Victor Marie Hugo

HUGO, VICTOR MARIE (1802-1885), French poet and novelist, was the third son of Captain (subsequently General) Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo by his wife Sophie, daughter of M. Trebuchet of Nantes. In the autobiographical notes which the poet dictated to his wife and which were published in 1863 under the title Victor Hugo raconte par un temoin de sa vie, a wholly apocryphal account of the origins of the Hugo family is given. History discloses only that the poet's grandfather, Joseph Hugo, was a carpenter at Nancy, that his great grandfather was a peasant-farmer in the Vosges. His mother's family were of Breton, and indeed Celtic origin, and the fact that Victor Hugo was thus "d'un sang breton et lorrain a la f ois," may account for the curious blending in his character of imagination and insensi tiveness, of recklessness and caution, of extravagance and parsi mony. At the time of the poet's birth his father, who was sus pected by Bonaparte of being a supporter of Moreau, had been relegated to the command of a battalion at Besancon. It was here, in the Maison Barette on the Place St. Quentin, that Victor Hugo was born on Feb. 26, 1802.

Victor Hugo's life divides itself into seven distinct though unequal periods. There is his exciting Napoleonic childhood (1802– ! 15) ; his infant-prodigy period in Paris (1815-22) ; his royalist period (1822-27) ; the three turbulent years of the romantic crusade (1827-3o) ; the 15 successful years under Louis Philippe (183o-45) ; his political period, and his 18 years of exile (1852– 70) ; and the final apotheosis when he lived on as the bard and prophet of the Third Republic (187o-85).

Childhood (1802-1815.

The events of Hugo's childhood are important and must be recorded in some detail. It was an exaggeration on his part to say that : Parmi les chars poudreux, les armes eclatantes Une muse des camps m'emporta sous les tentes . . .

but it is a fact that his early years were inflamed by many journeys and excitements, and that his whole subsequent attitude towards life was much affected by the contrasts and vicissitudes, by the actual flash and jingle, of the Napoleonic era. His father had attached himself to Joseph Bonaparte and accompanied that monarch first to Naples and then to Madrid. Of the Italian jour ney, undertaken at the age of five, little remained for Hugo beyond some faint memories of Rome and Naples, of the snow and sledges upon the Mont Cenis, of the nut-trees among the rocks at Avellino. The Spanish journey of 1811 left an infinitely deeper impress. General Hugo was by then a count of the Empire. ' He was governor of Madrid, and King Joseph's confidential ad viser : he was count of Cifuentes and marquis of Siguenza : he possessed on paper large properties in Castile and a fortune of one million reals. There was no limit to the honours or prosperity which such a father could obtain, and the Spanish journey was thus undertaken in a blaze of anticipation and with all the con veniences and attentions accorded to highly important personages. Such glories left an indelible impression, but they were not of long duration. Victor and his brother Eugene were sent to the College of Nobles in Madrid, where they were supposed to con sort with the Spanish aristocracy. The latter, however, regarded them as foreigners and invaders, whereas the Jesuits who were in charge of the college imagined that they were Protestants and eyed them askance. It was not a happy period; and it produced in Hugo an aristocracy-complex, a love-hatred of aristocracy, which, working on his persistent egoism, became one of the many con- , stituents of his later demagogics. For the moment, however, his vanity reacted to these humiliations only in the form of national arrogance : Chez dix peuples vaincus, je passais sans defense Et leur respect craintif etonnait mon enfance . . . Quand je balbutais le nom cheri de la France Je faisais palir l'etranger.

By the spring of 1812 the French position in Madrid, in spite of the pallor of the inhabitants, became insecure : General Hugo felt it safer to send his rife and children back to Paris.

