In another poem from Les Contemplations of 1856, ‘I am made of shadow and of marble’, Victor Hugo describes the poet as being ‘the stairway Darkness’. It is the poet’s task to go down into the depths and to examine them, on behalf of humanity. He or she should then re-emerge into the light to teach the lessons of what has been discovered there. Simply put, Hugo divided the world into matter and air, roughly represented by darkness and light, and by being (matter) and the soul. Matter lies beneath us, and it is easy to slip down into it and be submerged, never to reach ‘God’ who is to be found above us. The earth and the sea all threaten to overwhelm us. Life is a struggle to defeat the worldly and natural forces that conspire to bring us down. The study of the ‘book of nature’ that God has given us, through the medium of poetry, encourages and aids us to strive for the Ideal. The fate of humanity and nature are one; good and bad can be found in everything: darkness and light are within the souls of all of us. Hugo, the poet, by questioning his own soul, is our mediator.
Victor Hugo designed his house in Guernsey, Hauteville House, as a kind of monumental poem, itself made ‘of shadow and of marble.’ This is made very obvious in the structure of the house, which is centred around a winding and narrow staircase. At the foot of the staircase the hall is very dark. As you proceed up the stairway, the dark wood is lightened by mirrors added by Hugo, the frames decorated by him with his ‘mysterious flowers’. Eventually the staircase passes through a corridor lined with bookshelves and up to the celebrated lookout, the glass room Hugo added to the house. Here Hugo was at one with nature, separated only by panes of glass. He appears to be perched over the void, close to God and his messengers, the birds. He represents this journey up to the light in a drawing he made of the Casquets lighthouse off Alderney.
The lighthouse is described in his 1869 novel, The Man who Laughs, in its original elementary form, a small fire kept burning under a grill. The drawing represents this ancient beacon, a ship perilously close to the rocks beneath, but Hugo adds to it a set of winding steps that lead from darkness and danger up to the source of a brilliant light. In this drawing we can see a representation of Hauteville House as a microcosm of the world, in the same way that Hugo is a representative of Everyman; Hugo’s journey to the light is our journey. The way upward is fraught with rocks and reefs, but even if we fail and must start again, we will be given infinite chances to reach our goal.