Selected Poems, page 2
Before Hugo could bring this collection and Les Misérables, the novel he had begun, to completion, he became more deeply involved with politics following the 1848 revolution. In 1849, he was elected to the legislative assembly, but, with the coup of Louis Napoleon in December 1851, was forced to flee Paris, going first to Belgium with the help of Juliette Drouet, then, in 1852, to Jersey, an island off the French coast, and finally to Guernsey, another Channel Island, in 1855. This forced exile did wonders for Hugo’s creative output. After composing political invectives like Napoleon the Little (1852), he published a volume of poems directed against Louis Napoleon, Punishments (1853), before returning to the more personal lyrics of Contemplations. In 1859, Hugo published the first series of The Legend of the Centuries, a collection of mostly narrative poems (‘little epics’) beginning with the dawn of creation and continuing through the present day and even into the future. In 1862, Hugo published Les Misérables, his most famous novel.
Exile seemed to take a greater toll on Hugo’s family than on Hugo himself. In 1863, his daughter Adèle stowed away on a ship bound for Canada in search of an English army officer with whom she was infatuated, and eventually went mad: (her story has been dramatized in the French film Adèle H). Weary of island life, Madame Hugo moved what remained of the household to Brussels, leaving Hugo and Juliette Drouet alone on Guernsey for a time. Hugo went on writing, publishing a collection of poetry, Songs of the Streets and the Woods (1865), and a novel, The Toilers of the Sea (1867).Songs of the Streets and the Woods stands in direct contrast to The Legend of the Centuries in that it consists of short poems in short lines – mostly octosyllabic quatrains – on lyric subjects. This deliberately light collection may have been Hugo’s response to the chiselled quatrains of Théophile Gautier’s Emaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos, 1852–72), a kind of challenge and nod of admiration to his old friend.
In 1868, Madame Hugo died. One might imagine that Hugo, by now a sixty-six-year-old grandfather with a host of successful novels, plays, and poems behind him, would settle into a quiet retirement with his lifelong mistress, but instead events took a turn that propelled him back to France and public life. When the Franco-Prussian war brought about the fall of Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire in 1870, Hugo returned to Paris, where he stayed through the Prussians’ siege of the city. He commemorated these experiences in his next volume of verse, The Horrific Year (1872). With the help of his reputation as a man of the people, his long-standing opposition to the empire in exile, and, in general, his immense fame, Hugo was elected a national representative in 1871; in 1876 he was elected senator. As a politician Hugo was better at making thunderous speeches that at the practical implementation of programmes. As a representative of Paris, he opposed vigorously the surrender of any French land to the Prussians (in fact, he boasted that France would cross the Rhine and take German cities the way Napoleon’s armies had done half a century earlier) and indignantly stormed out of the peace talks, resigning his position. Hugo’s views might be best expressed as nationalistic with a strong show of moral support for the downtrodden. After the defeat of the Paris Commune, for example, he called for clemency, even though he did not support the aims of the Communards. He went so far as to harbour fugitives in Belgium, an activity that resulted in the Belgian government asking him to leave the country and an angry mob surrounding his house and calling for his head.
As before, Hugo’s public notoriety was accompanied by private tragedy. Soon after he left the peace talks his son Charles died of a heart attack followed by a haemorrhage. The funeral took place on the same day that the Commune began. As the funeral train made its way through Paris’s streets, it became something like the first public ceremony of the new state: people emptied out of cafés to follow the procession while barricades thrown up by revolutionaries forced the mourners to follow a circuitous course to the cemetery. Early in 1872, Hugo’s daughter Adèle was finally brought back from the New World where she had fled a decade before; mentally ill, she failed to recognize her father and family and was placed in an asylum outside Paris. Hugo’s only other remaining child, François-Victor, died of renal tuberculosis the following year.