In the intervals of these Italian and Spanish expeditions, Mme. Hugo educated her children in Paris. She was a hard and stingy woman, imperious, independent and cold. Her politics were anti Bonapartist, she was royalist and Vendeenne. Her religion was Voltairean, inclining to deism. Her influence upon her children was immense and she succeeded for many years in imposing upon them her dislike of Napoleon, her very acute dislike of their on father. They were happy there, in the large garden of No. 12 Impasse des Feuillantines, where they climbed the trees, and played with little Adele Foucher, and had pleasant discursive lessons from Pere de la Riviere, and listened to the long stories of General Lahorie, an aged conspirator whom their mother was hiding from the police. With the fall of Napoleon the fortunes of the Hugo family declined suddenly : their many castles in Spain melted into the air: General Hugo was interned on an allowance of £40 a year at Blois, where he established an alternative Mme. Hugo, and became thereafter for his sons "le brigand de la Loire." Mme., no longer countess, Hugo found herself in reduced cir cumstances : she left the Feuillantines and took a small flat in the rue Bonaparte. And Victor Hugo, for his part, was sent to the Pension Cordier, rue Marguerite, to prepare for the Ecole Poly technique. These circumstances of his early years have been recorded in some detail since their grandeur and their instability help to explain many outstanding faults in Hugo's genius and char acter. His intermittent education, the constant disagreements between his father and mother, the contrast between the splen dours of his father's prospects and the meagre squalor of the result, the violent tawdriness of the whole Napoleonic system, account in their several ways for the superficiality of his knowl edge and convictions, for his flashy exaggerations, for his passion for contrast, for the actual vulgarity of his character and mind. For the first 13 years of his life he was continually in a dramatic, and therefore in a false, position : a twist was thereby given to his egoism which developed into a foolish, and subsequently an em bittered, form of conceit.

The Infant Prodigy

three years at the Pension Cordier, the lectures which he attended simultaneously at Louis-le-Grand, were important to Hugo as constituting the only systematic or thorough education that he ever obtained. He was excellent at mathematics, superficial in his classical studies, and a voracious reader. The tragedies of Voltaire which had hitherto been his main source of reading, were now supplemented by Ossian, by Calderon, by Chateaubriand. On July 1 o, 1816 we find him writing "I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing." His literary ambition was thus aroused at the age of 14 and during his school-boy years he composed all manner of verses, odes, satires, acrostics, riddles, epics and madrigals. There was a tragedy, Irtamere, in the manner of Voltaire : a long poem on the flood : a melodrama entitled Inez de Castro: a comic opera : and a series of translations from Ossian and the classics. In 1817 he obtained an honourable mention from the Academie Francaise for a poem on the theme of "Happiness procured by study and ap plication," and, thus encouraged, he embarked upon his first novel Bug-largal, which dealt with a blood curdling episode in the negro revolt at San Domingo. In 1819 he was accorded by the Academy of the Jeux Floraux at Toulouse the first prize for a poem on the restoration of the statue of Henry IV., and it was on this occasion that Chateaubriand is said to have called him "l'enfant sublime." His eldest brother Abel Hugo had by then begun to edit a short lived journal entitled Le Conservateur Litteraire. To this journal Victor Hugo contributed not only the text of his novel Bug Jargal, but a great mass of valueless prose and verse which poured precociously from his teeming brain. He was already secretly en gaged to his early playmate Adele Foucher ; the death of his mother in June 1821, and his refusal to accept any money from his father, brought him face to face with actual penury : for a whole year he existed on 700 francs in an attic in the rue du Dragon, an experience which he subsequently exploited in the person of Marius in Les Miserables: and during these months he wrote with dogged perseverance, with that self-confidence which throughout his life never failed him.

