Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

_La Statue_, with its grim swift glance over the worldwide rottenness of imperial Rome, finds again an echo yet fuller and more sonorous than the note which it repeats in the poem on Roman decadence which forms the eighth division of the revised and completed _Légende des Siècles._ The two delicately tender poems on the death of a little child are well relieved by the more terrible tenderness of the poem on a mother found dead of want among her four little children. In this and the next poem, a vivid and ghastly photograph of vicious poverty, we find again the same spirit of observant and vigilant compassion that inspires and informs the great prose epic of suffering which records the redemption of Jean Valjean: and in the next, suggested by the sight (a sorrowful sight always, except perhaps to very small children or adults yet more diminutive in mental or spiritual size) of a caged lion, we recognize the depth of noble pity which moved its author to write _Le Crapaud_--a poem redeemed in all rational men's eyes from the imminent imputation of repulsive realism by the profound and pathetic beauty of the closing lines--and we may recognize also the imaginative and childlike sympathy with the traditional king of beasts which inspired him long after to write _L'Épopée du Lion_ for the benefit of his grandchildren. _Insomnie_, a record of the tribute exacted by the spirit from the body, when the impulse to work and to create will not let the weary workman take his rest, but enforces him, reluctant and recalcitrant, to rise and gird up his loins for labor in the field of imaginative thought, is itself a piece of work well worth the sacrifice even of the happiness of sleep. The verses on music, suggested by the figure of a flute-playing shepherd on a bas-relief; the splendid and finished picture of spring, softened rather than shadowed by the quiet thought of death; the deep and tender fancy of the dead child's return to its mother through the gateway of a second birth; the grave sweetness and gentle fervor of the verses on the outcast and detested things of the animal and the vegetable world; and, last, the nobly thoughtful and eloquent poem on the greatness of such little things as the fire on the shepherd's hearth confronting the star at sunset, which may be compared with the _Prayer for all men_ in the _Feuilles d'Automne_; these at least demand a rapid word of thankful recognition before we close the first volume of the _Contemplations._

The fourth book, as most readers will probably remember, contains the poems written in memory of Victor Hugo's daughter, drowned by the accidental capsizing of a pleasure-boat, just six months and seventeen days after her marriage with the young husband who chose rather to share her death than to save himself alone. These immortal songs of mourning are almost too sacred for critical appreciation of even the most reverent and subdued order. There are numberless touches in them of such thrilling beauty, so poignant in their simplicity and so piercing in their truth, that silence is perhaps the best or the only commentary on anything so "rarely sweet and bitter." One only may perhaps be cited apart from its fellows: the sublime little poem headed _Mors._

Je vis cette faucheuse. Elle était dans son champ. Elle allait à grands pas moissonnant et fauchant, Noir squelette laissant passer le crépuscule. Dans l'ombre où l'on dirait que tout tremble et recule, L'homme suivait des yeux les lueurs de sa faulx. Et les triomphateurs sous les arcs triomphaux Tombaient; elle changeait en désert Babylone, Le trône en échafaud et l'échafaud en trône, Les roses en fumier, les enfants en oiseaux, L'or en cendre, et les yeux des mères en ruisseaux. Et les femmes criaient: Rends-nous ce petit être. Pour le faire mourir, pourquoi l'avoir fait naître? Ce n'était qu'un sanglot sur terre, en haut, en bas; Des mains aux doigts osseux sortaient des noirs grabats; Un vent froid bruissait dans les linceuls sans nombre; Les peuples éperdus semblaient sous la faulx sombre Un troupeau frissonnant qui dans l'ombre s'enfuit: Tout était sous ses pieds deuil, épouvante et nuit. Derrière elle, le front baigné de douces flammes, Un ange souriant portait la gerbe d'âmes.

The fifth book opens most fitly with an address to the noble poet who was the comrade of the author's exile and the brother of his self-devoted son-in-law. Even Hugo never wrote anything of more stately and superb simplicity than this tribute of fatherly love and praise, so well deserved and so royally bestowed. The second poem, addressed to the son of a poet who had the honor to receive the greatest of all his kind as a passing guest in the first days of his long exile, is as simple and noble as it is gentle and austere. The third, written in reply to the expostulations of an old friend and a distant kinsman, is that admirable vindication of a man's right to grow wiser, and of his duty to speak the truth as he comes to see it better, which must have imposed silence and impressed respect on all assailants if respect for integrity and genius were possible to the imbecile or the vile, and if silence or abstinence from insult were possible to the malignant or the fool The epilogue, appended nine years later to this high-minded and brilliant poem, is as noble in imagination, in feeling, and in expression, as the finest page in the _Châtiments._

_ÉCRIT EN 1855_

J'ajoute un post-scriptum après neuf ans. J'écoute; Êtes-vous toujours là? Vous êtes mort sans doute, Marquis; mais d'où je suis on peut parler aux morts. Ah! votre cercueil s'ouvre:--Où donc es tu?--Dehors. Comme vous.--Es-tu mort?--Presque. J'habite l'ombre. Je suis sur un rocher qu'environne l'eau sombre, Écueil rongé des flots, de ténèbres chargé, Où s'assied, ruisselant, le blême naufragé. --Eh bien, me dites-vous, après?--La solitude Autour de moi toujours a la même attitude; Je ne vois que l'abîme, et la mer, et les cieux, Et les nuages noirs qui vont silencieux; Mon toit, la nuit, frissonne, et l'ouragan le mêle Aux souffles effrénés de l'onde et de la grêle; Quelqu'un semble clouer un crêpe à l'horizon; L'insulte dat de loin le seuil de ma maison; Le roc croule sous moi dès que mon pied s'y pose; Le vent semble avoir peur de m'approcher, et n'ose Me dire qu'en baissant la voix et qu'à demi L'adieu mystérieux que me jette un ami. La rumeur des vivants s'éteint diminuée. Tout ce que j'ai rêvé s'est envolé, nuée! Sur mes jours devenus fantômes, pâle et seul, Je regarde tomber l'infini, ce linceul.-- Et vous dites:--Après?--Sous un mont qui surplombe, Près des flots, j'ai marqué la place de ma tombe; Ici, le bruit du gouffre est tout ce qu'on entend; Tout est horreur et nuit--Après?--Je suis content.

