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Ebook has 1310 lines and 126695 words, and 27 pages
Memoir of Victor Marie Hugo
EARLY POEMS.
ODES.--1818-28.
BALLADES.--1823-28.
LES ORIENTALES.--1829
LES FEUILLES D'AUTOMNE.--1831.
LES CHANTS DU CR?PUSCULE.--1849.
LES RAYONS ET LES OMBRES.--1840.
LES CH?TIMENTS.--1853.
LES CONTEMPLATIONS.--1830-56.
LA L?GENDE DES SI?CLES.
LES CHANSONS DES RUES ET DES BOIS.
Love of the Woodland Shooting Stars
L'ANN?E TERRIBLE.
L'ART D'?TRE GRANDP?RE.
LES QUATRE VENTS DE L'ESPRIT.
VARIOUS PIECES.
DRAMATIC PIECES.
Victor in Poesy, Victor in Romance, Cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears, French of the French, and Lord of human tears; Child-lover; Bard whose fame-lit laurels glance Darkening the wreaths of all that would advance, Beyond our strait, their claim to be thy peers; Weird Titan by thy winter weight of years As yet unbroken, Stormy voice of France!
TENNYSON.
MEMOIR OF VICTOR MARIE HUGO.
Towards the close of the First French Revolution, Joseph Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, son of a joiner at Nancy, and an officer risen from the ranks in the Republican army, married Sophie Tr?buchet, daughter of a Nantes fitter-out of privateers, a Vendean royalist and devotee.
Victor Marie Hugo, their second son, was born on the 26th of February, 1802, at Besan?on, France. Though a weakling, he was carried, with his boy-brothers, in the train of their father through the south of France, in pursuit of Fra Diavolo, the Italian brigand, and finally into Spain.
Colonel Hugo had become General, and there, besides being governor over three provinces, was Lord High Steward at King Joseph's court, where his eldest son Abel was installed as page. The other two were educated for similar posts among hostile young Spaniards under stern priestly tutors in the Nobles' College at Madrid, a palace become a monastery. Upon the English advance to free Spain of the invaders, the general and Abel remained at bay, whilst the mother and children hastened to Paris.
School claimed the young Hugos after this tragical episode, where they were oddities among the humdrum tradesmen's sons. Victor, thoughtful and taciturn, rhymed profusely in tragedies, "printing" in his books, "Ch?teaubriand or nothing!" and engaging his more animated brother to flourish the Cid's sword and roar the tyrant's speeches.
In 1814, both suffered a sympathetic anxiety as their father held out at Thionville against the Allies, finally repulsing them by a sortie. This was pure loyalty to the fallen Bonaparte, for Hugo had lost his all in Spain, his very savings having been sunk in real estate, through King Joseph's insistence on his adherents investing to prove they had "come to stay."
The Bourbons enthroned anew, General Hugo received, less for his neutrality than thanks to his wife's piety and loyalty, confirmation of his title and rank, and, moreover, a fieldmarshalship. Abel was accepted as a page, too, but there was no money awarded the ex-Bonapartist--money being what the Eaglet at Reichstadt most required for an attempt at his father's throne--and the poor officer was left in seclusion to write consolingly about his campaigns and "Defences of Fortified Towns."
Decidedly the pen had superseded the sword, for Victor and Eug?ne were scribbling away in ephemeral political sheets as apprenticeship to founding a periodical of their own.
In 1817, the French Academy honorably mentioned Victor's "Odes on the Advantages of Study," with a misgiving that some elder hand was masked under the line ascribing "scant fifteen years" to the author. At the Toulouse Floral Games he won prizes two years successively. His critical judgment was sound as well, for he had divined the powers of Lamartine.
It was the windfall for which the youth had been waiting to enable him to gratify his first love. In his childhood, his father and one M. Foucher, head of a War Office Department, had jokingly betrothed a son of the one to a daughter of the other. Abel had loftier views than alliance with a civil servant's child; Eug?ne was in love elsewhere; but Victor had fallen enamored with Ad?le Foucher. It is true, when poverty beclouded the Hugos, the Fouchers had shrunk into their mantle of dignity, and the girl had been strictly forbidden to correspond with her child-sweetheart.
He, finding letters barred out, wrote a love story in two weeks, where were recited his hopes, fears, and constancy, and this book she could read.
It pleased the public no less, and its sale, together with that of the "Odes" and a West Indian romance, "Buck Jargal," together with a royal pension, emboldened the poet to renew his love-suit. To refuse the recipient of court funds was not possible to a public functionary. M. Foucher consented to the betrothal in the summer of 1821.
His "Orientales," though written in a Parisian suburb by one who had not travelled, appealed for Grecian liberty, and depicted sultans and pashas as tyrants, many a line being deemed applicable to personages nearer the Seine than Stamboul.
"Cromwell" was not actable, and "Amy Robsart," in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Foucher, miserably failed, notwithstanding a finale "superior to Scott's 'Kenilworth.'" In one twelvemonth, there was this failure to record, the death of his father from apoplexy at his eldest son's marriage, and the birth of a second son to Victor towards the close.