The Royalist Period (1822-18

27).-In June 1822, at the age of twenty, Victor Hugo published his first volume of poetry under the title Odes et Poesies diverses. Apart from some sentimental verses addressed to Adele Foucher (le Vallon de Cherizy, A toz, le Regret) the pieces collected in this volume were designed to catch the ear of the court. This design succeeded. Fifteen hundred copies were sold in four months. The little volume reached the hands even of Louis XVIII. who with tears in his eyes read the stilted odes on the death of the Duc de Berry or on the birth of the Duc de Bordeaux. Victor Hugo was accorded a pension of from the privy purse, a salary which in the following year was doubled. He felt justified in pressing his suit on Adele Foucher : the parents consented : the marriage took place at St. Sulpice on Oct. 14, 1822: Victor Hugo was reconciled with his father who thereupon ceased to be the "brigand de la Loire" and became "ce heros au sourire si doux" : and Eugene Hugo, who was also in love with Adele, went mad during the wedding and had to be confined in an asylum, where he died in 1837. Money was re quired to support Hugo's wife and impending family. Early in 1823 he published a second "tale of horror" under the title Han d'Islande and in 1824 he founded the Muse f rancaise. The con tributors to this journal formed the Cenacle, a literary club which met in the rooms of Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal, and of which the leading members were Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Nodier, Soumet, Emile Deschamps and Delphine Gay. Of these young writers it was Nodier only who was frankly revolutionary and romantic. The others hedged : Victor Hugo himself, who had just been made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur and who had personally been invited to attend the coronation of Charles X. at Rheims, was again in a false position. The year 1825, however, marks the first definite break on his part with the classic traditions of the restoration court. He came more and more under the in fluence of Nodier ; he visited Switzerland in the company of that romantic ; he visited Lamartine at St. Pont : he read German bal lads. In 1826 he published Bug-Jargal, and to a new edition of the Odes which appeared the same year he added the Ballades in which the transition from classicism to romanticism is clearly adum brated. His early admiration of Chateaubriand bore a compara tively tardy fruit.

The Romantic Crusade

(1827-1830).—It must be remem bered that Hugo was a cautious man, and one who would have hesitated to put himself at the head of the new romantic move ment had he not been assured not only of leadership but also of success. By the end of 1826 the originators of the French romantic movement, Chateaubriand and Lamartine, had retired into political life ; a second and more vigorous wave of romanti cism was about to overwhelm French literature; Hugo was quick to realise the tidal force of this new movement and quick to deter mine that he himself should ride upon its crest. The great deci sions of Hugo's life were always taken under the impulse of an inspired opportunism. His convictions were adjusted rapidly to the new formula, and into the expression of this formula he flung the irresistible force of his imagination and his rhetoric. The influence of the Cenacle, the influence of Nodier, the far more forceful and encouraging influence of Sainte-Beuve, all contributed to this new orientation : the affectionate relations which he now established with his father revived the excited Bonapartism of his early years : and, no less importantly, the success of Weber's Freischutz in 1826, and the still greater success of Miss Smith son's Shakespearean season in 1827, convinced him that the Pari sian public were ready for something exciting, for something ex plosive, for something which had nothing whatever to do with complimentary odes to Charles X. His break with the court was signalized by the publication in the Debats of his Ode a la Colonne, a fine diatribe in which he championed Napoleon's marshals against the insults which had been offered them by the Austrian am bassador. By Feb. 1827 he had already written the first draft of Cromwell, and during the months that followed he was engaged on writing the preface to that play which constituted the "decla ration of rights" of the romantic movement. The essence of this manifesto is its wholly justified attack upon the stagnation which had come over French literature owing to the tyranny of the classical formula and the rigid rules of Boileau. With impassioned rhetoric Hugo argued that art was evolutionary and dynamic, that the old formula stood only for rigidity and decay. "The object," he wrote, "of modern art is not beauty but life." This famous preface, which was published in Oct. 1827, at once rendered Hugo the prophet and protagonist of the new school. It was less difficult, however, to formulate these new conceptions than to put them into practice. Cromwell itself was not suited for the stage, and an adaptation of Scott's Kenilworth which he produced under a pseu donym early in 1828 with the title of Amy Robsart was a ghastly failure. With his quick sensitiveness to public opinion Hugo aban doned drama for the moment, and adopting the then popular theme of the Greek War of Independence he composed and pub lished Les Orientales, a series of poems on the Levant which, while they reflected no personal experiences, were yet so beautifully cadenced and designed that they at once achieved an immediate popularity. This volume in which he had the insight, thanks to Sainte-Beuve, to revive the forgotten metres of Ronsard and his imitators, was issued in Jan. 1829, one of the most active, and certainly one of the most important years of Hugo's life. In this year he produced Les Orientales, Le Dernier jour d'un Condamne, and Marion de Lorme: and he wrote the whole of Hernani, a great portion of Notre Dame de Paris and most of the lyrics which were subsequently included in the Feuilles d'Automne. Marion de Lorme was banned for political reasons by the censor, but on Feb. 25, 1830 Hernani was produced at the Theatre Francais with Mlle. Mars in the part of Dona Sol. The 45 representations of this elo quent melodrama are known in French literary history as "Les batailles d'Hernani." It may be questioned whether the opposition of the classics was as determined as has been represented : but there can be no question regarding the violence of the claque which Hugo, Mme. Hugo and Theophile Gautier had organized. Sainte-Beuve, who was already in love with Mme. Hugo, dis approved of all this self-advertisement. "Je suis blase," he wrote, "sur Hernani." But Hugo for his part had achieved not fame only, but fortune : the play brought him 15,00o francs : he was ac claimed by Chateaubriand as "the rising sun" : he had opened the flood-gates of romanticism to Alexandre Dumas, to Alfred de Vigny, and to George Sand: and he moved with his wife and children to a larger house near the Champs Elysees. Unfortunately, however, the Revolution of July momentarily distracted public attention from Victor Hugo.

