Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Familiar Studies of Men and Books




PREFACE
BY WAY OF CRITICISM.



THESE studies are collected from the monthly press.  One
appeared in the NEW QUARTERLY, one in MACMILLAN'S, and the
rest in the CORNHILL MAGAZINE.  To the CORNHILL I owe a
double debt of thanks; first, that I was received there in
the very best society, and under the eye of the very best of
editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to
republish so considerable an amount of copy.

These nine worthies have been brought together from many
different ages and countries.  Not the most erudite of men
could be perfectly prepared to deal with so many and such
various sides of human life and manners.  To pass a true
judgment upon Knox and Burns implies a grasp upon the very
deepest strain of thought in Scotland, - a country far more
essentially different from England than many parts of
America; for, in a sense, the first of these men re-created
Scotland, and the second is its most essentially national
production.  To treat fitly of Hugo and Villon would involve
yet wider knowledge, not only of a country foreign to the
author by race, history, and religion, but of the growth and
liberties of art.  Of the two Americans, Whitman and Thoreau,
each is the type of something not so much realised as widely
sought after among the late generations of their countrymen;
and to see them clearly in a nice relation to the society
that brought them forth, an author would require a large
habit of life among modern Americans.  As for Yoshida, I have
already disclaimed responsibility; it was but my hand that
held the pen.

In truth, these are but the readings of a literary vagrant.
One book led to another, one study to another.  The first was
published with trepidation.  Since no bones were broken, the
second was launched with greater confidence.  So, by
insensible degrees, a young man of our generation acquires,
in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial commission through
the ages; and, having once escaped the perils of the Freemans
and the Furnivalls, sets himself up to right the wrongs of
universal history and criticism.  Now, it is one thing to
write with enjoyment on a subject while the story is hot in
your mind from recent reading, coloured with recent
prejudice; and it is quite another business to put these
writings coldly forth again in a bound volume.  We are most
of us attached to our opinions; that is one of the "natural
affections" of which we hear so much in youth; but few of us
are altogether free from paralysing doubts and scruples.  For
my part, I have a small idea of the degree of accuracy
possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem with
error.  One and all were written with genuine interest in the
subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with
imperfect knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to
end, under the disadvantages inherent in this style of
writing.

Of these disadvantages a word must here be said.  The writer
of short studies, having to condense in a few pages the
events of a whole lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of
many various volumes, is bound, above all things, to make
that condensation logical and striking.  For the only
justification of his writing at all is that he shall present
a brief, reasoned, and memorable view.  By the necessity of
the case, all the more neutral circumstances are omitted from
his narrative; and that of itself, by the negative
exaggeration of which I have spoken in the text, lends to the
matter in hand a certain false and specious glitter.  By the
necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his
subject throughout in a particular illumination, like a
studio artifice.  Like Hales with Pepys, he must nearly break
his sitter's neck to get the proper shadows on the portrait.
It is from one side only that he has time to represent his
subject.  The side selected will either be the one most
striking to himself, or the one most obscured by controversy;
and in both cases that will be the one most liable to
strained and sophisticated reading.  In a biography, this and
that is displayed; the hero is seen at home, playing the
flute; the different tendencies of his work come, one after
another, into notice; and thus something like a true, general
impression of the subject may at last be struck.  But in the
short study, the writer, having seized his "point of view,"
must keep his eye steadily to that.  He seeks, perhaps,
rather to differentiate than truly to characterise.  The
proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the
proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the
shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, continually
forced, may degenerate at length into a grimace; and we have
at best something of a caricature, at worst a calumny.
Hence, if they be readable at all, and hang together by their
own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief
representations.  They take so little a while to read, and
yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly
introduced in the same light and with the same expression,
that, by sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon
the reader.  The two English masters of the style, Macaulay
and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers.  Carlyle, indeed,
had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his
portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with so much more
poetic comprehension, and he, like his favourite Ram Dass,
had a fire in his belly so much more hotly burning than the
patent reading lamp by which Macaulay studied, that it seems
at first sight hardly fair to bracket them together.  But the
"point of view" was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged
of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel but
almost stupid.  They are too often broken outright on the
Procrustean bed; they are probably always disfigured.  The
rhetorical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied; it will take
longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle.  So with all
writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that
comes before them; and the writer of short studies is bound,
by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in that
spirit.  What he cannot vivify he should omit.

Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers, I hope
I should have had the courage to attempt it.  But it is not
possible.  Short studies are, or should be, things woven like
a carpet, from which it is impossible to detach a strand.
What is perverted has its place there for ever, as a part of
the technical means by which what is right has been
presented.  It is only possible to write another study, and
then, with a new "point of view," would follow new
perversions and perhaps a fresh caricature.  Hence, it will
be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of salt to be
taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every
study in the volume, it will be most simple to run them over
in their order.  But this must not be taken as a propitiatory
offering to the gods of shipwreck; I trust my cargo
unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and do not, by
criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and
less partial critics.

HUGO'S ROMANCES. - This is an instance of the "point of
view."  The five romances studied with a different purpose
might have given different results, even with a critic so
warmly interested in their favour.  The great contemporary
master of wordmanship, and indeed of all literary arts and
technicalities, had not unnaturally dazzled a beginner.  But
it is best to dwell on merits, for it is these that are most
often overlooked.

BURNS. - I have left the introductory sentences on Principal
Shairp, partly to explain my own paper, which was merely
supplemental to his amiable but imperfect book, partly
because that book appears to me truly misleading both as to
the character and the genius of Burns.  This seems
ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to blame; so good a
Wordsworthian was out of character upon that stage.

This half apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except
upon a remark called forth by my study in the columns of a
literary Review.  The exact terms in which that sheet
disposed of Burns I cannot now recall; but they were to this
effect - that Burns was a bad man, the impure vehicle of fine
verses; and that this was the view to which all criticism
tended.  Now I knew, for my own part, that it was with the
profoundest pity, but with a growing esteem, that I studied
the man's desperate efforts to do right; and the more I
reflected, the stranger it appeared to me that any thinking
being should feel otherwise.  The complete letters shed,
indeed, a light on the depths to which Burns had sunk in his
character of Don Juan, but they enhance in the same
proportion the hopeless nobility of his marrying Jean.  That
I ought to have stated this more noisily I now see; but that
any one should fail to see it for himself, is to me a thing
both incomprehensible and worthy of open scorn.  If Burns, on
the facts dealt with in this study, is to be called a bad
man, I question very much whether either I or the writer in
the Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to
call a good one.  All have some fault.  The fault of each
grinds down the hearts of those about him, and - let us not
blink the truth - hurries both him and them into the grave.
And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault, as
all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by
its consequences, to gloss the matter over, with too polite
biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring
beacons on a perilous seaboard; but to call him bad, with a
self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one's sleep with
Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.

Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised
in many quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what
every one well knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal
consequences of his marriage.  And for this there are perhaps
two subsidiary reasons.  For, first, there is, in our drunken
land, a certain privilege extended to drunkenness.  In
Scotland, in particular, it is almost respectable, above all
when compared with any "irregularity between the sexes."  The
selfishness of the one, so much more gross in essence, is so
much less immediately conspicuous in its results that our
demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy smiles apologetically on its victims.
It is often said - I have heard it with these ears - that
drunkenness "may lead to vice."  Now I did not think it at
all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard; and I
was obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the
too frequent vanity and meanness of his relations to women.
Hence, in the eyes of many, my study was a step towards the
demonstration of Burns's radical badness.

But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low
morality so greatly more distressing than the better sort of
vice, to whom you must never represent an act that was
virtuous in itself, as attended by any other consequences
than a large family and fortune.  To hint that Burns's
marriage had an evil influence is, with this class, to deny
the moral law.  Yet such is the fact.  It was bravely done;
but he had presumed too far on his strength.  One after
another the lights of his life went out, and he fell from
circle to circle to the dishonoured sickbed of the end.  And
surely for any one that has a thing to call a soul he shines
out tenfold more nobly in the failure of that frantic effort
to do right, than if he had turned on his heel with Worldly
Wiseman, married a congenial spouse, and lived orderly and
died reputably an old man.  It is his chief title that he
refrained from "the wrong that amendeth wrong."  But the
common, trashy mind of our generation is still aghast, like
the Jews of old, at any word of an unsuccessful virtue.  Job
has been written and read; the tower of Siloam fell nineteen
hundred years ago; yet we have still to desire a little
Christianity, or, failing that, a little even of that rude,
old, Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike
go unrewarded, and was yet not shaken in its faith.

