HUGO, VICTOR MARIE
(1802?1885), French poet, dramatist and romance-writer, youngest son of General J. L. S. Hugo (1773?1828), a distinguished soldier in Napoleon’s service, was born at Besancon on the 26th of February 1802. The all but still-born child was only kept alive and reared by the indefatigable devotion of his mother Sophie Trebuchet (d. 1821), a royalist of La Vendee. Educated first in Spain and afterwards in France, the boy whose infancy had followed the fortunes of the imperial camp grew up a royalist and a Catholic. His first work in poetry and in fiction was devoted to the passionate proclamation of his faith in these principles.
The precocious eloquence and ardour of these early works made him famous before his time. The odes which he published at the age of twenty, admirable for their spontaneous fervour and fluency, might have been merely the work of a marvellous boy; the ballads which followed them two years later revealed him as a great poet, a natural master of lyric and creative song. In 1823, at the age of twenty-one, he married his cousin Adele Foucher (d. 1868). In the same year his first romance,
Han
d’Islande
, was given to the press; his second,
Bug-Jargal
, appeared three years later. In 1827 he published the great dramatic poem of
Cromwell
, a masterpiece at all points except that of fitness for the modern stage. Two years afterwards he published
Les Orientales
, a volume of poems so various in style, so noble in spirit, so perfect in workmanship, in music and in form, that they might alone suffice for the foundation of an immortal fame. In the course of nine years, from 1831 to 1840, he published
Les Feuilles d’automne
,
Les Chants du crepuscule
,
Les Voix interieures
and
Les Rayons et les ombres
.
That their author was one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets ever born into the world, any one of these volumes would amply suffice to prove. That he was the greatest tragic and dramatic poet born since the age of Shakespeare, the appearance of
Hernani
in 1830 made evident for ever to all but the meanest and most perverse of dunces and malignants. The earlier and even greater tragedy of
Marion de Lorme
(1828) had been proscribed on the ground that it was impossible for royalty to tolerate the appearance of a play in which a king was represented as the puppet of a minister. In all the noble and glorious life of the greatest poet of his time there is nothing on record
more chivalrous and characteristic than the fact that Victor
Hugo refused to allow the play which had been prohibited by
the government of Charles X. to be instantly produced under
the government of his supersessor.
Le Roi s’amuse
(1832),
the next play which Hugo gave to the stage, was prohibited
by order of Louis Philippe after a tumultuous first night?to
reappear fifty years later on the very same day of the same
month, under the eyes of its author, with atoning acclamation
from a wider audience than the first. Terror and pity had never
found on the stage word or expression which so exactly realized
the ideal aim of tragic poetry among the countrymen of Aeschylus
and Sophocles since the time or since the passing of Shakespeare,
of Marlowe and of Webster. The tragedy of
Lucrece Borgia
,
coequal in beauty and power with its three precursors, followed
next year in the humbler garb of prose; but the prose of Victor
Hugo stands higher on the record of poetry than the verse of
any lesser dramatist or poet.
Marie Tudor
(1833), his next
play, was hardly more daring in its Shakespearean defiance of
historic fact, and hardly more triumphant in its Shakespearean
loyalty to the everlasting truth of human character and passion.
Angelo
,
Tyran de Padoue
(1835), the last of the tragic triad to
which their creator denied the transfiguration of tragic verse,
is inferior to neither in power of imagination and of style, in
skill of invention and construction, and in mastery over all
natural and noble sources of pity and of terror.
La Esmeralda
,
the libretto of an opera founded on his great tragic romance
of
Notre-Dame de Paris
, is a miracle of lyric melody and of
skilful adaptation.
Ruy Blas
(1838) was written in verse,
and in such verse as none but he could write. In command
and in expression of passion and of pathos, of noble and of evil
nature, it equals any other work of this great dramatic poet;
in the lifelike fusion of high comedy with deep tragedy it excels
them all.
Les Burgraves
, a tragic poem of transcendent beauty
in execution and imaginative audacity in conception, found
so little favour on the stage that the author refused to submit
his subsequent plays to the verdict of a public audience.
Victor Hugo’s first mature work in prose fiction,
Le Dernier
Jour d’un condamne
, has appeared thirteen years earlier (1829).
