Chapter VI: Part 6

"Whoever in a state," said Milton, "knows how wisely to form the manners of men and to rule them at home and in war with excellent institutes, him in the first place, above others, I should esteem worthy of all honour. But next to him the man who strives to establish in maxims and rules the method and habit of speaking and writing received from a good age of the nation, and, as it were, to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, the daring to overleap which let a law only short of that of Romulus be used to prevent.... The one, as I believe, supplies noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy invading the territory. The other takes to himself the task of extirpating and defeating, by means of a learned detective police of ears, and a light band of good authors, that barbarism which makes large inroads upon the minds of men, and is a destructive intestine enemy of genius. Nor is it to be considered of small consequence what language, pure or corrupt, a people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in speaking it.... For, let the words of a country be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, any state, did not at least flourish in a middling degree as long as its own liking and care for its language lasted."[1]

[Footnote 1: Letter to Bonmattei, from Florence, 1638.]

The probabilities are that we are now coming to an epoch of a quieter style. There have been in our generation three strong masters in the aft of prose writing. There was, first of all, Carlyle, there was Macaulay, and there is Mr. Raskin. These are all giants, and they have the rights of giants. But I do not believe that a greater misfortune can befall the students who attend classes here, than that they should strive to write like any one of these three illustrious men. I think it is the worst thing that can happen to them. They can never attain to the high mark which they have set before themselves. It Is not everybody who can bend the bow of Ulysses, and most men only do themselves a mischief by trying to bend it. If we are now on our way to a quieter style, I am not sorry for it. Truth is quiet. Milton's phrase ever lingers in our minds as one of imperishable beauty--where he regrets that he is drawn by I know not what, from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies. Moderation and judgment are, for most purposes, more than the flash and the glitter even of the genius. I hope that your professors of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate that golden art--the steadfast use of a language in which truth can be told; a speech that is strong by natural force, and not merely effective by declamation; an utterance without trick, without affectation, without mannerisms, without any of that excessive ambition which overleaps itself as disastrously in prose writing as in so many other things.

I will detain you no longer. I hope that I have made it clear that we conceive the end of education on its literary side to be to make a man and not a cyclopaedia, to make a citizen and not an album of elegant extracts. Literature does not end with knowledge of forms, with inventories of books and authors, with finding the key of rhythm, with the varying measure of the stanza, or the changes from the involved and sonorous periods of the seventeenth century down to the _staccato_ of the nineteenth, or all the rest of the technicalities of scholarship. Do not think I contemn these. They are all good things to know, but they are not ends in themselves. The intelligent man, says Plato, will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and he will less value the others. Literature is one of the instruments, and one of the most powerful instruments, for forming character for giving us men and women armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfastness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit and public virtue of which it has been well said that they are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man. Bacon is right, as he generally is, when he bids us read not to contradict and refute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and to consider. Yes, let us read to weigh and to consider. In the times before us that promise or threaten deep political, economical, and social controversy, what we need to do is to induce our people to weigh and consider. We want them to cultivate energy without impatience, activity without restlessness, inflexibility without ill-humour. I am not going to preach to you any artificial stoicism. I am not going to preach to you any indifference to money, or to the pleasures of social intercourse, or to the esteem and good-will of our neighbours, or to any other of the consolations and necessities of life. But, after all, the thing that matters most, both for happiness and for duty, is that we should strive habitually to live with wise thoughts and right feelings. Literature helps us more than other studies to this most blessed companionship of wise thoughts and right feelings, and so I have taken this opportunity of earnestly commending it to your interest and care.

VICTOR HUGO'S "NINETY-THREE."

"History has its truth, Legend has its truth. Legendary truth is of a different nature from historic truth. Legendary truth is invention with reality for result. For the rest, history and legend have the same aim--to paint under the man of a day eternal humanity." These words from his new and latest work (ii. 4) are a repetition of what Victor Hugo had already said in the introduction to his memorable _Legend of the Ages_[1]. But the occasion of their application is far more delicate. Poetry lends itself naturally to the spacious, distant, vague, highly generalised way of present and real events. A prose romance, on the other hand, is of necessity abundant in details, in special circumstances, in particularities of time and place. This leaves all the more room for historic error, and historic error in a work of imagination dealing with actual and known occurrences is obviously fatal, not only to legendary truth, but to legendary beauty and poetic impressiveness. And then the pitfalls which lie about the feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,--the terrible year of the modern epoch! The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or that actor in it.

[Footnote 1: The references are to the "Édition Définitive" in two volumes.]

It was hardly a breach, therefore, of one's allegiance to Hugo's superb imaginative genius, if one had misgivings as to the result of an attempt, even in his strong hands, to combine legend with truth on a disastrous field, in which grave writers with academic solemnity had confounded truth with the falsest kind of legend. The theme was so likely to emphasise the defects incident to his mighty qualities; so likely to provoke an exaggeration of those mannerisms of thought no less than of phrase, which though never ignoble nor paltry, yet now and then take something from the loftiness and sincerity of the writer's work. Wisdom, however, is justified of her children, and M. Hugo's genius has justified his choice of a difficult and perilous subject. _Quatrevingt-treize_ is a monument of its author's finest gifts; and while those who are happily endowed with the capacity of taking delight in nobility and beauty of imaginative work will find themselves in possession of a new treasure, the lover of historic truth who hates to see abstractions passed off for actualities and legend erected in the place of fact escapes with his sensibilities almost unwounded.

