Hugo, - hélas!Author(s): Justin O'BrienSource: The French Review, Vol. 37, No. 5 (Apr., 1964), pp. 554-556Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/385254 .

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Hugo, - he 1as!

by Justin O'Brien

T HIS SORT OF THING MUST STOP. The only way to revive a quotation, it has been said, is to quote it exactly. And exactness in such cases includes the correct naming of the author, unless of course one hopes to pass off the remark as one's own.

A short time ago, readers of Esquire should have been shocked when a well-known American writer quoted Paul Val6ry as having said: "Victor Hugo, hilas!" Some readers of Esquire must have known that Andr6 Gide originally made the remark and in the much more memorable form of "Hugo, -h6las!" After all, Gide, understandably proud of his pithy sally, quoted it often enough himself in subsequent writings for it to become famous although no one could be expected to know where or under what circumstances he originally said the words.

The magazine-contributor named Dwight Macdonald might have con- sulted one of the many reference books which list quotations. He would not have found this one in Bartlett or Stevenson or The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations or even the comparatively recent Encyclopedic des citations of Dupr6 (1959). But it does appear in the impressive New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles by H. L. 1Mencken (Knopf, 1942) in the following form:

Alas, Victor Hugo! Paul Verlaine: On being asked, on his deathbed, to name the greatest French poet of the XIX century, 1896.

Verlaine did indeed die in 1896, but that is the only fact that is correct in the circumstantial evidence here adduced by the sage of Baltimore. One wonders how he managed to garble the quotation so lamentably and why, in fact, he bothered to list anything so insignificant.

Although Macdonald obviously shares Mencken's deafness to rhythm, his word-order is closer to the truth. So is his attribution, for Val6ry prob- ably did quote the remark at least once in a lecture in London in October 1923. If Macdonald is old enough and was in London at that time, he may have heard Val6ry and taken careless notes. At least Val6ry wrote his friend Gide in a letter now on record that he was going to quote what he

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GIDE 555

considered "le plus beau mot du siicle." Paul Verlaine, on the other hand, could not have acted likewise, as he died six years before Andre Gide first made the remark.

No doubt Paul Valery, who was no fool, felt as Oscar Wilde did when he wished he had made Whistler's sally, and Gide could have retorted as Whistler did: "You will, Paul, you will." To be sure, many writers in France have quoted or appropriated "Hugo, -h6las!" but most of them unfortunately have recorded the now famous mot as answering the ques- tion: "Who was the greatest French poet?" Even authorities on Gide have not bothered to discover under what circumstances he said it. Nor did Gide himself bother. As he aged, he forgot the occasion on which he first made his laconic reply. Obviously proud of the memorable two words, he quoted them himself rather frequently and came to think he had indeed picked Hugo as the greatest French poet of all time ... hlas!

To be sure, Andre Gide first read Hugo at the age of sixteen "with rap- ture and enthusiasm." All through life he read and re-read that vast lyric poet, while lucidly recognizing the verbal virtuosity and too frequent bombast that rapidly dampened the public enthusiasm for Hugo. Gide was as aware as anyone of Hugo's sacrifice of emotion to pathos, but he was frequently shocked by the often petty detractors of the colossus who entered the French Pantheon in 1885 when Gide was just sixteen.

It is not surprising then that he tipped his hat in a sweeping gesture of obeisance to Hugo. But he did so in February 1902 in a long-forgotten periodical entitled L'Ermitage, to which Gide and so many of his contem- poraries, both writers and painters, regularly contributed. Inspired by an article in the rival Mercure de France signed Remy de Gourmont, the edi- tors filled sixty-five pages (Vol. XXIII, pp. 81-146) with replies to a questionnaire. Gourmont had worked himself into his customary lather because someone had written: "Hugo fut toute la poesie et toute ]a pensde du XIXe siecle."

Ne rdpitez pas cela [said Gourmont in the Mercure]. De telles syntheses sont vraiment trop hardies. Est-ce que sans Vigny, Lamartine, Musset, Baudelaire, Verlaine, et quelques autres anciens ou recents, on a "toute la poesie" du si cle dernier? Je voudrais que l'on demanddt

' deux cents pontes d'aujourd'hui: Quel est votre porte? On verrait. Toute la poesie: non, pas plus que l'orgue n'est toute la musique. L'orgue n'est pas le violon ...

Gourmont wisely did not waste space in his own periodical for such a footless enquete, but L'Ermitage took the bait and asked the question:

Nous vous serions done trps obligQ s si vous vouliez bien rppondre 2 la question suivante:

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556 FRENCH REVIEW

QUEL EST VOTRE POETE? Il s'agit, bien entendu, du XIXe siecle; et, pour eviter un double emploi

avec de pr'cedentes consultations (l'Nlection d'un prince des pontes, etc.), nous demandons que l'on n'indique ici aucun porte vivant.

Replies poured in, many of them appallingly long. On page 109 of the February issue appeared the only laconic reply of them all, written by one of the most obscure of the two hundred, the thirty-two year-old Andre Gide, who used that peculiarly deplorable French punctuation of comma followed by a long dash to say simply: "Hugo,--hblas!"

Undoubtedly Gide was aware that his answer could not be pleasing either to Remy de CGourmiont (for his attitude toward that elder, one has only to consult his Journal) or to the editors of L'Ermitage. But he made sure that his reply, by its brilliant juxtaposition and alliteration, would be the only memorable one in the whole collection. To tell the truth, Gide never really abandoned the initiator whom he later half-reluctantly called "le pare de la poesie moderne." Throughout his voluminous journals and his complete works, Gide shows a consistent affection for the lyric poet, a lack of interest in the novelist in Hugo, and a downright scorn for the dramatist. In his own anthology of French poetry, put together when he was eighty, Gide claims to have overcome his youthful insistence on Hugo's dross and reveals sharp irritation with those who would thought- lessly reject him. He then proceeds to include more selections from Hugo than from any other poet. Significantly, the runner-up is Baudelaire, whose total output was so much smaller than Hugo's immensity. And a few years before, in one of his Imaginary Interviews, he had himself discreetly placed Baudelaire above Hugo-but only, he had hastened to add, after having tipped his hat most ostentatiously to Victor Hugo.

Gide's lifelong attitude toward Hugo decidedly preceded the bon mot and dictated it. Despite his early frequentation of Oscar Wilde down there in Algiers and Blida, Gide was never one to sacrifice truth to a witticism. Later, because the mot was so true, it enjoyed an exceptional fortune among literary people. Witness Mencken and Macdonald, who both admired it without quite understanding it, without quoting it correctly, and without knowing who said it.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

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