THE OLYMPIAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 887, 3 August 1956, Page 13

THE OLYMPIAN

VICTOR HUGO, by André Maurois, translated by Gerard Hopkins; Jonathan Cape, English price 30/-. YV ICTOR HUGO is not the poet for us that he is for the French; but few of us grew up without being profoundly affected by Les Misérables and Notre Dame de Paris. He was also a political figure-not the giant he would have liked to be, and too much of a poet to be at home in any sort of assembly; yet he touched the life of France at great moments, and he spoke always with courage and sometimes with powerful influence when freedom was in danger. The story of his life is a story of work and love. Perhaps "love’’ is not the word that should be used to describe the promiscuous attachments which continued until] his death at 83, but it can certainly be used of his long relationship with Juliette Drouet, the most enchanting and the noblest of all the women who crowd into these pages. Hugo was an astonishing person. His genius was undisputed, his vitality prodigious; he seemed in youth to reach

the mastery of words without effort, and thereafter to produce books which in his own day were acclaimed as masterpieces. The completeness of his success makes him too much of a phenomenon to be of lasting interest to students of creative writing: there was not enough internal conflict; he worked too much in black and white, and was often concerned with words rather than with ideas. But the man himself is a fascinating study in greatness and frailty. André Maurois, a skilful and sympathetic biographer, is interested in the contradiction. "How came it," he asks, "that this prudent, economical man was also generous? That this chaste adolescent, this model father, grew to be, in his last years, an ageing faun? That this legitimist changed, first into a Bonapartist, only, later still, to be hailed as the grandfather of the Republic?" There are other questions, and some are hard to answer; but in putting forward the evidence M. Maurois has written an impressive and most readable biography. Nothing is concealed, and perhaps -only in French writing could candour and delicacy be placed so

adroitly in balance.

H.