Success

(183o-1845) .—With the advent of the monarchy of July, under the sly complacency of Louis-Philippe, we leave the Sturm and Drang period of Hugo's life and pass into a phase of 15 years' success. He published Notre Dame de Paris in April of 1831 and acquired thereby great popularity in circles where poetry was unread and where controversial drama was not appreciated. In December of that year he again, and rightly, aroused the admiration of the intellectuals by his Feuilles d'Automne. Fortune smiled upon him : his four children, Leopoldine, Charles, Francois Victor and Adele were living depositaries of sentimentality : he was surrounded by friends and disciples, by de Musset, de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas and Petrus Borel: he was sufficiently in opposi tion to Louis Philippe to be regarded as a martyr while not actually becoming one : and he moved into another and more romantic apartment, now the Musee Victor Hugo, in the Place des Vosges. In Nov. 1832, he produced le Roi s'amuse, which would have been a failure had it not been banned by the censor on the second night. On Feb. 2, 1833 he gave Lucrezia Borgid at the Porte St. Martin, and was accorded a public ovation : the part of Princess Negroni was taken by Juliette Gauvain, known, under the name of Juliette Drouet, as a leading courtesan. Hugo decided to redeem this woman, and for several years he confined her in a little flat which he alone was allowed to visit ; she is the heroine of his most lovely lyrics and she remained his mistress for more than 5o years. Mme. Hugo, who was not allowed any similar indulgence in regard to Sainte-Beuve, acquiesced unhappily in this arrangement. Lucrezia Borgia was the last but one of Hugo's successes on the stage ; Marie Tudor and Angelo both failed in 1833 ; for a moment the triumph of Ruy Blas in 1838 recalled the days of Hernani, but a final end was put to the romantic drama by the complete collapse of Les Burgraves in During these years, however, his reputation as one of the great est of French lyric poets was firmly established. The Feuilles d'Automne of 1831 was succeeded by the Chants du Crepuscule of 1835, by Les V oix interieures of 1837, and Les Rayons et les Ombres of 1840. In 1839 Hugo presented himself for election to the French Academy : M. Dupaty was selected in his place. In 1839 he again stood as a candidate, but it was M. Mole who was chosen. A third time, in 184o, it was M. Flourens, and not Victor Hugo, who was elected. It was only at his fourth attempt, in 1841, that he secured admission. These years of popular, if not official, success and adulation were not good for Victor Hugo : his tempera mental egoism increased, and his former austerity was succeeded by a period of indulgence which provoked frequent scandals. The year 1843 was marked by a double tragedy: the failure of Les Burgraves was complete and crushing : and in the autumn of the same year his daughter Leopoldine, who had just married, was drowned in the Seine. In later years, this tragedy echoed for Victor Hugo in what are perhaps the finest of all his lyrics (Trois Ans Apres and the Villequier series in the second volume of Contemplations), but for the moment he was stunned. He aban doned poetry for politics, and in 1845 he was created a peer of France.

