Creators (21 page)

Morris himself failed as a painter and an architect. His socialism, too, was defective in that he ran his firm, supposedly a cooperative in which workers shared the profits, as a standard commercial enterprise, even a ruthless one, since he did not believe ordinary workingmen could be trusted to spend money sensibly. As a furniture maker too, he was often accused, with justice, of making uncomfortable chairs and impractical articles generally. But he produced magnificent stained glass. And as a designer, especially of patterned textiles and wallpapers, he has never been surpassed. Many of his designs—especially Trellis, Pomegranate, Chrysanthemum, Jasmine, Tulip and Willow, Larkspur, Acanthus, Honeysuckle, Marigold and Willow Boughs, to give some of the most notable in chronological order—have been in use (chiefly for wallpaper, but also for cotton prints, rugs, runners, and tiles) for 150 years and are still popular today.
¹⁸
Moreover, Morris’s work and example became, almost
imperceptibly, the “arts and crafts movement,” whose objective was to design beautiful, well-made things; place them in every household; and so elevate the taste and morals of society. This movement spread to America, to the British empire, and all over Europe, leading to the foundation of thousands of craft firms in every branch of the arts, which not only produced high-quality goods in prodigious quantities but in many cases survive into the twenty-first century and have permanently changed the way we see everyday objects. Thus Pugin and Morris, starting from the same premise but working in different ways and modes, created a worldwide resistance to the aesthetic weaknesses of the industrial age; and it would be hard to say which of them made the larger and more lasting contribution to making the world a more beautiful place. Morris’s taste as a designer was uniquely pure—it can be said with truth that he never produced a bad or even a mediocre design. On the other hand the creative spirit in Pugin burned with a more intense, gemlike flame (to quote Walter Pater, one of his admirers), and as an artist, producer, and entrepreneur, as well as an architect of genius, he was a much better example than Morris of moral principles in art. But these are all matters of opinion. Together they transformed taste, all over the world, in ways that have had permanent consequences.

By contrast, Viollet-le-Duc, though learned, gifted, immensely industrious, and highly sensitive, was not primarily a creator. Although he has often been called the “French Pugin,” and although he was responsible, following Pugin and hugely influenced by Pugin’s work, for making Gothic respectable and even popular in France, he was a different kind of artist, and the differences between him and Pugin are illuminating. Viollet-le-Duc was two years younger, born in 1814, and he took many years to find his niche in France’s teeming artistic world. His father was curator of rural residences under Louis-Philippe; his uncle was a pupil of David and later art critic of the
Journal des Débats
. Violletle-Duc, following his father (like Pugin), became a superb architectural draftsman and topographical artist in watercolor. For many years he assisted a remarkable publishing entrepreneur, Baron Taylor, in illustrating a series (modeled on English examples that went back to the 1780s) called
Voyages Pittoresques et
Romantique dans l’Ancienne France
(1820 and following years). It eventually encompassed 740 volumes and 2,950 illustrative folios, each of four plates. It aimed to include every “old” building in France and employed artists such as Eugène Isabey, Horace Vernet, and R. P. Bonington (who lived mostly in France) as well as Viollet-le-Duc, though he was the most important contributor, drawing beautiful
entourages
, as they were called—lithographic drawings surrounding the texts. At the Salon of 1838 he won a gold medal for his superb drawings of Raphael’s loggia at the Vatican, and the next year he became an inspector in France’s National Council of Civic Buildings (he was to remain in the state sector for the rest of his life).
¹⁹

His work was overwhelmingly in restoration. Victor Hugo, as a young man, had raised his powerful voice in protest at the way France’s medieval architectural heritage, the largest by far in the world, was being allowed to deteriorate—indeed was being pulled down. Hugo’s protests and those of others were effective, and Viollet-le-Duc was the key figure in the national response. He is identified with three projects in particular—the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris, the rescue of the enormous and unique medieval town-cathedral-palace-fortress of Carcassone, and the rebuilding of the magnificent castle of Pierrefonds. But he was also involved in scores of other important restoration projects, of churches, cathedrals, abbeys, and public buildings, all over the country. Despite bitter twentieth-century criticism, similar to that leveled at Gilbert Scott in Britain, Viollet-le-Duc’s work was generally of the highest quality and based on profound knowledge. He was sensitive in deciding what had to be rebuilt, what could simply be restored, and how restoration should be done. He provided, too, a unique record of his work in his magnificent “before” and “after” watercolors, which are among the best topographical drawings ever made. Like Pugin, he was responsible for a series of immense books, which are works of architectural and historical philosophy as well as deeply researched records. They include his
Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’Architecture Française du XIème au XVIème
siècles (9 vols., Paris, 1854–1868) and his
Dictionnaire Raisonné du Mobilier Français de l’Époque Caroligienne à la Renaissance
(6 vols., 1858–1874), which revolutionized the study of medieval art and architecture in France
and throughout Europe. Viollet-le-Duc became an expert not only on how medieval artists and artisans worked but on many arcane subjects—locks and locksmiths, wood-casters, joiners, clothes, armor, weapons, and siege engines—illustrating all these topics with stunning watercolors and etchings. He entered into the spirit of medieval craftsmanship as thoroughly as Pugin. But though he could reproduce medieval designs of great utility to nineteenth-century builders who wanted to work or decorate in the Gothic manner, he lacked Pugin’s extraordinary skill in producing new expressions of the art. His
Habitations Modernes
(2 vols., Paris, 1877) shows a disappointing lack of originality; and his own country house, La Vedette (near Lausanne, now destroyed), makes a poverty-stricken contrast to Pugin’s work at Ramsgate.
²⁰

