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, theSouvenir des vieilles guerresis 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.
Ce siècle a la formeD'un monstrueux char.Sa croissance énormeSous un nain césar.Son air de prodige,Sa gloire qui ment,Mêlent le vertigeÀ l'écrasement.Louvois pour ministre,Scarron pour griffon,C'est un chant sinistreSur un air bouffon.Sur sa double roueLe grand char descend;L'une est dans la boue,L'autre est dans le sang.La mort au carrosseAttelle—où va-t-il?—Lavrillière atroce,Roquelaure vil.Comme un geai dans l'arbre,Le roi s'y tient fier;Son cœur est de marbreSon ventre est de chair.On a pour sa nuqueEt son front vermeilFait une perruqueAvec le soleil.Il règne et végète,Effrayant zéroSur qui se projetteL'ombre du bourreau.Ce trône est la tombe;Et sur le pavéQuelque chose en tombeQu'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 thanLes 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, calledLa 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 publishedL'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 ofL'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 theédition 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 rayonsEntre en cette ombre immense où, pâles, nous fuyons.Oh! quel farouche bruit font dans le crépusculeLes 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 avancePensif et pas à pas vers le reste du blé;C'est mon tour; et la nuit emplit mon œil troubléQui, 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 ofQuatrevingt-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 hisActes 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 ofActes 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 ofL'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 theLégende 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—asUn 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 deliciousChanson de grand-père, the gloriousChanson 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 composeLa 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 passagesD'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 feuilleLa 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 sûrDorment; et son berceau, qu'entoure un vague azurAinsi 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 divinementQue 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 donnerÀ 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 Papeis 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 ofLa 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 itselfamusinginto 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 withReligions et ReligionVictor 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 usLes Quatre Vents de l'Esprit.In the first division, the book of satire, every page bears witness that the hand which wrote theChâtimentshad 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 theLégende 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 ofHernani.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 theLégende 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 hâterLaissez tout ce qui trembleChanter.Les marins fatigués sommeillent sur le gouffre.La mer bleue ou Vésuve épand ses flots de soufreSe tait dès qu'il s'éteint, et cesse de gémir.Laissez tout ce qui souffreDormir.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 pleurePrier.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 tombeTomber!
Next, we may take two songs of earlier and later life, whose contrast is perfect concord.
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 douceQui sort de tes beaux yeuxOn 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 fleurisSont pleins de petits cris.—Voici de son regard, voici de son sourire;Amour, ô doux vainqueur,Fais ton nid dans mon cœur.
Je disais:—Dieu qu'aucun suppliant n'importune,Quand vous m'éprouverez dans votre volonté,Laissez mon libre choix choisir dans la fortuneL'un ou l'autre côté;Entre un riche esclavage et la pauvreté francheLaissez-moi choisir, Dieu du cèdre et du roseau;Entre l'or de la cage et le vert de la brancheFaites juge l'oiseau.—Maintenant je suis libre et la nuit me réclame;J'ai choisi l'âpre exil; j'habite un bois obscur;Mais je vois s'allumer les étoiles de l'âmeDans mon sinistre azur.
If this can be surpassed for outward and inward sweetness, the following poem may perhaps have been equaled for sensible and spiritual terror in the range of lyric song.
Il grêle, il pleut. Neige et brume;Fondrière à chaque pas.Le torrent veut, crie, écume,Et le rocher ne veut pas.Le sabbat à notre oreilleJette ses vagues hourras.Un fagot sur une vieillePasse en agitant les bras.Passants hideux, clartés blanches;Il semble, en ces noirs chemins,Que les hommes ont des branches.Que les arbres ont des mains.
On entend passer un coche,Le lourd coche de la mort,Il vient, il roule, il approche,L'eau hurle et la bise mord.Le dur cocher, dans la plaineAux aspects noirs et changeants,Conduit sa voiture pleineDe toute sorte de gens.Novembre souffle, la terreFrémit, la bourrasque fond;Les flèches du sagittaireSifflent dans le ciel profond.
