After yet another three years’ space the author of La Légende des siècles reappeared as the author of Les Misérables, the greatest epic and dramatic work of fiction ever created or conceived: the epic of a soul transfigured and redeemed, purified by heroism and glorified through suffering; the tragedy and the comedy of life at its darkest and its brightest, of humanity at its best and at its worst. Two years afterwards the greatest man born since the death of Shakespeare paid homage to the greatest of his predecessors in a volume of magnificent and discursive eloquence which bore the title of William Shakespeare, and might, as its author admitted and suggested, more properly have been entitled À propos de Shakespeare. It was undertaken with the simple design of furnishing a preface to his younger son’s translation of Shakespeare; a monument of perfect scholarship, of indefatigable devotion, and of literary genius, which eclipses even Urquhart’s Rabelais—its only possible competitor; and to which the translator’s father prefixed a brief and admirable note of introduction in the year after the publication of the volume which had grown under his hand into the bulk and the magnificence of an epic poem in prose. In the same year Les Chansons des rues el des bois gave evidence of new power and fresh variety in the exercise and display of an unequalled skill and a subtle simplicity of metre and of style employed on the everlasting theme of lyric and idyllic fancy, and touched now and then with a fire more sublime than that of youth and love. Next year the exile of Guernsey published his third great romance, Les Travailleurs de la mer, a work unsurpassed even among the works of its author for splendour of imagination and of style, for pathos and sublimity of truth. Three years afterwards the same theme was rehandled with no less magnificent mastery in L’Homme qui rit; the theme of human heroism confronted with the superhuman tyranny of blind and unimaginable chance, overpowered and unbroken, defeated and invincible. Between the dates of these two great books appeared La Voix de Guernesey, a noble and terrible poem on the massacre of Mentana which branded and commemorated for ever the papal and imperial infamy of the colleagues in that crime. In 1872 Victor Hugo published in imperishable verse his record of the year which followed the collapse of the empire, L’Année terrible. All the poet and all the man spoke out and stood evident in the perfervid patriotism, the filial devotion, the fatherly tenderness, the indignation and the pity, which here find alternate expression in passionate and familiar and majestic song. In 1874 he published his last great romance, the tragic and historic poem in prose called Quatrevingt-treize; a work as rich in thought, in tenderness, in wisdom and in humour and in pathos, as ever was cast into the mould of poetry or of fiction.
The introduction to his first volume of Actes et paroles, ranging in date from 1841 to 1851, is dated in June 1875; it is one of his most earnest and most eloquent appeals to the conscience and intelligence of the student. The second volume contains the record of his deeds and words during the years of his exile; like the first and the third, it is headed by a memorable preface, as well worth the reverent study of those who may dissent from some of the writer’s views as of those who may assent to all. The third and fourth volumes preserve the register of his deeds and words from 1870 to 1885; they contain, among other things memorable, the nobly reticent and pathetic tribute to the memory of the two sons, Charles (1826-1871) and François (1828-1873), he had lost since their common return from exile. In 1877 appeared the second series of La Légende des siècles; and in the same year the author of that colossal work, treating no less of superhuman than of human things, gave us the loveliest and most various book of song on the loveliest and simplest of subjects ever given to man, L’Art d’être grandpère. Next year he published Le Pape, a vision of the spirit of Christ in appeal against the spirit of Christianity, his ideal follower confronted and contrasted with his nominal vicar; next year again La Pitié suprême, a plea for charity towards tyrants who know not what they do, perverted by omnipotence and degraded by adoration; two years later Religions et religion, a poem which is at once a cry of faith and a protest against the creeds which deform and distort and leave it misshapen and envenomed and defiled; and in the same year L’Ane, a paean of satiric invective against the past follies