Chapter II: Introduction

Victor Hugo's conception of the scheme of the series of poems to which he gave the title of _La Légende des Siècles_ is thus described in the preface to the first scenes: 'Exprimer l'humanité dans une espèce d'oeuvre cyclique; la peindre successivement et simultanément sous tous ses aspects, histoire, fable, philosophie, religion, science, lesquels se résument en un seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la lumière; faire apparaître, dans une sorte de miroir sombre et clair--que l'interruption naturelle de travaux terrestres brisera probablement avant qu'il ait la dimension rêvée par l'auteur--cette grande figure une et multiple, lugubre et rayonnante, faible et sacrée, L'Homme.' The poet thus dreamt of a vast epic, of which the central figure should be no mythical or legendary hero, but Man himself, conceived as struggling upwards from the darkness of barbarism to the light of a visionary golden age. Every epoch was to be painted in its dominant characteristic, every aspect of human thought was to find its fitting expression. The first series could pretend to no such completeness, but the poet promised that the gaps should be filled up in succeeding volumes. It cannot be said that this stupendous design was ever carried out. The first volumes, which were published in 1859, and from which the poems contained in this selection are taken, left great spaces vacant in the ground-plan of the work, and little attempt was made in the subsequent series, which appeared in 1877 and 1883, to fill up those spaces. In fact, Hugo has left large tracts of human history untrod. He has scarcely touched the civilization of the East, he has given us no adequate picture of ancient Greece. _L'Aide offerte à Majorien_ can hardly be regarded as a sufficient picture of the wanderings of the nations, nor _Le Régiment du Baron Madruce_ as an adequate embodiment of the spirit of the eighteenth century. The Reformation, and, what is stranger still, the French Revolution, are not handled at all, though the heroism of the Napoleonic era finds fitting description in _Le Cimetière d'Eylau_. The truth is that Hugo set himself a task which was perhaps beyond the power of any single poet to accomplish, and was certainly one for which he was not altogether well fitted. He did not possess that capacity for taking a broad and impartial view of history which was needed in the author of such an epic as he designed. His strong predilections on the one hand, and his violent antipathies on the other, swayed his choice of subjects, narrowed his field of vision, and influenced his manner of presentment. The series cannot therefore pretend to philosophic completeness. It is a gallery of pictures painted by a master-hand, and pervaded by a certain spirit of unity, yet devoid of any strict arrangement, and formed on no carefully maintained principle. It is a set of cameos, loosely strung upon a thread, a structure with countless beautiful parts, which do not however cohere into any symmetrical whole. The poems are cast in many forms; allegory, narrative, vision, didactic poetry, lyric poetry, all find a place. There is little history, but much legend, some fiction, and a good deal of mythology. The series was not designed as a whole. _La Chanson des Aventuriers de la Mer_ was written in or before 1840, _Le Mariage de Roland_, _Aymerillot_, and _La Conscience_ in or about 1846, and other pieces at intervals between 1849 and 1858, the date at which the poet appears to have begun the task of building these fragments into an epic structure. Nor is there in these poems any dispassionate attempt to portray the character of the successive ages in the life of the race. For Hugo there was no 'émancipation du moi.' The _Légende_ is less a revelation of history than it is a revelation of the poet. His choice of themes was dictated less by a careful search after what was most characteristic of each epoch than by his own strong predilections. He loved the picturesque, the heroic, the enormous, the barbarous, the grotesque. Hence _Éviradnus_, _Ratbert_, _Le Mariage de Roland_. He loved also the weak, the poor, the defenceless, the old man and the little child. Hence _Les Pauvres Gens_, _Booz endormi_, _Petit Paul_. He delighted in the monstrous, he revelled in extremes, and he had little perception of the lights and shades which make up ordinary human character. Neither his poems nor his romances show much trace of that psychological analysis which is the peculiar feature of so much modern literature. Child of the nineteenth century, as he was in so many respects, in many of the features of his art he belongs to no era, and conforms to no tendency, except that of his own Titanic genius. He could see white and he could see black, but he could not see grey, and never tried to paint it. He does not allow Philip II even his redeeming virtues of indefatigable industry and unceasing devotion to duty, while in his Rome of the decadence would assuredly be found scarce five good men. His vision is curiously limited to the darker side of history; he hears humanity uttering in all ages a cry of suffering, and but rarely a shout of laughter. He sees the oppression of the tyrant more vividly than the heroism of the oppressed. Has he to write of the power of Spain? It is in the portrayal of the tyrant of Spain rather than the men who overcame Spain that his genius finds scope. Does he wish to paint the era of religious persecution? It is the horror of the Inquisition rather than the heroism of its victims that is pictured on his canvas. Delineations of heroic virtue there are indeed in the _Légende_, but it is noteworthy that they occur usually in fictions such as _Éviradnus_, _Le Petit Roi de Galice_, and _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice._[1] He has given us no historical portraits of noble characters which can be put side by side with those of Philip II and Sultan Mourad. As in his dramas, his kings and rulers are always drawn in dark colours. His heroes belong to the classes that he loved, poor people, common soldiers, old men, children, and, be it added, animals. He is always the man of great heart and strong prejudices, never the dramatist or the philosopher.

[Footnote 1: It is interesting to observe how frequently his heroes are old men, as Éviradnus, Booz, Fabrice.]

