« Le couchant me regarde avec ses yeux de flamme,
La vaste mer me parle, et je me sens sacré. »
Les Quatre vents de l’esprit, quatrième promenade
Love
Love is a recurring theme in the author’s correspondence. But not necessarily where a Romantic would expect it, in today’s sense of the word. For Victor Hugo, love is a principle of communication with beings, with all beings, human or not, dead or alive. Passionate love is one of these paths. Love for one’s children and love of sea bathing are others. Of course, there are dissonances: anger, malice, death. But for Hugo, love always has the last word. On August 4, 1855, he wrote to Georges Sand:
I heard that a misfortune has just struck you. You have lost a little child. You are suffering. Would you allow someone who admires and loves you to take your hand in his and tell you that all his heart is yours. (…) There is no death. All is life, all is love, all is light, or waiting for light.
Nature
Victor Hugo’s world is prodigiously animated. It is the antithesis of Descartes’ world, made up of decomposable mechanisms, where living beings are highly sophisticated machines. Everything thinks. Everything is full of souls. For Hugo, a rock thinks, just like a grasshopper or a bird. As a result, the world becomes extraordinarily alive.
Man! Around you, creation dreams
A thousand unknown beings surround you in your wall.
You come, you go, you sleep beneath their shadowed gaze,
Unaware of their lives woven around your days.
(…)
What you call thing, object, lifeless nature,
Knows, thinks, listens, and hears with quiet nurture.
The lock on your door perceives sin drawing near,
And yearns to close itself to shield you here.
Your window knows the dawn and whispers, “See, Believe!
And above all, Love!”—the truth it will always weave.
Little flower
“Do you see this little flower, my beloved Toto? It took a whole big mountain to make it. It is the image of poetry in this world. Poetry is an exquisite and delicate thing, and it takes a big heart to produce it. (…) Keep also forever in your heart the love of God, of nature, of your mother and of your father. Let these four feelings be one. To be intelligent is to be good. To be good is to be everything.”
To his son François-Victor, Tolosa, August 9, 1843
“[Les vents] pétrissent, comme avec des millions de mains, la souplesse de l’eau immense.”
Les Travailleurs de la mer
Simplicity
If there’s complexity in Hugo’s novels, it’s in the construction, in the architecture, or in the detail. When it comes to psychology, however, don’t look for Dostoyevsky in Victor Hugo. The characters are simple, driven by impulses of violence or goodness, but not very nuanced. They’re cartoon characters. Nothing is further removed from them, for example, than the neither-good-nor-bad characters of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education.
Hugo is simple, but not naïve: he knows the violence of men, their cowardice, all the dark shades of our species. But he is driven by an indestructible faith: once a man has seen and felt the light of goodness, he is capable of redemption.
The people
Victor Hugo is perhaps the only writer who loves the crowd. His colleagues in general shy away from it. He likes the power that emerges when it is angry, the rustling of humanity in the street, the titanic battles. Because he loves what is great, unfathomable, violent, unpredictable.
But he also loves the people in their humility, in their diversity. He believes in the original goodness of human beings, and will denounce all his life with great vigor the violence of the society towards the poor and the weak (Les Misérables). This was not a struggle shared by many writers in the 19th century, where holding the worker to be congenitally inferior was a commonplace opinion.