Throughout all of the public and private travail, Hugo continued to write. In the 1870s he published several autobiographical commentaries and some travel literature. He also completed and published Ninety-three (1874), a historical novel centered on a pivotal year in the French Revolution. His poetic output of this decade includes the second series of The Legend of the Centuries (1877) and The Art of Being a Grandfather (1877). The latter volume shows Hugo at his most domestic, a grandfather playing with, spoiling, and being spoiled by his two grandchildren, Georges and Jeanne (‘George’ and ‘Jeannine’ in my translations). After a stroke and congestion of the brain in June of 1878, Hugo wrote little poetry in the remaining years of his life. In part through the efforts of his editors, however, his published output continued uninterrupted, preserving his public image of vitality. Poetic works that had already been written, in some cases many years before, appeared one after the other: four long poems, The Pope (1878), The Highest Pity (1879), Religions and Religion (1880), and The Ass (1880); a volume of ‘satiric, dramatic, lyric, and epic verse’, The Four Winds of the Spirit (1881); a play, Torquemada (1882); and the third and final series of The Legend of the Centuries (1883).
The events of Hugo’s last years include countless honours bestowed on the aging writer; a seventy-ninth birthday party in 1881 (‘Victor Hugo entering his eightieth year’) for which half a million people passed by Hugo’s house, saluting him as he and his grandchildren waved from the balcony; and the death of Juliette Drouet from stomach cancer in 1883. To judge from the coded recordings in his diary, Hugo remained sexually active into the spring of 1885, almost to the end. In May, 1885 he contracted pneumonia, seemed to recover, then died in a little over a week. His decline was front-page news in many newspapers around the world. Obituaries compared Hugo’s life with the history of the nineteenth century, and the day after his funeral was a national holiday.
Hugo’s Poetry
Readers coming to Hugo after French symbolists like Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Anglophone modernists like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, or any poet who places a high value on poetic economy may initially find his work exasperating. Hugo thrives on expansiveness, believes strongly in human progress, and is unabashed by multiple exclamation points. At times his language seems overinflated, poetic in the pejorative sense, or padded to fill out the line. Conversely, readers coming from Hugo’s older and younger contemporaries, William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, may at first be reassured to find similarities in tone and gesture, including romantic themes and concerns, only to be upset by the combination of philosophical reflections and topical invectives, the sublime and the ridiculous, in his work. Further difficulties may arise due to Hugo’s verse forms, especially his alexandrines, if only because most English speakers since romanticism have not been entirely able to disassociate rhyming couplets from artificiality. For readers of any stripe, of course, the sheer volume of his work can prove to be a stumbling block to enjoyment.
Most barriers to an appreciation of Hugo will fall given an appropriate selection of poems: if you like poetry, the odds are that you will enjoy something in Hugo the first time you read him. But as with all poetry, a closer look at the style and the context in which the poems have been received can deepen one’s appreciation. Hugo’s expansiveness, for example, is a relative trait: as ‘Tomorrow, at dawn …’, ‘At Villequier’, and ‘To the One Who Stayed Behind in France’ show, Hugo was capable of writing short, medium-sized, and long elegies; his poems range from brief lyrics like ‘My Two Daughters’ to sprawling poems in multiple parts like ‘The Expiation’. More importantly, Hugo’s poems tend toward a conversational style even at their most visionary moments and thus remain easy to peruse whatever their length. In spite, and to some extent because, of all the rhymes and start-and-stop rhythms in his poetry, Hugo’s verse feels almost like prose with its unfragmented expressions of thought and forward– moving flow. Hugo furthers this effect by incorporating everyday words and phrases into passages that otherwise seem invested in a more grandiose rhetoric, such as the opening of ‘The Parricide’ (‘Le Parricide’):
One day, Kanut, when twilight, soft and heaven-sent,
Was closing eyes everywhere beneath the firmament,
Having only one (blind and giant) witness, night,
Seeing his old and senile father under torchlight
Asleep, without a guard or guard dog – bending low,
Murdered him, remarking, ‘Even he doesn’t know.’
Then he was a great king.
[Un jour, Kanut, à l’heure où l’assoupissement
Ferme partout les yeux sous l’obscur firmament,
Ayant pour seul témoin la nuit, l’aveugle immense,
Vit son père Swéno, vieillard presque en démence,
Qui dormait, sans un garde à ses pieds, sans un chien;
Il le tua, disant: Lui-même n’en sait rien.
Puis il fut un grand roi.]
In this passage, the image of twilight ‘closing eyes everywhere beneath the firmament’, the metaphor of night as a ‘blind and giant’ witness, and other more overtly poetic details are framed by the pedestrian phrases ‘One day’, ‘Even he doesn’t know’, and ‘Then he was a great king’. What is more, the verse keeps advancing, refusing to pause too long on its lyric descriptions, surprising the reader with the sudden act of murder, and then summing up the consequences of everything in a pointedly short sentence that stops in the middle of the line. Hugo is playing the poetic and the prosaic off each other.
