Hugo

“ Here lay the repository of Ravengar's secrets, the grave of Hugo's happiness, the dead mate of Tudor's desire. Here lay the eternal woman, symbol of all beauty and all charm, victimized by her own loveliness. For if she had not been lovely, thought Hugo, if the curves of her cheek and her nostrils and the colour of her skin had been ever so slightly different, the world might have contained one widower, one ruined heart, and one murderer the less that night. ”

“ The reason is that Hugo is typically a mystic, a man who finds a meaning in everything. We all know what are the uninteresting, the inevitably uninteresting parts of fiction: we all know what parts of a novel to skip. We skip the long description of the country where the hero was born, with its flat sandy wastes, made ragged with fir trees and tumbling towards the west into low discoloured hills. We skip the long account of the heroine's room, with its quaint old carved furniture and the portraits on the wall, dim with age but gorgeous with ancient colour. ”

“ Hugo, for all his dramatic and narrative mastery of effect, will always probably remind men rather of such poets as Dante or Isaiah than of such poets as Sophocles or Shakespeare. We cannot of course imagine the Florentine or the Hebrew endowed with his infinite variety of sympathies, of interests, and of powers; but as little can we imagine in the Athenian such height and depth of passion, in the Englishman such unquenchable and sleepless fire of moral and prophetic faith. ”

“ Guy, and Hugo, and Cousin Delia, and Sophia Lane-Watson, and Diana, and Walter, and George Addington, and Mollie; and Yearsly, and Hampstead, and here; but Hugo goes through it all; when I try to think of my life without Hugo, it is impossible; it is as though there were nothing there at all.
And really, so little has happened to me; my life has been a very ordinary one; no adventures, nothing dramatic, just the same sort of life as most of the women I meet in the street, and think so dull. ”

“ Hugo: Nay, old comrade, she hath spoken Words we must not hear; Shall we pause for sign or token— Taunted twice with fear? Yonder, hilt to hilt adjusted, Stand the swords in which we trusted Years ago. Their blades have rusted, So, perchance, have we. Ursula! thy words may shame us, Yet we once were counted famous, Morituri, salutamus, Aut victuri, te! [They go out.] SCENE—The Outskirts of Rudolph's Camp. RUDOLPH, OSRIC, and DAGOBERT. HUGO. Rudolph: Lord Hugo! thy speech is madness; Thou hast tax'd our patience too far; We offer'd thee peace—with gladness, We gladly accept thy war. ”

“ All people turned aside by fate fall into the same morass. Except in his strength, Hugo was pitifully like all people: wounds could easily be opened in his sensitiveness; his moral courage could be taxed to the fringe of dilemma; he looked upon his fellow men sometimes with awe at the variety of high places they attained in spite of the heavy handicap of being human—he looked upon them again with repugnance—and very rarely, as he grew older, did such inspections of his kind include a study of the difference between them and him made by his singular gift. ”

“ When at eleven o'clock that same winter night Hugo stood hesitating, with certain tools and a hooded electric lamp in his hand, on the balcony in front of the drawing-room window of Francis Tudor's sealed flat, he thought what a strange, illogical, and capricious thing is the human heart. ”

“ All the sounds and shadows of a moonlit wilderness, all the dews and murmurs and breaths of midsummer midnight, have become for once articulate in such music as was never known even to Shakespeare's forest of Arden. In the heart of a poem so full of tragedy and terror that Hugo alone could have brightened it with his final touch of sunrise, this birdlike rapture breaks out as by some divine effect of unforbidden and blameless magic. ”

“ I thought of Guy and Hugo as boys, as they had been in those early summers when first I was there, boys in the branches of the beech trees in the High Wood, calling to each other among the calling of the rooks; and regret came over me, poignant, impersonal regret, at the inevitable pathos of existence; the relentlessness of time, and change, and the haunting dearness of the past. ”

