EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS
FICTION
HUGO’S TOILERS OF THE SEA
NOW NEWLY COMPLETED FROM
W. MOY THOMAS’S TRANSLATION
INTRODUCTION BY ERNEST RHYS
| THIS IS NO. 509 OF EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY. THE PUBLISHERS WILL BE PLEASED TO SEND FREELY TO ALL APPLICANTS A LIST OF THE PUBLISHED AND PROJECTED VOLUMES ARRANGED UNDER THE FOLLOWING SECTIONS: |
| TRAVEL · SCIENCE · FICTION THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY HISTORY · CLASSICAL FOR YOUNG PEOPLE ESSAYS · ORATORY POETRY & DRAMA BIOGRAPHY REFERENCE ROMANCE |
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First Issue of this Edition 1911
Reprinted 1913, 1917, 1920, 1928
Printed in Great Britain
INTRODUCTION
Victor Hugo was thinking much of Æschylus and his Prometheusat the time he conceived the figure of Gilliatt, heroicwarrer with the elements. But it is to a creature of theGothic mind like Byron’s Manfred, and not to any earlier, orclassic, type of the eternal rebellion against fate or time orcircumstance, that Hugo’s readers will be tempted to turn forthe fellow to his Guernsey hero:
“My joy was in the wilderness—to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain’s top,
Where the birds dare not build—nor insects wing
Flit o’er the herbless granite; or to plunge
Into the torrent, and to roll along
On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave
Of river-stream, or ocean, in their flow.”
The island of Guernsey was Gilliatt’s Alp and sea-solitude,where he, too, had his avalanches waiting to fall “like foamfrom the round ocean of old Hell.” And as Byron figured hisown revolt against the bonds in Manfred, so Hugo, being inexile, put himself with lyrical and rhetorical impetuosity intothe island marcou and child of destiny that he concoctedwith “a little sand and a little blood and a deal of fantasy” inthe years 1864 and 1865. There is a familiar glimpse of theHugo household to be had in the first winter of its transferenceto the Channel Islands, years before Les Travailleurswas written, which betrays the mood from which finally sprangthis concrete fable of the man-at-odds. It was the end ofNovember 1852, and a father and his younger son sat in aroom of a house of Marine Terrace, Jersey—a plain, unpicturesquehouse; square, hard in outline, and newly whitewashed,—Methodism,said Hugo, in stones and mortar.Outside its windows the rain fell and the wind blew: thehouse was like a thing benumbed by the angry noise. Thetwo inmates sat plunged in thought, possibly thinking of thesad significance of these beginnings of winter and of exilewhich had arrived together. At length the son (FrançoisHugo) asked the father what he meant to do during theirexile, whic