He escaped to Brussels, and from there went to the Channel Islands, first taking refuge in Jersey, then finally settling in Guernsey. His exile was to last nearly twenty years. Now he could say at last: “The literary revolution and the political revolution have effected their junction in me.” What a liberation! Youth had suddenly burst into his life: “Those who become young late in life, stay young longer.”[17] He was to stay young till his death in 1885, at age eighty-three.
Hugo’s writings are full of prophetic insights on his own destiny. Some twenty years earlier, commenting on the life of Rubens during a first visit to Belgium, he observed: “A great man is born twice. The first time as a man, the second as a genius.”[18] Exile was to be Hugo’s second birth — the chance of his life. And he had the wisdom to see this. Three years into his new life, he noted:
I find increasingly that exile is good.
It is as if, without their knowing it, the exiles were near some sort of sun: they mature quickly.
These last three years, I feel that I am on the true peak of life; I can distinguish the real lineaments of all that people call facts, history, events, successes, catastrophes — the huge machinery of Providence.
At least, for this reason alone, I should thank Mr. Bonaparte who exiled me, and God who chose me.
Maybe I shall die in this exile, but I shall die a better man. All is well.
Five years later:
What a pity I was not exiled earlier! I could have achieved so many things which I fear I shall not have the time to complete.
Eight years later:
In exile, I said the word that explains my entire life: I grew.[19]
In his dashing early days in Paris, he had been the centre of an ebullient court of admirers, fellow writers, followers, idlers and parasites. His house was invaded by endless cohorts of visitors, he did not even have the time to answer his mail, and from dawn till night his door was simply left open. Now, however, not many of his fair-weather acquaintances would still find the courage to brave the mists and storms of the Channel to make a pilgrimage to the exile’s rock, or be bold enough to run the gauntlet of the spies and secret police who kept Hugo’s outside contacts under close surveillance. As a result, the poet found himself left with only two interlocutors — but with these at least, he felt on the same footing: God and the ocean.
No wonder these years of solitude and contemplation were the most productive of his life. They were also happy years — for himself at least, if not for his family. (His daughter Adèle went insane; his wife[20] and grown-up sons could not bear the loneliness and eventually moved back to Brussels, where Hugo would from time to time pay them a visit, on the way to one of his occasional continental jaunts.)
Most of his masterpieces date from this period, climaxing in 1862 with his monumental novel, Les Misérables—less a novel than an immense prose poem, perhaps the last and only genuine epic of modern times. Hugo’s passion for language found here its hugest and wildest outlet. The book is like a foaming and thundering Niagara of words; it is also a dumbfounding patchwork in which philosophico-socio-political dissertations constantly interrupt the narrative. There are passages of comedy, of drama, of satire, of breathtaking action; there are tender elegies, realistic sketches, huge historic frescoes; there are essays on the most disparate topics, such as the linguistic structure of slang, the economics of sewage recycling — a prodigious display of encyclopaedic interests (which influenced Jules Verne) — and yet these heteroclite fragments are all swept together and eventually merge in one powerful poetic stream.
By its very nature, such a book should be untranslatable. And yet it was soon to become a part of all the main cultures of the world and to touch millions of readers in many different languages.[21] What is the power latent in the original that enables it to survive translation and to remain operative, even in a mutilated form? Les Misérables has a mythic dimension that directly taps into the deeper sources of our common humanity. It is popular literature in the same sense as Homer is popular literature: it addresses all mankind.
The book was first printed in Brussels (1 April 1862); other editions immediately followed, nearly simultaneously, in Paris, Madrid, London, Leipzig, Milan, Naples, Warsaw, Saint Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro.[22] From the start it exerted a universal appeaclass="underline" the original publication was delayed at the printers by the tears of the typographers who were reading and composing the galley proofs. Their emotion and enthusiasm were soon to be shared by the most diverse readership — French and foreign, young and old, naïve and sophisticated. At the remotest end of Europe, Tolstoy secured without delay a copy of the book and was overwhelmed. One may say without exaggeration that Les Misérables triggered War and Peace.[23] Giants breed giants.
* * *
Hugo’s prodigious creativity during the years of exile found another outlet — more intimate, but no less intense and powerful — in his pictorial activity. Though critics have not ignored it, it seems to me that this aspect of his genius has remained somehow underestimated. For instance, instead of talking of Hugo’s drawings, it would be much more accurate to speak of his paintings — borrowing a concept from Chinese traditional aesthetics, which would be particularly appropriate in his case.[24] For the Chinese, all the graphic improvisations, or “ink-plays” which scholars and literary men execute during their leisure hours, simply using the basic tools they need for their daily writing (calligraphic brush, ink and paper) are not only considered as fully fledged paintings but, more than the large-scale, showy productions of professional artists, they achieve the very perfection of what a true painting should always aim at: they are a visible “imprint of the heart” of the painter.
Delacroix said that the highest feat for a painter is to inject reality into a dream.[25] Here lies precisely the haunting power of Hugo’s visionary works: his imagination, however bold and wild, was always sustained by a technical proficiency acquired through a long practice of sketching. (During his early journeys through Belgium and Germany, Hugo recorded with vivid accuracy, in pen or pencil, monuments and scenic spots: his sketch books were to him what cameras have become for today’s travellers.)
Hugo said that “every great artist, at his beginning, remakes the whole art to his own image.” This is particularly true for Hugo’s paintings. Most of these were not shown in his time, and for good reason: the public for such an art was not yet born. It is only now, through a familiarity with the developments of twentieth-century painting, that we are able at last to appreciate Hugo’s graphic experiments.
Hugo’s exile came to an end with the fall of the Second Empire. His return to France was triumphal, and the last fifteen years of his life were one long protracted apotheosis. He continued to produce: poems, political addresses, polemical essays (the eloquence and ferocity of Histoire d’un crime—1877—contributed to saving the Republic from the menace of a new coup), and one last magnificent novel, Quatre-vingt-treize. But not even death could put an end to his career: posthumous publication of his private papers (notebooks, drafts, prose and verse fragments, diaries, correspondence, etc., which equal the published works in quantity, and sometimes even exceed them in interest) have occupied another three-quarters of a century.