"Homme fatal, l'histoire, dans ses enseignements, Comme on montre un gibet, entouré d'ossements, It was perhaps partly the bitterness of these publications, but more probably some demonstration against the French government by the exiles at Jersey, that gave offence to the authorities of that island, and caused Victor Hugo, in 1854, to remove to the neighboring island of Guernsey, where he has since lived. Here we get occasional glimpses of him in the shadow. At one time we find him writing a remarkable letter to Lord Palmerston, reproaching him in terms which must have seemed either extremely audacious or extremely French to that aristocratic Minister, for having refused to grant a reprieve to a criminal who had been executed under aggravated circumstances. "I am but a proscrit, you are only a minister. I am ashes, you are dust. Between atom and atom there need be no ceremony. Well, then," &c. This letter, printed afterwards in the newspapers of Belgium, found its way across the ocean, and was instrumental, if we may believe the author, in saving the life of one Julien, who was under sentence of death in Quebec. Again we find him writing an impressive letter to the magistrates of Geneva, who were considering the propriety of abolishing the death penalty. And on last Christmas day we see him giving a dinner at his own house to some thirty or forty of the poor children of Guernsey, "as an experiment," he said.* Here, in an old mansion which he calls Hauteville House, standing high up * "On Thursday last, being Christmas eve, M. Victor Hugo entertained at Hauteville House the poor children who, for about two years, have been the constant recipients of his bounty. The party consisted of forty children, and several of their parents, for the whole of whom M. Hugo provides a substantial dinner (always including fresh meat and a small glass of wine) once a fortnight, twenty being received each week. These children are entertained without regard to their nationality or religion, English, French, Guernsey, and Irish, Protestants and Catholics, being equally welcome; poverty being the only qualification required. "The party assembled on Thursday, having been regaled with a solid dinner and a dessert of cakes and wine, were taken into the billiard-room, where several visitors were assembled, and where, much to their delight, the children saw the table spread with a liberal supply of useful apparel, such as jackets, gowns, shirts, caps, bonnets, stockings and shoes, &c." - Guernsey Star, Dec. 26, 1863. above the town, and overlooking the island, with a study in a sort of belvidere on the roof, from which he looks far out to sea, he spends the quiet and sad years of his banishment. Here he seems now to have entered on a second literary period, divided from the first by the storms of two revolutions, and of which we have had already the first fruits in Les Misérables, that strange compound of beauty and deformity, of repose and extravagance, of sweet and genuine pathos and wretched sentimentalism, of vigorous and telling narrative and wandering episode, which has in it, disguised and overlaid by a thousand follies and encumbrances, enough of excellence and greatness to outweigh a generation of modern popular novelists, and which furnishes in itself, in its contradictions and inconsistencies, the best picture of its author. It is not for us to determine the place of Victor Hugo in French literature. We have become convinced of the impossibility of a French author ever being quite understood by any one of Anglo-Saxon blood and temper. What seems extravagance to us, is temperance to him; what seems to our taste morbid and sickening, is to him pure and elevated sentiment. We give Hugo this just praise, that, in the midst of the growing corruption of French literature, his own writings have grown constantly purer and more healthy in tone, until it is impossible to find in his later works anything which corresponds in the least to the foulness of the latest school of novelists among that polite people. And we give him this praise also, as just and not less high, that, when the French nation held out its slavish hands that Louis Napoleon might fasten on them the shackles of his most despicable Empire, he stood firm, and by speech and act did what one man might to save the failing honor of the nation. Many men of letters in France, many men of letters in America, may learn a lesson from his life. Hugo is one of those men who believe that the influence and power which gradually concentrate themselves in the pen of a famous writer may be used in other ways than through the pen, and that in critical times," when great interests are at stake, and strong passions are to be excited," the authors of a country may, without inconsistency or loss, become to some extent its legislators. It is only just to say that, in carrying out this opinion, no writer or statesman was ever more true to his principles, or more steady and unflinching in upholding them; and further, that those principles have been always, to an unusual extent, those which command the adhesion of all good men. He had the right to say, as he said in his reply to M. Baroche, the servile minister of the Prince-President, the day after his last speech in the National Assembly: "This profession of faith [a letter accepting his nomination as representative in 1848], it is my entire life, it is everything I have said or written or done for twenty-five years. I defy any man to prove that I have failed in a single promise of that programme. And if I had - failed in all, shall I tell you who would have had the right to reproach me? (Interruption à droite.) If I had