of learned ignorance, and lyric rapture of confidence in the future wisdom and the final conscience of the world. These four great poems, one in sublimity of spirit and in supremacy of style, were succeeded next year by a fourfold gift of even greater price, Les Quatre Vents de l’esprit: the first book, that of satire, is as full of fiery truth and radiant reason as any of his previous work in that passionate and awful kind; the second or dramatic book is as full of fresh life and living nature, of tragic humour and of mortal pathos, as any other work of the one great modern dramatist’s; the third or lyric book would suffice to reveal its author as incomparably and immeasurably the greatest poet of his age, and one great among the greatest of all time; the fourth or epic book is the sublimest and most terrible of historic poems—a visionary pageant of French history from the reign and the revelries of Henry IV. to the reign and the execution of Louis XVI. Next year the great tragic poem of Torquemada came forth to bear witness that the hand which wrote Ruy Blas had lost nothing of its godlike power and its matchless cunning, if the author of Le Roi s’amuse had ceased to care much about coherence of construction from the theatrical point of view as compared with the perfection of a tragedy designed for the devotion of students not unworthy or incapable of the study; that his command of pity and terror, his powers of intuition and invention, had never been more absolute and more sublime; and that his infinite and illimitable charity of imagination could transfigure even the most monstrous historic representative of Christian or Catholic diabolatry into the likeness of a terribly benevolent and a tragically magnificent monomaniac. Two years later Victor Hugo published the third and concluding series of La Légende des siècles.
On the 22nd of May 1885 Victor Hugo died. He was given a magnificent public funeral, and his remains were laid in the Pantheon. The first volume published of his posthumous works was the exquisite and splendid Théâtre en liberté, a sequence if not a symphony of seven poems in dramatic form, tragic or comic or fanciful eclogues, incomparable with the work of any other man but the author of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in combination and alternation of gayer and of graver harmonies. The unfinished poems, Dieu and La Fin de Satan, are full to overflowing of such magnificent work, such wise simplicity of noble thought, such heroic and pathetic imagination, such reverent and daring faith, as no other poet has ever cast into deathless words and set to deathless music. Les Jumeaux, an unfinished tragedy, would possibly have been the very greatest of his works if it had been completed on the same scale and on the same lines as it was begun and carried forward to the point at which it was cut short for ever. His reminiscences of “Things Seen” in the course of a strangely varied experience, and his notes of travel among the Alps and Pyrenees, in the north of France and in Belgium, in the south of France and in Burgundy, are all recorded by such a pen and registered by such a memory as no other man ever had at the service of his impressions or his thoughts. Toute la lyre, his latest legacy to the world, would be enough, though no other evidence were left, to show that the author was one of the very greatest among poets and among men; unsurpassed in sublimity of spirit, in spontaneity of utterance, in variety of power, and in perfection of workmanship; infinite and profound beyond all reach of praise at once in thought and in sympathy, in perception and in passion; master of all the simplest as of all the subtlest melodies or symphonies of song that ever found expression in a Border ballad or a Pythian ode.
(A. C. S.)
Bibliography.—Victor Hugo’s complete works were published in a definitive edition at Paris in 58 volumes (1885-1902). The critical literature which has grown up round his name is very extensive, from the time of Sainte-Beuve onwards, and only a few of the more important books need here be mentioned for reference on biographical and other details: F. T. Marzials, Life of Hugo, with bibliography (1888); A. C. Swinburne, Study of Hugo (1886); E. Dupuy, Victor Hugo, l’homme et le poète (1886); Paul de Saint Victor, Victor Hugo (1885); F. Brunetière, Victor Hugo (1903); Jules Claretie, Victor Hugo, souvenirs intimes (1902). See also The Bookman for August 1904; Francis Gribble, “The Hugo Legend,” an adverse view, in Fortnightly Review (February 1910); and the article [French Literature].
