RÉGINA

Oui.--Mais moi je ne verrai

Ni l'oiseau revenir ni la feuille renaître!

Two years before the appearance of _Les Burgraves_ Victor Hugo had begun

his long and glorious career as an orator by a speech of

characteristically generous enthusiasm, delivered on his reception into

the Academy. The forgotten playwright and versifier whom he succeeded

had been a professional if not a personal enemy: the one memorable thing

about the man was his high-minded opposition to the tyranny of Napoleon,

his own personal friend before the epoch of that tyranny began: and this

was the point at once seized and dwelt on by the orator in a tone of

earnest and cordial respect. The fiery and rapturous eloquence with

which, at the same time, he celebrated the martial triumphs of the

empire, gave ample proof that he was now, as his father had prophesied

that his mother's royalist boy would become when he grew to be a man, a

convert to the views of that father, a distinguished though ill-requited

soldier of the empire, and a faithful champion or mourner of its cause.

The stage of Napoleonic hero-worship, single-minded and single-eyed if

short-sighted and misdirected, through which Victor Hugo was still

passing on towards the unseen prospect of a better faith, had been

vividly illustrated and vehemently proclaimed in his letters on the

Rhine, and was hereafter to be described with a fervent and pathetic

fidelity in a famous chapter of _Les Misérables._ The same phase of

patriotic prepossession inspired his no less generous tribute to the not

very radiant memory of Casimir Delavigne, to whom he paid likewise the

last and crowning honor of a funeral oration: an honor afterwards

conferred on Frédéric Soulié, and far more deservedly bestowed on

Honoré de Balzac. More generous his first political speech in the

chamber of peers could not be, but there was more of reason and justice

in its fruitless appeal for more than barren sympathy, for a moral

though not material intervention, on behalf of Poland in 1846. His

second speech as a peer is an edifying commentary on the vulgar English

view of his character as defective in all the practical and rational

qualities of a politician, a statesman, or a patriot. The subject was

the consolidation and defense of the French coastline: a poet, of

course, according to all reasonable tradition, if he ventured to open

his unserviceable lips at all on such a grave matter of public business,

ought to have remembered what was expected of him by the sagacity of

blockheads, and carefully confined himself to the clouds, leaving facts

to take care of themselves and proofs to hang floating in the air, while

his vague and verbose declamation wandered at its own sweet will about

and about the matter in hand, and never came close enough to grapple it.

This, I regret to say, is exactly what the greatest poet of his age was

inconsiderate enough to avoid, and most markedly to abstain from doing;

a course of conduct which can only be attributed to his notorious and

deplorable love of paradox. His speech, though not wanting in eloquence

of a reserved and masculine order, was wholly occupied with sedate and

business-like exposition of facts and suggestion of remedies, grounded

on experience and study of the question, and resulting in a proposal at

once scientific and direct for such research as might result, if

possible, in an arrest of the double danger with which the coast was

threatened by the advance of the Atlantic and the Channel to a gradual

obstruction of the great harbors and by the withdrawal or subsidence of

the Mediterranean from the seaports of the south; finally, the orator

urged upon his audience as a crowning necessity the creation of fresh

harbors of refuge in dangerous and neglected parts of the coast;

insisting, with a simple and serious energy somewhat unlike the

imaginary tone of the typical or traditional poet, on the plain fact

that ninety-two ships had been lost on the same part of the coast within

a space of seven years, which might have been saved by the existence of

a harbor of refuge. To an Olympian or a Nephelococcygian intelligence

such a paltry matter should have been even more indifferent than the

claim of a family of exiles on the compassion of the country which had

expelled them. To my own more humble and homely understanding it seems

that there are not many more significant or memorable facts on record in

the history of our age than this: that Victor Hugo was the advocate

whose pleading brought back to France the banished race of which the

future representative was for upwards of twenty years to keep him in

banishment from France. On the evening of the same day on which the

house of peers had listened to his speech in behalf of the Bonaparte

family, Louis-Philippe, having taken cognizance of it, expressed his

intention to authorize the return of the brood whose chief was hereafter

to pick the pockets of his children. In the first fortnight of the

following year the future author of the terrible _Vision of Dante_

saluted in words full of noble and fervent reverence the apostle of

Italian resurrection and Italian unity in the radiant figure of Pope

Pius the Ninth. When the next month's revolution had flung

Louis-Philippe from his throne, Victor Hugo declined to offer himself to

the electors as a candidate for a seat in the assembly about to

undertake the charge of framing a constitution for the commonwealth;

but, if summoned by his fellow-citizens to take his share of this task,

he expressed himself ready to discharge the duty so imposed on him with

the disinterested self-devotion of which his whole future career was to

give such continuous and such austere evidence. From the day on which

sixty thousand voices summoned him to redeem this pledge, he never

stinted nor slackened his efforts to fulfill the charge he had accepted

in the closing words of a short, simple, and earnest address, in which

he placed before his electors the contrasted likenesses of two different

republics; one, misnamed a commonweal, the rule of the red flag, of

barbarism and blindness, communism and proscription and revenge; the

other a commonwealth indeed, in which all rights should be respected and

no duties evaded or ignored; a government of justice and mercy, of

practicable principles and equitable freedom, of no iniquitous

traditions and no utopian aims. To establish this kind of commonwealth

and prevent the resurrection of the other, Hugo, at the age of

forty-six, professed himself ready to devote his life. The work of

thirty-seven years is now before all men's eyes for proof how well this

promise has been kept. On dangerous questions of perverse or perverted

socialism (June 20, 1848), on the freedom of the press, on the state of

siege, its temporary necessity and its imminent abuse, on the

encouragement of letters and the freedom of the stage, he spoke, in the

course of a few months, with what seems to my poor understanding the

most admirable good sense and temperance, the most perfect moderation

and loyalty. I venture to dwell upon this division of Hugo's life and

labors with as little wish of converting as I could have hope to convert

that large majority whose verdict has established as a law of nature the

fact or the doctrine that "every poet is a fool" when he meddles with

practical politics; but not without a confidence grounded on no

superficial study that the maintainers of this opinion, if they wish to

cite in support of it the evidence supplied by Victor Hugo's political

career, will do well to persevere in the course which I will do them the

justice to admit that--as far as I know--they have always hitherto

adopted; in other words, to assume the universal assent of all persons

worth mentioning to the accuracy of this previous assumption, and

dismiss with a quiet smile or an open sneer the impossible notion that

any one but some single imbecile or eccentric can pretend to take

seriously what seems to them ridiculous, or to think that ridiculous

which to their wiser minds commends itself as serious. This beaten road

of assumption, this well-worn highway of assertion, is a safe as well as

a simple line of travel: and the practical person who keeps to it can

well afford to dispense with argument as palpably superfluous, and with

evidence as obviously impertinent. Should he so far forget that great

principle of precaution as to diverge from it into the modest and simple

course of investigation and comparison of theory with fact and

probability with proof, his task maybe somewhat harder, and its result

somewhat less satisfactory. I would not advise any but an honest and

candid believer in the theory which identifies genius with idiocy--which

at all events would practically define one special form of genius as a

note of general idiocy--to study the speeches (they are nine in number,

including two brief and final replies to the personal attacks of one

Montalembert, whose name used to be rather popular among a certain class

of English journalists as that of a practical worshipper of their great

god Compromise, and a professional enemy of all tyranny or villainy that

was not serviceable and obsequious to his Church)--to study, I say, the

speeches delivered by Victor Hugo in the Legislative Assembly during a

space of exactly two years and eight days. The first of these speeches

dealt with the question of what in England we call pauperism--with the

possibility, the necessity, and the duty of its immediate relief and its

ultimate removal: the second, with the infamous and inexpiable crime

which diverted against the Roman republic an expedition sent out under

the plea of protecting Rome against the atrocities of Austrian triumph.

A double-faced and double-dealing law, which under the name or the mask

of free education aimed at securing for clerical instruction a monopoly

of public support and national encouragement, was exposed and denounced

by Hugo in a speech which insisted no less earnestly and eloquently on

the spiritual duty and the spiritual necessity of faith and hope than on

the practical necessity and duty of vigilant resistance to priestly

pretension, and vigilant exposure of ecclesiastical hypocrisy and

reactionary intrigue. Against "the dry guillotine" of imprisonment in a

tropical climate added to transportation for political offences, the

whole eloquence of a heart as great as his genius was poured forth in

fervor of indignation and pity, of passion and reason combined. The next

trick of the infamous game played by the conspirators against the

commonwealth, who were now beginning to show their hand, was the

mutilation of the suffrage. To this again Victor Hugo opposed the same

steadfast front of earnest and rational resistance; and yet again to the

sidelong attack of the same political gang on the existing freedom of

the press. A year and eight days elapsed before the delivery of his next

and last great speech in the Assembly which he would fain have saved

from the shame and ruin then hard at hand--the harvest of its own

unprincipled infatuation. The fruit of conspiracy, long manured with

fraud and falsehood and all the furtive impurities of intrigue, was now

ripe even to rottenness, and ready to fall into the hands already

stretched towards it--into the lips yet open to protest that no one--the

accuser himself must know it--that no one was dreaming of a second

French empire. All that reason and indignation, eloquence and argument,

loyalty and sincerity could do to save the commonwealth from destruction

and the country from disgrace, was done: how utterly in vain is matter

of history--of one among the darkest pages in the roll of its criminal

records. The voice of truth and honor was roared and hooted down by the

faction whose tactics would have discredited a den of less dishonest and

more barefaced thieves; the stroke of state was ready for striking; and

the orator's next address was the utterance of an exile.

There are not, even in the whole work of Victor Hugo, many pages of

deeper and more pathetic interest than those which explain to us "what

exile is." Each of the three prefaces to the three volumes of his _Actes

et Paroles_ is rich in living eloquence, in splendid epigram and

description, narrative and satire and study of men and things: but the

second, it seems to me, would still be first in attraction, if it had no

other claim than this, that it contains the record of the death of

Captain Harvey. No reverence for innocent and heroic suffering, no

abhorrence of triumphant and execrable crime, can impede or interfere

with our sense of the incalculable profit, the measureless addition to

his glory and our gain, resulting from Victor Hugo's exile of nineteen

years and nine months. Greater already than all other poets of his time

together, these years were to make him greater than any but the very

greatest of all time. His first task was of course the discharge of a

direct and practical duty; the record or registration of the events he

had just witnessed, the infliction on the principal agent in them of the

simple and immediate chastisement consisting in the delineation of his

character and the recapitulation of his work. There would seem to be

among modern Englishmen an impression--somewhat singular, it appears to

me, in a race which professes to hold in special reverence a book so

dependent for its arguments and its effects on a continuous appeal to

conscience and emotion as the Bible--that the presence of passion, be it

never so righteous, so rational, so inevitable by any one not ignoble or

insane, implies the absence of reason; that such indignation as inflamed

the lips of Elijah with prophecy, and armed the hand of Jesus with a

scourge, is a sign--except of course in Palestine of old--that the

person affected by this kind of moral excitement must needs be a lunatic

of the sentimental if not rather of the criminal type. The main facts

recorded in the pages of _Napoléon le Petit_ and _L'Histoire d'un

Crime_ are simple, flagrant, palpable, indisputable. The man who takes

any other view of them than is expressed in these two books must be

prepared to impugn and to confute the principle that perjury, robbery,

and murder are crimes. But, we are told, the perpetual vehemence of

incessant imprecation, the stormy insistence of unremitting obloquy,

which accompanies every chapter, illuminates every page, underlines

every sentence of the narrative, must needs impair the confidence of an

impartial reader in the trustworthiness of a chronicle and a commentary

written throughout as in characters of flaming fire. Englishmen are

proud to prefer a more temperate, a more practical, a more sedate form

of political or controversial eloquence. When I remember and consider

certain examples of popular oratory and controversy now flagrant and

flourishing among us, I am tempted to doubt the exact accuracy of this

undoubtedly plausible proposition: but, be that as it may, I must take

leave to doubt yet more emphatically the implied conclusion that the

best or the only good witness procurable on a question of right and

wrong is one too impartial to feel enthusiasm or indignation; that

indifference alike to good and evil is the sign of perfect equity and

trustworthiness in a judge of moral or political questions; that a man

who has witnessed a deliberate massacre of unarmed men, women, and

children, if he be indiscreet enough to describe his experience in any

tone but that of a scientific or æsthetic serenity, forfeits the

inherent right of a reasonable and an honorable man to command a

respectful and attentive hearing from all honorable and reasonable men.