As a tragic monodrama it is incomparable for sustained power
and terrible beauty. The story of
Claude Gueux
, published
five years later (1834), another fervent protest against the infliction
of capital punishment, was followed by many other
eloquent and passionate appeals to the same effect, written or
spoken on various occasions which excited the pity or the
indignation of the orator or the poet. In 1831 appeared the
greatest of all tragic or historic or romantic poems in the form
of prose narrative,
Notre
-Dame de Paris
. Three years afterwards
the author published, under the title of
Litterature et
philosophie melees
, a compilation or selection of notes and essays
ranging and varying in date and in style from his earliest effusions
of religious royalism to the magnificent essay on Mirabeau
which represents at once the historical opinion and the critical
capacity of Victor Hugo at the age of thirty-two. Next year
he published
Le Rhin
, a series of letters from Germany, brilliant
and vivid beyond all comparison, containing one of the most
splendid stories for children ever written, and followed by a
political supplement rather pathetically unprophetic in its
predictions.
At the age of thirty-eight he honoured the French Academy
by taking his place among its members; the speech delivered
on the occasion was characteristically generous in its tribute to
an undeserving memory, and significantly enthusiastic in its
glorification of Napoleon. Idolatry of his father’s hero and
leader had now superseded the earlier superstition inculcated
by his mother. In 1846 his first speech in the chamber of peers?Louis
Philippe’s House of Lords?was delivered on behalf
of Poland; his second, on the subject of coast defence, is memorable
for the evidence it bears of careful research and practical
suggestion. His pleading on behalf of the exiled family of
Bonaparte induced Louis Philippe to cancel the sentence which
excluded its members from France. After the fall and flight
of the house of Orleans, his parliamentary eloquence was never
less generous in aim and always as fervent in its constancy
to patriotic and progressive principle. When the conspiring
forces of clerical venality and political prostitution had placed a
putative Bonaparte in power attained by perjury after perjury,
and supported by massacre after massacre, Victor Hugo, in
common with all honourable men who had ever taken part in
political or public life under the government superseded by
force of treason and murder, was driven from his country into
an exile of well-nigh twenty years. Next year he published
Napoleon le petit
; twenty-five years afterwards,
Histoire d’un
crime
. In these two books his experience and his opinion of
the tactics which founded the second French empire stand
registered for all time. In the deathless volume of
Chatiments
,
which appeared in 1853, his indignation, his genius, and his
faith found such utterance and such expression as must recall
to the student alternately the lyric inspiration of Coleridge and
Shelley, the prophetic inspiration of Dante and Isaiah, the
satiric inspiration of Juvenal and Dryden. Three years after
Les Chatiments
, a book written in lightning, appeared
Les
Contemplations
, a book written in sunlight and starlight. Of the
six parts into which it is divided, the first translates into many-sided
music the joys and sorrows, the thoughts and fancies, the
studies and ardours and speculations of youth; the second, as
full of light and colour, grows gradually deeper in tone of thought
and music; the third is yet riper and more various in form of
melody and in fervour of meditation; the fourth is the noblest
of all tributes ever paid by song to sorrow?a series of poems
consecrated to the memory of the poet’s eldest daughter, who
was drowned, together with her husband, by the upsetting of
a boat off the coast of Normandy, a few months after their
wedding-day, in 1843; the fifth and the sixth books, written
during his first four years of exile (all but one noble poem which
bears date nine years earlier than its epilogue or postscript),
contain more than a few poems unsurpassed and unsurpassable
for depth and clarity and trenchancy of thought, for sublimity
of inspiration, for intensity of faith, for loyalty in translation
from nature, and for tenderness in devotion to truth; crowned
and glorified and completed by their matchless dedication to
the dead. Three years later again, in 1859, Victor Hugo gave
to the world the first instalment of the greatest book published
in the 19th century,
La Legende des siecles
. Opening with a
vision of Eve in Paradise which eclipses Milton’s in beauty no
less than in sublimity?a dream of the mother of mankind at
the hour when she knew the first sense of dawning motherhood,
it closes with a vision of the trumpet to be sounded on the day
of judgment which transcends the imagination of Dante by
right of a realized idea which was utterly impossible of conception
to a believer in Dante’s creed: the idea of real and final equity;
the concept of absolute and abstract righteousness. Between
this opening and this close the pageant of history and of legend,
marshalled and vivified by the will and the hand of the poet,
ranges through an infinite variety of action and passion, of light
and darkness, of terror and pity, of lyric rapture and of tragic
triumph.