The historic interlude at the beginning of the second volume is undoubtedly open to criticism from the political student's point of view. As a sketch of the Convention, the scene of its sittings, the stormful dramas that were enacted there one after another for month after month, the singular men who one after another rode triumphant upon the whirlwind for a little space, and were then mercilessly in an instant swept into outer darkness, the commoner men who cowered before the fury of the storm, and were like "smoke driven hither and thither by the wind," and laboured hard upon a thousand schemes for human improvement, some admirable, others mere frenzy, while mobs filed in and danced mad carmagnoles before them--all this is a magnificent masterpiece of accurate, full, and vivid description. To the philosophy of it we venture to demur. The mystic, supernatural view of the French Revolution, which is so popular among French writers who object to the supernatural and the mystical everywhere else, is to us a thing most incredible, most puerile, most mischievous. People talk of '93, as a Greek tragedian treats the Tale of Troy divine, or the terrible fortunes of the house of Atreus, as the result of dark invincible fate, as the unalterable decree of the immortal gods. Even Victor Hugo's strong spirit does not quite overcome the demoralising doctrine of a certain revolutionary school, though he has the poet's excuse. Thus, of the Convention:--

"Minds all a prey to the wind. But this wind was a wind of miracle
and portent. To be a member of the Convention was to be a wave
of the ocean. And this was true of its greatest. The force of
impulsion came from on high. There was in the Convention a will,
which was the will of all, and yet was the will of no one. It was
an idea, an idea resistless and without measure, which breathed in
the shadow from the high heavens. We call that the Revolution. As
this idea passed, it threw down one and raised up another; it bore
away this man in the foam, and broke that man to pieces upon the
rocks. The idea knew whither it went, and drove the gulf of waters
before it. To impute the Revolution to men is as one who should
impute the tide to the waves. The revolution is an action of the
Unknown.... It is a form of the abiding phenomenon that shuts us
in on every side and that we call Necessity.... In presence
of these climacteric catastrophes which waste and vivify
civilisation, one is slow to judge detail. To blame or praise men
on account of the result, is as if one should blame or praise the
figures on account of the total. That which must pass passes, the
storm that must rage rages. The eternal serenity does not suffer
from these boisterous winds. Above revolutions truth and justice
abide, as the starry heaven abides above the tempests" (i.
188-189).

As a lyric passage, full of the breath of inspiration; as history, superficial and untrue; as morality, enervating and antinomian. The author is assuredly far nearer the mark in another place when he speaks of "_that immense improvisation_ which is the French Revolution" (ii. 35)--an improvisation of which every step can be rationally explained.

After all, this is no more than an interlude. Victor Hugo only surveys the events of '93 as a field for the growth of types of character. His instinct as an artist takes him away from the Paris of '93, where the confusion, uproar, human frenzy, leave him no background of nature, with nature's fixity, sternness, indifference, sublimity. This he found in La Vendée, whose vast forests grow under the pencil of this master of all the more terrible and majestic effects, into a picture hardly less sombre and mighty in its impressiveness than the memorable ocean pieces of the _Toilers of the Sea_. If the waves are appalling in their agitation, their thunders, their sterility, the forest is appalling in its silence, its dimness, its rest, and the invisibleness of the thousand kinds of life to which it gives a shelter. If the violence and calm and mercilessness of the sea penetrated the romance of eight years ago with transcendent fury, so does the stranger, more mysterious, and in a sense even the more inhuman life of the forest penetrate the romance of to-day. From the opening chapter down to the very close, even while the interlude takes us for a little while to the Paris café where Danton, Robespierre, and Marat sit in angry counsel, even while we are on the sea with the royalist Marquis and Halmalo, the reader is subtly haunted by the great Vendean woods, their profundity, their mystery, their tragic and sinister beauties.

"The forest is barbarous.

"The configuration of the land counsels man in many an act. More
than we suppose, it is his accomplice. In the presence of certain
savage landscapes, you are tempted to exonerate man and blame
creation; you feel a silent challenge and incitement from nature;
the desert is constantly unwholesome for conscience, especially
for a conscience without light. Conscience may be a giant; that
makes a Socrates or a Jesus: it may be a dwarf; that makes an
Atreus or a Judas. The puny conscience soon turns reptile; the
twilight thickets, the brambles, the thorns, the marsh waters
under branches, make for it a fatal haunting place; amid all this
it undergoes the mysterious infiltration of ill suggestions. The
optical illusions, the unexplained images, the scaring hour,
the scaring spot, all throw man into that kind of affright,
half-religious, half-brutal, which in ordinary times engenders
superstition, and in epochs of violence, savagery. Hallucinations
hold the torch that lights the path to murder. There is something
like vertigo in the brigand. Nature with her prodigies has a
double effect; she dazzles great minds, and blinds the duller
soul. When man is ignorant, when the desert offers visions,
the obscurity of the solitude is added to the obscurity of the
intelligence; thence in man comes the opening of abysses. Certain
rocks, certain ravines, certain thickets, certain wild openings
of the evening sky through the trees, drive man towards mad or
monstrous exploits. We might almost call some places criminal"
(ii. 21).

