A Study of Victor Hugo/La Légende des Siècles
LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES
1883
'Chacun a sa manière. Quant à moi, qui parle ici, j'admire tout, comme une brute.—N'espérez donc aucune critique.—Je ne chicane point ces grands bienfaiteurs-là. Ce que vous qualifiez défaut, je le qualifie accent. Je reçois et je remercie.—Ayant eu l'honneur d'être appelé 'niais' par plusieurs écrivains et critiques distingués, je cherche à justifier l'épithète.'
The greatest work of the century is now at length complete. It is upwards of twenty-four years since the first part of it was sent home to France from Guernsey. Eighteen years later we received a second instalment of the yet unexhausted treasure. And here, at the age of eighty-one, the sovereign poet of the world has placed the copingstone on the stateliest of spiritual buildings that ever in modern times has been reared for the wonder and the worship of mankind.
Those only to whom nothing seems difficult because nothing to them seems greater than themselves could find it other than an arduous undertaking to utter some word of not unworthy welcome and thanksgiving when their life is suddenly enriched and brightened by such an addition to its most precious things as the dawn of a whole new world of song—and a world that may hold its own in heaven beside the suns created or evoked by the fiat of Shakespeare or of Dante. To review the Divine Comedy, to dispose of Hamlet in the course of a leading article, to despatch in a few sentences the question of Paradise Lost and its claim to immortality, might seem easy to judges who should feel themselves on a level with the givers of these gifts; for others it could be none the less difficult to discharge this office because the gift was but newly given. One minor phase of the difficulty which presents itself is this: the temporary judge, self-elected to pass sentence on any supreme achievement of human power, must choose on which horn of an inevitable dilemma he may prefer to run the risk of impalement. If, recognizing in this new master-work an equal share of the highest qualities possible to man with that possessed and manifested by any previous writer of now unquestioned supremacy, he takes upon himself to admit, simply and honestly, that he does recognize this, and cannot choose but recognize it, he must know that his judgment will be received with no more tolerance or respect, with no less irritation and derision, than would have been, in Dante's time, the judgment of a critic who should have ventured to rank Dante above Virgil, in Shakespeare's time of a critic who should have dared to set Shakespeare beside Homer. If, on the other hand, he should abstain with all due discretion from any utterance or any intimation of a truth so ridiculous and untimely, he runs the sure and certain risk of leaving behind him a name to be ranked, by all who remember it at all, with those which no man mentions without a smile of compassion or of scorn, according to the quality of error discernible in the critic's misjudgment: innocent and incurable as the confidence of a Johnson or a Jeffrey, venomous and malignant as the rancour of Sainte-Beuve or Gifford. Of these two dangers I choose the former; and venture to admit, in each case with equal diffidence, that I do upon the whole prefer Dante to any Cino or Cecco, Shakespeare to all the Greenes and Peeles and Lillys, Victor Hugo to all or any, of their respective times. The reader who has no tolerance for paradox or presumption has therefore fair warning to read no further.
Auguste Vacquerie, of all poets and all men living the most worthy to praise the greatest poet of his century, has put on record long ago, with all the vivid ardour of his admirable style, an experience of which I now am but too forcibly reminded. He was once invited by Victor Hugo to choose among the manuscripts of the master's unpublished work, from the drawers containing respectively some lyric or dramatic or narrative masterpiece, of which among the three kinds he would prefer to have a sample first. Unable to select, he touched a drawer at random, which contained the opening chapters of a yet unfinished story—Les Misérables. If it is no less hard to choose where to begin in a notice of the Légende des Siècles—to decide what star in all this thronged and living heaven should first attract the direction of our critical telescope—it is on the other hand no less certain that on no side can the telescope be misdirected. From the miraculous music of a legendary dawn, when the first woman felt first within her the movement of her first-born child, to the crowning vision of ultimate justice made visible and material in the likeness of the trumpet of doom, no radiance or shadow of days or nights intervening, no change of light or cadence of music in all the tragic pageant of the centuries, finds less perfect expression and response, less absolute refraction or reflection, than all that come and go before or after it. History and legend, fact and vision, are fused and harmonized by the mastering charm of moral unity in imaginative truth. There is no more possibility of discord or default in this transcendent work of human power than in the working of those powers of nature which transcend humanity. In the first verses of the overture we hear such depth and height of music, see such breadth and splendour of beauty, that we know at once these cannot but continue to the end; and from the end, when we arrive at the goal of the last line, we look back and perceive that it has been so. Were this overture but a thought less perfect, a shade less triumphant, we might doubt if what was to follow it could be as perfect and triumphant as itself. We might begin—and indeed, as it is, there are naturally those who have begun—to debate with ourselves or to dispute with the poet as to the details of his scheme, the selection of his types, the propriety of his method, the accuracy of his title. There are those who would seem to infer from the choice of this title that the book is, in the most vulgar sense, of a purely legendary cast; who object, for example, that a record of unselfish and devoted charity shown by the poor to the poor is, happily, no 'legend.' Writers in whom such self-exposure of naked and unashamed ignorance with respect to the rudiments of language is hardly to be feared have apparently been induced or inclined to expect some elaborate and orderly review of history, some versified chronicle of celebrated events and significant epochs, such as might perhaps be of subsidiary or supplementary service in the training of candidates for a competitive examination; and on finding something very different from this have tossed head and shrugged shoulder in somewhat mistimed impatience, as at some deception or misnomer on the great author's part which they, as men of culture and understanding, had a reasonable right to resent. The book, they affirm, is a mere agglomeration of unconnected episodes, irrelevant and incoherent, disproportionate and fortuitous, chosen at random by accident or caprice; it is not one great palace of poetry, but a series or congeries rather of magnificently accumulated fragments. It may be urged in answer to this impeachment that the unity of the book is not logical but spiritual; its diversity is not accidental or chaotic, it is the result and expression of a spontaneous and perfect harmony, as clear and as profound as that of the other greatest works achieved by man. To demonstrate this by rule and line of syllogism is no present ambition of mine. A humbler, a safer, and perhaps a more profitable task would be to attempt some flying summary, some glancing revision of the three great parts which compose this mightiest poem of our age; or rather, if this also should seem too presumptuous an aspiration, to indicate here and there the points to which memory and imagination are most fain to revert most frequently and brood upon them longest, with a deeper delight, a more rapturous reverence, than waits upon the rest. Not that I would venture to assert or to insinuate that there is in any poem of the cycle any note whatever of inferiority or disparity; but having neither space nor time nor power to speak, however inadequately, of each among the hundred and thirty-eight poems which compose the now perfect book, I am compelled to choose, not quite at random, an example here and there of its highest and most typical qualities. In the first book, for instance, of the first series, the divine poem on Ruth and Boaz may properly be taken as representative of that almost indefinable quality which hitherto has seemed more especially the gift of Dante: a fusion, so to speak, of sublimity with sweetness, the exaltation of loveliness into splendour and simplicity into mystery, such as glorifies the close of his Purgatory and the opening of his Paradise. Again, the majestic verses which bring Mahomet before us at his end strike a deeper impression into the memory than is left by the previous poem on the raising of Lazarus; and when we pass into the cycle of heroic or chivalrous legend we find those poems the loftiest and the loveliest which have in them most of that prophetic and passionate morality which makes the greatest poet, in this as in some other ages, as much a seer as a singer, an evangelist no less than an artist. Hugo, for all his dramatic and narrative mastery of effect, will always probably remind men rather of such poets as Dante or Isaiah than of such poets as Sophocles or Shakespeare. We cannot of course imagine the Florentine or the Hebrew endowed with his infinite variety of sympathies, of interests, and of powers; but as little can we imagine in the Athenian such height and depth of passion, in the Englishman such unquenchable and sleepless fire of moral and prophetic faith. And hardly in any one of these, though Shakespeare may perhaps be excepted, can we recognize the same buoyant and childlike exultation in such things as are the delight of a high-hearted child—in free glory of adventure and ideal daring, in the triumph and rapture of reinless imagination, which gives now and then some excess of godlike empire and superhuman kingship to their hands whom his hands have created, to the lips whose life is breathed into them from his own. By the Homeric stature of the soul he measures the heroic capacity of the sword. And indeed it is hardly in our century that men who do not wish to provoke laughter should venture to mock at a poet who puts a horde to flight before a hero, or strikes down strongholds by the lightning of a single will. No right and no power to disbelieve in the arm of Hercules or the voice of Jesus can rationally remain with those who have seen Garibaldi take a kingdom into the hollow of his hand, and not one man but a whole nation arise from the dead at the sound of the word of Mazzini.
