VICTOR HUGO-4

Victor Hugo returning to France in 1871, he wrote Ninety Three (1873), a romance of the Revolution, and The Four Winds of the Spirit (1881), poems in lyrical, epic, satirical and dramatic form; being the best fruit of that almost juvenile productivity. A lover of children, he was revered as “the universal grandfather,” publishing The Art of Being a Grandfather in 1877.

Baudelaire acknowledge his supremacy, Alfred Tennyson called him “weird Titan, cloud-weaver of phantasmal hopes and fears,” and Andre Gide, the very antithesis of Hugo, had to confess: “Our greatest poet, alas!” and in later year withdrew the “alas!”