THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-Les Misérables. Par Victor Hugo. Bruxelles, 1862. E livre que le lecteur a sous les yeux en ce moment, c'est, d'un bout à l'autre, dans son ensemble et dans ses détails, quelles que soient les intermittences, les exceptions ou les défaillances, la marche du mal au bien, de l'injuste au juste, du faux au vrai, de la nuit au jour, de l'appétit à la conscience, de la pourriture à la vie, de la bestialité au devoir, de l'enfer au ciel, du néant à Dieu. Point de départ : la matière ;-point d'arrivée : l'âme. L'hydre au commencement, l'ange à la fin.'* Such are the words in which M. Victor Hugo incidentally sets forth the pith and gist of the ten volumes before us. Strange words, indeed, to come from the pen of a French novelist under the Second Empire; and all the more strange because, we are thankful to say, they convey no vain boast. They are in the main true. It was observed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, that to make the morals of her contemporaries square with the enactments of the Divine law, the printers of the Book of Common Prayer ought in future to omit all the nots in the Decalogue. In like manner it might be said, that if at each clause of the passage quoted above you were to insert a not-or, in other words, if you were to read the passage backwards-you would not in the slightest degree overstate the marche' which French fiction has taken during the last ten years. Proud as the Third Napoleon may be of the masterly manner in which his Parisian edility (as. the French newspapers term it) have ruled out the capital in streets as straight (and we might add, as stiff and unpicturesque) as the lines in a schoolboy's copybook; bright as may be the lustre which he believes himself to have thrown over France by the less peaceful triumphs of Magenta and Solferino with which he has saddled the gratitude of Italy; it will be a grave omission on the part of his historian if he omit to notice that while he embellished the streets of Paris with marble and mortar, his era. enervated the minds of its inhabitants with a literature as filthy, as frivolous, and as false as ever sapped the morals of a nation or made the fortune of a publisher. Such works as 'Madame

Vol. 112.-No. 224.

Bovary,' as 'Fanny,'' Daniel' et Compagnie, reaching as they have done, some of them, a bonâ fide twentieth edition, and dragging in their trail the details of a medical treatise on the nervous diseases of women, poisoned by the nastiness of a prurient mind and set out with all the artifice of a showy pen, are not so much outrages on decency as signs of the times amid which they crawled out of the dunghill-their authors' brainsto bask themselves in the sunny étalage of the Rue Vivienne or of the Rue de la Paix, of a Levy or an Amyot. Shut out from all the inestimable benefits which political life confers, taught to believe meanwhile that in order to have the full use of liberty they must learn not to abuse it—which sounds like telling a man that to get the use of his limbs he must never stir but in a Bath chair-Frenchmen have allowed themselves to seek elsewhere for some substitute for that healthy excitement and play of mind which they can no longer find in the field of politics: we might add, which they no longer seek. Drowned in the beastly sinks of sensuality, zealous for nothing unless it be côté à la Bourse, the mind of France is only rescued from that most fatal disease, political apathy, by the vigorous efforts of those faithful few, the Sadouxor in the race after everything which constitutes the higher life of man, who, from the Aventine of a dignified Secession, protest against the reign of a coarse materialism, and sustain, in all their force and beauty, the traditions of one of the noblest bodies of literature that ever wedded lofty thoughts to words that burn.*

Considered, then, with reference to the works of fiction which have caused the greatest 'fureur' in France during the last ten years, this new novel of Victor Hugo's, conceived as it is in the spirit which its author justly vindicates for it in the words which