Politics and Exile (1845-1870).—Victor Hugo, unlike Cha teaubriand or Lamartine or Byron, was not good at politics. In the tribune of the House of Peers he ranted and raved and indulged in phrases of such bombastic rhetoric that even his brother peers failed to take him seriously. After the revolution of 1848 he stood for the presidency of the Republic but obtained only a very few votes. During the coup d'etat of December 1851, he made a scene in an omnibus, and he addressed the troops in the Place de la Bastille from a four-wheeler. He was a member of the committee of Insurrection and behaved during the two days of December with courage but without good sense. He was rescued by Juliette Drouet, and finally on Dec. 14, 1851 he escaped to Brussels in the disguise of a workman. In Aug. 1852 he proceeded to Jersey, where he lived at Marine Parade ("la roche ou j'ai ploye mon aile") and from where he published Napoleon le Petit (1852) and Les Cliatiments (1853) which, whatever its weakness and exaggeration as a satire, contains some of the most marvellous of his metrical triumphs. In 1855 he moved to Guernsey where, the next year, he bought Hauteville House. Here he resided, revelling in his martyrdom, for 17 years. In 1856, at the age that is of 54, he published Les Contemplations' which contain what is perhaps the most durable section of his lyric verse, and two years later he composed the first section of the Legende des Siecles. In 1862 he published Les Miserables, and in 1866 Les Travailleurs de la Mer and in 1869 L'homme qui rit. The last years of his exile had been saddened by the desertion of his family : his wife went to live in Brussels where she died in 1868: his daughter Adele ran away with an English officer ; only Mme. Drouet, in her cottage next to Hauteville House, remained faithful to the veteran egoist. The establishment of the Republic released Victor Hugo from exile. He returned in triumph to Paris in Sept. 187o.

Last Years (187o-1885).—His re-entry into the political life of his country was not of long duration. He was elected to the Na tional Assembly but resigned on being unable to obtain a hear ing. During the Commune he moved to Brussels where his offer to house the communist exiles led to a riot and his expulsion by the Belgian Government. On his return to Paris he was elected to the Senate, but took no part in the debates. It was easier and safer for him to remain in his house in the Avenue d'Eylau and to watch while one by one the beacons of his apotheosis were lit around him. His fame was universal : his faculties undimmed by age. In his 8oth year he published those still fresh and lovely verses of the Quatre Vents de l'Esprit: he attended the triumphant jubilee of Hernani; and on his 8oth birthday he was acclaimed by six hundred thousand of his fellow citizens. Juliette Drouet, faithful to the end, died in 1883 : and on May 31, 1885 Victor Hugo himself was buried in the Pantheon. His body, in accordance with his last behest, had been placed in a pauper's coffin ; for a night it lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe ; the pomp and drama of his funeral was symbolic of his strangely histrionic mind.

