low according to the reader’s feeling for reality and prose. But whatever one’s opinion of their artistic excellence may be, their fervid didactic passages, their soaring flights of vision, and their pervading lyric afflatus possess independent value, and make a strong appeal, especially to the young.

La Légende des Siècles is a collection of narrative poems, in epic style, but often unmistakably lyric in spirit. They were designed to present in concrete episodes a history of civilization. Some of them, a great many of them, are of a very high order. Victor Hugo nowhere else performs more astounding miracles of versification and diction, his fertility is nowhere else so abundantly illustrated; whether true to history or not, many of these narratives give to the dead past an undeniable vitality. We almost forget what critics like M. Lemaître have called to our attention, namely, that the general ideas which are insisted on so strenuously are few and commonplace. It is, for the time being, enough for us to realize, with admiration and gratitude, that this great lyric poet was also a narrative poet, endlessly resourceful, with almost as much virtuosity at his command as a Chaucer even, or a Schiller, and able here and there to write with entire objectivity.

Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois are masterpieces in a lighter vein. Their subjects, it may be said in general, are the same as those favorite topics of Béranger, the mansard and alcove of the Latin Quarter. The songs of Béranger, however, are gayety itself, and sufficiently unreal to possess a certain innocency, a certain detachment. But Hugo’s reminiscences — if they are reminiscences — dwell feelingly upon points which Béranger touched lightly. We look curiously at the date of the volume.

L’Année Terrible, published in 1872, is a collection of poems occasioned by the war, the siege of Paris, and the Commune. Quatrevingt-treize, Hugo’s third monumental romance, was published in 1874. Between that date and his death appeared two more series of La Légende des Siècles; L’Art d’être Grand-père, a delicious picture of his home life in old age; Les Quatre Vents de l’Esprit; and other less notable but equally large volumes of poetry, which contain signs of failing genius. Several new volumes of his poetry have been printed since his death, among them Toute la Lyre, which includes many poems of high quality, dating from various periods of his life.

It may be said that between 1838 and 1885 Hugo’s literary reputation received scarcely a single check. On his return to France he entered upon such a period of idolization as no other man of letters ever enjoyed, — longer than the period allotted to Voltaire. Of his popularity there can be no doubt. But literary criticism in France is admirably independent of mere popular vogue. The two most authoritative critics twenty years ago, not to say the two most magisterial, were probably Faguet and Schérer. About the time of Hugo’s death the former wrote an analysis of his qualities, which marks an epoch in the history of opinion on this subject. M. Faguet did not hesitate to avail himself of what was known of Hugo the man, in order to understand his works, and he says, “The truth is that Victor Hugo was an ordinary and mediocre character.” In support of this judgment he mentions Hugo’s rancor, his swollen vanity, his want of tact, his having no sense of the ridiculous,— in short, his pedantry. “Of real wit, such as was possessed by La Fontaine, Molière, Voltaire, and Heine, Victor Hugo had not a trace,” although he did, M. Faguet admits, have an inferior species of wit, “a certain dashing, unbridled, and adventurous fancy.” M. Faguet grants him, also, a certain kind of sensibility: not the finest kind, but rather, indeed, a common, bourgeois kind, which most men possess, though few have ever turned it to so much account in literature. Proceeding in his analysis, M. Faguet remarks: “It is easily seen that he has few ideas, and even that he does not care for ideas, nor for men who possess them; and at the same time we behold him talking incessantly about ideas, and forever exalting ‘ thinkers, ’ ‘ great minds, ’ and ' sublime verities.’ ... It is a commonplace to say that he is a trivial moralist and not well acquainted with man, and that the heroes of his novels and dramas are not alive and have no concreteness and complexity, being only the magnificent speaking-trumpets of his sonorous muse, and by the same token hollow as a horn.” It may, at first thought, seem as if a mediocre man, deficient in refined sensibility and in wit, and so ill equipped with general ideas, could hardly, then, be a great poet; but M. Faguet, with some delicate manœuvring, presently discovers, in Hugo’s power of composition, his mastery of diction, and his gift of rhyme and rhythm, quite sufficient grounds for concluding: “He is our greatest lyric poet. He is almost our only epic poet. He would be, for style and rhythm, our most skillful artist in verse if La Fontaine did not exist.”

Is it not going too far, however, to call Hugo an epic poet ? If words mean anything, and if distinctions are to be preserved at all, he wrote no epic poem; and his narrative poems in epic style are disparate in tone, and possess no unity of subject. They are not even, therefore, branches of an epic cycle. Moreover, just as we may say that Browning, though employing for the most part lyrical and narrative forms, is really dramatic in temperament, and has imparted a dramatic spirit to nearly all his work, so Hugo, whatever form he may adopt, he it dramatic, narrative, or critical, verse or prose, is always and inevitably a lyric poet. He is a singer, and the subject, almost the only subject of his song, is himself, with his views, his feelings, his ideals.