The verses addressed to friends whose love and reverence had not forsaken the exile--to Jules Janin, to Alexandre Dumas, above all to Paul Meurice--are models of stately grace in their utterance of serene and sublime resignation, of loyal and affectionate sincerity: but those addressed to the sharers of his exile--to his wife, to his children, to their friend--have yet a deeper spiritual music in the sweet and severe perfection of their solemn cadence. I have but time to name with a word of homage in passing the famous and faultless little poem _Aux Feuillantines_, fragrant with the memory and musical as the laugh of childhood; the memorial verses recurring here and there, with such infinite and subtle variations on the same deep theme of mourning or of sympathy; the great brief studies of lonely landscape, imbued with such grave radiance and such noble melancholy, or kindled with the motion and quickened by the music of the sea: but two poems at all events I must select for more especial tribute of more thankful recognition: the sublime and wonderful vision of the angel who was neither life nor death, but love, more strong than either; and the all but sublimer allegory couched in verse of such majestic resonance, which shows us the star of Venus in heaven above the ruin of her island on earth. The former and shorter of these is as excellent an example as could be chosen of its author's sovereign simplicity of insight and of style.

_APPARITION_

Je vis un ange blanc qui passait sur ma tête; Son vol éblouissant apaisait la tempête, Et faisait taire au loin la mer pleine de bruit. --Qu'est-ce que tu viens faire, ange, dans cette nuit? Lui dis-je. Il répondit:--Je viens prendre ton âme.-- Et j'eus peur, car je vis que c'était une femme; Et je lui dis, tremblant et lui tendant les bras: --Que me restera-t-il? car tu t'envoleras.-- Il ne répondit pas; le ciel que l'ombre assiège S'éteignait...--Si tu prends mon âme, m'écriai-je. Où l'emporteras-tu? montre-moi dans quel lieu. Il se taisait toujours.--O passant du ciel bleu, Es-tu la mort? lui dis-je, ou bien es-tu la vie?-- Et la nuit augmentait sur mon âme ravie, Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:--Je suis l'amour. Mais son front sombre était plus charmant que le jour, Et je voyais, dans l'ombre où brillaient ses prunelles, Les astres à travers les plumes de ses ailes.

If nothing were left of Hugo but the sixth book of the _Contemplations_, it would yet be indisputable among those who know anything of poetry that he was among the foremost in the front rank of the greatest poets of all time. Here, did space allow, it would be necessary for criticism with any pretense to adequacy to say something of every poem in turn, to pause for observation of some beauty beyond reach of others at every successive page. In the first poem a sublime humility finds such expression as should make manifest to the dullest eye not clouded by malevolence and insolent conceit that when this greatest of modern poets asserts in his own person the prerogative and assumes for his own spirit the high office of humanity, to confront the darkest problem and to challenge the utmost force of intangible and invisible injustice as of visible and tangible iniquity, of all imaginable as of all actual evil, of superhuman indifference as well as of human wrongdoing, it is no merely personal claim that he puts forward, no vainly egotistic arrogance that he displays; but the right of a reasonable conscience and the duty of a righteous faith, common to ail men alike in whom intelligence of right and wrong, perception of duty or conception of conscience can be said to exist at all. If there be any truth in the notion of any difference between evil and good more serious than the conventional and convenient fabrications of doctrine and assumption, then assuredly the meanest of his creatures in whom the perception of this difference was not utterly extinct would have a right to denounce an omnipotent evil-doer as justly amenable to the sentence inflicted by the thunders of his own unrighteous judgment. How profound and intense was the disbelief of Victor Hugo in the rule or in the existence of any such superhuman malefactor could not be better shown than by the almost polemical passion of his prophetic testimony to that need for faith in a central conscience and a central will on which he has insisted again and again as a crowning and indispensable, requisite for moral and spiritual life. From the sublime daring, the self-confidence born of self-devotion, which finds lyrical utterance in the majestic verses headed _Ibo_, through the humble and haughty earnestness of remonstrance and appeal--"humble to God, haughty to man"--which pervades the next three poems, the meditative and studious imagination of the poet passes into the fuller light and larger air of thought which imbues and informs with immortal life every line of the great religious poem called _Pleurs dans la nuit._ In this he touches the highest point of poetic meditation, as in the epilogue to the _Châtiments_, written four months earlier, he had touched the highest point of poetic rapture possible to the most ardent of believers in his faith and the most unapproachable master of his art. Where all is so lofty in its coherence of construction, so perfect in its harmony of composition, it seems presumptuous to indicate any special miracle of inspired workmanship: yet, as Hugo in his various notes on mediaeval architecture was wont to select for exceptional attention and peculiar eloquence of praise this or that part or point of some superb and harmonious building, so am I tempted to dwell for a moment on the sublime imagination, the pathetic passion, of the verses which render into music the idea of a terrene and material purgatory, with its dungeons of flint and cells of clay wherein the spirit imprisoned and imbedded may envy the life and covet the suffering of the meanest animal that toils on earth; and to set beside this wonderful passage that other which even in a poem so thoroughly imbued with hope and faith finds place and voice for expression of the old mysterious and fantastic horror of the grave, more perfect than ever any mediæval painter or sculptor could achieve.