Hugo himself says sadly in his Preface, 'Les tableaux riants sont rares dans ce livre; cela tient à ce qu'ils ne sont pas fréquents dans l'histoire,' but in truth the tinge of gloom which lies upon the _Légende_ is rather the impress upon the volume of history of the poet's own puissant individuality. He was no scientist and no _savant_, he had none of that spirit of imperturbable calm with which Shakespeare surveyed all mankind, none of that impartial sympathy with which Browning investigated the psychology of saints and sinners alike. He loved deeply and he hated fiercely, and his poetry was the voice of his love and his hate. The intensity of his own poetic vision made the past stand before him as clearly as the present; the note of personal feeling is as clear and strong in _Sultan Mourad_ and _Bivar_ as in _Les Châtiments_ or _Le Retour de l'Empereur_. His great qualities of heart and mind and his singular defects are written large upon every page of the _Légende_. His passionate hatred of injustice and his passionate love of liberty, his reverence for the virtues of the home, and especially for filial obedience and respect, his love for little children, his antagonism to war and his admiration for what is great in war which was ever struggling with that antagonism, his patriotic feeling for the triumphs of the Napoleonic era, to him the heroic age of French history, his exaggerated belief in the wickedness of kings and the innocence of poor people, the exaltation of pity into the greatest of all virtues--these and many other characteristic traits find ample illustration in his legend of the centuries. It is ever Hugo that is speaking to us, however many be the masks that he wears.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that no general conception of the history and destiny of mankind is to be found in the work, or that the author had no sense of an increasing purpose running through the ages. The conception is no doubt that of a poet and a seer, not of a historian or a philosopher, but it is clear and vivid, and is expressed with Titanic force. Hugo pictured the history of mankind as a long struggle upwards towards the light. Man has in all ages been oppressed by many evils--by war, by tyranny, by materiality, by mental and moral darkness. He has sinned greatly, he has suffered greatly; he has been burdened with toil and surrounded by shadow, tormented by his rulers and misled by his priests. Paganism was merely material; Rome was strong, cruel, and repressive; 'a winding-sheet of the nations,' he calls her in _Changement d'Horizon_[2]; Judaism, his view of which must be sought rather in _Dieu_ than in the _Légende_, cold and harsh, could influence man only by keeping him within the strait-waistcoat of a narrow law; the life of the founder of Christianity was only a momentary gleam of light in the darkness; the Middle Age was a confused turmoil of rude heroism and cunning savagery; the Renaissance a relapse into heathenism and the worship of nature. Yet with the modern ages comes a rift in the blackness; the poets reveal a new spirit; their songs are the songs of peace and not of war:

Le poète à la mort dit: Meurs, guerre, ombre, Envie!--
Et chasse doucement les hommes vers la vie;
Et l'on voit de ses vers, goutte à goutte, des pleurs
Tomber sur les enfants, les femmes et les fleurs;
Et des astres jaillir de ses strophes volantes;
Et son chant fait pousser des bourgeons verts aux plantes;
Et ses rêves sont faits d'aurore, et dans l'amour,
Sa bouche chante et rit, toute pleine de jour.
(_Changement d'Horizon_.)

[Footnote 2: For a fuller development of this view see _La Fin de Satan: Le Gibet_, I, i.]

Gentleness and humanity are the characteristic virtues of the later age. It is a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that such pieces as _Le Crapaud_, _Après la Bataille_, and _Les Pauvres Gens_ have no connexion with any epoch. In Hugo's view, that tenderness for the weak and the defenceless which is their keynote was the peculiar mark of the age in which he lived, and a foretaste of the glory that was to come. For the great purpose which his reading of human history reveals to him is the increase of the love of man to man, the widening of the bounds of liberty, the growth of brotherly feeling. Suffering and oppression behind, freedom and joy in front, so does Hugo's imagination picture world-history, and his love of violent antitheses made him paint the past in the darkest colours in order that his vision of the future might shine with the greater radiance. Troubled as he was, no doubt, by the sombre events of 1850-1, and by the slow progress that the principles of peace seemed to be making in the world, yet the inspiration of that vision was never lost, and in the apocalyptic vision of the poem _Plein Ciel_ he gave superb lyrical expression to the thought that man will find his heaven, not above the clouds, but in a regenerated earth, penetrated with the spirit of light and love.

This underlying conception was expressed again in the poem entitled _La Vision d'où est sorti ce livre_, which was written at Guernsey in 1857, but published only in 1877. In this vision the history of man appears to the poet in the form of a gigantic wall, on which are seen the crimes and sufferings of all the ages. Two spirits pass by, the spirit of Fate (_Fatalité_), which is the enemy of man, and the spirit of God (Dieu), which is the friend of man. This wall is shivered into fragments, by which the seer understands the destruction of pain and evil, and the closing of the long volume of human history. That volume, the end of which the dreamer foresees, the poet proposes to write:

Ce livre, c'est le reste effrayant de Babel;
C'est la lugubre Tour des Choses, l'édifice
Du bien, du mal, des pleurs, des deuils, des sacrifices,
Fier jadis, dominant les lointains horizons,
Aujourd'hui n'ayant plus que de hideux tronçons
Épars, couchés, perdus dans l'obscure vallée;
C'est l'épopée humaine, âpre, immense--écroulée.

The poet's view of the problem of evil and the destiny of humanity becomes clearer if the _Légende_ is read in connexion with the two poems mentioned in the Preface to the volume of 1859, as designed to form with it an immense trilogy: _Dieu_ and _La Fin de Satan_. Neither was published till after the poet's death, and the latter was left in an unfinished condition. But they were both planned in the days when, isolated on his rock and severed from active life, the poet meditated on the deep questions of life and death. They were meant to be, the one the prelude, and the other the sequel of his poem of humanity. The leading thought of _Dieu_ is the falseness of all the positive systems of religion which have burdened or inspired humanity, and the truth that

'Dieu n'a qu'un front: Lumière; et n'a qu'un nom: Amour,'

though it is only death which will fully reveal that light.