HUGUENOTS, the name given from about the middle of the 16th century to the Protestants of France. It was formerly explained as coming from the German Eidgenossen, the designation of the people of Geneva at the time when they were admitted to the Swiss confederation. This explanation is now abandoned. The words Huguenot, Huguenote are old French words, common in 14th and 15th-century charters. As the Protestants called the Catholics papistes, so the Catholics called the Protestants huguenots. Henri Estienne, one of the great savants of his time, in the introduction to his Apologie d’Herodote (1566) gives a very clear explanation of the term huguenots. The Protestants at Tours, he says, used to assemble by night near the gate of King Hugo, whom the people regarded as a spirit. A monk, therefore, in a sermon declared that the Lutherans ought to be called Huguenots as kinsmen of King Hugo, inasmuch as they would only go out at night as he did. This nickname became popular from 1560 onwards, and for a long time the French Protestants were always known by it.
France could not stand outside the religious movement of the 16th century. It is true that the French reform movement has often been regarded as an offshoot of Lutheranism; up to I he middle of the century its adherents were known as Lutherans. But it should not be forgotten that so early as 1512 Jacobus Faber (q.v.) of Étaples published his Santi Pauli Epistolae xiv. ... cum commentariis, which enunciates the cardinal doctrine of reform, justification by faith, and that in 1523 appeared his French translation of the New Testament. The first Protestants were those who set the teachings of the Gospel against the doctrines of the Roman Church. As early as 1525 Jacques Pavannes, the hermit of Livry, and shortly afterwards Louis de Berquin, the first martyrs, were burned at the stake. But no persecution could stop the Reform movement, and on the walls of Paris and even at Amboise, on the very door of Francis I.’s bedroom, there were found placards condemning the mass (1534). On the 29th of January 1535 an edict was published ordering the extermination of the heretics. From this edict dates the emigration of French Protestants, an emigration which did not cease till the middle of the 18th century. Three years later (1538) at Strassburg the first French Protestant Church, composed of 1500 refugees, was founded.
Of all these exiles the most famous was John Calvin (q.v.), the future leader of the movement, who fled to Basel, where he is said to have written the famous Institutio christianae religionis, preceded by a letter to Francis I. in which he pleaded the cause of the reformers. The first Protestant community in France was that of Meaux (1546) organized on the lines of the church at Strassburg of which Calvin was pastor. The Catholic Florimond de Remond paid it the beautiful tribute of saying that it seemed as though “la chrétienté fut revenue en elle à sa primitive innocence.”
Persecution, however, became more rigorous. The Vaudois of Cabrières and Mérindol had in 1545 been massacred by the orders of Jean de Maynier, baron d’Oppède, lieutenant-general of Provence, and at Paris was created a special court in the parlement, for the suppression of heretics, a court which became famous in history as the Chambre ardente (1549). In spite of persecution the churches became more numerous; the church at Paris was founded in 1556. They realized the necessity of uniting in defence of their rights and their liberty, and in 1558 at Poitiers it was decided that all the Protestant churches in France should formulate by common accord a confession of faith and an ecclesiastical discipline. The church at Paris was commissioned to summon the first synod, which in spite of the danger of persecution met on the 25th of May 1559. The Synod of Paris derived its inspiration from the constitution introduced by Calvin at Geneva, which has since become the model for all the presbyterian churches. Ecclesiastical authority resides ultimately in the people, for the faithful select the elders who are charged with the general supervision of the church and the choice of pastors. The churches are independent units, and there can be no question of superiority among them; at the same time they have common interests and their unity must be maintained by an authority which is capable of protecting them. The association of several neighbouring churches forms a local council (colloque). Over these stands the provincial synod, on which each church is equally represented by lay delegates and pastors. Supreme authority resides in the National Synod composed of representatives, lay and ecclesiastic, elected by the provincial synods. The democratic character of this constitution of elders and synods is particularly remarkable in view of the early date at which it began to flourish. The striking individuality of the Huguenot character cannot be fully realized without a clear understanding of this powerful organization which contrived to reconcile individual liberty with a central authority.