Both Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc acquired a knowledge and feeling for medieval art that have never been equaled. But a comparison of their work shows that knowledge and skill in reproducing it in word and line are not enough. Creative power must be there too, as it was superabundantly in Pugin’s case, and as it conspicuously was not in Viollet-le-Duc’s. Carcassone and Pierrefonds can be admired and enjoyed as medieval entities, brought back to artificial life by a restorer of spectacular energy.
²¹
But Pugin’s church at Cheadle is a genuine masterpiece of nineteenth-century art and architecture, which could have been created in no other age and by no other man.

V
ICTOR
H
UGO
(
1802–1885
)
was a creative artist on the grandest possible scale, with the widest scope and the highest productivity. In all four great divisions of literature—poetry, drama, the novel, and the essay—he was equally productive and remarkable. At thirteen he was writing classical tragedies and stories, and three years later he received public recognition with a prize from the Académie de Toulouse. Thereafter his output was incessant (except for one period of depression in the mid-1840s when he turned from writing to drawing) until he suffered a stroke in 1878, at age seventy-six, and slowed down. Even then he continued to write sporadically until his death at age eighty-three. He published in all about 10 million words, of which 3 million were edited from his manuscripts and published posthumously.

Hugo wrote something almost every day of his life, be it only a love letter to Adèle, his wife, or to his principal mistress, Juliette Drouet. Usually it was one or more poems, or several thousand words of prose—perhaps both. Poetry punctuated his life, like his heartbeats, and seems always to have been spontaneous, effortless, and fluent. He often wrote poetry first thing in the morning, as soon as he got up and before breakfast. He was twenty when he published his first volume of verse,
Odes et Poésies Diverse
(1822). Other collections followed every two or three years. The most important are
Les Orientales
(1829),
Leo Feuilles d’Automne
(1831),
Les Chants de Crépuscule
(1835),
Les Châtiments
(1853),
L’Année Terrible
(1872), and
La Légende des Siècles
, collections of poems commenting on all ages of history, which he published in four separate volumes in the years 1859–1883. All in all there are twenty-four books of poetry, and these do not include important
pièces d’occasion
, printed immediately after he wrote them in newspapers. There are probably over 3,000 poems by Hugo, a few very long, most short, some never published.
¹

Hugo wrote nine novels. The first, published in 1823, when Hugo was twenty-one, is
Han d’Islande
, set in seventeenth-century Norway. It is a romance containing the first of the great set-piece descriptions for which his novels became famous, a prolonged fight to the death with the bandit from which the novel takes its name.
Bug-Jargal
(1826), the story of the Negro revolution in San Domingo in 1791, features a horrific execution, as does
Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné
(1829), a fictional manifesto against capital punishment.
Notre-Dame de Paris
(1831), the first of Hugo’s “great” novels, is set in fifteenth-century Paris. It contains spectacular crowd scenes involving the underworld and a mob attacking the cathedral and being repulsed by the powerful hunchback Quasimodo, who lives in the belfry.
Claude Gueux
(1834), about convict life, is a failure; this was really a preparatory sketch for Hugo’s next novel,
Les Misérables
(1862), an examination and indictment of the entire criminal justice system. It features Jean Valjean, an escaped convict—Hugo’s most memorable creation—and Javert, the policeman who tracks him down. There are some spectacular scenes of pursuit including one in the great sewer of Paris; a description of the battle of Waterloo; and scenes from the barricades in the July Revolution of 1830.
Les Travailleurs de la Mer
(1866) is about the ocean and the fisheries, and has a magnificent fight between a mariner and a giant octopus.
L’Homme Qui Rit
(1869) is set in late-seventeenth-century England and is full of absurdities and unintentional jokes, featuring characters with names like Lord Gwynplaine; Lord David Dirry-More; the Duchess Josiane de Clan-charlie; Tom Jim-Jack; and Barkiphedro, receiver of jetsam at the Admiralty—plus officials from “the Wapentake.” Hugo’s last novel,
Quatre-Vingt-Treize
(1873), concerns the Vendée rising against the French revolutionary tyranny and contains marvelous scenes set in the swamps and secret forests of west France.