“ Hugo: How close to our ears the thunder peals! How the earth beneath us shudders and reels! A Voice (chanting) : Woe to the earth! Where men give death! And women give birth! To the sons of Adam, by Cain or Seth! Plenty and dearth! To the daughters of Eve, who toil and spin, Barren of worth! Let them sigh, and sicken, and suffer sin! Woe to the earth! Hugo: What is yon phantom large and dim That over the mountain seems to swim? Orion: 'Tis the scarlet woman of Babylon! Hugo: Whence does she come? ”

“ That sense of the infinite which Hugo's great forerunner, André Chénier, despised, that religious feeling which was non-existent in the child of the eighteenth century, reappears in Hugo, purified from the superstition of the reactionary period.
From a height near the shore the poet hears two voices, one from the sea and one from the land. Every wave has its murmur, every human being his distinct utterance, his sigh, his shriek; and the wave voices and the human voices form two great, pathetic choruses—the song of nature and the cry of humanity. ”

“ There is nothing in Homer, in Dante, or in Shakespeare, the three only poets who can properly be cited for comparison, of a pathos more poignant in its bitter perfection of sweetness.
Among the many good things which seem, for the lovers of poetry, to have come out of one and so great an evil as the long exile of Hugo from his country, there is none better or greater than the spiritual inhalation of breeze and brine into the very heart of his genius, the miraculous impregnation of his solitary Muse by the sea-wind. ”

“ Hugo is an instance of the intellectual nature which will not rest in reason’s province, but feels equally impelled to find expression for matters that either exceed the mind, or do not altogether belong to it. Such an intellect is impelled to formulate its convictions in regard to these; its negative conviction that it cannot comprehend them, and why it cannot; and its more positive conviction of their value—of the absolute worth of God, and of man’s need of Him, and of the love and fear by which men may come close to Him, or avoid His wrath. ”

“ Children and madmen can practise this singular and surprising fatalism. Disturbed, he raised his head and caught sight of Hugo. They gazed at one another by the flickering candle.
'Where's the man who helped you?' Hugo demanded faintly.
He had not much heart, much force, much firmness left. Ravengar's eyes, at once empty and significant, blank and yet formidable, startled him. He had the revolver and the handcuffs in his pocket, but he could not have used them. Ravengar's eyes, so fiendish and so ineffably sad, melted his spine. Ravengar stepped forward and Hugo stepped back. ”

“ He would not condescend to threaten Hugo with the police-court and the criminal cell. He loosed his hold on the young man's shoulder, and told him to rise from the half-kneeling posture, to which fear, rather than Dino's strength, had brought him. And when Hugo stood before him, he spoke in the tone of one to whom the spiritual side of life was more real, more important than any other, and it seemed to Hugo as if he spoke from out some other world.
"There is a day coming," he said, "when the secrets of all men's hearts will be revealed. ”

“ Victor Hugo, though simple in nature, was many-sided in intellect. As I approach the conclusion of my task, I feel how truly great the sum of this man's work was, notwithstanding the flaws which disfigured it. And in proportion to its greatness is the difficulty of appraising, or even of approximately appraising, its value. This task belongs to a writer or writers yet unborn; for neither in his own nor even in the next generation does such a man of genius as Hugo—an author sui generis, one utterly unlike all others—assume his distinctive niche in the Walhalla of literature. ”

“ Only Hugo does not change. He grows, of course, and changes to that extent, from a child into a man, but from the earliest time that I remember him, and I cannot remember any time before that, it is the same indescribable personality. He is different and more lovable than other people. Not cleverer, nor better, exactly. Guy could do most things better than he could, and many other people are as good; but no one I have ever met was like Hugo in the special quality he had. Guy felt it too, and Cousin Delia, and the Addingtons did, and, I think, Sophia Lane Watson. ”

“ In order not to grieve that child, Count Hugo took the greatest care to prevent the rumour of the low state of his finances reaching the convent. He was in the habit of twice a year visiting his daughter, and the young girl, who up to this time had devoted all the power of loving she as yet had to her father, and admired him as the ideal of every human and knightly virtue and perfection,--did not fail to notice that the eyes of the fast aging man, had for some time back lost their open and joyous expression, that his cheeks were sunk, and his lips habitually compressed. ”

“ To the free-born, high-spirited Hugo this constant sense of being watched and spied upon, and kept in like a chained dog, would have been galling at any time; for he was not only a prisoner but a slave—the slave of those “heathen dogs” whom every Christian of that age, alas! thought himself bound to hate and curse and slay, in place of trying to enlighten them and do them good. But now that he had learned that his brother was alive and near him, and the freedom of which he had begun to despair actually within reach, this degrading bondage became intolerable. ”

“ Hugo, with the dusky red still tingeing his delicate, dark face, hung his head and made no reply.
"One can but try to do better for the future," said Brian, somewhat unsteadily, after that moment's pause. "Hugo, dear boy, will you promise that, at least?" ”

“ The first weeks were taken up with a long review of Victor Hugo's prose and poetry, with a view to a final critical result. It seemed to him that there was stuff in the great Frenchman to suit all weathers and all skies. There were sombre, wind-swept days, when the stretches of brown ling not yet in flower, the hurrying clouds, and the bending trees, were in harmony with all the fierce tempestuous side of the great Romantic. ”

“ To strike a more human note in poetry was their chief aim: they were concerned with art rather than with life itself; and though Hugo, in the privacy of his room, doffed with relief that bourgeois symbol, the high linen collar, he was like a general in his tent drawing up that transcendental plan of operations, the preface to "Cromwell," which was to inspire his troops in their pioneering and shooting, in their whole bodily attack on the classic tradition. ”

“ Hugo represents the culmination of a revolution which almost in our own time shook the foundations of humanity, and already that revolution is old, and Hugo is a vague and remote figure, a doubtful and little discussed author. Yet he was, beyond question, one of the greatest men of letters that Europe has seen, and the day of his return into intellectual triumph is remote indeed, but certain. There can be little doubt that we are divided from the generations that immediately precede us by a gulf far more unfathomable than that which divides us from the darkest ages and the most distant lands. ”

“ Are you very sure, Ordener? Perhaps she is, she surely is, handsome, amiable, virtuous. She is far superior to her for whom you perish. Do not turn away your head, dear friend, dear Ordener. You are so noble and so young to mount the scaffold. Think! you might live with her in some gay city where you would lose all memory of this fatal dungeon; your days would flow by peacefully, without a thought of me. I consent,—you may drive me from your heart, erase my image from your thoughts, Ordener. ”

“ He is a biographer of meanness, and times, and sham aristocracy and folks, and can, when he cares to do so, portray heroism lofty as tallest mountains. With Hugo all is different. He will do nothing else than dream and depict heroism and heroes.
He loves them with a passion fervent as desert heats. His pages are ablaze with them. Somebody lifting up the face, and facing God in some mood or moment of briefer or longer duration—this is Hugo's method. ”

“ There is an energy of fury in Hugo’s political verse that keeps it alive even to-day, when Louis Napoleon, a charlatan without this redeeming fury, has receded into such littleness that the eye scarcely any longer perceives him. Hugo at times seems a painfully vocative poet—the poet, not merely of the vocative singular, but of the vocative plural. But there is always coursing through his verse a great natural force, like that of the wind or the waves, that carries us along as we read. ”

“ Husband, that man is ill and weak; On foot he goes and alone Through a barren moor in a night-storm bleak. Eric: Now I wonder where he has gone! Hugo: Indeed, I have not the least idea; The man is certainly mad. He wedded my sister, Dorothea, And used her cruelly bad. He was once my firmest and surest friend, And once my deadliest foe; But hate and friendship both find their end— Now I heed not where he may go. SCENE—A Chamber in the Castle. HUGO, THORA, and ERIC. Hugo: That letter that came from Palestine, By the hands of yon wandering Dane, Will cost me a pilgrimage to the Rhine. ”