Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

  Hugo wrote something almost every day of his life, be it only a love letter to Adèle, his wife, or to his principal mistress, Juliette Drouet. Usually it was one or more poems, or several thousand words of prose—perhaps both. Poetry punctuated his life, like his heartbeats, and seems always to have been spontaneous, effortless, and fluent. He often wrote poetry first thing in the morning, as soon as he got up and before breakfast. He was twenty when he published his first volume of verse, Odes et Poésies Diverse(1822). Other collections followed every two or three years. The most important are Les Orientales (1829), Leo Feuilles d’Automne (1831), Les Chants de Crépuscule (1835), Les Châtiments (1853), L’Année Terrible (1872), and La Légende des Siècles, collections of poems commenting on all ages of history, which he published in four separate volumes in the years 1859–1883. All in all there are twenty-four books of poetry, and these do not include important pièces d’occasion, printed immediately after he wrote them in newspapers. There are probably over 3,000 poems by Hugo, a few very long, most short, some never published.1

  Hugo wrote nine novels. The first, published in 1823, when Hugo was twenty-one, is Han d’Islande, set in seventeenth-century Norway. It is a romance containing the first of the great set-piece descriptions for which his novels became famous, a prolonged fight to the death with the bandit from which the novel takes its name. Bug-Jargal (1826), the story of the Negro revolution in San Domingo in 1791, features a horrific execution, as does Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné (1829), a fictional manifesto against capital punishment. Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), the first of Hugo’s “great” novels, is set in fifteenth-century Paris. It contains spectacular crowd scenes involving the underworld and a mob attacking the cathedral and being repulsed by the powerful hunchback Quasimodo, who lives in the belfry. Claude Gueux (1834), about convict life, is a failure; this was really a preparatory sketch for Hugo’s next novel, Les Misérables (1862), an examination and indictment of the entire criminal justice system. It features Jean Valjean, an escaped convict—Hugo’s most memorable creation—and Javert, the policeman who tracks him down. There are some spectacular scenes of pursuit including one in the great sewer of Paris; a description of the battle of Waterloo; and scenes from the barricades in the July Revolution of 1830. Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866) is about the ocean and the fisheries, and has a magnificent fight between a mariner and a giant octopus. L’Homme Qui Rit (1869) is set in late-seventeenth-century England and is full of absurdities and unintentional jokes, featuring characters with names like Lord Gwynplaine; Lord David Dirry-More; the Duchess Josiane de Clan-charlie; Tom Jim-Jack; and Barkiphedro, receiver of jetsam at the Admiralty—plus officials from “the Wapentake.” Hugo’s last novel, Quatre-Vingt-Treize (1873), concerns the Vendée rising against the French revolutionary tyranny and contains marvelous scenes set in the swamps and secret forests of west France.

  The plays began with Cromwell (1827), in verse, with a striking introduction setting out Hugo’s views of the new romantic movement in France, of which he became the leader. Amy Robsart, in prose, was followed in 1830 by the verse play Hernani, whose production at the Comédie Française marked the point at which romanticism drove classicism from the stage. Marion de Lorme(1829), in verse, is unimportant, as are Marie Tudor (1833); Lucrèce Borgia, in prose (also 1833); and Angel, in prose (1835). But Le Roi s’Amuse (1832), in verse, is memorable, not least because it became the libretto for Verdi’s Rigoletto; and Ruy Blas (1838), in verse, is Hugo’s best play. In 1843 Hugo wrote a bad play, Les Bur-graves, which was ill-received, and thereafter he left the stage alone, except for his feeble Torquemada (1882) and a collection of one-acters, Le Théâtre en Liberté (1886).

  Hugo’s essays and nonfiction include Le Rhin (1842), a travel book also setting out Hugo’s strident patriotic views; Napoléon le Petit (1862), his assault on the imperial regime of Napoléon III; William Shakespeare (1864), setting out Hugo’s theory of genius; and a continuing series called Actes et Paroles (1841–1900, posthumous), taken from his journals. This list does not include vast numbers of articles, scores of pamphlets, and political ephemera.