With La Vendée for background, and some savage incidents of the bloody Vendean war for external machinery, Victor Hugo has realised his conception of '93 in three types of character: Lantenac, the royalist marquis; Cimourdain, the puritan turned Jacobin; and Gauvain, for whom one can as yet find no short name, he belonging to the millenarian times. Lantenac, though naturally a less original creation than the other two, is still an extremely bold and striking figure, drawn with marked firmness of hand, and presenting a thoroughly distinct and coherent conception. It is a triumph of the poetic or artistic part of the author's nature over the merely political part, that he should have made even his type of the old feudal order which he execrates so bitterly, a heroic, if ever so little also a diabolic, personage. There is everything that is cruel, merciless, unflinching, in Lantenac; there is nothing that is mean or insignificant. A gunner at sea, by inattention to the lashing of his gun, causes an accident which breaks the ship to pieces, and then he saves the lives of the crew by hazarding his own life to secure the wandering monster. Lantenac decorates him with the cross of Saint Lewis for his gallantry, and instantly afterwards has him shot for his carelessness. He burns homesteads and villages, fusillades men and women, and makes the war a war without quarter or grace. Yet he is no swashbuckler of the melodramatic stage. There is a fine reserve, a brief gravity, in the delineation of him, his clear will, his quickness, his intrepidity, his relentlessness, which make of him the incarnation of aristocratic coldness, hatred, and pride. You might guillotine Lantenac with exquisite satisfaction, and yet he does not make us ashamed of mankind. Into his mouth, as he walks about his dungeon, impatiently waiting to be led out to execution, Victor Hugo has put the aristocratic view of the Revolution. Some portions of it (ii. 224-226) would fit amazingly well into M. Renan's notions about the moral and intellectual reform of France.

If the Breton aristocrat of '93 was fearless, intrepid, and without mercy in defence of God and the King--and his qualities were all shared, the democrat may love to remember, by the Breton peasant, whether peasant follower or peasant leader--the Jacobin was just as vigorous, as intrepid, as merciless in defence of his Republic. "Pays, Patrie," says Victor Hugo, in words which perhaps will serve to describe many a future passage in French history, "ces deux mots résument toute la guerre de Vendée; querelle de l'idée locale centre l'idée universelle; paysans contre patriotes" (ii. 22).[1] Certainly the Jacobins were the patriots of that era, the deliverers of France from something like that process of partition which further east was consummated in this very '93. We do not mean the handful of odious miscreants who played fool and demon in turns in the insurrectionary Commune and elsewhere: such men as Collot d'Herbois, or Carrier, or Panis. The normal Jacobin was a remarkable type. He has been excellently described by Louis Blanc as something powerful, original, sombre; half agitator and half statesman; half puritan and half monk half inquisitor and half tribune. These words of the historian are the exact prose version of the figure of Cimourdain, the typical Jacobin of the poet. "Cimourdain was a pure conscience, but sombre. He had in him the absolute. He had been a priest and that is a serious thing. Man, like the sky, may have a dark serenity; it is enough that something should have brought night into his soul. Priesthood had brought night into Cimourdain. He who has been a priest is one still. What brings night upon us may leave the stars with us. Cimourdain was full of virtues, full of truths, but they shone in the midst of darkness" (i. 123). If the aristocrat had rigidity, so had the Jacobin. "Cimourdain had the blind certitude of the arrow, which only sees the mark and makes for it. In revolution, nothing so formidable as the straight line. Cimourdain strode forward with fatality in his step. He believed that in social genesis the very extreme point must always be solid ground, an error peculiar to minds that for reason substitute logic" (i. 127). And so forth, until the character of the Jacobin lives for us with a precision, a fulness, a naturalness, such as neither Carlyle nor Michelet nor Quinet has been able to clothe it with, though these too have the sacred illumination of genius. Victor Hugo's Jacobin is a poetic creation, yet the creation only lies in the vivid completeness with which the imagination of a great master has realised to itself the traits and life of an actual personality. It is not that he has any special love for his Jacobin, but that he has the poet's eye for types, politics apart. He sees how much the aristocrat, slaying hip and thigh for the King, and the Jacobin, slaying hip and thigh for the Republic, resembled one another. "Let us confess," he says, "these two men, the Marquis and the priest [Lantenac and Cimourdain], were up to a certain point the self-same man. The bronze mask of civil war has two profiles, one turned towards the past, the other towards the future, but as tragic the one as the other. Lantenac was the first of these profiles, Cimourdain was the second; only the bitter rictus of Lantenac was covered with shadow and night, and on the fatal brow of Cimourdain was a gleaming of the dawn" (ii. 91).

[Footnote 1: In corroboration of this view of the Vendean rising as democratic, see Mortimer-Ternaux, _Hist. de la Terreur_, vol. vi. bk. 30.]