The plays began with
Cromwell
(1827), in verse, with a striking introduction setting out Hugo’s views of the new romantic movement in France, of which he became the leader.
Amy Robsart
, in prose, was followed in 1830 by the verse play
Hernani
, whose production at the Comédie Française marked the point at which romanticism drove classicism from the stage.
Marion de Lorme
(1829), in verse, is unimportant, as are
Marie Tudor
(1833);
Lucrèce Borgia
, in prose (also 1833); and
Angel
, in prose (1835). But
Le Roi s’Amuse
(1832), in verse, is memorable, not least because it became the libretto for Verdi’s
Rigoletto
; and
Ruy Blas
(1838), in verse, is Hugo’s best play. In 1843 Hugo wrote a bad play,
Les Bur-graves
, which was ill-received, and thereafter he left the stage alone, except for his feeble
Torquemada
(1882) and a collection of one-acters,
Le Théâtre en Liberté
(1886).

Hugo’s essays and nonfiction include
Le Rhin
(1842), a travel book also setting out Hugo’s strident patriotic views;
Napoléon le Petit
(1862), his assault on the imperial regime of Napoléon III;
William Shakespeare
(1864), setting out Hugo’s theory of genius; and a continuing series called
Actes et Paroles
(1841–1900, posthumous), taken from his journals. This list does not include vast numbers of articles, scores of pamphlets, and political ephemera.

Hugo dominated French literature in the nineteenth century, from the 1820s to the 1880s, and he is the nearest equivalent to Shakespeare in France. Yet despite his importance, there is no scholarly complete edition of his works, his vast correspondence has never been systematically edited, and critical works on his oeuvre are almost invariably vitiated by vehement partisanship.
²
There is only one really good biography, and that by an Englishman, Graham Robb.
³
It is hard to think of a writer whose popularity is so enormous but who has received so little objective study as a whole. Toward the end of Hugo’s life, his works were selling well over 1 million copies a year in France. He was immensely widely read abroad.
Les Misérables
was published simultaneously in eight major capital cities. In Britain, for instance, just before World War I, there were over 3 million copies of Hugo’s novels in print. One measure of his international popularity is that at least fifty-five operas have been based on his works, and others have been projected or sketched by a diverse a group of composers. Bizet, Wagner, Mous-
sourgsky, Honegger, Franc, Massenet, Delibes, Saint-Saens, Auric, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Fauré, Gounod, Widor, and Donizetti have found musical inspiration in his texts.
⁴
And Hugo has been a godsend to writers of contemporary musicals, and to Disney. He still attracts comment: Graham Robb calculates that, on average, every day sees the publication of 3,000 words about Hugo, somewhere. Yet something is lacking: a true summation, a definitive placing of Hugo in the context of French, indeed world, literature. A century and a quarter after his death, he is still a loose cannon, crashing about the deck. Why is this?

One collateral reason is the continuing lack of a scholarly edition of his works (and essentially his letters), which compounds the inherent difficulty of mastering their sheer extent. But the real explanation lies much deeper and concerns the nature of creativity and its roots in other aspects of the human mind. That Hugo was phenomenally creative is unarguable: in sheer quantity and often in quality too, he is in the highest class of artists. But he forces one to ask the question: is it possible for someone of high creative gifts to be possessed of mediocre, banal, even low intelligence?