Two out of the five heroic poems which compose the fourth book of the first series will always remain types of what the genius of Hugo could achieve in two opposite lines. All the music of morning, all the sunshine of romance, all the sweetness and charm of chivalry, will come back upon all readers at the gracious and radiant name of Aymerillot; all the blackness of darkness rank with fumes of blood and loud with cries of torment, which covers in so many quarters the history, not romantic but actual, of the ages called ages of faith, will close in upon the memory which reverts to the direful Day of Kings. The sound of the final note struck in the latter poem remains in the mind as the echo of a crowning peal of thunder in the ear of one entranced and spell-stricken by the magnetism of storm. The Pyrenees belong to Hugo as the western coasts of Italy, Neapolitan or Tuscan, belong to Shelley; they can never again be done into words and translated into music as for once they have been by these. It can hardly be said that he who knows the Pyrenees has read Victor Hugo; but certainly it may be said that he who knows Victor Hugo has seen the Pyrenees. From the author's prefatory avowal that his book contains few bright or smiling pictures, a reader would never have inferred that so many of its pages are fragrant with all the breath and radiant with all the bloom of April or May among the pine-woods and their mountain lawns, ablaze with ardent blossom and astir with triumphant song. Tragedy may be hard at hand, with all the human train of sorrows and passions and sins; but the glory of beauty, the loveliness of love, the exultation of noble duty and lofty labour in a stress of arduous joy, these are the influences that pervade the world and permeate the air of the poems which deal with the Christian cycle of heroic legend, whose crowning image is the ideal figure of the Cid. To this highest and purest type of mediæval romance or history the fancy of the great poet whose childhood was cradled in Spain turns and returns throughout the course of his threefold masterpiece with an almost national pride and passion of sublime delight. Once in the first part and once in the third his chosen hero is set before us in heroic verse, doing menial service for his father in his father's house, and again, in a king's palace, doing for humanity the sovereign service of tyrannicide. But in the second part it seems as though the poet could hardly, with his fullest effusion of lyric strength and sweetness, do enough to satisfy his loving imagination of the perfect knight, most faithful and most gentle and most terrible, whom he likens even to the very Pic du Midi in its majesty of solitude. Each fresh blast of verse has in it the ring of a golden clarion which proclaims in one breath the honour of the loyal soldier and the dishonour of the disloyal king. There can hardly be in any language a more precious and wonderful study of technical art in verse of the highest kind of simplicity than this Romancero du Cid, with its jet of luminous and burning song sustained without lapse or break through sixteen 'fyttes' of plain brief ballad metre. It is hard to say whether the one only master of all forms and kinds of poetry that ever left to all time the proof of his supremacy in all has shown most clearly by his use of its highest or his use of its simplest forms the innate and absolute equality of the French language as an instrument for poetry with the Greek of Æschylus and of Sappho, the English of Milton and of Shelley.
But among all Hugo's romantic and tragic poems of mediæval history or legend the two greatest are in my mind Eviradnus and Ratbert. I cannot think it would be rash to assert that the loveliest love-song in the world, the purest and keenest rapture of lyric fancy, the sweetest and clearest note of dancing or dreaming music, is that which rings forever in the ear which has once caught the matchless echo of such lines as these that must once more be quoted, as though all the world of readers had not long since known them by heart:—
Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre.
O les verts taillis mouillés!
Ton souffle te fera suivre
Des papillons réveillés.
*****Allons-nous-en par l'Autriche!
Nous aurons l'aube à nos fronts;
Je serai grand, et toi riche,
Puisque nous nous aimerons.
*****
Tu seras dame, et moi comte;
Viens, mon cœur s'épanouit.
Viens, nous conterons ce conte
Aux étoiles de la nuit.
The poet would be as sure of a heavenly immortality in the hearts of men as any lyrist of Greece itself, who should only have written the fourteen stanzas of the song from which I have ventured to choose these three. All the sounds and shadows of a moonlit wilderness, all the dews and murmurs and breaths of midsummer midnight, have become for once articulate in such music as was never known even to Shakespeare's forest of Arden. In the heart of a poem so full of tragedy and terror that Hugo alone could have brightened it with his final touch of sunrise, this birdlike rapture breaks out as by some divine effect of unforbidden and blameless magic.
And yet, it may be said or thought, the master of masters has shown himself even greater in Ratbert than in Eviradnus. This most tragic of poems, lit up by no such lyric interlude, stands unsurpassed even by its author for tenderness, passion, divine magnificence of righteous wrath, august and pitiless command of terror and pity. From the kingly and priestly conclave of debaters more dark than Milton's to the superb admonition of loyal liberty in speech that can only be silenced by murder, and again from the heavenly and heroic picture of childhood worshipped by old age to the monstrous banquet of massacre, when the son of the prostitute has struck his perjured stroke of state, the poem passes through a change of successive pageants each fuller of splendour and wonder, of loveliness or of horror, than the last. But the agony of the hero over the little corpse of the child murdered with her plaything in her hand—the anguish that utters itself as in peal upon peal of thunder, broken by sobs of storm—the full crash of the final imprecation, succeeded again by such unspeakably sweet and piteous appeal to the little dead lips and eyes that would have answered yesterday—and at last the one crowning stroke of crime which calls down an answering stroke of judgment from the very height of heaven, for the comfort and refreshment and revival of all hearts—these are things of which no praise can speak aright. Shakespeare only, were he living, would be worthy to write on Hugo's Fabrice as Hugo has written on Shakespeare's Lear. History will forget the name of Bonaparte before humanity forgets the name of Ratbert.