And let us mark Victor Hugo's signal distinction in his analysis of character. It is not mere vigour of drawing, nor acuteness of perception, nor fire of imagination, though he has all these gifts in a singular degree, and truest of their kind. But then Scott had them too, and yet we feel in Victor Hugo's work a seriousness, a significance, a depth of tone, which never touches us in the work of his famous predecessor in romance, delightful as the best of that work is. Balfour of Burley is one of Scott's most commanding figures, and the stern Covenanter is nearly in the same plane of character as the stern heroic Jacobin. Yet Cimourdain impresses us more profoundly. He is as natural, as human, as readily conceivable, and yet he produces something of the subtle depth of effect which belongs to the actor in a play of Aeschylus. Why is this? Because Hugo makes us conscious of that tragedy of temperament, that sterner Necessity of character, that resistless compulsion of circumstance, which is the modern and positive expression for the old Destiny of the Greeks, and which in some expression or other is now an essential element in the highest presentation of human life. Here is not the Unknown. On the contrary, we are in the very heart of science; tragedy to the modern is not [Greek: tuchae], but a thing of cause and effect, invariable antecedent and invariable consequent. It is the presence of this tragic force underlying action that gives to all Hugo's work its lofty quality, its breadth, and generality, and fills both it, and us who read, with pity and gravity and an understanding awe.

The action is this. Cimourdain had the young Gauvain to train from his earliest childhood, and the pupil grew up with the same rigid sense of duty as the master, though temperament modified its form. When the Revolution came, Gauvain, though a noble, took sides with the people, but he was not of the same spirit as his teacher. "The Revolution," says Victor Hugo, "by the side of youthful figures of giants, such as Danton, Saint-Just, and Robespierre, has young ideal figures, like Hoche and Marceau. Gauvain was one of these figures" (ii. 34). Cimourdain has himself named delegate from the Committee of Public Safety to the expeditionary column of which Gauvain is in command. The warmth of affection between them was undiminished, but difference in temperament bred difference in their principles. They represented, as the author says, with the candour of the poet, the two poles of the truth; the two sides of the inarticulate, subterranean, fatal contention of the year of the Terror. Their arguments with one another make the situation more intelligible to the historic student, as they make the characters of the speakers more transparent for the purposes of the romance.

This is Cimourdain:--

"Beware, there are terrible duties in life. Do not accuse what is
not responsible. Since when has the disorder been the fault of the
physician? Yes, what marks this tremendous year is being without
pity. Why? Because it is the great revolutionary year. This year
incarnates the revolution. The revolution has an enemy, the old
world, and to that it is pitiless, just as the surgeon has
an enemy, gangrene, and is pitiless to that. The revolution
extirpates kingship in the king, aristocracy in the noble,
despotism in the soldier, superstition in the priest, barbarity in
the judge, in a word whatever is tyranny in whatever is tyrant.
The operation is frightful, the revolution performs it with a sure
hand. As to the quantity of sound flesh that it requires, ask
Boerhave what he thinks of it. What tumour that has to be cut out
does not involve loss of blood?... The revolution devotes itself
to its fated task. It mutilates but it saves.... It has the past
in its grasp, it will not spare. It makes in civilisation a deep
incision whence shall come the safety of the human race. You
suffer? No doubt. How long will it last? The time needed for the
operation. Then you will live," etc. (ii. 65-66).

"One day," he adds, "the Revolution will justify the Terror." To which Gauvain retorts thus:--

"Fear lest the Terror be the calumny of the Revolution. Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, are dogmas of peace and harmony. Why give
them an aspect of alarm? What do we seek? To win nations to the
universal public. Then why inspire fright? Of what avail is
intimidation? It is wrong to do ill in order to do good. You do
not pull down the throne to leave the scaffold standing. Let us
hurl away crowns, let us spare heads. The revolution is concord,
not affright. Mild ideas are ill-served by men who do not know
pity. Amnesty is for me the noblest word in human speech. I will
shed no blood save at hazard of my own.... In the fight let us be
the enemies of our foes, and after the victory their brothers"
(ii. 67).

These two together, Cimourdain and Gauvain, make an ideal pair of the revolutionists of '93. Strip each of them of the beauty of character with which the poet's imagination has endowed them, add instead passion, violence, envy, egoism, malice; then you understand how in the very face of the foreign enemy Girondins sharpened the knife for the men of the Mountain, Hébertists screamed for the lives of Robespierrists, Robespierre struck off the head of Danton, Thermidorians crushed Robespierre.

Victor Hugo has given to this typic historical struggle of '93 the qualities of nobleness and beauty which art requires in dealing with real themes. Lantenac falls into the hands of the Blues, headed by Cimourdain and Gauvain, but he does so in consequence of yielding to a heroic and self-devoting impulse of humanity. Cimourdain, true to his temperament, insists on his instant execution. Gauvain, true also to his temperament, is seized with a thousand misgivings, and there is no more ample, original, and masterly presentation of a case of conscience, that in civil war is always common enough, than the struggle through which Gauvain passes before he can resolve to deliver Lantenac. This pathetic debate--"the stone of Sisyphus, which is only the quarrel of man with himself"--turns on the loftiest, broadest, most generous motives, touching the very bases of character, and reaching far beyond the issue of '93. The political question is seen to be no more than a superficial aspect of the deeper moral question. Lantenac, the representative of the old order, had performed an exploit of signal devotion. Was it not well that one who had faith in the new order should show himself equally willing to cast away his life to save one whom self-sacrifice had transformed from the infernal Satan into the heavenly Lucifer?

