Victor Hugo

“ Unlike many other great men, Victor Hugo was not compelled to wait for a posthumous recognition of his powers. His genius was incontestable; he towered far above all his contemporaries; and the universal acknowledgment of his talents left no room for jealousy. Hence writers and artists of all classes, and of varying eminence, combined with their less distinguished fellow-countrymen in paying homage to one who has shed undying lustre upon the French name. ”

“ Finally, the great personality of Victor Hugo proved potent enough definitively to break the spell that had been so long and so heavily laid on the literary development of France. The bloodless warfare was fierce between the revolutionary Romanticists and the conservative Classicists in literary style, but the victory seemed at last to remain with the advocates of the new romantic revival. It looked, on the face of the matter, like a signal triumph of originality over prescription, of genius over criticism, of power over rule. ”

“ Victor Hugo's soul then burst into feu et flamme. He caught fire like a volcano long silent, a burning mountain (p. 164) that had simulated quiet unawares, and clothed itself with vineyards and villages. In the tranquil days when Louis-Philippe plotted and pottered, and France lay dormant, amusing her restrained spirit with the outbreak of the romantic against the classical, and taking pleasure in the burst of genius which had arisen suddenly and unawares in her midst, the poet was so little dissatisfied with the bourgeois régime that he accepted the title of "pair de France." ”

“ For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven. This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo’s writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric. Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him. ”

“ For humanity he selected France; in the nation he chose the people; and in the people, woman, and his pity was mainly given to her. At the present time he preferred an idea to a fact, a poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job even more than an event like Marengo; and when after a day of meditation he returned along the boulevard and saw through the trees the illimitable space, the nameless gleams, the abyss, shadow, and mystery, all that was only human seemed to him infinitely little. He believed that he had—and probably he had—reached the truth of life and of human philosophy ”

“ What a gathering together there is of ruinous passion and bewildering incident! All the foulness as well as all the faith of the Middle Ages are kneaded together with a trowel of gold and of iron. At the sound of the poet's voice all that was in ruins has risen to its fullest height, reanimated by his breath.... Victor Hugo has followed his vocation as poet and architect, as writer of history and romance; his pen has been guided alike by ancient chronicle and by his own personal genius ”

“ In fancy, in imagination, in brilliancy, in grandeur, in style,—in all that makes a poet—excepting purity—he must yield to Victor Hugo. In purity he yields to none. His mind is essentially religious. He never forgot what he learned at a sainted mother's knee,—a mother whom he has a thousand times lovingly commemorated in his writings. There is much in Victor Hugo—far greater poet though he be—which it would not be wise to put into the hands of young people whose principles have not been sufficiently formed; but Lamartine may be placed indiscriminately in the hands of all. ”

“ Victor Hugo was banished from France for his opposition to the coup d'état. He was ever true to his convictions without counting the cost. "If there is anything grander than Victor Hugo's genius," said Louis Blanc, "it is the use which he has made of it." He affords us an instance of the highest fame and the favor of fortune culminating in ripe old age. ”

“ No poet has a rarer and more delicate touch of pathos, none a more masculine or a fuller tone of indignation. The great peculiarity of Victor Hugo is that his poetry always transports. No one who cares for poetry at all, and who has mastered the preliminary necessity of acquaintance with the French language and French prosody, can read any of his better works without gradually rising to a condition of enthusiasm in which the possible defects of the matter are altogether lost sight of in the unsurpassed and dazzling excellence of the manner. ”

“ So Hugo is a mixture of thunder and sunshine; of smiles and tears. No man had ever a greater heart—Shakspeare, and few others only, a more expansive intellect. He lacks the grand impartiality and the majestic calm of the author of Hamlet; but his soul is filled with the same love of his species, and it is large enough to embrace all the sons of humanity. His is a name which any nation, might well hold in everlasting honour. Though his life be ended, the splendour of his fame has but just begun ”

“ There he walked at a slow pace, with his head strained forward, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, his eye immovably fixed on a point which seemed to be a star to him, which never varied, and which was no other than the corner of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The nearer he approached the corner of the street the more his eye lighted up; a sort of joy illuminated his pupils like an inward aurora, he had a fascinated and much affected air, his lips indulged in obscure movements, as though he were talking to some one whom he did not see, he smiled vaguely and advanced as slowly as possible. ”

“ I rushed downstairs to embrace him for it, but by the time I had reached the passage, jostled against De Chilly, who wanted to stop me, and descended the staircase, Victor Hugo had disappeared. I could see only the old woman’s back, but it seemed to me that she hobbled along now more briskly.
The next day I told the poet that I had witnessed his delicate, good deed. “Oh,” said Paul Maurice, his eyes wet with emotion, “every day that dawns is a day of kindness for him!” I embraced Victor Hugo and we went to the rehearsal. ”

“ Victor Hugo seeks strong and extraordinary effects; he is a master of terrible image, profound emotion, audacious fancy; but then these are as real, as natural, as true to fact, as the fairest reproduction of the moral poverties and meannesses of the world. And let it be added that while he is without a rival in the dark mysterious heights of imaginative effect, he is equally a master in strokes of tenderness and the most delicate human sympathy. ”

“ In some respects, no man of equal genius was ever so unfortunate as Victor Hugo in his relations with the stage. I refer, of course, to the earlier part of his career, for there came a time when the appreciation of him as a dramatist was as high and universal as was the admiration of his literary excellence. But during the long struggle between the old and the new drama there were always enemies ready to denounce and hiss whatsoever he produced; and had he given them a Romeo and Juliet or a Hamlet, the result would have been precisely the same. ”

“ But the persistence of his smile led me to think that, aware of the servant’s discomfiture, what he felt was perhaps really a malicious joy. “But, my dear, you know you’re not revealing any new discovery when you tell us about Victor Hugo,” went on the Duchess, this time addressing Mme. d’Arpajon whom she had just seen turn away from the General with a troubled air. “You mustn’t expect to launch that young genius. Everybody knows that he has talent. What is utterly detestable is the Victor Hugo of the last stage, the Légende des Siècles, I forget all their names. ”

“ EDITOR’S OUTLOOK. VICTOR HUGO.
The greatest of the French writers of this century has passed away from earth, after eighty-three years of a life which was, like Carlyle’s, full of work to the very end. Victor Hugo’s greatness is difficult to measure at this hour; we are too near to know whether this is an Alp or only a hill. That it has attracted the attention, the admiration, the homage of mankind for half a century would seem to mean that this was one of the three or four great lives of the nineteenth century. Victor Hugo came of a union of aristocratic and plebeian blood. ”

“ What with my somewhat cosmopolitan family, their rather snobbish acquaintances and friends, and the acquaintances and friends I had chosen in my independent life as an artiste, I was living in rather a bourgeois atmosphere. I had heard Victor Hugo spoken of ever since my childhood as a rebel and a renegade, and his works, which I had read with passion, did not prevent my judging him with very great severity. And I blush to-day with anger and shame, when I think of all my absurd prejudices, nourished by the imbecile or insincere little court which flattered me. ”

“ That, in a most close and exact symbol, is the best possible definition I can give of Victor Hugo's genius. And the impression of that hour was upon me the impression of his mind; physical, as it touched the nerves with a more vivid passion of pleasure than music or wine; spiritual, as it exalted the spirit with the senses and above them to the very summit of vision and delight. It is no fantastic similitude, but an accurate likeness of two causes working to the same effect. There is nothing but that delight like the delight given by some of his work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Youth is the time for forming friendships. I love Hugo because I knew and loved him at a period of life when the heart is still expanding within the breast.... I found myself on the ground floor of an obscure house at the end of a court. There a grave, melancholy mother was industriously instructing some boys of various ages—her sons. She showed me into a low room a little apart, at the farther end of which, either reading or writing, sat a studious youth 133 with a fine massive head, intelligent and thoughtful. This was Victor Hugo, the man whose pen can now charm or terrify the world. ”

“ Renan.
Journalists.
The immense popularity of Victor Hugo was not so much due to the love of poetry in Frenchmen as to their gratitude for his fidelity to the popular cause, and admiration for his steady resistance to Napoleon III. Had he remained a royalist to the last, his fame would have been of a quieter kind. The French have a way of taking up a man and making political capital out of him, increasing his reputation as much as possible for that purpose. Hugo’s name and his portraits were familiar to multitudes who knew nothing of his poetry. ”

“ René-Jean went to his crib, pulled out the sack of straw that served him for a mattress, dragged it to the window, and stretching himself out upon it, said, "Let us go to bed."
Gros-Alain leaned his head against René-Jean, Georgette laid hers on Gros-Alain, and thus the three culprits fell sound asleep.
Warm breezes stole in at the open windows; the scent of wild-flowers borne upon the wind from the ravines and hills mingled with the breath of evening; Nature lay calm and sympathetic; radiance, peace, and love pervaded the world; the sunlight touched each object with a soft caress ”

“ A workingman who recognized the poet would not let him sit down till with his blouse he had wiped the seat clean and dry. Victor Hugo thanked him and offered him his hand, and with a naïve delight the good fellow cried, "Ah, monsieur, ah, citizen, how proud I am to have seen you and touched you!" More than once the cabman employed to take the poet to his house has refused to accept his fare, declaring that the honor of having driven Victor Hugo was recompense enough. ”

“ Hugo stood for the fact that democracy isolated the citizen fully as much as the ancient religions isolated the soul. He resisted the rule of the Third Napoleon because he saw that it had the supreme and final mark of the rule of the tyrant, the fact that it relied on the masses. As if a million of the images of God could by any possibility become a mass. He made his appeal to the individual, as every poet must do, and asked the solitary citizen to act as if he were really not only the only human being on the earth, but the only sentient being in the universe. ”

“ Victor Hugo was the great star of the French capital from that day.
Meanwhile, all was happiness in the poet's household. The wife of his youthful dreams presided with tact and grace over his home and her dark Spanish beauty was much admired by the crowds of youthful friends who now began to frequent the house. This type of beauty appears almost as constantly in Victor Hugo's books as the head of La Fornarina did in the pictures of Raphael. He seems constantly to seek to immortalize her whom he had chosen for his own. ”

“ He gives a regal yawn as fairest women dance; Music has outpoured all its notes, the soft and loud, But dully on his wearied ear its accents roll, As dully as the praises of the servile crowd Who falsely sing the purity of his black soul. He has had before his daïs from the prison brought Two thieves, whose terror makes their chains to loudly ring, Then gaping most unkingly, he dismissed his slaves, And tranquilly, half rising, looked around to seek In the weighty stillness—such as broods round graves— Something within his royal scope to which to speak. ”