Such a view was, of course, simply the reflex of the predatory artist’s own greed for money, luxury, fame and power. He lived alternately for art and Mammon. He would shut himself up alone in a secret place and write for weeks, even months, without seeing anyone. He would start work at midnight, clad in a white Benedictine robe, with a black skull-cap, by the light of a dozen candles, and under the stimulus of many pots of coffee. Having thus completed a masterpiece, he would emerge to receive the applause of Paris, carrying a cane with an enormous jeweled head. Having made another fortune and paid a small part of what he called his “floating debt,” he would plunge into the wholesale purchasing of silks and satins and velvets, furniture and carpets and tapestries and jewels and “objects of art,” vast store-rooms full of that junk whereby the bourgeois world sets forth the emptiness of its mind and the futility of its aims. Lacking money enough, his maniac imagination would evolve new schemes—book publishing, paper manufacturing, a journal, a secret society, silver mines in Sardinia, the buried treasure of Toussaint l’Ouverture, each of which he was sure was going to turn him into a millionaire overnight.
Balzac gives prominence to that type of men whom the French call “careerists”; that is to say, men who set out to make their fortune, at any cost of honor, decency and fair play. Balzac admired such men—for the simple reason that he himself was that kind. In his later years he met a wealthy Polish lady, Madame Hanska, who became his mistress; writing to his sister about it, he set forth what this meant to him, and his language was such as a “confidence man” would use, writing to a woman confederate. The alliance, he wrote, would give him access to the great world, and “opportunity for domination.”
Is the work of such a man propaganda? If you accept the common dogma that blind egotistical instinct, and the portrayal and glorification thereof, constitute art, while the effort to understand life, and to reconstruct it into a thing of order and sense and dignity, is propaganda—why then undoubtedly the “Comédie Humaine” of Honoré de Balzac is pure and unadulterated art. If, on the other hand, you admit my contention that a man who is born into a money-ravenous world, and who absorbs its poisoned atmosphere, and sets himself to the task of portraying it, not merely as real and inevitable, but as glorious, magnificent, fascinating, sublime—if you admit with me that such a man is a propagandist, why then you must reconcile yourself to enduring the opposition of all orthodox literary critics.
CHAPTER LXI
THE OLD COMMUNARD
Victor Hugo was born in 1802, three years later than Balzac. He grew up in the same world, but was not satisfied to contemplate its diseases; he sought remedies, and became a convert to revolutionary ideals, and so all critics agree that his work is marred by propaganda. He lived to be eighty-three years old, and went on writing and working to the very end, so that the story of his life carries us through practically the whole of the nineteenth century. We shall follow it, and then come back and retrace parts of the same story in the lives of other artists, French, German, British and American.
Hugo’s father was a revolutionary soldier who rose to be a general in Napoleon’s army. As a little boy the poet followed the armies from place to place in Switzerland, Italy and Spain. His mother was a Royalist, and the boy had an old Catholic priest for a tutor, and was taught the old dogmas, literary as well as religious and political. His conversion into a revolutionist was not completed until the age of forty-six. Having been brought about by contact with daily events, this conversion was of tremendous influence upon the thought of Europe.
He was a child of genius, and his prodigious activity began early. We find him composing a tragedy at the age of fourteen, and at the age of seventeen publishing a journal with the title of the “Literary Conservator.” He gets married upon a pension of a thousand francs, conferred upon him by King Louis XVIII, who has been put upon the throne to preserve Catholic reaction. Then comes King Charles X, who makes him a knight of the Legion of Honor at the age of twenty-three. But gradually the young poet’s “throne and altar stuff” begins to shown signs of independent thought; he composes a play in which Richelieu is portrayed as master of his king, and this is considered unsuitable for such ticklish times; the censor bars it, and the young poet’s personal intercession with the king does not avail.
All this time, you understand, French art is still under the sway of the so-called “classical” ideals of Voltaire and Racine; tragic dramatists have to obey the “three unities,” or they cannot get produced. But by 1830 the French people are sick of reaction, and ready to make their revolution again. As part of the change comes a surge of “romanticism” in the arts. Shakespeare is played in Paris for the first time; and Victor Hugo publishes a drama on the theme of Cromwell, with a preface in which he commits the blasphemy of declaring that Racine is “not a dramatist”! In the midst of the new revolution he produces a romantic play, “Hernani,” dealing with a revolutionary Spaniard of the Byronic type, who declaims all over the stage and dies sublimely.
The production of this play resulted in one continuous riot for forty-five nights. The leading lady protested, the hired claque revolted; so Victor Hugo called for help to the young artists of the studios, and they poured out of Montmartre and took possession of the theater. In those days the first purpose of romantic youth was to “shock the bourgeois” by strange costumes. Here was Théophile Gautier, nineteen years old, with long locks hanging over his shoulders, a scarlet satin waistcoat, pale sea-green trousers seamed with black, and a gray overcoat lined with green satin. Night after night the rival factions shouted and raged as long as the play lasted. All this in order to gain for dramatists the right to show more than one scene in a play, and more than twenty-four hours of their hero’s life!
Victor Hugo also wrote fiction and prose, and in every field he became the new sun of France. But he was not content with literary laurels; he went on seeking a remedy for the bourgeois disease. He espoused the cause of a poor workingman, who, having been tortured in prison, had killed the governor of the prison. The young poet came upon a novel remedy—to sow the Bible all over France. “Let there be a Bible in every peasant’s hut.” Here in America the Gideonites have tried out the idea, sowing a Bible in every hotel room—but for some reason there are more crimes of violence in the United States than ever before in any civilized country!