"Gauvain saw in the shade the sinister smile of the sphinx. The
situation was a sort of dread crossway where the conflicting
truths issued and confronted one another, and where the three
supreme ideas of man stood face to face--humanity, the family, the
fatherland. Each of the voices spoke in turn, and each in turn
declared the truth. How choose? Each in turn seemed to hit the
mark of reason and justice, and said, Do that. Was that the thing
to be done? Yes. No. Reasoning counselled one thing; sentiment
another; the two counsels were contradictory. Reasoning is only
reason; sentiment is often conscience; the one comes from man,
the other from a loftier source. That is why sentiment has less
distinctness, and more might. Yet what strength in the severity
of reason! Gauvain hesitated. His perplexity was so fierce. Two
abysses opened before him: to destroy the marquis, or to save him.
Which of these two gulfs was duty?"

The whole scene (ii. 206-219) is a masterpiece of dramatic strength, sustention, and flexibility--only equalled by the dramatic vivacity of the scene in which Cimourdain, sitting as judge, orders the prisoner to be brought forward, to his horror sees Gauvain instead of Lantenac, and then proceeds to condemn the man whom he loves best on earth to be taken to the guillotine.

* * * * *

The tragedy of the story, its sombre tone, the overhanging presence of death in it, are prevented from being oppressive to us by the variety of minor situation and subordinate character with which the writer has surrounded the central figures. No writer living is so consummate a master of landscape, and besides the forest we here have an elaborate sea-piece, full of the weird, ineffable, menacing suggestion of the sea in some of her unnumbered moods; and there is a scene of late twilight on a high solitary down over the bay of Mont Saint-Michel, to which a reader blessed with sensibility to the subtler impressions of landscape will turn again and again, as one visits again and again some actual prospect where the eye procures for the inner sense a dream of beauty and the incommensurable. Perhaps the palm for exquisite workmanship will be popularly given, and justly given, to the episode humorously headed _The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew_, at the opening of the third volume. It is the story of three little children, barely out of infancy, awaking, playing, eating, wondering, slumbering, in solitude through a summer day in an old tower. As a rule the attempt to make infancy interesting in literature ends in maudlin failure. But at length the painters have found an equal, or more than an equal, in an artist whose medium lends itself less easily than colour and form to the reproduction of the beauty and life of childhood. In his poetry Victor Hugo had already shown his passing sensibility to the pathos of the beginnings of our life; witness such pieces as _Chose vue un Jour de Printemps, Les Pauvres Gens_, the well-known pieces in _L'Année Terrible_, and a hundred other lively touches and fragments of finished loveliness and penetrating sympathy. In prose it is a more difficult feat to collect the trivial details which make up the life of the tiny human animal into a whole that shall be impressive, finished, and beautiful. And prose can only describe by details enumerated one by one. This most arduous feat is accomplished in the children's summer day in the tower, and with enchanting success. Intensely realistic, yet the picture overflows with emotion--not the emotion of the mother, but of the poet. There is infinite tenderness, pathos, love, but all heightened at once and strengthened by the self-control of masculine force. A man writing about little ones seems able to place himself outside, and thus to gain more calmness and freedom of vision than the more passionate interest or yearning of women permits to them in this field of art. Not a detail is spared, yet the whole is full of delight and pity and humour. Only one lyric passage is allowed to poetise and accentuate the realism of the description. Georgette, some twenty months old, scrambles from her cradle and prattles to the sunbeam.

"What a bird says in its song, a child says in its prattle. 'Tis
the same hymn; a hymn indistinct, lisping, profound. The child has
what the bird has not, the sombre human destiny in front of it.
Hence the sadness of men as they listen, mingling with the joy of
the little one as it sings. The sublimest canticle to be heard on
earth is the stammering of the human soul on the lips of infancy.
That confused chirruping of a thought, that is as yet no more than
an instinct, has in it one knows not what sort of artless appeal
to the eternal justice; or is it a protest uttered on the
threshold before entering in, a protest meek and poignant? This
ignorance smiling at the Infinite compromises all creation in the
lot that shall fall to the weak defenceless being. Ill, if it
shall come, will be an abuse of confidence.

"The child's murmuring is more and is less than words; there are
no notes, and yet it is a song; there are no syllables, and yet it
is a language.... This poor stammering is a compound of what the
child said when it was an angel, and of what it will say when
it becomes a man. The cradle has a Yesterday as the grave has a
Morrow; the Morrow and the Yesterday mingle in that strange cooing
their twofold mystery...."

