Ô fête, ô gloire, ô joie!
La clémence terrible et superbe flamboie!
Délivrance à jamais! Damnés, soyez absous!
Le bûcher sur la terre éteint l'enfer dessous.
Sois béni, toi par qui l'âme au bonheur remonte,
Bûcher, gloire du feu dont l'enfer est la honte,
Issue aboutissant au radieux chemin,
Porte du paradis rouverte au genre humain,
Miséricorde ardente aux caresses sans nombre,
Mystérieux rachat des esclaves de l'ombre,
Auto-da-fé! Pardon, bonté, lumière, feu,
Vie! éblouissement de la face de Dieu!
Oh! quel départ splendide et que d'âmes sauvées!
Juifs, mécréants, pécheurs, ô mes chères couvées,
Un court tourment vous paie un bonheur infini;
L'homme n'est plus maudit, l'homme n'est plus banni;
Le salut s'ouvre au fond des cieux. L'amour s'éveille,
Et voici son triomphe, et voici sa merveille,
Quelle extase! entrer droit au ciel! ne pas languir!
_Cris dans le brasier._
Entendez-vous Satan hurler de les voir fuir?
Que l'éternel forçat pleure en l'éternel bouge!
J'ai poussé de mes poings l'énorme porte rouge.
Oh! comme il a grincé lorsque je refermais
Sur lui les deux battants hideux, Toujours, Jamais!
Sinistre, il est resté, derrière le mur sombre.
_Il regarde le ciel._
Oh! j'ai pansé la plaie effrayante de l'ombre.
Le paradis souffrait; le ciel avait au flanc.
Cet ulcère, l'enfer brûlant, l'enfer sanglant;
J'ai posé sur l'enfer la flamme bienfaitrice,
Et j'en vois dans l'immense azur la cicatrice.
C'était ton coup de lance au côté, Jésus-Christ!
Hosanna! la blessure éternelle guérit.
Plus d'enfer. C'est fini. Les douleurs sont taries.
_Il regarde le quemadero._
Rubis de la fournaise! ô braises! pierreries!
Flambez, tisons! brûlez, charbons! feu souverain,
Pétille! luis, bûcher! prodigieux écrin
D'étincelles qui vont devenir des étoiles!
Les âmes, hors des corps comme hors de leurs voiles,
S'en vont, et le bonheur sort du bain de tourments!
Splendeur! magnificence ardente! flamboiements!
Satan, mon ennemi, qu'en dis-tu?
_En extase._
Feu! lavage
De toutes les noirceurs par la flamme sauvage!
Transfiguration suprême! acte de foi!
Nous sommes deux sous l'œil de Dieu, Satan et moi.
Deux porte-fourches, lui, moi. Deux maîtres des
flammes.
Lui perdant les humains, moi secourant les âmes;
Tous deux bourreaux, faisant par le même moyen
Lui l'enfer, moi le ciel, lui le mal, moi le bien;
Il est dans le cloaque et je suis dans le temple,
Et le noir tremblement de l'ombre nous contemple.
_Il se retourne vers les suppliciés._
Ah! sans moi, vous étiez perdus, mes bien-aimés!
La piscine de feu vous épure enflammés.
Ah! vous me maudissez pour un instant qui passe,
Enfants! mais tout à l'heure, oui, vous me rendrez
grâce
Quand vous verrez à quoi vous avez échappé;
Car, ainsi que Michel-Archange, j'ai frappé;
Car les blancs séraphins, penchés au puits de souffre,
Raillent le monstrueux avortement du gouffre;
Car votre hurlement de haine arrive au jour,
Bégaie, et, stupéfait, s'achève enchant d'amour!
Oh! comme j'ai souffert de vous voir dans les chambres
De torture, criant, pleurant, tordant vos membres,
Maniés par l'étau d'airain, par le fer chaud!
Vous voilà délivrés, partez, fuyez là-haut!
Entrez au paradis!
_Il se penche et semble regarder sous terre._
Non, tu n'auras plus d'âmes!
_Il se redresse._
Dieu nous donne l'appui que nous lui demandâmes,
Et l'homme est hors du gouffre. Allez, allez, allez!
À travers l'ombre ardente et les grands feux ailés,
L'évanouissement de la fumée emporte
Là-haut l'esprit vivant sauvé de la chair morte!
Tout le vieux crime humain de l'homme est arraché;
L'un avait son erreur, l'autre avait son péché,
Faute ou vice, chaque âme avait son monstre en elle
Qui rongeait sa lumière et qui mordait son aile;
L'ange expirait en proie au démon. Maintenant
Tout brûle, et le partage auguste et rayonnant
Se fait devant Jésus dans la clarté des tombes.
Dragons, tombez en cendre; envolez-vous, colombes!
Vous que l'enfer tenait, liberté! liberté!
Montez de l'ombre au jour. Changez d'éternité!
The last act would indeed be too cruel for endurance if it were not too
beautiful for blame. But not the inquisition itself was more inevitably
inexorable than is the spiritual law, the unalterable and immitigable
instinct, of tragic poetry at its highest. Dante could not redeem
Francesca, Shakespeare could not rescue Cordelia. To none of us, we must
think, can the children of a great poet's divine imagination seem dearer
or more deserving of mercy than they seemed to their creator: but when
poetry demands their immolation, they must die, that they may live for
ever.
Once more, but now for the last time, the world was to receive yet
another gift from the living hand of the greatest man it had seen since
Shakespeare. Towards the close of his eighty-second year he bestowed on
us the crowning volume of his crowning work, the imperishable and
inappreciable _Légende des Siècles._ And at the age of eighty-three
years, two months, and twenty-six days, he entered into rest for ever,
and into glory which can perish only with the memory of all things
memorable among all races and nations of mankind.
I have spoken here--and no man can know so well or feel so deeply as
myself with what imperfection of utterance and inadequacy of insight I
have spoken--of Victor Hugo as the whole world knew and as all honorable
or intelligent men regarded and revered him. But there are those among
his friends and mine who would have a right to wonder if no word were
here to be said of the unsolicited and unmerited kindness which first
vouchsafed to take notice of a crude and puerile attempt to render some
tribute of thanks for the gifts of his genius just twenty-three years
ago; of the kindness which was always but too ready to recognize and
requite a gratitude which had no claim on him but that of a very perfect
loyalty; of the kindness which many years afterwards received me as a
guest under his roof with the welcome of a father to a son. Such
matters, if touched on at all, unquestionably should not be dwelt on in
public: but to give them no word whatever of acknowledgment at parting
would show rather unthankfulness than reserve in one who was honored so
far above all possible hope or merit by the paternal goodness of Victor
Hugo.
