Victor-Marie Hugo wrote verse very early, beginning as a classicist. In later youth he was royalist and religious in spirit. At twenty he acquired the title of “the sublime boy.” How he acquired this title seems a matter of doubt. It is generally supposed to have been given by Chateaubriand, in his quality of patriarch of French letters. But this origin of the sobriquet the present writer has seen seriously suggested to be, along with the sobriquet itself, the pure invention of Victor Hugo’s own imaginative egotism; which fruitful source of autobiography is said also to have yielded the poet’s noble pedigree—the process of production employed on his part being, in the latter case, the extremely simple one of adopting for ancestry the ancient line of a family, bearing the same name indeed with himself, but otherwise utterly unrelated to his own humble house. The really extraordinary independence of fact with which Victor Hugo undoubtedly made his assertions respecting himself renders any testimony that he bears on this point interesting as imagination rather than instructive as history. For three or four years now he was an irrepressible producer and publisher of verse. At twenty-five he put out his “Cromwell,” a drama, with a belligerent preface in favor of romanticism. After this each play of his was a battle for that literary cause. His “Hernani” (1830) was at last more than a battle—it was a victory.
The royalist in due time became republican. When Louis Napoleon was president, Victor Hugo opposed him. When Louis Napoleon made himself emperor, Victor Hugo denounced him. Banished for this from France, the poet betook himself to Belgium. Repelled from Belgium, he found refuge in England. Here, or, more exactly, in the island of Jersey first, and longer, afterward, in the island of Guernsey, he remained till the second empire fell. He then returned to Paris, and shared the melancholy fortunes of that beleaguered capital during the Prussian siege and during the anarchy of the Commune. Here, finally, he died, and, by his own will and testament, in a quite other than the original meaning of that pregnant Scripture phrase, “was buried”—for his funeral was to be attended with peculiar obsequies. He signified his wish to be treated in burial exactly as one of those paupers of whose cause he had been in his works the life-long champion.
During his long exile, which, notwithstanding his passionate love of Paris, he refused to shorten by any understanding arrived at with the emperor, he kept persecuting that usurper with printed diatribes, both in prose and in verse, which for mordant bitterness have probably never been surpassed in the literature of invective. One of these diatribes was a book entitled “The History of a Crime.” To this he prefixed a kind of imprimatur of his own, which may be quoted here as well exemplifying the high oracular style of expression characterized by short sentences and short paragraphs—these often of a single sentence only—that he habitually affected:
This work is more than opportune. It is imperative. I publish it.
V. H.
Victor Hugo’s egotism was so vast that it was insane if it was not sublime. To exemplify adequately this statement by extracts would ask pages of room. The four lines about to follow, from one of his longer poems, present a modest and moderate example. The poet has been supposing the impossible case that the Supreme Being should take different views, in a certain matter, from his, the poet’s, own—that he should outrage his, the poet’s, sense of moral propriety. Here is how, in that case, Victor Hugo would, he declares, deal with offending Deity (we translate literally the original Alexandrines, line for line, without attempting to reproduce either meter or rhyme):
| I would go, I would see him, and I would seize him, Amid the heavens, as one takes a wolf amid the woods, And, terrible, indignant, calm, extraordinary, I would denounce him with his own thunder. |
To Victor Hugo himself, the foregoing was not blasphemy; it was simply sublimity of a sort suitable to the character of the poet. There was, it is said, fully developed mental unsoundness in his father’s family and in his own. Victor Hugo’s own genius had, we suspect, some trace of a real, though noble, insanity in it.
In 1862, appeared “Les Miserables,” which must be accounted, if not the greatest, at least the most popular work of its author. This book was issued simultaneously in eight different cities and in nine different languages—a circumstance probably not paralleled in the history of literature. The fame of “Les Miserables” does not fade, and it hardly will fade. It is a book of truly prodigious elemental power. That, however, Victor Hugo’s genius in producing it worked with some disturbing consciousness of a theory of literary art to be exemplified and defended, the following curious note, inserted in the midst of the text, at a point of interest in the story, may serve to show:
Then the poor old man began sobbing and soliloquizing; for it is a mistake to suppose that there is no soliloquy in nature. Powerful agitations often talk aloud.