Hugo, VICTOR-MARIE (1802-85), was the son of a Lorrainer and a Breton, and was born at Besançon. His father, General Hugo, was on active service, so that his earlier years were mostly spent in the track of the emperor's armies. He was educated partly in Paris at the Fenillaintines (1809-11, 1813-15), partly in Madrid (1812), and partly at the École Polytechnique, where he read mathematics and practised poetry. At fourteen he produced a tragedy; at fifteen he went near to winning a prize at an Académie competition; and at twenty, when he published his first set of Odes et Ballades (1822), he had thrice been victor at the Floral Games of Toulouse. The next year, being by this time a married man and the enfant sublime of M. de Chateaubriand, he published his Hans d'Islande (1823), that wild and whirling romance of an impossible Iceland; and followed it up with Bug-Jargal (1824), a second set of Odes et Ballades (1826), and the famous Cromwell (1827), thanks to which last—a tragedy even then impossible to act and now almost as difficult to read—he became the most conspicuous figure in aesthetic France. For Romanticism—that protest in action against the effete and hidebound conventions of the age of Louis XIV.—was now by way of being an accomplished fact; and the preface to Cromwell was greeted with an enthusiasm of approval on the one hand and of detestation on the other in these days not easy to understand. In its way, indeed, it is a document of singular importance in literary history. It is largely compacted of paradox and antithesis no doubt; and no doubt its premises are mostly dubious and its conclusions not more than fantastic. But it asserted the artist's right to be as Shakespearean—that is, as lawless—as he pleased, and it was so completely a declaration of independence, and a decree of emancipation, that, whatever happens, the literature of France can never wholly recover from its effect.
The time indeed was big with revolution and with change, and Hugo's manifesto was accepted by the Romanticists with the solemnity of absolute conviction, so that he instantly took his place by right of genius and authority at the head of the literary host. He was fully equal to the charge of course; for while he was far and away the greatest artist in words that modern France has seen, he was also very careful and curious in the work of 'engineering a reputation,' and contrived to take himself and his function so seriously that to his followers he was not much below divinity itself. It is said that he made himself a forehead; and it is certain that while M. Rodin's magnificent bust of him is far less suggestive of Apollo than of Hercules, the Hugo brow—enormous, radiant, 'prone with excess of mind'—appears and reappears in contemporary caricature with all the persistency and more than the effect of Gillray's view of the 'Bottomless Pitt.' It is certain, too, that the first sketch of his life and work that got into print was written in his own house, and was the work of his own wife; and as Mme. Hugo never wrote again, it is legitimate to argue that the hero may very possibly have lent a hand to the epic. But he never ceased from achievement; and his achievement was inevitably that of a great artist in speech. In 1828 he published his Orientales, wherein he revealed himself for such a master of rhythm, such an inventor in style, such an adept in the mystery of the use of words as France had never seen. The year 1830 was the great year of Hernani—the first in fact and the second in time of those 'five-act lyrics' of which Hugo's drama is composed. In so far as it relates to drama—material, structure, amount, movement, the presentation of emotion in action—the question had been settled now and for all time by Dumas the year before; but Dumas was not a writer in the sense that Hugo was, and the battle of style was still to fight, and the battlefield was the Théâtre-Français, and the casus belli was Hernani. It is so brilliantly written, the movement of the verse is so victorious and the diction is so gorgeous, that even now it takes one time and patience and a certain familiarity to see that, while constructed in the formula of Henri Trois et sa Cour, it is no more a play than Samson Agonistes. In those days men had neither time nor patience, while as for familiarity! . . . It was enough that to one side the verse was incomparable, and that to another it was the Accursed Thing. As Hugo took care to pack as much of the house as he could get made over to him with Romantics, and as on the other part the Classicists were to the full as eager for the quarrel, the question of what is and what is not style was argued for many nights on end with a vehemence—sometimes attaining to the inspiration of assault and battery—which has made 1830, as the year of Hernani, a sacred date—as who should say a species of Hegira in the annals of Romanticism.