[Footnote 1: In the winter of the year which in spring had seen _Les
Rayons et les Ombres_ come forth to kindle and refresh the hearts of
readers, Victor Hugo published au ode in the same key as those _To the
Column_ and _To the Arch of Triumph_, on the return and reinterment of
the dead Napoleon. Full of noble feeling and sonorous eloquence, the
place of this poem in any collection of its author's works is distinctly
and unmistakably marked out by every quality it has and by every quality
it wants. In style and in sentiment, in opinion and in rhythm, it is one
with the national and political poems which had already been published
by the author since the date of his _Orientales_: in other words, it is
in every possible point utterly and absolutely unlike the poems long
afterwards to be written by the author in exile. Its old place,
therefore, in all former editions, at the end of the volume containing
the poems previously published in the same year, is obviously the only
right one, and rationally the only one possible. By what inexplicable
and inconceivable caprice it has been promoted to a place in the
so-called _édition définitive_, on the mighty roll of the _Légende
des Siècles_, at the head of the fourth volume of that crowning work of
modern times, I am hopelessly and helplessly at a loss to conjecture.
But, at all risk of impeachment on a charge of unbecoming presumption, I
must and do here enter my most earnest and strenuous protest against the
claim of an edition to be in any sense final and unalterable, which
rejects from among the _Châtiments_ the poem on the death of
Saint-Arnaud and admits into the _Légende des Siècles_ the poem on the
reinterment of Napoleon.]
[Footnote 2: This poem on St-Arnaud is dated from Jersey, and must
therefore have been written before the second of November 1855—a date
of disgrace for Jersey, if not indeed for England. It appears in the
various later editions of the _Châtiments_, but has disappeared from
the so-called "édition définitive." All readers have aright to ask
why--and a right to be answered when they ask.]
_LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES_
1883
"Chacun a sa manière. Quant à moi, qui parle ici, j'admire tout, comme
une brute.--N'espérez donc aucune critique.--Je ne chicane point ces
grands bienfaiteurs-là. Ce que vous qualifiez défaut, je le qualifie
accent. Je reçois et je remercie.--Ayant eu l'honneur d'être appelé
"niais" par plusieurs écrivains et critiques distingués, je cherche à
justifier l'épithète."
The greatest work of the century is now at length complete. It is
upwards of twenty-four years since the first part of it was sent home to
France from Guernsey. Eighteen years later we received a second
installment of the yet unexhausted treasure. And here, at the age of
eighty-one, the sovereign poet of the world has placed the copings-tone
on the stateliest of spiritual buildings that ever in modern times has
been reared for the wonder and the worship of mankind.
Those only to whom nothing seems difficult because nothing to them seems
greater than themselves could find it other than an arduous undertaking
to utter some word of not unworthy welcome and thanksgiving when their
life is suddenly enriched and brightened by such an addition to its most
precious things as the dawn of a whole new world of song--and a world
that may hold its own in heaven beside the suns created or evoked by the
fiat of Shakespeare or of Dante. To review the _Divine Comedy_, to
dispose of _Hamlet_ in the course of a leading article, to despatch in a
few sentences the question of _Paradise Lost_ and its claim to
immortality, might seem easy to judges who should feel themselves on a
level with the givers of these gifts; for others it could be none the
less difficult to discharge this office because the gift was but newly
given. One minor phase of the difficulty which presents itself is this:
the temporary judge, self-elected to pass sentence on any supreme
achievement of human power, must choose on which horn of an inevitable
dilemma he may prefer to run the risk of impalement. If, recognizing in
this new master-work an equal share of the highest qualities possible to
man with that possessed and manifested by any previous writer of now
unquestioned supremacy, he takes upon himself to admit, simply and
honestly, that he does recognize this, and cannot choose but recognize
it, he must know that his judgment will be received with no more
tolerance or respect, with no less irritation and derision, than would
have been, in Dante's time, the judgment of a critic who should have
ventured to rank Dante above Virgil, in Shakespeare's time of a critic
who should have dared to set Shakespeare beside Homer. If, on the other
hand, he should abstain with all due discretion from any utterance or
any intimation of a truth so ridiculous and untimely, he runs the sure
and certain risk of leaving behind him a name to be ranked, by all who
remember it at all, with those which no man mentions without a smile of
compassion or of scorn, according to the quality of error discernible in
the critic's misjudgment: innocent and incurable as the confidence of a
Johnson or a Jeffrey, venomous and malignant as the rancor of
Sainte-Beuve or Gifford. Of these two dangers I choose the former; and
venture to admit, in each case with equal diffidence, that I do upon the
whole prefer Dante to any Cino or Cecco, Shakespeare to all the Greenes
and Peeles and Lillys, Victor Hugo to all or any, of their respective
times. The reader who has no tolerance for paradox or presumption has
therefore fair warning to read no further.
Auguste Vacquerie, of all poets and all men living the most worthy to
praise the greatest poet of his century, has put on record long ago,
with all the vivid ardor of his admirable style, an experience of which
I now am but too forcibly reminded. He was once invited by Victor Hugo
to choose among the manuscripts of the master's unpublished work, from
the drawers containing respectively some lyric or dramatic or narrative
masterpiece, of which among the three kinds he would prefer to have a
sample first. Unable to select, he touched a drawer at random, which
contained the opening chapters of a yet unfinished story--_Les
Misérables._ If it is no less hard to choose where to begin in a notice
of the _Légende des Siècles_--to decide what star in all this thronged
and living heaven should first attract the direction of our critical
telescope--it is on the other hand no less certain that on no side can
the telescope be misdirected. From the miraculous music of a legendary
dawn, when the first woman felt first within her the movement of her
first-born child, to the crowning vision of ultimate justice made
visible and material in the likeness of the trumpet of doom, no radiance
or shadow of days or nights intervening, no change of light or cadence
of music in all the tragic pageant of the centuries, finds less perfect
expression and response, less absolute refraction or reflection, than
all that come and go before or after it. History and legend, fact and
vision, are fused and harmonized by the mastering charm of moral unity
in imaginative truth. There is no more possibility of discord or default
in this transcendent work of human power than in the working of those
powers of nature which transcend humanity. In the first verses of the
overture we hear such depth and height of music, see such breadth and
splendor of beauty, that we know at once these cannot but continue to
the end; and from the end, when we arrive at the goal of the last line,
we look back and perceive that it has been so. Were this overture but a
thought less perfect, a shade less triumphant, we might doubt if what
was to follow it could be as perfect and triumphant as itself. We might
begin--and indeed, as it is, there are naturally those who have
begun--to debate with ourselves or to dispute with the poet as to the
details of his scheme, the selection of his types, the propriety of his
method, the accuracy of his title. There are those who would seem to
infer from the choice of this title that the book is, in the most vulgar
sense, of a purely legendary cast; who object, for example, that a
record of unselfish and devoted charity shown by the poor to the poor