But if this be the highest poem of all for passion and pathos and fire of terrible emotion, the highest in sheer sublimity of imagination is to my mind Zim-Zizimi. Again and again, in reading it for the first time, one thinks that surely now the utmost height is reached, the utmost faculty revealed, that can be possible for a spirit clothed only with human powers, armed only with human speech. And always one finds the next step forward to be yet once more a step upward, even to the very end and limit of them all. Neither in Homer nor in Milton, nor in the English version of Job or Ezekiel or Isaiah, is the sound of the roll and the surge of measured music more wonderful than here. Even after the vision of the tomb of Belus the miraculous impression of splendour and terror, distinct in married mystery, and diverse in unity of warning, deepens and swells onward like a sea till we reach the incomparable psalm in praise of the beauty and the magic of womanhood made perfect and made awful in Cleopatra, which closes in horror at the touch of a hand more powerful than Orcagna's. The walls of the Campo Santo are fainter preachers and feebler pursuivants of the triumph of death than the pages of the poem which yet again renews its note of menace after menace and prophecy upon prophecy till the end. There is probably not one single couplet in all this sweet and bitter roll of song which could have been written by any poet less than the best or lower than the greatest of all time.
Passants, quelqu'un veut-il voir Cléopâtre au lit?
Venez; l'alcôve est morne, une brume l'emplit;
Cléopâtre est couchée à jamais; cette femme
Fut l'éblouissement de l'Asie, et la flamme
Que tout le genre humain avait dans son regard;
Quand elle disparut, le monde fut hagard;
Ses dents étaient de perle et sa bouche était d'ambre;
Les rois mouraient d'amour en entrant dans sa chambre;
Pour elle Ephractæus soumit l'Atlas, Sapor
Vint d'Ozymandias saisir les cercle d'or,
Mamylos conquit Suse et Tentyris détruite
Et Palmyre, et pour elle Antoine prit la fuite;
Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient à la fois
Il hésita, lâchant le monde dans son choix.
Cléopâtre égalait les Junons éternelles;
Une chaîne sortait de ses vagues prunelles;
O tremblant cœur humain, si jamais tu vibras,
C'est dans l'étreinte altière et douce de ses bras;
Son nom seul enivrait; Strophus n'osait l'écrire;
La terre s'éclairait de son divin sourire,
À force de lumière et d'amour, effrayant;
Sons corps semblait mêlé d'azur; en la voyant,
Vénus, le soir, rentrait jalouse sous la nue;
Cléopâtre embaumait l'Egypte; toute nue,
Elle brûlait les yeux ainsi que le soleil;
Les roses enviaient l'ongle de son orteil;
O vivants, allez voir sa tombe souveraine;
Fière, elle était déesse et daignait être reine;
L'amour prenait pour arc sa lèvre aux coins moqueurs;
Sa beauté rendait fous les fronts, les sens, les cœurs,
Et plus que les lions rugissants était forte;
Mais bouchez-vous le nez si vous passez la porte.
At every successive stage of his task, the man who undertakes to glance over this great cycle of poems must needs incessantly call to mind the most worn and hackneyed of all quotations from its author's works—'J'en passe, et des meilleurs.' There is here no room, as surely there should nowhere now be any need, to speak at any length of the poems in which Roland plays the part of protagonist; first as the beardless champion of a five days' fight, and again as the deliverer whose hand could clear the world of a hundred human wolves in one continuous sword-sweep. There is hardly time allowed us for one poor word or two of tribute to such a crowning flower of song as La Rose de L'Infante, with its parable of the broken Armada made manifest in a wrecked fleet of drifting petals; to the superb and sonorous chant of the buccaneers, in which all the noise of lawless battle and stormy laughter passes off into the carol of mere triumphant love and trust; or even to the whole inner cycle of mystic and primæval legend which seeks utterance for the human sense of oppression or neglect by jealous or by joyous gods; for the wild profound revolt of riotous and trampled nature, the agony and passion and triumph of invincible humanity, the protest and witness of enduring earth against the passing shades of heaven, the struggle and the plea of eternal manhood against all transient forces of ephemeral and tyrannous god head. Within the orbit of this epicycle one poem only of the first part, a star of strife and struggle, can properly be said to revolve; but the light of that planet has fire enough to animate with its reflex the whole concourse of stormy stars which illuminate the world-wide wrestle of the giants with the gods. The torch of revolt borne by the transfigured satyr, eyed like a god and footed like a beast, kindles the lamp of hopeful and laborious rebellion which dazzles us in the eye of the Titan who has seen beyond the world. In the song that struck silence through the triumph of amazed Olympus there is a sound and air as of the sea or the Book of Job. There may be something of Persian or Indian mysticism, there is more of universal and imaginative reason, in the great allegoric myth which sets forth here how the half-brute child of one poor planet has in him the seed, the atom, the principle of life everlasting, and dilates in force of it to the very type and likeness of the eternal universal substance which is spirit or matter of life; and before the face of his transfiguration the omnipresent and omnipotent gods who take each their turn to shine and thunder are all but shadows that pass away. Since the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind no ear has heard the burst of such a song; but this time it is the world that answers out of its darkness the lords and gods of creed and oracle, who have mastered and have not made it. And in the cry of its protest and the prophecy of its advance there is a storm of swelling music which is as the sound of the strength of rollers after the noise of the rage of breakers.
It is noticeable that the master of modern poets should have in the tone and colour of his genius more even of the Hebrew than the Greek. In his love of light and freedom, reason and justice, he is not of Jerusalem, but of Athens; but in the bent of his imagination, in the form and colour of his dreams, in the scope and sweep of his wide-winged spiritual flight, he is nearer akin to the great insurgent prophets of deliverance and restoration than to any poet of Athens except only their kinsman Æschylus. It is almost wholly of the Persian war, the pass of Thermopylae, the strait of Euripus, that he sings when he sings of Hellas. All his might of hand, all his cunning of colour, all his measureless resources of sound and form and symbol, are put forth in the catalogue of nations and warriors subject to Xerxes. There is nothing in poetry so vast and tremendous of its kind as this pageant of immense and monstrous invasion. But indeed the choice of gigantic themes, the predominance of colossal effects, the prevalence of superhuman visions over the types and figures of human history or legend, may be regarded as a distinctive point of difference between the second and the first series. A typical example of the second is the poem which has added an eighth wonder built by music to the seven wonders of the world, which it celebrates in verse more surely wrought for immortality than they. Another is the song of the worm which takes up in answer to their chant of life and light and pride of place, and prolongs through measure after measure of rolling and reverberating verse, the note of a funereal and universal triumph, the protest and the proclamation of death. Another, attuned to that mighty music of meditation which rings through so many of the poems written in exile and loneliness, is the stately prophetic hymn which bears the superscription of All the Past and all the Future. This might seem to belong to the sixth book of the Contemplations, in which the same note of proud and ardent faith was struck so often with such sovereignty of hand. As much might be said of the great 'abysmal' poem which closes the second series with a symphony of worlds and spirits. Other groups of poems, in like manner, bear signs of common or of diverse kinship to former works of a creator whose spirit has put life into so many of the same likeness, yet with no more sign of repetition or weary monotony than is traceable in the very handiwork of nature. The book of idyls is of one inspiration with the Chansons des Rues et des Bois; in both cases, as in so many of the poet's earlier lyric volumes, his incomparable fertility of speech and superb facility of verse leave almost an impression as of work done by way of exercise, as though he were writing to keep his hand in, or to show for a wager with incredulous criticism how long he could keep up the golden ball of metre, carve arabesques of the same pattern, play variations in the same key. But the Old Man's Idyl which closes the book belongs by kinship to another work of the poet's, more beloved and more precious to the inmost heart, if not more eminent for strength and cunning of hand, than any of these. In 'the voice of a child a year old' there is the same welling and bubbling melody which flows and laughs and murmurs and glitters through the adorable verses of L'Art d'être Grand-père, making dim with love and delight the reader's or the hearer's eyes. At last the language of babies has found its interpreter; and that, as might have been expected, in the greatest poet of his age.