"Her lips smiled, her eyes smiled, the dimples in her cheeks
smiled. There came forth in this smile a mysterious welcome of the
morning. The soul has faith in the ray. The heavens were blue,
warm was the air. The fragile creature, without knowing anything,
or recognising anything, or understanding anything, softly
floating in musings which are not thought, felt itself in safety
in the midst of nature, among those good trees and that guileless
greenery, in the pure and peaceful landscape, amid the rustle of
nests, of flowing springs, of insects, of leaves, while over all
there glowed the great innocency of the sun" (ii. 104).

As an eminent man has recently written about Wordsworth's most famous Ode, there may be some bad philosophy here, but there is assuredly some noble and touching poetry.

If the carelessness of infancy is caught with this perfection of finish, there is a tragic companion piece in the horror and gnawing anguish of the wretched woman from whom her young have been taken--her rescue from death, her fierce yearnings for them like the yearnings of a beast, her brute-like heedlessness of her life and her body in the cruel search.

And so the poet conducts us along the strange excursive windings of the life and passion of humanity. The same hand which draws such noble figures as Gauvain--and the real Lanjuinais of history was fully as heroic and as noble as the imaginary Gauvain of fiction--is equally skilful in drawing the wild Breton beggar who dwells underground among the branching tree-roots; and the monstrous Imânus, the barbarous retainer of the Lord of the Seven Forests; and Radoub, the serjeant from Paris, a man of hearty oaths, hideous, heroic, humoursome, of a bloody ingenuity in combat. And the same hand which described the silent sundown on the sandy shore of the bay, and the mysterious darkness of the forests, and the blameless play of the little ones, gives us the prodigious animation of the night surprise at Dôl, the furious conflict at La Tourgue, and, perhaps most powerful of all, the breaking loose of the gun on the deck of the _Claymore_. You may say that this is only melodrama; but if we turn to the actual events of '93, the melodrama of the romancer will seem tame compared with the melodrama of the faithful chronicler. And so long as the narrative of melodramatic action is filled with poetry and beauty, there is no reproach in uncommon situation, in intense passion, in magnanimous or subtle motives that are not of every day. Of Hugo's art we may say what Dr. Newman has said of something else: _Such work is always open to criticism and it is always above it_.

There is poetry and beauty, no doubt, in the common lives about us, if we look at them with imaginative and sympathetic eye, and we owe much to the art that reveals to us the tragedy of the parlour and the frockcoat, and analyses the bitterness and sorrow and high passion that may underlie a life of outer smoothness and decorum. Still, criticism cannot accept this as the final and exclusive limitation of imaginative work. Art is nothing if not catholic and many-sided, and it is certainly not exhausted by mere domestic possibilities. Goethe's fine and luminous feeling for practical life, which has given such depth of richness and wisdom to his best prose writing, fills us with a delightful sense of satisfaction and adequateness; and yet why should it not leave us with a mind eagerly open for the larger and more inventive romance, in which nature is clothed with some of that awe and might and silent contemplation of the puny destinies of man, that used to surround the conception of the supernatural? Victor Hugo seeks strong and extraordinary effects; he is a master of terrible image, profound emotion, audacious fancy; but then these are as real, as natural, as true to fact, as the fairest reproduction of the moral poverties and meannesses of the world. And let it be added that while he is without a rival in the dark mysterious heights of imaginative effect, he is equally a master in strokes of tenderness and the most delicate human sympathy. His last book seems to contain pieces that surpass every other book of Hugo's in the latter range of qualities, and not to fall at all short in the former. And so, in the words of the man of genius who last wrote on Victor Hugo in these pages,[1] "As we pity ourselves for the loss of poems and pictures which have perished, and left of Sappho but a fragment and of Zeuxis but a name, so are we inclined to pity the dead who died too soon to enjoy the great works we have enjoyed. At each new glory that 'swims into our ken,' we surely feel that it is something to have lived to see that too rise."

[Footnote 1: Mr. Swinburne.]

ON "THE RING AND THE BOOK."

When the first volume of Mr. Browning's new poem came before the critical tribunals, public and private, recognised or irresponsible, there was much lamentation even in quarters where a manlier humour might have been expected, over the poet's choice of a subject. With facile largeness of censure, it was pronounced a murky subject, sordid, unlovely, morally sterile, an ugly leaf out of some ancient Italian Newgate Calendar. One hinted in vain that wisdom is justified of her children, that the poet must be trusted to judge of the capacity of his own theme, and that it is his conception and treatment of it that ultimately justify or discredit his choice. Now that the entire work is before the world, this is plain, and it is admitted. When the second volume, containing _Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, appeared, men no longer found it sordid or ugly; the third, with _Pompilia_, convinced them that the subject was not, after all, so incurably unlovely; and the fourth, with _The Pope_, and the passage from the Friar's sermon, may well persuade those who needed persuasion, that moral fruitfulness depends on the master, his eye and hand, his vision and grasp, more than on this and that in the transaction which has taken possession of his imagination.

