Le brin d'herbe sur la roche,
Le nuage dans le ciel,
Regarde marcher ce coche,
Et croit voir rouler Babel.
Sur sa morne silhouette,
Battant de l'aile à grands cris,
Volent l'orage, chouette,
Et l'ombre, chauve-souris.
Vent glacé, tu nous secoues!
Le char roule, et l'œil tremblant,
À travers ses grandes roues,
Voit un crépuscule blanc.
V
La nuit, sinistre merveille,
Répand son effroi sacré;
Toute la forêt s'éveille,
Comme un dormeur effaré.
Après les oiseaux, les âmes!
Volez sous les cieux blafards.
L'étang, miroir, rit aux femmes
Qui sortent des nénuphars.
L'air sanglote, et le vent râle,
Et, sous l'obscur firmament,
La nuit sombre et la mort pâle
Se regardent fixement.
But the twenty-fifth poem in this book of lyrics has assuredly never
been excelled since first the impulse of articulate song awoke in the
first recorded or unrecorded poet.
Proscrit, regarde les roses;
Mai joyeux, de l'aube en pleurs
Les reçoit toutes écloses;
Proscrit, regarde les fleurs.
--Je pense
Aux roses que je semai.
Le mois de mai sans la France,
Ce n'est pas le mois de mai.
Proscrit, regarde les tombes;
Mai, qui rit aux cieux si beaux,
Sous les baisers des colombes
Fait palpiter les tombeaux.
--Je pense
Aux yeux chers que je fermai.
Le mois de mai sans la France.
Ce n'est pas le mois de mai.
Proscrit, regarde les branches,
Les branches où sont les nids;
Mai les remplit d'ailes blanches
Et de soupirs infinis.
--Je pense
Aux nids charmants où j'aimai.
Le mois de mai sans la France,
Ce n'est pas le mois de mai.
_Mai_ 1854.
In October of the same year--the second year of his long exile--a
loftier note of no less heavenly melody was sounded by the lyric poet
who alone of all his nation has taken his place beside Coleridge and
Shelley. The word "passant," as addressed by the soul to the body, is
perhaps the very finest expression of his fervent faith in immortality
to be found in all the work of Victor Hugo.
Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle,
Reine marguerite; aux champs défleuris
Bientôt vont souffler le givre et la grêle.
--Passant, l'hiver vient, et je lui souris.
Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle,
Étoile du soir; les rayons taris
Sont tous retournés à l'aube éternelle.
--Passant, la nuit vient, et je lui souris.
Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle,
Mon âme; joyeuse en mes noirs débris,
Tu m'éblouis, fière et rouvrant ton aile.
--Passant, la mort vient, et je lui souris.
No date is affixed to the divine song of yearning after home and the
graves which make holier for every man old enough to have been a mourner
the native land which holds them. The play on sound which distinguishes
the last repetition of the burden is the crowning evidence that the
subtlest effect of pathos and the most austere effect of sublimity may
be conveyed through a trick of language familiar in their highest and
most serious moods to Æschylus and to Shakespeare.
_EXIL_
Si je pouvais voir, ô patrie.
Tes amandiers et tes lilas,
Et fouler ton herbe fleurie,
Hélas!
Si je pouvais,--mais, ô mon père,
Ô ma mère, je ne peux pas,--
Prendre pour chevet votre pierre,
Hélas!
Dans le froid cercueil qui vous gêne,
Si je pouvais vous parler bas,
Mon frère Abel, mon frère Eugène,
Hélas!
Si je pouvais, ô ma colombe.
Et toi, mère, qui t'envolas,
M'agenouiller sur votre tombe,
Hélas!
Oh! vers l'étoile solitaire,
Comme je lèverais les bras!
Comme je baiserais la terre,
Hélas!
Loin de vous, ô morts que je pleure,
Des flots noirs j'écoute le glas;
Je voudrais fuir, mais je demeure,
Hélas!
Pourtant le sort, caché dans l'ombre,
Se trompe si, comptant mes pas,
Il croit que le vieux marcheur sombre
Est las.
The epic book is the most tragic and terrible of all existing poems of
its kind; if indeed we may say that it properly belongs to any kind
existing before its advent. The growing horror of the gradual vision of
history, from Henri the Fourth to his bloody and gloomy son, from Louis
the Thirteenth to the murderer and hangman of the Palatinate and the
Cévennes, from Louis the Fourteenth to the inexpressible pollution of
incarnate ignominy in his grandson, seems to heave and swell as a sea
towards the coming thunder which was to break above the severed head of
their miserable son.
And next year came _Torquemada_: one of the greatest masterpieces of the
master poet of our century. The construction of this tragedy is
absolutely original and unique: free and full of change as the wildest
and loosest and roughest of dramatic structures ever flung together, and
left to crumble or cohere at the pleasure of accident or of luck, by the
rudest of primæval playwrights: but perfect in harmonious unity of
spirit, in symmetry or symphony of part with part, as the most finished
and flawless creation of Sophocles or of Phidias. Between some of the
characters in this play and some of those in previous plays of Hugo's
there is a certain resemblance as of kinship, but no touch or shadow of
mere repetition or reproduction from types which had been used before:
Ferdinand the Catholic has something in his lineaments of Louis the
Just, and Gucho of L'Angely in _Marion de Lorme_: the Marquis of Fuentel
has a touch of Gunich in _Les deux trouvailles de Gallus_, redeemed by a
better touch of human tenderness for his recovered grandson. The young
lovers are two of the loveliest figures, Torquemada is one of the
sublimest, in all the illimitable world of dramatic imagination. The
intensity of interest, anxiety, and terror, which grows by such rapid
and subtle stages of development up to the thunder-stroke of royal
decision at the close of the first act, is exchanged in the second for
an even deeper and higher kind of emotion. The confrontation of the
hermit with the inquisitor, magnificent enough already in its singleness
of effect, is at once transfigured and completed by the apparition of
the tremendous figure whose very name is tragedy, whose very shadow
sufficed for the central and the crowning terror which darkened the
stage of _Lucrèce Borgia._