A History of the French Novel. Volume 2. To the Close of the 19th Century. Saintsbury George
and one of the great poets of the world.
Han d'Islande.
To deal with Hugo's first published, though not first written, novel requires, in almost the highest degree, what Mr. Matthew Arnold called "a purged considerate mind." There are, I believe, some people (I myself know at least one of great excellence) who, having had the good luck to read Han d'Islande as schoolboys, and finding its vein congenial to theirs, have, as in such cases is not impossible, kept it unscathed in their liking. But this does not happen to every one. I do not think, though I am not quite certain, that when I first read it myself I was exactly what may be called a schoolboy pure and simple (that is to say, under fifteen). But if I did not read it in upper school-boyhood (that is to say, before eighteen), I certainly did, not much later. I own that at that time, whatever my exact age was, I found it so uninteresting that I do not believe I read it through. Nor, except in the last respect, have I improved with it – for it would be presumptuous to say, "has it improved with me" – since. The author apologised for it in two successive prefaces shortly after its appearance, and in yet another after that of Notre-Dame de Paris, ten years later. None of them, it is to be feared, "touches the spot." The first, indeed, is hardly an apology at all, but a sort of goguenard "showing off" of the kind not uncommon with youth; the second, a little more serious, contains rather interesting hits94 of again youthful jealousy at the popularity of Pigault-Lebrun and Ducray-Duminil; the third and much later one is a very early instance of the Victorian philosophising. "There must be," we are told with the solemnity which for some sixty years excited such a curious mixture of amazement and amusement, "in every work of the mind – drama or novel – there must be many things felt, many things observed, and many things divined," and while in Han there is only one thing felt – a young man's love – and one observed – a girl's ditto – the rest is all divined, is "the fantastic imagination of an adolescent."
One impeticoses the gratility of the explanation, and refrains, as far as may be, from saying, "Words! words!" Unluckily, the book does very little indeed to supply deeds to match. The feeling and the observation furnish forth a most unstimulating love-story; at least the present critic, who has an unabashed fondness for love-stories, has never been able to feel the slightest interest either in Ordener Guldenlew or in Ethel Schumacker, except in so far as the lady is probably the first of the since innumerable and sometimes agreeable heroines of her name in fiction. As for the "divining," the "intention," and the "imagination," they have been exerted to sadly little purpose. The absurd nomenclature, definitely excused in one of the prefaces, may have a slight historic interest as the first attempt, almost a hopeless failure, at that science des noms with which Hugo was later credited, and which he certainly sometimes displayed. It is hardly necessary to say much about Spladgest and Oglypiglaf, Musdaemon and Orugix. They are pure schoolboyisms. But it is perhaps fair to relieve the author from the reproach, which has been thrown on him by some of his English translators, of having metamorphosed "Hans" into "Han." He himself explains distinctly that the name was a nickname, taken from the grunt or growl (the word is in France applied to the well-known noise made by a paviour lifting and bringing down his rammer) of the monster.
But that monster himself! A more impossible improbability and a more improbable impossibility never conceived itself in the brain of even an as yet failure of an artist. Han appears to have done all sorts of nasty things, such as eating the insides of babies when they were alive and drinking the blood of enemies when they were not dead, out of the skulls of his own offspring, which he had extracted from their dead bodies by a process like peeling a banana: also to have achieved some terrible ones, such as burning cathedrals and barracks, upsetting rocks on whole battalions, and so forth. But the only chances we have of seeing him at real business show him to us as overcoming, with some trouble, an infirm old man, and not overcoming at all, after a struggle of long duration, a not portentously powerful young one. His white bear, and not he, seems to have had the chief merit of despatching six surely rather incompetent hunters who followed the rash "Kennybol": and of his two final achievements, that of poniarding two men in a court of justice might have been brought about by anybody who was careless enough of his own life, and that of setting his gaol on fire by any one who, with the same carelessness, had a corrupt gaoler to supply him with the means.
It would be equally tedious and superfluous to go through the minor characters and incidents. The virtuous and imprisoned statesman Schumacker, Ethel's father, excites no sympathy: his malignant and finally defeated enemy, the Chancellor Ahlefeld, no interest. That enemy's most unvirtuous wife and her paramour Musdaemon —the villain of the piece as Han is the monster – as to whom one wonders whether he could ever have been as attractive as a lover as he is unattractive as a villain, are both puppets. Indeed, one would hardly pay any attention to the book at all if it did not hold a position in the work of a man of the highest genius partly similar to, and partly contrasted with, that of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne. But St. Irvyne and Zastrozzi are much shorter than Han d'Islande, and Shelley, whether by accident, wisdom (nemo omnibus horis insanit), or the direct intervention of Apollo, never resumed the task for which his genius was so obviously unsuited.
Still, it must be said for Hugo that, even at this time, he could have – in a manner actually had – put in evidence of not absolute incompetence for the task.
Bug-Jargal.
Bug-Jargal was, as glanced at above, written, according to its author's own statement, two years before Han, when he was only sixteen; was partially printed (in the Constitutionnel) and (in fear of a piracy) rewritten in fifteen days and published, seven years after its composition, and almost as many before Notre-Dame de Paris appeared. Taking it as it stands, there is nothing of the sixteen years or of the fifteen days to be seen in it. It is altogether superior to Han, and though it has not the nightmare magnificence and the phantasmagoric variety of Notre-Dame, it is, not merely because it is much shorter, a far better told, more coherent, and more generally human story. The jester-obi Habibrah has indeed the caricature-grotesquery of Han himself, and of Quasimodo, and long afterwards of Gwynplaine, as well as the devilry of the first named and of Thénardier in Les Misérables; but we do not see too much of him, and nothing that he does is exactly absurd or utterly improbable. The heroine – so far as there is a heroine in Marie d'Auverney, wife of the part-hero-narrator, but separated from him on the very day of their marriage by the rebellion of San Domingo – is very slight; but then, according to the story, she is not wanted to be anything more. The cruelty, treachery, etc., of the half-caste Biassou are not overdone, nor is the tropical scenery, nor indeed anything else. Even the character of Bug-Jargal himself, a modernised Oroonoko (whom probably Hugo did not know) and a more direct descendant of persons and things in Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and to some extent the "sensibility" novelists generally (whom he certainly did know), is kept within bounds. And, what is perhaps most extraordinary of all, the half-comic interludes in the narrative where Auverney's comrades talk while he makes breaks in his story, contain few of Hugo's usually disastrous attempts at humour. It is impossible to say that the book is of any great importance or of any enthralling interest. But it is the most workmanlike of all Hugo's work in prose fiction, and, except Les Travailleurs de La Mer and Quatre-Vingt-Treize, which have greater faults as well as greater beauties, the most readable, if not, like them, the most likely to be re-read.
Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné.
Its merits are certainly not ill set off by the two shorter pieces, both of fairly early date, but the one a little before and the other a little after Notre-Dame de Paris, which usually accompany it in the collected editions. Of these Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné is, with its tedious preface, almost two-thirds as long as Bug-Jargal itself; the other, Claude Gueux, contents itself with thirty pages. Both are pieces with a purpose – manifestos of one of Hugo's most consistent and most irrational crazes – the objection to capital punishment.95 There is no need to argue against this, the immortal "Que MM. les assassins," etc., being, though in fact the weakest of a thousand refutations, sufficient, once for all, to explode it. But it is not irrelevant to point out that the two pieces themselves are very battering-rams against their own theory. We are not told – the objection
See note in Vol. I. p. 472 of this
These crazes were not in origin, though they probably were in influence, political: Hugo held more than one of them while he was still a Royalist.