The output of his last years was, in quantity if not in quality, amazing, It can be catalogued as follows :—Actes et Paroles (1872) ; L'Annee Terrible (1872); Quatre-vingt-treize (1874); Legende des Siecles (second series 1877) ; L'Art d'être grand-pere (1877); L'Histoire d'un crime (1877) ; Discours pour Voltaire (1878); Le Pape (1878); La Pitie supreme (1879); L'Ane (188o) ; Religions et Religion (188o) ; Les Quatre Vents de l'E.s prit 0880; Torquemada (1882) ; Legende des Siecles (3rd 1883) . Of the many posthumous works published by his friends Paul Meurice and Auguste Vacquerie the most interesting is the volume of autobiographical notes entitled Choses vues, and the collection of poetry published under the name of Toute la Lyre. The other posthumous collections served only to harm the poet's reputation.

The idolatry with which Victor Hugo was acclaimed by his worshippers has produced an inevitable reaction. Under the in fluence of this reaction his bad qualities—his vulgarity, his bom bast, the tenuity of his thought and feeling, his sheer blatant egoism—have obscured his remarkable gifts. It is possible per haps to make a juster estimate. From the historical point of view Victor Hugo is unquestionably one of the greatest figures in French literature. His influence was not only very deep but also extremely wide : it is possible to find in Hugo's work the germ of practically every subsequent movement, whether Parnassian, Symbolist or Decadent ; such diverse figures as Baudelaire, Verlaine and even Rimbaud owe him heavy debts ; he was without doubt the greatest literary influence in 19th century France. It is true that this influence bore almost wholly on technique, but technique in French poetry is of primary importance. Victor Hugo was not quite the revolutionary ("le demagogue horrible et deborde") that he pre tended : but he did re-introduce the lovely metres and cadences of the 16th century, he did break the tyranny of Boileau, and he did render the French ear sensitive to the delicate vowel changes and balances in which their language is so rich. Thus although his drama is dead, and his novels can scarcely be compared with those of Balzac, Sand or even Dumas, yet the great mass of his verse, whether lyric, satiric or narrative, will always retain, not only its beauty but its strength. Most of Hugo's boasts about him self, about that "ego Hugo" who was the centre of all his thoughts, are not only insufferable, but inaccurate : he was right, however, and absolutely right, when he described himself as placed "au centre de tout comme un echo sonore." His receptive faculty was unlimited : his interpretive faculty was of a high standard : it was his selective faculty which was at fault. The fact that he could, with dangerous facility, cast into beautiful and convincing form what the average person of 184o-8o felt inarticulately, accounts not only for his unequalled popularity, but for his own unfortunate conviction that he was the prophet of his country and his age.

"Moi," he exclaims in a characteristic passage: "Moi, qui me crus apotre . .

"La France, dans sa nuit profonde "Verra ma torche flamber." Interpretation and melody, however, are not enough. Victor Hugo possessed a trivial character and an uninteresting mind. A high quality of either mind or character are not perhaps essential to the finest poetry, but the absence of both must always reduce a poet to the second category. Hugo was a master of language : he was a great literary figure : he might perhaps have been a great mystic had he been less worldly : but as it is, when asked who was the greatest French poet of the 19th century we must reply, in the words of a recent French cynic, "Unfortunately, Victor Hugo." (H. Ni.) Barbou, Profils et grimaces (1856) ; A. Vacquerie, Victor Hugo raconte par un temoin de sa vie (1863) ; E. Bire, Victor Hugo (188o), Victor Hugo avant 1830 (1883), Victor Hugo apres 1830, and Victor Hugo apres 1852 (i894) ; the last three books are very valuable. See also A. Asselone, Victor Hugo intime (1885) ; R. Lesclide, Propos de table de Victor Hugo (1885) ; E. Depuy, Victor Hugo, l'homme et le poete (1887), and La jeunesse de Victor Hugo (1902) ; L. Gimbaud, Victor Hugo et Juliette Drouet (1914); F. Gregh, Etude sur Victor Hugo (1915) ; L. Barthon, Les amours d'un poete (1919) ; Mme. Duclaux, Victor Hugo (1921; an excellent and truthful book) ; Mary Robinson, Victor Hugo (1925).