WALT WHITMAN. - This is a case of a second difficulty which
lies continually before the writer of critical studies: that
he has to mediate between the author whom he loves and the
public who are certainly indifferent and frequently averse.
Many articles had been written on this notable man.  One
after another had leaned, in my eyes, either to praise or
blame unduly.  In the last case, they helped to blindfold our
fastidious public to an inspiring writer; in the other, by an
excess of unadulterated praise, they moved the more candid to
revolt.  I was here on the horns of a dilemma; and between
these horns I squeezed myself with perhaps some loss to the
substance of the paper.  Seeing so much in Whitman that was
merely ridiculous, as well as so much more that was
unsurpassed in force and fitness, - seeing the true prophet
doubled, as I thought, in places with the Bull in a China
Shop, - it appeared best to steer a middle course, and to
laugh with the scorners when I thought they had any excuse,
while I made haste to rejoice with the rejoicers over what is
imperishably good, lovely, human, or divine, in his
extraordinary poems.  That was perhaps the right road; yet I
cannot help feeling that in this attempt to trim my sails
between an author whom I love and honour and a public too
averse to recognise his merit, I have been led into a tone
unbecoming from one of my stature to one of Whitman's.  But
the good and the great man will go on his way not vexed with
my little shafts of merriment.  He, first of any one, will
understand how, in the attempt to explain him credibly to
Mrs. Grundy, I have been led into certain airs of the man of
the world, which are merely ridiculous in me, and were not
intentionally discourteous to himself.  But there is a worse
side to the question; for in my eagerness to be all things to
all men, I am afraid I may have sinned against proportion.
It will be enough to say here that Whitman's faults are few
and unimportant when they are set beside his surprising
merits.  I had written another paper full of gratitude for
the help that had been given me in my life, full of
enthusiasm for the intrinsic merit of the poems, and
conceived in the noisiest extreme of youthful eloquence.  The
present study was a rifacimento.  From it, with the design
already mentioned, and in a fit of horror at my old excess,
the big words and emphatic passages were ruthlessly excised.
But this sort of prudence is frequently its own punishment;
along with the exaggeration, some of the truth is sacrificed;
and the result is cold, constrained, and grudging.  In short,
I might almost everywhere have spoken more strongly than I
did.

THOREAU. - Here is an admirable instance of the "point of
view" forced throughout, and of too earnest reflection on
imperfect facts.  Upon me this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic
Thoreau had exercised a great charm.  I have scarce written
ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but his
influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer.
Still it was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I
took him on his own explicit terms; and when I learned
details of his life, they were, by the nature of the case and
my own PARTI-PRIS, read even with a certain violence in terms
of his writings.  There could scarce be a perversion more
justifiable than that; yet it was still a perversion.  The
study indeed, raised so much ire in the breast of Dr. Japp
(H. A. Page), Thoreau's sincere and learned disciple, that
had either of us been men, I please myself with thinking, of
less temper and justice, the difference might have made us
enemies instead of making us friends.  To him who knew the
man from the inside, many of my statements sounded like
inversions made on purpose; and yet when we came to talk of
them together, and he had understood how I was looking at the
man through the books, while he had long since learned to
read the books through the man, I believe he understood the
spirit in which I had been led astray.

On two most important points, Dr. Japp added to my knowledge,
and with the same blow fairly demolished that part of my
criticism.  First, if Thoreau were content to dwell by Walden
Pond, it was not merely with designs of self-improvement, but
to serve mankind in the highest sense.  Hither came the
fleeing slave; thence was he despatched along the road to
freedom.  That shanty in the woods was a station in the great
Underground Railroad; that adroit and philosophic solitary
was an ardent worker, soul and body, in that so much more
than honourable movement, which, if atonement were possible
for nations, should have gone far to wipe away the guilt of
slavery.  But in history sin always meets with condign
punishment; the generation passes, the offence remains, and
the innocent must suffer.  No underground railroad could
atone for slavery, even as no bills in Parliament can redeem
the ancient wrongs of Ireland.  But here at least is a new
light shed on the Walden episode.

Second, it appears, and the point is capital, that Thoreau
was once fairly and manfully in love, and, with perhaps too
much aping of the angel, relinquished the woman to his
brother.  Even though the brother were like to die of it, we
have not yet heard the last opinion of the woman.  But be
that as it may, we have here the explanation of the "rarefied
and freezing air" in which I complained that he had taught
himself to breathe.  Reading the man through the books, I
took his professions in good faith.  He made a dupe of me,
even as he was seeking to make a dupe of himself, wresting
philosophy to the needs of his own sorrow.  But in the light
of this new fact, those pages, seemingly so cold, are seen to
be alive with feeling.  What appeared to be a lack of
interest in the philosopher turns out to have been a touching
insincerity of the man to his own heart; and that fine-spun
airy theory of friendship, so devoid, as I complained, of any
quality of flesh and blood, a mere anodyne to lull his pains.
The most temperate of living critics once marked a passage of
my own with a cross ar d the words, "This seems nonsense."
It not only seemed; it was so.  It was a private bravado of
my own, which I had so often repeated to keep up my spirits,
that I had grown at last wholly to believe it, and had ended
by setting it down as a contribution to the theory of life.
So with the more icy parts of this philosophy of Thoreau's.
He was affecting the Spartanism he had not; and the old
sentimental wound still bled afresh, while he deceived
himself with reasons.

