His depiction of the bishop in Les Miserables is detestably dishonest - Tolstoy was similarly dishonest when describing young women. Tolstoy famously mistreated women - like his idol Pushkin he probably inflicted venereal disease on dozens of women whose parents were poor - and, if you know much about Hugo, you know he was similarly self-centered. Sad - people like that do not ever have access to the real genius of the real artist who loves his fellow people in a way proportionate, at the humble level of the true artist, to the way God loves us all.


Like Dickens, he (Victor Hugo) was an extremely lucky person, having been born and raised in an environment full of gossipers of genius, full of desperate characters seeking to be remembered, and full of the great joy in life that the early Industrial age gave to the lucky people who grew rich in still-fairly clean and well-governed (except during years of tumult) cities.

Sadly, our great American west was not all that populous, so all we got was a bunch of really good Western movies ----- populous France got Hugo and a few more like him, populous England got Dickens and a few more like him, we got the Western movies of the 40s and 50s.

Still, John Ford, Bruce Boetticher, and Henry Hathaway, and people like them, while they might not have had the genius of a Hugo or a Tolstoy, understood people, and left us first rate versions of what art is like when second rate people do their best at making art in which real depictions of real people are important. Poor Hugo will always have people who are ready to say he was a great artist, but I know he did not really understand, or even, unless they were of some use to him, like people. A great poet but not a very bright person, when it comes to the greatest intellectual task any of us are faced with, that is, understanding our fellow men and women.

Sad!

Hope that answers your question.

Replies: @anonymous

I can’t imagine anyone thinking Hugo wasn’t an incredibly intelligent man. I say that even as someone who is pretty much 100% certain he’d be out on the far left end of the political spectrum were he alive today (though he seems an independent enough intellect that he could easily surprise in that regard). Les Miserables was a tough slog in parts, but it’s certainly one of the greatest novels of all time, and I can’t imagine going to my gave without having read it.

Replies: @anonymous