The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature

his story.

It is not any specific code of values that concerns him here, but the wider abstraction: man’s loyalty to values, whatever any man’s particular values might be. Although Hugo’s personal sympathy is obviously on the side of the republicans, he presents his characters with impersonal detachment, or rather, with an impartial admiration granted equally to both sides of the conflict. In spiritual grandeur, intransigent integrity, unflinching courage and ruthless dedication to his cause, the old Marquis de Lantenac, the leader of the royalists, is the equal of Cimourdain, the ex-priest who became the leader of the republicans. (And, perhaps, Lantenac is Cimourdain’s superior, as far as the color and power of his characterization are concerned.) Hugo’s sympathy for the gay, boisterous exuberance of the republican soldiers is matched by his sympathy for the grim, desperate stubbornness of the royalist peasants. The emphasis he projects is not: “What great values men are fighting for!” but: “What greatness men are capable of, when they fight for their values!”

Hugo’s inexhaustible imagination is at its virtuoso best in an extremely difficult aspect of a novelist’s task: the integration of an abstract theme to the plot of a story. While the events of Ninety-Three are a sweeping emotional torrent directed by the inexorable logic of a plot structure, every event features the theme, every event is an instance of man’s violent, tortured, agonized, yet triumphant dedication to his values. This is the invisible chain, the corollary of the plot-line, that unites such scenes as: the ragged, disheveled young mother, staggering blindly, with savage endurance, through flaming villages and devastated fields, searching desperately for the children she has lost in the chaos of the civil war—the beggar who acts as host to his former feudal master, in a cave under the roots of a tree—the humble sailor who has to make a choice, knowing that for a few brief hours, in a rowboat, in the darkness of night, he holds the fate of the monarchy in his hands—the tall, proud figure of a man with the clothes of a peasant and the bearing of an aristocrat, who looks up from the bottom of a ravine at the distant reflection of a fire and finds himself confronted by a terrible alternative—the young revolutionary, pacing back and forth in the darkness, in front of a breach in a crumbling tower, torn between treason to the cause he has served all his life and the voice of a higher loyalty—the white-faced figure of a man who rises to pronounce the verdict of a revolutionary tribunal, while the crowd waits in total stillness to hear whether he will spare or sentence to death the only man he had ever loved.

The greatest example of the power of dramatic integration is an unforgettable scene which only Hugo could have written, a scene in which the agonizing intensity and suspense of a complex development are resolved and surpassed by two simple lines of dialogue: “Je t’arrete.”—“Je t’approuve.” (“I arrest you.”—“You are right.”) The reader will have to reach these lines in their full context to discover who speaks them and what enormous psychological significance and grandeur the author makes them convey.

“Grandeur” is the one word that names the leitmotif of Ninety-Three and of all of Hugo’s novels—and of his sense of life. And perhaps the most tragic conflict is not in his novels, but in their author. With so magnificent a view of man and of existence, Hugo never discovered how to implement it in reality. He professed conscious beliefs which contradicted his subconscious ideal and made its application to reality impossible.

He never translated his sense of life into conceptual terms, he did not ask himself what ideas, premises or psychological conditions were necessary to enable men to achieve the spiritual stature of his heroes. His attitude toward the intellect was highly ambiguous. It is as if Hugo the artist had overwhelmed Hugo the thinker; as if a great mind had never drawn a distinction between the processes of artistic creation and of rational cognition (two different methods of using one’s consciousness, which need not clash, but are not the same); as if his thinking consisted of images, in his work and in his own life; as if he thought in metaphors, not in concepts, in metaphors that stood for enormous emotional complexities, as hurried symbols and mere approximations. It is as if the wide emotional abstractions he handled as an artist made him too impatient for the task of rigorous defining and of identifying that which he sensed rather than knew—and so he reached for any available theories that seemed to connote, rather than denote, his values.

Toward the close of Ninety-Three, Hugo the artist sets up two superlatively dramatic opportunities for his characters to express their ideas, to declare the intellectual grounds of their stand: one, a scene between Lantenac and Gauvain, in which the old royalist is supposed to defy the young revolutionary by an impassioned defense of the monarchy; the other, between Cimourdain and Gauvain, in which they are supposed to confront each other as the spokesmen for two different aspects of the revolutionary spirit. I say “supposed,” because Hugo the thinker was unable to do it: the characters’ speeches are not expressions of ideas, but only rhetoric, metaphors and generalities. His fire, his eloquence, his emotional power seemed to desert him when he had to deal with theoretical subjects.

Hugo the thinker was archetypical of the virtues and the fatal errors of the nineteenth century. He believed in an unlimited, automatic human progress. He believed that ignorance and poverty were the only causes of human evil. Feeling an enormous, incoherent benevolence, he was impatiently eager to abolish any form of human suffering and he proclaimed ends, without thinking of means: he wanted to abolish poverty, with no idea of the source of wealth; he wanted the people to be free, with no idea of what is necessary to secure political freedom; he wanted to establish universal brotherhood, with no idea that force and terror will not establish it. He took reason for granted and did not see the disastrous contradiction of attempting to combine it with faith— though his particular form of mysticism was not of the abject Oriental variety, but was closer to the proud legends of the Greeks, and his God was a symbol of human perfection, whom he worshiped with a certain arrogant confidence, almost like an equal or a personal friend.

The theories by which Hugo the thinker sought to implement it do not belong in the universe of Hugo the artist. When and as they are put into practice, they achieve the opposite of those values which he knew only as a sense of life. Hugo the artist paid for that lethal contradiction. Even though no other artist had ever projected so deeply joyous a universe as his, there is a somber touch of tragedy in all his writing. Most of his novels have tragic endings—as if he were unable to concretize the form in which his heroes could triumph on earth, and he could only let them die in battle, with an unbroken integrity of spirit as the only assertion of their loyalty to life; as if, to him, it was the earth, not heaven, that represented an object of longing, which he could never fully reach or win.

Such was the nature of his conflict: a professed mystic in his conscious convictions, he was passionately in love with this earth; a professed altruist, he worshiped man’s greatness, not his suffering, weaknesses or evils; a professed advocate of socialism, he was a fiercely intransigent individualist; a professed champion of the doctrine that emotions are superior to reason, he achieved the grandeur of his characters by making them all superbly conscious, fully aware of their motives and desires, fully focused on reality and acting accordingly—from the peasant mother in Ninety-Three to Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. And this is the secret of their peculiar cleanliness, this is what gives a beggar the stature of a giant, this absence of blind irrationality and stuporous, unfocused drifting; this is the hallmark of all of Hugo’s characters; it is also the hallmark of human self-esteem.

On whose political-philosophical side does Victor Hugo belong? It is not an accident that in our day, in a culture dominated by altruistic collectivism, he is not a favorite of those whose alleged ideals he allegedly shared.

I discovered Victor Hugo when I was thirteen, in the stifling, sordid ugliness of Soviet Russia. One would have to have lived on some pestilent planet in order fully to understand what his novels—and his radiant universe—meant to me then, and mean now. And that I am writing an introduction to one of his novels—in order to present it to the American public—has, for me, the sense of the kind of drama that he would have approved and understood. He helped to make it possible for me to be here and to be a writer. If I can help another young reader to find what I found in his work, if I can bring to the novels of Victor Hugo some part of the kind of audience he deserves, I shall regard it as a payment on an incalculable debt that can never be computed or repaid.

11. The Goal of My Writing

THE motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.

Let me stress this: my purpose is not the philosophical enlightenment of my