Thoreau's theory, in short, was one thing and himself
another: of the first, the reader will find what I believe to
be a pretty faithful statement and a fairly just criticism in
the study; of the second he will find but a contorted shadow.
So much of the man as fitted nicely with his doctrines, in
the photographer's phrase, came out.  But that large part
which lay outside and beyond, for which he had found or
sought no formula, on which perhaps his philosophy even
looked askance, is wanting in my study, as it was wanting in
the guide I followed.  In some ways a less serious writer, in
all ways a nobler man, the true Thoreau still remains to be
depicted.

VILLON. - I am tempted to regret that I ever wrote on this
subject, not merely because the paper strikes me as too
picturesque by half, but because I regarded Villon as a bad
fellow.  Others still think well of him, and can find
beautiful and human traits where I saw nothing but artistic
evil; and by the principle of the art, those should have
written of the man, and not I.  Where you see no good,
silence is the best.  Though this penitence comes too late,
it may be well, at least, to give it expression.

The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of
France.  Fat Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola,
the Goncourts, and the infinitely greater Flaubert; and,
while similar in ugliness, still surpasses them in native
power.  The old author, breaking with an ECLAT DE VOIX, out
of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched on his
own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking
impression of reality.  Even if that were not worth doing at
all, it would be worth doing as well as he has done it; for
the pleasure we take in the author's skill repays us, or at
least reconciles us to the baseness of his attitude.  Fat Peg
(LA GROSSE MARGOT) is typical of much; it is a piece of
experience that has nowhere else been rendered into
literature; and a kind of gratitude for the author's
plainness mingles, as we read, with the nausea proper to the
business.  I shall quote here a verse of an old students'
song, worth laying side by side with Villon's startling
ballade.  This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he
did not choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it is
thus, with both wit and pathos, that he laments her fall:-

Nunc plango florem
AEtatis tenerae
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire praecipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Caecos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa. (1)

(1) GAUDEAMUS: CARMINA VAGORUM SELECTA.  Leipsic.  Trubner.
1879.

But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to
deceive; it was the flight of beauty alone, not that of
honesty or honour, that he lamented in his song; and the
nameless mediaeval vagabond has the best of the comparison.

There is now a Villon Society in England; and Mr. John Payne
has translated him entirely into English, a task of unusual
difficulty.  I regret to find that Mr. Payne and I are not
always at one as to the author's meaning; in such cases I am
bound to suppose that he is in the right, although the
weakness of the flesh withholds me from anything beyond a
formal submission.  He is now upon a larger venture,
promising us at last that complete Arabian Nights to which we
have all so long looked forward.

CHARLES OF ORLEANS. - Perhaps I have done scanty justice to
the charm of the old Duke's verses, and certainly he is too
much treated as a fool.  The period is not sufficiently
remembered.  What that period was, to what a blank of
imbecility the human mind had fallen, can only be known to
those who have waded in the chronicles.  Excepting Comines
and La Salle and Villon, I have read no author who did not
appal me by his torpor; and even the trial of Joan of Arc,
conducted as it was by chosen clerks, bears witness to a
dreary, sterile folly, - a twilight of the mind peopled with
childish phantoms.  In relation to his contemporaries,
Charles seems quite a lively character.

It remains for me to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Henry
Pyne, who, immediately on the appearance of the study, sent
me his edition of the Debate between the Heralds: a courtesy
from the expert to the amateur only too uncommon in these
days.

KNOX. - Knox, the second in order of interest among the
reformers, lies dead and buried in the works of the learned
and unreadable M'Crie.  It remains for some one to break the
tomb and bring him forth, alive again and breathing, in a
human book.  With the best intentions in the world, I have
only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their
predecessors, to the mass of obstruction that buries the
reformer from the world; I have touched him in my turn with
that "mace of death," which Carlyle has attributed to
Dryasdust; and my two dull papers are, in the matter of
dulness, worthy additions to the labours of M'Crie.  Yet I
believe they are worth reprinting in the interest of the next
biographer of Knox.  I trust his book may be a masterpiece;
and I indulge the hope that my two studies may lend him a
hint or perhaps spare him a delay in its composition.

Of the PEPYS I can say nothing; for it has been too recently
through my hands; and I still retain some of the heat of
composition.  Yet it may serve as a text for the last remark
I have to offer.  To Pepys I think I have been amply just; to
the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles of Orleans,
even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too
grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner.  It is
not easy to see why I should have been most liberal to the
man of least pretensions.  Perhaps some cowardice withheld me
from the proper warmth of tone; perhaps it is easier to be
just to those nearer us in rank of mind.  Such at least is
the fact, which other critics may explain.  For these were
all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I
did not love the men, my love was the greater to their books.
I had read them and lived with them; for months they were
continually in my thoughts; I seemed to rejoice in their joys
and to sorrow with them in their griefs; and behold, when I
came to write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly courteous
and seldom wholly just.

