The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France

Conclusion

183 Conclusion In 1834, Victor Hugo defiantly renounced good taste, specifically the good taste of eighteenth-century France, in a long, polemical poem entitled “Réponse à un acte d’accusation.” The violent language of this piece reveals to what extent he assumes that taste had exerted an oppressive power over poetic creativity. In this poem, Hugo represents the norms of rhetoric and poetics as a number of arrogant aristocrats , while he imagines the words that did not fit the rules of decorum as the long-suffering populace. “Poetry was a monarchy,”1 he proclaims, and he takes on the role of the monarchy’s destroyer when he cries, “I am that Danton! that Robespierre!”2 He incites the lowly words, for example cochon and nez, to revolt against their masters in a reenactment of the events of 1789. And it is no coincidence that those whom he attacks by name in this poem are exactly the authors whose ideas I have discussed in this study. Hugo begins by announcing “I trampled good taste and ye olde ffrench verse / Under my feet”3 and proceeds to call out the authors who, he claims, have ruled despotically over the world of letters. He takes aim at Aristotle, Vaugelas, Racine, and Dumarsais, and he enjoins the “people” to “throw out the Bouhours, the Batteux, and Brossettes / That have put thumbscrews on the human mind!”4 Boileau , who served as a model for eighteenth-century philosophes, is not spared; he appears as one of the legendary members of the Acad émie Française, an institution that legitimized the authority of many of the defenders of good taste. Boileau is guilty by association, since Hugo implies that the despotic rule of the Académie Française both Conclusion 184 parallels and proceeds from royal power: “Gold-lilied, Tristan-andBoileau , blue-backdropped, / Forty Academy chairs with the throne in the middle.”5 Furthermore, Hugo depicts an Art poétique, possibly Boileau’s, being hanged from a lamppost, recalling many incidents during the Revolution in which people suffered the same fate at the hands of the mob. Another proponent of good taste, Voltaire, appears several times, once as the author of Mérope, a tragedy for which he was much admired , and another time as a bully who is tormenting Corneille. Hugo describes an amusing situation in which Corneille finds a low word, a member of the “stylistic riffraff,”6 in his works and decides to keep it: “Corneille, / If he found one cowering in his lines, / Let it stay— didn’t stoop to pick it up.”7 Notwithstanding the English translation, the original French verse makes an explicit reference to the famously tasteful phrase “qu’il mourût,” when Hugo’s imaginary Corneille refuses to send away the vulgar word with the phrase “qu’il s’en aille.” It is apparent here that while Hugo condemns the elitism of Voltaire and other critics, he favors Corneille as a “bonhomme,”8 slightly humiliated by his fellow writers but still one of the “great ones” that Hugo favors. Aside from caricaturing famous critics, Hugo attacks specific phrases such as the “qu’il mourût” and common motifs, such as that of clarity, found in eighteenth-century writings on taste. For instance, he evokes Boileau’s biblical example of the sublime, “Let there be light” but subverts it: “I, hideous creature, said: / ‘Let darkness be!’— and voilà! there was darkness.”9 The technique of undercutting the metaphors of taste continues throughout the poem and culminates in the apparition of a muse, who embodies several elements of socalled bad taste. In her emotion, she “sweep[s] from zenith to nadir,” a hyperbole that we had seen parodied by Montesquieu in the Lettres persanes, and she dazzles with “a hurricane of sparks,” which recalls Buffon’s scorn of false brilliance. Rather than submit to the restraints of moderation, she revels in unreason and excess; she thus represents the return of so-called bad taste in a more egalitarian world that does not put limits on creativity. In this poem, Hugo demonstrates to us not only that he was well versed in the previous century’s conceptions of taste but also that the educational system that formed him had already absorbed these ideas enough to impose them as a dogma. He emphasizes this point by associating the rigid conventions of literature with his schooldays, par- Conclusion 185 ticularly in the...