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THE ESSENTIAL VICTOR HUGO
V H was born in Besançon in , the youngest of three sons of an o cer (eventually a general), who took his family with him from posting to posting, as far as Italy and Spain. Victor"s proli c literary career began with publication of poems ( ), a novel ( ), and a drama,
Cromwell
(), the preface of which remains a major manifesto of French Romanticism. The riot occasioned at the rst performance of his drama
Hernani
established him as a leading gure among the Romantics, and
Notre-
Dame () added to his prestige at home and abroad. Favoured by Louis-Philippe ( ), he chose exile rather than live under Napoleon III. In exile in Brussels ( ), Jersey ( ), and
Guernsey (
) he published some of his nest works, notably the satirical poems
Les Châtiments
(), the lyrical poems Les
Contemplations
(), the rst series of epic poems La Légende des siècles (), and the lengthy novel Les Misérables (). Only with Napoleon III"s defeat and replacement by the Third Republic did Hugo return, to be elected deputy, and later senator. His opposition to tyranny and continuing immense literary output established him as a national hero. When he died in he was honoured by interment in the Panthéon.
E. H. B
and A. M. B are freelance writers and translators. Their previous Hugo translations have appeared inSix French Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford World"s Classics),Selected Poems of Victor Hugo (winner of the American Literary Translators" Association Prize and the Modern Language Association Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation),
The Major
Epics of Victor Hugo
, and
Contemplations, Lyrics, and Dramatic
Monologues by Victor Hugo
. They are currently preparing a bilingual edition of the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé for Oxford World"s
Classics.
For over
years Oxford Worlds Classics have brought readers closer to the worlds great literature. Now with over titles......from the -year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth centurys greatest novels......the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary fi gures which enriched the experience of reading.
Today the series is recognized for its
fi ne scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.
OXFORD WORLD"S CLASSICS
The Essential Victor Hugo
New translations with an Introduction and Notes by E. H. and A. M. BLACKMORE 1 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University"s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in
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Published in the United States
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© E. H. and A. M. Blackmore 2004
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First published as an Oxford World"s Classics paperback 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
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You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
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ISBN 0-19-280363-8
13579108642
Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
CONTENTS
Introductionxi
Note on the Text and Translationxxii
Select Bibliographyxxiv
A Chronology of Victor Hugoxxviii
THE ESSENTIAL VICTOR HUGO
BEFORE THE EXILE I: 1824-1843
fromOdes and Ballads
The Song of the Circus?
To a Traveller?
fromOrientalia
Zara Bathing?
fromCromwell
Preface??
fromThings Seen
Joanny??
fromA Blend of Literature and Philosophy fromJournal of the Ideas and Opinions of a
Revolutionary of
fromNotre-Dame de Paris
Notre-Dame??
An Impartial Peep at the Magistrates of Old??
fromAutumn Leaves
Heard on the Mountain??
'Sometimes, beneath the clouds" deceptive twists . . ."?? fromSongs of the Half-Light
A Ball at the Hôtel de Ville??
'O that I could ll your deep reverie . . ." 'The rest of them drift any way at all . . ." fromSunlight and Shadows
A Popular Man
'Indian caverns! tombs! monumental arrays . . ."
The Shadow
fromContemplations
Thérèse"s Party
For Dust Thou Art
Written on the Plinth of an Ancient Bas-Relief
'The child saw Grandma busy spinning . . ." fromLast Gleanings 'Life, dear sir, is a comedy . . ." fromThe Four Winds of the Spirit
Near Avranches
fromThings Seen
Talleyrand
fromAlps and Pyrenees
Bayonne
BEFORE THE EXILE II: 1843-1851
fromThings Seen
King Louis-Philippe
Villemain
fromLes Misérables
A Righteous Man
The Fall
fromThings Seen
The Living Pictures
The PrincesContentsvi
fromContemplations
Uttered in the Shadows???
While Looking at the Heavens One Evening???
'Atfirst, oh! I was like a maniac . . ."??? 'While mariners, who estimate and doubt . . ."???
Veni, Vidi, Vixi???
'Tomorrow, when the fi elds grow light . . ."??? fromThings Seen
At the Académie française???
The Death of Balzac???
fromDeeds and Words
Balzac"s Funeral???
fromThings Seen
Pius IX and Louis Bonaparte???
fromDeeds and Words
Proposed Grant to Monsieur Bonaparte???
fromThe Whole Lyre
Postscript???
DURING THE EXILE: 1851-1870
fromHistory of a Crime
Paris Sleeps; the Doorbell Rings???
How Dark the Crime Was???
fromNapoleon the Little
Biography???