Among judgments pronounced by men of eminent authority at the end of Hugo’s life, Schérer’s is one of the most favorable. It occurs, to be sure, in an article which is little more than a note, dated May 22, 1885, the day of Hugo’s death, and entirely eulogistic, as the occasion demanded. He writes: “ Hugo has been more and better than the head of a school: he has been a creator, an initiator. I see no one to compare with him in this, — neither Ronsard, nor Corneille, nor Voltaire.” He remarks “Hugo’s continual development, unceasing fresh departures, and new surprises ; his force of temperament, power of hard work, and length of life; the immensity of his production, the variety of his forms of expression.” In conclusion he calls attention to Hugo’s generous ideas and to his personal qualities, — his patriotism, humanity, and faith. “Yes, his faith! ” he exclaims. “Victor Hugo was an optimist, — that is to say, a believer ; he had confidence in human nature, in society and its future. Glory will never fall to the skeptics ; the people love only those who share the certitudes or the illusions on which they live themselves.” This is a sufficient account of the causes of Hugo’s popularity; but fame is a different kind of glory, and we may find more to enlighten us as to the progress of Hugo’s fame in writings more remote from the day of his death.

M. Brunetière and M. Lemaître will suffice for our purpose, both because of their eminence and because they represent two different manners of criticism. M. Brunetière, being especially interested in all that concerns the drama, has much to say about Hugo; but the long and short of it is that he dismisses his dramatic productions as of far less consequence than his lyric poetry, and concentrates attention upon this. In an essay written in 1886, his attitude reminds us that the point of view of the best judges has not changed since 1836. His appreciation of Hugo’s real excellence is enthusiastic, but even Planche does not analyze his defects with so much mordant energy. He admits that Hugo is the greatest lyric poet of France, and agrees with earlier critics in thinking that imagination was his master faculty. But he is keenly aware of his decadence, of the inferiority of much of his later work. “Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois,” he says, “marked the beginning of the decline, and, by imperceptible degrees, there remained of this poetical imagination in the Solitary of Hauteville House only an inimitable versifier, an astonishing rhetorician, and the old satyr who, if he showed his face already in Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois, displayed himself more cynically in Le Théâtre en Liberté.” This judgment is not too morose, in view of the documents. It is, indeed, disillusioning to find that the poet of domestic life, the inconsolable mourner, the celebrant of an old religion and the prophet of a new faith, “le songeur profond, ” “l’exile farouche, ” “l’homme à l’œil morne, ” “le vieux marcheur sombre, ” should sing even more ardently of Suzon and Fanchette than of his favorite archangels, and make the ludicrous admission that

“What was the use,” cries M. Brunetière, “of having poured forth so many Pleurs dans la Nuit, and of being called Victor Hugo, if one is to end thus like the singer of Lisette, but without ever having had his gayety ? ”

In a passage which is less expressive of offended taste, and therefore, perhaps, has greater weight, M. Brunetière remarks that “it is not by his ideas, which are few, of little import, of little originality, and seldom his own, that Hugo has influenced our age, but by his rhetoric.” He also concludes, with the older critics, that in French literature “Victor Hugo is perhaps the only poet who has never recognized any other law or submitted to any other domination than those of his imagination.” “While all the others,” he continues, “and — without mentioning our classics — while Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, in this century, realize, complete, and illuminate the idea by the image, Hugo alone never thought except in so far as he imagined; and as it is the rhyme that constitutes the core of his verses, so, even in his prose, one may say literally that the image creates the idea.” Is not this, we are impelled to ask, the natural and usual order of poetic creation ? But M. Brunetière has his ideals, which he finds in “the poetry of reason,” and it is a long time since the poetry of reason has been regarded as the highest standard in English. M. Brunetière shows that he is not inaccessible to Hugo’s charm, in the following enthusiastic terms: “Of the Victor Hugo of Les Contemplations and La Légende des Siècles, one may say that his fecundity of invention, and especially his poetic imagination, are more than incomparable, and are veritably unique in our literary history.”

M. Lemaître, in his amusing but fundamentally serious way, has been even less respectful to Hugo than M. Brunetière. Yet, like his predecessors, from Nisard to M. Faguet, he finds a saving quality in Hugo’s command of language. “If then,” he writes, “we attempt to define Hugo’s genius by what is essentially his own, I fear we must set aside his ideas and his philosophy; for they do not belong to him, or belong to him only by the excess, the enormity, the prodigious redundance, of the translation he has made of them. And, moreover, he has adopted them only because they lent themselves to this enormity and this excess of expression. With him, it is the manipulator of words, the man of style, who dominates the man of thought and feeling. To analyze and describe his poetics and his rhetoric is to define the whole of Hugo, — or almost. ” Then M. Lemaître shows how this virtuosity itself furnishes ideas, or at least produces great poetry: “He was the king of words. But words, after so many centuries of literature, are impregnated with sentiments and thought: they necessarily, then, by virtue of their combinations, forced him to think and feel. Thus this dreamer, who was so far from being philosophical, has at times deep verses, and this poet of much more imagination than tenderness has delicate and tender verses. Then, since the slightest idea suggests to him an image, and as images call up others and link themselves together in his mind with supernatural rapidity, the subject which he treats may be never so meagre and insufficient in its essence, yet the form in which he clothes it is a vast enchantment.” M. Lemaître protests, however, that even this enchantment fails with him, for he says, “Hugo never had more than one manner,” and remarks that the facility with which he has been parodied “proves at least that there is in the poetry of the author of Les Quatre Vents de l’Esprit an enormous share of almost mechanical and automatic fabrication, something in which neither the heart nor the mind is concerned.” And he asserts furthermore that “his failure to understand men’s souls and human life with its complexities is incredible.”