Le soir vient; l'horizon s'emplit d'inquiétude; L'herbe tremble et bruit comme une multitude; Le fleuve blanc reluit; Le paysage obscur prend les veines des marbres; Ces hydres que, le jour, on appelle des arbres, Se tordent dans la nuit.

Le mort est seul. Il sent la nuit qui le dévore. Quand naît le doux matin, tout l'azur de l'aurore, Tous ses rayons si beaux, Tout l'amour des oiseaux et leurs chansons sans nombre, Vont aux berceaux dorés; et, la nuit, toute l'ombre Aboutit aux tombeaux.

Il entend des soupirs dans les fosses voisines; Il sent la chevelure affreuse des racines Entrer dans son cercueil; Il est l'être vaincu dont s'empare la chose; Il sent un doigt obscur, sous sa paupière close, Lui retirer son œil.

Il a froid; car le soir qui mêle à son haleine Les ténèbres, l'horreur, le spectre et le phalène, Glace ces durs grabats; Le cadavre, lié de bandelettes blanches, Grelotte, et dans sa bière entend les quatre planches Qui lui parlent tout bas.

L'une dit:--Je fermais ton coffre-fort--Et l'autre Dit:--J'ai servi de porte au toit qui fut le nôtre.-- L'autre dit:--Aux beaux jours, La table où rit l'ivresse et que le vin encombre. C'était moi.--L'autre dit:--J'étais le chevet sombre Du lit de tes amours.

Among all the poems which follow, some exquisite in their mystic tenderness as the elegiac stanzas on _Claire_ and the appealing address to a friend unknown (_À celle qui est voilée_), others possessed with the same faith and wrestling with the same questions as beset and sustained the writer of the poem at which we have just rapidly and reverently glanced, there are three at least which demand--at any rate one passing word of homage. The solemn song of meditation "at the window by night" seems to me to render in its first six lines the aspects and sounds of sea and cloud and wind and trees and stars with an utterly incomparable magic of interpretation.

Les étoiles, points d'or, percent les branches noires; Le flot huileux et lourd décompose ses moires Sur l'océan blêmi; Les nuages ont l'air d'oiseaux prenant la fuite; Par moments le vent parle, et dit des mots sans suite, Comme un homme endormi.

No poet but one could have written the three stanzas, so full of infinite sweetness and awe, inscribed "to the angels who see us."

--Passant, qu'es-tu? je te connais. Mais, étant spectre, ombre et nuage, Tu n'as plus de sexe ni d'âge. --Je suis ta mère, et je venais!

--Et toi dont l'aile hésite et brille, Dont l'œil est noyé de douceur, Qu'es-tu, passant?--Je suis ta sœur. --Et toi, qu'es-tu?--Je suis ta fille.

--Et toi, qu'es-tu, passant?--Je suis Celle à qui tu disais: Je t'aime! --Et toi?--Je suis ton âme même.-- Oh! cachez-moi, profondes nuits!

Nor could any other hand have achieved the pathetic perfection of the verses in which just thirty years since, twelve years to a day after the loss of his daughter, and fifteen years to a day before the return of liberty which made possible the return of Victor Hugo to France, his claims to the rest into which he now has entered, and his reasons for desiring the attainment of that rest, found utterance unexcelled for divine and deep simplicity by any utterance of man on earth.

_EN FRAPPANT À UNE PORTE_

J'ai perdu mon père et ma mère, Mon premier-né, bien jeune, hélas! Et pour moi la nature entière Sonne le glas.

Je dormais entre mes deux frères; Enfants, nous étions trois oiseaux; Hélas! le sort change en deux bières Leurs deux berceaux.

Je t'ai perdue, ô fille chère, Toi qui remplis, ô mon orgueil, Tout mon destin de la lumière De ton cercueil!

J'ai su monter, j'ai su descendre. J'ai vu l'aube et l'ombre en mes cieux. J'ai connu la pourpre, et la cendre Qui me va mieux.

J'ai connu les ardeurs profondes, J'ai connu les sombres amours; J'ai vu fuir les ailes, les ondes, Les vents, les jours.

J'ai sur ma tête des orfraies; J'ai sur tous mes travaux l'affront, Au pied la poudre, au cœur des plaies, L'épine au front.

J'ai des pleurs à mon œil qui pense, Des trous à ma robe en lambeau; Je n'ai rien à la conscience; Ouvre, tombeau.

Last comes the magnificent and rapturous hymn of universal redemption from suffering as from sin, the prophetic vision of evil absorbed by good, and the very worst of spirits transfigured into the likeness of the very best, in which the daring and indomitable faith of the seer finds dauntless and supreme expression in choral harmonies of unlimited and illimitable hope. The epilogue which dedicates the book to the daughter whose grave was now forbidden ground to her father--so long wont to keep there the autumnal anniversary of his mourning--is the very crown and flower of the immortal work which it inscribes, if we may say so, rather to the presence than to the memory of the dead.

