26 February: Boreham on Victor Hugo

An Evangelist of Humanity
Victor Hugo, whose birthday this is, was a faggot of thunderbolts. His works represent a catalogue of thrills. In many ways he stands unequalled. At the age of 15 he wrote poetry that would have won for him the most coveted distinctions of the French Academy if the Academy could have brought itself to believe that the boy actually penned the poems. As a child, sightless and voiceless, he seemed too frail to live. How could such a weakling have produced such epics? He was 28 when he published "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and he persisted along his path of excellence until, at 60, he wrote "Les Miserables." Such consistence and persistence is altogether phenomenal.

His countrymen claim for him that he is the greatest master of romance that the world has ever seen, and that no man ever stirred the inmost heart of the French people as did he. But he did far more than this. Every treader of foreign fiction knows that the crucial test of authorship is the test of translation. Very few writers ever get translated into foreign tongues. Of those few, only a microscopic fraction become really popular on alien shores. But Victor Hugo holds the distinction of having written, in his native French, three novels—"Les Miserables," "Travailleurs de la Mer," and "Notre Dame"—which are as familiar throughout the Anglo-Saxon world as any three romances penned by an English writer.

A Philosopher Stands At The Heart Of The Storm
In order to assess the value of this extraordinary tribute, it is only necessary to recall the amazing wealth of imaginative genius of which all the European nations, particularly our own, found themselves possessed during the 19th century. A mere list of the names represents a dazzling galaxy of brilliance; it follows, therefore, that to have attained superexcellence in such brave company is to have triumphed on a singularly lordly scale. Moreover, we have to remember that Victor Hugo's romances were written not with pen and ink, but with blood and tears. His life story is one long and tragic adventure. In his day everybody knew him. In those electrical and tumultuous times, he himself cut a striking and dynamic figure. Theophile Gautier has embedded his commanding features and expressive countenance in an exquisite cameo that will live imperishably.

To see Victor Hugo once was, Gautier says, to rememember him vividly through all the succeeding years. He had a forehead rising like some marble monument above the serene and earnest countenance. Framing this splendid brow was a wreath of rich chestnut hair, falling to a considerable length behind. The face was closely shaven, and its exceptional pallor was relieved by a pair of hazel eyes, keen as an eagle's. His attire was neat and faultless—black frock coat, grey trousers, and small turn-down collar with an ample bow-tie. Here, in a few deft and graphic touches, the work of a master hand, Gautier has pencilled for us, the man who stood with calm face and unflinching heart, amidst the social turmoil that seemed to be incessantly raging around him, and who refused to recognise defeat in the ostracism and loneliness of his later years. Few records are more moving than the records of those days in which he was eating out his heart in exile. He surrounded himself with all things beautiful; yet his banishment maddened him. On the day his wife's body was borne away to Paris for burial, he was forbidden by the authorities to accompany it. He bowed his head in grief, but his soul remained adamant, dauntless, indomitable. His own sufferings lend significance to his philosophy of life.

The Novelist Becomes The Seer
For Victor Hugo was essentially and pre-eminently a man with a message. In all his novels he portrays the foulest creatures imaginable, and shows that they may be uplifted and ennobled. "The multitude can be sublimated," he confidently declares. "These bare feet, these shivering forms, these shades of ignorance, these depths of abjectness, these abysses of gloom may be employed in the conquest of the ideal. This lowly sand which you trample beneath your feet, if you cast it into the furnace, may become resplendent crystals; by means of the lenses that it makes a Galileo and a Newton shall discover stars." Mr. W. T. Stead used to say that "Les Miserables" is the supreme novel of pity. "It is," he says, "the very gospel of compassion, written by an evangelist of humanity. Here we have the wrongs of the wretched sung as never before by one who unites the tenderness of a Christian with the passion of a revolutionist." What, it may be asked, is the secret of this pity and this passion?

It is, of course, rooted in faith. Victor Hugo looked, quite literally, not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen. In cruel exile, writhing under the most ruthless and inexorable injustice, he held that the anomalies of this life are indisputable evidence of another. In His own eternities, he declared, God will vindicate His ways with men. "Death," he told his friends, "is just a parenthesis in life's activities. Life closes in the twilight: it opens with the dawn." Is there, in all our poetry, a lovelier line than that in which he urges us to be:—

".....like the bird who, pausing in her flight,
Awhile on boughs too
slight,
Feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings
Knowing that she
hath wings."

It is difficult to think of many men who have appealed more profoundly to the heart of humanity than has he.

F W Boreham.

Image: Victor Hugo