After yet another three years’ space the author of
La Legende
des siecles
reappeared as the author of
Les Miserables
, the
greatest epic and dramatic work of fiction ever created or
conceived: the epic of a soul transfigured and redeemed, purified
by heroism and glorified through suffering; the tragedy and
the comedy of life at its darkest and its brightest, of humanity
at its best and at its worst. Two years afterwards the greatest
man born since the death of Shakespeare paid homage to the
greatest of his predecessors in a volume of magnificent and
discursive eloquence which bore the title of
William Shakespeare
,
and might, as its author admitted and suggested, more properly
have been entitled
A propos de Shakespeare
. It was undertaken
with the simple design of furnishing a preface to his younger
son’s translation of Shakespeare; a monument of perfect
scholarship, of indefatigable devotion, and of literary genius,
which eclipses even Urquhart’s Rabelais?its only possible
competitor; and to which the translator’s father prefixed a
brief and admirable note of introduction in the year after the
publication of the volume which had grown under his hand into
the bulk and the magnificence of an epic poem in prose. In the
same year
Les Chansons des rues et des bois
gave evidence of
new power and fresh variety in the exercise and display of an
unequalled skill and a subtle simplicity of metre and of style
employed on the everlasting theme of lyric and idyllic fancy, and
touched now and then with a fire more sublime than that of
youth and love. Next year the exile of Guernsey published
his third great romance,
Les Travailleurs de la mer
, a work
unsurpassed even among the works of its author for splendour of
imagination and of style, for pathos and sublimity of truth.
Three years afterwards the same theme was rehandled with no
less magnificent mastery in
L’Homme qui rit
; the theme of
human heroism confronted with the superhuman tyranny of
blind and unimaginable chance, overpowered and unbroken,
defeated and invincible. Between the dates of these two great
books appeared
La Voix de Guernesey
, a noble and terrible
poem on the massacre of Mentana which branded and commemorated
for ever the papal and imperial infamy of the colleagues
in that crime. In 1872 Victor Hugo published in
imperishable verse his record of the year which followed the
collapse of the empire,
L’Annee terrible
. All the poet and all
the man spoke out and stood evident in the perfervid patriotism,
the filial devotion, the fatherly tenderness, the indignation and
the pity, which here find alternate expression in passionate
and familiar and majestic song. In 1874 he published his last
great romance, the tragic and historic poem in prose called
Quatrevingt-treize
; a work as rich in thought, in tenderness,
in wisdom and in humour and in pathos, as ever was cast into
the mould of poetry or of fiction.
The introduction to his first volume of
Actes et paroles
, ranging
in date from 1841 to 1851, is dated in June 1875; it is one of his
most earnest and most eloquent appeals to the conscience and
intelligence of the student. The second volume contains the
record of his deeds and words during the years of his exile; like
the first and the third, it is headed by a memorable preface, as
well worth the reverent study of those who may dissent from
some of the writer’s views as of those who may assent to all.
The third and fourth volumes preserve the register of his deeds
and words from 1870 to 1885; they contain, among other things
memorable, the nobly reticent and pathetic tribute to the
memory of the two sons, Charles (1826?1871) and Francois
(1828?1873), he had lost since their common return from exile.