Not till the thirtieth year from the publication of these two volumes was the inexhaustible labor of the spirit which inspired them to cease for a moment--and then, among us at least, for ever. Three years afterwards appeared the first series of the _Légende des Siècles_, to be followed nineteen years later by the second, and by the final complementary volume six years after that: so that between the inception and the conclusion of the greatest single work accomplished in the course of our century a quarter of that century had elapsed--with stranger and more tragic evolution of events than any poet or any seer could have foretold or foreseen as possible. Three years again from this memorable date appeared the great epic and tragic poem of contemporary life and of eternal humanity which gave us all the slowly ripened fruit of the studies and emotions, the passions and the thoughts, the aspiration and the experience, brought finally to their full and perfect end in _Les Misérables._ As the key-note of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ was doom--the human doom of suffering to be nobly or ignobly endured--so the key-note of its author's next romance was redemption by acceptance of suffering and discharge of duty in absolute and entire obedience to the utmost exaction of conscience when it calls for atonement, of love when it calls for sacrifice of all that makes life more endurable than death. It is obvious that no account can here be given of a book which if it required a sentence would require a volume to express the character of its quality or the variety of its excellence--the one unique, the latter infinite as the unique and infinite spirit whose intelligence and whose goodness gave it life.

Two years after _Les Misérables_ appeared the magnificent book of meditations on the mission of art in the world, on the duty of human thought towards humanity, inscribed by Victor Hugo with the name of William Shakespeare. To allow that it throws more light on the greatest genius of our own century than on the greatest genius of the age of Shakespeare is not to admit that it is not rich in valuable and noble contemplations or suggestions on the immediate subject of Shakespeare's work; witness the admirably thoughtful and earnest remarks on Macbeth, the admirably passionate and pathetic reflections on Lear. The splendid eloquence and the heroic enthusiasm of Victor Hugo never found more noble and sustained expression than in this volume--the spontaneous and inevitable expansion of a projected preface to his son's incomparable translation of Shakespeare. The preface actually prefixed to it is admirable for concision, for insight, and for grave historic humor. It appeared a year after the book which (so to speak) had grown out of it; andin the same year appeared the _Chansons des Rues et des Bois._ The miraculous dexterity of touch, the dazzling mastery of metre, the infinite fertility in variations on the same air of frolic and thoughtful fancy, would not apparently allow the judges of the moment to perceive or to appreciate the higher and deeper qualities displayed in this volume of lyric idyls. The prologue is a superb example of the power peculiar to its author above all other poets; the power of seizing on some old symbol or image which may have been in poetic use ever since verse dawned upon the brain of man, and informing it again as with life, and transforming it anew as by fire. Among innumerable exercises and excursions of dainty but indefatigable fancy there are one or two touches of a somewhat deeper note than usual which would hardly be misplaced in the gravest and most ambitious works of imaginative genius. The twelve lines (of four syllables each) addressed _À la belle Imperieuse_ are such, for example, as none but a great poet of passion, a master of imaginative style, could by any stroke of chance or at any cost of toil have written.

L'amour, panique De la raison, Se communique Par le frisson.

Laissez-moi dire, N'accordez rien. Si je soupire, Chantez, c'est bien.

Si je demeure, Triste, à vos pieds, Et si je pleure, C'est bien, riez.

Un homme semble Souvent trompeur. Mais si je tremble, Belle, ayez peur.

The sound of the songs of a whole woodland seems to ring like audible spring sunshine through the adorable song of love and youth rejoicing among the ruins of an abbey.

Seuls tous deux, ravis, chantants! Comme on s'aime! Comme on cueille le printemps Que Dieu sème!

Quels rires étincelants Dans ces ombres Pleines jadis de fronts blancs. De cœurs sombres!

On est tout frais mariés. On s'envoie Les charmants cris variés De la joie.

Purs ébats mêlés au vent Qui frissonne! Gaîtés que le noir couvent Assaisonne!

On effeuille des jasmins Sur la pierre Où l'abbesse joint ses mains En prière.

Ses tombeaux, de croix marqués, Font partie De ces jeux, un peu piqués Par l'ortie.

Ou se cherche, on se poursuit, On sent croître Ton aube, amour, dans la nuit Du vieux cloître.

On s'en va se becquetant, On s'adore, On s'embrasse à chaque instant, Puis encore,

Sous les piliers, les arceaux, Et les marbres. C'est l'histoire des oiseaux Dans les arbres.

The inexhaustible exuberance of fancies lavished on the study of the natural church, built by the hawthorn and the nettle in the depth of the living wood, with foliage and wind and flowers, leaves the reader not unfit for such reading actually dazzled with delight: In a far different key, the _Souvenir des vieilles guerres_ is one of Hugo's most pathetic and characteristic studies of homely and heroic life. The dialogue which follows, between the irony of skepticism and the enthusiasm of reason, on the progressive ascension of mankind, is at once sublime and subdued in the fervent tranquillity of its final tone: and the next poem, on the so-called "great age" and its dwarf of a Cæsar with the sun for a periwig, has in it a whole volume of history and of satire condensed into nine stanzas of four lines of five syllables apiece.

_LE GRAND SIÈCLE_

Ce siècle a la forme D'un monstrueux char. Sa croissance énorme Sous un nain césar.

Son air de prodige, Sa gloire qui ment, Mêlent le vertige À l'écrasement.

Louvois pour ministre, Scarron pour griffon, C'est un chant sinistre Sur un air bouffon.

Sur sa double roue Le grand char descend; L'une est dans la boue, L'autre est dans le sang.

La mort au carrosse Attelle--où va-t-il?-- Lavrillière atroce, Roquelaure vil.

Comme un geai dans l'arbre, Le roi s'y tient fier; Son cœur est de marbre Son ventre est de chair.

On a pour sa nuque Et son front vermeil Fait une perruque Avec le soleil.

Il règne et végète, Effrayant zéro Sur qui se projette L'ombre du bourreau.