But valuable and precious as all such readers will always hold these two

book of immediate and implacable history, they will not, I presume, be

rated among the more important labors of their author's literary life.

No one who would know fully or would estimate aright the greatest genius

born into the world in our nineteenth century can afford to pass them by

with less than careful and sympathetic study: for without moral sympathy

no care will enable a student to form any but a trivial and a frivolous

judgment on writings which make their primary appeal to the

conscience--to the moral instinct and the moral intelligence of the

reader. They may perhaps not improperly be classed, for historic or

biographic interest, with the _Littérature et Philosophie mêlées_

which had been given to the world in 1834. From the crudest impressions

of the boy to the ripest convictions of the man, one common quality

informs and harmonizes every stage of thought, every phase of feeling,

every change of spiritual outlook, which has left its mark on the

writings of which that collection is composed; the quality of a pure, a

perfect, an intense and burning sincerity. Apart from this personal

interest which informs them all, two at least are indispensable to any

serious and thorough study of Hugo's work: the fervent and reiterated

intercession on behalf of the worse than neglected treasures of

mediaeval architecture then delivered over for a prey to the claws of

the destroyer and the paws of the restorer; the superb essay on

Mirabeau, which remains as a landmark or a tidemark in the history of

his opinions and the development of his powers. But the highest

expression of these was not to be given in prose--not even in the prose

of Victor Hugo.

There is not, it seems to me, in all this marvelous life, to which well

nigh every year brought its additional aureole of glory, a point more

important, a date more memorable, than the publication of the

_Châtiments._ Between the prologue _Night_ and the epilogue _Light_ the

ninety-eight poems that roll and break and lighten and thunder like

waves of a visible sea fulfill the choir of their crescent and refluent

harmonies with hardly less depth and change and strength of music, with

no less living force and with no less passionate unity, than the waters

on whose shores they were written. Two poems, the third and the sixth,

in the first of the seven books into which the collection is divided,

may be taken as immediate and sufficient instances of the two different

keys in which the entire book is written; of the two styles, one

bitterly and keenly realistic, keeping scornfully close to shameful

fact--one higher in flight and wider in range of outlook, soaring

strongly to the very summits of lyric passion--which alternate in

terrible and sublime antiphony throughout the living pages of this

imperishable record. A second Juvenal might have drawn for us with not

less of angry fidelity and superb disgust the ludicrous and loathsome

inmates of the den infested by holy hirelings of the clerical press; no

Roman satirist could have sung, no Roman lyrist could have thundered,

such a poem as that which has blasted for ever the name and the memory

of the prostitute archbishop Sibour. The poniard of the priest who

struck him dead at the altar he had desecrated struck a blow less deep

and deadly than had been dealt already on the renegade pander of a far

more infamous assassin. The next poem is a notable and remarkable

example of the fusion sometimes accomplished--or, if this be thought a

phrase too strong for accuracy, of the middle note sometimes touched, of

the middle way sometimes taken--between the purely lyric and the purely

satiric style or method. But it would be necessary to dwell on every

poem, to pause at every page, if adequate justice were to be done to

this or indeed to any of the volumes of verse published from this time

forth by Victor Hugo. I will therefore, not without serious diffidence,

venture once more to indicate by selection such poems as seem to me most

especially notable among the greatest even of these. In the first book,

besides the three already mentioned, I take for examples the solemn

utterance of indignant mourning addressed to the murdered dead of the

fourth of December; the ringing song in praise of art which ends in a

note of noble menace; the scornful song that follows it, with a burden

so majestic in its variations; the fearful and faithful "map of Europe"

in 1852, with its closing word of witness for prophetic hope and faith;

and the simple perfection of pathos in the song of the little forsaken

birds and lambs and children. In the second book, the appeal "To the

People," with a threefold cry for burden, calling on the buried Lazarus

to rise again in words that seem to reverberate from stanza to stanza

like peal upon peal of living thunder, prolonged in steadfast cadence

from height to height across the hollows of a range of mountains, is one

of the most wonderful symphonies of tragic and triumphant verse that

ever shook the hearts of its hearers with rapture of rage and pity. The

first and the two last stanzas seem to me absolutely unsurpassed and

unsurpassable for pathetic majesty of music.

Partout pleurs, sanglots, cris funèbres.

Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?

Je ne veux pas que tu sois mort.

Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres?

Ce n'est pas l'instant où l'on dort.

La pâle Liberté gît sanglante à ta porte.

Tu le sais, toi mort, elle est morte.

Voici le chacal sur ton seuil,

Voici les rats et les belettes,

Pourquoi t'es-tu laissé lier de bandelettes?

Ils te mordent dans ton cercueil!

De tous les peuples on prépare

Le convoi...--

Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!

Lève-toi!

* * * * * *

Ils bâtissent des prisons neuves;

Ô dormeur sombre, entends les fleuves

Murmurer, teints de sang vermeil;

Entends pleurer les pauvres veuves,

Ô noir dormeur au dur sommeil!

Martyrs, adieu! le vent souffle, les pontons flottent,

Les mères au front gris sanglotent;

Leurs fils sont en proie aux vainqueurs;

Elles gémissent sur la route;

Les pleurs qui de leurs yeux s'échappent goutte à goutte

Filtrent en haine dans nos cœurs.

Les juifs triomphent, groupe avare

Et sans foi...--

Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!

Lève-toi!

Mais, il semble qu'on se réveille!

Est-ce toi que j'ai dans l'oreille,

Bourdonnement du sombre essaim?

Dans la ruche frémit l'abeille;

J'entends sourdre un vague tocsin.

Les césars, oubliant qu'il est des gémonies,

S'endorment dans les symphonies,

Du lac Baltique au mont Etna;

Les peuples sont dans la nuit noire;

Dormez, rois; le clairon dit aux tyrans: victoire!

Et l'orgue leur chante; hosanna!

Qui répond à cette fanfare?

Le beffroi...--

Lazare! Lazare! Lazare!

Lève-toi!

If ever a more superb structure of lyric verse was devised by the brain

of man, it must have been, I am very certain, in a language utterly

unknown to me. Every line, every pause, every note of it should be

studied and restudied by those who would thoroughly understand the

lyrical capacity of Hugo's at its very highest point of power, in the

fullest sweetness of its strength.

About the next poem--'Souvenir de la nuit du 4'--others may try, if they

please, to write, if they can; I can only confess that I cannot. Nothing

so intolerable in its pathos, I should think, was ever written.

The stately melody of the stanzas in which the exile salutes in a tone

of severe content the sorrows that environ and the comforts that sustain

him, the island of his refuge, the sea-birds and the sea-rocks and the

sea, closes aptly with yet another thought of the mothers weeping for

their children.

Puisque le juste est dans l'abîme,

Puisqu'on donne le sceptre au crime,

Puisque tous les droits sont trahis,

Puisque les plus fiers restent mornes,

Puisqu'on affiche au coin des bornes

Le déshonneur de mon pays;

Ô République de nos pères,

Grand Panthéon plein de lumières.

Dôme d'or dans le libre azur,

Temple des ombres immortelles,

Puisqu'on vient avec des échelles

Coller l'empire sur ton mur;

Puisque toute âme est affaiblie,

Puisqu'on rampe, puisqu'on oublie

Le vrai, le pur, le grand, le beau.

Les yeux indignés de l'histoire,

L'honneur, la loi, le droit, la gloire,

Et ceux qui sont dans le tombeau;

Je t'aime, exil! douleur, je t'aime!

Tristesse, sois mon diadème!

Je t'aime, altière pauvreté!

J'aime ma porte aux vents battue.

J'aime le deuil, grave statue

Qui vient s'asseoir à mon côté.

J'aime le malheur qui m'éprouve,

Et cette ombre où je vous retrouve,

Ô vous à qui mon cœur sourit,

Dignité, foi, vertu voilée,

Toi, liberté, fière exilée,

Et toi, dévouement, grand proscrit!

J'aime cette île solitaire,

Jersey, que la libre Angleterre

Couvre de son vieux pavillon,

L'eau noire, par moments accrue,

Le navire, errante charrue,

Le flot, mystérieux sillon.

J'aime ta mouette, ô mer profonde,

Qui secoue en perles ton onde

Sur son aile aux fauves couleurs,

Plonge dans les lames géantes,

Et sort de ces gueules béantes

Comme l'âme sort des douleurs.

J'aime la roche solennelle

D'où j'entends la plainte éternelle,

Sans trêve comme le remords,

Toujours renaissant dans les ombres,

Des vagues sur les écueils sombres,

Des mères sur leurs enfants morts.

The close of the third poem in the fourth book is a nobler protest than

ever has been uttered or ever can be uttered in prose against the

servile sophism of a false democracy which affirms or allows that a

people has the divine right of voting itself into bondage. There is

nothing grander in Juvenal, and nothing more true.

Ce droit, sachez-le bien, chiens du berger Maupas,

Et la France et le peuple eux-mêmes ne l'ont pas.

L'altière Vérité jamais ne tombe en cendre.

La Liberté n'est pas une guenille à vendre,

Jetée au tas, pendue au clou chez un fripier.

Quand un peuple se laisse au piège estropier,

Le droit sacré, toujours à soi-même fidèle,

Dans chaque citoyen trouve une citadelle;

On s'illustre en bravant un lâche conquérant,

Et le moindre du peuple en devient le plus grand.

Donc, trouvez du bonheur, ô plates créatures,

À vivre dans la fange et dans les pourritures,

Adorez ce fumier sous ce dais de brocart,

L'honnête homme recule et s'accoude à l'écart.

Dans la chute d'autrui je ne veux pas descendre.

L'honneur n'abdique point. Nul n'a droit de me prendre

Ma liberté, mon bien, mon ciel bleu, mon amour.

Tout l'univers aveugle est sans droit sur le jour.

Fût on cent millions d'esclaves, je suis libre.

Ainsi parle Caton. Sur la Seine ou le Tibre,

Personne n'est tombé tant qu'un seul est debout.

Le vieux sang des aïeux qui s'indigne et qui bout,

La vertu, la fierté, la justice, l'histoire,

Toute une nation avec toute sa gloire

Vit dans le dernier front qui ne veut pas plier.

