VICTOR HUGO.
The greatest of the French writers of this century has passed away from earth, after eighty-three years of a life which was, like Carlyle’s, full of work to the very end. Victor Hugo’s greatness is difficult to measure at this hour; we are too near to know whether this is an Alp or only a hill. That it has attracted the attention, the admiration, the homage of mankind for half a century would seem to mean that this was one of the three or four great lives of the nineteenth century. Victor Hugo came of a union of aristocratic and plebeian blood. His father’s tribe had been of the nobles since 1531; his mother was the daughter of a seafaring race. The current sketches of his father omit the most dramatic incident of Colonel Hugo’s career. We refer to his long chase and final capture of Fra Diavalo—the brigand hero of the opera which bears his name. In the whole history of brigandage in South Italy, there is no more exciting and romantic story than that of his hunt and capture of the “Friar-Devil” by the father of Victor Hugo. In the blood of the poet the plebeian mother triumphed at length over the Monarchist father, and Victor Hugo’s pen has rendered the Republicanism of France more valuable service than his father’s sword gave to the Napoleonic crown.
His genius was fortunate in the poverty which compelled him to work for bread, and the banishment which in 1853 threw him into exile, and again forced him to take up the severe literary labor which brought forth “Les Miserables” in 1862. This son of the aristocracy might have lived a life with out fruit if he had not abandoned the ideals of his father for those popular sympathies which made him the most dangerous enemy of Napoleon III. The change in his views came slowly. He was a Royalist under Louis Phillippe, and that king created him a peer of France in 1845. It was not until 1849 that he changed his political attitude, and he was then forty-seven years of age—so that he divided his life pretty evenly between the aristocratic and popular causes. His works show the influence of his political thoughts, and the differences between the earlier and later are very marked. The earlier works gave him the ears of the great world; the later won him the hearts of the people. Whether in prose or in verse, all that he ever wrote was poetry. His later prose is a collection of poems of human aspirations. It is idle to seek in them any system, they are emotion rather than thought; but the emotion is the throbbing of the universal human heart. He believed in God and in man. He rejected the religion of his people less under the stress of conviction than through the force of his hostility to the organized human world in which he saw men suffering. It was not his office to resolve the riddles of human pain; it was his to gather men’s tears into God’s bottle. It may be called a one-sided life; but it was on that side where great lives are too seldom found. It may be said that emotion is blind, passionate, dangerous, as Frenchmen have abundantly proved; but it is still true that the emotion which rouses men from lethargy is necessary to beneficent change, and that even though the wail of human misery must go up forever, we must honor the great souls who seek solutions of the mystery of evil in a happier ordering of human society. We need not become socialists to reverence Victor Hugo’s socialistic philanthropy. Its aim was high, and it has its great uses. Though only God’s bottle be large enough to hold the tears of his children, it is a noble poetry which considers the sorrows of the earth and seeks to pour the sunshine or hope into the low valleys of humanity. Hugo’s way may be the wrong way—probably it is—but it is good for men to hold fast the hope that there is some way through the sea to the promised land. There is a desert beyond the sea; but somehow we shall cross the desert into the Canaan of humanity.
It is, therefore, as a poet of the sorrows and aspirations of our race that we shall most profitably think of Victor Hugo. He was somewhat too French in spirit to be a poet of mankind; he was too egotistic to be on the heights of his human song; he would have been greater if his knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth had been deeper, and his imitation of him perfect in the measure of his great capacity; he would have left something unsaid which wounded men whose purpose was as high as his own, if he had been more Christian and less Hugoist. But why do we ask all things of all men? Victor Hugo did a great work in his own great way. A dangerous socialism has temporarily profited by his denunciations of society, but in the end of the account it will probably appear that he has advanced Christian socialism by the uplift he has given to human aspirations. Men are not so willing to go back to the fleshpots of Egypt, not so much in danger of leaving the bones of the whole race in the desert, more anxious to move on to their promised land.