The truth is, we have for long been so debilitated by pastorals, by graceful presentation of the Arthurian legend for drawing-rooms, by idylls, not robust and Theocritean, by verse directly didactic, that a rude blast of air from the outside welter of human realities is apt to give a shock, that might well show in what simpleton's paradise we have been living. The ethics of the rectory parlour set to sweet music, the respectable aspirations of the sentimental curate married to exquisite verse, the everlasting glorification of domestic sentiment in blameless princes and others, as if that were the poet's single province and the divinely-appointed end of all art, as if domestic sentiment included and summed up the whole throng of passions, emotions, strife, and desire; all this might seem to be making valetudinarians of us all. Our public is beginning to measure the right and possible in art by the superficial probabilities of life and manners within a ten-mile radius of Charing Cross. Is it likely, asks the critic, that Duke Silva would have done this, that Fedalma would have done that? Who shall suppose it possible that Caponsacchi acted thus, that Count Guido was possessed by devils so? The poser is triumphant, because the critic is tacitly appealing to the normal standard of probabilities in our own day. In the tragedy of Pompilia we are taken far from the serene and homely region in which some of our teachers would fain have it that the whole moral universe can be snugly pent up. We see the black passions of man at their blackest; hate, so fierce, undiluted, implacable, passionate, as to be hard of conception by our simpler northern natures; cruelty, so vindictive, subtle, persistent, deadly, as to fill us with a pain almost too great for true art to produce; greediness, lust, craft, penetrating a whole stock and breed, even down to the ancient mother of "that fell house of hate,"--

"The gaunt grey nightmare in the furthest smoke,
The hag that gave these three abortions birth,
Unmotherly mother and unwomanly
Woman, that near turns motherhood to shame,
Womanliness to loathing: no one word,
No gesture to curb cruelty a whit
More than the she-pard thwarts her playsome whelps
Trying their milk-teeth on the soft o' the throat
O' the first fawn, flung, with those beseeching eyes,
Flat in the covert! How should she but couch,
Lick the dry lips, unsheathe the blunted claw,
Catch 'twixt her placid eyewinks at what chance
Old bloody half-forgotten dream may flit,
Born when herself was novice to the taste,
The while she lets youth take its pleasure" (iv. 40).

But, then, if the poet has lighted up for us these grim and appalling depths, he has not failed to raise us too into the presence of proportionate loftiness and purity.

"Tantum vertice in auras
Aetherias quantum radice in Tartara tendit."

Like the gloomy and umbrageous grove of which the Sibyl spake to the pious Aeneas, the poem conceals a golden branch and golden leaves. In the second volume, Guido, servile and false, is followed by Caponsacchi, as noble alike in conception and execution as anything that Mr. Browning has ever achieved. In the third volume, the austere pathos of Pompilia's tale relieves the too oppressive jollity of Don Giacinto, and the flowery rhetoric of Bottini; while in the fourth, the deep wisdom, justice, and righteous mind of the Pope, reconcile us to endure the sulphurous whiff from the pit in the confession of Guido, now desperate, naked, and satanic. From what at first was sheer murk, there comes out a long procession of human figures, infinitely various in form and thought, in character and act; a group of men and women, eager, passionate, indifferent; tender and ravenous, mean and noble, humorous and profound, jovial with prosperity or half-dumb with misery, skirting the central tragedy, or plunged deep into the thick of it, passers-by who put themselves off with a glance at the surface of a thing, and another or two who dive to the heart of it. And they all come out with a certain Shakespearian fulness, vividness, directness. Above all, they are every one of them men and women, with free play of human life in limb and feature, as in an antique sculpture. So much of modern art, in poetry as in painting, runs to mere drapery. "I grant," said Lessing, "that there is also a beauty in drapery, but can it be compared with that of the human form? And shall he who can attain to the greater, rest content with the less? I much fear that the most perfect master in drapery shows by that very talent wherein his weakness lies." This was spoken of plastic art, but it has a yet deeper meaning in poetic criticism. There too, the master is he who presents the natural shape, the curves, the thews of men, and does not labour and seek praise for faithful reproduction of the mere moral drapery of the hour, this or another; who gives you Hercules at strife with Antaeus, Laocoon writhing in the coils of the divine serpents, the wrestle with circumstance or passion, with outward destiny or inner character, in the free outlines of nature and reality. The capacity which it possesses for this presentation, at once so varied and so direct, is one reason why the dramatic form ranks as the highest expression and measure of the creative power of the poet; and the extraordinary grasp with which Mr. Browning has availed himself of this double capacity is one reason why we should reckon _The Ring and the Book_ as one of his masterpieces.