L'enfant apporte un peu de ce ciel dont il sort;
Il ignore, il arrive; homme, tu le recueilles.
Il a le tremblement des herbes et des feuilles.
La jaserie avant le langage est la fleur
Qui précède le fruit, moins beau qu'elle, et meilleur,
Si c'est être meilleur qu'être plus nécessaire.
A conclusion which may be doubted when we consider as follows:—
L'enfant fait la demande et l'ange la réponse;
Le babil puéril dans le ciel bleu s'enfonce,
Puis s'en revient, avec les hésitations
Du moineau qui verrait planer les alcyons.
Can language or can thought be lovelier? if so, the one possible instance is to be sought in these succeeding verses:—
Quand l'enfant jase avec l'ombre qui le bénit,
La fauvette, attentive, au rebord de son nid
Se dresse, et ses petits passent, pensifs et frêles,
Leurs têtes à travers les plumes de ses ailes;
La mère semble dire à sa couvée: Entends,
Et tâche de parler aussi bien.
It seems and is not strange that the lips which distill such honey as this should be the same so often touched with a coal of fire from that 'altar of Righteousness' where Æschylus was wont to worship. The twenty-first section of the second series is in the main a renewal or completion of the work undertaken in the immortal Châtiments. Even in that awful and incomparable book of judgment such poems as La Colère du Bronze, and the two following on the traffic of servile clerical rapacity in matters of death and burial, would have stood high among the stately legions of satire which fill its living pages with the sound and the splendour of righteous battle for the right; but the verses with which Hugo has branded the betrayer of Metz and Strasburg are hardly to be matched except by those with which, half a century ago, he branded the betrayer of the Duchess of Berry. Truly may all who read them cry out with the poet at their close,
Et qui donc maintenant dit qu'il s'est évadé?
In Le Cimetière d'Eylau, a poem to which we have now in the third series of the book a most noble and exquisite pendant (Paroles de mon Oncle), all the Homeric side of a poet born of warlike blood comes out into proud and bright relief. There is no better fighting in the Iliad; it has the martial precision and practical fellow-feeling which animate in his battle-pieces the lagging verse of Walter Scott; and it has, of course, that omnipresent breath and light and fire of perfect poetry which a Scott or a Byron is never quite permitted to attain. Beside or even above these two poems, that other which commemorates the devotion of a Vendean peasant chief will be set in the hearts of all readers competent to appreciate either heroic action or heroic song.
The love of all high things which finds one form of expression in warlike sympathy with warriors who can live and die for something higher than personal credit or success takes another and as natural a shape in the poems which are inspired by love and worship of nature and her witness for liberty and purity and truth in the epic evangel of august and indomitable mountains. The sublimest cry of moral passion ever inspired by communion in spirit with these is uttered in the great poem on the Swiss mercenaries of the seventeenth century, which even among its fellows stands out eminent and radiant as an Alp at sunrise. Mountain and cataract, the stars and the snows, never yet in any language found such a singer and interpreter as this. Two or three verses, two or three words, suffice for him to bring before us, in fresh and actual presence, the very breath of the hills or the sea, the very lights and sounds and spaces of clouded or sunlit air. Juvenal is not so strong in righteousness, nor Pindar so sublime in illustration, as the poet who borrowed from nature her highest symbols to illustrate the glory and the duty of righteous wrath and insuppressible insurrection against wrong-doing, when he wrote Le Régiment du baron Madruce.
L'homme s'est vendu. Soit. A-t-on dans le louage
Compris le lac, le bois, la ronce, le nuage?
La nature revient, germe, fleurit, dissout,
Féconde, croît, décroît, rit, passe, efface tout.
La Suisse est toujours là, libre. Prend-on au piège
La précipice, l'ombre et la bise et la neige?
Signe-t-on des marchés dans lesquels il soit dit
Que l'Orteler s'enrôle et devient un bandit?
Quel poing cyclopéen, dites, ô roches noires,
Pourra briser la Dent de Morde en vos mâchoires?
Quel assembleur de bœufs pourra forger un joug
Qui du pic de Glaris aille au piton de Zoug?
C'est naturellement que les monts sont fidèles
Et purs, ayant la forme âpre des citadelles,
Ayant reçu de Dieu des créneaux où le soir,
L'homme peut, d'embrasure en embrasure, voir
Étinceler le fer de lance des étoiles.
Est-il une araignée, aigle, qui dans ses toiles
Puisse prendre la trombe et la rafale et toi?
Quel chef recrutera le Salève? à quel roi
Le Mythen dira-t-il: 'Sire, je vais descendre!
Qu'après avoir dompté l'Athos, quelque Alexandre,
Sorte de héros monstre aux cornes de taureau,
Aille donc relever sa robe à la Jungfrau!
Comme la vierge, ayant l'ouragan sur l'épaule,
Crachera l'avalanche à la face du drôle!
********Non, rien n'est mort ici. Tout grandit, et s'en vante.
L'Helvétie est sacrée, et la Suisse est vivante;
Ces monts sont des héros et des religieux;
Cette nappe de neige aux plis prodigieux
D'où jaillit, lorsqu'en mai la tiède brise ondoie,
Toute une floraison folle d'air et de joie,
Et d'où sortent des lacs et des flots murmurants,
N'est le linceul de rien, excepté des tyrans.
This glorious poem of the first series finds a glorious echo in the twenty-fifth division of the second; even as the Pyrenean cycle which opened in the first series is brought in the second to fuller completion of equal and corresponsive achievement. It is wonderful, even in this vast world of poetic miracle where nothing is other than wonderful, that Masferrer should be equal to Aymenllot in frank majesty of beauty; that even after Le Parricide a fresh depth of tragic terror should be sounded by Gaïffer-Forge; and that after all he had already written on fatherhood and sonship, on duty and chivalry, on penitence and pride, Victor Hugo should have struck so new and so profound a note as rings in every fine of La Paternité.
But of all echoes and of all responses which reverberate from end to end of these three great sections of song, the very sweetest, and perhaps the very deepest, are those evoked by love of little children, and compassionate reverence for the poor. If but one division were to be left us out of all the second series, and fate or chance, comparatively compassionate in its cruelty, gave us our choice which this one should be, the best judgments might perhaps decide to preserve the twenty-third at all events. What the words 'realism' and 'naturalism' do naturally and really signify in matters of art, the blatant babblers who use them to signify the photography of all things abject might learn, if shallow insolence and unclean egotism were suddenly made capable of learning, by the study of only the two poems which set before us in two different forms the strength of weakness in the child whose love redeems his father from death, and the child who can find no comfort but in death for the lack of a father's love. There is nothing in Homer, in Dante, or in Shakespeare, the three only poets who can properly be cited for comparison, of a pathos more poignant in its bitter perfection of sweetness.
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. This influence could not naturally but combine with the lifelong influence of all noble sympathies to attract his admiration and his pity towards the poor folk of the shore, and to produce from that sense of compassion for obscurer sorrows and brotherhood with humbler heroism than his own such work as the poem which describes the charity of a fisherman's wife towards the children of her dead neighbour. It has all the beautiful precision and accurate propriety of detail which distinguish the finest idyls of Theocritus or Tennyson, with a fervour of pathetic and imaginative emotion which Theocritus never attained, and which Tennyson has attained but once. All the horror of death, all the trouble and mystery of darkness, seem as we read to pass into our fancy with the breath of pervading night, and to vanish with the husband's entrance at sunrise before the smile with which the wife draws back the curtains of the cradle.