The theme of _La Fin de Satan_ is the final reconciliation of good and evil. As Satan falls from heaven, a feather drops from his wing, and from that feather the Almighty creates the angel Liberty, who is thus the child equally of the spirit of Good and the spirit of Evil; that angel finally brings about the pardon of Satan, when the demon finds that it is impossible for him to live without the presence of the Almighty. Man is endowed with liberty, this child of good and ill, and his spirit hovers therefore ever between the exalted and the mean. So humanity appears to the seer in _Dieu_:

Et je vis apparaître une étrange figure;
Un être tout semé de bouches, d'ailes, d'yeux,
Vivant, presque lugubre et presque radieux;
Vaste, il volait; plusieurs des ailes étaient chauves.
En s'agitant, les cils de ses prunelles fauves
Jetaient plus de rumeur qu'une troupe d'oiseaux,
Et ses plumes faisaient un bruit de grandes eaux.
Cauchemar de la chair ou vision d'apôtre,
Selon qu'il se montrait d'une face ou de l'autre,
Il semblait une bête ou semblait un esprit.
Il paraissait, dans l'air où mon vol le surprit,
Faire de la lumière, et faire des ténèbres.

To Hugo, therefore, evil is not an equal force with good, nor is it eternal. It was created in time, it will end in time. It is a mistake to suppose that he accepted any kind of Manichaeism as his solution of the problem of the universe. In reality his thought is much more permeated with Christian feeling than with Manichaeism. Though he rejected dogmatic Catholicism, and indeed assailed it with Voltairian mockery, yet his vision of the Eternal as the embodiment of that mercy and goodness which is greater than justice is in its essence a Christian conception. Inspired, in part at least, by Christian thought seems also to be his conception of the eventual reconciliation of good and evil, and that belief in the restoration of all things which finds expression in the concluding lines of _L'Âne_:

Dieu ne veut pas que rien, même l'obscurité,
Même l'Erreur qui semble ou funeste ou futile,
Que rien puisse, en criant: Quoi, j'étais inutile!
Dans le gouffre à jamais retomber éperdu;
Et le lien sacré du service rendu,
A travers l'ombre affreuse et la céleste sphère,
Joint l'échelon de nuit aux marches de lumière.

Hope is indeed the keynote of Hugo's poetry. In the darkest days of 1871, when France was tearing out her own vitals and Paris was destroying itself, he could write thus:

Les récits montrent l'un après l'autre leurs têtes,
Car les évènements ont leur cap des Tempêtes,
Derrière est la clarté. Ces flux et ces reflux,
Ces recommencements, ces combats sont voulus,
Au-dessus de la haine immense, quelqu'un aime.
Ayons foi. Ce n'est pas sans quelque but suprême
Que sans cesse, en ce gouffre où rêvent les sondeurs,
Un prodigieux vent soufflant des profondeurs,
A travers l'âpre nuit, pousse, emporte et ramène
Sur tout l'écueil divin toute la mer humaine.
(_L'Année Terrible._)

See too the beautiful lines written when to public disaster was added private grief for the loss of his son Charles, especially the passage, too long to quote here, in _L'Enterrement_, beginning 'Quand le jeune lutteur....'

If, passing from the underlying conception to the actual material of the _Légende_, we ask to what extent the poems can be regarded as history, the answer must be that they are not history at all in the ordinary sense of the word. In his _Préface_ Hugo remarks: 'C'est l'aspect légendaire qui prévaut dans ces deux volumes.' As a matter of fact, there is not a single poem in any of the series which is a narrative based upon actual fact. Of the pieces in the present volume, _Le Mariage de Roland, Aymerillot_, and _Bivar_ are founded on legends. _Éviradnus_ and _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice_ are inventions, and the others are mostly embroideries woven upon ancient themes rather than historical or even legendary pictures. These latter, of which _La Conscience_ is the best instance in this volume, suggest De Vigny's conception: 'Une pensée philosophique, mise en scène sous une forme épique ou dramatique.' Of accuracy in detail and local colour, Hugo was utterly careless. He possessed a capacious, but not an exact, memory, and, provided the general impression produced by a description was the true one, he did not stop to inquire whether every detail was correct. Nor did he always enjoy an extensive knowledge of the epoch which he delineated. But he possessed to the full the poet's faculty of building the whole form and feature of a past age out of a few stray fragments of information. The historical colour of _Ruy Blas_ is said to be based on two French books, carelessly consulted, yet of _Ruy Blas_ M. Paul de Saint-Victor, after making a close study of the period, wrote: 'Ce fragment de siècle que je venais d'exhumer de tant de recherches, je le retrouvais, vivant et mouvant, dans l'harmonie d'un drame admirable. Le souffle d'un grand poète ressuscitait subitement l'ossuaire des faits et des choses que j'avais péniblement rajusté.'[3]

[Footnote 3: Quoted in Eugène Rigal's _Victor Hugo, poète épique_.]