is, happily, no "legend." Writers in whom such self-exposure of naked
and unashamed ignorance with respect to the rudiments of language is
hardly to be feared have apparently been induced or inclined to expect
some elaborate and orderly review of history, some versified chronicle
of celebrated events and significant epochs, such as might perhaps be of
subsidiary or supplementary service in the training of candidates for a
competitive examination; and on finding something very different from
this have tossed head and shrugged shoulder in somewhat mistimed
impatience, as at some deception or misnomer on the great author's part
which they, as men of culture and understanding, had a reasonable right
to resent. The book, they affirm, is a mere agglomeration of unconnected
episodes, irrelevant and incoherent, disproportionate and fortuitous,
chosen at random by accident or caprice; it is not one great palace of
poetry, but a series or congeries rather of magnificently accumulated
fragments. It may be urged in answer to this impeachment that the unity
of the book is not logical but spiritual; its diversity is not
accidental or chaotic, it is the result and expression of a spontaneous
and perfect harmony, as clear and as profound as that of the other
greatest works achieved by man. To demonstrate this by rule and line of
syllogism is no present ambition of mine. A humbler, a safer, and
perhaps a more profitable task would be to attempt some flying summary,
some glancing revision of the three great parts which compose this
mightiest poem of our age; or rather, if this also should seem too
presumptuous an aspiration, to indicate here and there the points to
which memory and imagination are most fain to revert most frequently and
brood upon them longest, with a deeper delight, a more rapturous
reverence, than waits upon the rest. Not that I would venture to assert
or to insinuate that there is in any poem of the cycle any note whatever
of inferiority or disparity; but having neither space nor time nor power
to speak, however inadequately, of each among the hundred and
thirty-eight poems which compose the now perfect book, I am compelled to
choose, not quite at random, an example here and there of its highest
and most typical qualities. In the first book, for instance, of the
first series, the divine poem on Ruth and Boaz may properly be taken as
representative of that almost indefinable quality which hitherto has
seemed more especially the gift of Dante: a fusion, so to speak, of
sublimity with sweetness, the exaltation of loveliness into splendor and
simplicity into mystery, such as glorifies the close of his _Purgatory_
and the opening of his _Paradise._ Again, the majestic verses which
bring Mahomet before us at his end strike a deeper impression into the
memory than is left by the previous poem on the raising of Lazarus; and
when we pass into the cycle of heroic or chivalrous legend we find those
poems the loftiest and the loveliest which have in them most of that
prophetic and passionate morality which makes the greatest poet, in this
as in some other ages, as much a seer as a singer, an evangelist no less
than an artist. Hugo, for all his dramatic and narrative mastery of
effect, will always probably remind men rather of such poets as Dante or
Isaiah than of such poets as Sophocles or Shakespeare. We cannot of
course imagine the Florentine or the Hebrew endowed with his infinite
variety of sympathies, of interests, and of powers; but as little can we
imagine in the Athenian such height and depth of passion, in the
Englishman such unquenchable and sleepless fire of moral and prophetic
faith. And hardly in any one of these, though Shakespeare may perhaps be
excepted, can we recognize the same buoyant and childlike exultation in
such things as are the delight of a high-hearted child--in free glory of
adventure and ideal daring, in the triumph and rapture of reinless
imagination, which gives now and then some excess of godlike empire and
superhuman kingship to their hands whom his hands have created, to the
lips whose life is breathed into them from his own. By the Homeric
stature of the soul he measures the heroic capacity of the sword. And
indeed it is hardly in our century that men who do not wish to provoke
laughter should venture to mock at a poet who puts a horde to flight
before a hero, or strikes down strongholds by the lightning of a single
will. No right and no power to disbelieve in the arm of Hercules or the
voice of Jesus can rationally remain with those who have seen Garibaldi
take a kingdom into the hollow of his hand, and not one man but a whole
nation arise from the dead at the sound of the word of Mazzini.
Two out of the five heroic poems which compose the fourth book of the
first series will always remain types of what the genius of Hugo could
achieve in two opposite lines. All the music of morning, all the
sunshine of romance, all the sweetness and charm of chivalry, will come
back upon all readers at the gracious and radiant name of _Aymerillot_;
all the blackness of darkness rank with fumes of blood and loud with
cries of torment, which covers in so many quarters the history, not
romantic but actual, of the ages called ages of faith, will close in
upon the memory which reverts to the direful _Day of Kings._ The sound
of the final note struck in the latter poem remains in the mind as the
echo of a crowning peal of thunder in the ear of one entranced and
spell-stricken by the magnetism of storm. The Pyrenees belong to Hugo as
the western coasts of Italy, Neapolitan or Tuscan, belong to Shelley;
they can never again be done into words and translated into music as for
once they have been by these. It can hardly be said that he who knows
the Pyrenees has read Victor Hugo; but certainly it may be said that he
who knows Victor Hugo has seen the Pyrenees. From the author's prefatory
avowal that his book contains few bright or smiling pictures, a reader
would never have inferred that so many of its pages are fragrant with
all the breath and radiant with all the bloom of April or May among the
pine-woods and their mountain lawns, ablaze with ardent blossom and
astir with triumphant song. Tragedy may be hard at hand, with all the
human train of sorrows and passions and sins; but the glory of beauty,
the loveliness of love, the exultation of noble duty and lofty labor in
a stress of arduous joy, these are the influences that pervade the world
and permeate the air of the poems which deal with the Christian cycle of
heroic legend, whose crowning image is the ideal figure of the Cid. To
this highest and purest type of mediæval romance or history the fancy
of the great poet whose childhood was cradled in Spain turns and returns
throughout the course of his threefold masterpiece with an almost
national pride and passion of sublime delight. Once in the first part
and once in the third his chosen hero is set before us in heroic verse,
doing menial service for his father in his father's house, and again, in
a king's palace, doing for humanity the sovereign service of
tyrannicide. But in the second part it seems as though the poet could
hardly, with his fullest effusion of lyric strength and sweetness, do
enough to satisfy his loving imagination of the perfect knight, most
faithful and most gentle and most terrible, whom he likens even to the
very Pic du Midi in its majesty of solitude. Each fresh blast of verse
has in it the ring of a golden clarion which proclaims in one breath the
honor of the loyal soldier and the dishonor of the disloyal king. There
can hardly be in any language a more precious and wonderful study of
technical art in verse of the highest kind of simplicity than this
_Romancero du Cid_, with its jet of luminous and burning song sustained
without lapse or break through sixteen "fyttes" of plain brief ballad
metre. It is hard to say whether the one only master of all forms and
kinds of poetry that ever left to all time the proof of his supremacy in
all has shown most clearly by his use of its highest or his use of its
simplest forms the innate and absolute equality of the French language
as an instrument for poetry with the Greek of Æschylus and of Sappho,
the English of Milton and of Shelley.
