First English translation of Octave Mirbeau’s powerful 1885 tribute to Victor Hugo, originally published in La France. This previously untranslated essay brilliantly links Hugo to Napoleon and explores his revolutionary impact on French literature.
Crowned with glory, sated with days, lulled by the universal murmur of reverence and mourning, Victor Hugo has departed. Yet his soul remains radiant as a sun that bathes all humanity in light. No foul breath, not even death’s, could extinguish “the great Torch.” No darkness falls upon this tomb, from which rises, majestic, the renewed dawn of immortality.
How does one salute this new life? What words could possibly match its serene grandeur? What songs, what music could evoke this figure—sovereignly terrible and sovereignly good—now veiling itself in light, now sleeping in luminescence? Can one even attempt to recount this almost superhuman existence, to compress it into a few lines? And isn’t this merely a lost cry, a futile acclamation, vanishing into the pious, immense rumble of the crowds? To try and capture some features of this personality that was itself a world—each trait demanding volumes and poems—isn’t this sheer madness? The eye is small yet encompasses leagues, said the poet. Admiration too is small, and alas, how rarely does it encompass genius!
Victor Hugo was born with this century that he alone would fill with ineffable glory. Son of an Empire general, Léopold-Sigisbert, Count Hugo, his child’s eyes were struck by all the military splendour of that epoch. He witnessed the plumed reviews, the return of victorious armies, the parade of captured flags, of defeated cannons lowering their bronze muzzles. He saw in the Tuileries courtyard the carriages of all Europe’s vassal sovereigns tangling together. And his mind received its first dazzlement from that mysterious, pale man who made the earth tremble, from the “formidable passer-by” one saw coming and going in the tempest—Napoleon. One might say Napoleon was Victor Hugo’s true father. The poet was born from that epic. And he remained, to the end, despite criminal hatreds, despite criminal exile, faithful to his origins. Even in recent times, he couldn’t forgive the greatest modern historian, the foremost resurrector of vanished figures and customs—Michelet, of whom he said “You are the Himalayas”—for having dared touch the Man.
The revolution Napoleon wrought in the human soul through politics and war, Victor Hugo continued and completed through literature. Both spring from the same movement that swept along men and things, sentiments and systems, at the eighteenth century’s end. They are marchers of the same impulse, the same thrust.
“I’ve put the red cap on the old dictionary,” cries the poet in Contemplations.
On one side, the Civil Code liberating man; on the other, the preface to Cromwell, liberating man’s thought.
That preface—romanticism’s revolutionary gospel—topples one by one the insipid rules, blind boundaries, and crawling prejudices. Without effort, cleanly, as if placing his Herculean finger upon them, Victor Hugo reduces these cold divinities to dust. Classical tragedy’s three unities vanish; Shakespearean drama, ardent and sublime, is reborn. And we see Roman palaces collapse, Greek colonnades crumble, antiquated phantoms flee, comically tangled in the folds of their tunics and peplums. Life enters with air and light. Language, which was dying, resurrects in a magnificent explosion of rediscovered and new words it had forgotten and never known. Ears that had been shocked by the “handkerchief” timidly ventured on stage by Alfred de Vigny now heard with delight the torrent of resounding nouns and epithets rolling over demolished old rhetoric and uprooted systems. Simultaneously, replacing the cold, flat prosody of the Delilles, Baour-Lormians, Andrieuxs, and Lebruns, came—with Odes and Ballads, Autumn Leaves, with so many works full of dreams and thought—verse of unprecedented charm, verse abundant and sparkling, “beautiful without knowing it.” This verse sings like music, evokes like painting, sculpts like sculpture. Even a kind of architectural genius seems to preside over the construction of rhythms that expand, swell like sonorous vaults, rise like porticoes upon the unshakeable foundations of marble steps and iron bridges.
Theatre, novel, poem—which had become coterie—become crowd again. The keyboard of human genius recovers all its scorned and broken notes. And from bottom to top, from grotesque to sublime, the monument rises, like a Gothic cathedral whose forest of pillars and columns shelters an entire world, chimerical and real, angelic and demonic, in the tangle of stone foliage.
From then on, Victor Hugo conquered all. He was the impetuous river sweeping everything shattered in its angry current, carving new beds through new lands; then he became again the spring, the inexhaustible and serene spring in which sky reflects itself and where everyone comes to fill their urns and drink. From his thought burst rays, the most brilliant being Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle. And everywhere passed something of the master’s aesthetic, vision, and imagination. His invisible presence makes itself felt everywhere. Souls shape themselves on his, we see with his eyes, love with his heart, hate with his hatred. He is the century’s inspired soul, humanity’s thought.
I cannot follow Victor Hugo through his work and life. Besides, his life is known, and his works—who doesn’t know them by heart? One might say his life is summed up in this word: Love; his works in this other: Vision.
The great poet was a sublime visionary. His gaze seems to mesmerise whatever it rests upon. Every object he fixes takes on enormous relief. Even at a distance, when describing countries he has never visited; even historically, when painting distant epochs entirely covered in the dust of the past—men, cities, beasts, woods, everything surges up, everything animates, everything resurrects with an extraordinary crash of life. Perhaps even more than in his verse, this characteristic trait shows in his prose, where the lyricism of description flows from the very intensity of his pitiless and mysterious intuition. He is so open to impressions that barely graze the common run of gifted, vibrant minds that he finds this admirable, strange expression: “the ear sees.” Indeed, all his faculties seem like eyes trained on all points at once. No horizons so distant they don’t reach them, no walls so thick they don’t pierce them, no tombs so deep whose lid they don’t lift, no brows so dark they don’t illuminate. It’s the terrible Eye that watched Cain. It’s in the past, it’s in the future that it lights with prophetic gleams. It evokes what must be born, as it revives what is dead, with God’s magnificence and omnipotence. This force reaches such a degree in this prodigious genius that it will be, I believe, unique in literary, political, and human history.
The great poet was Goodness itself. He loved humanity as Christ loved it, with infinite love. Widening the bloodstained borders of nations, preaching the communion of peoples, the forgetting of races, the end of conquests, he wept over miseries, dressed wounds, dried tears; he raised up all the vanquished, consoled all captives, avenged all injustices. He tried to snatch man from the prey of terrified thrones, from the scaffolds of fearful societies, and his resounding voice, made of tenderness and pity for the wretched, of anger and haughty supplication for the powerful, dominated—whenever man was threatened—the tumult of oppressive interests and homicidal laws.
And then, he sang the divine tenderness surrounding fragile childhood; he made woman a sacred weakness; weakness a power, and power a pardon. The small, the humble, the poor, the disinherited, the sick—he gave them the first place in the fairy kingdom of his work, which is doubly immortal through the artist’s genius and the man’s goodness.
And all will say for Victor Hugo what Victor Hugo said of Napoleon in his “Ode to the Column”:
Oh! go! we’ll give you a splendid funeral.
Octave Mirbeau, La France, 24 May 1885
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
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