This poem, which so many hearts must have treasured among their choicest memories for now so many years, has found at length its fellow in the final volume of the book. There is even more savour of the sea in the great lyric landscape called Les paysans au bord de la mer than in the idyllic interior called Les pauvres gens. There we felt the sea-wind and saw the sea-mist through the chinks of door and window; but here we feel all the sweep of the west wind's wings, and see all the rush of rain along the stormy shore that the flock of leaping waves has whitened with the shreddings of their fleece. We remember in Les Voix Intérieures the all but matchless music of the song of the sea-wind's trumpet, and in the notes of this new tune we find at last that music matched and deepened and prolonged. In the great lyric book which gives us the third of the four blasts blown from Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit, there are visions as august and melodies as austere as this; but outside the vast pale of the master's work we should look for the likeness of such songs in vain. The key of all its tenderness if not of all its terror is struck in these two first verses.
Les pauvres gens de la côte,
L'hiver, quand la mer est haute
Et qu'il fait nuit, Viennent où finit la terre
Voir les flots pleins de mystère
Et pleins de bruit.
Ils sondent la mer sans bornes;
Ils pensent aux écueils mornes
Et triomphants;
L'orpheline pâle et seule
Crie: ô mon père! et l'aïeule
Dit: mes enfants!
The verses which translate the landscape are as absolutely incomparable in their line as those which render the emotion of the watchers. Witness this:—
Et l'on se met en prières,
Pendant que joncs et bruyères
Et bois touffus,
Vents sans borne et flots sans nombre,
Jettent dans toute cette ombre
Des cris confus.
Here, as usual, it is the more tragic aspect of the waters that would appear to have most deeply impressed the sense or appealed to the spirit of Victor Hugo. He seems to regard the sea with yet more of awe than of love, as he may be said to regard the earth with even more of love than of awe. He has put no song of such sweet and profound exultation, such kind and triumphant motherhood, into the speaking spirit of the sea as into the voice of the embodied earth. He has heard in the waves no word so bountiful and benignant as the message of such verses as these:—
La terre est calme auprès de l'océan grondeur;
La terre est belle; elle a la divine pudeur
De se cacher sous les feuillages;
Le printemps son amant vient en mai la baiser;
Elle envoie au tonnerre altier pour l'apaiser
La fumée humble des villages.
Ne frappe pas, tonnerre. Ils sons petits, ceux-ci.
La terre est bonne; elle est grave et'sévère aussi;
Les roses sont pures comme elle;
Quiconque pense, espère et travaille lui plaît;
Et l'innocence offerte à tout homme est son lait,
Et la justice est sa mamelle.
La terre cache l'or et montre les moissons;
Elle met dans le flanc des fuyantes saisons
Le germe des saisons prochaines,
Dans l'azur les oiseaux qui chuchotent: aimons!
Et les sources au fond de l'ombre, et sur les monts
L'immense tremblement des chênes.
The loving loveliness of these divine verses is in sharp contrast with the fierce resonance of those in which the sea's defiance is cast as a challenge to the hopes and dreams of mankind:—
Je suis la vaste mêlée,
Reptile, étant l'onde, ailée,
Étant le vent;
Force et fuite, haine et vie,
Houle immense, poursuivie
Et poursuivant.
The motion of the sea was never till now so perfectly done into words as in these three last lines; but any one to whom the water was as dear or dearer than the land at its loveliest would have found a delight as of love no less conceivable than a passion as of hatred in the more visible and active life of waves, and at least as palpable to the 'shaping spirit of imagination.' It remains true, after all, for the greatest as for the humblest, that—in the words of one of the very few poets whose verses are fit to quote even after a verse of Hugo's—
we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth nature live;
so far, at least, as her life concerns us, and is perceptible or appreciable by our spirit or our sense. A magnificent instance of purely dramatic vision, in which the lyric note is tempered to the circumstance of the speakers with a kind of triumphant submission and severe facility, is La Chanson des Doreurs de Proues. The poet's unequalled and unapproached variety in mastery of metre and majesty of colour and splendid simplicity of style, no less exact than sublime, and no less accurate than passionate, could hardly be better shown than by comparison of the opening verses with the stanza cited above.
Nous sommes les doreurs de proues.
Les vents, tournant comme des roues,
Sur la verte rondeur des eaux
Mêlent les lueurs et les ombres,
Et dans les plis des vagues sombres
Traînent les obliques vaisseaux.
La bourrasque décrit des courbes,
Les vents sont tortueux et fourbes,
L'archer noir souffle dans son cor,
Ces bruits s'ajoutent aux vertiges,
Et c'est nous qui dans ces prodiges
Faisons rôder des spectres d'or.
Car c'est un spectre que la proue.
Le flot l'étreint, l'air la secoue;
Fière, elle sort de nos bazars
Pour servir aux éclairs de cible,
Et pour être un regard terrible
Parmi les sinistres hasards.
It is more than fifty years since Les Orientales rose radiant upon the world of letters, and the hand which gave them to mankind has lost so little of its cunning that we are wellnigh tempted to doubt whether then, for all its skill and sureness of touch, it had quite the same strength and might of magnificent craftsmanship as now. There was fire as well as music on the lips of the young man, but the ardour of the old man's song seems even deeper and keener than the passion of his past. The fervent and majestic verses of June 2, 1883, strike at starting the note of measureless pity and immeasurable indignation which rings throughout the main part of the fifth and last volume almost louder and fuller, if possible, than it was wont. All Victor Hugo, we may say, is in this book; it is as one of those ardent evening skies in which sunrise and sunset seem one in the flush of overarching colour which glows back from the west to the east with reverberating bloom and fervour of rose-blossom and fire. There is life enough in it, enough of the breath and spirit and life-blood of living thought, to vivify a whole generation of punier souls and feebler hearts with the heat of his fourscore years. It may be doubted whether there ever lived a poet and leader of men to whom these glorious verses would be so closely applicable as to their writer.
Un grand esprit en marche a ses rumeurs, ses houles,
Ses chocs, et fait frémir profondément les foules,
Et remue en passant le monde autour de lui.
On est épouvanté si l'on n'est ébloui;
L'homme comme un nuage erre et change de forme;
Nul, si petit qu'il soit, échappe au souffle énorme;
Les plus humbles, pendant qu'il parle, ont le frisson.
Ainsi quand, évadé dans le vaste horizon,
L'aquilon qui se hâte et qui cherche aventure
Tord la pluie et l'éclair, comme de sa ceinture
Une fille défait en souriant le nœud,
Quand l'immense vent gronde et passe, tout s'émeut,
Pas un brin d'herbe au fond des ravins, que ne touche
Cette rapidité formidable et farouche.
