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.
THE REVISED OLD TESTAMENT.
It required fifty years of the Elizabethan age to introduce that revision of the English Bible which has so long been the standard edition of the Holy Scriptures in our tongue. It would be strange if the revision of that standard Bible which has just been completed were to come into immediate and general use. The New Testament revision met with a harsh reception from the critics of conservative temper; and it certainly has some defects, though the sense of the original is more obvious, to use the mildest term, in the new than in the older revision. The revised Old Testament has consumed fourteen years of the labor of the English and American committees, and the most obvious fact is that it is a more conservative piece of work than the revised New Testament. The committees probably profited by the buffetings of their New Testament revision brethren; but they had a simpler task, since they had not to settle the text of the original Hebrew, whereas the Greek text of the New Testament is still a battle ground of criticism. After all, however, the two revisions constitute one “revised Bible,” and must stand or fall together. The general judgment may probably run to the effect that the New Testament is revised too much and the Old too little. There is a special defect, however, in the New Testament English—it is not idiomatic, and it is not always intelligible. There is a rumor that it will be re-revised into harmony with the conservatism which characterizes the new Old Testament. It is not to be overlooked that there are various demands made upon a revision. Those who most earnestly desire one have in view a more plain and understandable text for popular use. Wycliffe’s great thought, “a Bible understonden of the people,” is their desire. But the literary demands upon the revisers exclude intelligibility by the people as a governing rule. This group of demands defies the skill of any revision committee. They ask for improvements; but they object to any changes. The Bible as an Elizabethan classic is their admiration and they seem not to be willing that the people should have any other Bible. There would seem to be ample room for both revisions; let the literary people have their English of 1611, while the people have English of this century. We are not yet, however, sufficiently advanced in the thinking which revision requires to qualify even the critics among us to distinguish between a classic text for scholars and a plain text for the millions. A modern English Bible will come by and by; we can afford to wait, and meanwhile to study the fruits of the labors of a Revision Committee loaded down with a great weight of conservative environments. For it is not the classicist alone who stands guard over the old English text; conservative theologians regard that old text as too sacred to be modernized, and distrust modernizing as involving changes in the moral and religious influence of the Bible upon mankind. The intelligibility of the Bible is not, to such thinkers, a leading requisite; reverence for its mysteries ranks all other considerations. We are probably outgrowing this view of Holy Scripture; but it is an opinion strong enough yet to keep utterly dead English locutions in the revised Old Testament of 1885. This conservatism is much stronger in England than in this country; the American Committee desired to substitute modern for obsolete words.
That any changes have been made under such respectable and imposing auspices is a great gain to Christian knowledge. The thing is done; the grand old text has been subjected to a revision. It is quite possible that we are entering an age of biblical revision; and it should be remembered that the Bible of 1611 closed an age of revision. It was the last in a series of revisions, each of which contributed to the perfection of the English text. We can not be content with an English Bible which employs which for who, wist for knew, earing for plowing and ouches for settings. The American Committee was thoroughly right in desiring to use modern words in these and other cases. If any revision is to stand, it must contain such modifications of the old text. A satisfactory English text can not be attained so long as the English Christians insist upon retaining archaic forms of such insignificance as the foregoing; there must be an agreement to make an English text on Wycliffe’s principle of popular intelligibleness, before a revision can be of very high utility. The present revision breaks the ice; we have begun; some time or other we shall go on to the logical conclusion of the movement—a modern English Bible for all who use our mighty speech. The assent of the conservative to a single change concedes the principle of revision; his assent to many changes prepares the way for all that are necessary to the modernizing of the Book of Books.
SUMMER HEALTH AND PLEASURE.
The summer is looked forward to with eager desire and it is dismissed without regret by the residents of the temperate zone. The explanation lies partly, if not mainly, in our defective adaptation of ourselves to the hot season. Charles Lamb once wrote, “The summer has set in with its usual severity.” The wit covers a truth; we adjust ourselves so imperfectly to the heated term that we suffer from the high temperature. The art of living must include devices and cautions through which we get the good and shun the evil of each season. Men are slowly learning that to “enjoy life” on this planet one must pay the same price as for liberty—“eternal vigilance.” The summer of the North ought to be our golden time of health and enjoyment. We have the whole of the atmosphere to breathe from—not bits of it let into artificially heated spaces. There is shade for the noonday heats, and the evenings and mornings for exercise and refreshment of muscular energy. But the hot hours are often dangerous and the atmosphere may be poisoned by our own neglect of decaying vegetables or animal matter. We must aim to keep clean and keep all things about us clean; food should be lighter than in winter (less heat-producing); exercise should avoid the hours of fervent heat; the occupations should take a more leisurely pace; the scene of life should, if possible, be shifted for some week or weeks so as to diversify our mental interests and break the dreary monotony of long days spent in one environment of body and soul. The word which describes the art of summer life is moderation; but moderation is not indolence, though there is a natural tendency to drop into the laziness which characterizes barbarian humanity in hot lands. To be healthy and happy one should resist the disposition to be idle. Neither health nor happiness come to lazy people in any desirable measure. The best forms of both depend on activity; but in summer it must be moderate and regular. If, then, one has constant occupation, he should cultivate moderation of interest and exertion, shun the blazing noontide, and take his food as well as his exercise in reduced doses. Too much food, care, exercitation, these are our northern summer dangers. Our civilization is yet very imperfect in this region of art. We have attained to food, clothing, shelter. We do not quite understand how to use them all wisely; but beyond these lie the adjustment of exertion, rest, air, water, electrical and chemical instruments of vitality, and the inner forces of our own being. Happiness is the result of a complex mass of conditions and instruments of life acting upon the spirit and reacted against by the spirit. Our knowledge grows; but while it is growing we have to take for our text moderation, and elaborate the sermon each man for himself.
The great opportunities of the year come to us in summer. Nature is all alive to please and instruct us—to give us the delights of the eye and the inspiration of study. The world has been dressed with infinite art, to afford us a holiday which shall be full of instruction. We need travel to widen our vision of God’s modern Edens dressed by human art. We need an active intelligence, to see and understand the Eden world of summer. But all depends upon our care of our bodies. Health is the condition of all summer pleasures. Is it not strange that we will spend months and years learning how to use lifeless tools, and yet will not spend needed time to learn the management of this vital tool by use of which all happiness comes to us? Let us all try this time to keep the instrument of life in tune for the music of the summer; to make of the season of highest opportunity all there is in it for ourselves. Starting with that selfish purpose, we shall soon find that we need social food, and that here also, “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” Helping others to enjoyment is the healthiest of “health movements;” for no tonic is so spiritually exhilarating as the sight of other people’s happiness which we have made. The man who sends a child out of the city suffocation of summer time has a poor imagination if he can not enjoy the gambols of that child in the country meadows and groves as he never enjoyed a banquet in his own house. Doing as many generous actions as possible is one way to get both health and pleasure out of the summer.