In this same preface, too, Hugo justifies innovations in language, very necessary for an art whose new won freedom was to let it explore so much that was unknown. When the body changes, he asks, would you keep the coat the same? Triumphantly appealing to history, he points out that 'the language of Montaigne is no longer that of Rabelais, the language of Pascal is no longer that of Montaigne, and the language of Montesquieu is no longer that of Pascal.' He is justifying there the coloured prose of Chateaubriand, the opulent vocabulary of Gautier, and his own infinitely various effects in prose and verse.
Victor Hugo on Scott.
He was, until Sainte-Beuve took the work from his hands, at once the leader and the defender of Romanticism. And, critic and artist, severally and in the combination that we have grown accustomed to expect in fulfilment of both these functions, his was too sovereign a mind to adopt or borrow anything from another writer without knowing very clearly what he intended to do with it. Writing of Quentin Durward, he said: 'Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poètique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère.' That romance is Victor Hugo's own. His tremendous books are conceived in the manner of an epic poet rather than of a novelist or a romancer. The relations of his characters are not solely concerned with themselves but with some large principle that animates the book in which they live. If he is without Norns or Fates, if he sets his characters against a background other than that of Destiny, he substitutes the power of the law or the power of the sea, and illumines with a story not only the actors who take part in it, but also the spirit of the Gothic or the spirit of revolution.
The Waverley Novels and Hugo's romances.
To turn from the Waverley Novels to the romances of Hugo, is like stepping from the open air into a vast amphitheatre whose enclosed immensity is more overwhelming than the clear sky. Scott writes, on a plain human level, tales that we can readily believe, chronicles that are like private documents, or memoirs such as might have been written by the ancestors of our own families. Hugo does not tell his tale from the point of view of its actors, but puts them before us in a setting far larger than the one they saw. Their petty adventures are but threads chosen arbitrarily from a far more intricate design, and they themselves but illustrations of some greater motion than any to which in their own right they could aspire. There are hundreds of them, and with our narrow powers of interest and attention we fasten on one or two, like children choosing colours on a race-course, and follow them to the end, while Hugo, with his godlike eye, sees them all as threads in his pattern, poor, small lives, twisted in accordance with a design beyond their comprehension. In Scott's open air we can live and breathe and be content, and stand firmly with our feet upon the ground. In Hugo's amphitheatre we see an ordered spectacle of life and death, and are, as it were, present at the shapings of the ends of man.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Dumas on Scott.
There is a much less terrible pleasure to be had from the works of Dumas. Behind all Hugo's books is the solemnity, behind Dumas' the joy of living, the joie de vivre—the French phrase, although identical, seems better to express it. To compare Hugo's with Dumas' criticism of the Scott novel is to see very clearly the difference in weight and depth between the two men. Hugo sees in Scott the promise of another and a greater kind of romance. Dumas sees only that it is possible to improve on Scott's technique. He notices that Scott spends half a volume or so in describing his characters before setting them in action, and in his gay way justifies him by saying: 'Il n'y a pas de feu sans fumée, il n'y a pas de soleil sans ombre. L'ennui, c'est l'ombre; l'ennui c'est la fumée.' Sacrifice fifty pages of ennui to the gods, and then away with your story. Dumas decides to improve on this, to set his characters moving, and to pour his libations of ennui on the way. 'Commencer par l'intérêt, au lieu de commencer par l'ennui; commencer par l'action, au lieu de commencer par la préparation; parler des personnages après les avoir fait paraître, au lieu de les faire paraître après avoir parlé d'eux.' This is not very sublime, after the suggestion that Hugo won from the same subject; but it produced 'Les Trois Mousquetaires.' D'Artagnan is in a hubbub on the first page, and the ennui of description is given us so sparsely that, watching for it chapter by chapter, we almost consider ourselves swindled when we reach the last and are still without it. 'The purpose of this tale is not to describe interiors,' Dumas petulantly ejaculates when tired of talking about Cornelius' room in La Tulipe Noire. No; certainly not; neither of rooms nor of men. Damn psychology, and hey for full-blooded adventure. Dumas took a free stage for his duels and headlong rides and gallant adventures and ingenious stratagems. His men moved too fast not to feel themselves encumbered in a furnished room; there was little point in describing a landscape for them, since, before it was done, they were several leagues off in another; too intricate furniture in their own heads would have cost them hesitancies, unguarded stabs, and possible falls from a galloping horse.