Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with in the
first two members of the series, it remained for "Les Travailleurs de la
Mer" to show man hand to hand with the elements, the last form of
external force that is brought against him. And here once more the
artistic effect and the moral lesson are worked out together, and are,
indeed, one. Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers
a type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion of forces
into the illimitable," and the visionary development of "wasted labour"
in the sea, and the winds, and the clouds. No character was ever thrown
into such strange relief as Gilliat. The great circle of sea-birds that
come wonderingly around him on the night of his arrival, strikes at once
the note of his pre-eminence and isolation. He fills the whole reef with
his indefatigable toil; this solitary spot in the ocean rings with the
clamour of his anvil; we see him as he comes and goes, thrown out
sharply against the clear background of the sea. And yet his isolation
is not to be compared with the isolation of Robinson Crusoe, for
example; indeed, no two books could be more instructive to set side by
side than "Les Travailleurs" and this other of the old days before art
had learnt to occupy itself with what lies outside of human will. Crusoe
was one sole centre of interest in the midst of a nature utterly dead
and utterly unrealised by the artist; but this is not how we feel with
Gilliat; we feel that he is opposed by a "dark coalition of forces,"
that an "immense animosity" surrounds him; we are the witnesses of the
terrible warfare that he wages with "the silent inclemency of phenomena
going their own way, and the great general law, implacable and passive":
"a conspiracy of the indifferency of things" is against him. There is
not one interest on the reef, but two. Just as we recognise Gilliat for
the hero, we recognise, as implied by this indifferency of things, this
direction of forces to some purpose outside our purposes, yet another
character who may almost take rank as the villain of the novel, and the
two face up to one another blow for blow, feint for feint, until, in the
storm, they fight it epically out, and Gilliat remains the victor;--a
victor, however, who has still to encounter the octopus. I need say
nothing of the gruesome, repulsive excellence of that famous scene; it
will be enough to remind the reader that Gilliat is in pursuit of a crab
when he is himself assaulted by the devil fish, and that this, in its
way, is the last touch to the inner significance of the book; here,
indeed, is the true position of man in the universe. But in "Les Travailleurs," with all its strength, with all its
eloquence, with all the beauty and fitness of its main situations, we
cannot conceal from ourselves that there is a thread of something that
will not bear calm scrutiny. There is much that is disquieting about the
storm, admirably as it begins. I am very doubtful whether it would be
possible to keep the boat from foundering in such circumstances, by any
amount of breakwater and broken rock. I do not understand the way in
which the waves are spoken of, and prefer just to take it as a loose way
of speaking, and pass on. And lastly, how does it happen that the sea
was quite calm next day? Is this great hurricane a piece of
scene-painting after all? And when we have forgiven Gilliat's prodigies
of strength (although, in soberness, he reminds us more of Porthos in
the "Vicomte de Bragelonne" than is quite desirable), what is to be said
to his suicide, and how are we to condemn in adequate terms that
unprincipled avidity after effect, which tells us that the sloop
disappeared over the horizon, and the head under the water, at one and
the same moment? Monsieur Hugo may say what he will, but we know better;
we know very well that they did not; a thing like that raises up a
despairing spirit of opposition in a man's readers; they give him the
lie fiercely as they read. Lastly, we have here already some beginning
of that curious series of English blunders, that makes us wonder if
there are neither proof-sheets nor judicious friends in the whole of
France, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what
may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign
tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth,"
and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps in Paris. It
is here that we learn that "laird" in Scotland is the same title as
"lord" in England. Here, also, is an account of a Highland soldier's
equipment, which we recommend to the lovers of genuine fun. In "L'Homme qui Rit," it was Hugo's object to "denounce" (as he would
say himself) the aristocratic principle as it was exhibited in England;
and this purpose, somewhat more unmitigatedly satiric than that of the
two last, must answer for much that is unpleasant in the book. The
repulsiveness of the scheme of the story, and the manner in which it is
bound up with impossibilities and absurdities, discourage the reader at
the outset, and it needs an effort to take it as seriously as it
deserves. And yet when we judge it deliberately, it will be seen that,
here again, the story is admirably adapted to the moral. The
constructive ingenuity exhibited throughout is almost morbid. Nothing
could be more happily imagined, as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
aristocratic principle, than the adventures of Gwynplaine, the itinerant
mountebank, snatched suddenly out of his little way of life, and
installed without preparation as one of the hereditary legislators of a
great country. It is with a very bitter irony that the paper, on which
all this depends, is left to float for years at the will of wind and
tide. What, again, can be finer in conception than that voice from the
people heard suddenly in the House of Lords, in solemn arraignment of
the pleasures and privileges of its splendid occupants? The horrible
laughter, stamped for ever "by order of the king" upon the face of this
strange spokesman of democracy, adds yet another feature of justice to
the scene; in all time, travesty has been the argument of oppression;
and, in all time, the oppressed might have made this answer: "If I am
vile, is it not your system that has made me so?" This ghastly laughter
gives occasion, moreover, for the one strain of tenderness running
through the web of this unpleasant story: the love of the blind girl
Dea, for the monster. It is a most benignant providence that thus
harmoniously brings together these two misfortunes; it is one of those
compensations, one of those after-thoughts of a relenting destiny, that
reconcile us from time to time to the evil that is in the world; the
atmosphere of the book is purified by the presence of this pathetic
love; it seems to be above the story somehow, and not of it, as the full
moon over the night of some foul and feverish city.