'LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,' ETC.
I have reserved this poem for somewhat fuller mention than I have been
able to accord to Victor Hugo's other works. This is called for by
reason of the inherent grandeur of the work, and because upon this noble
achievement the greatness of the poet's fame must ultimately rest. Mr.
Swinburne holds it to be the greatest work of the century, and many
critics who have not his _perfervidum ingenium_ incline to the same
view. When the first part of the _Legende_ appeared, in 1859, it excited
so much interest that every poet of any note in France wrote warm
letters of congratulation to the author. To one of these, penned by
Baudelaire, and typical of the rest, Hugo characteristically replied.
Regarding humanity in two aspects--the historical and the legendary, and
maintaining that the latter was in one sense as true as the former,
Hugo took up the legendary side of the question in this Legend of the
Ages. It was intended to be followed by two other sections under the
respective titles of 'The End of Satan' and 'God.' The first part of
this great trilogy was far more striking than any of its author's
previous poems. Its brilliancy and energy, its literary skill and its
powerful conceptions, enchained the attention. The poet divided his work
into sixteen cycles, extending from the Creation to the Trump of
Judgment. A full and on the whole discriminating criticism of this
remarkable poem has been given by the Bishop of Derry, who also, with
some success, has translated passages from it. But Victor Hugo's French
is too peculiar and impassioned to be brought within the trammels of
English verse. Nevertheless, I will quote from the Bishop the last three
stanzas of that beautiful poem, _Booz Endormi_, one of the first set of
poems, all of which are devoted to Scriptural subjects. The rich man
Boaz sleeps, quite unconscious of the Moabitess Ruth, who lies expectant
at his feet:
'Asphodel scents did Gilgal's breezes bring--
Through nuptial shadows, questionless, full fast
The angels sped, for momently there pass'd
A something blue which seem'd to be a wing.
'Silent was all in Jezreel and in Ur--
The stars were glittering in the heaven's dusk meadows.
Far west among those flowers of the shadows,
The thin clear crescent, lustrous over her,
'Made Ruth raise question, looking through the bars
Of Heaven, with eyes half-oped, what God, what comer
Unto the harvest of the eternal summer,
Had flung his golden hook down on the field of stars.'
The second section deals with the Decadence of Rome, and here the poet's
imagination has full sway. The well-known story of Androcles and the
Lion is the subject of a beautiful poem. The third section is Islam, and
then come the Heroic Christian Cycle, the Day of Kings, etc. But perhaps
the most important composition in the work is Eviradnus, a poem in
praise of the true and gentle knight. The Thrones of the East, Ratbert,
Sultan Mourad, the Twentieth Century, and some other sections, all bear
evidence of intense poetic realism, and show the mastery of the author
over pictorial and dramatic effects.
The Bishop of Derry raises a question upon which a good deal might be
said, when he propounds a theory to the effect that Victor Hugo
possesses fancy rather than imagination. It may not be possible to
produce passages from Hugo which, for sustained grandeur and breadth of
conception, would be equal to isolated passages that could be cited from
Dante and Milton; yet there are as unquestionably scores of other
passages in the works of Victor Hugo in describing which it would be
wholly inadequate to use the term fancy. They are either grandly and
powerfully imaginative, or they are nothing. This writer no doubt too
frequently distorts his conceptions, while his treatment sometimes falls
from sublimity into caricature; but it is incontestable, I think, that
in spite of all _bizarrerie_, and every other exception or
qualification, he possesses a mobile and an impressive imagination.
In 1877 appeared the second part of _La Legende des Siecles_. Although
it scarcely rose to the level of the first part, it was not without
those exalted passages which gave supremacy to the poet. 'Once again the
seer surveys the cycle of humanity from the days of Paradise to the
future which he anticipates; he takes his themes alike from the legends
of the heroic age of Greece, and from the domains of actual history, and
after singing of the achievements of the great, he dedicates his lay to
the little ones, and in a charming poem entitled _Petit Paul_ he
depicts with fascinating pathos all the tenderness and all the sorrows
of childhood.'
The third and final part of the work was published in 1883. Discussing
the unity of tone which entitles this strange work, with its multitude
of separate characters and incidents, to be called a poem, a writer in
the _Athenaeum_ observed: 'It is an apprehension, at once profound and
tender, of the pathos of man's mysterious life on the earth; a pity such
as has never before been expressed by any poet; a beautiful faith in God
such as, in these days, can only find an echo in rare and noble souls;
and an aspiration for justice and the final emancipation of man such as
seems an anachronism, indeed, in a time which has given birth to Gautier
and to Baudelaire on the one hand, and to Zola and his followers on the
other.' Yet, notwithstanding its unity, it is not a little curious that
the Legend was as finished a work at the end of the first instalment as
it was at the end of the whole. As to the poetic qualities of the
closing part of the work, there was no decadence of true poetic impulse,
nor any subsidence of that marvellous brilliance which dazzled Europe
when the first part of the poem appeared. But neither was there any
growth of those highest poetic characteristics 'in which Hugo's
magnificent poetry was always weak--such as self-dominance, serenity,
and that wise sweetness of a balancing judgment, equitable alike to the
slave in the field and to the king on his throne, which belongs to the
mind we call dramatic, whether the dramatist be the writer of
_Oedipus_ or the writer of _Hamlet_.'