But among all Hugo's romantic and tragic poems of mediæval history or
legend the two greatest are in my mind _Eviradnus_ and _Ratbert._ I
cannot think it would be rash to assert that the loveliest love-song in
the world, the purest and keenest rapture of lyric fancy, the sweetest
and clearest note of dancing or dreaming music, is that which rings
forever in the ear which has once caught the matchless echo of such
lines as these that must once more be quoted, as though all the world of
readers had not long since known them by heart:--
Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre.
Ô les verts taillis mouillés!
Ton souffle te fera suivre
Des papillons réveillés.
* * * * * *
Allons-nous-en par l'Autriche!
Nous aurons l'aube à nos fronts;
Je serai grand, et toi riche,
Puisque nous nous aimerons.
* * * * * *
Tu seras dame, et moi comte;
Viens, mon cœur s'épanouit.
Viens, nous conterons ce conte
Aux étoiles de la nuit.
The poet would be as sure of a heavenly immortality in the hearts of men
as any lyrist of Greece itself, who should only have written the
fourteen stanzas of the song from which I have ventured to choose these
three. All the sounds and shadows of a moonlit wilderness, all the dews
and murmurs and breaths of midsummer midnight, have become for once
articulate in such music as was never known even to Shakespeare's forest
of Arden. In the heart of a poem so full of tragedy and terror that Hugo
alone could have brightened it with his final touch of sunrise, this
birdlike rapture breaks out as by some divine effect of unforbiden and
blameless magic.
And yet, it may be said or thought, the master of masters has shown
himself even greater in _Ratbert_ than in _Eviradnus._ This most tragic
of poems, lit up by no such lyric interlude, stands unsurpassed even by
its author for tenderness, passion, divine magnificence of righteous
wrath, august and pitiless command of terror and pity. From the kingly
and priestly conclave of debaters more dark than Milton's to the superb
admonition of loyal liberty in speech that can only be silenced by
murder, and again from the heavenly and heroic picture of childhood
worshipped by old age to the monstrous banquet of massacre, when the son
of the prostitute has struck his perjured stroke of state, the poem
passes through a change of successive pageants each fuller of splendor
and wonder, of loveliness or of horror, than the last. But the agony of
the hero over the little corpse of the child murdered with her plaything
in her hand--the anguish that utters itself as in peal upon peal of
thunder, broken by sobs of storm--the full crash of the final
imprecation, succeeded again by such unspeakably sweet and piteous
appeal to the little dead lips and eyes that would have answered
yesterday--and at last the one crowning stroke of crime which calls down
an answering stroke of judgment from the very height of heaven, for the
comfort and refreshment and revival of all hearts--these are things of
which no praise can speak aright. Shakespeare only, were he living,
would be worthy to write on Hugo's Fabrice as Hugo has written on
Shakespeare's Lear. History will forget the name of Bonaparte before
humanity forgets the name of Ratbert.
But if this be the highest poem of all for passion and pathos and fire
of terrible emotion, the highest in sheer sublimity of imagination is to
my mind _Zim-Zizimi._ Again and again, in reading it for the first time,
one thinks that surely now the utmost height is reached, the utmost
faculty revealed, that can be possible for a spirit clothed only with
human powers, armed only with human speech. And always one finds the
next step forward to be yet once more a step upward, even to the very
end and limit of them all. Neither in Homer nor in Milton, nor in the
English version of Job or Ezekiel or Isaiah, is the sound of the roll
and the surge of measured music more wonderful than here. Even after the
vision of the tomb of Belus the miraculous impression of splendor and
terror, distinct in married mystery, and diverse in unity of warning,
deepens and swells onward like a sea till we reach the incomparable
psalm in praise of the beauty and the magic of womanhood made perfect
and made awful in Cleopatra, which closes in horror at the touch of a
hand more powerful than Orcagna's. The walls of the Campo Santo are
fainter preachers and feebler pursuivants of the triumph of death than
the pages of the poem which yet again renews its note of menace after
menace and prophecy upon prophecy till the end. There is probably not
one single couplet in all this sweet and bitter roll of song which could
have been written by any poet less than the best or lower than the
greatest of all time.
Passants, quelqu'un veut-il voir Cléopâtre au lit?
Venez; l'alcôve est morne, une brume l'emplit;
Cléopâtre est couchée à jamais; cette femme
Fut l'éblouissement de l'Asie, et la flamme
Que tout le genre humain avait dans son regard;
Quand elle disparut, le monde fut hagard;
Ses dents étaient de perle et sa bouche était d'ambre;
Les rois mouraient d'amour en entrant dans sa chambre;
Pour elle Ephractæus soumit l'Atlas, Sapor
Vint d'Ozymandias saisir les cercle d'or,
Mamylos conquit Suse et Tentyris détruite
Et Palmyre, et pour elle Antoine prit la fuite;
Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient à la fois
Il hésita, lâchant le monde dans son choix.
Cléopâtre égalait les Junons éternelles;
Une chaîne sortait de ses vagues prunelles;
Ô tremblant cœur humain, si jamais tu vibras,
C'est dans l'étreinte altière et douce de ses bras;
Son nom seul enivrait; Strophus n'osait l'écrire;
La terre s'éclairait de son divin sourire,
À force de lumière et d'amour, effrayant;
Sons corps semblait mêlé d'azur; en la voyant,
Vénus, le soir, rentrait jalouse sous la nue;
Cléopâtre embaumait l'Egypte; toute nue,
Elle brûlait les yeux ainsi que le soleil;
Les roses enviaient l'ongle de son orteil;
Ô vivants, allez voir sa tombe souveraine;
Fière, elle était déesse et daignait être reine;
L'amour prenait pour arc sa lèvre aux coins moqueurs;
Sa beauté rendait fous les fronts, les sens, les cœurs,
Et plus que les lions rugissants était forte;
Mais bouchez-vous le nez si vous passez la porte.