Moreover, inaccurate as Hugo often is, it is never the inaccuracy that falsifies. He has been severely criticized for having in _Au Lion d'Androclès_ assigned to a single epoch events and personages which are really separated by centuries. But all the facts are typical of the spirit which dominated Imperial Rome, and combine therefore to form a description which has poetic and imaginative, if not historical, truth. And if, with greater licence, he has accumulated upon the head of a single Mourad all the crimes of a long line of Sultans it is because in drawing Mourad he is drawing the Turkish nation. Mourad is to him the typical Turk, the embodiment of Oriental cruelty and lust. If again, to pass to a larger subject, he has chosen legend rather than history as the basis of many of his poems, it is not only because of his own innate love of the marvellous and romantic, but because he cared for the truth embodied in legend more than the truth embodied in chronicle. If he mingled fiction with his history, it was because he conceived of the fiction as being as true a representation of the facts of an era as annals and records. It may be true that Hugo made imagination do duty for study, but it is also true that an imagination, such as Hugo's, may be as sure an instrument as study in reconstructing the past. He may have mistaken the date of Crassus by several centuries, but readers of Suetonius will hardly deny the faithfulness of his delineation of at least one side of the civilization of ancient Rome; he may have invented a Spanish princess, but his carefully stippled portrait of Philip II is true to the life, even if it be Philip in his darkest moods. His inaccuracies are in truth of small account. Who that reads _Le Cimetière d'Eylau_ cares whether there was a place of burial in the battlefield or not? or what lover of _Booz endormi_ seeks to know how closely the flora of Palestine has been studied? A more serious criticism than the charge of inaccuracy is that of partial vision, and from this Hugo cannot be entirely exculpated. He saw with his heart, and seeing with the heart must always mean partial vision. For at the root of Hugo's nature lay an immense pity, pity not merely for the suffering, but for what is base or criminal, or what is ugly or degraded. It was this pity which is the keynote of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ and _Les Misérables_; it is this pity which inspired much of the _Légende des Siècles_.

The defence of the weak by the strong is one of his constant themes, as witness _Éviradnus_, _Le Petit Roi de Galice_, _Les Pauvres Gens._ The contrast of the weak and the strong is one of his favourite artistic effects, as witness _Booz endormi_, _La Confiance du Marquis Falrice._ An act of pity redeemed Sultan Mourad, an act of pity made the poor ass greater than all the philosophers. It was this absorbing pity for the defenceless that made Hugo so merciless to the oppressor and so incapable of seeing anything but the deepest black in the picture of the tyrant. One-sided the poet may be, but it is the one-sidedness of a generous nature; he may err, but his errors at least lean to the side of virtue.

It would be impossible in the brief space of an introduction such as this to discuss at any length the characteristics of Hugo as a literary artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume. It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet's extraordinary fecundity of words and images. Occasionally, especially in his later works, this degenerates into diffuseness, and he exhibits a tendency to repetition and a fondness for long enumeration of names and details. On the other hand, he constantly shows how well he understood the power of brevity and compression. There is not a superfluous word nor a poetic image in _La Conscience_, the severe and simple style of which is well suited to the sternness of the subject. The story of _Après la Bataille_ is related with telling conciseness, while in the highly finished work of _Booz endormi_ there are no redundant phrases. The many variations on the same theme in _Aymerillot_ may be criticized as tedious, but there underlies them the artistic purpose of intensifying the reader's sense of the cowardice of the nobles by an accumulation of examples. A like criticism and a like defence may be made of the long list of the crimes of Sultan Mourad, though here perhaps the poet's torrent of facts goes beyond the point at which the amassing of details is effective. On the other hand, the swiftness of the narrative of the _Mariage de Roland_, and the soldierly brevity of the _Cimetière d'Eylau_, a piece not included in this volume, are alike admirable, and show Hugo at his best as a story-teller.

One of the most marked features of Hugo's poetry is his custom of attributing human desires and volition to inanimate objects. To Hugo, the whole universe seemed to be alive, both as a whole and in each of its separate parts, and his way of humanizing the inanimate is not so much a conscious literary artifice as the natural habit of his imagination. The tendency is not confined to his poetry; readers of his romances will remember the gargoyles of Notre-Dame and the cannon which got loose in the hold of the _Claymore_ and became 'une bête surnaturelle.' But the instances in his romantic poetry are naturally more numerous and more vivid. The swords of the heroes are always alive; in the duel between Roland and Olivier:

Durandal heurte et suit Closamont.

In the combat between Roland and his enemies in the _Petit Roi de Galice_, the hero staggers and Froïla leaps forward to crush him:

Mais Durandal se dresse et jette Froïla
Sur Pacheco, dont l'âme en ce moment hurla.

The statues in the hall at Final are moved at the gentle tread of Fabrice and his little ward, and seem to bow to them as they pass.

Chaque statue, émue à leur pas doux et sombre,
Vibre, et toutes ont l'air de saluer dans l'ombre,
Les héros le vieillard, et les anges l'enfant.

But the most striking instance of this tendency occurs in _Éviradnus_, where, from beginning to end, all that surrounds the actors in the story lives with a passionate life. The trees that overhear the plot of Sigismond and Ladislas tremble and moan, and the words that issue from the lips of the miscreants are dark with shadow or red with blood. The half-ruined castle of Corbus fights with the winter, like a strong man with his enemies; the gargoyles on its towers bark at the winds, the graven monsters on the ramparts snarl and snort, the sculptured lions claw and bite the wind and rain[4]. In the gloomy halls the griffins seize with their teeth the great beams of the roofs, and the door is afraid of the noise of its own opening. The very shadows feel fear and the pillars are chilled with terror. The armour of the horses and the men is terribly alive, and charger and knight make but one monster, clothed in scales of steel.

[Footnote 4: With this picture in verse of the fight between the castle and the storm should be compared the prose picture of the fight between the fire and the water in _Le Rhin_ (Lettre xix).]

Hugo loves especially to endow with life objects that suggest a struggle. It is the wrecked and broken ship of _Pleine Mer_ rather than the triumphant vessel of _Plein Ciel_ that is animate.