Still imprudent, the young father again irritated the court with satire in "Marion Delorme" and "Hernani," two plays immediately suppressed by the Censure, all the more active as the Revolution of July, 1830, was surely seething up to the edge of the crater.
In the summer of 1831, a civil ceremony was performed over the insurgents killed in the previous year, and Hugo was constituted poet-laureate of the Revolution by having his hymn sung in the Pantheon over the biers.
Thus, at 1837, when he was promoted to an officership in the Legion of Honor, it was acknowledged his due as a laborious worker in all fields of literature, however contestable the merits and tendencies of his essays.
In 1839, the Academy, having rejected him several times, elected him among the Forty Immortals. In the previous year had been successfully acted "Ruy Blas," for which play he had gone to Spanish sources; with and after the then imperative Rhine tour, came an unendurable "trilogy," the "Burgraves," played one long, long night in 1843. A real tragedy was to mark that year: his daughter L?opoldine being drowned in the Seine with her husband, who would not save himself when he found that her death-grasp on the sinking boat was not to be loosed.
Meanwhile, he satirized the Third Napoleon and his congeners with ceaseless shafts, the principal being the famous "Napoleon the Little," based on the analogical reasoning that as the earth has moons, the lion the jackal, man himself his simian double, a minor Napoleon was inevitable as a standard of estimation, the grain by which a pyramid is measured. These flings were collected in "Les Ch?timents," a volume preceded by "Les Contemplations" , and followed by "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois."
His poems, written during the War and Siege, collected under the title of "L'Ann?e Terrible" , betray the long-tried exile, "almost alone in his gloom," after the death of his son Charles and his child. Fleeing to Brussels after the Commune, he nevertheless was so aggressive in sheltering and aiding its fugitives, that he was banished the kingdom, lest there should be a renewal of an assault on his house by the mob, supposed by his adherents to be, not "the honest Belgians," but the refugee Bonapartists and Royalists, who had not cared to fight for France in France endangered. Resting in Luxemburg, he prepared "L'Ann?e Terrible" for the press, and thence returned to Paris, vainly to plead with President Thiers for the captured Communists' lives, and vainly, too, proposing himself for election to the new House.
In 1872, his novel of "'93" pleased the general public here, mainly by the adventures of three charming little children during the prevalence of an internecine war. These phases of a bounteously paternal mood reappeared in "L'Art d'?tre Grandp?re," published in 1877, when he had become a life-senator.
"Hernani" was in the regular "stock" of the Th??tre Fran?ais, "Rigoletto" always at the Italian opera-house, while the same subject, under the title of "The Fool's Revenge," held, as it still holds, a high position on the Anglo-American stage. Finally, the poetic romance of "Torquemada," for over thirty years promised, came forth in 1882, to prove that the wizard-wand had not lost its cunning.
After dolor, f?tes were come: on one birthday they crown his bust in the chief theatre; on another, all notable Paris parades under his window, where he sits with his grandchildren at his knee, in the shadow of the Triumphal Arch of Napoleon's Star. It is given to few men thus to see their own apotheosis.
Whilst he was dying, in May, 1885, Paris was but the first mourner for all France; and the magnificent funeral pageant which conducted the pauper's coffin, antithetically enshrining the remains considered worthy of the highest possible reverence and honors, from the Champs Elys?es to the Pantheon, was the more memorable from all that was foremost in French art and letters having marched in the train, and laid a leaf or flower in the tomb of the prot?g? of Ch?teaubriand, the brother-in-arms of Dumas, the inspirer of Mars, Dorval, Le-ma?tre, Rachel, and Bernhardt, and, above all, the Nemesis of the Third Empire.
EARLY POEMS.
MOSES ON THE NILE.
"Sisters! the wave is freshest in the ray Of the young morning; the reapers are asleep; The river bank is lonely: come away! The early murmurs of old Memphis creep Faint on my ear; and here unseen we stray,-- Deep in the covert of the grove withdrawn, Save by the dewy eye-glance of the dawn.
"Within my father's palace, fair to see, Shine all the Arts, but oh! this river side, Pranked with gay flowers, is dearer far to me Than gold and porphyry vases bright and wide; How glad in heaven the song-bird carols free! Sweeter these zephyrs float than all the showers Of costly odors in our royal bowers.
"The sky is pure, the sparkling stream is clear: Unloose your zones, my maidens! and fling down To float awhile upon these bushes near Your blue transparent robes: take off my crown, And take away my jealous veil; for here To-day we shall be joyous while we lave Our limbs amid the murmur of the wave.
"Hasten; but through the fleecy mists of morn, What do I see? Look ye along the stream! Nay, timid maidens--we must not return! Coursing along the current, it would seem An ancient palm-tree to the deep sea borne, That from the distant wilderness proceeds, Downwards, to view our wondrous Pyramids.
"But stay! if I may surely trust mine eye,-- It is the bark of Hermes, or the shell Of Iris, wafted gently to the sighs Of the light breeze along the rippling swell; But no: it is a skiff where sweetly lies An infant slumbering, and his peaceful rest Looks as if pillowed on his mother's breast.
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