At every successive stage of his task, the man who undertakes to glance
over this great cycle of poems must needs incessantly call to mind the
most worn and hackneyed of all quotations from its author's works--"J'en
passe, et des meilleurs." There is here no room, as surely there should
nowhere now be any need, to speak at any length of the poems in which
Roland plays the part of protagonist; first as the beardless champion of
a five days' fight, and again as the deliverer whose hand could clear
the world of a hundred human wolves in one continuous sword-sweep. There
is hardly time allowed us for one poor word or two of tribute to such a
crowning flower of song as _La Rose de L'Infante_, with its parable of
the broken Armada made manifest in a wrecked fleet of drifting petals;
to the superb and sonorous chant of the buccaneers, in which all the
noise of lawless battle and stormy laughter passes off into the carol of
mere triumphant love and trust; or even to the whole inner cycle of
mystic and primæval legend which seeks utterance for the human sense of
oppression or neglect by jealous or by joyous gods; for the wild
profound revolt of riotous and trampled nature, the agony and passion
and triumph of invincible humanity, the protest and witness of enduring
earth against the passing shades of heaven, the struggle and the plea of
eternal manhood against all transient forces of ephemeral and tyrannous
godhead. Within the orbit of this epicycle one poem only of the first
part, a star of strife and struggle, can properly be said to revolve;
but the light of that planet has fire enough to animate with its reflex
the whole concourse of stormy stars which illuminate the world-wide
wrestle of the giants with the gods. The torch of revolt borne by the
transfigured satyr, eyed like a god and footed like a beast, kindles the
lamp of hopeful and laborious rebellion which dazzles us in the eye of
the Titan who has seen beyond the world. In the song that struck silence
through the triumph of amazed Olympus there is a sound and air as of the
sea or the Book of Job. There may be something of Persian or Indian
mysticism, there is more of universal and imaginative reason, in the
great allegoric myth which sets forth here how the half-brute child of
one poor planet has in him the seed, the atom, the principle of life
everlasting, and dilates in force of it to the very type and likeness of
the eternal universal substance which is spirit or matter of life; and
before the face of his transfiguration the omnipresent and omnipotent
gods who take each their turn to shine and thunder are all but shadows
that pass away. Since the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind no ear
has heard the burst of such a song; but this time it is the world that
answers out of its darkness the lords and gods of creed and oracle, who
have mastered and have not made it. And in the cry of its protest and
the prophecy of its advance there is a storm of swelling music which is
as the sound of the strength of rollers after the noise of the rage of
breakers.
It is noticeable that the master of modern poets should have in the tone
and color of his genius more even of the Hebrew than the Greek. In his
love of light and freedom, reason and justice, he is not of Jerusalem,
but of Athens; but in the bent of his imagination, in the form and color
of his dreams, in the scope and sweep of his wide-winged spiritual
flight, he is nearer akin to the great insurgent prophets of deliverance
and restoration than to any poet of Athens except only their kinsman
Æschylus. It is almost wholly of the Persian war, the pass of
Thermopylae, the strait of Euripus, that he sings when he sings of
Hellas. All his might of hand, all his cunning of color, all his
measureless resources of sound and form and symbol, are put forth in the
catalogue of nations and warriors subject to Xerxes. There is nothing in
poetry so vast and tremendous of its kind as this pageant of immense and
monstrous invasion. But indeed the choice of gigantic themes, the
predominance of colossal effects, the prevalence of superhuman visions
over the types and figures of human history or legend, may be regarded
as a distinctive point of difference between the second and the first
series. A typical example of the second is the poem which has added an
eighth wonder built by music to the seven wonders of the world, which it
celebrates in verse more surely wrought for immortality than they.
Another is the song of the worm which takes up in answer to their chant
of life and light and pride of place, and prolongs through measure after
measure of rolling and reverberating verse, the note of a funereal and
universal triumph, the protest and the proclamation of death. Another,
attuned to that mighty music of meditation which rings through so many
of the poems written in exile and loneliness, is the stately prophetic
hymn which bears the superscription of _All the Past and all the
Future._ This might seem to belong to the sixth book of the
_Contemplations_, in which the same note of proud and ardent faith was
struck so often with such sovereignty of hand. As much might be said of
the great "abysmal" poem which closes the second series with a symphony
of worlds and spirits. Other groups of poems, in like manner, bear signs
of common or of diverse kinship to former works of a creator whose
spirit has put life into so many of the same likeness, yet with no more
sign of repetition or weary monotony than is traceable in the very
handiwork of nature. The book of idyls is of one inspiration with the
_Chansons des Rues et des Bois_; in both cases, as in so many of the
poet's earlier lyric volumes, his incomparable fertility of speech and
superb facility of verse leave almost an impression as of work done by
way of exercise, as though he were writing to keep his hand in, or to
show for a wager with incredulous criticism how long he could keep up
the golden ball of metre, carve arabesques of the same pattern, play
variations in the same key. But the _Old Man's Idyl_ which closes the
book belongs by kinship to another work of the poet's, more beloved and
more precious to the inmost heart, if not more eminent for strength and
cunning of hand, than any of these. In "the voice of a child a year old"
there is the same welling and bubbling melody which flows and laughs and
murmurs and glitters through the adorable verses of _L'Art d'être
Grand-père_, making dim with love and delight the reader's or the
hearer's eyes. At last the language of babies has found its interpreter;
and that, as might have been expected, in the greatest poet of his age.
L'enfant apporte un peu de ce ciel dont il sort;
Il ignore, il arrive; homme, tu le recueilles.
_Il a le tremblement des herbes et des feuilles._
La jaserie avant le langage est la fleur
Qui précède le fruit, moins beau qu'elle, et meilleur,
Si c'est être meilleur qu'être plus nécessaire.
A conclusion which may be doubted when we consider as follows:
L'enfant fait la demande et l'ange la réponse;
Le babil puéril dans le ciel bleu s'enfonce,
Puis s'en revient, avec les hésitations
Du moineau qui verrait planer les alcyons.
Can language or can thought be lovelier? if so, the one possible
instance is to be sought in these succeeding verses:
Quand l'enfant jase avec l'ombre qui le bénit,
La fauvette, attentive, au rebord de son nid
Se dresse, et ses petits passent, pensifs et frêles,
Leurs têtes à travers les plumes de ses ailes;
La mère semble dire à sa couvée: Entends,
Et tâche de parler aussi bien.
It seems and is not strange that the lips which distill such honey as
this should be the same so often touched with a coal of fire from that
"altar of Righteousness" where Æschylus was wont to worship. The
twenty-first section of the second series is in the main a renewal or
completion of the work undertaken in the immortal _Châtiments._ Even in
that awful and incomparable book of judgment such poems as _La Colère
du Bronze_, and the two following on the traffic of servile clerical
rapacity in matters of death and burial, would have stood high among the
stately legions of satire which fill its living pages with the sound and
the splendor of righteous battle for the right; but the verses with
which Hugo has branded the betrayer of Metz and Strasburg are hardly to
be matched except by those with which, half a century ago, he branded
the betrayer of the Duchess of Berry. Truly may all who read them cry
out with the poet at their close,
Et qui donc maintenant dit qu'il s'est évadé?
In _Le Cimetière d'Eylau_, a poem to which we have now in the third
series of the book a most noble and exquisite pendant (_Paroles de mon
Oncle_), all the Homeric side of a poet born of warlike blood comes out
into proud and bright relief. There is no better fighting in the Iliad;
it has the martial precision and practical fellow-feeling which animate
in his battle-pieces the lagging verse of Walter Scott; and it has, of
course, that omnipresent breath and light and fire of perfect poetry
which a Scott or a Byron is never quite permitted to attain. Beside or
even above these two poems, that other which commemorates the devotion
of a Vendean peasant chief will be set in the hearts of all readers
competent to appreciate either heroic action or heroic song.
