Half the pages that Frenchmen have written about Victor Hugo are not unnaturally given to the breach he made in the fortress of the French classical tradition. And the other point is still more important. We at least shall not go to French poets for instruction in our political duty. Neither the political nor the literary quarrels of the French matter very greatly to us. And this simplification of the problem of Hugo is at once an easier and a more necessary task in the case of us who are not Frenchmen. And perhaps the time has begun to come, now that he has been more than twenty years in the grave to which he was carried with such ostentatious simplicity, when we may try to set our hands to the work of posterity, and begin to strip him of what was ephemeral and unessential, and look only at the vital and immortal part by which he has his place among the undying glories of France. Yet no one writing on French poetry, whatever else he may be obliged to leave untouched, can dare to turn away from the most splendid figure of all. He began life as a literary rebel, and died an accepted classic.Īll these things, and the fact that he touched life so long and from so many sides, make him an embarrassingly large subject to attempt to treat in an essay. He knew the taste of exile, the bitterest cup of all that must be drained by the defeated politician, and he survived it to know in turn that of popular adulation, the most intoxicating and the most dangerous. A Royalist in his youth, both by in heritance and by temperament, he lived to be the voice, almost the incarnation, of the spirit of demo cracy. Born less than ten years after the Terror, he lived fourteen years after the Commune. He had a long life and a large personality. Perhaps no name in French literature stands for so much as that of Victor Hugo. London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1907. The following essay is reprinted from The Claims of French Poetry: Nine Studies in the Greater French Poets.
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