  Hugo dominated French literature in the nineteenth century, from the 1820s to the 1880s, and he is the nearest equivalent to Shakespeare in France. Yet despite his importance, there is no scholarly complete edition of his works, his vast correspondence has never been systematically edited, and critical works on his oeuvre are almost invariably vitiated by vehement partisanship.2 There is only one really good biography, and that by an Englishman, Graham Robb.3 It is hard to think of a writer whose popularity is so enormous but who has received so little objective study as a whole. Toward the end of Hugo’s life, his works were selling well over 1 million copies a year in France. He was immensely widely read abroad. Les Misérables was published simultaneously in eight major capital cities. In Britain, for instance, just before World War I, there were over 3 million copies of Hugo’s novels in print. One measure of his international popularity is that at least fifty-five operas have been based on his works, and others have been projected or sketched by a diverse a group of composers. Bizet, Wagner, Mous-sourgsky, Honegger, Franc, Massenet, Delibes, Saint-Saens, Auric, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Fauré, Gounod, Widor, and Donizetti have found musical inspiration in his texts.4 And Hugo has been a godsend to writers of contemporary musicals, and to Disney. He still attracts comment: Graham Robb calculates that, on average, every day sees the publication of 3,000 words about Hugo, somewhere. Yet something is lacking: a true summation, a definitive placing of Hugo in the context of French, indeed world, literature. A century and a quarter after his death, he is still a loose cannon, crashing about the deck. Why is this?

  One collateral reason is the continuing lack of a scholarly edition of his works (and essentially his letters), which compounds the inherent difficulty of mastering their sheer extent. But the real explanation lies much deeper and concerns the nature of creativity and its roots in other aspects of the human mind. That Hugo was phenomenally creative is unarguable: in sheer quantity and often in quality too, he is in the highest class of artists. But he forces one to ask the question: is it possible for someone of high creative gifts to be possessed of mediocre, banal, even low intelligence?

  The same question has also been asked of Charles Dickens. But it must be said that, with Hugo, the query was raised at the beginning of his literary career; it was repeated at intervals, often with great vehemence; and it remains suspended and unanswered over his posthumous reputation. Chateaubriand, godfather of French romanticism, who regarded Hugo as his prize pupil, referred to him as the “sublime infant.” The words “childish” and “infantile” crop up often in comment on Hugo by his peers. So do “insane” and “madness.” Certainly madness ran in the family. Hugo’s brother Eugène ended his sad, unfulfilled life in a padded cell; and Hugo’s daughter Adèle, after teetering on the brink of insanity for many years, finally fell over it. Balzac seized on this: “Hugo has the skull of a madman, and his brother, the great, unknown poet, died insane.” People referred to Hugo’s popularity as l’ivresse de Victor Hugo. Moreover, he not only was mad himself but infected others. Still, the most common criticism was lack of intelligence. Lecomte de Lisle called him as stupid as the Himalayas (to which Hugo rejoined that de Lisle was “just stupid”). Léon Bloy used the phrase “an imbecile lama” and went on to a more general indictment, written shortly before Hugo died: “No one is unaware of his pitiful intellectual senility, his sordid avarice, his monstrous egotism, and his complete hypocrisy.” Tristan Legay argued (1922) that Hugo, master of the poetic antithesis, had missed the one about himself, his “splendor of manner and absence of thought,” a point anticipated by Paul Stapfer (in 1887): “greatest of French poets but also a crude rhetorician, eloquent spokesman, and talker of trivia, a diverse author but an imperfect man.” Emile Fagnet did not dispute Hugo’s genius but rated him as “an average and ordinary character…. His ideas were always those of everybody else at a cer
tain period, but always a little behind the times…a magnificent stage-manager of commonplaces.” Jules Lemaître (1889) put it more cruelly: “This man may have genius. You may be sure he has nothing else.”

  The case against Hugo, as a mind and a human being, takes away nothing from his creative powers, and therefore can be put in some detail. He was born in Besançon, the son of a professional army officer who flourished mightily under Bonaparte, becoming a full general and ennobled as Comte Sigisbut Hugo. Some of the child Victor’s life was spent traveling, in Italy and Spain, while his father was campaigning; and he saw and took in terrible sights on the roads—wounded men and corpses, dead horses, shattered villages. The parents were unhappy together; and Madame Hugo took her three sons (Victor was the youngest) away in 1812 and settled in Paris at 12 Impasse des Feuillantines, formerly a convent of nuns founded by Anne of Austria. It had an immense garden, with a ruined chapel and a dense wilderness, and these features imprinted ineffaceable memories on Hugo’s young mind. The ruined chapel may well have been the ultimate progenitor of Notre-Dame de Paris, then in a state of some dilapidation, and the wilderness certainly reappeared in the dense woods and thickets of Quatre-Vingt-Treize. Hugo was always an intensely visual writer; this was his strength and his weakness. He would seize on an image—for a poem naturally but also for a novel or the key scene in a play—and would then expand the image in all directions to create a story, a plot, a scenario.