Ce Titan se rua, joyeux, dans la tempête;
* * * * *
Quand il marchait, fumant, grondant, couvert de toile,
Il jetait un tel râle â l'air épouvanté
Que toute l'eau tremblait.
* * * * *
Et pour l'âme il avait dans sa cale un enfer.

Allied with this habit of vivifying the inanimate is the more subtle artifice of transfiguring or magnifying concrete objects, so that they become symbolic without ceasing to be real. This blending of the actual and the figurative is seen in the description of the King and Emperor in _Éviradnus:_

Leurs deux figures sont lugubrement grandies
Par de rouges reflets de sacs et d'incendies.
* * * * *
Leurs ongles monstrueux, crispés sur des rapines,
Égratignent le pâle et triste continent.

In _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice_ the reality of the wine and the suggestion of the blood are very artfully mingled

Quelque chose de rouge entre les dalles fume,
Mais, si tiède que soit cette douteuse écume,
Assez de barils sont éventrés et crevés
Pour que ce soit du vin qui court les pavés.

Another remarkable feature of Hugo's literary art is the feeling for light and shade which it displays. He likes to wrap his poems in a physical atmosphere of brightness or gloom, corresponding to the sentiment which pervades them. How, for instance, in _Les Orientales_, that exquisite little gem, _Sarah la Baigneuse_, flashes and sparkles with light! How striking in _La Fin de Satan_ is the contrast between the murky atmosphere in which the maker of crosses works and the bright sunshine in which Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem is bathed! With what consummate art the darkness of the Crucifixion is made to accentuate the horror of the event!

L'ombre immense avait l'air d'une accusation;
Le monde était couvert d'une nuit infamante;
C'était l'accablement plus noir que la tourmente,
La morne extinction de l'haleine et du bruit.

Contrast the radiance of the dawn in which the Satyr, the emblem of strong and joyous Nature, is first seen:

C'était l'heure où sortaient les chevaux du soleil;
Le ciel tout frémissant du glorieux réveil,
Ouvrant les deux battants de sa porte sonore,
Blancs, ils apparaissaient formidables d'aurore;
Derrière eux, comme un orbe effrayant, couvert d'yeux,
Éclatait la rondeur du char radieux
* * * * *
Les quatre ardents chevaux dressaient leur poitrail d'or;
Faisant leurs premiers pas, ils se cabraient encor
Entre la zone obscure et la zone enflammée;
De leurs crins, d'où semblait sortir une fumée
De perles, de saphirs, d'onyx, de diamants,
Dispersée et fuyante au fond des éléments,
Les trois premiers, l'oeil fier, la narine embrasée,
Secouaient dans le jour des gouttes de rosée;
Le dernier secouait des astres dans la nuit.

In _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice_ light and shadow are very skilfully managed. We see the little princess Isora making her toilet in the early morning, when everything is fresh and bright. It is in the dawn that she loves to play. But the banquet of death takes place at night in a dimly lighted hall, when the lack of clear light adds to the horror of the scene. Note the Rembrandtesque effects in such phrases: 'aux tremblantes clartés,' 'l'ombre indistincte,' 'à travers l'ombre, on voit toutes les soifs infâmes,' and it ends in 'le triomphe de l'ombre,' a phrase in which the literal and the figurative are subtly blended together. On the other hand, how everything sparkles and gleams in _Le Mariage de Roland_! Olivier's sword-point glitters like the eye of a demon, while Durandal shines as he falls on his foeman's head; the sunshine is all round them in the day, and the night passes quickly; sparks fly from the weapons as they strike one another, and light up the very shadows with a dull flash. Take again _La Rose de l'Infante_. Everything round the little princess is bright: 'le profond jardin rayonnant et fleuri,' 'un grand palais comme au fond d'une gloire,' 'de clairs viviers,' 'des paons étoilés.' The very grass, too, seems to sparkle with diamonds and rubies. But Philip is a dark shadow, half hidden in mist:

On voit d'en bas une ombre, au fond d'une vapeur,
De fenêtre à fenêtre errer, et l'on a peur.

He is always dressed in black:

Toujours vêtu de noir, ce tout-puissant terrestre
Avait l'air d'être en deuil de ce qu'il existait.

No light is ever seen in his palaces:

L'Escurial, Burgos, Aranjuez, ses repaires,
Jamais n'illuminaient leurs livides plafonds.

His eye shines, it is true, but it is a gleam that suggests a darkness beneath:

Sa prunelle
Luit comme un soupirail de caverne.

Note again the oppressive darkness of the opening lines of _Pleine Mer_, in which the only touch of light is the winding-sheet of the waves, and contrast it with the atmosphere of light which surrounds the ship in _Plein Ciel_, where even the night is bright:

La Nuit tire du fond des gouffres inconnus
Son filet où luit Mars, où rayonne Vénus.

_Le Crapaud_ is wrapped in the light of sunset:

Le couchant rayonnait dans les nuages roses;
C'était la fin d'un jour d'orage, et l'occident
Changeait l'ondée en flamme en son brasier ardent.
* * * * *
Les feuilles s'empourpraient dans les arbres vermeils;
L'eau miroitait, mêlée à l'herbe, dans l'ornière.

And this because sunset is the hour for gentle thoughts and quiet feeling:

Dans la sérénité du pâle crépuscule,
La brute par moments pense et sent qu'elle est soeur
De la mystérieuse et profonde douceur.