The same question has also been asked of Charles Dickens. But it must be said that, with Hugo, the query was raised at the beginning of his literary career; it was repeated at intervals, often with great vehemence; and it remains suspended and unanswered over his posthumous reputation. Chateaubriand, godfather of French romanticism, who regarded Hugo as his prize pupil, referred to him as the “sublime infant.” The words “childish” and “infantile” crop up often in comment on Hugo by his peers. So do “insane” and “madness.” Certainly madness ran in the family. Hugo’s brother Eugène ended his sad, unfulfilled life in a padded cell; and Hugo’s daughter Adèle, after teetering on the brink of insanity for many years, finally fell over it. Balzac seized on this: “Hugo has the skull of a madman, and his brother, the great, unknown poet, died insane.” People referred to Hugo’s popularity as
l’ivresse de Victor Hugo.
Moreover, he not only was mad himself but infected others. Still, the most common criticism was lack of intelligence. Lecomte de Lisle called him as stupid as the Himalayas (to which Hugo rejoined that de Lisle was “just stupid”). Léon Bloy used the phrase
“an imbecile lama” and went on to a more general indictment, written shortly before Hugo died: “No one is unaware of his pitiful intellectual senility, his sordid avarice, his monstrous egotism, and his complete hypocrisy.” Tristan Legay argued (1922) that Hugo, master of the poetic antithesis, had missed the one about himself, his “splendor of manner and absence of thought,” a point anticipated by Paul Stapfer (in 1887): “greatest of French poets but also a crude rhetorician, eloquent spokesman, and talker of trivia, a diverse author but an imperfect man.” Emile Fagnet did not dispute Hugo’s genius but rated him as “an average and ordinary character…. His ideas were always those of everybody else at a certain period, but always a little behind the times…a magnificent stage-manager of commonplaces.” Jules Lemaître (1889) put it more cruelly: “This man may have genius. You may be sure he has nothing else.”

The case against Hugo, as a mind and a human being, takes away nothing from his creative powers, and therefore can be put in some detail. He was born in Besançon, the son of a professional army officer who flourished mightily under Bonaparte, becoming a full general and ennobled as Comte Sigisbut Hugo. Some of the child Victor’s life was spent traveling, in Italy and Spain, while his father was campaigning; and he saw and took in terrible sights on the roads—wounded men and corpses, dead horses, shattered villages. The parents were unhappy together; and Madame Hugo took her three sons (Victor was the youngest) away in 1812 and settled in Paris at 12 Impasse des Feuillantines, formerly a convent of nuns founded by Anne of Austria. It had an immense garden, with a ruined chapel and a dense wilderness, and these features imprinted ineffaceable memories on Hugo’s young mind. The ruined chapel may well have been the ultimate progenitor of
Notre-Dame de Paris
, then in a state of some dilapidation, and the wilderness certainly reappeared in the dense woods and thickets of
Quatre-Vingt-Treize
. Hugo was always an intensely visual writer; this was his strength and his weakness. He would seize on an image—for a poem naturally but also for a novel or the key scene in a play—and would then expand the image in all directions to create a story, a plot, a scenario.

Hugo’s education was scrappy and unsystematic. In many
respects he was an autodidact. Throughout his life he read voraciously but sporadically, in a wild and undisciplined manner, absorbing or half-absorbing vast quantities of facts, images, and the sounds of words as much as their orthography. He had a wonderful ear for words, which made him love them, and this gift above all others made him a poet. He loved music itself, too, especially Mozart and Beethoven, and he became a friend, in so far as he was ever capable of friendship, of Liszt and Berlioz. But it was the music of words, from first to last, that entranced and empowered him. No Frenchman ever used the language with more caressing affection or at times more brutal strength. Hugo played with it like a young panther, and charged into it like a rhinoceros.

Hugo always thought of bringing himself fame through literature. But he also always (if at some times more directly than at others) sought power through politics. He worked the two in tandem when he could. However, in his long career, sometimes close to the center, at other times on the periphery of politics, it is impossible to find any thread of consistency or any basis of moral principle or intellectual logic. There were always noisy ideals; but they were words. Behind this rhetorical facade was a love of power, normally blind and pursued with such clumsy incompetence that, even when office was within his grasp, he dashed it to the ground from impatience or vacillation.

Heredity should have made him a Bonapartist and a republican. He never repudiated his father’s record as a faithful follower of Napoleon, and in particular quietly made use of the title his father’s sword had earned, calling himself virtually all his life—except at brief moments when republican egalitarianism was in vogue—“le vicomte Hugo,” and always treating his brothers and his wife as members of the
noblesse
. Yet when Bonaparte fell, and even before then, Hugo was a legitimist and fervent royalist, a teenage Bourbon fanatic and Catholic ultra. The intellectual inspiration for the monarchist-papist revival in France was Chateaubriand’s great work
Le Génie du Christianisme
(1802), but it is doubtful that Hugo read this. What he absorbed, rather, were the symbols of the resurrected creed—the fleur-de-lis, the Gothic visual vocabulary, and the apparatus of medieval chivalry
and crusading zeal he feasted on greedily, then regurgitated in poetry. When he was seventeen, he and his brother Abel founded the
Conservateur Littéraire
(1819), which flourished for eighteen months or so, Hugo writing in every issue, especially reviews of current poetry in which he castigated the authors for the smallest infraction of the strict rules of grammar, meter, and prosody—all the rules he was later to break with the most reckless abandon, and successfully.