  Hugo’s education was scrappy and unsystematic. In many respects he was an autodidact. Throughout his life he read voraciously but sporadically, in a wild and undisciplined manner, absorbing or half-absorbing vast quantities of facts, images, and the sounds of words as much as their orthography. He had a wonderful ear for words, which made him love them, and this gift above all others made him a poet. He loved music itself, too, especially Mozart and Beethoven, and he became a friend, in so far as he was ever capable of friendship, of Liszt and Berlioz. But it was the music of words, from first to last, that entranced and empowered him. No Frenchman ever used the language with more caressing affection or at times more brutal strength. Hugo played with it like a young panther, and charged into it like a rhinoceros.

  Hugo always thought of bringing himself fame through literature. But he also always (if at some times more directly than at others) sought power through politics. He worked the two in tandem when he could. However, in his long career, sometimes close to the center, at other times on the periphery of politics, it is impossible to find any thread of consistency or any basis of moral principle or intellectual logic. There were always noisy ideals; but they were words. Behind this rhetorical facade was a love of power, normally blind and pursued with such clumsy incompetence that, even when office was within his grasp, he dashed it to the ground from impatience or vacillation.

  Heredity should have made him a Bonapartist and a republican. He never repudiated his father’s record as a faithful follower of Napoleon, and in particular quietly made use of the title his father’s sword had earned, calling himself virtually all his life—except at brief moments when republican egalitarianism was in vogue—“le vicomte Hugo,” and always treating his brothers and his wife as members of the noblesse. Yet when Bonaparte fell, and even before then, Hugo was a legitimist and fervent royalist, a teenage Bourbon fanatic and Catholic ultra. The intellectual inspiration for the monarchist-papist revival in France was Chateaubriand’s great work Le Génie du Christianisme (1802), but it is doubtful that Hugo read this. What he absorbed, rather, were the symbols of the resurrected creed—the fleur-de-lis, the Gothic visual vocabulary, and the apparatus of medieval chivalry and crusading zeal he feasted on greedily, then regurgitated in poetry. When he was seventeen, he and his brother Abel founded the Conservateur Littéraire (1819), which flourished for eighteen months or so, Hugo writing in every issue, especially reviews of current poetry in which he castigated the authors for the smallest infraction of the strict rules of grammar, meter, and prosody—all the rules he was later to break with the most reckless abandon, and successfully.

  At age twenty he married a childhood friend, Adèle Foucher, in a spirit of Catholic sacramentalism. Both were virgins, and he insisted that she preserve the strictest modesty, rebuking her for lifting her dress when she crossed a muddy street and so exposing her ankle. The same year as his marriage (1822), he published his first volume of poetry, receiving a donation from the king, Louis XVIII, of 500 francs from the privy purse. The next year Hugo’s first novel, Han d’Islande, was again rewarded with a royal bounty, a regular pension; it also got Hugo invited to the gatherings that Charles Nodier, the protoromantic novelist, held at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, where he was librarian—the first cénacle (coterie) of the romantic movement. Within two years, however, Hugo set up a cénacle of his own, taking most of the young writers with him. Then followed a cunning period of backing both sides. Still a royalist, and a sufficiently vocal one to be invited to the coronation of Charles X—and to write a poem about the royal birth describing the baby as a “royal like Jésu” and “a sublime infant” (another!)—he was also working up a band of his own followers to assist him to the center of events. His play Cromwell (1827) struck an ominous note for the Bourbons, for it was ambivalent about the choice between monarchy and republic. The preface he wrote to this drama is a kind of political manifesto, but about what? That is hard to say. It has the air of a mystery or a vacuity. Charles X offered to increase his pension. Hugo let it be known he had turned the offer down. But he kept the original pension, an early example of what became a habit—having it both ways. By 1830 he had a sufficiently large and fanatical band of followers to arrange a bellicose demonstration in his favor at the opening night of his play Hernani at the Comèdie Française. This was the official, historic triumph of the romantics, led by Hugo, over the classicists. His 300 warriors were dispersed strategically throughout the theater and carefully trained and rehearsed. In the riot that ensued, several classicists were badly beaten up and the rest fled, leaving romanticism triumphant. It was a characteristic operation by Hugo, well planned and carried through with brio—he was not a general’s son for nothing—but the fruit of cunning, not intelligence, let alone idealism.