April
The Littleness of the Master???
fromThings Seen
Writing to France???
Charles II???
fromThe Empire in the Pillory 'When, France, you are mere prostrate slaves . . ."???Contentsvii 'Night--dark night, deep, and full of drowsy things . . ."
Apotheosis
The Man Has Laughed
The Joint Commissions
The Black Hunter
'I was in Brussels; it was June . . ."
The Last Word
fromContemplations
The Birds
Unity
Wayside Pause
'I was reading. Reading what? The timeless poem . . ."
The Beggar
Lowing of Oxen
Apparition
Cerigo
'The poet"s verse-form used to pillage April"s basket . . ."
The Weather Clears
'The soul dives in the chasm . . ." fromThe Four Winds of the Spirit Storm fromGod fromThe Threshold of the Abyss fromThe Eagle from the reliquat of God 'What do you think of death, you vain philosopher? . . ." 'The depths of the I AM are swathed in cloud . . ." fromThe Legend of the Ages
The Consecration of Woman
Boaz Asleep
Christ"s First Encounter with the TombContentsviii fromSongs of Street and Wood
Connubial Bliss???
'Nature? she"s amorous everywhere . . ."???
From Woman to Heaven???
An Alcove in the Sunrise???
During an Illness???
fromLes Misérables
Waterloo???
Grandeur among the Middle Classes???
The House in the Rue Plumet???
Leviathan"s Intestine???
fromThe Toilers of the Sea
A Turbulent Life and a Tranquil Conscience???
The Old Old Story of Utopia???
The Story of Utopia, Continued???
A Quirk of Lethierry"s Character???
A Contradiction???
fromDeeds and Words
Emily de Putron???
fromThings Seen
The Death of Madame Victor Hugo???
AFTER THE EXILE I: 1870-1878
fromThings Seen
The Return to France???
A Prayer???
fromThe Legend of the Ages
The Vanished City???
Orpheus???
'I knew Firdausi in Mysore, long since . . ."???
After the Caudine Forks???
fromThe Art of Being a Grandfather
For Georges???Contentsix
The Immaculate Conception Revisited
Jeanne Asleep, iv
fromThe Whole Lyre
Letter
Waking Impressions
Hail, Goddess, Hail from One about to Die
fromReligions and Religion 'Dante wrote two lines . . ." fromHistory of a Crime
The Rue Tiquetonne
fromThings Seen
The Emperor of Brazil
fromDeeds and Words
TheHernani Dinner
AFTER THE EXILE II: 1878-1885
'Suddenly the door opened . . ."
Last Wishes
Last Line
Appendix
: The Structure of the
Contemplations, The
Legend of the Ages
, and God
Explanatory NotesContentsx
INTRODUCTION
Victor-Marie Hugo was born in
, at Besançon, and died in . During an active literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote proli cally in an unparalleled variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history books, critical essays, travel writings, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, letters public and private, and dramas in verse and prose. When, late in his career, he gathered his occasional prose writings under the title
Deeds and Words
(-), he divided the work into three sections: 'Before the Exile", 'During the Exile", and 'After the Exile". The 'Exile" had been the most conspicuous public event in his eventful life. On
December
, the President of the French Republic, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, seized absolute power in a coup détat . According to the new government"s own statistics, people (many of them uninvolved civilians) were killed; were imprisoned, and of those were deported to the notorious penal colonies in Algeria and French Guiana. Hugo, who had been one of Louis-Napoléon"s most outspoken opponents, escaped into exile, rst in Belgium, and then on the Channel Islands, where he remained for almost twenty years, vowing never to return to France as long as the dictator remained in power. Eventually, in September , Louis-Napoléon (now the Emperor Napoleon III) was forced to abdicate as a result of France"s disastrous defeat during the Franco-Prussian War; and Hugo returned to Paris in triumph. Other, less conspicuous, upheavals also left their mark on his literary career. On
September
his -year-old daughter Léopoldine drowned in a boating accident. Her unexpected death shattered him emotionally, in a way that no other experience of his long life did. In some respects he never fully recovered from it. For months he wrote almost nothing of any kind; for nearly three years he wrote no signi cant verse. More than thirty years later, he was still addressing the dead girl"s spirit in his private diaries. And when he published his major collection of lyrical poems--
Contemplations
(), a kind of ctionalized diary in verse--he divided the work into two major sections, with the loss of
Léopoldine at its midpoint.
