There is here a quality in the narration more intimate and particular
than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that
the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and
his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as
much an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an
abuse of conventional conversation, such as may be quite pardonable in
the drama where needs must, but is without excuse in the romance. Lastly, I suppose one must say a word or two about the weak points of
this not immaculate novel; and if so, it will be best to distinguish at
once. The large family of English blunders, to which we have alluded
already in speaking of "Les Travailleurs," are of a sort that is really
indifferent in art. If Shakespeare makes his ships cast anchor by some
seaport of Bohemia, if Hugo imagines Tom-Jim-Jack to be a likely
nickname for an English sailor, or if either Shakespeare, or Hugo, or
Scott, for that matter, be guilty of "figments enough to confuse the
march of a whole history--anachronisms enough to overset all
chronology,"[2] the life of their creations, the artistic truth and
accuracy of their work, is not so much as compromised. But when we come
upon a passage like the sinking of the _Ourque_ in this romance, we can
do nothing but cover our face with our hands: the conscientious reader
feels a sort of disgrace in the very reading. For such artistic
falsehoods, springing from what I have called already an unprincipled
avidity after effect, no amount of blame can be exaggerated; and above
all, when the criminal is such a man as Victor Hugo. We cannot forgive
in him what we might have passed over in a third-rate sensation
novelist. Little as he seems to know of the sea and nautical affairs, he
must have known very well that vessels do not go down as he makes the
_Ourque_ go down; he must have known that such a liberty with fact was
against the laws of the game, and incompatible with all appearance of
sincerity in conception or workmanship. In each of these books, one after another, there has been some departure
from the traditional canons of romance; but taking each separately, one
would have feared to make too much of these departures, or to found any
theory upon what was perhaps purely accidental. The appearance of
"Quatrevingt-treize" has put us out of the region of such doubt. Like a
doctor who has long been hesitating how to classify an epidemic malady,
we have come at last upon a case so well marked that our uncertainty is
at an end. It is a novel built upon "a sort of enigma," which was at
that date laid before revolutionary France, and which is presented by
Hugo to Tellmarch, to Lantenac, to Gauvain, and very terribly to
Cimourdain, each of whom gives his own solution of the question, clement
or stern, according to the temper of his spirit. That enigma was this:
"Can a good action be a bad action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill
the sheep?" This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain undecided to the
end. And something in the same way, although one character, or one set
of characters, after another comes to the front and occupies our
attention for the moment, we never identify our interest with any of
these temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn. We soon
come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a general law; what we
really care for is something that they only imply and body forth to us. We know how history continues through century after century; how this
king or that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole
generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even feel as if
we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because our interest is not in
the men, but in the country that they loved or hated, benefited or
injured. And so it is here: Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we
regard them no more than the lost armies of which we find the cold
statistics in military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it
is the principle that put these men where they were, that filled them
for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power, now that they
are fallen, to inspire others with the same courage. The interest of the
novel centres about revolutionary France: just as the plot is an
abstract judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical force. And this has been done, not, as it would have been before, by the cold
and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but with bold, straightforward
realism, dealing only with the objective materials of art, and dealing
with them so masterfully that the palest abstractions of thought come
before us, and move our hopes and fears, as if they were the young men
and maidens of customary romance. The episode of the mother and children in "Quatrevingt-treize" is equal
to anything that Hugo has ever written. There is one chapter in the
second volume, for instance, called "_Sein guéri, coeur saignant_,"
that is full of the very stuff of true tragedy, and nothing could be
more delightful than the humours of the three children on the day before
the assault. The passage on La Vendée is really great, and the scenes in
Paris have much of the same broad merit. The book is full, as usual, of
pregnant and splendid sayings. But when thus much is conceded by way of
praise, we come to the other scale of the balance, and find this, also,
somewhat heavy. There is here a yet greater over-employment of
conventional dialogue than in "L'Homme qui Rit"; and much that should
have been said by the author himself, if it were to be said at all, he
has most unwarrantably put into the mouths of one or other of his
characters. We should like to know what becomes of the main body of the
troop in the wood of La Saudraie during the thirty pages or so in which
the foreguard lays aside all discipline, and stops to gossip over a
woman and some children. We have an unpleasant idea forced upon us at
one place, in spite of all the good-natured incredulity that we can
summon up to resist it. Is it possible that Monsieur Hugo thinks they
ceased to steer the corvette while the gun was loose? Of the chapter in
which Lantenac and Halmalho are alone together in the boat, the less
said the better; of course, if there were nothing else, they would have
been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable
workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and
trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin
unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our
ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to
the place where Lantenac meets the royalists, under the idea that he is
going to meet the republicans, it seems as if there were a hitch in the
stage mechanism.