French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

The accession of Louis Philippe to the throne of France and the first representation of Victor Hugo’s “Hernani” in Paris both occurred in the year 1830. The Bourbon or absolutist tradition in French politics and the classic tradition in French letters were thus at one and the same moment decisively interrupted. For, as in the commencing reign of Louis Philippe, the “Citizen King” of France, the French people became for the first time, under monarchical rule, a recognized estate in the realm, so, with the triumph of Victor Hugo’s “Hernani” on the stage, the hour may be said to have struck of culmination in splendor and in influence for the romantic movement in French literature. The dominance of the ideas indicated in the expression “the Romantic Movement” was then suddenly for the moment so overwhelming and so wide that it amounted almost to a usurpation of letters in France. We might indeed have written “The French Romanticists” as a fairly good alternative title to the present chapter.

1. Victor Hugo.

The men of 1830—we thus use a designation which has come to be established in French literary history—began each man his career in letters as a fighting romanticist. Victor Hugo was the acknowledged Achilles of the fight. Whoever wavered backward, Victor Hugo clamped his feet for his lifetime on the bridge of war, where his plume nodded defiance, seeming still to say for its wearer standing with a cliff of adamant at his back,

Come one, come all, this rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I.

Around Victor Hugo, as the towering central figure among them all, were mustered, though some of them not to remain in this comradeship with him, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, George Sand, De Musset. There were others than these, but these shall for us here constitute the group of 1830.

We shall be in yet better accord with Victor Hugo’s estimate of himself, if we take for his symbol a being mightier even than a demigod like Achilles. Let us do so and call him a Titan. But the past tense half seems an anachronism in speaking of Victor Hugo. The earth still trembles to his retiring footsteps and to the portentous reaction of his wrestle in war with the gods. This is his glory—he fought against Olympus, and, if he did not overthrow, at least he was not overthrown. Olympus in our parable was classicism in power; Victor Hugo was the genius of insurgent romanticism.

We thus repeat yet again terms which it would be difficult precisely to define. Classicism and romanticism are two forces in literature, seemingly opposed to each other, which, however, need to be compounded and reconciled in a single resultant, in order to the true highest effect from either. For neither classicism nor romanticism alone concludes the ultimate theory of literature.

Classicism criticises; romanticism creates. Classicism enjoins self-control; romanticism encourages self-indulgence. Classicism is mold; romanticism is matter. Classicism is art; romanticism is nature. Classicism is law; romanticism is life. Romanticism is undoubtedly first and indispensable; but so, not less, classicism is indispensable, though second. Neither, in short, can get along without the other. But Victor Hugo represents romanticism.

Victor Hugo’s personality seems to have been a literary force almost as much as was his genius. As his quantity was immense, so his quality was vivific. Such a man was certain to be not only the master of a school but the center of a worship. Mr. Swinburne’s late volume on Victor Hugo may be cited in extreme example of the deific ascription rendered by many at the shrine of this idolatry. Mr. Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, lost no opportunity to flout with indignity the claims of Victor Hugo to his supreme literary godship.

This great French writer has so recently died that, for the purposes of this book, he might almost be considered still living. At any rate, he has of late been so much talked about in current periodicals; he is, in some of his books, so freshly familiar to all, and, if we must say it, he offers a subject so perplexing to treat at this moment judicially, that we shall in some measure avoid responsibility by presenting him here with the utmost brevity—brevity, however, to be taken rather as a homage, than as a slight, to the unmanageable greatness by imminency of his merit and his fame.