R. L. S.



CONTENTS.


I.    VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES
II.   SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS
III.  WALT WHITMAN
IV.   HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
V.    YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO
VI.   FRANCOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSE-BREAKER
VII.  CHARLES OF ORLEANS
VIII. SAMUEL PEPYS
IX.   JOHN KNOX AND WOMEN



CHAPTER I - VICTOR HUGO'S ROMANCES



Apres le roman pittoresque mais prosaique de Walter Scott il
lestera un autre roman a creer, plus beau et plus complet
encore selon nous.  C'est le roman, a la fois drame et
epopee, pittoresque mais poetique, reel mais ideal, vrai mais
grand, qui enchassera Walter Scott dans Homere. - Victor Hugo
on QUENTIN DURWARD.


VICTOR HUGO'S romances occupy an important position in the
history of literature; many innovations, timidly made
elsewhere, have in them been carried boldly out to their last
consequences; much that was indefinite in literary tendencies
has attained to definite maturity; many things have come to a
point and been distinguished one from the other; and it is
only in the last romance of all, QUATRE VINGT TREIZE, that
this culmination is most perfect.  This is in the nature of
things.  Men who are in any way typical of a stage of
progress may be compared more justly to the hand upon the
dial of the clock, which continues to advance as it
indicates, than to the stationary milestone, which is only
the measure of what is past.  The movement is not arrested.
That significant something by which the work of such a man
differs from that of his predecessors, goes on disengaging
itself and becoming more and more articulate and cognisable.
The same principle of growth that carried his first book
beyond the books of previous writers, carries his last book
beyond his first.  And just as the most imbecile production
of any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to
comprehension we have sought long and vainly in contemporary
masterpieces, so it may be the very weakest of an author's
books that, coming in the sequel of many others, enables us
at last to get hold of what underlies the whole of them - of
that spinal marrow of significance that unites the work of
his life into something organic and rational.  This is what
has been done by QUATRE VINGT TREIZE for the earlier romances
of Victor Hugo, and, through them, for a whole division of
modern literature.  We have here the legitimate continuation
of a long and living literary tradition; and hence, so far,
its explanation.  When many lines diverge from each other in
direction so slightly as to confuse the eye, we know that we
have only to produce them to make the chaos plain: this is
continually so in literary history; and we shall best
understand the importance of Victor Hugo's romances if we
think of them as some such prolongation of one of the main
lines of literary tendency.

When we compare the novels of Walter Scott with those of the
man of genius who preceded him, and whom he delighted to
honour as a master in the art - I mean Henry Fielding - we
shall be somewhat puzzled, at the first moment, to state the
difference that there is between these two.  Fielding has as
much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller of
his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and
Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical
manner; and finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-
humoured as the great Scotchman.  With all these points of
resemblance between the men, it is astonishing that their
work should be so different.  The fact is, that the English
novel was looking one way and seeking one set of effects in
the hands of Fielding; and in the hands of Scott it was
looking eagerly in all ways and searching for all the effects
that by any possibility it could utilise.  The difference
between these two men marks a great enfranchisement.  With
Scott the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended
curiosity and an enfranchised imagination, has begun.  This
is a trite thing to say; but trite things are often very
indefinitely comprehended: and this enfranchisement, in as
far as it regards the technical change that came over modern
prose romance, has never perhaps been explained with any
clearness.

