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!
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.
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