So strong is Hugo's feeling for light and shadow that he often seems to solidify them, as it were, into concrete objects. When the trap-door in the hall of Corbus is opened

Il en sort de l'ombre, ayant l'odeur du crime,

and in the pit are seen

D'ombres tâtant le mur et de spectres reptiles.

In _Les Pauvres Gens_

La morte écoute l'ombre avec stupidité.

In _Fabrice_

L'aïeul semble d'ombre et de pierre construit.

The light seems solid in this line from _Le Satyre_:

Son pied fourchu faisait des trous dans la lumière.

Again, in _La Conscience_, shadow is vast and oppressive:

L'ombre des tours faisait la nuit dans les campagnes.

And in _Au Lion d'Androclès_ it is the fitting emblem of the human race in a degenerate age:

La créature humaine, importune au ciel bleu,
Faisait une ombre affreuse à la cloison de Dieu.

Very curious is the connexion between the legends of a countryside and the smoke of its cottages in the lines:

Les légendes toujours mêlent quelque fantôme
A l'obscure vapeur qui sort des toits de chaume,
L'âtre enfante le rêve, et l'on voit ondoyer
L'effroi dans la fumée errante du foyer. (_Éviradnus_.)

Of the infinite variety of Hugo's poetic gifts such a selection as is contained in this volume can of course give but a very inadequate idea. The extraordinary versatility and fecundity of his genius can be appreciated only by those who have read all, or at least much, of his output. But the first series of the _Légende_ is perhaps that part of the poet's work in which substance and beauty, original thought and vivid expression, are found in the most perfect combination. Written in middle life, it stands midway between his earlier poetry with its more lyric note and his later work with its deeper and more prophetic tones. In point of expression the poet's powers had attained their full development; he has perfect command of rime; the versification is free and shows no trace of the stilted style of his first volumes; the language is copious and eloquent, but exhibits few signs of that verbosity and tendency to vain repetition which, as has been already remarked, marred some of his later poetry. In the _Légende_, no doubt, are a thousand extravagances, _bizarreries_, anachronisms, and negligences. But the greatest poet is not, like the greatest general, he who makes fewest mistakes, but he who expresses the noblest and truest feeling in the noblest and truest language. So judged, the _Légende_ will take its place amongst the best that the nineteenth century produced in poetry.

G. F. BRIDGE.

LONDON, _March_, 1907.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Victor-Marie Hugo, son of an officer in Napoleon's army, was born at Besançon on February 26, 1802. He spent a roving and unsettled childhood, for wherever the father was sent the mother and children followed. The first three years of his life were spent in Elba, where he learnt to speak the Italian dialect spoken in the island in addition to his mother tongue. Then for three years the family was in Paris and Victor got a little education in a small school. But in 1805 the father was appointed to a post in the army of Naples, and in the autumn of 1807 his wife and children joined him at Avellino. Two years later General Hugo was invited by Joseph Bonaparte to fill an important position in the kingdom of Spain, and, desirous that his sons should receive a good education, he sent his family to Paris, where his wife chose for their home the house in the Rue des Feuillantines which has been so charmingly described by the poet in the lines _Ce qui se passait aux Feuillantines_. There he learnt much from an old soldier, General Lahorie, who, obnoxious to Napoleon for the share he had taken in Moreau's plot, lived secretly in the house, and from an old priest named Larivière, who came every day to teach the three brothers. There too he played in the garden with the little Adèle Foucher, who afterwards became his wife. But this quiet home life did not last long. In 1811 Madame Hugo set off to join her husband at Madrid, and the boys went with her. At Madrid they were sent to a school kept by Priests where Victor was not very happy, and from which he got small profit. Next year the whole family returned to Paris, and in 1815, at the age of thirteen, he was definitely sent to a boarding-school to prepare for the École Polytechnique. But his was a precocious genius, and he devoted himself, even at school, to verse-writing with greater ardour than to study. He wrote in early youth more than one poem for a prize competition, composed a romance which some years later he elaborated into the story _Bug-Jargal_, and in 1820, when only eighteen, joined his two brothers, Abel and Eugène, in publishing a literary journal called _Le Conservateur Littéraire_. About the same time he became engaged to Adèle Foucher, and wrote for her the romance of _Han d'Islande_, which, however, was not published till later. In 1822 he and Adèle were married, and in the same year he published his first volume of _Odes_. He was now fully launched on a literary career, and for twenty years or more the story of his life is mainly the story of his literary output. In 1827 he published his drama of _Cromwell_, the preface to which, with its note of defiance to literary convention, caused him to be definitely accepted as the head of the Romantic School of poetry. _Les Orientales_, _Le dernier jour d'un condamné_, _Marion de Lorme_, and _Hernani_ followed in quick succession. The revolution of 1830 disturbed for a moment his literary activity, but as soon as things were quiet again he shut himself in his study with a bottle of ink, a pen, and an immense pile of paper. For six weeks he was never seen, except at dinner-time, and the result was _Notre-Dame de Paris_. During the next ten years four volumes of poetry and four dramas were published; in 1841 came his election to the Academy, and in 1843 he published _Les Burgraves_, a drama which was less successful than his former plays, and which marks the close of his career as a dramatist. In the same year there came to him the greatest sorrow of his life. His daughter Léopoldine, to whom he was deeply attached, was drowned with her husband during a pleasure excursion on the Seine only a few months after their marriage.