Ce trône est la tombe; Et sur le pavé Quelque chose en tombe Qu'on n'a point lavé.

The exquisite poem on the closure of the church already described for the winter is as radiant with humor as with tenderness: and the epilogue responds in cadences of august antiphony to the moral and imaginative passion which imbues with life and fire the magnificent music of the prologue.

In the course of the next four years Victor Hugo published the last two great works which were to be dated from the haven of his exile. It would be the very ineptitude of impertinence for any man's presumption to undertake the classification or registry of his five great romances in positive order of actual merit: but I may perhaps be permitted to say without fear of deserved rebuke that none is to me personally a treasure of greater price than _Les Travailleurs de la Mer._ The splendid energy of the book makes the superhuman energy of the hero seem not only possible but natural, and his triumph over all physical impossibilities not only natural but inevitable. Indeed, when glancing at the animadversions of a certain sort of critics on certain points or passages in this and in the next romance of its author, I am perpetually inclined to address them in the spirit--were it worth while to address them in any wise at all--after the fashion if not after the very phrase of Mirabeau's reply to a less impertinent objector. Victor Hugo's acquaintance with navigation or other sciences may or may not have been as imperfect as Shakespeare's acquaintance with geography and natural history; the knowledge of such a man's ignorance or inaccuracy in detail is in either case of exactly equal importance: and the importance of such knowledge is for all men of sense and candor exactly equivalent to zero.

Between the tragedy of Gilliatt and the tragedy of Gwynplaine Victor Hugo published nothing but the glorious little poem on the slaughter of Mentana, called _La Voix de Guernesey_, and (in the same year) the eloquent and ardent effusion of splendid and pensive enthusiasm prefixed to the manual or guide-book which appeared on the occasion of the international exhibition at Paris three years before the collapse of the government which then kept out of France the Frenchmen most regardful of her honor and their own. In the year preceding that collapse he published _L'Homme qui Rit_; a book which those who read it aright have always ranked and will always rank among his masterpieces. A year and eight months after the fall of the putative Bonaparte he published the terrible register of _L'Année Terrible._ More sublime wisdom, more compassionate equity, more loyal self-devotion never found expression in verse of more varied and impassioned and pathetic magnificence. The memorial poem in which Victor Hugo so royally repaid, with praise beyond all price couched in verse beyond all praise, the loyal and constant devotion of Théophile Gautier, bears the date of All Souls' Day in the autumn of 1872. For tenderness and nobility of mingling aspiration and recollection, recollection of combatant and triumphant youth, aspiration towards the serene and sovereign ascension out of age through death, these majestic lines are worthy not merely of eternal record, but far more than that--of a distinct and a distinguished place among the poems of Victor Hugo. They are not to be found in the _édition ne varietur_: which, I must needs repeat, will have to be altered or modified by more variations than one before it can be accepted as a sufficient or standard edition of the complete and final text. In witness of this I cite the closing lines of a poem now buried in "the tomb of Théophile Gautier"--a beautiful volume which has long been out of print.

Ami, je sens du sort la sombre plénitude; J'ai commencé la mort par de la solitude, Je vois mon profond soir vaguement s'étoiler. Voici l'heure où je vais, aussi moi, m'en aller. Mon fil trop long frissonne et touche presque au glaive; Le vent qui t'emporta doucement me soulève, Et je vais suivre ceux qui m'aimaient, moi banni: Leur œil fixe m'attire au fond de l'infini. J'y cours. Ne fermez pas la porte funéraire.

Passons, car c'est la loi: nul ne peut s'y soustraire; Tout penche; et ce grand siècle avec tous ses rayons Entre en cette ombre immense où, pâles, nous fuyons. Oh! quel farouche bruit font dans le crépuscule Les chênes qu'on abat pour le bûcher d'Hercule! Les chevaux de la Mort se mettent à hennir, Et sont joyeux, car l'âge éclatant va finir; Ce siècle altier qui sut dompter le vent contraire. Expire...--O Gautier, toi, leur égal et leur frère, Tu pars après Dumas, Lamartine et Musset. L'onde antique est tarie où l'on rajeunissait; Comme il n'est plus de Styx il n'est plus de Jouvence. Le dur faucher avec sa large lame avance Pensif et pas à pas vers le reste du blé; C'est mon tour; et la nuit emplit mon œil troublé Qui, devinant, hélas, l'avenir des colombes, Pleure sur des berceaux et sourit à des tombes.

Two years after the year of terror, the poet who had made its memory immortal by his record of its changes and its chances gave to the world his heroic and epic romance of _Quatrevingt-treize_; instinct with all the passion of a deeper and wider chivalry than that of old, and touched with a more than Homeric tenderness for motherhood and childhood. This book was written in the space of five months and twenty-seven days. The next year witnessed only the collection of the second series of his _Actes et Paroles_ (_Pendant l'Exil_), and the publication of two brief and memorable pamphlets: the one a simple and pathetic record of the two beloved sons taken from him in such rapid succession, the other a terse and earnest plea with the judges who had spared the life of a marshal condemned on a charge of high treason to spare likewise the life of a private soldier condemned for a transgression of military discipline. Most readers will be glad to remember that on this occasion at least the voice of the intercessor was not uplifted in vain. A year afterwards he published the third series of _Actes et Paroles_ (_Depuis l'Exil_), with a prefatory essay full of noble wisdom, of pungent and ardent scorn, of thoughtful and composed enthusiasm, on the eternal contrast and the everlasting battle between the spirit of clerical Rome and the spirit of republican Paris.

