VICTOR HUGO. SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 1 MARIE-VICTOR HUGO was born in 1802 at Besançon, the ancient capital of Franche-Comté, in a family which had belonged to the nobility since the 16th century. His father, a native of Lorraine, had loyally accepted the new order of things and under the Empire rose to the rank of general. His mother, a Vendean by birth, had shared as a child all the dangers of the royalist insurgents and remained true, through life, to the traditions of her race. There are many passages in the poet's earlier writings in which we can trace the influence of this twofold origin and of the romantic impressions of his childhood. At a very early age he accompanied his father to the island of Elba, to Corsica and Geneva, spent the years 1805 and 1806 at Paris, and was next taken to Italy, where his father, as governour of a district in Calabria was engaged in tracking the famous robber-chief Fra Diavolo. After having seen Florence, Rome and Naples, he came back to Paris in 1809. There he spent a couple of years in a convent, his education being attended to by a proscribed royalist, whose hiding-place was one day betrayed, when he was arrested and put to death by the Imperial government. This event made a deep impression on the boy and contributed, together with his mother's teaching, in inspiring him with the loyalist enthusiasm which pervades all his youthful poems. In 1811 his father sent for him to Spain, where he spent a year in the Seminary for noblemen, but soon returned to Paris to continue his studies. In 1815 his parents having been judicially separated, owing chiefly to the divergence of their political views, their son was sent to a preparatory school, whence he was to go to the Ecole Polytechnique. There he studied Mathematics and at the same time wrote verses. Between 1819 and 1822 he sent in three admirable poems to the Académie des Jeux Floraux2 at Toulouse: les Vierges de Verdun, le Rétablissement de la statue de Henri IV and Moïse sur le Nil: each of them obtained a prize. The talent of the youthful poet was further stimulated by the publication of Lamartine's Méditationss and in 1822 appeared the first volume of his Odes et Ballades, which are equally conspicuous for the beauty of the poetry and the religious and royalist fervour, which pervades every line. These poems gained for their author the friendship of all the celebrities of the Restoration, among others Chateaubriand; they made him a favourite with the government, who granted him a pension, and threw around his name a perfect halo of glory. And yet the enthusiastic loyalty which won him these We have partly followed Vapereau, Dictionnaire des contemporains. The Jeux floraux, a literary institution, founded at Toulouse in 1323 for the purpose of encouraging poetry, by a number of poets whose gathering formed the College de la gaie science. The institution was renewed about 1500 by Clémence Isaure and transformed into an Academy in 1695. ' V. p. 493. 2 successes and stands out as the leading feature of the work, was more artificial than real, nor did it endure very long; for already in the second volume of the Odes et Ballades, which he published in 1826 (in the interval had appeared two very eccentric novels, Han d'Islande and Bug-Jargal) we are sensible of a considerable abatement in Victor Hugo's fervid loyalty. The original and singular bent of his mind now began to appear without disguise and led him on to ever bolder innovations in thought and language. Soon Victor Hugo found himself the heresiarch of a literary sect, who called themselves Le Cénacle, composed of a number of young authors, the chief of whom were Sainte-Beuve,1 Émile and Antony Deschamps,2 and Alfred de Musset.3 Their ideas were equally revolutionary; they urged their leader on to the fray and published their manifestoes in the Muse Française. An opening had already been made for the innovators. Mme de Staël, by disseminating in France the knowledge of German literature, had begun the reaction against the classical school; Chateaubriand had made his way in total disregard of the laws which had till then regulated literary success; Lamartine had continued his work; Victor Hugo finished it and became the declared and acknowledged leader of romanticism in France. Though the new school sought and found precedents in the works of the great poets of Germany and England, they affected a predilection for the productions of the old French writers; it was in the romans of the trouvères, in the mediæval romances, that they looked for their favourite models. Hence the name, École romantique. To the traditional imitation of the Classics the Romantic school everywhere opposed the Middle ages, i. e. that epoch of history which sprang from the fusion of the Germanic