* From the strictures in which we have here indulged on the light literature of France, it would be an unpardonable omission not to except the charming little works of M. J. T. de St. Germain-a pseudonym of a very transparent character to any one who has ever had before his eyes the books on which it figures. A writer in the 'Saturday Review' (Sept. 20, 1862), in speaking of the difficulty which French writers seem to experience in writing with success on the side of virtue,' and of the futility of that species of warning which is based on the example of anomalous and monstrous folly, rightly adds, that the best device of the instructive novelist is to sketch an ideal, to kindle or foster the better feelings of readers by inspiring notions of something purer, nobler, and better than themselves.' Such is the object which M. J. T. de St. Germain has proposed to himself in the Légende pour une Epingle,' in 'Mignon,' in Lady Clare,' and in Pour Parvenir,' &c. Not that the morality is offensively obtruded: it arises naturally out of the incidents related-it is put forth, not put on. To those who have experienced the difficulty of meeting with books among the current works of French fiction which may safely be left about, and are as adapted virginibus puerisque as for the riper taste of a more advanced age, it may be useful to be furnished with the titles of the above works, which in France at least have met with a success, less noisy indeed, but scarcely less substantial, than that of their impure rivals.

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we have placed at the head of this article, is a most welcome and noteworthy exception. Occasional grossness of expression indeed too frequently escapes him, but there is nothing that bewrays impurity of thought. The genius of the poet and the mind of the man have both of them been of too high an order to stoop to such lewdness, consciously and lovingly caressed, as seems to allure the readers and to absorb the minds of a Flaubert and a Feydeau. To what purpose, indeed, is Poesy a 'winged thing,' as Plato calls it, if it do not raise itself above the dirt and dust of the earth earthy, and become a 'sursum corda' to the world?

Hitherto we have allowed M. Victor Hugo to give his own version of the general tendencies of LES MISÉRABLES,' and this with the view of pointing out in limine the exceptional position which he so honourably holds in the French literature of the day. We must now, however, look more closely into the matter, and furnish the reader with such details as may give him a more accurate idea of the scope of the work, the nature of the story, and the merits of the style.

First, then, as to the material bulk and formal division of 'Les Misérables.' It consists of ten volumes, divided into five parts of two volumes each. These five parts bear successively and respectively the following designations :-I. FANTINE; II. COSETTE; III. MARIUS; IV. L'IDYLLE RUE PLUMET ET L'ÉPOPÉE RUE ST. DENIS; V. JEAN VALJEAN. Each 'part' again is divided into eight or more books,' and each book into chapters, and to the chapters are affixed headings, selected apparently for the purpose of giving the reader the smallest possible idea of the nature of the contents. The far-fetched conceits in which M. Hugo here indulges betray an amount of affectation scarcely compatible with good taste. The 4000 pages, in round numbers, of which the ten volumes (Brussels edition) consist would make about 1300 pages of the same type as the 'Quarterly Review.'

It is not, we believe, very generally known that 'Les Misérables' is the work of two writers-the one a poet, the other a system-monger; the one richly endowed with feelings of the highest order, which come to him as naturally as instincts (and herein is he a poet); the other sententiously parading the crudest notions, the product of no thought, the result of no experience, as very foundations of Law and Order, as the only conditions on which the happiness of a nation can be secured, and the victory over Sin and Misery completed. The one great on the smallest theme--the gambols of an infant: the other small on the greatest theme-the relation of the Individual to the State, and

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and the condition of the Dangerous Classes. This literary partnership has been productive of all the mischief which might be expected from the collaboration of two minds of so opposite a character. It is not only that we are indebted to it for the infliction of nearly one thousand pages of digressions with which we could well have dispensed, but these digressions mar the interest by interrupting the sequence of the story, which they do nothing to develope, and everything to retard. So great, indeed, is the injury which the social and political quack has done to his colleague the poet, that many critics have been thrown, it would seem, off the scent; have been unable to reunite that thread of the story which these interminable episodical essays are ever breaking, and have thus denied to Victor Hugo the poet that artistic skill of which Victor Hugo the quack has done so much to mask the grandeur and to mar the effect. It will be our endeavour in the following remarks to eliminate as far as may be the disastrous results which have ensued from this untoward collaboration of two unequal wits lodged under one cranium. We shall make it our business, by a searching analysis of the two first volumes (for it is in them that the kernel of the nut is to be found), to unsphere the spirit which has presided over the conception of the entire work. We shall thus be enabled to disentangle the idea which, in spite of all unseemly obstructions, does, in fact, knit together the different parts of Les Misérables,' and so to vindicate that artistic power to which Victor Hugo's critics have done such scanty justice. This more searching analysis completed, we shall follow it up by a hasty summary of the sequel of the story, sufficient to bring out the consensus partium' of which we shall previously have furnished the key. We shall then offer some remarks on other portions of the work which seem to call for special censure or special praise, as the case may be.