"Moi qu'un petit enfant rend tout à fait stupide," I do not propose to undertake a review of _L'Art d'être Grand-père._ It must suffice here to register the fact that the most absolutely and adorably beautiful book ever written appeared a year after the volume just mentioned, and some months after the second series of the _Légende des Siècles_; that there is not a page in it which is not above all possible eulogy or thanksgiving; that nothing was ever conceived more perfect than such poems--to take but a small handful for samples--as _Un manque, La sieste. Choses du soir, Ce que dit le public_ (at the Jardin des Plantes or at the Zoological Gardens; ages of public ranging from five, which is comparatively young, to seven, which is positively old), _Chant sur le berceau_, the song for a round dance of children, _Le pot cassé, La mise en liberté, Jeanne endormie_, the delicious _Chanson de grand-père_, the glorious _Chanson d'ancêtre_, or the third of the divine and triune poems on the sleep of a little child; that after reading these--to say nothing of the rest--it seems natural to feel as though no other poet had ever known so fully or enjoyed so wisely or spoken so sweetly and so well the most precious of truths, the loveliest of loves, the sweetest and the best of doctrines.

The first of all to see the light appeared in a magazine which has long ago collapsed under the influence of far other writers than the greatest of the century. Every word of the thirty-eight lines which compose _La Sieste de Jeanne_--if any speech or memory of man endure so long--will be treasured as tenderly by generations as remote from the writer's as now treasure up with thankful wonder and reverence every golden fragment and jeweled spar from the wreck of Simonides or of Sappho. It has all the subtle tenderness which invests the immortal song of Danaë; and the union of perfect grace with living passion, as it were the suffusion of human flesh and blood with heavenly breath and fire, brings back once again upon our thoughts the name which is above every name in lyric song. There is not one line which could have been written and set where it stands by the hand of any lesser than the greatest among poets. For once even the high priest and even the high priestess of baby-worship who have made their names immortal among our own by this especial and most gracious attribute--even William Blake and Christina Rossetti for once are distanced in the race of song, on their own sweet ground, across their own peculiar field of Paradise. Not even in the pastures that heard his pipe keep time to the "Songs of Innocence," or on the "wet bird-haunted English lawn" set ringing as from nursery windows at summer sunrise to the faultless joyous music and pealing birdlike laughter of her divine "Sing-Song," has there sounded quite such a note as this from the heaven of heavens in which little babies are adored by great poets, the frailest by the most potent of divine and human kind. And above the work in this lovely line of all poets in all time but one, there sits and smiles eternally the adorable baby who helps us for ever to forget all passing perversities of Christianized socialism or bastard Cæsarism which disfigure and diminish the pure proportions and the noble charm of "Aurora Leigh." Even the most memorable children born to art in Florence, begotten upon stone or canvas by Andrea del Sarto or by Luca della Robbia's very self, must yield to that one the crown of sinless empire and the palm of powerless godhead which attest the natural mystery of their omnipotence; and which haply may help to explain why no accumulated abominations of cruelty and absurdity which inlay the record of its history and incrust the fabric of its creed can utterly corrode the natal beauty or corrupt the primal charm of a faith which centres at its opening round the worship of a new-born child.

The most accurate and affectionate description that I ever saw or heard given of a baby's incomparable smile, when graciously pleased to permit with courtesy and accept with kindness the votive touch of a reverential finger on its august little cheek, was given long since in the text accompanying a rich and joyous design of childish revel by Richard Doyle. A baby in arms is there contemplating the riotous delights of its elders, fallen indeed from the sovereign state of infancy, but not yet degenerate into the lower life of adults, with that bland and tacit air of a large-minded and godlike tolerance which the devout observer will not fail to have remarked in the aspect of babies when unvexed and unincensed by any cross accident or any human shortcoming on the part of their attendant ministers. Possibly a hand which could paint that inexpressible smile might not fail also of the ability to render in mere words some sense of the ineffable quality which rests upon every line and syllable of this most divine poem. There are lines in it--but after all this is but an indirect way of saying that it is a poem by Victor Hugo--which may be taken as tests of the uttermost beauty, the extreme perfection, the supreme capacity and charm, to which the language of men can attain. It might seem as if the Fates could not allow two men capable of such work to live together in one time of the world; and that Shelley therefore had to die in his thirtieth year as soon as Hugo had attained his twentieth.

Elle fait au milieu du jour son petit somme; Car l'enfant a besoin du rêve plus que l'homme, Cette terre est si laide alors qu'on vient du ciel! L'enfant cherche à revoir Chérubin, Ariel, Les camarades, Puck, Titania, les fées, Et ses mains quand il dort sont par Dieu réchauffées. Oh! comme nous serions surpris si nous voyions, Au fond de ce sommeil sacré, plein de rayons, Ces paradis ouverts dans l'ombre, et ces passages D'étoiles qui font signe aux enfants d'être sages, Ces apparitions, ces éblouissements! Donc, à l'heure où les feux du soleil sont calmants, Quand tout la nature écoute et se recueille, Vers midi, quand les nids se taisent, quand la feuille La plus tremblante oublie un instant de frémir, Jeanne a cette habitude aimable de dormir; Et la mère un moment respire et se repose, Car on se lasse, même à servir une rose. Ses beaux petits pieds nus dont le pas est peu sûr Dorment; et son berceau, qu'entoure un vague azur Ainsi qu'une auréole entoure une immortelle, Semble un nuage fait avec de la dentelle; On croit, en la voyant dans ce frais berceau-là, Voir une lueur rose au fond d'un falbala; On la contemple, on rit, on sent fuir la tristesse, Et c'est un astre, ayant de plus la petitesse; L'ombre, amoureuse d'elle, a l'air de l'adorer; Le vent retient son souffle et n'ose respirer. Soudain dans l'humble et chaste alcôve maternelle, Versant tout le matin qu'elle a dans sa prunelle, Elle ouvre la paupière, étend un bras charmant, Agite un pied, puis l'autre, et, si divinement Que des fronts dans l'azur se penchent pour l'entendre, Elle gazouille...--Alors, de sa voix la plus tendre, Couvant des yeux l'enfant que Dieu fait rayonner, Cherchant le plus doux nom qu'elle puisse donner À sa joie, à son ange en fleur, à sa chimère: --Te voilà réveillée, horreur! lui dit sa mère.