To do so, it will be necessary roughly to compare the two
sets of conventions upon which plays and romances are
respectively based.  The purposes of these two arts are so
much alike, and they deal so much with the same passions and
interests, that we are apt to forget the fundamental
opposition of their methods.  And yet such a fundamental
opposition exists.  In the drama the action is developed in
great measure by means of things that remain outside of the
art; by means of real things, that is, and not artistic
conventions for things.  This is a sort of realism that is
not to be confounded with that realism in painting of which
we hear so much.  The realism in painting is a thing of
purposes; this, that we have to indicate in the drama, is an
affair of method.  We have heard a story, indeed, of a
painter in France who, when he wanted to paint a sea-beach,
carried realism from his ends to his means, and plastered
real sand upon his canvas; and that is precisely what is done
in the drama.  The dramatic author has to paint his beaches
with real sand: real live men and women move about the stage;
we hear real voices; what is feigned merely puts a sense upon
what is; we do actually see a woman go behind a screen as
Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval, we do actually
see her very shamefully produced again.  Now all these
things, that remain as they were in life, and are not
transmuted into any artistic convention, are terribly
stubborn and difficult to deal with; and hence there are for
the dramatist many resultant limitations in time and space.
These limitations in some sort approximate towards those of
painting: the dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a
moment, but to the duration of each scene or act; he is
confined to the stage, almost as the painter is confined
within his frame.  But the great restriction is this, that a
dramatic author must deal with his actors, and with his
actors alone.  Certain moments of suspense, certain
significant dispositions of personages, a certain logical
growth of emotion, these are the only means at the disposal
of the playwright.  It is true that, with the assistance of
the scene-painter, the costumier and the conductor of the
orchestra, he may add to this something of pageant, something
of sound and fury; but these are, for the dramatic writer,
beside the mark, and do not come under the vivifying touch of
his genius.  When we turn to romance, we find this no longer.
Here nothing is reproduced to our senses directly.  Not only
the main conception of the work, but the scenery, the
appliances, the mechanism by which this conception is brought
home to us, have been put through the crucible of another
man's mind, and come out again, one and all, in the form of
written words.  With the loss of every degree of such realism
as we have described, there is for art a clear gain of
liberty and largeness of competence.  Thus, painting, in
which the round outlines of things are thrown on to a flat
board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their
solidity is preserved.  It is by giving up these identities
that art gains true strength.  And so in the case of novels
as compared with the stage.  Continuous narration is the flat
board on to which the novelist throws everything.  And from
this there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a
great compensating gain in his power over the subject; so
that he can now subordinate one thing to another in
importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle detail,
to a degree that was before impossible.  He can render just
as easily the flourish of trumpets before a victorious
emperor and the gossip of country market women, the gradual
decay of forty years of a man's life and the gesture of a
passionate moment.  He finds himself equally unable, if he
looks at it from one point of view - equally able, if he
looks at it from another point of view - to reproduce a
colour, a sound, an outline, a logical argument, a physical
action.  He can show his readers, behind and around the
personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his
story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of
the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes,
dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant
events, the stream of national tendency, the salient
framework of causation.  And all this thrown upon the flat
board - all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the
texture of continuous intelligent narration.

This touches the difference between Fielding and Scott.  In
the work of the latter, true to his character of a modern and
a romantic, we become suddenly conscious of the background.
Fielding, on the other hand, although he had recognised that
the novel was nothing else than an epic in prose, wrote in
the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama.  This is not,
of course, to say that the drama was in any way incapable of
a regeneration similar in kind to that of which I am now
speaking with regard to the novel.  The notorious contrary
fact is sufficient to guard the reader against such a
misconstruction.  All that is meant is, that Fielding
remained ignorant of certain capabilities which the novel
possesses over the drama; or, at least, neglected and did not
develop them.  To the end he continued to see things as a
playwright sees them.  The world with which he dealt, the
world he had realised for himself and sought to realise and
set before his readers, was a world of exclusively human
interest.  As for landscape, he was content to underline
stage directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and
Molly retire into a practicable wood.  As for nationality and
public sentiment, it is curious enough to think that Tom
Jones is laid in the year forty-five, and that the only use
he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers
into his hero's way.  It is most really important, however,
to remark the change which has been introduced into the
conception of character by the beginning of the romantic
movement and the consequent introduction into fiction of a
vast amount of new material.  Fielding tells us as much as he
thought necessary to account for the actions of his
creatures; he thought that each of these actions could be
decomposed on the spot into a few simple personal elements,
as we decompose a force in a question of abstract dynamics.
The larger motives are all unknown to him; he had not
understood that the nature of the landscape or the spirit of
the times could be for anything in a story; and so, naturally
and rightly, he said nothing about them.  But Scott's
instinct, the instinct of the man of an age profoundly
different, taught him otherwise; and, in his work, the
individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small
proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre, and
great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders.
Fielding's characters were always great to the full stature
of a perfectly arbitrary will.  Already in Scott we begin to
have a sense of the subtle influences that moderate and
qualify a man's personality; that personality is no longer
thrown out in unnatural isolation, but is resumed into its
place in the constitution of things.