In 1831 Hugo published Notre Dame de Paris, a pretentious but picturesque and moving historical romance in which he enters into competition with Sir Walter and comes badly off, and Les Feuilles d'Autonne, a sheaf of lyric and contemplative verse in which is included some of his best poetry; and brought out his best play, Martin Delorme, at the Théâtre-Français. In 1832 he produced Le Roi s'amuse, which was interdicted after the first night, and of which the best that can be said is that it is superbly written and that it has gone the round of the world as Rigoletto. The next year was that of Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor, the first a good and stirring melodrama, the second a farrago of unvarieties of all kinds—moral, historical, dramatic, and the rest; in 1834 came Claude Gueux, which is pure humanitarian sentimentalism, and the Littérature et Philosophie Mêlées, a collection of juvenilia in prose, all carefully dated and all as carefully rewritten or revised. Followed in 1835 Angelo, a third melo- drama in prose, and the admirable lyricism of Les Chants du Crépuscule; in 1836 La Esmeralda (an opera for Mdlle. Bertin); in 1837, Les Voix Intérieures, in which, as in Les Feuilles d'Automne, the poet's genius of diction is held by some to have found its noblest expression; in 1838, Ruy Blas, after Hernani the most famous of his stage rhapsodies; and in 1840, Les Rayons et les Ombres, yet another collection of brilliant and sonorous verse; after which the prodigious affluence of creativeness to which all those were due appears to have been momentarily exhausted. Certain it is that Hugo published no more until 1843, when he again failed at the Français with that ponderous trilogy of Les Burgraves, surcharged with as it were an Æschylean sentimentalism. His next essay in pure art was not put forth till 1856, the dozen or fifteen years between being very largely given over to the pursuit of politics and the practice of oratory, journalism, and pamphleteering in prose and verse.
Putting it roughly, Hugo was until 1830 a Royalist, and worshipped Napoleon; and between 1830 and 1848 he was a Napoleonist with a turn for humanitarianism, but more or less resolute in the cause of order and law. In this latter capacity it was that he sat for the city of Paris in the Assemblée Constituante. There he voted now with the Right and now with the Left, so that, when on his election to the Assemblée Législative he threw in his lot with the democratic republicans, the reproach of apostasy was by no means unfounded. It is not clear that he would have been finally content with any change in the condition of things at this time—always excepting such a turn of the wheel as would have brought himself to the top and kept him there as a kind of emperor by the grace of genius and the democracy. But it is plain that he was bitterly dissatisfied with things as they were, even as it is plain that he could neither endure the eminence of Montalembert nor consider with patience and dignity the fact of the popularity of the prince-president. In 1852, after the coup d'état, he withdrew to Jersey, whence he issued his Napoléon le Petit, perhaps the most mannered and the least literary of all his works, and in 1853 Les Châtiments, which is certainly the greatest achievement in the fusion of pure poetry with political and personal satire in all literature. Three years after appeared Les Contemplations, a gathering of poems elegiacal, reflective, and lyrical, remarkable for beauty of expression and comparative simplicity of style; and three years after that the wonderful and often bewildering Légende des Siècles (1859). Still another silence of three years was broken by the publication (in ten languages) of Les Misérables (1862), a panoramic romance of modern life, mannered beyond measure in style and abounding in absurdities and longueurs, but including also not a little of Hugo's sincerest and most touching invention and achievement; and this in its turn was followed by the extraordinary rhapsody called William Shakespeare (1864), and by Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois (1865), a book of verses which is at the same time a little gallery of achievements in style; by Les Travailleurs de la Mer, an idyll of passion, adventure, and self-sacrifice; by L'Homme qui Rit, a piece of fiction whose purpose and tenor are intended to be historical, and whose effect is sometimes to overwhelm the reader, often to weary him, and still more often to amuse. Returning to Paris after the Fourth of September, Hugo at once distinguished himself by summoning the Germans to withdraw from France and proclaim the German Republic. Some five or six months after he was chosen to represent the Seine, but soon resigned his seat on the ground that one of his speeches was interrupted by the Right. He stayed on through the rule of the Commune, and defended the Vendôme Column while he could; and then, departing for Brussels, he protested publicly against the action of the Belgian government in respect of the beaten Communists, the effects of which proceeding were that the populace rose against him, and that he was expelled the kingdom. Again he stood for Paris, but was beaten by a majority of 27,000 on a register of 231,000. In 1872 he published L'Année Terrible, a series of pictures of the war, diatribes against Germany, and eulogies of France, which are often eloquent and are sometimes poetry; in 1874 his last romance in prose, the much-debated Quatre-Vingt-Treize; in 1875-76 a complete collection of his speeches and addresses. In 1876 he was made a senator, and published the second part of the Légende; 1877 was the year of the Histoire d'un Crime, which has been fairly enough described as 'the apotheosis of the Special Correspondent,' and of L'Art d'être Grand-père, wherein, with much charming verse, are good store of conceits and no small amount of what some one has called 'the pedantry of sentimentalism'; 1878 and 1879 enriched us with Le Pape—a piece humanitarian, anti-clerical, and above all theatrical, which they may praise who can—and La Pitié Suprême, the effect of which is much the same, and which—like L'Âne (1880), and a great deal of Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit (1881), and Torquemada (1882)—is merely Hugo in decay. His mastery of words remains invariable, his accomplishment is always superb; but all too frequently he produces anti-thesis under the delusion that he is expressing ideas, he parades all manner of affections with the air of one reviewing a Tenth Legion or Old Guard (so to speak) of the sentiments, he continually mistakes preposterousness for grandeur; he falls a prey to any of the eternal unvarieties he may chance to encounter; his 'philosophy' is a mere effect of appetite, and as always his depressing lack of humour is 'not merely zero, but even a frightful minus quantity,' so that he abides in error with a seriousness ridiculous indeed. But genius is always genius, and temperament never ceases from being temperament; and the final impression is one of unsurpassed accomplishment and abounding mental and emotional activity. So that Hugo died the foremost man of letters of his time, and they were few indeed who grudged him the public funeral with which he was dignified, and in which the pauper's hearse that bore him tombwards—(the invention was wholly his own)—was followed by the best and the worst of living France.
