The revolution of 1830 brought in a new king, Louis-Philippe, the ideal bourgeois monarch, an amiable gentleman who stayed at home with his wife and let the bankers and business men run the country. This king made Victor Hugo into a peer of France. But there was a new revolutionary outburst preparing, and in 1848 the bourgeois king was dethroned, and Victor Hugo was elected deputy to the new parliament, styling himself a “moderate Republican.” The French people at this time were in the same position as the American people at present; that is, they believed what they were told, and were ready to accept any tinseled circus-performer as a statesman. They chose for their president a wretched creature who happened to be a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and promised a return of all the old glories of France.
It took only a year of his government for Victor Hugo to realize that the one hope for progress lay in the program of the radicals. His two grown sons were thrown into jail for editing a paper attacking the policies of Louis Napoleon; and the father espoused the ideas of the old revolution, “the rights of man.” Egged on by the terrified financiers, Louis Napoleon overthrew the parliament and had himself made emperor. Victor Hugo sought to rouse the people, barricades were raised in the streets, and hundreds were shot down with cannon. The poet with great difficulty made his escape to Brussels, from which city he denounced the usurper—“Napoleon the Little” as he called him—with the result that the Catholic government of Belgium passed a law expelling him.
He fled to the channel island of Jersey, where he wrote a book of poems called “The Chastisements,” one of the most terrific pieces of denunciation in all the world’s literature. Shortly after this the bourgeois government of England combined with the bourgeois government of France to drive Russia out of the Crimea; there was a great war, and the people of Jersey objected to the poet’s attacks on the French emperor; they mobbed his home, and he had to flee to the neighboring island of Guernsey, where he settled down to the true task of a great artist, to reform the world by changing the ideals of the coming generations. For nineteen years he stayed in exile, until “Napoleon the Little” brought himself to ruin, and his country along with him. In the meantime Victor Hugo had published several volumes of marvelous poetry, and finally, after ten years’ labor, his masterpiece of fiction, “Les Misérables,” which appeared simultaneously in eight capitals of the world, and brought its author the sum of four hundred thousand francs.
Into this novel Hugo poured all his passionate devotion to liberty, equality and fraternity; likewise his blazing hatred of cruelty and tyranny. He tells the story of an escaped convict who reforms and makes a success of his life, but is pursued by the police and dragged back to prison. Incidentally the poet gives us a vast picture of the France of his own time, and the lives and struggles of the proletariat. The figure of Jean Valjean is one of the great achievements of the human imagination, and his story is a treasure of the revolutionary movement in every modern land.
“Napoleon the Little” led his country to war with Germany and was overwhelmingly crushed. Hugo came home in this crisis, and took part in the defense of Paris. Then came the terrible uprising of the starved and tortured masses, the Paris Commune. By this time the bourgeois savages had machine-guns, so that they could wipe out wholesale the idealism and faith of the people; they stood some fifty thousand workers, men, women and children, against the walls of Paris and shot them down in cold blood. Victor Hugo defended these Communards, and once more had to flee for his life.
After the peace with Germany, France was left a republic, and her great poet returned to live with his grandchildren, to labor for the working classes, and to pour out floods of eloquence in behalf of his social ideals. New movements arose, and the old man heard that he was theatrical, bombastic, unreal. All that is true to a considerable extent; for Hugo is like Shelley, having the defects of his great qualities. When the inspiration does not come to him, he learns to imitate it; he acquires mannerisms, he adopts poses. Following Milton’s suggestion of making an art work of his life, he sets his personality up as an embodiment of revolutionary idealism, he makes himself into a legend, a living monument, a literary shrine, one might say a literary cathedral. It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and we often take that step with Victor Hugo. But the masses of the people knew that the core of his being was a passionate devotion to liberty and justice; therefore they took him to their hearts, and his life is so blended with theirs that Victor Hugo and revolutionary France are two phrases with one meaning.
CHAPTER LXII
TYGER, TYGER!
What would Victor Hugo have been if he had had no social conscience? What would the romantic movement have amounted to if it had confined itself to the field of art? These questions are answered for us by Théophile Gautier.
We have seen him at the age of nineteen taking part in the battle of “Hernani” in his scarlet satin waistcoat; we see him at the same age leading the art students in mocking dances about a bust of Racine in a public square of Paris. After that we see him for forty-two years diligently following the art for art’s sake formula. He declares that he has no religion, no politics; he has no concern with any moral or intellectual question, he is purely and simply an artist, devoting himself with passionate fervor to the production of works of pure beauty. His fastidiousness is shown by the law he lays down, that a young artist should write not less than fifty thousand verses for practice before he writes one verse to be published.
And what is the content of this art? Gautier believes in one thing, the human body. He believes in it, not as an instrument of the mind, a house of the spirit, but as a thing in itself, to be fed and pampered and perfumed, and clad in silks and satins, and taken out to engage in sexual adventures. The pretensions of art for art’s sake turn out to be buncombe; the reality of the matter is art for orgy’s sake.