In conclusion, I wish to repeat here what I have said
in the General Preface to the ‘Oxford Modern
French Series,’ that ’those who speak a
modern language best invariably possess a good literary
knowledge of it.’ This has been endorsed
by the best teachers in this and other countries,
and is a generally admitted fact. The present
series by providing works of high literary merit will
certainly facilitate the acquisition of the French
language—a tongue which perhaps more than
any other offers a variety of literary specimens which,
for beauty of style, depth of sentiment, accuracy
and neatness of expression, may be equalled but not
surpassed.
Leon DELBOS.
Oxford, December, 1905.
Victor Hugo’s conception of the scheme of the
series of poems to which he gave the title of La
Legende des Siecles is thus described in the preface
to the first scenes: ’Exprimer l’humanite
dans une espece d’oeuvre cyclique; la peindre
successivement et simultanement sous tous ses aspects,
histoire, fable, philosophie, religion, science, lesquels
se resument en un seul et immense mouvement d’ascension
vers la lumiere; faire apparaitre, dans une sorte
de miroir sombre et clair—que l’interruption
naturelle de travaux terrestres brisera probablement
avant qu’il ait la dimension revee par l’auteur—cette
grande figure une et multiple, lugubre et rayonnante,
faible et sacree, L’Homme.’ The poet
thus dreamt of a vast epic, of which the central figure
should be no mythical or legendary hero, but Man himself,
conceived as struggling upwards from the darkness
of barbarism to the light of a visionary golden age.
Every epoch was to be painted in its dominant characteristic,
every aspect of human thought was to find its fitting
expression. The first series could pretend to
no such completeness, but the poet promised that the
gaps should be filled up in succeeding volumes.
It cannot be said that this stupendous design was ever
carried out. The first volumes, which were published
in 1859, and from which the poems contained in this
selection are taken, left great spaces vacant in the
ground-plan of the work, and little attempt was made
in the subsequent series, which appeared in 1877 and
1883, to fill up those spaces. In fact, Hugo
has left large tracts of human history untrod.
He has scarcely touched the civilization of the East,
he has given us no adequate picture of ancient Greece.
L’Aide offerte a Majorien can hardly
be regarded as a sufficient picture of the wanderings
of the nations, nor Le Regiment du Baron Madruce
as an adequate embodiment of the spirit of the eighteenth
century. The Reformation, and, what is stranger
still, the French Revolution, are not handled at all,
though the heroism of the Napoleonic era finds fitting
description in Le Cimetiere d’Eylau.
The truth is that Hugo set himself a task which was
