Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/225

 VICTOR HUGO 163 streams, will be of little more importance than the dustiest " m<*moires pour ser vir " materials from which the historian, with much smoothing down and apol- ogies for the pyrotechnics of a past age, will take here and there a vivid touch to illustrate his theories or brighten his narrative. They will retain, too, a certain importance as autobiography. But fortunately the great mass of the work which Victor Hugo has left behind him can be separated from the polemics of his troub- led age and fiery temper. It is not in any sense a peaceful literature. Conflict is its very inspiration. The struggle of human misery with all the confusing and overbearing forces of life ; of poverty with the requirements and oppressions of wealth ; of the small with the great ; of the people with tyrants ; of Man with Fate these are his subjects, and he is never an impartial historian. He is on the side of the weak in every combat, the partisan of the oppressed. But this does not detract from his work when his opponents are the oppressors of the past, or the still more subtle, veiled, and unassailable forces of Destiny. The poet's re- gion is there : he is born, if not to set right the times which are out of joint, at least to read to the world the high and often terrible lesson of the ages. But it vulgarizes his work when he is seen, tooth and nail, in violent personal conflict with foemen unworthy of his steel, embalming in poetry the trivial or the uncom- pleted incidents of contemporary warfare. It becomes almost ludicrous, indeed, when we find him pouring forth page after page of vehement and burning com- plaint in respect to the personal sufferings inflicted on himself, when we know that throughout his career Hugo never knew what the cold shock of failure was, and that, from the moment when Chateaubriand adopted him into the ranks of the poets as V enfant sublime, until the moment when all Paris conducted him to his last resting-place, no man has had a more enthusiastic following, or accom- plished a more triumphant career. Victor Hugo was a son of the Revolution. .He was born, as it were, between the two camps, at a moment when France was the theatre of the greatest popu- lar struggle in modern history, of a mother who was a Breton and a Legitimist, and a father who was a Republican general an extraordinary combination. This does not seem, however, to have made, as we might think, family life impossible, for Madame Hugo and her children followed the drum, and, notwithstanding all differences of opinion, found it possible to keep together. He was educated, it would appear, under his mother's influence rather than that of the soldier- father, and did not, till his mind was quite mature, throw himself into the revo- lutionary opinions which afterward influenced him so greatly. A Royalist in the Restoration period, an observant but not excited spectator of public affairs from 1830 to 1848, it was not till the coup d'etat and the beginning of the reign of the third Napoleon that he was seized with the passion of political life. That great betrayal seems to have stung him to a frenzied resistance and put poison in his veins. His country was cheated and betrayed ; the liberty for which she had made so many exertions, both heroic and fantastical, taken from her ; and his own personal liberty and safety threatened. Victor Hugo's soul then burst into feu et flamme. He caught fire like a volcano long silent, a burning mountain