The World's Greatest Books — Volume 10 — Lives and Letters

Part 1

THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS

JOINT EDITORS

ARTHUR MEE Editor and Founder of the Book of Knowledge

J.A. HAMMERTON Editor of Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia

VOL. X LIVES AND LETTERS

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Table of Contents

HUGO, VICTOR Deeds and Words

HUME, MARTIN Courtships of Elizabeth Love Affairs of Mary Queen of Scots

IRVING, WASHINGTON Life of Christopher Columbus Life of George Washington

JOSEPHUS, FLAVIUS Autobiography

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD: See ROCHEFOUCAULD

LOCKHART, JOHN GIBSON Life of Sir Walter Scott Life of Robert Burns

LUTHER, MARTIN Table Talk

MIRABEAU, COMTE DE Memoirs

MOORE, THOMAS Life of Byron

MORISON, J.A.C. Life of St. Bernard

MORLEY, JOHN Life of Cobden

PEPYS, SAMUEL Diary

PLINY THE YOUNGER Letters

RICHELIEU, CARDINAL Political Testament

ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES Confessions

ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANÇOIS DUC de LA Memoirs

SÉVIGNÉ, Mme. de Letters

SOUTHEY, ROBERT Life of Nelson

STAAL, Mme. de Memoirs

STANHOPE, EARL Life of Pitt

STANLEY, A.P. Life of Thomas Arnold, D.D.

Part 2

STRICKLAND, AGNES Life of Queen Elizabeth

SWIFT, JONATHAN Journal to Stella

TOLSTOY, COUNT LYOF N. Childhood, Boyhood, Youth My Confession

VILLARI, PASQUALE Life of Girolamo Savanarola

WESLEY, JOHN Journal

WOOLMAN, JOHN Journal

A Complete Index of THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS will be found at the end of Volume XX.

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Acknowledgement

Acknowledgement and thanks for permitting the use of the following selections in this volume, viz., "The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth," and "The Love Affairs of Mary Queen of Scots," by Major Martin Hume, are herewith tendered to Everleigh Nash, of London, England.

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VICTOR HUGO

Deeds and Words

"Deeds and Words" ("Actes et Paroles"), which is dated June, 1875, is the record of Victor Hugo's public life, speeches and letters, down to the year of his death, which occurred on May 32, 1885; but it is most important as a defence of his political career from 1848 onwards. It does not, however, tell us how changeable his opinions had actually been. His inconstant attachments are thus summed up by Dr. Brandes: "He warmly supports the candidacy of Louis Napoleon for the post of President of the Republic ... lends him his support when he occupies that post, and is even favourable to the idea of an empire, until the feeling that he is despised as a politician estranges him from the Prince-President, and resentment at the coup d'etat drives him into the camp of the extreme Republicans. His life may be said to mirror the political movements of France during the first half of the century." (See FICTION.)

I.--Right and Law

All human eloquence, among all peoples and in all times, may be summed up as the quarrel of Right against Law.

But this quarrel tends ever to decrease, and therein lies the whole of progress. On the day when it has disappeared, civilisation will have attained its highest point; that which ought to be will have become one with that which is; there will be an end of catastrophes, and even, so to speak, of events; and society will develop majestically according to nature. There will be no more disputes nor factions; no longer will laws be made, they will only be discovered. Education will have taken the place of war, and by means of universal suffrage there will be chosen a parliament of intellect.

In that serene and glorious age there will be no more warriors, but workers only; creators in the place of exterminators. The civilisation of action will have passed away, and that of thought will have succeeded. The masterpieces of art and of literature will be the great events.

Frontiers will disappear; and France, which is destined to die as the gods die, by transfiguration, will become Europe. For the Revolution of France will be known as the evolution of the peoples. France has laboured not for herself alone, but has aroused world-wide hopes, and is herself the representative of all human good-will.