We think it will be seen on the whole that, amid all its defects, this work has something more than the beauties of an exquisite style, and the word-compelling' power of a literary Zeus, to recommend it to the tender care of a distant posterity: that in dealing with all the emotions, passions, doubts, fears, which go to make up our common humanity, M. Victor Hugo has stamped upon every page the hall-mark of genius, and the loving patience and conscientious labour of a true artist. We sit here as utterly dispassionate judges. Unlike his own countrymen, we have no personal pique against the author, no old scores to pay off, no literary côterie to serve, no political principles to denounce, no bugbear of socialism to defy. We approach M. Victor Hugo, indeed, with all the tenderness which is due to an exile, and with all the respect which is due to a man of genius-Solem quis

dicere falsum-but beyond that, it is needless to assure M. Victor Hugo that we have no purpose to serve but that of saying with all frankness what we think of this important addition to a literature of which we are ever anxious to hail the glory, and to deplore the decay.

The work opens with a highly-finished portrait of a Christian bishop. Nothing seems so much to have exasperated M. Hugo's hostile critics as his audacity in attempting such a portrait. The so-called religious party seem to consider he is poaching on their preserves, and we doubt not would infinitely have preferred that he should have pointed the finger of scorn both at Bishops and at Christianity. The portrait, we may remark, is generally believed to be more or less from the life, and to refer to Monseigneur Miollis.* He resides in the episcopal town-but not in the episcopal palace, which he has given up as a hospital, making the old hospital his palace with his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, and his old servant, Madame Magloire. Mademoiselle Baptistine is thus beautifully described in language which it is impossible to translate:

Elle était une personne longue, pâle, mince, douce; elle réalisait l'idéal de ce qu'exprime le mot "respectable;" car il semble qu'il soit nécessaire qu'une femme soit mère pour être vénérable. Elle n'avait jamais été jolie; toute sa vie, qui n'avait été qu'une suite de saintes œuvres, avait fini par mettre sur elle une sorte de blancheur et de clarté; et, en vieillissant, elle avait gagné ce qu'on pourrait appeler la beauté de la bonté. Ce qui avait été de la maigreur dans sa jeunesse était devenu, dans sa maturité, de la transparence; et cette diaphanéité laissait voir l'ange. C'était une âme plus encore que ce n'était une vierge. Sa personne semblait faite d'ombre; à peine assez de corps pour qu'il y eût là un sexe; un peu de matière contenant une lueur: de grands yeux toujours baissés: un prétexte pour qu'une âme reste sur la terre.'-(i. p. 11.)

If

The words we have placed in italics remind us of what is undoubtedly true, that old age, so it be found in the way of righteousness, gives to the features a beauty not their own. the motions of the mind be good, the lines of the face will but become more and more beautiful as time wears, and as the more sensuous beauty wanes.

The life and conversation of the good Bishop-whom the

Charles François Melchior Bienvenu Miollis, formerly Bishop of Digne, in Provence. This prelate was born at Aix in the year 1753, and was made Bishop of Digne in 1805, an office which he adorned with simple, unostentatious virtues till the infirmities of age made him resign in 1838, five years before his death. His friends and admirers have not been slow to protest against the historical substratum which the author of 'Les Misérables' would have his readers suppose underlies the portrait of the Bishop of the story.

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