Pour soutenir le temple il suffit d'un pilier;

Un français, c'est la France; un romain contient Rome,

Et ce qui brise un peuple avorte aux pieds d'un homme.

The sixth and seventh poems in this book are each a superb example of

its kind; the verses on an interview between Abd-el-Kader and Bonaparte

are worthy of a place among the earlier _Orientales_ for simplicity and

fullness of effect in lyric tone and color; and satire could hardly give

a finer and completer little study than that of the worthy tradesman who

for love of his own strong-box would give his vote for a very Phalaris

to reign over him, and put up with the brazen bull for love of the

golden calf: an epigram which sums up an epoch. The indignant poem of

_Joyeuse Vie_, with its terrible photographs of subterranean toil and

want, is answered by the not less terrible though ringing and radiant

song of _L'empereur s'amuse_; and this again by the four solemn stanzas

in which a whole world of desolate suffering is condensed and realized.

The verses of good counsel in which the imperial Macaire is admonished

not to take himself too seriously, or trust in the duration of his fair

and foul good fortune, are unsurpassed for concentration of contempt.

The dialogue of the tyrannicide by the starlit sea with all visible and

invisible things that impel or implore him to do justice is so splendid

and thrilling in its keen and ardent brevity that we can hardly feel as

though a sufficient answer were given to the instinctive reasoning which

finds inarticulate utterance in the cry of the human conscience for

retribution by a human hand, even when we read the two poems, at once

composed and passionate in their austerity, which bid men leave God to

deal with the supreme criminal of humanity. _A Night's Lodging_, the

last poem of the fourth book, is perhaps the very finest and most

perfect example of imaginative and tragic satire that exists: if this

rank be due to a poem at once the most vivid in presentation, the most

sublime in scorn, the most intense and absolute in condensed expression

of abhorrence and in assured expression of belief.

But in the fifth of these seven caskets of chiseled gold and tempered

steel there is a pearl of greater price than in any of the four yet

opened. The song dated from sea, which takes farewell of all good things

and all gladness left behind--of house and home, of the flowers and the

sky, of the betrothed bride with her maiden brow--the song which has in

its burden tile heavy plashing sound of the wave following on the wave

that swells and breaks against the bulwarks--the song of darkening

waters and darkened lives has in it a magic, for my own ear at least,

incomparable in the whole wide world of human song. Even to the greatest

poets of all time such a godsend as this--such a breath of instant

inspiration--can come but rarely and seem given as by miracle. "There is

sorrow on the sea," as the prophet said of old; but when was there

sorrow on sea or land which found such piercing and such perfect

utterance as this?

Adieu, patrie!

L'onde est en furie.

Adieu, patrie,

Azur!

Adieu, maison, treille au fruit mûr

Adieu, les fleurs d'or du vieux mur!

Adieu, patrie!

Ciel, forêt, prairie!

Adieu, patrie,

Azur!

Adieu, patrie!

L'onde est en furie.

Adieu, patrie,

Azur!

Adieu, fiancée au front pur.

Le ciel est noir, le vent est dur.

Adieu, patrie!

Lise, Anna, Marie!

Adieu, patrie.

Azur!

Adieu, patrie!

L'onde est en furie.

Adieu, patrie,

Azur!

Notre œil, que voile un deuil futur.

Va du flot sombre au sort obscur.

Adieu, patrie!

Pour toi mon cœur prie.

Adieu, patrie,

Azur!

The next poem is addressed to a disappointed accomplice of the crime

still triumphant and imperial in the eyes of his fellow-scoundrels, who

seems to have shown signs of a desire to break away from them and a

suspicion that even then the ship of empire was beginning to

leak--though in fact it had still seventeen years of more or less

radiant rascality to float through before it foundered in the ineffable

ignominy of Sedan. Full of ringing and stinging eloquence, of keen and

sonorous lines or lashes of accumulating scorn, this poem is especially

noteworthy for its tribute to the murdered republic of Rome. Certain

passages in certain earlier works of Hugo, in _Cromwell_ for instance

and in _Marie Tudor_, had given rise to a natural and indeed inevitable

suspicion of some prejudice or even antipathy on the writer's part which

had not less unavoidably aroused a feeling among Italians that his

disposition or tone of mind was anything but cordial or indeed amicable

towards their country: a suspicion probably heightened, and a feeling

probably sharpened, by his choice of such dramatic subjects from Italian

history or tradition as the domestic eccentricities of the exceptional

family of Borgia, and the inquisitorial misdirection of the degenerate

commonwealth of Venice. To the sense that Hugo was hardly less than an

enemy and that Byron had been something more than a well-wisher to Italy

I have always attributed the unquestionable and otherwise inexplicable

fact that Mazzini should have preferred the pinchbeck and tinsel of

Byron to the gold and ivory of Hugo. But it was impossible that the

master poet of the world should not live to make amends, if indeed

amends were needed, to the country of Mazzini and of Dante.

If I have hardly time to mention the simple and vivid narrative of the

martyrdom of Pauline Roland, I must pause at least to dwell for a moment

on so famous and so great a poem as _L'Expiation_; but not to pronounce,

or presume to endeavor to decide, which of its several pictures is the

most powerful, which of its epic or lyric variations the most impressive

and triumphant in effect. The huge historic pageant of ruin, from Moscow

to Waterloo, from Waterloo to St. Helena, with the posthumous interlude

of apotheosis which the poet had loudly and proudly celebrated just

twelve years earlier in an ode, turned suddenly into the peep-show of a

murderous mountebank, the tawdry triumph of buffoons besmeared with

innocent blood, is so tremendous in its anticlimax that not the

sublimest and most miraculous climax imaginable could make so tragic and

sublime an impression so indelible from the mind. The slow agony of the

great army under the snow; its rout and dissolution in the supreme hour

of panic; the slower agony, the more gradual dissolution, of the

prisoner with a gaoler's eye intent on him to the last; who can say

which of these three is done into verse with most faultless and

sovereign power of hand, most pathetic or terrific force and skill? And

the hideous judicial dishonor of the crowning retribution after death,

the parody of his empire and the prostitution of his name, is so much

more than tragic by reason of the very farce in it that out of ignominy

itself and uttermost degradation the poet has made something more august

in moral impression than all pageants of battle or of death.

In the sixth book I can but rapidly remark the peculiar beauty and

greatness of the lyric lines in which the sound of steady seas regularly

breaking on the rocks at Rozel Tower is rendered with so solemn and

severe an echo of majestic strength in sadness; the verses addressed to

the people on its likeness and unlikeness to the sea; the scornful and

fiery appeal to the spirit of Juvenal; the perfect idyllic picture of

spring, with all the fruitless exultation of its blossoms and its birds,

made suddenly dark and dissonant by recollection of human crime and

shame; the heavenly hopefulness of comfort in the message of the morning

star, conveyed into colors of speech and translated into cadences of

sound which no painter or musician could achieve.

Je m'étais endormi la nuit près de la grève.

Un vent frais m'éveilla, je sortis de mon rêve,

J'ouvris les yeux, je vis l'étoile du matin.

Elle resplendissait au fond du ciel lointain

Dans une blancheur molle, infinie et charmante.

Aquilon s'enfuyait emportant la tourmente.

L'astre éclatant changeait la nuée en duvet.

C'était une clarté qui pensait, qui vivait;

Elle apaisait l'écueil où la vague déferle;

On croyait voir une âme à travers une perle.

Il faisait nuit encor, l'ombre régnait en vain,

Le ciel s'illuminait d'un sourire divin.

La lueur argentait le haut du mât qui penche;

Le navire était noir, mais la voile était blanche;

Des goëlands debout sur un escarpement,

Attentifs, contemplaient l'étoile gravement

Comme un oiseau céleste et fait d'une étincelle:

L'océan qui ressemble au peuple allait vers elle,

Et, rugissant tout bas, la regardait briller,

Et semblait avoir peur de la faire envoler.

Un ineffable amour emplissait l'étendue.

L'herbe verte à mes pieds frissonnait éperdue,

Les oiseaux se parlaient dans les nids; une fleur

Qui s'éveillait me dit: c'est l'étoile ma sœur.

Et pendant qu'à longs plis l'ombre levait son voile,

J'entendis une voix qui venait de l'étoile

Et qui disait:--Je suis l'astre qui vient d'abord.

Je suis celle qu'on croit dans la tombe et qui sort.

J'ai lui sur le Sina, j'ai lui sur le Taygète;

Je suis le caillou d'or et de feu que Dieu jette,

Comme avec une fronde, au front noir de la nuit.

Je suis ce qui renaît quand un monde est détruit.

Ô nations! je suis la Poésie ardente.

J'ai brillé sur Moïse et j'ai brillé sur Dante.

Le lion océan est amoureux de moi.

J'arrive. Levez-vous, vertu, courage, foi!

Penseurs, esprits! montez sur la tour, sentinelles!

Paupières, ouvrez-vous; allumez-vous, prunelles;

Terre, émeus le sillon; vie, éveille le bruit;

Debout, vous qui dormez; car celui qui me suit,

Car celui qui m'envoie en avant la première,

C'est l'ange Liberté, c'est le géant Lumière!

The first poem of the seventh book, on the falling of the walls of

Jericho before the seventh trumpet-blast, is equally great in

description and in application; the third is one of the great lyric

masterpieces of all time, the triumphant ballad of the Black Huntsman,

unsurpassed in the world for ardor of music and fitful change of note

from mystery and terror to rage and tempest and supreme serenity of

exultation--"wind and storm fulfilling his word," we may literally say

of this omnipotent sovereign of song.

The sewer of Rome, a final receptacle for dead dogs and rotting Cæsars,

is painted line by line and detail by detail in verse which touches with

almost frightful skill the very limit of the possible or permissible to

poetry in the way of realistic loathsomeness or photographic horror;

relieved here and there by a rare and exquisite image, a fresh breath or

tender touch of loveliness from the open air of the daylight world

above. The song on the two Napoleons is a masterpiece of skilful

simplicity in contrast of tones and colors. But the song which follows,

written to a tune of Beethoven's, has in it something more than the

whole soul of music, the whole passion of self-devoted hope and

self-transfiguring faith; it gives the final word of union between sound

and spirit, the mutual coronation and consummation of them both.

_PATRIA_

La-haut qui sourit?

Est-ce un esprit?

Est-ce une femme?

Quel front sombre et doux!

Peuple, à genoux!

Est-ce notre âme

Qui vient à nous?

Cette figure en deuil

Paraît sur notre seuil,

Et notre antique orgueil

Sort du cercueil.

Ses fiers regards vainqueurs

Réveillent tous les cœurs,

Les nids dans les buissons,

Et les chansons.

C'est l'ange du jour;

L'espoir, l'amour

Du cœur qui pense;

Du monde enchanté

C'est la clarté.

Son nom est France

Ou Vérité.

Bel ange, à ton miroir

Quand s'offre un vil pouvoir,

Tu viens, terrible à voir,

Sous le ciel noir.

Tu dis au monde: Allons!

Formez vos bataillons!

Et le monde ébloui

Te répond: Oui.

C'est l'ange de nuit.

Rois, il vous suit.

Marquant d'avance

Le fatal moment

Au firmament.

Son nom est France

Ou Châtiment.

Ainsi que nous voyons

En mai les alcyons,

Voguez, ô nations,

Dans ses rayons

Son bras aux deux dressé

Ferme le noir passé

Et les portes de fer

Du sombre enfer.

