I have tried it over in every way, and I cannot
conceive any disposition that would make the scene possible as narrated. Such then, with their faults and their signal excellences, are the five
great novels. Romance is a language in which many persons learn to speak with a
certain appearance of fluency; but there are few who can ever bend it to
any practical need, few who can ever be said to express themselves in
it. It has become abundantly plain in the foregoing examination that
Victor Hugo occupies a high place among those few. He has always a
perfect command over his stories; and we see that they are constructed
with a high regard to some ulterior purpose, and that every situation is
informed with moral significance and grandeur. Of no other man can the
same thing be said in the same degree. His romances are not to be
confused with "the novel with a purpose" as familiar to the English
reader: this is generally the model of incompetence; and we see the
moral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrown
externally over it like a carpet over a railing. Now the moral
significance, with Hugo, is of the essence of the romance; it is the
organising principle. If you could somehow despoil "Les Misérables" or
"Les Travailleurs" of their distinctive lesson, you would find that the
story had lost its interest and the book was dead. Having thus learned to subordinate his story to an idea, to make his art
speak, he went on to teach it to say things heretofore unaccustomed. If
you look back at the five books of which we have now so hastily spoken,
you will be astonished at the freedom with which the original purposes
of story-telling have been laid aside and passed by. Where are now the
two lovers who descended the main watershed of all the Waverley Novels,
and all the novels that have tried to follow in their wake? Sometimes
they are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man
against the sea and sky, as in "Les Travailleurs"; sometimes, as in "Les
Misérables," they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in
the epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in
"Quatrevingt-treize." There is no hero in "Notre Dame": in "Les
Misérables" it is an old man: in "L'Homme qui Rit" it is a monster: in
"Quatrevingt-treize" it is the Revolution. Those elements that only
began to show themselves timidly, as adjuncts, in the novels of Walter
Scott, have usurped ever more and more of the canvas; until we find the
whole interest of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that
Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being out of the
field of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as large
a place, playing (so to speak) nearly as important a _rôle_, as the man,
Gilliat, who opposes and overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a
nation put upon the stage with as much vividness as ever before the
fortunes of a village maiden or a lost heir; and the forces that oppose
and corrupt a principle holding the attention quite as strongly as the
wicked barons or dishonest attorneys of the past. Hence those individual
interests that were supreme in Fielding, and even in Scott stood out
over everything else, and formed as it were the spine of the story,
figure here only as one set of interests among many sets, one force
among many forces, one thing to be treated out of a whole world of
things equally vivid and important. So that, for Hugo, man is no longer
an isolated spirit without antecedent or relation here below, but a
being involved in the action and reaction of natural forces, himself a
centre of such action and reaction; or an unit in a great multitude,
chased hither and thither by epidemic terrors and aspirations, and, in
all seriousness, blown about by every wind of doctrine. This is a long
way that we have travelled: between such work and the work of Fielding
is there not, indeed, a great gulf of thought and sentiment? Art, thus conceived, realises for men a larger portion of life, and that
portion one that it is more difficult for them to realise unaided; and,
besides helping them to feel more intensely those restricted personal
interests which are patent to all, it awakes in them some consciousness
of those more general relations that are so strangely invisible to the
average man in ordinary moods. It helps to keep man in his place in
nature, and, above all, it helps him to understand more intelligently
the responsibilities of his place in society. And in all this
generalisation of interest, we never miss those small humanities that
are at the opposite pole of excellence in art; and while we admire the
intellect that could see life thus largely, we are touched with another
sentiment for the tender heart that slipped the piece of gold into
Cosette's sabot, that was virginally troubled at the fluttering of her
dress in the spring wind, or put the blind girl beside the deformity of
the laughing man. This, then, is the last praise that we can award to
these romances. The author has shown a power of just subordination
hitherto unequalled; and as, in reaching forward to one class of
effects, he has not been forgetful or careless of the other, his work is
more nearly complete work, and his art, with all its imperfections,
deals more comprehensively with the materials of life, than that of any
of his otherwise more sure and masterly predecessors. These five books would have made a very great fame for any writer, and
yet they are but one façade of the monument that Victor Hugo has erected
to his genius. Everywhere we find somewhat the same greatness, somewhat
the same infirmities. In his poems and plays there are the same
unaccountable protervities that have already astonished us in the
romances. There, too, is the same feverish strength, welding the fiery
iron of his idea under forge-hammer repetitions--an emphasis that is
somehow akin to weakness--a strength that is a little epileptic. He
stands so far above all his contemporaries, and so incomparably excels
them in richness, breadth, variety, and moral earnestness, that we
almost feel as if he had a sort of right to fall oftener and more
heavily than others; but this does not reconcile us to seeing him profit
by the privilege so freely. We like to have, in our great men, something
that is above question; we like to place an implicit faith in them, and
see them always on the platform of their greatness; and this, unhappily,
cannot be with Hugo. As Heine said long ago, his is a genius somewhat
deformed; but, deformed as it is, we accept it gladly; we shall have the
wisdom to see where his foot slips, but we shall have the justice also
to recognise in him one of the greatest artists of our generation, and,
in many ways, one of the greatest artists of time.