If the last word on so divine a subject could ever be said, it surely might well be none other than this. But with workmen of the very highest order there is no such thing as a final touch, a point at which they like others are compelled to draw bridle, a summit on which even their genius also may abide but while a man takes breath, and halt without a hope or aspiration to pass beyond it.

Far different in the promise or the menace of its theme, the poet's next work, issued in the following year, was one in spirit with the inner spirit of this book. In sublime simplicity of conception and in sovereign accomplishment of its design, _Le Pape_ is excelled by no poem of Hugo's or of man's. In the glory of pure pathos it is perhaps excelled, as in the divine long-suffering of all-merciful wisdom it can be but equalled, by the supreme utterance of _La Pitié Suprême._ In splendor of changeful music and imperial magnificence of illustration the two stand unsurpassed for ever, side by side. A third poem, attacking at once the misbelief or rather the infidelity which studies and rehearses "the grammar of assent" to creeds and articles of religion, and the blank disbelief or denial which rejects all ideals and all ideas of spiritual life, is not so rich even in satire as in reason, so earnest even in rejection of false doctrine as in assertion of free belief. Upon this book no one can hope to write anything so nearly adequate and so thoroughly worth reading as is the tribute paid to it by Théodore de Banville--the Simonides Melicertes of France.

In the midst of our confused life, turbulent and flat, bustling and indifferent, where books and plays, dreams and poems, driven down a wind of oblivion, are like the leaves which November sweeps away, and fly past, without giving us time to tell one from another, in a vague whirl and rush, at times there appears a new book by Victor Hugo, and lights up, resounds, murmurs, and sings at once everything.

The shining, sounding, fascinating verse, with its thousand surprises of sound, of color, of harmony, breaks forth like a rich concert, and ever newly stirred, dazzled and astonished, as if we were hearing verses for the first time, we remain stupefied with wonder before the persistent prodigy of the great seer, the great thinker, the unheard-of artist, self-transfigured without ceasing, always new and always like himself. It would be impertinent to say of him that he makes progress; and yet I find no other word to express the fact that every hour, every minute, he adds something new, something, yet more exact and yet more caressing, to that swing of syllables, that melodious play of rhyme renascent of itself, which is the grace and the invincible power of French poetry,--if English ears could but learn or would but hear it; whereas usually they have never been taught even the rudiments of French prosody, and receive the most perfect cadences of the most glorious or the most exquisite French poetry as a schoolboy who has not yet learnt scansion might receive the melodies of Catullus or of Virgil.

Let me be forgiven a seeming blasphemy; but since the time of periphrasis is over the real truth of things must be said of them. Well, then, the great peril of poetry is the risk it runs of becoming a weariness: for it may be almost sublime, and yet perfectly wearisome: but, on the contrary, with all its bewildering flight, its vast circumference, and the rage of its genius grown drunk with things immeasurable, the poetry of Victor Hugo is of itself _amusing_ into the bargain--amusing as a fairy tale, as a many-colored festival, as a lawless and charming comedy; for in them words play unexpected parts, take on themselves a special and intense life, put on strange or graceful faces, clash one against another either cymbals of gold or urns of crystal, exchange flashes of living light and dawn.

And let no one suspect in my choice of an epithet any idea of diminution; a garden-box on the window-sill may be thoroughly wearisome, and an immense forest may be amusing, with its shades wherein the nightingale sings, its giant trees with the blue sky showing through them, its mossy shelters where the silver brooklet hums its tune through the moistened greenery. Ay,--this is one of its qualities,--the poetry of Hugo can be read, can be devoured as one devours a new novel, because it is varied, surprising, full of the unforeseen, clear of commonplaces, like nature itself; and of such a limpid clearness as to be within the reach of every creature who can read, even when it soars to the highest summits of philosophy and idealism. In fact, to be obscure, confused, unintelligible, is not a rare quality, nor one difficult to acquire; and the first fool you may fell in with can easily attain to it. In this magnificent poem which has just appeared--as, for that matter, in all his other poems--what Victor Hugo does is just to dispel and scatter to the winds of heaven those lessons, those fogs, those rubbish-heaps, those clouds of dark bewildered words with which the sham wise men of all ages have overlaid the plain evidence of truth.

"The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo"; and I, who cannot pretend even to the gift of eloquence proper to the son of Maia, will not presume to add a word of less valuable homage to the choicer tribute of Banville. The three poems last mentioned were respectively published in three successive years: and in the same year with _Religions et Religion_ Victor Hugo published a fourth volume, _L'Âne_, in which the questions of human learning and of human training were handled with pathetic ardor and sympathetic irony. It would be superfluous if not insolent to add that the might of hand, the magic of utterance, the sovereign charm of sound, and the superb expression of sense, are equal and incomparable in all.

