The Great Romantic
SUNDEL, ALFRED
The Great Romantic Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo. By Andre Maurois. Harper. 498 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Alfred Sundel Contributor to "Perspective," "Retort," "Western Review" Well-blessed,...
...A Frenchman to the core, Hugo was no wallflower...
...The age of Flaubert, Stendhal and Balzac gave birth to the most consequential schools of French literature, which influenced the entire world...
...This helps to create the illusion as it existed among his wildest admirers then that Hugo was a French Shakespeare of sorts...
...Melodramatically revolving around a saint-sinner story, it is a redemptive novel of noble themes, with historical, sociological and philological properties...
...From exile, he continued his literary production unabated, piling up successes...
...Unfortunately, "sentimental" can be added to the list...
...Reviewed by Alfred Sundel Contributor to "Perspective," "Retort," "Western Review" Well-blessed, lucky, favored: Despite some family misfortunes, these are the adjectives that best describe the career of Victor Hugo, to whom love and fame early attached themselves and rarely left him wanting...
...If he does not meet the intellectual challenges of his material every inch, he certainly puts up a tremendous show of it...
...Circuiting this fact, Andre Maurois's new biography mainly treats Hugo within the context of his age, not ours i.e., while he was at the top...
...With Chateaubriand as his guiding star, he sought "grandeur" and the "sonorous" effect...
...An immense crowd was waiting...
...Maurois gives only the barest indication that he fully understands the derivations of the very styles he is using...
...The completion of Les Miserables dates from this period...
...Today, still generally considered France's number one poet (although with reservations by some), his novels have suffered most in the light of nearly a century's perspective...
...Soon, many well-known writers of the day were numbered among his acquaintances, and Sainte-Beuve, the famed critic, became his best friend...
...The train arrived at 9:35...
...a forerunner (as was Moby Dick, and others) of the 20th century encyclopedic novel...
...A welter of poetry, plays and novels followed...
...Who can really blame him for presenting his facts in a favorable light to his subject...
...From the start, Fortune and the Muses smiled on young Victor, placing a little magazine at his disposal in his teens...
...An extremely competent craftsman capable of blending Hugo's flights of rhetoric ("0 shades of "etc...
...the characters are without complex psychological reality, shadowless black and white...
...Her character, faithfulness and devotion were no small source of inspiration, although he was ever on the lookout for more sources, as Sainte-Beuve took to seeing his wife on the sly...
...There are times when outside of his obvious aim (a bull's-eye...
...with the understated "restraint" of Stendhal ("He wept...
...At 25, Victor Hugo was the recognized leader of the Romantic movement in France...
...Married at 20 (an aftermath: a jealous brother went mad), he finished a Gothic novel the next year...
...While he certainly displayed amazing energy in his prodigious output, and his talent was undeniably high, Hugo stands as one of the leading exponents of a literary movement that let the dam break on the idolization of romantic love and that entire literature of the bad guy and the good guy where justice always triumphs and reward and punishment are fairly meted out, e.g., Hollywood, TV, soap opera...
...One of the great novels of the 19th century, it suffers from the "Mani-chaean dualism" (i.e., good guy, bad guy) that marks all his Active efforts...
...His reception was indescribable...
...to strike a balance between the purely literary and the popular he seems to gracefully elude the reader on points of large significance for this era...
...As his marriage grew stale, he acquired an actress-mistress, Juliette Drouet, whose life evolved into one of self-renunciation for him as surely as if she had taken monastic vows in his name...
...enlightening period quotes, an excellent integration of letters into the text, and a smattering of Hugo's poetry in the original French appear throughout...
...On the other hand, it owes this to Victor Hugo: that he served as a sounding-board for the anti-romantics, Flaubert and Stendhal, who used him as a model to repudiate by writing with greater fidelity...
...However, Maurois is amiable...
...A titan of mid-19th-century literature, he left such contemporaries as Flaubert, Stendhal and Balzac in the dust behind his bounding reputation...
...as editor, he published "under 11 different pseudonyms 112 articles and 22 poems...
...It is, nonetheless, a remarkable achievement, offering in its pyramidal mass interjections of passionless factual parts into a passionate running narrative which serve not only as contrast and change of pace but as another dimension for thematic enlargement...
...Politically an early believer in a United States of Europe, his idealism caused a breach with Napoleon III, and after the coup d'etat of 1851 he was forced to move to the Channel Islands...
...she remained his illicit second wife to the end...
...The debt the modern novel owes this trinity is enormous...
...Wanting to please everyone, he takes pains to step on nobody's toes, and marvelously succeeds...
...His conception of drama was based on "a struggle between two opposing principles," most clearly realized in the way he would "incarnate the sublime and the grotesque in different characters...
Vol. 39 • June 1956 • No. 23
