The great and salutary idea of the book, is that honesty before the law is a cruel hypocrisy, in so far as it arrogates to itself the right of dividing society according to its own standard into elect and reprobates, and thus confounds the relative with the absolute. The leading passage is that in which Javert, thrown off the rails, upsets the whole moral system of the strict Javert, half spy, half priest--of the irreproachable police-officer. In this chapter the writer shows us social charity illuminating and transforming a harsh and unrighteous justice. Suppression of the social hell, that is to say, of all irreparable stains, of all social outlawries for which there is neither end nor hope--it is an essentially religious idea.
The erudition, the talent, the brilliancy of execution, shown in the book are astonishing, bewildering almost. Its faults are to be found in the enormous length allowed to digressions and episodical dissertations, in the exaggeration of all the combinations and all the theses, and, finally, in something strained, spasmodic, and violent in the style, which is very different from the style of natural eloquence or of essential truth. Effect is the misfortune of Victor Hugo, because he makes it the center of his aesthetic system; and hence exaggeration, monotony of emphasis, theatricality of manner, a tendency to force and over-drive. A powerful artist, but one with whom you never forget the artist; and a dangerous model, for the master himself is already grazing the rock of burlesque, and passes from the sublime to the repulsive, from lack of power to produce one harmonious impression of beauty. It is natural enough that he should detest Racine.
But what astonishing philological and literary power has Victor Hugo! He is master of all the dialects contained in our language, dialects of the courts of law, of the stock-exchange, of war, and of the sea, of philosophy and the convict-gang, the dialects of trade and of archaeology, of the antiquarian and the scavenger. All the bric-à-brac of history and of manners, so to speak, all the curiosities of soil, and subsoil, are known and familiar to him. He seems to have turned his Paris over and over, and to know it body and soul as one knows the contents of one’s pocket. What a prodigious memory and what a lurid imagination! He is at once a visionary and yet master of his dreams; he summons up and handles at will the hallucinations of opium or of hasheesh, without ever becoming their dupe; he makes of madness one of his tame animals, and bestrides, with equal coolness, Pegasus or Nightmare, the Hippogriff or the Chimera. As a psychological phenomenon he is of the deepest interest. Victor Hugo draws in sulphuric acid, he lights his pictures with electric light. He deafens, blinds, and bewilders his reader rather than he charms or persuades him. Strength carried to such a point as this is a fascination; without seeming to take you captive, it makes you its prisoner; it does not enchant you, but it holds you spellbound. His ideal is the extraordinary, the gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His most characteristic words are _immense, colossal, enormous, huge, monstrous_. He finds a way of making even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which seems impossible to him is to be natural. In short, his passion is grandeur, his fault is excess; his distinguishing mark is a kind of Titanic power with strange dissonances of puerility in its magnificence. Where he is weakest is, in measure, taste, and sense of humor: he fails in _esprit_, in the subtlest sense of the word. Victor Hugo is a gallicized Spaniard, or rather he unites all the extremes of south and north, the Scandinavian and the African. Gaul has less part in him than any other country. And yet, by a caprice of destiny, he is one of the literary geniuses of France in the nineteenth century! His resources are inexhaustible, and age seems to have no power over him. What an infinite store of words, forms, and ideas he carries about with him, and what a pile of works he has left behind him to mark his passage! His eruptions are like those of a volcano; and, fabulous workman that he is, he goes on forever raising, destroying, crushing, and rebuilding a world of his own creation, and a world rather Hindoo than Hellenic.