C'est l'ange de Dieu.

Dans le ciel bleu

Son aile immense

Couvre avec fierté

L'humanité.

Son nom est France

Ou Liberté!

The _Caravan_, a magnificent picture, is also a magnificent allegory and

a magnificent hymn. The poem following sums up in twenty-six lines a

whole world of terror and of tempest hurtling and wailing round the

wreck of a boat by night. It is followed by a superb appeal against the

infliction of death on rascals whose reptile blood would dishonor and

defile the scaffold: and this again by an admonition to their chief not

to put his trust in the chance of a high place of infamy among the more

genuinely imperial hellhounds of historic record. The next poem gives us

in perfect and exquisite summary the opinions of a contemporary

conservative on a dangerous anarchist of extravagant opinions and

disreputable character, whom for example's sake it was at length found

necessary to crucify. There is no song more simply and nobly pitiful

than that which tells us in its burden how a man may die for lack of his

native country as naturally and inevitably as for lack of his daily

bread. I cite only the last three stanzas by way of sample.

Les exilés: s'en vont pensifs.

Leur âme, hélas! n'est plus entière.

Ils regardent l'ombre des ifs

Sur les fosses du cimetière;

L'un songe à l'Allemagne altière,

L'autre an beau pays transalpin,

L'autre à sa Pologne chérie.

--On ne peut pas vivre sans pain;

On ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie.--

Un proscrit, lassé de souffrir,

Mourait; calme, il fermait son livre;

Et je lui dis: "Pourquoi mourir?"

Il me répondit: "Pourquoi vivre?"

Puis il reprit: "Je me délivre.

Adieu! je meurs. Néron Scapin

Met aux fers la France flétrie..."

--On ne pent pas vivre sans pain;

Où ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie.

"...Je meurs de ne plus voir les champs

Où je regardais l'aube naître,

De ne plus entendre les chants

Que j'entendais de ma fenêtre.

Mon âme est où je ne puis être.

Sons quatre planches de sapin

Enterrez-moi dans la prairie."

--On ne peut pas vivre sans pain;

On ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie.

Then, in the later editions of the book, came the great and terrible

poem on the life and death of the miscreant marshal who gave the

watchword of massacre in the streets of Paris, and died by the

visitation of disease before the walls of Sebastopol. There is hardly a

more splendid passage of its kind in all the _Légende des Siècles_

than the description of the departure of the fleet in order of battle

from Constantinople for the Crimea; nor a loftier passage of more

pathetic austerity in all this book of _Châtiments_ than the final

address of the poet to the miserable soul, disembodied at length after

long and loathsome suffering, of the murderer and traitor who had earned

no soldier's death.[2]

And then come those majestic "last words" which will ring for ever in

the ears of men till manhood as well as poetry has ceased to have honor

among mankind. And then comes a poem so great that I hardly dare venture

to attempt a word in its praise. We cannot choose but think, as we read

or repeat it, that "such music was never made" since the morning stars

sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. This epilogue of

a book so bitterly and inflexibly tragic begins as with a peal of golden

bells, or an outbreak of all April in one choir of sunbright song;

proceeds in a graver note of deep and trustful exultation and yearning

towards the future; subsides again into something of a more subdued key,

while the poet pleads for his faith in a God of righteousness with the

righteous who are ready to despair; and rises from that tone of

awe-stricken and earnest pleading to such a height and rapture of

inspiration as no Hebrew psalmist or prophet ever soared beyond in his

divinest passion of aspiring trust and worship. It is simply impossible

that a human tongue should utter, a human hand should write, anything of

more supreme and transcendent beauty than the last ten stanzas of the

fourth division of this poem. The passionate and fervent accumulation of

sublimities, of marvelous images and of infinite appeal, leaves the

sense too dazzled, the soul too entranced and exalted, to appreciate at

first or in full the miraculous beauty of the language, the superhuman

sweetness of the song. The reader impervious to such impressions may

rest assured that what he admires in the prophecies or the psalms of

Isaiah or of David is not the inspiration of the text, but the warrant

and sign-manual of the councils and the churches which command him to

admire them on trust.

Ne possède-t-il pas toute la certitude?

Dieu ne remplit-il pas ce monde, notre étude,

Du nadir au zénith?

Notre sagesse auprès de la sienne est démence.

Et n'est-ce pas à lui que la clarté commence,

Et que l'ombre finit?

Ne voit-il pas ramp r les hydres sur leurs ventres?

Ne regarde-t-il pas jusqu'au fond de leurs antres

Atlas et Pélion?

Ne connaît-il pas l'heure où la cigogne émigre?

Sait-il pas ton entrée et ta sortie, ô tigre,

Et ton antre, ô lion?

Hirondelle, réponds, aigle à l'aile sonore,

Parle, avez-vous des nids que l'Eternel ignore?

Ô cerf, quand l'as-tu fui?

Renard, ne vois-tu pas ses yeux dans la broussaille?

Loup, quand tu sens la nuit une herbe qui tressaille,

Ne dis-tu pas: C'est lui!

Puisqu'il sait tout cela, puisqu'il peut toute chose,

Que ses doigts font jaillir les effets de la cause

Comme un noyau d'un fruit,

Puisqu'il peut mettre un ver dans les pommes de l'arbre,

Et faire disperser les colonnes de marbre

Par le vent de la nuit;

Puisqu'il bat l'océan pareil au bœuf qui beugle,

Puisqu'il est le voyant et que l'homme est l'aveugle,

Puisqu'il est le milieu,

Puisque son bras nous porte, et puisqu'à son passage

La comète frissonne ainsi qu'en une cage

Tremble une étoupe en feu;

Puisque l'obscure nuit le connaît, puisque l'ombre

Le voit, quand il lui plaît, sauver la nef qui sombre,

Comment douterions-nous,

Nous qui, fermes et purs, fiers dans nos agonies,

Sommes debout devant toutes les tyrannies,

Pour lui seul, à genoux!

D'ailleurs, pensons. Nos jours sont des jours

d'amertume,

Mais, quand nous étendons les bras dans cette brume,

Nous sentons une main;

Quand nous marchons, courbés, dans l'ombre du martyre,

Nous entendons quelqu'un derrière nous nous dire:

C'est ici le chemin.

Ô proscrits, l'avenir est aux peuples! Paix, gloire,

Liberté, reviendront sur des chars de victoire

Aux foudroyants essieux;

Ce crime qui triomphe est fumée et mensonge.

Voilà ce que je puis affirmer, moi qui songe

L'œil fixé sur les cieux.

Les césars sont plus fiers que les vagues marines,

Mais Dieu dit:--Je mettrai ma boucle en leurs narines.

Et dans leur bouche un mors,

Et je tes traînerai, qu'on cède ou bien qu'on lutte,

Eux et leurs histrions et leurs joueurs de flûte,

Dans l'ombre où sont les morts!

Dieu dit; et le granit que foulait leur semelle

S'écroule, et les voilà disparus pêle-mêle

Dans leurs prospérités!

Aquilon! aquilon! qui viens battre nos portes,

Oh! dis-nous, si c'est toi, souffle, qui les emportes,

Où les as-tu jetés?

Three years after the _Châtiments_ Victor Hugo published the

_Contemplations_; the book of which he said that if the title did not

sound somewhat pretentious it might be called "the memoirs of a soul."

No book had ever in it more infinite and exquisite variety; no concert

ever diversified and united such inexhaustible melodies with such

unsurpassable harmonies. The note of fatherhood was never touched more

tenderly than in the opening verses of gentle counsel, whose cadence is

fresher and softer than the lapse of rippling water or the sense of

falling dew: the picture of the poet's two little daughters in the

twilight garden might defy all painters to translate it: the spirit,

force, and fun of the controversial poems, overflowing at once with good

humor, with serious thought, and with kindly indignation, give life and

charm to the obsolete questions of wrangling schools and pedants; and

the last of them, on the divine and creative power of speech, is at once

profound and sublime enough to grapple easily and thoroughly with so

high and deep a subject. The songs of childish loves and boyish fancies

are unequalled by any other poets known to me for their union of purity

and gentleness with a touch of dawning ardor arid a hint of shy delight:

_Lise, La Coccinelle, Vieille chanson du jeune temps_, are such sweet

miracles of simple perfection as we hardly find except in the old songs

of unknown great poets who died and left no name. The twenty-first poem,

a lyric idyl of but sixteen lines, has something more than the highest

qualities of Theocritus; in color and in melody it does but equal the

Sicilian at his best, but there are two lines at least in it beyond his

reach for depth and majesty of beauty. _Childhood_ and _Unity_, two

poems of twelve and ten lines respectively, are a pair of such flawless

jewels as lie now in no living poet's casket. Among the twenty-eight

poems of the second book, if I venture to name with special regard the

second and the fourth, two songs uniting the subtle tenderness of

Shelley's with the frank simplicity of Shakespeare's; the large and

living land--scape in a letter dated from Tréport; the tenth and the

thirteenth poems, two of the most perfect love-songs in the world,

written (if the phrase be permissible) in a key of serene rapture; the

"morning's note," with its vision of the sublime sweetness of life

transfigured in a dream; _Twilight_, with its opening touches of magical

and mystic beauty; above all, the mournful and tender magnificence of

the closing poem, with a pathetic significance in the double date

appended to the text: I am ready to confess that it is perhaps

presumptuous to express a preference even for these over the others. Yet

perhaps it may be permissible to select for transcription two of the

sweetest and shortest among them.

Mes vers fuiraient, doux et frêles,

Vers votre jardin si beau,

Si mes vers avaient des ailes,

Des ailes comme l'oiseau.

Ils voleraient, étincelles,

Vers votre foyer qui rit,

Si mes vers avaient des ailes,

Des ailes comme l'esprit.

Près de vous, purs et fidèles,

Ils accourraient nuit et jour,

Si mes vers avaient des ailes,

Des ailes comme l'amour.

Nothing of Shelley's exceeds this for limpid perfection of melody,

renewed in the next lyric with something of a deeper and more fervent

note of music.

Si vous n'avez rien à me dire,

Pourquoi venir auprès de moi?

Pourquoi me faire ce sourire

Qui tournerait la tête au roi?

Si vous n'avez rien à me dire,

Pourquoi venir auprès de moi?

Si vous n'avez rien à m'apprendre,

Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main?

Sur le rêve angélique et tendre,

Auquel vous songez en chemin,

Si vous n'avez rien à m'apprendre,

Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main?

Si vous voulez que je m'en aille,

Pourquoi passez-vous par ici?

Lorsque je vous vois, je tressaille,

C'est ma joie et c'est mou souci.

Si vous voulez que je m'en aille,

Pourquoi passez-vous par ici?

In the third book, which brings us up to the great poet's forty-second

year, the noble poem called _Melancholia_ has in it a foretaste and a

promise of all the passionate meditation, all the studious and

indefatigable pity, all the forces of wisdom and of mercy which were to

find their completer and supreme expression in _Les Misérables._ In

_Saturn_ we may trace the same note of earnest and thoughtful meditation

on the mystery of evil, on the vision so long cherished by mankind of

some purgatorial world, the shrine of expiation or the seat of

retribution, which in the final volume of the _Légende des Siècles_

was toched again with a yet more august effect: the poem there called

_Inferi_ resumes and expands the tragic thought here first admitted into

speech and first clothed round with music. The four lines written

beneath a crucifix may almost be said to sum up the whole soul and

spirit of Christian faith or feeling in the brief hour of its early

purity, revived in every age again for some rare and beautiful

natures—and for these alone.

