"J'ai dans l'âme une fraternité profonde pour le grand et libre peuple anglais"

Autograph letter signed by Victor Hugo to poet Algernon Swinburne, 1 page written in black ink on one sheet. Discreet folds, a small angular tear to upper left corner.
A rare and emphatic declaration of affection by Victor Hugo for the English people who granted him asylum and continue to applaud his writings. From Guernsey, Hugo writes to one of his most fervent British admirers, the pre-Raphaelite poet Swinburne, who considered Hugo the "first poet of [his] age", and the "spiritual ruler of the 19th century".

Jean Gaudon, professor of French literature at Yale and editor of several volumes of Hugo's early correspondence (also former owner of the letter) first identified Swinburne as the addressee.
Hugo expresses his satisfaction upon reading Swinburne's translation of his poem "Pauvres Gens" (The Poor People): "I found it excellent and congratulate you for it" Hugo writes. In return, the British poet praised the "idyllic interior" of this poem, a tragic and sublime picture of the miseries endured by a family of fishermen, in his Study of Victor Hugo (1886): "There we felt the sea-wind and saw the sea-mist through the chinks of door and window". Swinburne even credited the beauty of Hugo's sea poems to his time spent in Guernsey: "Among the many good things which seem, for the lovers of poetry, to have come out of one and so great an evil as the long exile of Hugo from his country, there is none better or greater than the spiritual inhalation of breeze and brine into the very heart of his genius, the miraculous impregnation of his solitary Muse by the sea-wind."
The poem had just appeared in the first part of 'The Legend of the Ages' and here the writer is pleased by the positive reception of his poems: "What you tell me about the success of ‘The Legend of the Ages' in England moves me greatly. I have in my soul a deep feeling of brotherhood for the great and free English people". With this important confession, Hugo relates to the destiny of the English who succeeded in combining republic and aristocracy through parliamentary monarchy - whereas France had fallen into absolutism and exiled its greatest poet. In another letter to Swinburne, he further strengthened the bond between himself and the poet, using once again a maritime metaphor: "You are right : you, Byron, and Shelley, three aristocrats, three republicans. And I, it is from aristocracy that I have risen to democracy, it is from the peerage that I have arrived at the Republic, as one passes from a river to the ocean."
As the letter implies, Swinburne sent his translation of "Les Pauvres Gens" to a renowned translator: François-Victor, "My son, who translates Shakespeare, read me your translation of The Poor People", Hugo writes. A Shakespeare scholar himself, Swinburne greatly praised François-Victor's "titanic labor" of translation which "adds a new lustre even to his paternal name" (Swinburne, Auguste Vacquerie, 1875).
Swinburne tried his hand at translating Hugo's poems again in 1870 with "Pauvres enfants", writing to Lord Houghton of the difficulty of the exercise: "I [...] have just thrown off the version I send you, which, inadequate as it may be to reproduce the exquisite charm of the original, is at least as closely faithful as I can make it".
One of Hugo's rare letters to a foreign writer, bearing witness to their mutual admiration ; Swinburne dedicated his drama 'Chastelard' to Hugo, later translated into French by his son François-Victor.

Provenance: collection of Jean and Sheila Gaudon.