The love of all high things which finds one form of expression in
warlike sympathy with warriors who can live and die for something higher
than personal credit or success takes another and as natural a shape in
the poems which are inspired by love and worship of nature and her
witness for liberty and purity and truth in the epic evangel of august
and indomitable mountains. The sublimest cry of moral passion ever
inspired by communion in spirit with these is uttered in the great poem
on the Swiss mercenaries of the seventeenth century, which even among
its fellows stands out eminent and radiant as an Alp at sunrise.
Mountain and cataract, the stars and the snows, never yet in any
language found such a singer and interpreter as this. Two or three
verses, two or three words, suffice for him to bring before us, in fresh
and actual presence, the very breath of the hills or the sea, the very
lights and sounds and spaces of clouded or sunlit air. Juvenal is not so
strong in righteousness, nor Pindar so sublime in illustration, as the
poet who borrowed from nature her highest symbols to illustrate the
glory and the duty of righteous wrath and insuppressible insurrection
against wrong-doing, when he wrote _Le Régiment du baron Madruce._
L'homme s'est vendu. Soit. A-t-on dans le louage
Compris le lac, le bois, la ronce, le nuage?
La nature revient, germe, fleurit, dissout,
Féconde, croît, décroît, rit, passe, efface tout.
La Suisse est toujours là, libre. Prend-on au piège
La précipice, l'ombre et la bise et la neige?
Signe-t-on des marchés dans lesquels il soit dit
Que l'Orteler s'enrôle et devient un bandit?
Quel poing cyclopéen, dites, ô roches noires,
Pourra briser la Dent de Morde en vos mâchoires?
Quel assembleur de bœufs pourra forger un joug
Qui du pic de Glaris aille au piton de Zoug?
C'est naturellement que les monts sont fidèles
Et purs, ayant la forme âpre des citadelles,
Ayant reçu de Dieu des créneaux où le soir,
L'homme peut, d'embrasure en embrasure, voir
Étinceler le fer de lance des étoiles.
Est-il une araignée, aigle, qui dans ses toiles
Puisse prendre la trombe et la rafale et toi?
Quel chef recrutera le Salève? à quel roi
Le Mythen dira-t-il: "Sire, je vais descendre!
Qu'après avoir dompté l'Athos, quelque Alexandre,
Sorte de héros monstre aux cornes de taureau,
Aille donc relever sa robe à la Jungfrau!
Comme la vierge, ayant l'ouragan sur l'épaule,
Crachera l'avalanche à la face du drôle!
* * * * * *
Non, rien n'est mort ici. Tout grandit, et s'en vante.
L'Helvétie est sacrée, et la Suisse est vivante;
Ces monts sont des héros et des religieux;
Cette nappe de neige aux plis prodigieux
D'où jaillit, lorsqu'en mai la tiède brise ondoie,
Toute une floraison folle d'air et de joie,
Et d'où sortent des lacs et des flots murmurants,
N'est le linceul de rien, excepté des tyrans.
This glorious poem of the first series finds a glorious echo in the
twenty-fifth division of the second; even as the Pyrenean cycle which
opened in the first series is brought in the second to fuller completion
of equal and corresponsive achievement. It is wonderful, even in this
vast world of poetic miracle where nothing is other than wonderful, that
_Masferrer_ should be equal to _Aymenllot_ in frank majesty of beauty;
that even after _Le Parricide_ a fresh depth of tragic terror should be
sounded by _Gaïffer-Forge_; and that after all he had already written
on fatherhood and sonship, on duty and chivalry, on penitence and pride,
Victor Hugo should have struck so new and so profound a note as rings in
every fine of _La Paternité._
But of all echoes and of all responses which reverberate from end to end
of these three great sections of song, the very sweetest, and perhaps
the very deepest, are those evoked by love of little children, and
compassionate reverence for the poor. If but one division were to be
left us out of all the second series, and fate or chance, comparatively
compassionate in its cruelty, gave us our choice which this one should
be, the best judgments might perhaps decide to preserve the twenty-third
at all events. What the words "realism" and "naturalism" do naturally
and really signify in matters of art, the blatant babblers who use them
to signify the photography of all things abject might learn, if shallow
insolence and unclean egotism were suddenly made capable of learning, by
the study of only the two poems which set before us in two different
forms the strength of weakness in the child whose love redeems his
father from death, and the child who can find no comfort but in death
for the lack of a father's love. There is nothing in Homer, in Dante, or
in Shakespeare, the three only poets who can properly be cited for
comparison, of a pathos more poignant in its bitter perfection of
sweetness.
Among the many good things which seem, for the lovers of poetry, to have
come out of one and so great an evil as the long exile of Hugo from his
country, there is none better or greater than the spiritual inhalation
of breeze and brine into the very heart of his genius, the miraculous
impregnation of his solitary Muse by the sea-wind. This influence could
not naturally but combine with the lifelong influence of all noble
sympathies to attract his admiration and his pity towards the poor folk
of the shore, and to produce from that sense of compassion for obscurer
sorrows and brotherhood with humbler heroism than his own such work as
the poem which describes the charity of a fisherman's wife towards the
children of her dead neighbor. It has all the beautiful precision and
accurate propriety of detail which distinguish the finest idyls of
Theocritus or Tennyson, with a fervor of pathetic and imaginative
emotion which Theocritus never attained, and which Tennyson has attained
but once. All the horror of death, all the trouble and mystery of
darkness, seem as we read to pass into our fancy with the breath of
pervading night, and to vanish with the husband's entrance at sunrise
before the smile with which the wife draws back the curtains of the
cradle.
This poem, which so many hearts must have treasured among their choicest
memories for now so many years, has found at length its fellow in the
final volume of the book. There is even more savor of the sea in the
great lyric landscape called _Les paysans au bord de la mer_ than in the
idyllic interior called _Les pauvres gens._ There we felt the sea-wind
and saw the sea-mist through the chinks of door and window; but here we
feel all the sweep of the west wind's wings, and see all the rush of
rain along the stormy shore that the flock of leaping waves has whitened
with the shreddings of their fleece. We remember in _Les Voix
Intérieures_ the all but matchless music of the song of the sea-wind's
trumpet, and in the notes of this new tune we find at last that music
matched and deepened and prolonged. In the great lyric book which gives
us the third of the four blasts blown from _Les Quatre Vents de
l'Esprit_, there are visions as august and melodies as austere as this;
but outside the vast pale of the master's work we should look for the
likeness of such songs in vain. The key of all its tenderness if not of
all its terror is struck in these two first verses.
Les pauvres gens de la côte,
L'hiver, quand la mer est haute
Et qu'il fait nuit,
Viennent où finit la terre
Voir les flots pleins de mystère
Et pleins de bruit.