—Cocher, d'où viens-tu? dit l'arbre.—Où vas-tu? dit l'eau qui fuit.Le cocher est fait de marbreEt le coche est fait de nuit.Il emporte beauté, gloire,Joie, amour, plaisirs bruyants;La voiture est toute noire,Les chevaux sont effrayants.L'arbre en frissonnant s'incline,L'eau sent les joncs se dresser.Le buisson sur la collineGrimpe pour le voir passer.
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.
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 femmesQui sortent des nénuphars.L'air sanglote, et le vent râle,Et, sous l'obscur firmament,La nuit sombre et la mort pâleSe 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 pleursLes reçoit toutes écloses;Proscrit, regarde les fleurs.—Je penseAux 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 colombesFait palpiter les tombeaux.—Je penseAux 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 blanchesEt de soupirs infinis.—Je penseAux nids charmants où j'aimai.Le mois de mai sans la France,Ce n'est pas le mois de mai.
Mai1854.
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 défleurisBientôt 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 tarisSont 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.
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 sombreEst 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 cameTorquemada: 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 inMarion de Lorme: the Marquis of Fuentel has a touch of Gunich inLes 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 ofLucrèce Borgia.
LE CHASSEUR
Le hasard a pétri la cendre avec l'instant;Cet amalgame est l'homme. Or, moi-même n'étantComme vous que matière, ah! je serais stupideD'être hésitant et lourd quand la joie est rapide,De ne point mordre en hâte au plaisir dans la nuit,Et de ne pas goûter à tout, puisque tout fuit!Avant tout, être heureux. Je prends à mon serviceCe qu'on appelle crime et ce qu'on nomme vice.L'inceste, préjugé. Le meurtre, expédient.J'honore le scrupule en le congédiant.Est-ce que vous croyez que, si ma fille est belle,Je me gênerai, moi, pour être amoureux d'elle!Ah ça, mais je serais un imbécile. Il fautQue j'existe. Allez donc demander au gerfaut,À l'aigle, à l'épervier, si cette chair qu'il broieEst permise, et s'il sait de quel nid sort si proie.Parce que vous portez un habit noir ou blanc,Vous vous croyez forcé d'être inepte et tremblant,Et vous baissez les yeux devant cette offre immenseDu bonheur, que vous fait l'univers en démence.Ayons donc de l'esprit. Profitons du temps. RienEtant le résultat de la mort, vivons bien!La salle de bal croule et devient catacombe.L'âme du sage arrive en dansant dans la tombe.Servez-moi mon festin. S'il exige aujourd'huiUn assaisonnement de poison pour autrui,Soit. Qu'importe la mort des autres! J'ai la vie.Je suis une faim, vaste, ardente, inassouvie.Mort, je veux t'oublier; Dieu, je veux t'ignorer.Oui, le monde est pour moi le fruit à dévorer.Vivant, je suis en hâte heureux; mort, je m'échappe!
FRANÇOIS DE PAULE, àTorquemada.
Qu'est-ce que ce bandit?
TORQUEMADA
Mon père, c'est le pape.
The third act revives again the more immediate and personal interest of the drama. Terror and pity never rose higher, never found utterance more sublime and piercing, in any work of any poet in the world, than here in the scene of the supplication of the Jews, and the ensuing scene of the triumph of Torquemada.
The Jews enter; men, women, and children all covered with ashes and clothed in rags, barefoot, with ropes round their necks, some mutilated and made infirm by torture, dragging themselves on crutches or on stumps; others, whose eyes have been put out, are led by children. And their spokesman pleads thus with the king and the queen of the kingdoms from whence they are to be driven by Christian jurisdiction.
MOÏSE-BEN-HABIB,grand rabbin, à genoux.