In 1845 Hugo began to take an active part in politics. Son of a Vendean mother, he had been in early life a fervent royalist, and even in 1830 he could write of the fallen royal family with respectful sympathy. Yet by that time his democratic leanings had declared themselves, and he accepted the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe only as a step towards a republic, for which he considered France was not yet ripe. In 1845 the king made him a peer of France, but this did not prevent him from throwing himself with all the ardour of his nature into the revolution of 1848. Divining the ambition of Louis Napoleon, he resisted his growing power, and when the Second Empire was established the poet was among the first who were exiled from France. He took refuge first in Jersey, and afterwards in Guernsey, where he lived in a house near the coast, from the upper balcony of which the cliffs of Normandy could sometimes be discerned. Thence he launched against the usurper a bitter prose satire, _Napoléon le Petit_, and a still bitterer satire in verse, _Les Châtiments_, and there he wrote two of his greatest novels, _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ and _Les Misérables_, two of his finest volumes of poetry, _Les Contemplations_, the greater part of the first series of _La Légende des Siècles_, and the two remarkable religious poems, _Dieu_ and _La Fin de Satan_. He returned to France on the fall of Napoleon in 1870, to be for fifteen years the idol of the people, who regarded him as the incarnation of the spirit of liberty. Several volumes of poetry were issued during those fifteen years, notably _L'Année Terrible_, _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_, and a second series of _La Légende des Siècles_, none perhaps equal as a whole to the best of his earlier volumes, but all, especially the second-named, abounding in beautiful and striking poetry. He died in 1885, and was buried in a manner befitting one who had filled Europe with his fame, and had been for so many years the 'stormy voice of France.'

PRÉFACE DE LA PREMIÈRE SÉRIE

_Hauteville-House, Septembre 1857,_

Les personnes qui voudront bien jeter un coup d'oeil sur ce livre ne s'en feraient pas une idée précise, si elles y voyaient autre chose qu'un commencement.

Ce livre est-il donc un fragment? Non. Il existe à part. Il a, comme on le verra, son exposition, son milieu et sa fin.

Mais, en même temps, il est, pour ainsi dire, la première page d'un autre livre.

Un commencement peut-il être un tout? Sans doute. Un péristyle est un édifice.

L'arbre, commencement de la forêt, est un tout. Il appartient à la vie isolée, par la racine, et à la vie en commun, par la sève. A lui seul, il ne prouve que l'arbre, mais il annonce la forêt.

Ce livre, s'il n'y avait pas quelque affectation dans des comparaisons de cette nature, aurait, lui aussi, ce double caractère. Il existe solitairement et forme un tout; il existe solidairement et fait partie d'un ensemble.

Cet ensemble, que sera-t-il?

Exprimer l'humanité dans une espèce d'oeuvre cyclique; la peindre successivement et simultanément sous tous ses aspects, histoire, fable, philosophie, religion, science, lesquels se résument en un seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la lumière; faire apparaître dans une sorte de miroir sombre et clair--que l'interruption naturelle des travaux terrestres brisera probablement avant qu'il ait la dimension rêvée par l'auteur--cette grande figure une et multiple, lugubre et rayonnante, fatale et sacrée, l'Homme; voilà de quelle pensée, de quelle ambition, si l'on veut, est sortie _La Légende des Siècles_.

Le volume qu'on va lire n'en contient que la première partie, la première série, comme dit le titre.

Les poèmes qui composent ce volume ne sont donc autre chose que des empreintes successives du profil humain, de date en date, depuis Ève, mère des hommes, jusqu'à la Révolution, mère des peuples; empreintes prises, tantôt sur la barbarie, tantôt sur la civilisation, presque toujours sur le vif de l'histoire; empreintes moulées sur le masque des siècles.

Quand d'autres volumes se seront joints à celui-ci, de façon à rendre l'oeuvre un peu moins incomplète, cette série d'empreintes, vaguement disposées dans un certain ordre chronologique, pourra former une sorte de galerie de la médaille humaine.

Pour le poète comme pour l'historien, pour l'archéologue comme pour le philosophe, chaque siècle est un changement de physionomie de l'humanité. On trouvera dans ce volume, qui, nous le répétons, sera continué et complété, le reflet de quelques-uns de ces changements de physionomie.

On y trouvera quelque chose du passé, quelque chose du présent et comme un vague mirage de l'avenir. Du reste, ces poèmes, divers par le sujet, mais inspirés par la même pensée, n'ont entre eux d'autre noeud qu'un fil, ce fil qui s'atténue quelquefois au point de devenir invisible, mais qui ne casse jamais, le grand fil mystérieux du labyrinthe humain, le Progrès.

Comme dans une mosaïque, chaque pierre a sa couleur et sa forme propre; l'ensemble donne une figure. La figure de ce livre, on l'a dit plus haut, c'est l'Homme.

Ce volume d'ailleurs, qu'on veuille bien ne pas l'oublier, est à l'ouvrage dont il fait partie, et qui sera mis au jour plus tard, ce que serait à une symphonie l'ouverture. Il n'en peut donner l'idée exacte et complète, mais il contient une lueur de l'oeuvre entière.

Le poème que l'auteur a dans l'esprit n'est ici qu'entr'ouvert.

Quant à ce volume pris en lui-même, l'auteur n'a qu'un mot à en dire. Le genre humain, considéré comme un grand individu collectif accomplissant d'époque en époque une série d'actes sur la terre, a deux aspects, l'aspect historique et l'aspect légendaire. Le second n'est pas moins vrai que le premier; le premier n'est pas moins conjectural que le second.

Qu'on ne conclue pas de cette dernière ligne--disons-le en passant--qu'il puisse entrer dans la pensée de l'auteur d'amoindrir la haute valeur de l'enseignement historique. Pas une gloire, parmi les splendeurs du génie humain, ne dépasse celle du grand historien philosophe. L'auteur, seulement, sans diminuer la portée de l'histoire, veut constater la portée de la légende. Hérodote fait l'histoire, Homère fait la légende.