acquiesced in the Roman expedition, if I had acquiesced in the law which confiscates education, by giving it into the hands of the Jesuits, if I had accepted the law of transportation which revives the punishment of death for political offences, if I had accepted the law which destroyed the universal suffrage, and that which took away the freedom of the press, do you know who would have had the right to say to me, 'You are an apostate'? (Pointing to the right.) It is not that side of the chamber, - it is this. (Pointing to the left.)” We say, then, that Victor Hugo, after all allowances are made for defects of style, of tone, of construction, is a man who in every printed work, in every public speech, has been true to the responsibility which rests upon every man who aims to influence the thought of the age; and has displayed, through a long career, in which brilliant prosperity and loftiness of position have alternated with the most heart-breaking reverses, a faithfulness, a conscientious earnestness, extremely rare even under circumstances much less trying. He has done his part towards educating that giddy and fickle French people up to a serious liberality of thought and opinion, and to a deep-seated hatred of tyranny, which will one day lift them above the bitter necessity of choosing between anarchy and despotism. He has done it in his own way, which, if it is not the way of De Tocqueville, is perhaps quite as well suited to the temper and tastes of his people. And if his reward for so much steadfastness seems but scanty, he has no doubt found VOL. LXXVI. - 5TH S. VOL. XIV. NO. III. 29 his consolation in the honest satisfaction with which he can look backward over his own history, more than in the faint hope of some new change in the future which may make it possible for him once more to call France his home as well as his country. Until that change, he prefers the freedom and dignity of exile to the silent acquiescence by which alone he could find safety in France. "J'accepte l'âpre exil, n'êut-il ni fin ni terme; Si quelqu'un a plié qu'on aurait cru plus ferme, “Oui, tant qu'il sera là, qu'on cède ou qu'on persiste, ART. II. — ART IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Geschichte der bildenden Künste im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Von ANTON SPRINGER. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus. 1858. Or the condition and tendency of modern Art this little book furnishes at once the most philosophical account and the ablest criticism which is to be found, perhaps, in the recent literature of Germany. Conscientious and vigorous and brief, it exhibits the enthusiasm and condenses the results of much earnest study and much independent thought. Overbeck and the religious school, the leaders of idealism, the Munich and Düsseldorf schools, realism in sculpture, historical and landscape and genre painting, - architecture since Schinkel's death; such are the topics presented by the development of the art it assumes to illustrate. - Modern views of art may have had their origin in that larger knowledge of antiquity and that clearer perception of its splendor, in that brilliant unfolding of the critical faculty, which we owe to the labor of Winckelmann and the genius of Lessing. But in the latter years the national spirit of the Ger mans has been awakened; the task and the duty of the nation's individual progress are more distinctly recognized. From the delusion of a cosmopolitan art, as from the deadening unity of political forms and the degrading monotony of impossible hierarchies, the world has been, let us hope, finally and forever delivered. The later vision, the profounder harmony, the diviner element of unity in diversity, is instinctively felt and everywhere proclaimed. The true artist, whose creations are but the breath, as it were, of his nation's life, the expression of its cravings, the illumination of its fancy, -its ideal and its rest,-is as little summoned now to Rome to unfold his power or to direct his effort, as to Paris, which in the last century was filled with the ambition of becoming a universal European school of art. an as truth is persome results of Nor is there, to our mind, an inevitable collision between the adherents of the Greek and the medieval art, the only two great schools the world has yet known. Art is not a cause, agency, a will, a power to reform or to create; it does not originate ideas or establish philosophies. It is but the expression, in pure form, as Springer happily says, of the governing ideas of the age. And it is not for us to pretend first to have caught and depicted the all-pervading activity and rule of the World-Spirit (das Walten des Weltgeistes). The character of the art of an age will depend upon its culture. And as some principles are discovered once for all, manent, and only the application of it varies, art will survive the civilization it celebrates; some flowers abide with us fresh and fragrant and full of beauty in the last days as in the first. That in the Middle Age men did not build their cathedrals as the Greeks built their temples, - that we do not build our villas as feudal lords built their castles, is not to be taken as a sign of contempt in the one or an evidence of degeneracy in the other. We may still cherish the Greek art, still be perplexed by the mystery of its beauty, while we wonder at the grandeur and are softened by the grace of the medieval cathedrals and the Madonna faces they enshrine. Beyond and above the special manifestation of a particular age or country, pervading change, surviving ruin, it is for us to seek always and to find the general law, the individual tri - - |