Vous qui pleurez, venez à ce Dieu, car il pleure.

Vous qui souffrez, venez à lui, car il guérit.

Vous qui tremblez, venez à lui, car il sourit.

Vous qui passez, venez à lui, car il demeure.

_La Statue_, with its grim swift glance over the worldwide rottenness of

imperial Rome, finds again an echo yet fuller and more sonorous than the

note which it repeats in the poem on Roman decadence which forms the

eighth division of the revised and completed _Légende des Siècles._

The two delicately tender poems on the death of a little child are well

relieved by the more terrible tenderness of the poem on a mother found

dead of want among her four little children. In this and the next poem,

a vivid and ghastly photograph of vicious poverty, we find again the

same spirit of observant and vigilant compassion that inspires and

informs the great prose epic of suffering which records the redemption

of Jean Valjean: and in the next, suggested by the sight (a sorrowful

sight always, except perhaps to very small children or adults yet more

diminutive in mental or spiritual size) of a caged lion, we recognize

the depth of noble pity which moved its author to write _Le Crapaud_--a

poem redeemed in all rational men's eyes from the imminent imputation of

repulsive realism by the profound and pathetic beauty of the closing

lines--and we may recognize also the imaginative and childlike sympathy

with the traditional king of beasts which inspired him long after to

write _L'Épopée du Lion_ for the benefit of his grandchildren.

_Insomnie_, a record of the tribute exacted by the spirit from the body,

when the impulse to work and to create will not let the weary workman

take his rest, but enforces him, reluctant and recalcitrant, to rise and

gird up his loins for labor in the field of imaginative thought, is

itself a piece of work well worth the sacrifice even of the happiness of

sleep. The verses on music, suggested by the figure of a flute-playing

shepherd on a bas-relief; the splendid and finished picture of spring,

softened rather than shadowed by the quiet thought of death; the deep

and tender fancy of the dead child's return to its mother through the

gateway of a second birth; the grave sweetness and gentle fervor of the

verses on the outcast and detested things of the animal and the

vegetable world; and, last, the nobly thoughtful and eloquent poem on

the greatness of such little things as the fire on the shepherd's hearth

confronting the star at sunset, which may be compared with the _Prayer

for all men_ in the _Feuilles d'Automne_; these at least demand a rapid

word of thankful recognition before we close the first volume of the

_Contemplations._

The fourth book, as most readers will probably remember, contains the

poems written in memory of Victor Hugo's daughter, drowned by the

accidental capsizing of a pleasure-boat, just six months and seventeen

days after her marriage with the young husband who chose rather to share

her death than to save himself alone. These immortal songs of mourning

are almost too sacred for critical appreciation of even the most

reverent and subdued order. There are numberless touches in them of such

thrilling beauty, so poignant in their simplicity and so piercing in

their truth, that silence is perhaps the best or the only commentary on

anything so "rarely sweet and bitter." One only may perhaps be cited

apart from its fellows: the sublime little poem headed _Mors._

Je vis cette faucheuse. Elle était dans son champ.

Elle allait à grands pas moissonnant et fauchant,

Noir squelette laissant passer le crépuscule.

Dans l'ombre où l'on dirait que tout tremble et recule,

L'homme suivait des yeux les lueurs de sa faulx.

Et les triomphateurs sous les arcs triomphaux

Tombaient; elle changeait en désert Babylone,

Le trône en échafaud et l'échafaud en trône,

Les roses en fumier, les enfants en oiseaux,

L'or en cendre, et les yeux des mères en ruisseaux.

Et les femmes criaient: Rends-nous ce petit être.

Pour le faire mourir, pourquoi l'avoir fait naître?

Ce n'était qu'un sanglot sur terre, en haut, en bas;

Des mains aux doigts osseux sortaient des noirs grabats;

Un vent froid bruissait dans les linceuls sans nombre;

Les peuples éperdus semblaient sous la faulx sombre

Un troupeau frissonnant qui dans l'ombre s'enfuit:

Tout était sous ses pieds deuil, épouvante et nuit.

Derrière elle, le front baigné de douces flammes,

Un ange souriant portait la gerbe d'âmes.

The fifth book opens most fitly with an address to the noble poet who

was the comrade of the author's exile and the brother of his

self-devoted son-in-law. Even Hugo never wrote anything of more stately

and superb simplicity than this tribute of fatherly love and praise, so

well deserved and so royally bestowed. The second poem, addressed to the

son of a poet who had the honor to receive the greatest of all his kind

as a passing guest in the first days of his long exile, is as simple and

noble as it is gentle and austere. The third, written in reply to the

expostulations of an old friend and a distant kinsman, is that admirable

vindication of a man's right to grow wiser, and of his duty to speak the

truth as he comes to see it better, which must have imposed silence and

impressed respect on all assailants if respect for integrity and genius

were possible to the imbecile or the vile, and if silence or abstinence

from insult were possible to the malignant or the fool The epilogue,

appended nine years later to this high-minded and brilliant poem, is as

noble in imagination, in feeling, and in expression, as the finest page

in the _Châtiments._

_ÉCRIT EN 1855_

J'ajoute un post-scriptum après neuf ans. J'écoute;

Êtes-vous toujours là? Vous êtes mort sans doute,

Marquis; mais d'où je suis on peut parler aux morts.

Ah! votre cercueil s'ouvre:--Où donc es tu?--Dehors.

Comme vous.--Es-tu mort?--Presque. J'habite l'ombre.

Je suis sur un rocher qu'environne l'eau sombre,

Écueil rongé des flots, de ténèbres chargé,

Où s'assied, ruisselant, le blême naufragé.

--Eh bien, me dites-vous, après?--La solitude

Autour de moi toujours a la même attitude;

Je ne vois que l'abîme, et la mer, et les cieux,

Et les nuages noirs qui vont silencieux;

Mon toit, la nuit, frissonne, et l'ouragan le mêle

Aux souffles effrénés de l'onde et de la grêle;

Quelqu'un semble clouer un crêpe à l'horizon;

L'insulte dat de loin le seuil de ma maison;

Le roc croule sous moi dès que mon pied s'y pose;

Le vent semble avoir peur de m'approcher, et n'ose

Me dire qu'en baissant la voix et qu'à demi

L'adieu mystérieux que me jette un ami.

La rumeur des vivants s'éteint diminuée.

Tout ce que j'ai rêvé s'est envolé, nuée!

Sur mes jours devenus fantômes, pâle et seul,

Je regarde tomber l'infini, ce linceul.--

Et vous dites:--Après?--Sous un mont qui surplombe,

Près des flots, j'ai marqué la place de ma tombe;

Ici, le bruit du gouffre est tout ce qu'on entend;

Tout est horreur et nuit--Après?--Je suis content.

The verses addressed to friends whose love and reverence had not

forsaken the exile--to Jules Janin, to Alexandre Dumas, above all to

Paul Meurice--are models of stately grace in their utterance of serene

and sublime resignation, of loyal and affectionate sincerity: but those

addressed to the sharers of his exile--to his wife, to his children, to

their friend--have yet a deeper spiritual music in the sweet and severe

perfection of their solemn cadence. I have but time to name with a word

of homage in passing the famous and faultless little poem _Aux

Feuillantines_, fragrant with the memory and musical as the laugh of

childhood; the memorial verses recurring here and there, with such

infinite and subtle variations on the same deep theme of mourning or of

sympathy; the great brief studies of lonely landscape, imbued with such

grave radiance and such noble melancholy, or kindled with the motion and

quickened by the music of the sea: but two poems at all events I must

select for more especial tribute of more thankful recognition: the

sublime and wonderful vision of the angel who was neither life nor

death, but love, more strong than either; and the all but sublimer

allegory couched in verse of such majestic resonance, which shows us the

star of Venus in heaven above the ruin of her island on earth. The

former and shorter of these is as excellent an example as could be

chosen of its author's sovereign simplicity of insight and of style.

_APPARITION_

Je vis un ange blanc qui passait sur ma tête;

Son vol éblouissant apaisait la tempête,

Et faisait taire au loin la mer pleine de bruit.

--Qu'est-ce que tu viens faire, ange, dans cette nuit?

Lui dis-je. Il répondit:--Je viens prendre ton âme.--

Et j'eus peur, car je vis que c'était une femme;

Et je lui dis, tremblant et lui tendant les bras:

--Que me restera-t-il? car tu t'envoleras.--

Il ne répondit pas; le ciel que l'ombre assiège

S'éteignait...--Si tu prends mon âme, m'écriai-je.

Où l'emporteras-tu? montre-moi dans quel lieu.

Il se taisait toujours.--O passant du ciel bleu,

Es-tu la mort? lui dis-je, ou bien es-tu la vie?--

Et la nuit augmentait sur mon âme ravie,

Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:--Je suis l'amour.

Mais son front sombre était plus charmant que le jour,

Et je voyais, dans l'ombre où brillaient ses prunelles,

Les astres à travers les plumes de ses ailes.

If nothing were left of Hugo but the sixth book of the _Contemplations_,

it would yet be indisputable among those who know anything of poetry

that he was among the foremost in the front rank of the greatest poets

of all time. Here, did space allow, it would be necessary for criticism

with any pretense to adequacy to say something of every poem in turn, to

pause for observation of some beauty beyond reach of others at every

successive page. In the first poem a sublime humility finds such

expression as should make manifest to the dullest eye not clouded by

malevolence and insolent conceit that when this greatest of modern poets

asserts in his own person the prerogative and assumes for his own spirit

the high office of humanity, to confront the darkest problem and to

challenge the utmost force of intangible and invisible injustice as of

visible and tangible iniquity, of all imaginable as of all actual evil,

of superhuman indifference as well as of human wrongdoing, it is no

merely personal claim that he puts forward, no vainly egotistic

arrogance that he displays; but the right of a reasonable conscience and

the duty of a righteous faith, common to ail men alike in whom

intelligence of right and wrong, perception of duty or conception of

conscience can be said to exist at all. If there be any truth in the

notion of any difference between evil and good more serious than the

conventional and convenient fabrications of doctrine and assumption,

then assuredly the meanest of his creatures in whom the perception of

this difference was not utterly extinct would have a right to denounce

an omnipotent evil-doer as justly amenable to the sentence inflicted by

the thunders of his own unrighteous judgment. How profound and intense

was the disbelief of Victor Hugo in the rule or in the existence of any

such superhuman malefactor could not be better shown than by the almost

polemical passion of his prophetic testimony to that need for faith in a

central conscience and a central will on which he has insisted again and

again as a crowning and indispensable, requisite for moral and spiritual

life. From the sublime daring, the self-confidence born of

self-devotion, which finds lyrical utterance in the majestic verses

headed _Ibo_, through the humble and haughty earnestness of remonstrance

and appeal--"humble to God, haughty to man"--which pervades the next

three poems, the meditative and studious imagination of the poet passes

into the fuller light and larger air of thought which imbues and informs

with immortal life every line of the great religious poem called _Pleurs

dans la nuit._ In this he touches the highest point of poetic

meditation, as in the epilogue to the _Châtiments_, written four months

earlier, he had touched the highest point of poetic rapture possible to

the most ardent of believers in his faith and the most unapproachable

master of his art. Where all is so lofty in its coherence of

construction, so perfect in its harmony of composition, it seems

presumptuous to indicate any special miracle of inspired workmanship:

yet, as Hugo in his various notes on mediaeval architecture was wont to

select for exceptional attention and peculiar eloquence of praise this

or that part or point of some superb and harmonious building, so am I

tempted to dwell for a moment on the sublime imagination, the pathetic

passion, of the verses which render into music the idea of a terrene and

material purgatory, with its dungeons of flint and cells of clay wherein

the spirit imprisoned and imbedded may envy the life and covet the

suffering of the meanest animal that toils on earth; and to set beside

this wonderful passage that other which even in a poem so thoroughly

imbued with hope and faith finds place and voice for expression of the

old mysterious and fantastic horror of the grave, more perfect than ever

any mediæval painter or sculptor could achieve.