Of his other life experiences, the one that most radically a ected his literary output was the severe cerebrovascular stroke he su ered on June . His extraordinary productivity had already been waning with age; now the torrent of prose and verse virtually dried up, and during the remaining seven years of his life he wrote little. Thus the material in the present volume is arranged in ve unequal sections, separated by the death of Léopoldine in September the"ight into exile in December , the return from exile in
September , and the stroke in June .
Before the Exile I:
Like most writers, Hugo began by imitating his predecessors; and his choice of models was signi cant. Some of the epigraphs to hisrst volume of Odes were drawn from the Scriptures and the Classics, especially Virgil: nothing unusual there. But the book contained almost no epigraphs from mainstream seventeenth- or eighteenth-century French literature; no Racine, for instance, and no Voltaire. Instead, there were passages from Schiller, as translated in Madame de Staël"s in uential eulogy of the new German Romanticism, De lAllemagne (); from André Chénier, whose poetry broke some of the seventeenth-century rules, and whose rst collected edition (posthumously published in ) had something of the impact in France that Gerard Manley Hopkins"s had in England a century later; and from Shakespeare"sA Midsummer
Nights Dream
, a work that appealed to the young French poet not only because of its adventurous and colourful imagery, but also because of its use of 'low", ignoble language (several decades later, Hugo was still relishing the fact that Shakespeare had dared to call a character 'Bottom"). The Odes also quoted (and addressed) the prose writer Chateaubriand, who in the early s was at the height of his in uence. French prose had never been as rulebound as French verse, and Chateaubriand"s style was notable for a vividness, colour, and passion that went far beyond anything to be found in the poets of his generation. In those days a writer who admired Shakespeare, Schiller,
Chénier, and Chateaubriand was likely to
nd himself branded aIntroductionxii 'Romantic". Hugo tried to keep clear of partisan distinctions as long as he could. 'Today", he wrote in the preface to
New Odes
'there are two parties in literature, just as there are in politics, and apparently the poetic war has to be no less furious and frenzied than the social one. The two camps seem keener to fi ght than to reach an agreement." And he himself proposed to 'repudiate all the stock terms that these parties are hurling back and forth at each other like empty balloons--signs that signify nothing, expressions that express nothing, imprecise words that anyone can de fi ne to suit his own hatreds and prejudices". He himself, he declared, was utterly unable to understand the alleged distinction between 'Classical" and 'Romantic" literatures. If 'Classic" was a term of praise, wasn"t
Shakespeare as much a Classic as Racine?
As that passage shows, he was hoping to reach a similar com- promise in politics. His mother had been a committed opponent of Napoleon (indeed, she actively assisted an abortive conspiracy to overthrow him), and under her in fl uence the young Victor Hugo had grown up as a staunch political traditionalist, a supporter of the Bourbon monarchy and a foe to the ideals of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era. But during the s he became increasingly conscious that no political party had a monopoly of virtue--or of its opposite. So a poem like 'The Song of the Circus" seems to cut both ways. It can be seen as a protest against the cruelties of the late dictator; but it can be seen as a protest against the cruelties of other autocratic rulers too. If Napoleon had points of resemblance with the ancient Roman emperors, so did the Bourbon monarchs who replaced him. In both literature and politics, however, the attempted com- promise was too precarious to last. A couple of years later, in the preface to his play
Cromwell
, the -year-old Hugo reluctantly accepted the label that could not be detached, and identi fi ed himself with the Romantic movement. There was no longer any question offinding some middle ground between Shakespeare and Racine.
Classical notions of decorum were de
fi nitively abandoned; instead, Hugo deliberately sought out subjects that would have seemed bizarre, grotesque, or tasteless in the age of Louis XIV, and he portrayed them in linguistically fl amboyant, highly coloured verse that drew its imagery from the mundane and the exotic alike ('To a Traveller", written in ; 'Zara Bathing", written in ). HisIntroductionxiii admirers could point to his virtuosity, his inventiveness, his sheer productivity, and his mastery of di erent literary genres: major works of poetry (
Orientalia
,;Autumn Leaves,),ction
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
,;Notre-Dame de Paris, ), and drama (
Hernani
,) were appearing in rapid succes- sion. His detractors generally acknowledged the gifts but considered that they were grossly misapplied. At the rst performance of
Hernani
, on
February
, there was something like a pitched battle between supporters and opponents. It may be said that the battle has never stopped. One recent critic describes Hugo, without quali cation or reservation, as 'France"s greatest writer"; another calls him 'a monstrous aberration in literary history". His bio- graphers, similarly, may be divided into Boswellian hagiolators of a humanitarian hero and Stracheyite debunkers of an Eminent Victorian. No one has yet managed to synthesize these antagonisticquotesdbs_dbs46.pdfusesText_46
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