and the Christian element. It was in 1827 that Victor Hugo finally broke with the traditions of the Classics of the 17th century. He did so by the publication of his Cromwell, a drama preceded by a lengthy preface, in which he developed his new theories. He did not confine himsel to an attack on the time-honoured rules of the unities, which were revered in France as being the règles d'Aristote, règles saines, axiomes du bon goût, or the artificial beauty produced by a minute observance of literary convention; the hatred of all conventional beauty led him and his followers on to the negation of the beautiful in itself. The new school proclaimed as their fundamental principle the combination of the sublime and the grotesque, which sometimes culminated in a morbid fondness for every kind of monstrosity, both physical and moral. The drama which was looked upon as the manifesto of the school was exalted to the skies by its followers, while it was scornfully criticized by their antagonists. Unfortunately it was not adapted for the stage and was never acted. The partisans of the new ideas 1 V. page 615. 2 Émile Deschamps, born in 1791, died 1870, author of the Études françaises et étrangères (1829) which contain a number of imitations from the German; Antony Deschamps, his brother, born 1800, died 1869, is the author of a metrical translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. p. 446. 3 A. de Musset, v. p. 650. V. p. 438. 5 V. 7 V. Remarks on the Unities p. 166. declared accordingly that the great, the true drama of the Romantic school was still to come, and that their chief and master would not be long before producing it. Meanwhile they and the public had to be content with a fresh volume of odes and ballads which Victor Hugo published in 1828 under the title Les Orientales. These poems are at the same time the most marvellous of the author's productions for wealth of colouring and imagery, and the least worthy of note as regards the thought that underlies them. However, the admirers of the poet were pressing him for a dramatic work, which should worthily inaugurate the advent of the new school on the stage. Accordingly he brought out Marion Delorme (1829), a piece which the censor would not allow to be acted, and subsequently, in the same year, Hernani ou l'Honneur castillan. This play met with great opposition before it was finally received at the ThéâtreFrançais. The members of the French Academy, who seriously looked on themselves as the guardians of classical literature, made themselves supremely ridiculous by petitioning the king to prohibit the piece, but Charles X, with great good sense, replied that, in a case of this kind, he had only equal rights with every other spectator. Hernani was accordingly acted in February 1830. The fanatics of both parties actually came to blows in the pit of the theatre; but it is fair to say that the success which Hernani owed on the first night to brute force, was repeated on subsequent and more peaceful occasions, for the play was acted no less than fifty times in one year. The Bourbon government having fallen meanwhile, Marion Delorme was also put on the stage and in the first year reached the number of sixty nights; so weary were the French public of the monotonous classical plays and so attractive did the daring innovations of the new school prove to the rising generation. The revolution of 1830 completed Victor Hugo's political conversion; henceforth he joined the liberal ranks. He also awoke to a tardy appreciation of the national idol, Napoleon I. and his famous ode on the Birth of the king of Rome, which begins with the fantastic exclamation Mil huit cent onze! as well as the poem La Colonne were immensely popular in France. In 1831 Victor Hugo published the historical novel Notre-Dame de Paris, which of all his productions has met with the greatest and most lasting success. This work is a curious medley of the beautiful and the repulsively hideous, the simple and the eccentric; but whatever faults we may discover in it, we cannot deny that the original conception of the characters, the dramatic interest of the whole and an admirable talent for description, supported by great antiquarian knowledge, make Notre-Dame de Paris one of the masterpieces of modern literature. Some of the personages of this novel, such as the bell-ringer Quasimodo and especially the charming figure of Esmeralda, which art soon made its own, have become familiar and favourite characters in every country. At the same time Victor Hugo brought out the Feuilles d'Automne, which may be said to contain the best of his lyrical poems. In the drama on the other hand he went farther and farther in his worship of ugliness R. Platz, Manual of French Literature. 