The _Legende des Siecles_ offers a bewildering maze of things, sweet,
beautiful, and sublime. It scintillates with the brilliant lights of
genius as the vault of heaven is fretted with the glittering stars. Yet
what is perhaps nobler still, as Mr. Swinburne has said, 'Over and
within this book faith shines as a kindling torch, hope breathes as a
quickening wind, love burns as a changing 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 recognise the greatness and heroism of his love for mankind.
As in the case of AEschylus, 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.
Hugo's poetic masterpiece, to translate his own language concerning it,
had its rise in the past, in the tomb, in the darkness and the night of
the ages; but permeating all is the regenerating light of a mighty
hope.'
The poet published in 1881 _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_. The work
which bore this fanciful title of the four winds of the Spirit was
divided into four distinct sections--the Book Satiric, the Book
Dramatic, the Book Lyric, and the Book Epic. The wind of Victor Hugo,
however, is chiefly of the lyric kind. It 'is like a fine sou'wester,
warm and bright, but deeply charged with tears. Over the bitter and
eager wind of satire, for instance, he has no real command, and none
over that bracing north wind of masculine thought and intellectual
strength which is necessary to vitalize epic and drama.' So it was
complained, and not without force or reason, that while it would be
impossible to praise the lyrical portions of his work too highly, the
satirical lacked subtlety and delicacy to make it effective; the epic
wanted a larger freedom of natural growth; while situations intended to
be dramatic rarely rose above the merely theatrical. The play in which
these situations occur is concerned with the absolute equality of all
men in regard to the great human passions. Cynicism or conventionality
may for a long period encrust a man, but there comes a time when the
heart will have its way. Hugo's latest illustrator of this truth, Duc
Gallus, rescues a peasant girl from a proposed marriage with a brutal
fellow whom she loathes, but rescues her with the deliberate intention
of making her his mistress. Though surrounded with splendour, the girl
soon pines and breaks her heart through sheer loneliness, and at last in
despair she kills herself by means of a poisoned ring. The Nemesis of
remorse now overtakes the Duc. Beneath this pretended cynicism there has
been all the while smouldering a real passion, which, now that it is too
late, breaks out into a fierce and inextinguishable flame; it was in
depicting these heights and depths of emotion that Hugo found his
keenest delight.
The Book Epic deals with the great French Revolution, but it is in the
Book Lyric that the poet achieves his finest triumph. In considering the
substance and variety of Hugo's lyrical efforts, every reader will agree
with the judgment that amongst poets of energy, as distinguished from
the poets of art and culture, Shelley's is the only name in
nineteenth-century literature which can stand beside that of Victor
Hugo.
In 1882 was published _Torquemada_, a drama written chiefly during
Victor Hugo's exile in Guernsey. The poet himself regarded it as one of
his best efforts, and it certainly exhibits his glowing imagination and
his power of depicting human misery at their highest. The great
Inquisitor is drawn as a single-minded enthusiast who, following
relentlessly to their conclusion the doctrines upon which he has been
nourished from childhood, burns and tortures people out of pure love of
their souls--that is, fastens their bodies to the stake for the purpose
of saving from the everlasting fires of hell both their souls and their
bodies. The poet shows how the idea gradually mastered him until it
became irresistible as fate. The chief point in the plot well
illustrates this. Torquemada having been condemned as a fanatic by the
Bishop of Urgel, is ordered to be bricked up alive in a vault. He is
rescued from his living tomb by two lovers, Don Sanche and Donna Rosa.
Torquemada swears to be their eternal friend, and subsequently saves
them from the wrath of the King. Sanche and Rosa are just being freed
when the former relates the manner of the deliverance of Torquemada from
his tomb. Sanche had used as a lever on that occasion an iron cross
which hung upon the tottering wall. 'O ciel! ils sont damnes!' exclaims
Torquemada, when he hears this. In his view the lovers are now condemned
to eternal perdition, but in order to save their souls he sends their
bodies to the stake. It need scarcely be said that the author, in
ascribing honesty and other characteristics to the bloodthirsty
Inquisitor, gives a more exalted view of him than is taken by impartial
history. But the play must be read for its poetry and its scenic
effects, which are magnificent.
A prose work by Hugo, to which considerable interest attaches, was
published in 1883, under the title of _L'Archipel de la Manche_. As its
title implies, it deals with the Channel Islands, in one of which the
author found for so long a time his home. From the literary aspect, the
work suffers when compared with its author's verse, which alone can be
grandly descriptive--at least since the production of his earlier
romances. But for its glimpses of the inhabitants of Guernsey, and its
occasional touches of rich local colour, this work may be turned to with
pleasure and advantage.