Ils sondent la mer sans bornes;
Ils pensent aux écueils mornes
Et triomphants;
L'orpheline pâle et seule
Crie: ô mon père! et l'aïeule
Dit: mes enfants!
The verses which translate the landscape are as absolutely incomparable
in their line as those which render the emotion of the watchers. Witness
this:--
Et l'on se met en prières,
Pendant que joncs et bruyères
Et bois touffus,
Vents sans borne et flots sans nombre,
Jettent dans toute cette ombre
Des cris confus.
Here, as usual, it is the more tragic aspect of the waters that would
appear to have most deeply impressed the sense or appealed to the spirit
of Victor Hugo. He seems to regard the sea with yet more of awe than of
love, as he may be said to regard the earth with even more of love than
of awe. He has put no song of such sweet and profound exultation, such
kind and triumphant motherhood, into the speaking spirit of the sea as
into the voice of the embodied earth. He has heard in the waves no word
so bountiful and benignant as the message of such verses as these:--
La terre est calme auprès de l'océan grondeur;
La terre est belle; elle a la divine pudeur
De se cacher sous les feuillages;
Le printemps son amant vient en mai la baiser;
Elle envoie au tonnerre altier pour l'apaiser
La fumée humble des villages.
Ne frappe pas, tonnerre. Ils sons petits, ceux-ci.
La terre est bonne; elle est grave et sévère aussi;
Les roses sont pures comme elle;
Quiconque pense, espère et travaille lui plaît;
Et l'innocence offerte à tout homme est son lait,
Et la justice est sa mamelle.
La terre cache l'or et montre les moissons;
Elle met dans le flanc des fuyantes saisons
Le germe des saisons prochaines,
Dans l'azur les oiseaux qui chuchotent: aimons!
Et les sources au fond de l'ombre, et sur les monts
L'immense tremblement des chênes.
The loving loveliness of these divine verses is
in sharp contrast with the fierce resonance of
those in which the sea's defiance is cast as a challenge
to the hopes and dreams of mankind:--
Je suis la vaste mêlée,
Reptile, étant l'onde, ailée,
Étant le vent;
Force et fuite, haine et vie,
Houle immense, poursuivie
Et poursuivant.
The motion of the sea was never till now so perfectly done into words as
in these three last lines; but any one to whom the water was as dear or
dearer than the land at its loveliest would have found a delight as of
love no less conceivable than a passion as of hatred in the more visible
and active life of waves, and at least as palpable to the "shaping
spirit of imagination." It remains true, after all, for the greatest as
for the humblest, that--in the words of one of the very few poets whose
verses are fit to quote even after a verse of Hugo's--
we receive but what we give.
And in our life alone doth nature live;
so far, at least, as her life concerns us, and is perceptible or
appreciable by our spirit or our sense. A magnificent instance of purely
dramatic vision, in which the lyric note is tempered to the circumstance
of the speakers with a kind of triumphant submission and severe
facility, is _La Chanson des Doreurs de Proues._ The poet's unequalled
and unapproached variety in mastery of metre and majesty of color and
splendid simplicity of style, no less exact than sublime, and no less
accurate than passionate, could hardly be better shown than by
comparison of the opening verses with the stanza cited above.
Nous sommes les doreurs de proues.
Les vents, tournant comme des roues,
Sur la verte rondeur des eaux
Mêlent les lueurs et les ombres,
Et dans les plis des vagues sombres
Traînent les obliques vaisseaux.
La bourrasque décrit des courbes,
Les vents sont tortueux et fourbes,
L'archer noir souffle dans son cor,
Ces bruits s'ajoutent aux vertiges,
Et c'est nous qui dans ces prodiges
Faisons rôder des spectres d'or.
Car c'est un spectre que la proue.
Le flot l'étreint, l'air la secoue;
Fière, elle sort de nos bazars
Pour servir aux éclairs de cible,
Et pour être un regard terrible
Parmi les sinistres hasards.
It is more than fifty years since _Les Orientales_ rose, radiant upon
the world of letters, and the hand which gave them to mankind has lost
so little of its cunning that we are well-nigh tempted to doubt whether
then, for all its skill and sureness of touch, it had quite the same
strength and might of magnificent craftsmanship as now. There was fire
as well as music on the lips of the young man, but the ardor of the old
man's song seems even deeper and keener than the passion of his past.
The fervent and majestic verses of June 2, 1883, strike at starting the
note of measureless pity and immeasurable indignation which rings
throughout the main part of the fifth and last volume almost louder and
fuller, if possible, than it was wont. All Victor Hugo, we may say, is
in this book; it is as one of those ardent evening skies in which
sunrise and sunset seem one in the flush of overarching color which
glows back from the west to the east with reverberating bloom and fervor
of rose-blossom and fire. There is life enough in it, enough of the
breath and spirit and life-blood of living thought, to vivify a whole
generation of punier souls and feebler hearts with the heat of his
fourscore years. It may be doubted whether there ever lived a poet and
leader of men to whom these glorious verses would be so closely
applicable as to their writer.
Un grand esprit en marche a ses rumeurs, ses houles,
Ses chocs, et fait frémir profondément les foules,
Et remue en passant le monde autour de lui.
On est épouvanté si l'on n'est ébloui;
L'homme comme un nuage erre et change de forme;
Nul, si petit qu'il soit, échappe au souffle énorme;
Les plus humbles, pendant qu'il parle, ont le frisson.
Ainsi quand, évadé dans le vaste horizon,
L'aquilon qui se hâte et qui cherche aventure
Tord la pluie et l'éclair, comme de sa ceinture
Une fille défait en souriant le nœud,
Quand l'immense vent gronde et passe, tout s'émeut,
Pas un brin d'herbe au fond des ravins, que ne touche
Cette rapidité formidable et farouche.
And this wind "bloweth where it listeth": now it comes to us charged
with all the heart of all the roses in the world; its breath when it
blows towards Greece has in it a murmur as of Shelley's _Epipsychidion_;
the caress of its love-making has all the freedom and all the purity of
Blake's; now it passes by us in darkness, from depth to depth of the
bitter mystery of night. A vision of ruined worlds, the floating
purgatorial prisons of ruined souls, adrift as hulks on the sea of
darkness everlasting, shows us the harvest in eternity of such seed as
was sown in time by the hands of such guides and rulers of men as we
hear elsewhere speaking softly with each other in the shadows, within
hail of the confessional and the scaffold. The loftiest words of counsel
sound sweeter in the speech of this great spirit than the warmest
whispers of pleasure; and again, the heaviest stroke of damning satire
is succeeded by the tenderest touch of a compassion that would leave not
a bird in captivity. The hand that opens the cage-door is the same which
has just turned the key on the braggart swordsman, neither "victorious"
nor "dead," but condemned to everlasting prison behind the bars of iron
verse.
