French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns toward the land, endeavors to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road: he halts to get his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand....

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man!

Victor Hugo’s hero was involved thus in a quicksand—but the quicksand in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool—he was wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer. All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven. This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo’s writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric. Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.

That Victor Hugo willed to be buried exactly like a pauper did not prevent the occurrence of certain very important contrasts between his obsequies and the rites of an ordinary pauper funeral; perhaps, indeed, such a will on his part contributed to create the difference which at all events existed. The funeral attendance was said to be the most numerous ever seen in France. A million spectators were present. Three large wagons headed the procession filled with floral gifts. A beautiful diadem of Irish lilies was contributed by Tennyson, inscribed “To the World’s Greatest Poet.”

The French apotheosis of a national idol would not be complete without tribute from the theater. Accordingly, the Theâtre Français produced a drama by M. Rénan entitled “Mort,” in which the shades of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Voltaire, and Diderot hold a dialogue about human progress in the century to follow them, and, Corneille asking, “What poet will sing in that era, as sweet and tender as Racine, as logical as Boileau, as clear in style as Voltaire,” the genius of the age lyrically answers, “Hugo,” at the same time placing a crown on Hugo’s bust.

Victor Hugo the man, especially as he mellowed with old age, was a sunny, sweet, benignant nature. He was a hearty, one might almost say a partisan, believer in God—atheism was so offensive to him. Unfortunately, however, Victor Hugo’s theism was not such as to enforce departure, in his own personal practice, from that deplorable tradition of his country which has rendered so many distinguished French authors, from the earliest to the latest, offenders against the laws of marriage and of chastity.

2. Sainte-Beuve.

Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve’s fame as a critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is admitted to be a critic of the first rank. Nay, in the opinion of many, Sainte-Beuve constitutes a rank by himself, having no peers.

Sainte-Beuve’s range of subjects was very wide. He exercised himself to be equally open and fair toward all schools of taste and of opinion alike. At the outset, he was of the coterie of the romanticists. But he soon broke with these, either personally repelled by antipathies, or else unconsciously attracted by a secret sympathy of his own, too strong for his contrary will to resist, toward the classical standards respesented in the seventeenth-century writers. He never seems to feel himself more entirely in his element than when he is appreciating the literature of the French golden age.

As to religion, Sainte-Beuve, having had his phase of pietism even, ended by becoming a blank unbeliever. But his own antipathetic personal attitude of intellect and of heart toward Christianity he would not in the least allow to disturb the urbanity and serenity of his tolerance for the most orthodox Christian writers. Such, at any rate, was his standard and ideal.