And this wind 'bloweth where it listeth': now it comes to us charged with all the heart of all the roses in the world; its breath when it blows towards Greece has in it a murmur as of Shelley's Epipsychidion; the caress of its love-making has all the freedom and all the purity of Blake's; now it passes by us in darkness, from depth to depth of the bitter mystery of night. A vision of ruined worlds, the floating purgatorial prisons of ruined souls, adrift as hulks on the sea of darkness everlasting, shows us the harvest in eternity of such seed as was sown in time by the hands of such guides and rulers of men as we hear elsewhere speaking softly with each other in the shadows, within hail of the confessional and the scaffold. The loftiest words of counsel sound sweeter in the speech of this great spirit than the warmest whispers of pleasure; and again, the heaviest stroke of damning satire is succeeded by the tenderest touch of a compassion that would leave not a bird in captivity. The hand that opens the cage-door is the same which has just turned the key on the braggart swordsman, neither 'victorious' nor 'dead,' but condemned to everlasting prison behind the bars of iron verse.
But the two long poems which dominate the book, like two twin summits clothed round with fiery cloud and crowned with stormy sunshine, tower equal in height and mass of structure with the stateliest in the two parts preceding. The voice that rolls throughout Les Quatre Jours d'Elciis the thunder of its burning words reawakens and prolongs the echo of Félibien's pity and wrath over the murdered corpse of a child unborn; we recognize in the speaker a kinsman of Welf's, the unconquerable old castellan of Osbor, delivered only by an act of charity into the treacherous hands of the princes whom his citadel had so long defied. Of Elciis, as of him, the poet might have said—
Si la mer prononçait des noms dans ses marées,
O vieillard, ce serait des noms comme le tien.
Such names will no doubt provoke the soft superior smile of a culture too refined for any sort of enthusiasm but the elegant ecstasy of self-worship; and such simplicity will excite, on the other hand, a deep-mouthed bray of scorn from the whole school or church whose apostle in France was St. Joseph de Maistre, in England St. Thomas Coprostom, late of Craigenputtock and Chelsea; the literary lappers of imaginary blood, the inkhorn swordsmen and spokesmen of immaterial iron. The rage of their contempt for such as Hugo, the loathing of their scorn for such as Shelley, ought long since to have abashed the believers in principles which find no abler defenders or more effective champions than these.
For it is true that the main truths preached and enforced and insisted on by such fanatical rhetoricians as Milton, as Mazzini, or as Hugo, are as old as the very notion of right and wrong, as the rudest and crudest conception of truth itself; and it is undeniable that the Gospel according to St. Coprostom has the invaluable merit of pungent eccentricity and comparatively novel paradox. The evangelist of 'golden silence'—whose own speech, it may be admitted, was 'quite other' than 'silvern'—is logically justified in his blatant but ineffable contempt for the dull old doctrines of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty that knows no higher law than duty, of duty that depends for its existence on the existence of liberty. Such a creed, in the phrase of a brother philosopher whose 'reminiscences' may be gathered from Shakespeare, and whose views of his contemporaries were identical in tone and expression with the opinions of Mr. Carlyle on his, was mouldy before our grandsires had nails on their toes. It is far more intelligent, more original, more ingenious than all the old cant and rant against priests and kings and vow-breakers and blood-spillers, to discover the soul of goodness in Ratbert the Second or Napoleon the Third, and observingly distil it out into analytic and mono-dramatic blank verse. And it will never be said that this reaction against the puerile or senile preference of right to wrong and principle to prosperity has not been carried far enough in our time. Carlyle, the man of brass, and Musset, the man of clay, as far apart on all other points as two writers of genius could well be, have shown themselves at one in high-souled scorn for 'principles of mere rebellion' such as Landor's and Milton's, or for such 'belief in a new Brutus' as might disturb the dream of Augustulus. But, even as an old paradox becomes with time a commonplace, so does an old commonplace become in its turn a paradox; and a generation whose poets and historians have long blown the trumpet before the legitimacy of Romanoffs or the bastardy of Bonapartes may properly be startled and scandalized at the childish eccentricity of an old-world idealist who maintains his obsolete and preposterous belief that massacre is murder, that robbery is theft, and that perjury is treason. No newer doctrine, no sounder philosophy, no riper wisdom than this, can be gathered from the declamations of those idle old men—as Goneril, for example, would have called them—who speak this poet's mind again and again in verse which has no more variety of splendour or magnificence of music than the sea.
Hélas, on voit encor les astres se lever,
L'aube sur l'Apennin jeter sa clarté douce,
L'oiseau faire son nid avec des brins de mousse,
La mer battre les rocs dans ses flux et reflux,
Mais la grandeur des cœurs c'est ce qu'on ne voit plus.
There is nothing ingenious in that; it is no better, intellectually considered, than a passage of Homer or Isaiah.
But though every verse has the ring of tested gold, and every touch gives notice of the master's hand, yet the glory even of these Four Days is eclipsed by the Vision of Dante. Far apart and opposite as they stand in all matters of poetic style and method—Dante writing with the rigid and reserved concision of a Tacitus, Hugo with the rushing yet harmonious profusion of a Pindar—the later master is the only modern poet who could undertake without absurdity or presumption to put words worthy of Dante into Dante's mouth. The brazen clatter of Byron's Prophecy was not redeemed or brought into tune by the noble energy and sound insight of the political sympathies expressed in the accent of a stump-orator to the tune of a barrel-organ. But a verse of Hugo's falls often as solid and weighty and sure, as full in significance of perfect and pregnant sound, as even a verse of Alighieri's. He therefore, but he alone, had the power and the right to call up the spirit of Dante now thirty years ago, and bid it behold all the horrors of Europe in 1853; the Europe of Haynau and Radetzky, of Nicholas the First and Napoleon the last. Any great modern poet's notion of an everlasting hell must of course be less merely material than Dante's mechanism of hot and cold circles, fire and ice, ordure and mire; but here is the same absolute and equitable assent to justice, the same fierce and ardent fidelity to conscience, the same, logic and the same loyalty as his.
O sentence! ô peine sans refuge!
Tomber dans le silence et la brume à jamais!
D'abord quelque clarté des lumineux sommets
Vous laisse distinguer vos mains désespérées.
On tombe, on voit passer des formes effarées,
Bouches ouvertes, fronts ruisselants de sueur,
Des visages hideux qu'éclaire une lueur.
Puis on ne voit plus rien. Tout s'efface et recule.
La nuit morne succède au sombre crépuscule.
On tombe. On n'est pas seul dans ces limbes d'en bas;
On sent frissonner ceux qu'on ne distingue pas;
On ne sait si ce sont des hydres ou des hommes;
On se sent devenir les larves que nous sommes;
On entrevoit l'horreur des lieux inaperçus,
Et l'abîme au-dessous, et l'abîme au-dessus.
Puis tout est vide! on est le grain que le vent sème.
On n'entend pas le cri qu'on à poussé soi-même;
On sent les profondeurs qui's'emparent de vous;
Les mains ne peuvent plus atteindre les genoux;
On lève au ciel les yeux et l'on voit l'ombre horrible;
On est dans l'impalpable, on est dans l'invisible;
Des souffles par moments passent dans cette nuit.
Puis on ne sent plus rien.—Pas un vent, pas un bruit,
Pas un souffle; la mort, la nuit; nulle rencontre;
Rien pas même une chute affreuse ne se montre
Et l'on songe à la vie, au soleil, aux amours,
Et l'on pense toujours, et l'on tombe toujours!
The resurrection of the victims to give evidence at the summons of the archangel—a heavy cloud of witnesses,
Triste, livide, énorme, ayant un air de rage—
men bound to the yoke like beasts, women with bosoms gashed by the whip, children with their skulls cleft open—is direful as any less real and actual vision of the elder hell.