Le soir vient; l'horizon s'emplit d'inquiétude;

L'herbe tremble et bruit comme une multitude;

Le fleuve blanc reluit;

Le paysage obscur prend les veines des marbres;

Ces hydres que, le jour, on appelle des arbres,

Se tordent dans la nuit.

Le mort est seul. Il sent la nuit qui le dévore.

Quand naît le doux matin, tout l'azur de l'aurore,

Tous ses rayons si beaux,

Tout l'amour des oiseaux et leurs chansons sans nombre,

Vont aux berceaux dorés; et, la nuit, toute l'ombre

Aboutit aux tombeaux.

Il entend des soupirs dans les fosses voisines;

Il sent la chevelure affreuse des racines

Entrer dans son cercueil;

Il est l'être vaincu dont s'empare la chose;

Il sent un doigt obscur, sous sa paupière close,

Lui retirer son œil.

Il a froid; car le soir qui mêle à son haleine

Les ténèbres, l'horreur, le spectre et le phalène,

Glace ces durs grabats;

Le cadavre, lié de bandelettes blanches,

Grelotte, et dans sa bière entend les quatre planches

Qui lui parlent tout bas.

L'une dit:--Je fermais ton coffre-fort--Et l'autre

Dit:--J'ai servi de porte au toit qui fut le nôtre.--

L'autre dit:--Aux beaux jours,

La table où rit l'ivresse et que le vin encombre.

C'était moi.--L'autre dit:--J'étais le chevet sombre

Du lit de tes amours.

Among all the poems which follow, some exquisite in their mystic

tenderness as the elegiac stanzas on _Claire_ and the appealing address

to a friend unknown (_À celle qui est voilée_), others possessed with

the same faith and wrestling with the same questions as beset and

sustained the writer of the poem at which we have just rapidly and

reverently glanced, there are three at least which demand--at any rate

one passing word of homage. The solemn song of meditation "at the window

by night" seems to me to render in its first six lines the aspects and

sounds of sea and cloud and wind and trees and stars with an utterly

incomparable magic of interpretation.

Les étoiles, points d'or, percent les branches noires;

Le flot huileux et lourd décompose ses moires

Sur l'océan blêmi;

Les nuages ont l'air d'oiseaux prenant la fuite;

Par moments le vent parle, et dit des mots sans suite,

Comme un homme endormi.

No poet but one could have written the three stanzas, so full of

infinite sweetness and awe, inscribed "to the angels who see us."

--Passant, qu'es-tu? je te connais.

Mais, étant spectre, ombre et nuage,

Tu n'as plus de sexe ni d'âge.

--Je suis ta mère, et je venais!

--Et toi dont l'aile hésite et brille,

Dont l'œil est noyé de douceur,

Qu'es-tu, passant?--Je suis ta sœur.

--Et toi, qu'es-tu?--Je suis ta fille.

--Et toi, qu'es-tu, passant?--Je suis

Celle à qui tu disais: Je t'aime!

--Et toi?--Je suis ton âme même.--

Oh! cachez-moi, profondes nuits!

Nor could any other hand have achieved the pathetic perfection of the

verses in which just thirty years since, twelve years to a day after the

loss of his daughter, and fifteen years to a day before the return of

liberty which made possible the return of Victor Hugo to France, his

claims to the rest into which he now has entered, and his reasons for

desiring the attainment of that rest, found utterance unexcelled for

divine and deep simplicity by any utterance of man on earth.

_EN FRAPPANT À UNE PORTE_

J'ai perdu mon père et ma mère,

Mon premier-né, bien jeune, hélas!

Et pour moi la nature entière

Sonne le glas.

Je dormais entre mes deux frères;

Enfants, nous étions trois oiseaux;

Hélas! le sort change en deux bières

Leurs deux berceaux.

Je t'ai perdue, ô fille chère,

Toi qui remplis, ô mon orgueil,

Tout mon destin de la lumière

De ton cercueil!

J'ai su monter, j'ai su descendre.

J'ai vu l'aube et l'ombre en mes cieux.

J'ai connu la pourpre, et la cendre

Qui me va mieux.

J'ai connu les ardeurs profondes,

J'ai connu les sombres amours;

J'ai vu fuir les ailes, les ondes,

Les vents, les jours.

J'ai sur ma tête des orfraies;

J'ai sur tous mes travaux l'affront,

Au pied la poudre, au cœur des plaies,

L'épine au front.

J'ai des pleurs à mon œil qui pense,

Des trous à ma robe en lambeau;

Je n'ai rien à la conscience;

Ouvre, tombeau.

Last comes the magnificent and rapturous hymn of universal redemption

from suffering as from sin, the prophetic vision of evil absorbed by

good, and the very worst of spirits transfigured into the likeness of

the very best, in which the daring and indomitable faith of the seer

finds dauntless and supreme expression in choral harmonies of unlimited

and illimitable hope. The epilogue which dedicates the book to the

daughter whose grave was now forbidden ground to her father--so long

wont to keep there the autumnal anniversary of his mourning--is the very

crown and flower of the immortal work which it inscribes, if we may say

so, rather to the presence than to the memory of the dead.

Not till the thirtieth year from the publication of these two volumes

was the inexhaustible labor of the spirit which inspired them to cease

for a moment--and then, among us at least, for ever. Three years

afterwards appeared the first series of the _Légende des Siècles_, to

be followed nineteen years later by the second, and by the final

complementary volume six years after that: so that between the inception

and the conclusion of the greatest single work accomplished in the

course of our century a quarter of that century had elapsed--with

stranger and more tragic evolution of events than any poet or any seer

could have foretold or foreseen as possible. Three years again from this

memorable date appeared the great epic and tragic poem of contemporary

life and of eternal humanity which gave us all the slowly ripened fruit

of the studies and emotions, the passions and the thoughts, the

aspiration and the experience, brought finally to their full and perfect

end in _Les Misérables._ As the key-note of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ was

doom--the human doom of suffering to be nobly or ignobly endured--so the

key-note of its author's next romance was redemption by acceptance of

suffering and discharge of duty in absolute and entire obedience to the

utmost exaction of conscience when it calls for atonement, of love when

it calls for sacrifice of all that makes life more endurable than death.

It is obvious that no account can here be given of a book which if it

required a sentence would require a volume to express the character of

its quality or the variety of its excellence--the one unique, the latter

infinite as the unique and infinite spirit whose intelligence and whose

goodness gave it life.

Two years after _Les Misérables_ appeared the magnificent book of

meditations on the mission of art in the world, on the duty of human

thought towards humanity, inscribed by Victor Hugo with the name of

William Shakespeare. To allow that it throws more light on the greatest

genius of our own century than on the greatest genius of the age of

Shakespeare is not to admit that it is not rich in valuable and noble

contemplations or suggestions on the immediate subject of Shakespeare's

work; witness the admirably thoughtful and earnest remarks on Macbeth,

the admirably passionate and pathetic reflections on Lear. The splendid

eloquence and the heroic enthusiasm of Victor Hugo never found more

noble and sustained expression than in this volume--the spontaneous and

inevitable expansion of a projected preface to his son's incomparable

translation of Shakespeare. The preface actually prefixed to it is

admirable for concision, for insight, and for grave historic humor. It

appeared a year after the book which (so to speak) had grown out of it;

andin the same year appeared the _Chansons des Rues et des Bois._ The

miraculous dexterity of touch, the dazzling mastery of metre, the

infinite fertility in variations on the same air of frolic and

thoughtful fancy, would not apparently allow the judges of the moment to

perceive or to appreciate the higher and deeper qualities displayed in

this volume of lyric idyls. The prologue is a superb example of the

power peculiar to its author above all other poets; the power of seizing

on some old symbol or image which may have been in poetic use ever since

verse dawned upon the brain of man, and informing it again as with life,

and transforming it anew as by fire. Among innumerable exercises and

excursions of dainty but indefatigable fancy there are one or two

touches of a somewhat deeper note than usual which would hardly be

misplaced in the gravest and most ambitious works of imaginative genius.

The twelve lines (of four syllables each) addressed _À la belle

Imperieuse_ are such, for example, as none but a great poet of passion,

a master of imaginative style, could by any stroke of chance or at any

cost of toil have written.

L'amour, panique

De la raison,

Se communique

Par le frisson.

Laissez-moi dire,

N'accordez rien.

Si je soupire,

Chantez, c'est bien.

Si je demeure,

Triste, à vos pieds,

Et si je pleure,

C'est bien, riez.

Un homme semble

Souvent trompeur.

Mais si je tremble,

Belle, ayez peur.

The sound of the songs of a whole woodland seems to ring like audible

spring sunshine through the adorable song of love and youth rejoicing

among the ruins of an abbey.

Seuls tous deux, ravis, chantants!

Comme on s'aime!

Comme on cueille le printemps

Que Dieu sème!

Quels rires étincelants

Dans ces ombres

Pleines jadis de fronts blancs.

De cœurs sombres!

On est tout frais mariés.

On s'envoie

Les charmants cris variés

De la joie.

Purs ébats mêlés au vent

Qui frissonne!

Gaîtés que le noir couvent

Assaisonne!

On effeuille des jasmins

Sur la pierre

Où l'abbesse joint ses mains

En prière.

Ses tombeaux, de croix marqués,

Font partie

De ces jeux, un peu piqués

Par l'ortie.

Ou se cherche, on se poursuit,

On sent croître

Ton aube, amour, dans la nuit

Du vieux cloître.

On s'en va se becquetant,

On s'adore,

On s'embrasse à chaque instant,

Puis encore,

Sous les piliers, les arceaux,

Et les marbres.

C'est l'histoire des oiseaux

Dans les arbres.

The inexhaustible exuberance of fancies lavished on the study of the

natural church, built by the hawthorn and the nettle in the depth of the

living wood, with foliage and wind and flowers, leaves the reader not

unfit for such reading actually dazzled with delight: In a far different

key, the _Souvenir des vieilles guerres_ is one of Hugo's most pathetic

and characteristic studies of homely and heroic life. The dialogue which

follows, between the irony of skepticism and the enthusiasm of reason,

on the progressive ascension of mankind, is at once sublime and subdued

in the fervent tranquillity of its final tone: and the next poem, on the

so-called "great age" and its dwarf of a Cæsar with the sun for a

periwig, has in it a whole volume of history and of satire condensed

into nine stanzas of four lines of five syllables apiece.

_LE GRAND SIÈCLE_

Ce siècle a la forme

D'un monstrueux char.

Sa croissance énorme

Sous un nain césar.