Altesse de Castille, altesse d'Aragon,Roi, reine! ô notre maître, et vous, notre maîtresse,Nous, vos tremblants sujets, nous sommes en détresse,Et, pieds nus, corde au cou, nous prions Dieu d'abord,Et vous ensuite, étant dans l'ombre de la mort,Ayant plusieurs de nous qu'on va livrer aux flammes,Et tout le reste étant chassé, vieillards et femmes,Et, sous l'œil qui voit tout du fond du firmament,Rois, nous vous apportons notre gémissement.Altesses, vos décrets sur nous se précipitent,Nous pleurons, et les os de nos pères palpitent;Le sépulcre pensif tremble à cause de vous.Ayez pitié. Nos cœurs sont fidèles et doux;Nous vivons enfermés dans nos maisons étroites,Humbles, seuls; nos lois sont très simples et très droites,Tellement qu'un enfant les mettrait en écritJamais le juif ne chante et jamais il ne rit.Nous payons le tribut, n'importe quelles sommes.On nous remue à terre avec le pied; nous sommesComme le vêtement d'un homme assassiné,Gloire à Dieu! Mais faut-il qu'avec le nouveau-né,Avec l'enfant qu'on tette, avec l'enfant qu'on sèvre,Nu, poussant devant lui son chien, son bœuf, sa chèvre,Israël fuie et coure épars dans tous les sens!Qu'on ne soit plus un peuple et qu'on soit des passants!Rois, ne nous faites pas chasser à coups des piques,Et Dieu vous ouvrira des portes magnifiques.Ayez pitié de nous. Nous sommes accablés.Nous ne verrons donc plus nos arbres et nos blés!Les mères n'auront plus de lait dans leurs mamelles!Les bêtes dans les bois sont avec leurs femelles,Les nids dorment heureux sous les branches blottis,On laisse en paix la biche allaiter ses petits,Permettez-nous de vivre aussi, nous, dans nos caves,Sous nos pauvres toits, presque au bagne et presqueesclaves,Mais auprès des cercueils de nos pères! daignezNous souffrir sous vos pieds de nos larmes baignés!Oh! la dispersion sur les routes lointaines,Quel deuil! Permettez-nous de boire à nos fontainesEt de vivre en nos champs, et vous prospérerez.Hélas! nous nous tordons les bras, désespérés!Epargnez-nous l'exil, ô rois, et l'agonieDe la solitude âpre, éternelle, infinie!Laissez-nous la patrie et laissez-nous le ciel!Le pain sur qui l'on pleure en mangeant est du fiel.Ne soyez pas le vent si nous sommes la cendre.Voici notre rançon, hélas! daignez la prendre.Ô rois, protégez-nous. Voyez nos désespoirs.Soyez sur nous, mais non comme des anges noirs;Soyez des anges bons et doux, car l'aile sombreEt l'aile blanche, ô rois, ne font pas la même ombre.Révoquez votre arrêt. Rois, nous vous supplionsPar vos aïeux sacrés, grands comme les lions,Par les tombeaux des rois, parles tombeaux des reines,Profonds et pénétrés de lumières sereines,Et nous mettons nos cœurs, ô maîtres des humains,Nos prières, nos deuils dans les petites mainsDe votre infante Jeanne, innocente, et pareilleÀ la fraise des bois où se pose l'abeille.Roi, reine, ayez pitié!
After the sublime and inexpressible pathos of this appeal from age and innocence against the most execrable of all religions that ever infected earth and verified hell, it would have been impossible for any poet but one to find expression for the passion of unselfish faith in that infernal creed which should not merely horrify and disgust us. But when Hugo brings before us the figure of the grand inquisitor in contemplation of the supreme act of faith accomplished in defiance of king and queen to the greater glory of God, for the ultimate redemption of souls else condemned to everlasting torment, the rapture of the terrible redeemer, whose faith is in salvation by fire, is rendered into words of such magical and magnificent inspiration that the conscience of our fancy is well nigh conquered and convinced and converted for the moment as we read.
TORQUEMADA
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 refermaisSur 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 écrinD'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 desflammes.Lui perdant les humains, moi secourant les âmes;Tous deux bourreaux, faisant par le même moyenLui 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 rendrezgrâceQuand 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 chambresDe 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 emporteLà-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 elleQui rongeait sa lumière et qui mordait son aile;L'ange expirait en proie au démon. MaintenantTout brûle, et le partage auguste et rayonnantSe 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 inappreciableLégende 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.