  The first night of Hernani is usually presented as the dramatic prelude to the overthrow of the Bourbons later in the year. This overthrow, though foreseeable—the winter was exceptionally bad, and there were many hungry—came as a surprise to Hugo, who after a week of bewildered hesitation dropped all his links with the Bourbons and proclaimed himself a republican. The triumph of the duc d’Orléans—who was elected not “king of France” but “king of the French,” dropped the fleur-de-lis and took up the republican tricolor, with an Orléanist coat of arms on it (another example of having it both ways)—likewise surprised Hugo, though he was quick to endorse the new “popular monarchy.” In return, King Louis-Philippe made him a “peer of France,” with all the special privileges attached to the title, including a seat in the upper house of parliament. This proved convenient, as we shall see. Hugo’s relations with the kindhearted pear-shaped monarch were good, and on one occasion a tête-à-tête conversation they had at the Tuileries Palace prolonged itself so late into the night that the servants, thinking everyone was in bed, extinguished the lights, and the king had to find and light a candle, then unlock the street door and let Hugo out.

  Hugo always supported the state, and its grandeur, when it was advantageous to himself. Having originally upheld the strictest rules of French prosody and vocabulary, insisting that literary discipline was of the essence of French culture, he then broke them at will, especially in his verse. He invented new rhythms. He manipulated the alexandrine in the most audacious way. He used cunning, hitherto forbidden enjambements, carrying one line on to another. His placing of the caesura was idiosyncratic, and his use of the French silent e arbitrary. But all these devices were adopted or exploited by young poets, and Hugo’s poetic revolution quickly became orthodox or standard. In prose he
used “natural” speech and plebeian words, and described situations and events hitherto beneath the notice of literature. He also bared his soul and made huge use of moi and moi-même. Coleridge and Wordsworth had done much the same a generation before (Lyrical Ballads had been published in 1798), in England, and Wordsworth had made a literary virtue of self-centeredness. But these things were new in France, and seemed fresh and exciting. Together with his literary antinomianism, they made Hugo a hero to educated youth.

  At the same time, to counter charges that he was assaulting the temple of French culture, and importing destructive foreign practices, Hugo always took care to beat the patriotic drum and sound the French cultural trumpet at the charge. In 1840, on the tenth anniversary of the revolution of 1830, the choirs from the Paris opera sang a poem by Hugo during the celebrations in the Place de la Bastille:

  Gloire à notre France éternelle!

  Gloire à ceux qui sont mort pour elle!

  And much else in the same vein.

  Two years later Hugo published his travel book Le Rhin, whose theme was: “Give back to France what God gave her”—the Rhine frontier. The book presents France and Germany as the essence of Europe: “Germany is the heart, France the head.” If the two powers act together, with France doing the directing, they can beat Britain and Russia out of Europe. But the “Rhine frontier” was the essential preliminary to this alliance of head and heart. Hugo said it would be democratic, too: the Rhinelanders, although German-speaking, wanted to live under “the finest, the most noble, the most popular flag in the world, the Tricouleur.” They would soon adopt French, the true language of culture, the speaking mind—a theme he reiterated throughout his career. Thus: “How does one recognize intelligence in a nation? By its ability to speak French.”5 Hugo always, and often, presented France as a nation that had the destiny of ruling others. It was une nation conquérante.6 In a poem written in 1830 he presents Paris as the “mother city of Europe,” a “spider in whose huge web entire nations are caught.”7 He presented French nationalism, of the strident kind Napoleon Bonaparte had personified, as an unmixed boon to the world.8 What he did not see was that nationalism inevitably spread to other countries, such as Italy and Germany, and as such worked to France’s disadvantage. In the nineteenth century, the populations of both a united Germany and a united Italy each grew by 250 percent, whereas France grew by a mere 45 percent. But even in 1871, when the disastrous consequences of France’s ignition of the nationalist bonfire were apparent, and France’s own relative weakness was fully revealed, Hugo continued to pour forth nationalist froth. He told the National Assembly, of which he was a member, when it debated the peace terms laid down by the victorious Bismarck, that the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine would “soon be recaptured,” adding, in a loud voice: “Is that all? No. France will again seize Trèves, Mainz, Coblenz, Cologne—the entire left bank of the Rhine!” This empty bombast was received in embarrassed silence.9 Hugo’s views on politics and international affairs appear here and there in his writings, often at considerable length. But it is impossible to point to any passages that show unusual knowledge, genuine insight, or even routine intelligence. All are vacuous expressions of popular platitudes—the republic, the people, France, destiny, and so forth. There is no evidence that Hugo ever thought deeply about these issues.