VICTOR HUGO—Matthew Josephson—Doubleday, Doran ($3.50).
With this book Matthew Josephson fills a gaping hole in U.S. biographical writing (hitherto there has been no good life of Victor Hugo) and adds another superb study to his series of great French literary figures (Zola and His Time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau). In the U.S. the great champions of democracy have always been practical politicians. In France they have usually been literati.
Between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Emile Zola, there were no writers so influential as Victor Hugo. The last half of his life (he lived to be 83) was a long battle of books for the ideals of justice and humanity that have come to be called democratic. In his youth, however, literature was his chief passion. At 28 Hugo started one of the most sensational episodes in French literary history.
Wild Men. One icy night in 1830, Parisians, passing the famed Comédie- Françise, were terrified to see "a band, wild and bizarre, bearded, hairy, dressed in all fashions save the current ones." The strange creatures were yelling: "We are the Wild Men of art!" "We are the brigands of thought!"
Some of the brigands of thought were led by Poet Théophile Gautier, who wore a scarlet satin vest and green silk trousers. Others wore "red vests like Marat's and collars like Robespierre's." Also present were Authors Balzac and Stendhal, Composer Hector Berlioz. Occasion for this intellectual incursion was the first night of Poet Victor Hugo's romantic drama Hernani. His young supporters had come (lugging ham, sausage, garlic, wine) to shout for their youthful hero, to see him upset the classical traditions of the French theater and win Round One for the new Romantic Movement.
For the author of Hernani was the leader of the artistic radicals. He was no political radical.
Luckless Lover. Hugo's father was one of Napoleon's generals. Victor's infancy was full of the clash of swords. But the infant Hugo was not impressed by Bonaparte. Under the influence of his strong-willed mother, who despised her warrior husband, Victor became a Royalist. Father Hugo raged. But Mother Hugo got even by letting the little Hugos romp with their "godfather," her Royalist lover, General La Horie.
Mother Hugo regarded Waterloo as a personal triumph. So did Victor, but he was already engrossed in literary matters. At 14 he had translated much of Virgil, was composing "poems in every form, odes, satires, elegies." At 15 he carried off one of the French Academy's poetry prizes against the best poets of France. Secretary of the Academy Raynouard sent him "a few hexameters" of praise. King Louis XVIII gave him a purse of 500 francs. The great author and statesman Chateaubriand called him "the sublime child," received young Hugo in his bath, read him "huge sections of a poetic tragedy." (Victor thought it very dull.) At 18 Hugo was famous.