38 and monstrosity. Le Roi s'amuse, which appeared in November 1832 and was prohibited by a ministerial order after the first night, was followed by Lucrèce Borgia (1833), a strange character for a heroïne, and one over whose infamies it would be better to draw a veil than produce them on the stage, by Marie Tudor (1833), Angelo (1835), Ruy-Blas (1838), all most fantastic plays, which were however surpassed in this respect by the last of the poet's dramatic works, les Burgraves (1842). Fortunately Victor Hugo continued at the same time to write lyrical poetry, which of all his manifold productions will certainly prove his best claim to immortality. Les Chants du Crépuscule (1835), Les Voix intérieures (1837), Les Rayons et les Ombres (1840) belong to the same period of unexampled fertility. The popularity of the poet at length broke down the barriers, which had till then kept him out of the French Academy; his reception took place in 1840, on which occasion he delivered a speech of a political rather than a literary character. In the following years he made several tours on the Rhine and in Spain, whence he was suddenly recalled in 1843 by the death of his daughter Leopoldine and her husband. This sad event, which excited deep sympathy throughout France is the theme of a number of poems, Les Contemplations, some of which we reprint. In 1845 the poet was raised to the peerage and thus his great ambition satisfied: a political career was now open to him. After the revolution of February 1848 he became a candidate for the Constituante, was returned for the city of Paris, took his seat among the party of order and voted for all the measures proposed to avert the total anarchy with which society was threatened. But his attitude was precisely the reverse in the Legislative Assembly: there he joined the ranks of the extreme social democrats, one of the leaders and orators of whom he became, while at the same time he defended their cause in the press. After the coup d'état of December 2nd Victor Hugo's name figured on the first proscription list, which banished from France all the bitterest enemies of the new government. In the first days of his exile he signed with several of his fellow-refugees a violent appeal to arms, which he supplemented by his pamphlet Napoléon le Petit (1852). The unmeasured tone of this production and of the Châtiments, a collection of political poems, can only find their excuse in the bitterness of exile. In 1856 Victor Hugo published the Contemplations, a series of beautiful poems, which once more gathered round his name the sympathy and admiration of the public, and which in one respect at least are an improvement on his former works. We no longer meet with that excessive use of antithesis which disfigured his style, while the calm simplicity and depth of feeling exhibited in these poems appeal most strongly to our sympathies. In 1859 appeared la Légende des Siècles, of which it will be enough to say, that it outdoes in brilliancy and exuberance all Victor Hugo's previous works. In 1862 Victor Hugo, who had settled at Jersey and subsequently She was drowned, while boating on the Seine, and her husband perished in attempting to save her. at Guernsey, published les Misérables, a novel which was translated beforehand into nine different languages, and the Chants des Rues et des Bois (1865) a collection of poems, which are unequalled for eccentricity of ideas and metaphors. In 1866 appeared Les Travailleurs de la Mer, a kind of epic novel, in 1869 L'Homme qui rit, which outdid all the rest in every kind of eccentricity. After the downfall of the Empire and the proclamation of the Republic in September 1870, Victor Hugo returned to Paris, and addressed a lenghthy proclamation to the advancing Germans, in which he ingenuously advised them to go home and proclaim a German republic. In 1871 he was elected a member of the National Assembly, but having been violently interrupted in one of his speeches, he at once resigned his seat. After the fall of the Commune he retired to Bruxelles and thence to Guernsey. In 1872 he published one more volume of poems, l'Année Terrible, in which he eloquently described the recent misfortunes of France and in 1874 Quatre-vingt-treize, a so-called historical novel. Within the last few years Victor Hugo had the sad misfortune of losing his two sons Charles and François Hugo both of whom had made a name in literature. In 1876 the great poet was elected senator for life by the city of Paris and in the beginning of 1877 he published a new series of the Légende des siècles. I. ODES ET BALLADES. (1820-1826.) 1. LA GRAND' MÈRE.1 Dors-tu? .... réveille-toi, mère de notre mère! Pourquoi courber ton front plus bas que de coutume? Tu nous trouveras morts près de la lampe éteinte; We reprint this and the following pieces by permission of M. Victor Hugo. |