Against M. Victor Hugo as a man I have necessarily no word to utter. But Mr. Swinburne compels one to say something about him as a poet. In this paper upon Mr. Tennyson and De Musset alone, we come upon the following phrases, all of them applied to M. Victor Hugo: “The mightiest master of the nineteenth century”; “One far greater than Byron or Lamartine”; “The greatest living poet”; “The godlike hand of Victor Hugo”; “Only Victor Hugo himself can make words thunder and lighten like these.” There is more, I think, of the same kind; but it perhaps suffices to mention these, for previous experience has made us familiar with the assumption that underlies them.
It would be as presumptuous in me to make the world a present of my opinion as to who is the greatest of modern poets, as I conceive it is in Mr. Swinburne to be perpetually pursuing that course. I will therefore content myself with saying that to attribute that distinction to M. Hugo seems to me simply ludicrous, unless clatter be the same thing as fame, and confident copiousness is to be accepted as a conclusive credential of superiority; that in the opinion of Sainte-Beuve, De Musset was far more of a poet than M. Victor Hugo; and that, with the exception of Mr. Swinburne himself, all English critics, with whom I am acquainted, entertain no sort of doubt that Mr. Tennyson is a more considerable poet than both De Musset and M. Victor Hugo put together with a large margin to spare. In any case, does Mr. Swinburne think that, by “damnable iteration” about the “great master,” he will alter the fact, or convert any human being to a creed in the propagation of which he seems unaccountably zealous? If he does, I recommend to his perusal the following brief observation of Sainte-Beuve, which he will find in a “Causerie” upon George Sand:
Ceux qui cherchent à imposer aux autres une foi qu’ils ne sont pas bien sûrs d’avoir eux-mêmes, s’échauffent en parlant, affirment sur tous les tons, et se font prophètes afin de tâcher d’être croyants.
I have said that the zeal of Mr. Swinburne in perpetually asseverating the unapproachable superiority of M. Victor Hugo is unaccountable. Perhaps, however, it is to be accounted for by reading between the lines of the following passage:
“As lyric poet and as republican leader, the master poet of the world has equally deserved to attain this obloquy, to incur this tribute from a journal”—the reference, I believe, is to the Figaro of Paris—“to which the principles of republican faith, a writer to whom the pretensions of lyric poetry are naturally and equally abhorrent and contemptible: nor could any law of nature or any result of chance be more equitably satisfactory than one which should gratify the wish—or the three wishes—that all who do not love the one should hate the other: that all such men should be even as M. Zola: and that all such writers as M. Zola, should be haters and scorners alike of republican principles and of lyric song.”
With every desire not to be intolerant, and to inform oneself of what is going on in this world, I think one may be pardoned for being unable to read M. Zola. I should as soon think of doing things I will not even name, as of reading L’Assommoir; and I fancy most Englishmen, whether Monarchists or Republicans, whether lyrists or the most prosaic folk in the world, entertain the same repugnance. But what, in the name of all that is fair, and manly, and magnanimous, have political opinions got to do with literary merit? Politics and literature are distinct, and though, as abundant experience has shown, one and the same man may make his mark in both, they are separate spheres of the same brain, and a man may be a good poet and a bad politician, or a bad poet and a good politician, or either good or bad in each capacity alike. Once you care one straw what are the political opinions of a poet, there is an end of you as a critic. Royalist, Republican, Communist, Deist, Pantheist,—what care I which of these a poet is, so he is a poet? As a fact, I fancy the greater sort of poets usually wear their creeds rather loosely; and if we find a poet, in his character of poet, a perpetually passionate advocate, misgivings as to his permanent fame may reasonably be entertained. Still no absolute rule can be applied to these irregular planets. One likes a poet to love his country, on the same principle which Cicero says made Ulysses love Ithaca, “not because it was broad, but because it was his own.” Mr. Tennyson loves his country warmly, and for this Mr. Swinburne rebukes him with indulging in the “beardless bluster of the Tory member, not of a provincial deputy, but of a provincial schoolboy.” This is perhaps the most inapt of all the inapt observations in his amazing piece of criticism.
I might say more, but I feel I have said enough, I hope, not too much of a paper which, it seems to me, would be not unjustly described, in Mr. Swinburne’s own words, as “pseudo-poetic rhapsody in hermaphroditic prose,” and concerning which a person whose authority all would recognise were I to mention him, observed to me, “This is the Carmagnole of criticism.” But, before concluding, I should like, if Mr. Swinburne will not think me presuming, to remind him, in all friendliness, that he, no more than I, is any longer in the consulship of Plancus; that some of us would have been thankful to have had our youthful follies treated as leniently as his have been; and that the least return he can make for the indulgence that has been extended to him in consideration of his genius, is to remember the lines of the really “great master,”—not M. Victor Hugo, but Shakespeare:
... Reverence,
That angel of the world, doth make distinction
Of place ’tween high and low.