As can be glimpsed already, Hugo’s simultaneously lyrical and conversational style owes something to the way he handles rhyme and rhythm. Understanding the full effect of Hugo’s innovations in verse requires some literary-historical background. Hugo’s favourite poetic line, the alexandrin, was the most common verse form in France from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. The French alexandrine couplet consists of a pair of rhymed, twelve-syllable lines. The rules for composing poems in alexandrines are more stringent than anything comparable in English: they develop gradually in the sixteenth century, are said to be fully present in the poetry of François de Malherbe (1555–1628), and are codified by the time of the classical dramatists Pierre Corneille (1606–84) and Jean Racine (1633–99). A suggestive, though somewhat misleading, English analogue is anapestic tetrametre:
Twas the nìght | before Christ | mas and àll | through the hoùse,
Not a creà | ture was stìr | ring, not è | ven a moùse.
The insistent rhythms of the English are virtually absent from the French alexandrine, where stress, if it exists at all, occurs at the end of the phrase when intonation rises. In the classical French alexandrine, there is also a break, or caesura, in the middle of the line, typically coinciding with the end of a clause or a phrase:
You can see that from here. All ochres and chalk-whites. (‘Letter’)
[Tu vois cela d’ici. Des ocres et des craies. (‘Lettre’)]
The break need not be as abrupt as in the above example, though Hugo often uses the caesura in this way. Hugo also dislocates the midline caesura by adding other breaks in the line:
The water runs; a finch passes; ‘Thank you!’ I say,
‘Thank you, my God!’ I live this way. And in this way … (‘Letter’)
[L’eau coule, un verdier passe; et, moi, je dis: Merci!
Merci, Dieu tout-puissant! – Ainsi je vis; ainsi … (‘Lettre’)]
Another feature of Hugo’s alexandrines is what might be called ‘hard enjambment’. Enjambment is the carrying over of a clause or other grammatical unit from one line to the next, as in Shakespeare’s ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments.’ In classical French poetry, enjambment was rarely used in a way that called attention to itself. Hugo, however, influenced by some famous examples in the work of André Chénier (1762–94), set about exploring the expressive possibilities of meant-to-be-noticed enjambment:
An Aeginean hand sculpted there, on its base,
Europa …
(‘The Spinning Wheel of Omphale’)
[Un ouvrier d’Égine a sculpté sur la plinthe
Europe …
(«Le Rouet d’Omphale»)]
A small chick runs, a child plays and dances; a lamb
Jumps …
(‘The clarity that fills …’)
[Le poussin court, l’enfant joue et danse, l’agneau
Saute …
(«Le firmament est plein …»)]
While Hugo’s opposition to Napoleon III, his innovations in the theatre, and his support for the downtrodden may account for his revolutionary reputation during his lifetime, his experiments in verse have arguably had a more lasting influence. These experiments go beyond the formal issues surrounding the alexandrine to such features as a vastly increased range of poetic vocabulary and subject matter, and a provocative blend of the lowbrow and the highbrow.
Readers have not signalled out for praise all features of Hugo’s poetry. More than one critic has felt that his facility with rhyme, for example, leads him to ramble on occasion. The enumerations and lists of adjectives that mark his poetry may add to the prosaic feel and rhythmic drive of his verse, but they can also feel like padding. Some adjectives, like sombre, sinistre, absolu, éternel, and ineffable, are used frequently and in ways that suggest that Hugo did not care about their precise meanings. Although Hugo’s poems raise issues that have far-reaching philosophical, religious, and political implications, his actual thoughts on these subjects often seem cliché-ridden, arising out of or moving toward simplistic morals and punchlines. (Hugo’s poetic universe sometimes feels like a child’s fantasy, a place in which giant and almost unnamable forces struggle, and where justice prevails as if in compensation for the real world’s inevitable inadequacy.) Even or especially at their most intense moments, Hugo’s poems risk bombast.
