Which is the language of poetry? For each, perhaps, the language that
first named for him a flock of sheep, a hill, a mountain river, or
whatever thing touched a child’s mind with a remote and yet familiar
love. The poets who have for him a lifelong advantage over all others
are the poets who write that tongue. No other word than theirs will be
to him the very name of what he finds so fresh. Thus, for my own part,
reading again the _Chants du Crépuscule_, the _Feuilles d’Automne_,
_Contemplations_, and _Voix Intérieures_, I own the power of the poet
who knows the true name of an orchard, and so calls it ‘le verger’. ‘Le
verger’ is purely yonder steep field of fruit-trees round and soft above
their separate shadows. In another tongue the name is translated, and
therefore removed by one step; it has no longer the shape and figure and
spirit which the name first known has for the child learning the thing
and the word in one.
Besides, Victor Hugo falls in with the mood of one who has profound
childish memories connected with his common words, by writing so closely
of infantine things as though to secure the charm for all a reader’s
lifetime to come, and to establish the authority of his French precisely
upon those names of childish import that are most subject to such an
early spell.
A reader who, when he had learnt that there are birds, had learnt their
English name, and had, moreover, received his father, his mother, his
bed, his sleep, his nurse’s song, his little breakfast, in English, has
not, I think, an equal poet to rehearse for him those words, those
things rather, in his later years. For there seems to be no poet in our
master-poetry to do for him that singular office, and to sing the
language of his first nurse to a great and authentic lyre. He may learn
all nature with our poets, and he hears the Gospel first in an
incomparable tongue; and his first sense of Greece doubtless comes with
an adequate word. But he has no august poet to resume his ancient
lullabies, heard once in ancient regions between sleeping and waking,
the immemorial night-light, the homely language of antiquity and old
romance as children have the sense of them in their little words at play
upon the floor, at play upon the moss. He has not had Victor Hugo’s
French.
Furthermore still, an English reader whose childish life was uttered in
French has half forgotten, amid later English, some of the daily words
of that time, unused by grown men and women. These Victor Hugo sings to
him. They return to him out of the past and out of his poetic page at
once. They had but dropped to sleep in imperishable memory; they wake
again, and they are more fresh to his heart than swallows, and than
torrents from the Alps.
Here, then, is the tongue of poetry for him. The child and the poet know
it together. They meet, they understand, they have the way of it
together. And if they meet again across age and change and disuse, how
close, how light, how natural is this encounter, how sudden and how old
the intimacy! Poet and child have their traffic, no doubt, in every
life; but what incomparable traffic is this of Victor Hugo and an
English reader who had a French childhood! How ingenious is fortune to
bring their communion to pass! Many are the things, small and
all-important, known fully, and more than known—recognized, known after
estrangement—between these two only of all the pairs of poet and child,
in the world. Where else can there be just such a commerce? In the first
place that poet is unique. He, too, breathes the breath of the moss
closely; he has not only the child’s sense of it, but also the child’s
inexpert and invaluable word. And the reader, on his part, has, as I
have said, a peculiar experience both of memory and of oblivion. For
him, then, the French language has that grace of election which makes it
wholly, invincibly successful—the grace of each man’s first tongue; and
in overplus it has the powers of the tongue in which Victor Hugo was
wont to write of children, and, again, the powers of the tongue of a
great romance. Of a word in that language, therefore, it may be said, as
of the elect lady in a violent world—
Her gentle step to go or come
Gains her more merit than a martyrdom.
The word of poetry in after-life is sublime and tragic by will, by force
and conquest; the word, in the French of Hugo, has for me but to be
uttered. ‘Le verger’ possesses not only a young child’s sight of trees
under the sun and moon, a young child’s touch of the grass, but also the
genius of the South of France, of ancient agriculture and of early song.
Assuredly those to whom the word first learnt was ‘the orchard’ must be
content with something less than this.
A reading of later French persuades one easily that Victor Hugo was
alone, and is alone, the speaker of what has become so mysterious and so
intelligible, so surcharged and so buoyant a language:
Oh, ’tis not Spanish, but ’tis Heaven she speaks!
cries Crashaw. Victor Hugo speaks not so much French as childhood, and a
peculiar childhood; Romance, and a unique Romance; nature, too, as no
eyes of Latin race had seen it until then, with insight as well as with
perception—in Emerson’s phrase, ‘a little wildly, or with the flower of
the mind’.
Apart from all this which makes the lyrics of this great poet so dear,
for exclusive and accidental reasons, to one reader among many, I have
no praise for the French poetic tongue. It is true that the word
‘souffle’ is for my ear all a summer wind at night—it has more merit
than a martyrdom of description; that is by chance. It is by genius,
however, that Victor Hugo makes this word so fresh and dark.
What I have to suggest is that the poets, since he ceased to write
(ceased as a lyrist, not as a rhetorician), have done little more for
the enlargement of their language than he did in the distant days when
his work was a very revolution; and this in spite of their metrical
liberty, which seems to have no bounds. The freedom he claimed from the
bonds of the preceding century or so was precisely no more than his art
needed. Nothing was done for the sake of liberty, for the sake of
others, for the sake of pioneership, or for any other of the causes that
mediocrity is fond of. All was purely for his own poetry, and because,
being Victor Hugo, he could not write within the laws that held Boileau
content. Where he found no need of change he obeyed Boileau or another,
or La Harpe or another, with a cheerful docility that has left his verse
to-day far behind the reforms of modern French prosody, ‘reforms’ that
seem to have been inspired by the revolt of a Walt Whitman, and make
easy havoc of the whole order, the whole law. Even in the enlarged
liberty made for French poetry by Victor Hugo’s advance, the wave of
verse met salutary bars and measures as strong as rocks. But his
successors have spilt their art thinly over all boundaries, and the flat
country is already under shallow water.
I have under my hand the volume of a little recent symbolist, side by
side with _Les Voix Intérieures_, and the comparison persuades me that
not all this new licence is able to make the French language a really
liberal instrument. What has been written here must be the proof that if
I have a prejudice it is for French, and that for me magic and the
caprice of destiny are on that side. But there are disabilities; and it
is not metrical liberty, or the chance medley of masculine and feminine
endings, or the ignoring of the e mute, or rhymes that are but the
suggestion of a jingle, or any other of these later liberties that can
make this language sufficient. It lacks the second part, the other side,
the splendour of alternative. It has the strangest blanks. It cannot so
much as call an author shallow, nor a teacup, nor a sea.
As it has no alternative of derivation, French has none of time; no
place apart for poems and prayers, but the whole language is at the
disposal of the daily grocer and the trade-circular. The French of
commerce, merely exaggerated, has tempted poets to make that ready
eloquence resound, when the lyric could do no more, for lack of strings.
A word as to syllables—those great units of verse—and their motions. The
Italian syllables dance, springing from their double consonants and long
vowels; the English walk, with all variety of gait, and fly with all
variety of wing; the French trot. ‘Égalisez les syllabes.’ The Frenchman
who speaks right Parisian equalizes the syllables not only of his own
language but of every other. Hear him speak Italian thus; hear him, as a
good pastor in England, read the English Testament.