Son air de prodige,

Sa gloire qui ment,

Mêlent le vertige

À l'écrasement.

Louvois pour ministre,

Scarron pour griffon,

C'est un chant sinistre

Sur un air bouffon.

Sur sa double roue

Le grand char descend;

L'une est dans la boue,

L'autre est dans le sang.

La mort au carrosse

Attelle--où va-t-il?--

Lavrillière atroce,

Roquelaure vil.

Comme un geai dans l'arbre,

Le roi s'y tient fier;

Son cœur est de marbre

Son ventre est de chair.

On a pour sa nuque

Et son front vermeil

Fait une perruque

Avec le soleil.

Il règne et végète,

Effrayant zéro

Sur qui se projette

L'ombre du bourreau.

Ce trône est la tombe;

Et sur le pavé

Quelque chose en tombe

Qu'on n'a point lavé.

The exquisite poem on the closure of the church already described for

the winter is as radiant with humor as with tenderness: and the epilogue

responds in cadences of august antiphony to the moral and imaginative

passion which imbues with life and fire the magnificent music of the

prologue.

In the course of the next four years Victor Hugo published the last two

great works which were to be dated from the haven of his exile. It would

be the very ineptitude of impertinence for any man's presumption to

undertake the classification or registry of his five great romances in

positive order of actual merit: but I may perhaps be permitted to say

without fear of deserved rebuke that none is to me personally a treasure

of greater price than _Les Travailleurs de la Mer._ The splendid energy

of the book makes the superhuman energy of the hero seem not only

possible but natural, and his triumph over all physical impossibilities

not only natural but inevitable. Indeed, when glancing at the

animadversions of a certain sort of critics on certain points or

passages in this and in the next romance of its author, I am perpetually

inclined to address them in the spirit--were it worth while to address

them in any wise at all--after the fashion if not after the very phrase

of Mirabeau's reply to a less impertinent objector. Victor Hugo's

acquaintance with navigation or other sciences may or may not have been

as imperfect as Shakespeare's acquaintance with geography and natural

history; the knowledge of such a man's ignorance or inaccuracy in detail

is in either case of exactly equal importance: and the importance of

such knowledge is for all men of sense and candor exactly equivalent to

zero.

Between the tragedy of Gilliatt and the tragedy of Gwynplaine Victor

Hugo published nothing but the glorious little poem on the slaughter of

Mentana, called _La Voix de Guernesey_, and (in the same year) the

eloquent and ardent effusion of splendid and pensive enthusiasm prefixed

to the manual or guide-book which appeared on the occasion of the

international exhibition at Paris three years before the collapse of the

government which then kept out of France the Frenchmen most regardful of

her honor and their own. In the year preceding that collapse he

published _L'Homme qui Rit_; a book which those who read it aright have

always ranked and will always rank among his masterpieces. A year and

eight months after the fall of the putative Bonaparte he published the

terrible register of _L'Année Terrible._ More sublime wisdom, more

compassionate equity, more loyal self-devotion never found expression in

verse of more varied and impassioned and pathetic magnificence. The

memorial poem in which Victor Hugo so royally repaid, with praise beyond

all price couched in verse beyond all praise, the loyal and constant

devotion of Théophile Gautier, bears the date of All Souls' Day in the

autumn of 1872. For tenderness and nobility of mingling aspiration and

recollection, recollection of combatant and triumphant youth, aspiration

towards the serene and sovereign ascension out of age through death,

these majestic lines are worthy not merely of eternal record, but far

more than that--of a distinct and a distinguished place among the poems

of Victor Hugo. They are not to be found in the _édition ne varietur_:

which, I must needs repeat, will have to be altered or modified by more

variations than one before it can be accepted as a sufficient or

standard edition of the complete and final text. In witness of this I

cite the closing lines of a poem now buried in "the tomb of Théophile

Gautier"--a beautiful volume which has long been out of print.

Ami, je sens du sort la sombre plénitude;

J'ai commencé la mort par de la solitude,

Je vois mon profond soir vaguement s'étoiler.

Voici l'heure où je vais, aussi moi, m'en aller.

Mon fil trop long frissonne et touche presque au glaive;

Le vent qui t'emporta doucement me soulève,

Et je vais suivre ceux qui m'aimaient, moi banni:

Leur œil fixe m'attire au fond de l'infini.

J'y cours. Ne fermez pas la porte funéraire.

Passons, car c'est la loi: nul ne peut s'y soustraire;

Tout penche; et ce grand siècle avec tous ses rayons

Entre en cette ombre immense où, pâles, nous fuyons.

Oh! quel farouche bruit font dans le crépuscule

Les chênes qu'on abat pour le bûcher d'Hercule!

Les chevaux de la Mort se mettent à hennir,

Et sont joyeux, car l'âge éclatant va finir;

Ce siècle altier qui sut dompter le vent contraire.

Expire...--O Gautier, toi, leur égal et leur frère,

Tu pars après Dumas, Lamartine et Musset.

L'onde antique est tarie où l'on rajeunissait;

Comme il n'est plus de Styx il n'est plus de Jouvence.

Le dur faucher avec sa large lame avance

Pensif et pas à pas vers le reste du blé;

C'est mon tour; et la nuit emplit mon œil troublé

Qui, devinant, hélas, l'avenir des colombes,

Pleure sur des berceaux et sourit à des tombes.

Two years after the year of terror, the poet who had made its memory

immortal by his record of its changes and its chances gave to the world

his heroic and epic romance of _Quatrevingt-treize_; instinct with all

the passion of a deeper and wider chivalry than that of old, and touched

with a more than Homeric tenderness for motherhood and childhood. This

book was written in the space of five months and twenty-seven days. The

next year witnessed only the collection of the second series of his

_Actes et Paroles_ (_Pendant l'Exil_), and the publication of two brief

and memorable pamphlets: the one a simple and pathetic record of the two

beloved sons taken from him in such rapid succession, the other a terse

and earnest plea with the judges who had spared the life of a marshal

condemned on a charge of high treason to spare likewise the life of a

private soldier condemned for a transgression of military discipline.

Most readers will be glad to remember that on this occasion at least the

voice of the intercessor was not uplifted in vain. A year afterwards he

published the third series of _Actes et Paroles_ (_Depuis l'Exil_), with

a prefatory essay full of noble wisdom, of pungent and ardent scorn, of

thoughtful and composed enthusiasm, on the eternal contrast and the

everlasting battle between the spirit of clerical Rome and the spirit of

republican Paris.

"Moi qu'un petit enfant rend tout à fait stupide," I do not propose to

undertake a review of _L'Art d'être Grand-père._ It must suffice here

to register the fact that the most absolutely and adorably beautiful

book ever written appeared a year after the volume just mentioned, and

some months after the second series of the _Légende des Siècles_; that

there is not a page in it which is not above all possible eulogy or

thanksgiving; that nothing was ever conceived more perfect than such

poems--to take but a small handful for samples--as _Un manque, La

sieste. Choses du soir, Ce que dit le public_ (at the Jardin des Plantes

or at the Zoological Gardens; ages of public ranging from five, which is

comparatively young, to seven, which is positively old), _Chant sur le

berceau_, the song for a round dance of children, _Le pot cassé, La

mise en liberté, Jeanne endormie_, the delicious _Chanson de

grand-père_, the glorious _Chanson d'ancêtre_, or the third of the

divine and triune poems on the sleep of a little child; that after

reading these--to say nothing of the rest--it seems natural to feel as

though no other poet had ever known so fully or enjoyed so wisely or

spoken so sweetly and so well the most precious of truths, the loveliest

of loves, the sweetest and the best of doctrines.

The first of all to see the light appeared in a magazine which has long

ago collapsed under the influence of far other writers than the greatest

of the century. Every word of the thirty-eight lines which compose _La

Sieste de Jeanne_--if any speech or memory of man endure so long--will

be treasured as tenderly by generations as remote from the writer's as

now treasure up with thankful wonder and reverence every golden fragment

and jeweled spar from the wreck of Simonides or of Sappho. It has all

the subtle tenderness which invests the immortal song of Danaë; and the

union of perfect grace with living passion, as it were the suffusion of

human flesh and blood with heavenly breath and fire, brings back once

again upon our thoughts the name which is above every name in lyric

song. There is not one line which could have been written and set where

it stands by the hand of any lesser than the greatest among poets. For

once even the high priest and even the high priestess of baby-worship

who have made their names immortal among our own by this especial and

most gracious attribute--even William Blake and Christina Rossetti for

once are distanced in the race of song, on their own sweet ground,

across their own peculiar field of Paradise. Not even in the pastures

that heard his pipe keep time to the "Songs of Innocence," or on the

"wet bird-haunted English lawn" set ringing as from nursery windows at

summer sunrise to the faultless joyous music and pealing birdlike

laughter of her divine "Sing-Song," has there sounded quite such a note

as this from the heaven of heavens in which little babies are adored by

great poets, the frailest by the most potent of divine and human kind.

And above the work in this lovely line of all poets in all time but one,

there sits and smiles eternally the adorable baby who helps us for ever

to forget all passing perversities of Christianized socialism or bastard

Cæsarism which disfigure and diminish the pure proportions and the

noble charm of "Aurora Leigh." Even the most memorable children born to

art in Florence, begotten upon stone or canvas by Andrea del Sarto or by

Luca della Robbia's very self, must yield to that one the crown of

sinless empire and the palm of powerless godhead which attest the

natural mystery of their omnipotence; and which haply may help to

explain why no accumulated abominations of cruelty and absurdity which

inlay the record of its history and incrust the fabric of its creed can

utterly corrode the natal beauty or corrupt the primal charm of a faith

which centres at its opening round the worship of a new-born child.

The most accurate and affectionate description that I ever saw or heard

given of a baby's incomparable smile, when graciously pleased to permit

with courtesy and accept with kindness the votive touch of a reverential

finger on its august little cheek, was given long since in the text

accompanying a rich and joyous design of childish revel by Richard

Doyle. A baby in arms is there contemplating the riotous delights of its

elders, fallen indeed from the sovereign state of infancy, but not yet

degenerate into the lower life of adults, with that bland and tacit air

of a large-minded and godlike tolerance which the devout observer will

not fail to have remarked in the aspect of babies when unvexed and

unincensed by any cross accident or any human shortcoming on the part of

their attendant ministers. Possibly a hand which could paint that

inexpressible smile might not fail also of the ability to render in mere

words some sense of the ineffable quality which rests upon every line

and syllable of this most divine poem. There are lines in it--but after

all this is but an indirect way of saying that it is a poem by Victor

Hugo--which may be taken as tests of the uttermost beauty, the extreme

perfection, the supreme capacity and charm, to which the language of men

can attain. It might seem as if the Fates could not allow two men

capable of such work to live together in one time of the world; and that

Shelley therefore had to die in his thirtieth year as soon as Hugo had

attained his twentieth.

Elle fait au milieu du jour son petit somme;

Car l'enfant a besoin du rêve plus que l'homme,

Cette terre est si laide alors qu'on vient du ciel!

L'enfant cherche à revoir Chérubin, Ariel,

Les camarades, Puck, Titania, les fées,

Et ses mains quand il dort sont par Dieu réchauffées.

Oh! comme nous serions surpris si nous voyions,

Au fond de ce sommeil sacré, plein de rayons,

Ces paradis ouverts dans l'ombre, et ces passages

D'étoiles qui font signe aux enfants d'être sages,

Ces apparitions, ces éblouissements!