But the two long poems which dominate the book, like two twin summits
clothed round with fiery cloud and crowned with stormy sunshine, tower
equal in height and mass of structure with the stateliest in the two
parts preceding. The voice that rolls throughout _Les Quatre Jours
d'Elciis_ the thunder of its burning words reawakens and prolongs the
echo of Félibien's pity and wrath over the murdered corpse of a child
unborn; we recognize in the speaker a kinsman of Welf's, the
unconquerable old castellan of Osbor, delivered only by an act of
charity into the treacherous hands of the princes whom his citadel had
so long defied. Of Elciis, as of him, the poet might have said--
Si la mer prononçait des noms dans ses marées,
Ô vieillard, ce serait des noms comme le tien.
Such names will no doubt provoke the soft superior smile of a culture
too refined for any sort of enthusiasm but the elegant ecstasy of
self-worship; and such simplicity will excite, on the other hand, a
deep-mouthed bray of scorn from the whole school or church whose apostle
in France was St. Joseph de Maistre, in England St. Thomas Coprostom,
late of Craigenputtock and Chelsea; the literary lappers of imaginary
blood, the inkhorn swordsmen and spokesmen of immaterial iron. The rage
of their contempt for such as Hugo, the loathing of their scorn for such
as Shelley, ought long since to have abashed the believers in principles
which find no abler defenders or more effective champions than these.
For it is true that the main truths preached and enforced and insisted
on by such fanatical rhetoricians as Milton, as Mazzini, or as Hugo, are
as old as the very notion of right and wrong, as the rudest and crudest
conception of truth itself; and it is undeniable that the Gospel
according to St. Coprostom has the invaluable merit of pungent
eccentricity and comparatively novel paradox. The evangelist of "golden
silence"--whose own speech, it may be admitted, was "quite other" than
"silvern"--is logically justified in his blatant but ineffable contempt
for the dull old doctrines of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty
that knows no higher law than duty, of duty that depends for its
existence on the existence of liberty. Such a creed, in the phrase of a
brother philosopher whose "reminiscences" may be gathered from
Shakespeare, and whose views of his contemporaries were identical in
tone and expression with the opinions of Mr. Carlyle on his, was mouldy
before our grandsires had nails on their toes. It is far more
intelligent, more original, more ingenious than all the old cant and
rant against priests and kings and vow-breakers and blood-spillers, to
discover the soul of goodness in Ratbert the Second or Napoleon the
Third, and observingly distill it out into analytic and mono-dramatic
blank verse. And it will never be said that this reaction against the
puerile or senile preference of right to wrong and principle to
prosperity has not been carried far enough in our time. Carlyle, the man
of brass, and Musset, the man of clay, as far apart on all other points
as two writers of genius could well be, have shown themselves at one in
high-souled scorn for "principles of mere rebellion" such as Landor's
and Milton's, or for such "belief in a new Brutus" as might disturb the
dream of Augustulus. But, even as an old paradox becomes with time a
commonplace, so does an old commonplace become in its turn a paradox;
and a generation whose poets and historians have long blown the trumpet
before the legitimacy of Romanoffs or the bastardy of Bonapartes may
properly be startled and scandalized at the childish eccentricity of an
old-world idealist who maintains his obsolete and preposterous belief
that massacre is murder, that robbery is theft, and that perjury is
treason. No newer doctrine, no sounder philosophy, no riper wisdom than
this, can be gathered from the declamations of those idle old men--as
Goneril, for example, would have called them--who speak this poet's
mind again and again in verse which has no more variety of splendor or
magnificence of music than the sea.
Hélas, on voit encor les astres se lever,
L'aube sur l'Apennin jeter sa clarté douce,
L'oiseau faire son nid avec des brins de mousse,
La mer battre les rocs dans ses flux et reflux,
Mais la grandeur des cœurs c'est ce qu'on ne voit plus.
There is nothing ingenious in that; it is no better, intellectually
considered, than a passage of Homer or Isaiah.
But though every verse has the ring of tested gold, and every touch
gives notice of the master's hand, yet the glory even of these _Four
Days_ is eclipsed by the _Vision of Dante._ Far apart and opposite as
they stand in all matters of poetic style and method--Dante writing with
the rigid and reserved concision of a Tacitus, Hugo with the rushing yet
harmonious profusion of a Pindar--the later master is the only modern
poet who could undertake without absurdity or presumption to put words
worthy of Dante into Dante's mouth. The brazen clatter of Byron's
_Prophecy_ was not redeemed or brought into tune by the noble energy and
sound insight of the political sympathies expressed in the accent of a
stump-orator to the tune of a barrel-organ. But a verse of Hugo's falls
often as solid and weighty and sure, as full in significance of perfect
and pregnant sound, as even a verse of Alighieri's. He therefore, but he
alone, had the power and the right to call up the spirit of Dante now
thirty years ago, and bid it behold all the horrors of Europe in 1853;
the Europe of Haynau and Radetzky, of Nicholas the First and Napoleon
the last. Any great modern poet's notion of an everlasting hell must of
course be less merely material than Dante's mechanism of hot and cold
circles, fire and ice, ordure and mire; but here is the same absolute
and equitable assent to justice, the same fierce and ardent fidelity to
conscience, the same, logic and the same loyalty as his.
Ô sentence! ô peine sans refuge!
Tomber dans le silence et la brume à jamais!
D'abord quelque clarté des lumineux sommets
Vous laisse distinguer vos mains désespérées.
On tombe, on voit passer des formes effarées,
Bouches ouvertes, fronts ruisselants de sueur,
Des visages hideux qu'éclaire une lueur.
Puis on ne voit plus rien. Tout s'efface et recule.
La nuit morne succède au sombre crépuscule.
On tombe. On n'est pas seul dans ces limbes d'en bas;
On sent frissonner ceux qu'on ne distingue pas;
On ne sait si ce sont des hydres ou des hommes;
On se sent devenir les larves que nous sommes;
On entrevoit l'horreur des lieux inaperçus,
Et l'abîme au-dessous, et l'abîme au-dessus.
Puis tout est vide! on est le grain que le vent sème.
On n'entend pas le cri qu'on à poussé soi-même;
On sent les profondeurs qui s'emparent de vous;
Les mains ne peuvent plus atteindre les genoux;
On lève au ciel les yeux et l'on voit l'ombre horrible;
On est dans l'impalpable, on est dans l'invisible;
Des souffles par moments passent dans cette nuit.
Puis on ne sent plus rien.--Pas un vent, pas un bruit,
Pas un souffle; la mort, la nuit; nulle rencontre;
Rien pas même une chute affreuse ne se montre
Et l'on songe à la vie, au soleil, aux amours,
Et l'on pense toujours, et l'on tombe toujours!
The resurrection of the victims to give evidence at the summons of the
archangel--a heavy cloud of witnesses,