What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

“‘No, madame,’ has been invariably the cold answer.

“‘Or——?’

“‘No; he is not in society.’

“‘Or——?’

“‘Oh, no! His works live an hour—too long—and are forgotten.’”

Now, are the writers of French literature of the present day, whose names will at once present themselves to every reader’s mind, to be deemed superior to those of Louis Philippe, who “lent their voices to the cause of treason, regicide, rebellion, or obscenity,” and were unrestrained by either “decorum, principle, or taste”? For it is most assuredly no longer true that the writers in question are held to be a “pariah caste,” or that they are not known and sought by “society.” The facilis decensus progress of the half century that has elapsed since the cited passages were written, is certainly remarkable.

There is one name, however, which cannot be simply classed as one of the décousus. Victor Hugo had already at that day made an European reputation. But the following passage about him from my mother’s book on Paris and the Parisians is so curious, and to the present generation must appear so, one may almost say, monstrous, that it is well worth while to reproduce it.

“I have before stated,” she writes, “that I have uniformly heard the whole of the décousu school of authors spoken of with unmitigated contempt, and that not only by the venerable advocates for the bon vieux temps, but also, and equally, by the distinguished men of the present day—distinguished both by position and ability. Respecting Victor Hugo, the only one of the tribe to which I allude who has been sufficiently read in England to justify his being classed by us as a person of general celebrity, the feeling is more remarkable still. I have never mentioned him or his works to any person of good moral feeling or cultivated mind who did not appear to shrink from according him even the degree of reputation that those who are received as authority among our own cities have been disposed to allow him. I might say that of him France seems to be ashamed.” (My italics.) “‘Permit me to assure you,’ said one gentleman gravely and earnestly, ‘that no idea was ever more entirely and altogether erroneous than that of supposing that Victor Hugo and his productions can be looked on as a sort of type or specimen of the literature of France at the present hour. He is the head of a sect, the high priest of a congregation who have abolished every law, moral and intellectual, by which the efforts of the human mind have hitherto been regulated. He has attained this pre-eminence, and I trust that no other will arise to dispute it with him. But Victor Hugo is NOT a popular French author.’”

My recollections of all that I heard in Paris, and my knowledge of the circles (more than one) in which my mother used to live, enable me to testify to the absolute truth of the above representation of the prevalent Parisian feeling at that day respecting Victor Hugo. Yet he had then published his Lyrics, Notre Dame de Paris, and the most notable of his dramas; and I think no such wonderful change of national opinion and sentiment as the change from the above estimate to that now universally recognised in France, can be met with in the records of European literary history. Is it not passing strange that whole regions of Paris should have been but the other day turned, so to speak, into a vast mausoleum to this same “pariah,” and that I myself should have seen, as I did, the Pantheon not yet cleared from the wreck of garlands and inscriptions and scaffoldings for spectators, all of which had been prepared to do honour to his obsequies?

But it must be observed that the violent repulsion and reprobation with which he was in those days regarded by all his countrymen, save the extreme and restless spirits of the Republican party, cannot fairly be taken as the result and outcome of genuine literary criticism. All literary judgments in France were then subordinated to political party feeling, and that was intensified by the most fatal of all disqualifications for the formation of sound and equable estimates—by fear. All those well-to-do detesters of Victor Hugo and all his works, the “Quoique Bourbons” as well as the “Parceque Bourbons,” the prosperous supporters of the new régime as well as the regretful adherents of the old, lived in perpetual fear of the men whose corypheus and hierophant was Victor Hugo, and felt, not without reason, that the admittedly ricketty throne of the citizen king and those sleek and paunchy National Guardsmen alone stood between them and the loss of all they held dearest in the world. Nevertheless, the contrast between the judgments and the feeling of 1835 and those of fifty years later is sufficiently remarkable.