We may say this, and still not be blind to the faults of the poem. Many persons agree that they find it too long, and if they find it so, then for them it is too long. Others, who cannot resist the critic's temptation of believing that a remark must be true if it only look acute and specific, vow that the disclosure in the first volume of the whole plan and plot vitiates subsequent artistic merit. If one cannot enjoy what comes, for knowing beforehand what is coming, this objection may be allowed to have a root in human nature; but then two things might perhaps be urged on the other side,--first, that the interest of the poem lies in the development and presentation of character, on the one hand, and in the many sides which a single transaction offered to as many minds, on the other; and therefore that this true interest could not be marred by the bare statement what the transaction was or, baldly looked at, seemed to be; and, second, that the poem was meant to find its reader in a mood of mental repose, ready to receive the poet's impressions, undisturbed by any agitating curiosity as to plot or final outcome. A more valid accusation touches the many verbal perversities, in which a poet has less right than another to indulge. The compound Latin and English of Don Giacinto, notwithstanding the fan of the piece, still grows a burden to the flesh. Then there are harsh and formless lines, bursts of metrical chaos, from which a writer's dignity and self-respect ought surely to be enough to preserve him. Again, there are passages marked by a coarse violence of expression that is nothing short of barbarous (for instance, ii. 190, or 245). The only thing to be said is, that the countrymen of Shakespeare have had to learn to forgive uncouth outrages on form and beauty to fine creative genius. If only one could be sure that readers, unschooled as too many are to love the simple and elevated beauty of such form as Sophocles or as Corneille gives, would not think the worst fault the chief virtue, and confound the poet's bluntnesses with his admirable originality. It is certain that in Shakespeare's case his defects are constantly fastened upon, by critics who have never seriously studied the forms of dramatic art except in the literature of England, and extolled as instances of his characteristic mightiness. It may well be, therefore, that the grotesque caprices which Mr. Browning unfortunately permits to himself may find misguided admirers, or, what is worse, even imitators. It would be most unjust, however, while making due mention of these things, to pass over the dignity and splendour of the verse in many places, where the intensity of the writer's mood finds worthy embodiment in a sustained gravity and vigour and finish of diction not to be surpassed. The concluding lines of the _Caponsacchi_ (comprising the last page of the second volume), the appeal of the Greek poet in _The Pope_, one or two passages in the first _Guido_ (e.g. vol. ii., p. 156, from line 1957), and the close of the _Pompilia_, ought to be referred to when one wishes to know what power over the instrument of his art Mr. Browning might have achieved, if he had chosen to discipline himself in instrumentation.

When all is said that can be said about the violences which from time to time invade the poem, it remains true that the complete work affects the reader most powerfully with that wide unity of impression which it is the highest aim of dramatic art, and perhaps of all art, to produce. After we have listened to all the whimsical dogmatising about beauty, to all the odious cant about morbid anatomy, to all the well-deserved reproach for unpardonable perversities of phrase and outrages on rhythm, there is left to us the consciousness that a striking human transaction has been seized by a vigorous and profound imagination, that its many diverse threads have been wrought into a single, rich, and many-coloured web of art, in which we may see traced for us the labyrinths of passion and indifference, stupidity and craft, prejudice and chance, along which truth and justice have to find a devious and doubtful way. The transaction itself, lurid and fuliginous, is secondary to the manner of its handling and presentment. We do not derive our sense of unity from the singleness and completeness of the horrid tragedy, so much as from the power with which its own circumstances as they happened, the rumours which clustered about it from the minds of men without, the many moods, fancies, dispositions, which it for the moment brought out into light, playing round the fact, the half-sportive flights with which lawyers, judges, quidnuncs of the street, darted at conviction and snatched hap-hazard at truth, are all wrought together into one self-sufficient and compacted shape.

But this shape is not beautiful, and the end of art is beauty? Verbal fanaticism is always perplexing, and, rubbing my eyes, I ask whether that beauty means anything more than such an arrangement and disposition of the parts of the work as, first kindling a great variety of dispersed emotions and thoughts in the mind of the spectator, finally concentrates them in a single mood of joyous, sad, meditative, or interested delight. The sculptor, the painter, and the musician, have each their special means of producing this final and superlative impression; each is bound by the strictly limited capability in one direction and another of the medium in which he works. In poetry it is because they do not perceive how much more manifold and varied are the means of reaching the end than in the other expressions of art, that people insist each upon some particular quiddity which, entering into composition, alone constitutes it genuinely poetic, beautiful, or artistic. Pressing for definition, you never get much further than that each given quiddity means a certain Whatness. This is why poetical criticism is usually so little catholic. A man remembers that a poem in one style has filled him with consciousness of beauty and delight. Why conclude that this style constitutes the one access to the same impression? Why not rather perceive that, to take contemporaries, the beauty of _Thyrsis_ Is mainly produced by a fine suffusion of delicately-toned emotion; that of _Atalanta_ by splendid and barely rivalled music of verse; of _In Memoriam_ by its ordered and harmonious presentation of a sacred mood; of the _Spanish Gypsy_, in the parts where it reaches beauty, by a sublime ethical passion; of the _Earthly Paradise_, by sweet and simple reproduction of the spirit of the younger-hearted times? There are poems by Mr. Browning in which it is difficult, or, let us frankly say, impossible, for most of us at all events and as yet, to discover the beauty or the shape. But if beauty may not be denied to a work which, abounding in many-coloured scenes and diverse characters, in vivid image and portraiture, wide reflection and multiform emotion, does further, by a broad thread of thought running under all, bind these impressions into one supreme and elevated conviction, then assuredly, whatever we may think of this passage or that, that episode or the other, the first volume or the third, we cannot deny that _The Ring and the Book_, in its perfection and integrity, fully satisfies the conditions of artistic triumph. Are we to ignore the grandeur of a colossal statue, and the nobility of the human conceptions which it embodies, because here and there we notice a flaw in the marble, a blemish in its colour, a jagged slip of the chisel? "It is not force of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts in a face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of high sensibilities."