In 1877 appeared the second series of
La Legende des siecles
;
and in the same year the author of that colossal work, treating
no less of superhuman than of human things, gave us the loveliest
and most various book of song on the loveliest and simplest of
subjects ever given to man,
L’Art d’etre grandpere
. Next year
he published
Le Pape
, a vision of the spirit of Christ in appeal
against the spirit of Christianity, his ideal follower confronted
and contrasted with his nominal vicar; next year again
La
Pitie supreme
, a plea for charity towards tyrants who know
not what they do, perverted by omnipotence and degraded by
adoration; two years later
Religions et religion
, a poem which
is at once a cry of faith and a protest against the creeds which
deform and distort and leave it misshapen and envenomed and
defiled; and in the same year
L’Ane
, a paean of satiric invective
against the past follies of learned ignorance, and lyric rapture of
confidence in the future wisdom and the final conscience of the
world. These four great poems, one in sublimity of spirit and
in supremacy of style, were succeeded next year by a fourfold gift
of even greater price,
Les Quatre Vents de l’esprit
: the first
book, that of satire, is as full of fiery truth and radiant reason
as any of his previous work in that passionate and awful kind;
the second or dramatic book is as full of fresh life and living
nature, of tragic humour and of mortal pathos, as any other
work of the one great modern dramatist’s; the third or lyric
book would suffice to reveal its author as incomparably and
immeasurably the greatest poet of his age, and one great among
the greatest of all time; the fourth or epic book is the sublimest
and most terrible of historic poems?a visionary pageant of
French history from the reign and the revelries of Henry IV.
to the reign and the execution of Louis XVI. Next year the
great tragic poem of
Torquemada
came forth to bear witness
that the hand which wrote
Ruy Blas
had lost nothing of its
godlike power and its matchless cunning, if the author of
Le
Roi s’amuse
had ceased to care much about coherence of construction
from the theatrical point of view as compared with the
perfection of a tragedy designed for the devotion of students not
unworthy or incapable of the study; that his command of pity
and terror, his powers of intuition and invention, had never been
more absolute and more sublime; and that his infinite and
illimitable charity of imagination could transfigure even the
most monstrous historic representative of Christian or Catholic
diabolatry into the likeness of a terribly benevolent and a
tragically magnificent monomaniac. Two years later Victor
Hugo published the third and concluding series of
La Legende
des siecles
.
On the 22nd of May 1885 Victor Hugo died. He was given a
magnificent public funeral, and his remains were laid in the
Pantheon. The first volume published of his posthumous works
was the exquisite and splendid
Theatre en liberte
, a sequence if
not a symphony of seven poems in dramatic form, tragic or
comic or fanciful eclogues, incomparable with the work of any
other man but the author of
The Tempest
and
The Winter’s Tale
in combination and alternation of gayer and of graver harmonies.
The unfinished poems,
Dieu
and
La Fin de Satan
, are full to
overflowing of such magnificent work, such wise simplicity of
noble thought, such heroic and pathetic imagination, such
reverent and daring faith, as no other poet has ever cast into
deathless words and set to deathless music.
Les Jumeaux
, an
unfinished tragedy, would possibly have been the very greatest
of his works if it had been completed on the same scale and on
the same lines as it was begun and carried forward to the point
at which it was cut short for ever. His reminiscences of “Things
Seen” in the course of a strangely varied experience, and his
notes of travel among the Alps and Pyrenees, in the north of
France and in Belgium, in the south of France and in Burgundy,
are all recorded by such a pen and registered by such a memory
as no other man ever had at the service of his impressions or his
thoughts.
Toute la lyre
, his latest legacy to the world, would
be enough, though no other evidence were left, to show that the
author was one of the very greatest among poets and among
men; unsurpassed in sublimity of spirit, in spontaneity of
utterance, in variety of power, and in perfection of workmanship;
infinite and profound beyond all reach of praise at once in thought
and in sympathy, in perception and in passion; master of all the
simplest as of all the subtlest melodies or symphonies of song
that ever found expression in a Border ballad or a Pythian
ode.
(
A. C. S.
)
Bibliography.
?Victor Hugo’s complete works were published
in a definitive edition at Paris in 58 volumes (1885?1902). The
critical literature which has grown up round his name is very extensive,
from the time of Sainte-Beuve onwards, and only a few of
the more important books need here be mentioned for reference on
biographical and other details: F. T. Marzials,
Life of Hugo
, with
bibliography (1888); A. C. Swinburne,
Study of Hugo
(1886); E.
Dupuy,
Victor Hugo
,
l’homme et le poete
(1886); Paul de Saint
Victor,
Victor Hugo
(1885); F. Brunetiere,
Victor Hugo
(1903);
Jules Claretie,
Victor Hugo
,
souvenirs intimes
(1902). See also
The
Bookman
for August 1904; Francis Gribble, “The Hugo Legend,”
an adverse view, in
Fortnightly Review
(February 1910); and the
article
French Literature
.