Les cris d'enfant surtout venaient à mon oreille;
Car, dans cette nuit-là, gouffre ou l'équité veille,
La voix des innocents sur toute autre prévaut,
C'est le cri des enfants qui monte le plus haut,
Et le vagissement fait le bruit du tonnerre.
The appeal for justice which follows, with its enumeration of horrors unspeakable except by history and poetry, is followed in its turn by the evocation of the soldiers whom this army of martyrs has with one voice designated to the angel of judgment as their torturers and murderers. The splendid and sonorous verses in which the muster of these legions after legions, with their garments rolled in blood, is made to defile before the eyes of reader or hearer, can be matched only by the description of the Swiss mercenaries in Le Régiment du baron Madruce.
Un grand vautour doré les guidait comme un phare.
Tant qu'ils étaient au fond de l'ombre, la fanfare,
Comme un aigle agitant ses bruyants ailerons,
Chantait claire et joyeuse au front des escadrons,
Trompettes et tambours sonnaient, et des centaures
Frappaient des ronds de cuivre entre leurs mains sonores;
Mais, dès qu'ils arrivaient devant le flamboiement,
Les clairons effarés se taisaient brusquement,
Tout ce bruit s'éteignait. Reculant en désordre.
Leurs chevaux se cabraient et cherchaient à les mordre,
Et la lance et l'épée échappaient à leur poing.
Challenged to make answer, the assassins of Italy and Hungary plead that they were but the sword, their captains were the hand. These are summoned in their turn, and cast their crimes in turn upon the judges who bade them shed blood and applauded their blood-shedding in the name of law and justice. And the judges and lawgivers are summoned in their stead.
Ces hommes regardaient l'ange d'un air surpris:
Comme, en lettres de feu, rayonnait sur sa face
Son nom, Justice, entre eux ils disaient à voix basse:
Que veut dire ce mot qu'il porte sur son front?
Charged with their complicity in all the public crime and shame and horror of their period, these in turn cast the burden of their wrong-doing on the princes who commanded them and they obeyed, seeing how the priests and soothsayers had from all time assured them that kings were the images of God. The images of God are summoned, and appear, in the likeness of every form of evil imaginable by man.
Devant chaque fantôme, en la brume glacée.
Ayant le vague aspect d'une croix renversée,
Venait un glaive nu, ferme et droit dans le vent,
Qu'aucun bras ne tenait et qui semblait vivant.
Strange shapes of winged and monstrous beasts were harnessed to the chariots on which the thrones of the earth were borne forward. The figure seated on the last of them will be recognisable beyond all possibility of mistake by any reader whose eyes have ever rested on a face which beyond most human faces bore the visible image and superscription of the soul behind it.
Les trônes approchaient sous les lugubres cieux;
On entendait gémir autour des noirs essieux
La clameur de tous ceux qu'avaient broyés leurs roues;
Ils venaient, ils fendaient l'ombre comme des proues;
Sous un souffle invisible ils semblaient se mouvoir;
Rien n'était plus étrange et plus farouche à voir
Que ces chars effrayants tourbillonnant dans l'ombre.
Dans le gouffre tranquille où l'humanité sombre,
Ces trônes de la terre apparaissaient hideux.
Le dernier qui venait, horrible au milieu d'eux,
Était à chaque marche encombré de squelettes
Et de cadavres froids aux bouches violettes,
Et le plancher rougi fumait, de sang baigné;
Le char qui le portait dans l'ombre était traîné
Par un hibou tenant dans sa griffe une hache.
Un être aux yeux de loup, homme par la moustache,
Au sommet de ce char s'agitait étonné,
Et se courbait furtif, livide et couronné.
Pas un de ces césars à l'allure guerrière
Ne regardait cet homme. A l'écart, et derrière,
Vêtu d'un noir manteau qui semblait un linceul,
Espèce de lépreux du trône, il venait seul;
Il posait les deux mains sur sa face morose
Comme pour empêcher qu'on y vît quelque chose;
Quand parfois il ôtait ses mains en se baissant,
En lettres qui semblaient faites avec du sang
On lisait sur son front ces trois mots:—Je le jure.
It is a fearful thing, said the Hebrew, to fall into the hands of the living God; and it is a fearful thing for a malefactor to fall into the hands of an ever-living poet. The injured Cæsars of Rome—Tiberius, for example, and Domitian—have not even yet been delivered by the most conscientious efforts of German and Anglo-German Cæsarists out of the prison whose keys are kept by Juvenal; and a greater than Juvenal is here.
Summoned to make answer to the charge of the angel of judgment, even these also have their resource for evasion, and cast all their crimes upon the Pope.
Il nous disait: Je suis celui qui parle aux rois;
Quiconque me résiste et me brave est impie,
Ce qu'ici-bas j'écris, là-haut Dieu le copie.
L'église, mon épouse, éclose au mont Thabor,
A fait de la doctrine une cage aux fils d'or,
Et comme des oiseaux j'y tiens toutes les âmes.
This man had blessed the murderers in their triumph, and cursed their victims in the grave:—
Sa ceinture servait de corde à nos potences.
Il liait de ses mains l'agneau sons nos sentences;
Et quand on nous criait: Grâce! il nous criait: Feu!
C'est à lui que le mal revient. Voilà, grand Dieu,
Ce qu'il a fait: voilà ce qu'il nous a fait faire.
Cet homme était le pôle et l'axe de la sphère;
Il est le responsable et nous le dénonçons!
Seigneur, nous n'avons fait que suivre ses leçons.
Seigneur, nous n'avons fait que suivre son exemple.
And the pontiff whose advent and whose promises had been hailed with such noble trust and acclaimed with such noble thankfulness by those who believed in him as a deliverer—by Landor among others, and by Hugo himself—the Caiaphas-Iscariot whose benediction and consecrated massacre and anointed perjury with the rancid oil of malodorous gladness above its fellows in, empire and in crime—is summoned out of darkness to receive sentence by the sevenfold sounding of trumpets.
Vêtu de lin plus blanc qu'un encensoir qui fume,
Il avait, spectre blême aux idoles pareil,
Les baisers de la foule empreints sur son orteil,
Dans sa droite un bâton comme l'antique archonte,
Sur son front la tiare, et dans ses yeux la honte.
De son cou descendait un long manteau doré,
Et dans son poignet gauche il tenait, effaré,
Comme un voleur surpris par celui qu'il dérobe,
Des clefs qu'il essayait de cacher sous sa robe.
Il était effrayant à force de terreur.
Quand surgit ce vieillard, on vit dans la lueur
L'ombre et le mouvement de quelqu'un qui se penche.
À l'apparition de cette robe blanche,
Au plus noir de l'abîme un tonnerre gronda.
Then from all points of the immeasurable spaces, from the womb of the cloud and the edge of the pit, is witness given against Pope Pius IX. by the tyrants and the victims, mothers and children and old men, the judges and the judged, the murderers mingling with the murdered, great and small, obscure and famous.
Tous ceux que j'avais vus passer dans les ténèbres,
Avançant leur front triste, ouvrant leur œil terni,
Fourmillement affreux qui peuplait l'infini,
Tous ces spectres, vivant, parlant, riant naguère,
Martyrs, bourreaux, et gens du peuple et gens de guerre,
Regardant l'homme blanc d'épouvante ébloui,
Elevèrent la main et crièrent: C'est lui.