Hugo's work is vitiated as an expression of life by the presence of an abounding insincerity in combination with a quality of self-sufficiency so inordinate as scarce to be distinguished now and then from an immense stupidity. In truth he does but seem to create: his personalities—Cimourdain, Josiane, Didier, Ursus, Ruy Gomez de Silva, Claude Frollo, Lantenac, Lucrèce Borgia, Javert, and Myriel, the very piéuvre of Les Travailleurs de la Mer, are all expressions not of humanity but of Victor Hugo. You would believe in them—and in him—if you could; but you cannot, for he takes care to make belief impossible. His plays are sometimes well made, are always heavily decorated, are all magnificently written, and have all had their chance of immortality. But their author is Victor Hugo, and the situations are abnormal, the personages peculiar, the interests remote from experience, and such motive as is developed is too individual and strange to be felt beyond the footlights. Much the same is true of his prose romance; but while the level of style is nothing like so high as in the plays, it has merits—of invention, pathos and terror, presentation—absent from these, and which made him one of the most popular writers of his epoch. That said, it may be added that to talk of Hugo as either a dramatist or a master of romantic fiction is to beg the question of Hugo's greatness. His prose, as prose, has never the easy, voluptuous, natural eloquence of George Sand's, nor the mordant felicity of Mérimée's, nor the spontaneity and vivacity of Dumas's, nor the terrible yet irresistible persuasiveness of the opening chapters of Musset's Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle. His dramas are only so many lyrical expressions of Hugolatry, the work of the arch-Hugolater. His best and truest title to immortality is his poetry. In truth, the range and the capacity of his genius in rhythm and rhyme are unparalleled in the literature of France. It was for Musset to utter the truest note, and to make the invention speak the very language of the heart; it has been for Leconte de Lisle, for Baudelaire, for Gautier to produce impeccable work each after his kind; but assuredly it was for Hugo to accomplish the most gorgeous and the most heroic achievement in the divine art of song. His verse, with its infinite capacity of violence and calm, sunshine and thunder, apocalyptic fury and grace ineffable, has something of the effect of the multitudinous seas as he saw and described them from his eyrie in midchannel. The effect of his alexandrines, with their wealth of colour and light and energy, may fairly be paralleled with that of Shakespeare's iambics; while in their purity of form, the sweetness and distinction of their cadences, their richness of rhyme, their magical felicity of expression, his lyrical measures put the Pleiad and all its works to shame. There can be no possible doubt that in many of the relations of life Hugo was a poseur of the first magnitude—that from the first he humbugged his contemporaries with a pertinacity and a success that are only equalled by his faculty of taking himself seriously. But there can be as little that while essentially un-French—a combination, indeed, of Teuton and Celt, and moreover absolutely lacking in sanity—he was a lyrist of the first order, a master of words and cadences, an artist in rhythms and rhymes.
See Victor Hugo raconté par un Témoin de sa Vie (1863) by his wife, who died at Brussels in 1868; works on him by Rivel (1878), Paul de Saint Victor (1885), Barbou (1881), Asseline (1885), Biré (three mainly hostile books, 1883-93), Dupuy (two books, 1887-90), Mabilleau (1893), Boudon (4th ed. 1893), Renouviér (1893); Swinburne, A Study of Victor Hugo (1886), and English works by Barnett Smith (1885), and J. P. Nichol (1892); and criticisms by Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire, and Sainte Beuve.—His son Charles (1826-71), publicist and novelist, was the father of the 'George' and 'Jeanne' of L'Art de d'être Grandpère; François (1828-73) trans. Shakespeare.