: Hernani by Hugo Victor - Tragedies; Hernani (Fictitious character) Drama Opera; FR Théâtre; Banned Books from Anne Haight's list

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HERNANI

A DRAMA BY VICTOR HUGO

PREFACE

Mr. H.A. Perry and Dr. John E. Matzke, in their editions of , have so thoroughly annotated it that it has been impossible to avoid the appearance of following them very closely; and there are indeed several notes for which I am directly indebted to them. Without their indications, I should in other cases have been obliged to spend a great deal more time in looking up references than has been necessary. It would be unfair to Dr. Matzke, in particular, not to pay tribute to the completeness of his notes, which leave his successor little chance for originality.

GEORGE McLEAN HARPER. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY June 16, 1894.

VICTOR HUGO.

It was by such a tribunal that Victor Hugo was judged, long before his name was known outside of France. And yet, although the popular voice has been immensely favorable to him for two generations, this high court of criticism has not decided the case. The position of Victor Hugo is by no means definitely established, as Alfred de Musset's is established, and Balzac's. But, whatever be the verdict, Victor Hugo, because of the power and quantity of his work, and his long life, certainly is the most imposing figure of this century in French literature.

It is often a questionable proceeding to make one man's life and works interpret for us the doings of his contemporaries, to try to find in one term the expression for a whole series of events. It is the most convenient method, to be sure, but not on that account the most reliable. When therefore I remembered that Victor Hugo entered into prominence only a little after the beginning of our century, and that although dead he yet speaks, for the definitive edition of his works is not completed, and every year adds new volumes of posthumous books to that enormous succession; when I perceived how convenient it would be to make him the central and distributive figure of this whole epoch in French literary history,--I regarded the chronological coincidence rather as a temptation than as a help, and resolved not to yield to the solicitations of a mere facile arrangement. For I had no great belief in Victor Hugo's fitness to be called the representative and interpreter of his age. I was under the influence of the prevailing Anglo-Saxon opinion of him as an egoist, whom even the impulsions of his mighty genius could not break loose from absorbed contemplation of self.

Even a critic so appreciative of national differences as Lowell expressed this opinion when he said:

Nothing more deplorable can be conceived than the intellectual condition of France under the First Empire. The fine ideals of the young republic were a laughingstock, a butt of saddest ridicule. For there is nothing men hate so much as the thought of a pure ideal they have once cherished and since shrunk away from; and the remembrance of a lost opportunity to be one's true self is the bitterest of griefs; and no reproach stings deeper than this, of a former and nobler state of conscience which was not obeyed. Liberty was borne down under a weight of circumstance all the more oppressive because it was thought that the new order of things was the natural product of the Revolution; and indeed it looked so. Literature was bidden to flourish by the despot. He posed as a protector of the arts, and at his command the seventeenth century was to begin again and a new Corneille, a new Boileau, a new Moli?re, were to adorn his reign. But he who conquered Italy could not compel unwilling Minerva, and the victor of the Pyramids could not reanimate a dead past. The writings of the period 1800-1815, indeed the whole intellectual life of that time, its art, its music, its literature, its philosophy, are what might have been expected.

Such, then, was the intellectual condition of France in 1815--uncertainty and division and dearth of ideals and purposes, in the face of a future full of perplexing problems. But she was strangely hopeful. She has never been otherwise. The French are the most elastic people in Europe, and no defeat has ever discouraged them. And she was in love with herself as much as ever, and as fully convinced of her right to the leading place among all nations. Indeed it did not occur to her that she had ever surrendered that right.

What have been the principal lines of movement in French literature since 1815? In order to answer this question we must not merely follow the traces of political history and say that literature changed with the government. Such a solution would be facile, but would do violence to the facts. The matter is verv indeterminate, and the best way to bring it into a clear arrangement is to ask ourselves who were the influential writers of any given period and what did they stand for. In 1815 there were three men prominent in French letters and life: Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Lamennais. Victor Hugo was born in 1802, and by 1817 he had become a literary man, not by intention merely, but by writing. He came upon the scene, therefore, when these three men were at the height of their activity; for Chateaubriand was born in 1768, Lamartine in 1790, and Lamennais in 1782; and they, appreciating the need of leadership in France under the newly restored monarchy, had thrown themselves enthusiastically into the work of instructing the people. Let us inquire who they were and what was the nature of their activity; or, in other words, what was the first public literary atmosphere that surrounded Victor Hugo.

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