Donc, à l'heure où les feux du soleil sont calmants,

Quand tout la nature écoute et se recueille,

Vers midi, quand les nids se taisent, quand la feuille

La plus tremblante oublie un instant de frémir,

Jeanne a cette habitude aimable de dormir;

Et la mère un moment respire et se repose,

Car on se lasse, même à servir une rose.

Ses beaux petits pieds nus dont le pas est peu sûr

Dorment; et son berceau, qu'entoure un vague azur

Ainsi qu'une auréole entoure une immortelle,

Semble un nuage fait avec de la dentelle;

On croit, en la voyant dans ce frais berceau-là,

Voir une lueur rose au fond d'un falbala;

On la contemple, on rit, on sent fuir la tristesse,

Et c'est un astre, ayant de plus la petitesse;

L'ombre, amoureuse d'elle, a l'air de l'adorer;

Le vent retient son souffle et n'ose respirer.

Soudain dans l'humble et chaste alcôve maternelle,

Versant tout le matin qu'elle a dans sa prunelle,

Elle ouvre la paupière, étend un bras charmant,

Agite un pied, puis l'autre, et, si divinement

Que des fronts dans l'azur se penchent pour l'entendre,

Elle gazouille...--Alors, de sa voix la plus tendre,

Couvant des yeux l'enfant que Dieu fait rayonner,

Cherchant le plus doux nom qu'elle puisse donner

À sa joie, à son ange en fleur, à sa chimère:

--Te voilà réveillée, horreur! lui dit sa mère.

If the last word on so divine a subject could ever be said, it surely

might well be none other than this. But with workmen of the very highest

order there is no such thing as a final touch, a point at which they

like others are compelled to draw bridle, a summit on which even their

genius also may abide but while a man takes breath, and halt without a

hope or aspiration to pass beyond it.

Far different in the promise or the menace of its theme, the poet's next

work, issued in the following year, was one in spirit with the inner

spirit of this book. In sublime simplicity of conception and in

sovereign accomplishment of its design, _Le Pape_ is excelled by no poem

of Hugo's or of man's. In the glory of pure pathos it is perhaps

excelled, as in the divine long-suffering of all-merciful wisdom it can

be but equalled, by the supreme utterance of _La Pitié Suprême._ In

splendor of changeful music and imperial magnificence of illustration

the two stand unsurpassed for ever, side by side. A third poem,

attacking at once the misbelief or rather the infidelity which studies

and rehearses "the grammar of assent" to creeds and articles of

religion, and the blank disbelief or denial which rejects all ideals and

all ideas of spiritual life, is not so rich even in satire as in reason,

so earnest even in rejection of false doctrine as in assertion of free

belief. Upon this book no one can hope to write anything so nearly

adequate and so thoroughly worth reading as is the tribute paid to it by

Théodore de Banville--the Simonides Melicertes of France.

In the midst of our confused life, turbulent and flat, bustling and

indifferent, where books and plays, dreams and poems, driven down a wind

of oblivion, are like the leaves which November sweeps away, and fly

past, without giving us time to tell one from another, in a vague whirl

and rush, at times there appears a new book by Victor Hugo, and lights

up, resounds, murmurs, and sings at once everything.

The shining, sounding, fascinating verse, with its thousand surprises of

sound, of color, of harmony, breaks forth like a rich concert, and ever

newly stirred, dazzled and astonished, as if we were hearing verses for

the first time, we remain stupefied with wonder before the persistent

prodigy of the great seer, the great thinker, the unheard-of artist,

self-transfigured without ceasing, always new and always like himself.

It would be impertinent to say of him that he makes progress; and yet I

find no other word to express the fact that every hour, every minute, he

adds something new, something, yet more exact and yet more caressing, to

that swing of syllables, that melodious play of rhyme renascent of

itself, which is the grace and the invincible power of French

poetry,--if English ears could but learn or would but hear it; whereas

usually they have never been taught even the rudiments of French

prosody, and receive the most perfect cadences of the most glorious or

the most exquisite French poetry as a schoolboy who has not yet learnt

scansion might receive the melodies of Catullus or of Virgil.

Let me be forgiven a seeming blasphemy; but since the time of

periphrasis is over the real truth of things must be said of them. Well,

then, the great peril of poetry is the risk it runs of becoming a

weariness: for it may be almost sublime, and yet perfectly wearisome:

but, on the contrary, with all its bewildering flight, its vast

circumference, and the rage of its genius grown drunk with things

immeasurable, the poetry of Victor Hugo is of itself _amusing_ into the

bargain--amusing as a fairy tale, as a many-colored festival, as a

lawless and charming comedy; for in them words play unexpected parts,

take on themselves a special and intense life, put on strange or

graceful faces, clash one against another either cymbals of gold or urns

of crystal, exchange flashes of living light and dawn.

And let no one suspect in my choice of an epithet any idea of

diminution; a garden-box on the window-sill may be thoroughly wearisome,

and an immense forest may be amusing, with its shades wherein the

nightingale sings, its giant trees with the blue sky showing through

them, its mossy shelters where the silver brooklet hums its tune through

the moistened greenery. Ay,--this is one of its qualities,--the poetry

of Hugo can be read, can be devoured as one devours a new novel, because

it is varied, surprising, full of the unforeseen, clear of commonplaces,

like nature itself; and of such a limpid clearness as to be within the

reach of every creature who can read, even when it soars to the highest

summits of philosophy and idealism. In fact, to be obscure, confused,

unintelligible, is not a rare quality, nor one difficult to acquire; and

the first fool you may fell in with can easily attain to it. In this

magnificent poem which has just appeared--as, for that matter, in all

his other poems--what Victor Hugo does is just to dispel and scatter to

the winds of heaven those lessons, those fogs, those rubbish-heaps,

those clouds of dark bewildered words with which the sham wise men of

all ages have overlaid the plain evidence of truth.

"The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo"; and I, who

cannot pretend even to the gift of eloquence proper to the son of Maia,

will not presume to add a word of less valuable homage to the choicer

tribute of Banville. The three poems last mentioned were respectively

published in three successive years: and in the same year with

_Religions et Religion_ Victor Hugo published a fourth volume, _L'Âne_,

in which the questions of human learning and of human training were

handled with pathetic ardor and sympathetic irony. It would be

superfluous if not insolent to add that the might of hand, the magic of

utterance, the sovereign charm of sound, and the superb expression of

sense, are equal and incomparable in all.

And next year Victor Hugo gave us _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit._ In the

first division, the book of satire, every page bears witness that the

hand which wrote the _Châtiments_ had neither lost its strength nor

forgotten its cunning; it is full of keen sense, of wise wrath, of

brilliant reason and of merciful equity, The double drama which follows

is one of the deepest and sweetest and richest in various effect among

the masterpieces of its author. In Margarita we breathe again the same

fresh air of heroic mountain-ranges and woodlands inviolable, of winds

and flowers and all fair things and thoughts, which blows through all

the brighter and more gracious interludes of the _Légende des

Siècles_: the figures of Gallus, the libertine by philosophy, and

Gunich, the philosopher of profligacy--the former a true man and true

lover at heart, the latter a cynic and a courtier to the core--are as

fresh in their novelty as the figures of noble old age and noble young

love are fresh in their renewal and reimpression of types familiar to

all hearts since the sunrise of _Hernani._ The tragedy which follows

this little romantic comedy is but the more penetrative and piercing in

its pathos and its terror for its bitter and burning vein of realism and

of humor. The lyric book is a casket of jewels rich enough to outweigh

the whole wealth of many a poet. After the smiling song of old times,

the stately song of to-day with its other stars and its other roses, in

sight of the shadow where grows the deathless flower of death, pale and

haggard, with its shadowy perfume: the song of all sweet waking dreams

and visions, and sweetest among them all the vision of a tyrant loyally

slain: the song on hearing a princess sing, sweeter than all singing and

simple as "the very virtue of compassion": the song of evening and rest

from trouble, and prayer in sorrow, and hope in death: the many-colored

and sounding song of seaside winter nights: the song of three nests, the

reed-warbler's and the martlet's made with moss and straw, in the wall

or on the water, and love's with glances and smiles, in the lover's

inmost heart: the song of the watcher by twilight on the cliff, which

strikes a note afterwards repeated and prolonged in the last issue of

the _Légende des Siècles_, full of mystery and mourning and fear and

faith: the brief deep note of bewildered sorrow that succeeds it: the

great wild vision of death and night, cast into words which have the

very sound of wind and storm and water, the very shape and likeness of

things actually touched or seen: the soft and sublime song of dawn as it

rises on the thinker deep sunk in meditation on death and on life to

come: the strange dialogue underground, grim and sweet, between the

corpse and the rose-tree: the song of exile in May, sweet as flowers and

bitter as tears: the lofty poem of suffering which rejects the old Roman

refuge of stoic suicide: the light swift song of a lover's quarrel

between the earth and the sun in winter time: the unspeakably sweet song

of the daisy that smiles at coming winter, the star that smiles at

coming night, the soul that smiles at coming death: the most pathetic

and heroic song of all, the cry of exile towards the graves of the

beloved over sea, that weeps and is not weary: the simple and sublime

verses on the mountain desolation to which truth and conscience were the

guides: the four magnificent studies of sea and land, _Promenades dans

les rochers_: the admirable verses on that holy mystery of terror

perceptible in the most glorious works alike of nature and of poetry:

all these and more are fitly wound up by the noble hymn on planting the

oak of the United States of Europe in the garden of the house of exile.

A few of the briefer among these may here be taken as examples of a gift

not merely unequalled but unapproached by any but the greatest among

poets. And first we may choose the following unsurpassable psalm of

evensong.

Un hymne harmonieux sort des feuilles du tremble;

Les voyageurs craintifs, qui vont la nuit ensemble.

Haussent la voix dans l'ombre où l'on doit se hâter

Laissez tout ce qui tremble

Chanter.

Les marins fatigués sommeillent sur le gouffre.

La mer bleue ou Vésuve épand ses flots de soufre

Se tait dès qu'il s'éteint, et cesse de gémir.

Laissez tout ce qui souffre

Dormir.

Quand la vie est mauvaise on la rêve meilleure.

Les yeux en pleurs au ciel se lèvent à toute heure;

L'espoir vers Dieu se tourne et Dieu l'entend crier.

Laissez tout ce qui pleure

Prier.

C'est pour renaître ailleurs qu'ici-bas on succombe.

Tout ce qui tourbillonne appartient à la tombe.

Il faut dans le grand tout tôt ou tard s'absorber.

Laissez tout ce qui tombe

Tomber!

Next, we may take two songs of earlier and later life, whose contrast is

perfect concord.

I

_CHANSON D'AUTREFOIS_

Jamais elle ne raille,

Étant un calme esprit;

Mais toujours elle rit.--

Voici des brins de mousse avec des brins de paille;

Fauvette des roseaux,

Fais ton nid sur les eaux.

Quand sous la clarté douce

Qui sort de tes beaux yeux

On passe, on est joyeux.--

Voici des brins de paille avec des brins de mousse;

Martinet de l'azur,

Fais ton nid dans mon mur.

Dans l'aube avril se mire,

Et les rameaux fleuris

Sont pleins de petits cris.--

Voici de son regard, voici de son sourire;

Amour, ô doux vainqueur,

Fais ton nid dans mon cœur.