Et pendant qu'ils criaient, sa robe devint rouge.
Au fond du gouffre où rien ne tressaille et ne bouge
Un écho répéta:—C'est lui!—Les sombres rois
Dirent:—C'est lui! c'est lui! c'est lui! voilà sa croix!
Les clefs du paradis sont dans ses mains fatales.—
Et l'homme-loup, debout sur les cadavres pâles
Dont le sang tiède encor tombait dans l'infini,
Cria d'une voix rauque et sourde:—Il m'a béni!
A judgment less terrible than what follows is that by which Dante long ago made fast the gates of hell upon Nicholas and Boniface and Clement with one stroke of his inevitable hand. The ghastly agony of the condemned is given with all the bitterest realism of the great elder anti-papist who sent so many vicars of Christ to everlasting torment for less offenses than those of Mastai-Ferretti.
Lui se tourna vers l'ange en frissonnant,
Et je vis le spectacle horrible et surprenant
D'un homme qui vieillit pendant qu'on le regarde.
L'agonie éteignit sa prunelle hagarde,
Sa bouche bégaya, son jarret se rompit,
Ses cheveux blanchissaient sur son front décrépit,
Ses tempes se ridaient comme si les années
S'étaient subitement sur sa face acharnées,
Ses yeux pleuraient, ses dents claquaient comme au gibet
Les genoux d'un squelette, et sa peau se plombait,
Et, stupide, il baissait, à chaque instant plus pâle,
Sa tête qu'écrasait la tiare papale.
From the sentence passed upon him after the avowal extorted by the angel of doom that he has none in the world above him but God alone on whom to cast the responsibility of his works, not a word may be taken away for the purpose of quotation, as not a word could have been added to it by Dante or by Ezekiel himself. But about the eternity of his damnation there is not, happily for the human conscience, any manner of doubt possible; it must endure as long as the poem which proclaims it: in other words, as long as the immortality of poetry itself.
This great and terrible poem, the very crown or coping-stone of all the Châtiments, has a certain affinity with two others in which the poet's yearning after justice and mercy has borne his passionate imagination as high and far as here. In Sultan Mourad his immeasurable and incomparable depth of pity and charity seems well nigh to have swallowed up all sense of necessary retribution: it is perhaps because the portentous array of crimes enumerated is remote in time and place from all experience of ours that conscience can allow the tenderness and sublimity of its inspiration to justify the moral and ratify the sentence of the poem:—
Viens! tu fus bon un jour, sois à jamais heureux.
Entre, transfiguré! tes crimes ténébreux,
O roi, derrière toi s'effacent dans les gloires;
Tourne la tête, et vois blanchir tes ailes noires.
But in the crowning song of all the great three cycles every need and every instinct of the spirit may find the perfect exaltation of content. The vast and profound sense of ultimate and inevitable equity which animates every line of it is as firm and clear as the solid and massive splendour of its articulate expression. The date of it is outside and beyond the lapse of the centuries of time; but the rule of the law of righteousness is there more evident and indisputable than ever during the flight of these. Hardly in the Hebrew prophecies is such distinct and vivid sublimity, as of actual and all but palpable vision, so thoroughly impregnated with moral and spiritual emotion. Not a verse of all that strike root into the memory forever but is great alike by imagination and by faith. In such a single line as this—
Que qui n'entendit pas le remords l'entendrait—
there is the very note of conscience done into speech, cast into form, forged into substance
Avec de l'équité condensée en airain.
But this couplet for immensity of imaginative range, is of one birth with the sublimest verses in the Book of Job:—
Et toute l'épouvante éparse au ciel est sœur
De cet impénétrable et morne avertisseur.
From the magnificent overture to the second series, in which the poet has embodied in audible and visible symbol the vision whence this book was conceived—a vision so far surpassing the perhaps unconsciously imitative inspiration of the Apocalypse, with its incurably lame and arduously prosaic efforts to reproduce the effect or mimic the majesty of earlier prophecies, that we are amazed if not scandalized to find that book actually bracketed in one sublime passage of this prelude with the greatest spiritual poem in the world, the Oresteia of Æschylus—the reader would infer that any student wishing to give a notion of the Légende des Siècles ought to have dwelt less than I have done upon a few of its innumerable beauties, and more than I have done upon the impression of its incomparable grandeur. But samples of pure sweetness and beauty are more easily and perhaps more profitably detached for quotation from their context than samples of a sublimity which can only be felt by full and appreciative study of an entire and perfect poem. And it is rather from the prelude itself than from any possible commentary on it that a thoughtful and careful reader will seek to gather the aim and meaning of the book. It is there likened to a vast disjointed ruin lit by gleams of light—'le reste effrayant de Babel'—a palace and a charnel in one, built by doom for death to dwell in:—
Où se posent pourtant parfois, quand elles l'osent,
De la façon dont l'aile et le rayon se posent,
La liberté, lumière, et l'espérance, oiseau.
But over and within this book—
traduit
Du passé, du tombeau, du gouffre et de la nuit—
faith shines as a kindling torch, hope breathes as a quickening wind, love burns as a cleansing fire. It is tragic, not with the hopeless tragedy of Dante or the all but hopeless tragedy of Shakespeare. Whether we can or cannot share the infinite hope and inviolable faith to which the whole active and suffering life of the poet has borne such unbroken and imperishable witness, we cannot in any case but recognize the greatness and heroism of his love for mankind. As in the case of Æschylus, it is the hunger and thirst after righteousness, the deep desire for perfect justice in heaven as on earth, which would seem to assure the prophet's inmost heart of its final triumph by the prevalence of wisdom and of light over all claims and all pleas established or asserted by the children of darkness, so in the case of Victor Hugo is it the hunger and thirst after reconciliation, the love of loving kindness, the master passion of mercy, which persists in hope and insists on faith even in face of the hardest and darkest experience through which a nation or a man can pass. When evil was most triumphant throughout Europe, he put forth in a single book of verse, published with strange difficulty against incredible impediments, such a protest as would entitle him to say, in the very words he has given to the Olympian of old—
Quand, dans le saint paean par les mondes chanté,
L'harmonie amoindrie avorte ou dégénère,
Je rends le rhythme aux cieux par un coup de tonnerre:
and now more than ever would the verses that follow befit the lips of their author, if speaking in his own person:—
Mon crâne plein d'échos, plein de lueurs, plein d'yeux,
Est l'antre éblouissant du grand Pan radieux;
En me voyant on croit entendre le murmure
De la ville habitée et de la moisson mûre,
Le bruit du gouffre au chant de l'azur réuni,
L'onde sur l'océan, le vent dans l'infini,
Et le frémissement des deux ailes du cygne.
It is held unseemly to speak of the living as we speak of the dead; when Victor Hugo has joined the company of his equals, but apparently not till then, it will seem strange to regard the giver of all the gifts we have received from him with less than love that deepens into worship, than worship that brightens into love. Meantime it is only in the phrase of one of his own kindred, poet and exile and prophet of a darker age than his, that the last word should here be spoken of the man by whose name our century will be known for ever to all ages and nations that keep any record or memory of what was highest and most memorable in the spiritual history of the past:—
Onorate l'altissimo poeta.
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET