Classical Tradition by Highet Gilbert;

Author:Highet, Gilbert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1976-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

The heir of the Revolution

Although he belonged to a later generation, although he lived until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo (1802-85) was the heir of the Revolution. Among his earliest works were stormy lyrics inspired by the Greek war of freedom against the Turkish oppressors.45 The climax of his youthful literary career came when he created a revolution in French poetry.

He did this partly by breaking down the strictly limited verse-patterns which had dominated, and crippled, French poets since the opening of the baroque age. But more important and more far-reaching was his extension of the poetic vocabulary. Strange as it seems, it is true that throughout the Revolution and the First Empire poets were forced to avoid many ordinary words, because they were ‘low’. Audiences hissed if they heard a word like ‘room’ or ‘handkerchief. Manuals of correct diction were published, showing that ‘spouse’ was preferable to ‘husband’, because the latter signified merely a domestic or sexual relationship, while ‘spouse’ conveyed the idea of a contract hallowed by society. Poets were forbidden to use the word ‘horse’. They were enjoined to replace the word ‘negroes’ by

mortals blackened by the suns of Guinea.

They were urged not to use ‘priest’ and ‘bell’, but to prefer their noble equivalents ‘pontiff’ and ‘bronze’.46 The most popular translator of the age, Delille, complained that his task was made more difficult by the limitations of the French polite vocabulary. ‘In Rome’, he said, ‘the people was king, and its language shared its nobility; … among us, prejudices have debased both words and men, and there are noble expressions and lower-class expressions.’47 This was not really true of Roman poetry, which was aristocratic enough to eschew large numbers of colloquialisms; but at least in the Georgics Vergil could (as Delille could not) use real words for real things, and call the farmer’s implement a spade.

Hugo has a spirited poem in which he accepts the charge that he caused a new French Revolution in poetry by breaking down the social distinctions of language. French, he says, was like the state before 1789: words were nobles or commoners, they lived in a fixed caste-system. But I, he cries, I put a red cap on the old dictionary. I called a pig by its name. I stripped the astonished dog of its collar of epithets, and made Maggie the cow fraternize with the heifer Berenice. As if in a revolutionary orgy,

with breasts bare, the nine Muses sang the Carmagnole.48

Hugo’s relation to classical poetry was strangely affected by his revolutionary character and ideals. The poet he knew best and for long loved best was Vergil. We hear of him translating Vergil at sight, aged nine, at the entrance examination given by his exclusive Madrid school; trying his wings, during his early teens, on poetic versions of Bucolics, Georgics, and the horror episodes in the Aeneid. There is a book on his love of Vergil which shows again and again, almost as sensitively as Lowes does for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.