It is this change in the manner of regarding men and their
actions first exhibited in romance, that has since renewed
and vivified history.  For art precedes philosophy and even
science.  People must have noticed things and interested
themselves in them before they begin to debate upon their
causes or influence.  And it is in this way that art is the
pioneer of knowledge; those predilections of the artist he
knows not why, those irrational acceptations and
recognitions, reclaim, out of the world that we have not yet
realised, ever another and another corner; and after the
facts have been thus vividly brought before us and have had
time to settle and arrange themselves in our minds, some day
there will be found the man of science to stand up and give
the explanation.  Scott took an interest in many things in
which Fielding took none; and for this reason, and no other,
he introduced them into his romances.  If he had been told
what would be the nature of the movement that he was so
lightly initiating, he would have been very incredulous and
not a little scandalised.  At the time when he wrote, the
real drift of this new manner of pleasing people in fiction
was not yet apparent; and, even now, it is only by looking at
the romances of Victor Hugo that we are enabled to form any
proper judgment in the matter.  These books are not only
descended by ordinary generation from the Waverley novels,
but it is in them chiefly that we shall find the
revolutionary tradition of Scott carried farther that we
shall find Scott himself, in so far as regards his conception
of prose fiction and its purposes, surpassed in his own
spirit, instead of tamely followed.  We have here, as I said
before, a line of literary tendency produced, and by this
production definitely separated from others.  When we come to
Hugo, we see that the deviation, which seemed slight enough
and not very serious between Scott and Fielding, is indeed
such a great gulph in thought and sentiment as only
successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural
that one of the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott
is an advance in self-consciousness.  Both men follow the
same road; but where the one went blindly and carelessly, the
other advances with all deliberation and forethought.  There
never was artist much more unconscious than Scott; and there
have been not many more conscious than Hugo.  The passage at
the head of these pages shows how organically he had
understood the nature of his own changes.  He has, underlying
each of the five great romances (which alone I purpose here
to examine), two deliberate designs: one artistic, the other
consciously ethical and intellectual.  This is a man living
in a different world from Scott, who professes sturdily (in
one of his introductions) that he does not believe in novels
having any moral influence at all; but still Hugo is too much
of an artist to let himself be hampered by his dogmas; and
the truth is that the artistic result seems, in at least one
great instance, to have very little connection with the
other, or directly ethical result.

The artistic result of a romance, what is left upon the
memory by any really powerful and artistic novel, is
something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to
put a name upon it and yet something as simple as nature.
These two propositions may seem mutually destructive, but
they are so only in appearance.  The fact is that art is
working far ahead of language as well as of science,
realising for us, by all manner of suggestions and
exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct
name; nay, for which we may never perhaps have a direct name,
for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely
into the necessities of life.  Hence alone is that suspicion
of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance:
it is clear enough to us in thought; but we are not used to
consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in
words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently
shaped to that end.  We all know this difficulty in the case
of a picture, simple and strong as may be the impression that
it has left with us; and it is only because language is the
medium of romance, that we are prevented from seeing that the
two cases are the same.  It is not that there is anything
blurred or indefinite in the impression left with us, it is
just because the impression is so very definite after its own
kind, that we find it hard to fit it exactly with the
expressions of our philosophical speech.

It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance,
this something which it is the function of that form of art
to create, this epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek
and, as far as may be, to throw into relief, in the present
study.  It is thus, I believe, that we shall see most clearly
the great stride that Hugo has taken beyond his predecessors,
and how, no longer content with expressing more or less
abstract relations of man to man, he has set before himself
the task of realising, in the language of romance, much of
the involution of our complicated lives.

This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood,
in every so-called novel.  The great majority are not works
of art in anything but a very secondary signification.  One
might almost number on one's fingers the works in which such
a supreme artistic intention has been in any way superior to
the other and lesser aims, themselves more or less artistic,
that generally go hand in hand with it in the conception of
prose romance.  The purely critical spirit is, in most
novels, paramount.  At the present moment we can recall one
man only, for whose works it would have been equally possible
to accomplish our present design: and that man is Hawthorne.
There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose, about some
at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on
the most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and
weaknesses of the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid
and single impression of his works.  There is nothing of this
kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains to it, is indeed unity out
of multitude; and it is the wonderful power of subordination
and synthesis thus displayed, that gives us the measure of
his talent.  No amount of mere discussion and statement, such
as this, could give a just conception of the greatness of
this power.  It must be felt in the books themselves, and all
that can be done in the present essay is to recall to the
reader the more general features of each of the five great
romances, hurriedly and imperfectly, as space will permit,
and rather as a suggestion than anything more complete.