It is needless to say that the opinions quoted in this paper, though they faithfully represent the judgment of those men in France, during the last sixty-five years, who have been best qualified to write about Victor Hugo, do not coincide with the popular judgment. An account of Hugo’s literary reputation with the reading public would be a story of continued successes and accumulating praise, at least up to the time of his death. The public has not even made, in regard to his works, the primary discrimination which the critics one and all make tacitly and as a matter of course; for the public still thinks of Hugo as not merely a great poet, but a great dramatist and (pace Matthew Arnold) a great romancewriter. It is not often that an artist of any kind or degree has so thoroughly utilized all his resources in the service of the public. None of Hugo’s qualities were wasted. None of them, except perhaps the finest parts of his excellence as a versifier, were over the heads of the public. The steady-going world has appreciated, also, those elements of his success which bear a close analogy to business virtues, — the shrewdness, calculation, and foresight, the sense of opportuneness, the careful consideration of demand and supply, — and all this in a poet, in a romanticist, in a contemporary of Musset and Béranger! Length of days and quantity of work done, — the public is deeply impressed by these. To the critics, however, who realize how small an amount ultimately survives of the production of almost any writer, quantity is of little account. Will there be more of Hugo than of Musset in the anthologies five hundred years hence ? Which of the two utters the note of deeper feeling? Which speaks more nearly from the inmost heart of the age ? Criticism asks such questions as these, and cares less than the public about the variety and amount of an artist’s productiveness. If we remember how secure in English literature is the fame of Gray and of Keats, we shall find it easy to understand that criticism is probably right in affirming that quality is all.

On one point criticism and the popular mind are agreed. The optimism which Schérer notes with such lively appreciation was one source of Hugo’s acceptability with the world at large. Modern French poetry is dyed deep with melancholy. From André de Chénier down to the singers now alive, it is tinged with a vague sadness, which often seems to have no meaning. Of all these poets, Hugo has perhaps least often lent his ringing voice to tones of world-weariness or nervous distress or moral despair. His was a life so happy that even through his darkest expressions of sorrow there shines forth an acknowledgment of gratitude.

It would seem that in one respect the arbiters of his fame have failed to do him justice. To a foreign observer, they appear to make too little account of the reforms he effected in versification, in dramatic principles, and in literary standards generally. In other words, they seem scarcely to appreciate his importance as the chief of the romantic school. If we try to imagine the history of nineteenth - century French drama and poetry without Victor Hugo, surely these arts would have been poorer not only by the loss of their most accomplished and productive master, but also by the absence of those innovations for which more credit is due to him than to any other man, and which have by this time been so generally accepted that we fail to realize their value. A comparison from English literature will make the case clearer. Suppose that in 1817 English literature had been where it was in 1789, dominated almost entirely by classical ideals; and suppose that then a man had begun to be prominent whose works combined in themselves some of the most novel lyrical qualities of Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, and Mr. Swinburne, besides dramatic qualities with which our recent literature affords no parallel! This man would indeed have been an innovator. And if he had lived to be eighty-three years old, and remained productive and resourceful to the last, his career would have been comparable to that of Victor Hugo.

On the whole, however, it may as well be admitted that the verdict of the critics is just. It might perhaps here and there be a little more generous. But we must remember that Sainte-Beuve and Nisard and Lemaître, at least, began by being ardent admirers of Hugo. If they lost their enthusiasm and freed themselves from his domination, we may believe them when they tell us that the process was involuntary and painful. They could no longer constrain their better judgment. And their verdict will stand.

More and more, as education brings the masses up to a level where current literature becomes one of their interests, popularity and fame will have to be carefully distinguished. They rest on quite different bases. There is no longer any ground for the assumption that what the reading public enjoys will be approved by persons who know most or have the most refined taste. In Victor Hugo’s case, there is at present every indication that what literary history will say a hundred years hence will be something like this: “He was immensely popular in his day and long afterwards. Although he was a character and an intelligence of secondary order, he was popularly accepted as a leader of opinion and feeling in the nineteenth century. But posterity has hearkened not so much to the popular voice as to the great French critics of his time; and they found him wanting in many qualities which the larger public thought he possessed. In compensation, the critics appreciated, and posterity appreciates, more than the general public of his day ever did, Hugo’s wonderful mastery of the French language, Hugo’s energy and versatility, Hugo’s exuberant imagination.”

George McLean Harper.