C'est l'aspect légendaire qui prévaut dans ce volume et qui en colore les poèmes. Ces poèmes se passent l'un à l'autre le flambeau de la tradition humaine. _Quasi cursores_. C'est ce flambeau, dont la flamme est le vrai, qui fait l'unité de ce livre. Tous ces poèmes, ceux du moins qui résument le passé, sont de la réalité historique condensée ou de la réalité historique devinée. La fiction parfois, la falsification jamais; aucun grossissement de lignes; fidélité absolue à la couleur des temps et à l'esprit des civilisations diverses. Pour citer des exemples, la _Décadence romaine_ n'a pas un détail qui ne soit rigoureusement exact; la barbarie mahométane ressort de Cantemir, à travers l'enthousiasme de l'historiographe turc, telle qu'elle est exposée dans les premières pages de _Zim-Zizimi_ et de _Sultan Mourad_.

Du reste, les personnes auxquelles l'étude du passé est familière reconnaîtront, l'auteur n'en doute pas, l'accent réel et sincère de tout ce livre. Un de ces poèmes (_Première rencontre du Christ avec le tombeau_) est tiré, l'auteur pourrait dire traduit, de l'évangile. Deux autres (_Le Mariage de Roland_, _Aymerillot_) sont des feuillets détachés de la colossale épopée du moyen âge (_Charlemagne, emperor à la barbe florie_). Ces deux poèmes jaillissent directement des livres de geste de la chevalerie. C'est de l'histoire écoutée aux portes de la légende.

Quant au mode de formation de plusieurs des autres poèmes dans la pensée de l'auteur, on pourra s'en faire une idée en lisant les quelques lignes placées en note avant la pièce intitulée _Les Raisons du Momotombo_; lignes d'où cette pièce est sortie. L'auteur en convient, un rudiment imperceptible, perdu dans la chronique ou dans la tradition, à peine visible à l'oeil nu, lui a souvent suffi. Il n'est pas défendu au poète et au philosophe d'essayer sur les faits sociaux ce que le naturaliste essaie sur les faits zoologiques, la reconstruction du monstre d'après l'empreinte de l'ongle ou l'alvéole de la dent.

Ici lacune, là étude complaisante et approfondie d'un détail, tel est l'inconvénient de toute publication fractionnée. Ces défauts de proportion peuvent n'être qu'apparents. Le lecteur trouvera certainement juste d'attendre, pour les apprécier définitivement, que _La Légende des Siècles_ ait paru en entier. Les usurpations, par exemple, jouent un tel rôle dans la construction des royautés au moyen âge et mêlent tant de crimes à la complication des investitures, que l'auteur a cru devoir les présenter sous leurs trois principaux aspects dans les trois drames, _Le Petit Roi de Galice, Éviradnus, La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice. Ce qui peut sembler aujourd'hui un développement excessif s'ajustera plus tard à l'ensemble.

Les tableaux riants sont rares dans ce livre; cela tient à ce qu'ils ne sont pas fréquents dans l'histoire.

Comme on le verra, l'auteur, en racontant le genre humain, ne l'isole pas de son entourage terrestre. Il mêle quelquefois à l'homme, il heurte à l'âme humaine, afin de lui faire rendre son véritable son, ces êtres différents de l'homme que nous nommons bêtes, choses, nature morte, et qui remplissent on ne sait quelles fonctions fatales dans l'équilibre vertigineux de la création.

Tel est ce livre. L'auteur l'offre au public sans rien se dissimuler de sa profonde insuffisance. C'est une tentative vers l'idéal. Rien de plus.

Ce dernier mot a besoin peut-être d'être expliqué.

Plus tard, nous le croyons, lorsque plusieurs autres parties de ce livre auront été publiées, on apercevra le lien qui, dans la conception de l'auteur, rattache _La Légende des Siècles_ à deux autres poèmes, presque terminés à cette heure, et qui en sont, l'un le dénoûment, l'autre le commencement: _La Fin de Satan, Dieu_.

L'auteur, du reste, pour compléter ce qu'il a dit plus haut, ne voit aucune difficulté à faire entrevoir, dès à présent, qu'il a esquissé dans la solitude une sorte de poème d'une certaine étendue où se réverbère le problème unique, l'Être, sous sa triple face: l'Humanité, le Mal, l'Infini; le progressif, le relatif, l'absolu; en ce qu'on pourrait appeler trois chants, _La Légende des Siècles, La Fin de Satan, Dieu_.

Il publie aujourd'hui un premier carton de cette esquisse. Les autres suivront.

Nul ne peut répondre d'achever ce qu'il a commencé, pas une minute de continuation certaine n'est assurée à l'oeuvre ébauchée; la solution de continuité, hélas! c'est tout l'homme; mais il est permis, même au plus faible, d'avoir une bonne intention et de la dire.

Or l'intention de ce livre est bonne.

L'épanouissement du genre humain de siècle en siècle, l'homme montant des ténèbres à l'idéal, la transfiguration paradisiaque de l'enfer terrestre, l'éclosion lente et suprême de la liberté, droit pour cette vie, responsabilité pour l'autre; une espèce d'hymne religieux à mille strophes, ayant dans ses entrailles une foi profonde et sur son sommet une haute prière; le drame de la création éclairé par le visage du créateur, voilà ce que sera, terminé, ce poème dans son ensemble; si Dieu, maître des existences humaines, y consent.

CONTENTS