And next year Victor Hugo gave us _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit._ In the first division, the book of satire, every page bears witness that the hand which wrote the _Châtiments_ had neither lost its strength nor forgotten its cunning; it is full of keen sense, of wise wrath, of brilliant reason and of merciful equity, The double drama which follows is one of the deepest and sweetest and richest in various effect among the masterpieces of its author. In Margarita we breathe again the same fresh air of heroic mountain-ranges and woodlands inviolable, of winds and flowers and all fair things and thoughts, which blows through all the brighter and more gracious interludes of the _Légende des Siècles_: the figures of Gallus, the libertine by philosophy, and Gunich, the philosopher of profligacy--the former a true man and true lover at heart, the latter a cynic and a courtier to the core--are as fresh in their novelty as the figures of noble old age and noble young love are fresh in their renewal and reimpression of types familiar to all hearts since the sunrise of _Hernani._ The tragedy which follows this little romantic comedy is but the more penetrative and piercing in its pathos and its terror for its bitter and burning vein of realism and of humor. The lyric book is a casket of jewels rich enough to outweigh the whole wealth of many a poet. After the smiling song of old times, the stately song of to-day with its other stars and its other roses, in sight of the shadow where grows the deathless flower of death, pale and haggard, with its shadowy perfume: the song of all sweet waking dreams and visions, and sweetest among them all the vision of a tyrant loyally slain: the song on hearing a princess sing, sweeter than all singing and simple as "the very virtue of compassion": the song of evening and rest from trouble, and prayer in sorrow, and hope in death: the many-colored and sounding song of seaside winter nights: the song of three nests, the reed-warbler's and the martlet's made with moss and straw, in the wall or on the water, and love's with glances and smiles, in the lover's inmost heart: the song of the watcher by twilight on the cliff, which strikes a note afterwards repeated and prolonged in the last issue of the _Légende des Siècles_, full of mystery and mourning and fear and faith: the brief deep note of bewildered sorrow that succeeds it: the great wild vision of death and night, cast into words which have the very sound of wind and storm and water, the very shape and likeness of things actually touched or seen: the soft and sublime song of dawn as it rises on the thinker deep sunk in meditation on death and on life to come: the strange dialogue underground, grim and sweet, between the corpse and the rose-tree: the song of exile in May, sweet as flowers and bitter as tears: the lofty poem of suffering which rejects the old Roman refuge of stoic suicide: the light swift song of a lover's quarrel between the earth and the sun in winter time: the unspeakably sweet song of the daisy that smiles at coming winter, the star that smiles at coming night, the soul that smiles at coming death: the most pathetic and heroic song of all, the cry of exile towards the graves of the beloved over sea, that weeps and is not weary: the simple and sublime verses on the mountain desolation to which truth and conscience were the guides: the four magnificent studies of sea and land, _Promenades dans les rochers_: the admirable verses on that holy mystery of terror perceptible in the most glorious works alike of nature and of poetry: all these and more are fitly wound up by the noble hymn on planting the oak of the United States of Europe in the garden of the house of exile. A few of the briefer among these may here be taken as examples of a gift not merely unequalled but unapproached by any but the greatest among poets. And first we may choose the following unsurpassable psalm of evensong.

Un hymne harmonieux sort des feuilles du tremble; Les voyageurs craintifs, qui vont la nuit ensemble. Haussent la voix dans l'ombre où l'on doit se hâter Laissez tout ce qui tremble Chanter.

Les marins fatigués sommeillent sur le gouffre. La mer bleue ou Vésuve épand ses flots de soufre Se tait dès qu'il s'éteint, et cesse de gémir. Laissez tout ce qui souffre Dormir.

Quand la vie est mauvaise on la rêve meilleure. Les yeux en pleurs au ciel se lèvent à toute heure; L'espoir vers Dieu se tourne et Dieu l'entend crier. Laissez tout ce qui pleure Prier.

C'est pour renaître ailleurs qu'ici-bas on succombe. Tout ce qui tourbillonne appartient à la tombe. Il faut dans le grand tout tôt ou tard s'absorber. Laissez tout ce qui tombe Tomber!

Next, we may take two songs of earlier and later life, whose contrast is perfect concord.

I

_CHANSON D'AUTREFOIS_

Jamais elle ne raille, Étant un calme esprit; Mais toujours elle rit.-- Voici des brins de mousse avec des brins de paille; Fauvette des roseaux, Fais ton nid sur les eaux.

Quand sous la clarté douce Qui sort de tes beaux yeux On passe, on est joyeux.-- Voici des brins de paille avec des brins de mousse; Martinet de l'azur, Fais ton nid dans mon mur.

Dans l'aube avril se mire, Et les rameaux fleuris Sont pleins de petits cris.-- Voici de son regard, voici de son sourire; Amour, ô doux vainqueur, Fais ton nid dans mon cœur.

II

_CHANSON D'AUJOURD'HUI_

Je disais:--Dieu qu'aucun suppliant n'importune, Quand vous m'éprouverez dans votre volonté, Laissez mon libre choix choisir dans la fortune L'un ou l'autre côté;

Entre un riche esclavage et la pauvreté franche Laissez-moi choisir, Dieu du cèdre et du roseau; Entre l'or de la cage et le vert de la branche Faites juge l'oiseau.--

Maintenant je suis libre et la nuit me réclame; J'ai choisi l'âpre exil; j'habite un bois obscur; Mais je vois s'allumer les étoiles de l'âme Dans mon sinistre azur.

If this can be surpassed for outward and inward sweetness, the following poem may perhaps have been equaled for sensible and spiritual terror in the range of lyric song.

_EN MARCHANT LA NUIT DANS UN BOIS_