No More Learning

This play was followed
by "Lucrezia Borgia," "Marie Tudor," and "Angelo," written in a singular
poetic prose. Spite of bald translations, their action was sufficiently
dramatic to make them successes, and even still enduring on our stage. They
have all been arranged as operas, whilst Hugo himself, to oblige the father
of Louise Bertin, a magazine publisher of note, wrote "Esmeralda" for her
music in 1835.

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 Leopoldine 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.

For distraction, Hugo plunged into politics. A peer in 1845, he sat between
Marshal Soult and Pontecoulant, the regicide-judge of Louis XVI. His maiden
speech bore upon artistic copyright; but he rapidly became a power in much
graver matters.

As fate would have it, his speech on the Bonapartes induced King Louis
Philippe to allow Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to return, and, there
being no gratitude in politics, the emancipated outlaw rose as a rival
candidate for the Presidency, for which Hugo had nominated himself in his
newspaper the _Evenement_. The story of the _Coup d'Etat_ is well known;
for the Republican's side, read Hugo's own "History of a Crime. " Hugo,
proscribed, betook himself to Brussels, London, and the Channel Islands,
waiting to "return with right when the usurper should be expelled. "

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 Chatiments," a volume preceded by "Les Contemplations"
(mostly written in the '40's), and followed by "Les Chansons des Rues et
des Bois.
"

The baffled publisher's close-time having expired, or, at least, his heirs
being satisfied, three novels appeared, long heralded: in 1862, "Les
Miserables" (Ye Wretched), wherein the author figures as Marius and his
father as the Bonapartist officer: in 1866, "Les Travailleurs de la Mer"
(Toilers of the Sea), its scene among the Channel Islands; and, in 1868,
"L'Homme Qui Rit" (The Man who Grins), unfortunately laid in a fanciful
England evolved from recondite reading through foreign spectacles. Whilst
writing the final chapters, Hugo's wife died; and, as he had refused the
Amnesty, he could only escort her remains to the Belgian frontier, August,
1868. All this while, in his Paris daily newspaper, _Le Rappei_
(adorned with cuts of a Revolutionary drummer beating "to arms! "), he and
his sons and son-in-law's family were reiterating blows at the throne.
When it came down in 1870, and the Republic was proclaimed, Hugo hastened
to Paris.

His poems, written during the War and Siege, collected under the title of
"L'Annee Terrible" (The Terrible Year, 1870-71), 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'Annee 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'etre Grandpere," published in 1877, when he had become a
life-senator.

"Hernani" was in the regular "stock" of the Theatre Francais, "Rigoletto"
(Le Roi s'Amuse) 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, fetes 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 Elysees 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 protege of Chateaubriand, the brother-in-arms of Dumas, the
inspirer of Mars, Dorval, Le-maitre, Rachel, and Bernhardt, and, above all,
the Nemesis of the Third Empire.




EARLY POEMS.