Is the work of such a man propaganda? If you accept the common dogma that blind egotistical instinct, and the portrayal and glorification thereof, constitute art, while the effort to understand life, and to reconstruct it into a thing of order and sense and dignity, is propaganda--why then undoubtedly the “Comédie Humaine” of Honoré de Balzac is pure and unadulterated art. If, on the other hand, you admit my contention that a man who is born into a money-ravenous world, and who absorbs its poisoned atmosphere, and sets himself to the task of portraying it, not merely as real and inevitable, but as glorious, magnificent, fascinating, sublime--if you admit with me that such a man is a propagandist, why then you must reconcile yourself to enduring the opposition of all orthodox literary critics. CHAPTER LXI THE OLD COMMUNARD Victor Hugo was born in 1802, three years later than Balzac. He grew up in the same world, but was not satisfied to contemplate its diseases; he sought remedies, and became a convert to revolutionary ideals, and so all critics agree that his work is marred by propaganda. He lived to be eighty-three years old, and went on writing and working to the very end, so that the story of his life carries us through practically the whole of the nineteenth century. We shall follow it, and then come back and retrace parts of the same story in the lives of other artists, French, German, British and American. Hugo’s father was a revolutionary soldier who rose to be a general in Napoleon’s army. As a little boy the poet followed the armies from place to place in Switzerland, Italy and Spain. His mother was a Royalist, and the boy had an old Catholic priest for a tutor, and was taught the old dogmas, literary as well as religious and political. His conversion into a revolutionist was not completed until the age of forty-six. Having been brought about by contact with daily events, this conversion was of tremendous influence upon the thought of Europe. He was a child of genius, and his prodigious activity began early. We find him composing a tragedy at the age of fourteen, and at the age of seventeen publishing a journal with the title of the “Literary Conservator.” He gets married upon a pension of a thousand francs, conferred upon him by King Louis XVIII, who has been put upon the throne to preserve Catholic reaction. Then comes King Charles X, who makes him a knight of the Legion of Honor at the age of twenty-three. But gradually the young poet’s “throne and altar stuff” begins to shown signs of independent thought; he composes a play in which Richelieu is portrayed as master of his king, and this is considered unsuitable for such ticklish times; the censor bars it, and the young poet’s personal intercession with the king does not avail.