Victor Hugo Biography

VICTOR HUGO

VICTOR HUGO ( 1802-1885), far from being of noble origin
as he tried to make people believe, was of thoroughly
plebeian descent; his mind, instead of being Messianic and big
with prophecy, was that of an inflated and conceited bourgeois;
his language, says Juan Valera in his Cartas americanas, was that
of a French Gongora. His father was a general of the Empire
whose duties led him much about Europe, and Hugo in his youth
was at times on the wing, at times living in Paris with his mother
and his brother. His parents did not always get on well to­
gether, and Hugo suffered from want of consecutive training;
when with his mother, he had no training at all. The conse­
quence was that, with the exception of a brief period of prepar­
ation for the Polytechnic School, he had no real education.
To the very end of his days he remained superficial and inexact,
talking of much and knowing little, fond of elaborate and in­
coherent allusions in his prose and verse, such as impress at
first sight but do not stand scrutiny.

The most noteworthy experience of Hugo's impressionable
age was a sojourn in Spain, where his father was a military
governor. This journey affected more than one of his great
writings, such as Hernani and Ruy Blas, and he would even have
us believe that his conception of the grotesque as an element of
life was stirred by the sight of the papamoscas, the monster who
strikes the clock in the interior of the cathedral of Burgos.
When still younger he had gone to Italy.

Hugo took to literature at an early age and proved himself
an infant phenomenon in the conventional moulds, enough so to

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Publication Information: Book Title: A History of French Literature. Contributors: C. H. Conrad Wright - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1912. Page Number: 682.