Enjoying Hugo does not preclude acknowledging that there is some truth to these criticisms. For a modern reader, appreciation of Hugo’s poetry may even require such an acknowledgement, an updated version of Gide’s sigh. Nevertheless some of the criticisms levelled against the work are only half truths, stemming more from caricature than evenhanded appraisal, and many are misdirected, missing what is most important about the poems. Hugo’s expansiveness, for example, may at times verge on longwindedness, but it is also fundamental to his voice, if not his subject matter, and often in its excess enacts or points to some of the poetry’s concerns – the difficulty of expression, an overwhelming emotion, the immensity of a scene, the power of a vision. Hugo himself spoke of the need to understand his work as a whole, a consideration that takes some of the sting out of criticisms directed at local shortcomings in the verse, and that adds depth to his view of his œuvre as a monumental artistic accomplishment, like the epics of the ancients, in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. (In his writings and drawings, Hugo in fact represented his work in architectural terms, the most striking example of which may be his Vision’ of The Legend of the Centuries: a massive temple with a long, winding procession of people leading up to it.) Hugo’s aesthetic views surface now and then in the poems, sometimes with a touch of humour:
For God composes a long poem with variants,
And like old Homer, he repeats himself now and then,
Only it’s with flowers, forests, waves, or a mountain!
(‘Shepherds and Flocks’)
[Car Dieu fait un poëme avec des variantes;
Comme le vieil Homère, il rabâche parfois,
Mais c’est avec les fleurs, les monts, l’onde et les bois!
(‘Pasteurs et troupeaux’)]
As Hugo chides God, via a comparison to Homer, for repeating himself in his creations, he alludes to the famous adage which downplays flaws in works of genius, ‘Even Homer nods’. Hugo is nodding toward his own work, placing himself on the same level as the author of the Iliad and the author of all creation, maybe even above them.
One way to approach Hugo’s poetry is to allow it room to work its magic. ‘To allow it room’ should suggest not shutting down one’s critical faculties so much as letting oneself be guided by the desire to experience something new, the way one allows a piece of music holding in suspension several motifs, or a piece of critical prose juggling several lines of argument, time to yield its full power or insight because the pleasure one feels in the meantime promises a more holistic satisfaction. Though hardly constructed like Bach fugues, Hugo’s poems yield immediate pleasures that increase as one becomes more familiar with them and experiences surprising convergences in thought, image, sound. Hugo is not difficult in the ways that Mallarmé and Eliot can be, but he may require his own sort of acclimation.
For readers, like myself, apt to hold Hugo to the highest standards, out of admiration, mistrust, or a little of each, I offer some additional experiences as a translator. Time and time again, when I was stuck translating a phrase that I suspected Hugo had included to fill a line, or a word that seemed chosen because of its sonorous quality without regard to the register or sense of its context, or an image that had little to recommend it other than some vaguely ‘poetic’ quality, I would find upon closer inspection that my initial impression was either mistaken or misguided. Often my misjudgement stemmed from Hugo’s use of familiar words in unexpected contexts or unusual senses. In ‘The Infanta’s Rose’, for example, Hugo describes seeing a large palace ‘comme au fond d’une gloire’, a phrase that, taking ‘gloire’ in its usual and potentially grandiloquent sense, ‘glory’, one might render ‘as at the bottom of a glory’ or ‘as though deep inside a glory’. The phrase feels awkward, though it makes a kind of sense: the poem has already described the sun setting behind the palace and ‘glory’ helps evoke the image of a bright light framing a comparatively dark building. Hugo is in fact employing ‘gloire’ in a technical sense. The word refers to the halo-like light emanating from behind saintly or supernatural figures in medieval paintings, where the figures appear to emerge from the canvas. For all the precision of this simile, Hugo is not comparing the appearance of a palace, backed by the setting sun and therefore seeming to jut out more, to a painterly phenomenon, the way John Donne compares two lovers to a draftsman’s compass, in order to establish a series of logically consistent correspondences. Nor is Hugo primarily drawing on the recherché sense of a rhyming word, like Mallarmé, to unlock some secret within language, or to cause the reader to experience a frisson of momentary disequilibrium. ‘Gloire’ seems dictated mostly by Hugo’s vision of the scene at hand and the poem’s thematic concerns: his verbal portrait of the infanta is likely to have been inspired by a famous painting by Diego de Silva y Velázquez, the infanta is decidedly innocent and virginal (a mixture of those oft-haloed figures, the baby Jesus and Mary), and the background subject of the poem is Philip II and his would-be glorious military enterprise, the Armada. Consciously or not, Hugo has combined the painterly and everyday senses of ‘gloire’.
