traduit
Du passé, du tombeau, du gouffre et de la nuit--
faith shines as a kindling torch, hope breathes as a quickening wind,
love burns as a cleansing fire. It is tragic, not with the hopeless
tragedy of Dante or the all but hopeless tragedy of Shakespeare. Whether
we can or cannot share the infinite hope and inviolable faith to which
the whole active and suffering life of the poet has borne such unbroken
and imperishable witness, we cannot in any case but recognize the
greatness and heroism of his love for mankind. As in the case of
Æschylus, it is the hunger and thirst after righteousness, the deep
desire for perfect justice in heaven as on earth, which would seem to
assure the prophet's inmost heart of its final triumph by the prevalence
of wisdom and of light over all claims and all pleas established or
asserted by the children of darkness, so in the case of Victor Hugo is
it the hunger and thirst after reconciliation, the love of loving
kindness, the master passion of mercy, which persists in hope and
insists on faith even in face of the hardest and darkest experience
through which a nation or a man can pass. When evil was most triumphant
throughout Europe, he put forth in a single book of verse, published
with strange difficulty against incredible impediments, such a protest
as would entitle him to say, in the very words he has given to the
Olympian of old--
Quand, dans le saint paean par les mondes chanté,
L'harmonie amoindrie avorte ou dégénère,
Je rends le rhythme aux cieux par un coup de tonnerre:
and now more than ever would the verses that follow befit the lips of
their author, if speaking in his own person:--
Mon crâne plein d'échos, plein de lueurs, plein d'yeux,
Est l'antre éblouissant du grand Pan radieux;
En me voyant on croit entendre le murmure
De la ville habitée et de la moisson mûre,
Le bruit du gouffre au chant de l'azur réuni,
L'onde sur l'océan, le vent dans l'infini,
Et le frémissement des deux ailes du cygne.
It is held unseemly to speak of the living as we speak of the dead; when
Victor Hugo has joined the company of his equals, but apparently not
till then, it will seem strange to regard the giver of all the gifts we
have received from him with less than love that deepens into worship,
than worship that brightens into love. Meantime it is only in the phrase
of one of his own kindred, poet and exile and prophet of a darker age
than his, that the last word should here be spoken of the man by whose
name our century will be known forever to all ages and nations that keep
any record or memory of what was highest and most memorable in the
spiritual history of the past:--
Onorate l'altissimo poeta.