Right and Law are the two great forces whose harmony gives birth to order, but their antagonism is the source of all catastrophe. Right is the divine truth, and Law is the earthly reality; liberty is Right and society is Law. Wherefore there are two tribunes, one of the men of ideas, the other of the men of facts; and between these two the consciences of most still vacillate. Not yet is there harmony between the immutable and the variable power; Right and Law are in ceaseless conflict.

To Right belong the inviolability of human life, liberty, peace; and nothing that is indissoluble, irrevocable, or irreparable. To Law belong the scaffold, sword, and sceptre; war itself; and every kind of yoke, from divorceless marriage in the family to the state of siege in the city. Right is to come and go, buy, sell, exchange; Law has its frontiers and its custom-houses. Right would have free and compulsory education, without encroaching on young consciences; that is to say, lay instruction; Law would have the teaching of ignorant friars. Right demands liberty of belief, but Law establishes the state religions. Universal suffrage and universal jury belong to Right, but restricted franchise and packed juries are creatures of the Law.

What a difference there is! And let it be understood that all social agitation arises from the persistence of Right against the obstinacy of Law. The keynote of the present writer's public life has been "Pro jure contra legem"--for the Right which makes men, against the Law which men have made. He believes that liberty is the highest expression of Right, and that the republican formula, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," leaves nothing to be added or to be taken away. For Liberty is Right, Equality is Fact, and Fraternity is Duty. The whole of man is there. We are brothers in our life, equal in birth and death, free in soul.

II.--Days of Childhood

At the beginning of this nineteenth century there was a child who lived in a great house, surrounded by a large garden, in the most deserted part of Paris. He lived with his mother, two brothers, and a venerable and worthy priest, who was his only tutor, and taught him much Latin, a little Greek, and no history at all. Here, at the time of the First Empire, the three boys played and worked, watched the clouds and trees and listened to the birds, under the sweet influence of their mother's smile.

It was the child's misfortune, though no one's fault, that he was taught by a priest. What can be more terrible than a system of untruth, sincerely believed? For a priest teaches falsehoods, ignorant of the truth, and thinks he does well; everything he does for the child is done against the child, making crooked that which nature has made straight; his teaching poisons the young mind with aged prejudices, drawing evening twilight, like a curtain, over the dawn.

That ancient, solitary house and garden, formerly a convent and then the home of his childhood, is still in his old age a dear and religious memory, though its site is now profaned by a modern street He sees it in a romantic atmosphere, in which, amid sunbeams and roses, his spirit opened into flower. What a stillness was in its vast rooms and cloisters. Only at long intervals was the silence broken by the return of a plumed and sabred general, his father, from the wars. That child, already thoughtful, was myself.

One night--it was some great festival of the empire, and all Paris was illumined--my mother was walking in the garden with three of my father's comrades, and I was following them, when we saw a tall figure in the gloom of the trees. It was the proscribed Victor du Lahorie, my godfather. He was even then conspiring against Bonaparte in the cause of liberty, and was shortly after executed. I remember his saying, "If Rome had kept her kings, she had not been Rome," and then, looking on me, "Child, put liberty first of all!" That one word outweighed my whole education.

III.--Before the Exile

Part 3

It was not until the writer saw, in 1848, the triumph of all the enemies of progress that he knew in the depths of his heart that he belonged, not to the conquerors, but to the vanquished. The Republic lay inanimate; but, gazing on her form, he saw that she was liberty, and not even the sure fore-knowledge of the ruin and exile that must follow could prevent his espousal with the dead. On June 15 he made his protest from the tribune, and from that day he fought relentless battle for liberty and the republic. And on December 2, 1851, he received what he had expected--twenty years of exile. That is the history of what has been called his apostasy.

Throughout that strange period before his exile, the frightful phantom of the past was all-powerful with men. Every kind of question was debated--national independence, individual liberty, liberty of conscience, of thought, of speech, and of the Press; questions of marriage, of education, of the right to work, of the right to one's fatherland as against exile, of the right to life as against penal law, of the separation of Church and state, of the federation of Europe, of frontiers to be wiped out, and of custom-houses to be done away--all these questions were proposed, debated, and sometimes settled.

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