The moral end that the author had before him in the
conception of NOTRE DAME DE PARIS was (he tells us) to
"denounce" the external fatality that hangs over men in the
form of foolish and inflexible superstition.  To speak
plainly, this moral purpose seems to have mighty little to do
with the artistic conception; moreover it is very
questionably handled, while the artistic conception is
developed with the most consummate success.  Old Paris lives
for us with newness of life: we have ever before our eyes the
city cut into three by the two arms of the river, the boat-
shaped island "moored" by five bridges to the different
shores, and the two unequal towns on either hand.  We forget
all that enumeration of palaces and churches and convents
which occupies so many pages of admirable description, and
the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude from
this, that they were pages thrown away; but this is not so:
we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget or do not see
the different layers of paint on a completed picture; but the
thing desired has been accomplished, and we carry away with
us a sense of the "Gothic profile" of the city, of the
"surprising forest of pinnacles and towers and belfries," and
we know not what of rich and intricate and quaint.  And
throughout, Notre Dame has been held up over Paris by a
height far greater than that of its twin towers: the
Cathedral is present to us from the first page to the last;
the title has given us the clue, and already in the Palace of
Justice the story begins to attach itself to that central
building by character after character.  It is purely an
effect of mirage; Notre Dame does not, in reality, thus
dominate and stand out above the city; and any one who should
visit it, in the spirit of the Scott-tourists to Edinburgh or
the Trossachs, would be almost offended at finding nothing
more than this old church thrust away into a corner.  It is
purely an effect of mirage, as we say; but it is an effect
that permeates and possesses the whole book with astonishing
consistency and strength.  And then, Hugo has peopled this
Gothic city, and, above all, this Gothic church, with a race
of men even more distinctly Gothic than their surroundings.
We know this generation already: we have seen them clustered
about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the
church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles.  About them
all there is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that
conjunction of the grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois
snugness, with passionate contortion and horror, that is so
characteristic of Gothic art.  Esmeralda is somewhat an
exception; she and the goat traverse the story like two
children who have wandered in a dream.  The finest moment of
the book is when these two share with the two other leading
characters, Dom Claude and Quasimodo, the chill shelter of
the old cathedral.  It is here that we touch most intimately
the generative artistic idea of the romance: are they not all
four taken out of some quaint moulding, illustrative of the
Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven deadly
sins?  What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle?  What is
the whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art?

It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great
romances, there should be so little of that extravagance that
latterly we have come almost to identify with the author's
manner.  Yet even here we are distressed by words, thoughts,
and incidents that defy belief and alienate the sympathies.
The scene of the IN PACE, for example, in spite of its
strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
novelist.  I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the
bell; I should as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper.
And again the following two sentences, out of an otherwise
admirable chapter, surely surpass what it has ever entered
into the heart of any other man to imagine (vol. ii. p. 180):
"Il souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachait des
poignees de cheveux, POUR VOIR S'ILS NE BLANCHISSAIENT PAS."
And, p. 181: "Ses pensees etaient si insupportables qu'il
prenait sa tete a deux mains et tachait de l'arracher de ses
epaules POUR LA BRISER SUR LE PAVE."

One other fault, before we pass on.  In spite of the horror
and misery that pervade all of his later work, there is in it
much less of actual melodrama than here, and rarely, I should
say never, that sort of brutality, that useless insufferable
violence to the feelings, which is the last distinction
between melodrama and true tragedy.  Now, in NOTRE DAME, the
whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archer
is unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her
last hiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by
calling out to this sordid hero who has long since forgotten
her - well, that is just one of those things that readers
will not forgive; they do not like it, and they are quite
right; life is hard enough for poor mortals, without having
it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art.

We look in vain for any similar blemish in LES MISERABLES.
Here, on the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest
approach to literary restraint that Hugo has ever made: there
is here certainly the ripest and most easy development of his
powers.  It is the moral intention of this great novel to
awaken us a little, if it may be - for such awakenings are
unpleasant - to the great cost of this society that we enjoy
and profit by, to the labour and sweat of those who support
the litter, civilisation, in which we ourselves are so
smoothly carried forward.  People are all glad to shut their
eyes; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they can
forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices,
to be once roughly just in the general; that the bread that
we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes
life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death
- by the deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out
with labour, and the deaths of those criminals called tyrants
and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those revolutionaries
called criminals.  It is to something of all this that Victor
Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in LES MISERABLES; and this
moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the
artistic effect.  The deadly weight of civilisation to those
who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read.
A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find
Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most
serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting
Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ.  There is a
haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book.
The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law,
that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between
its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all
machinery, human or divine.  This terror incarnates itself
sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the
crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light
of the street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as
when the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the
darkness of the sewer; or as when the fugitive comes forth at
last at evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police
there also, waiting stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied
to take virtue instead.  The whole book is full of
oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause
of oppression.  We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand,
the prejudices of Marius, the prejudices in revolt that
defend the barricade, and the throned prejudices that carry
it by storm.  And then we have the admirable but ill-written
character of Javert, the man who had made a religion of the
police, and would not survive the moment when he learned that
there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just
creation, over which the reader will do well to ponder.