Chapter V (1)

La nuit, sinistre merveille, Répand son effroi sacré; Toute la forêt s'éveille, Comme un dormeur effaré.

Après les oiseaux, les âmes! Volez sous les cieux blafards. L'étang, miroir, rit aux femmes Qui sortent des nénuphars.

L'air sanglote, et le vent râle, Et, sous l'obscur firmament, La nuit sombre et la mort pâle Se regardent fixement.

But the twenty-fifth poem in this book of lyrics has assuredly never been excelled since first the impulse of articulate song awoke in the first recorded or unrecorded poet.

Proscrit, regarde les roses; Mai joyeux, de l'aube en pleurs Les reçoit toutes écloses; Proscrit, regarde les fleurs.

--Je pense Aux roses que je semai. Le mois de mai sans la France, Ce n'est pas le mois de mai.

Proscrit, regarde les tombes; Mai, qui rit aux cieux si beaux, Sous les baisers des colombes Fait palpiter les tombeaux.

--Je pense Aux yeux chers que je fermai. Le mois de mai sans la France. Ce n'est pas le mois de mai.

Proscrit, regarde les branches, Les branches où sont les nids; Mai les remplit d'ailes blanches Et de soupirs infinis.

--Je pense Aux nids charmants où j'aimai. Le mois de mai sans la France, Ce n'est pas le mois de mai.

_Mai_ 1854.

In October of the same year--the second year of his long exile--a loftier note of no less heavenly melody was sounded by the lyric poet who alone of all his nation has taken his place beside Coleridge and Shelley. The word "passant," as addressed by the soul to the body, is perhaps the very finest expression of his fervent faith in immortality to be found in all the work of Victor Hugo.

Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle, Reine marguerite; aux champs défleuris Bientôt vont souffler le givre et la grêle. --Passant, l'hiver vient, et je lui souris.

Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle, Étoile du soir; les rayons taris Sont tous retournés à l'aube éternelle. --Passant, la nuit vient, et je lui souris.

Il est un peu tard pour faire la belle, Mon âme; joyeuse en mes noirs débris, Tu m'éblouis, fière et rouvrant ton aile. --Passant, la mort vient, et je lui souris.

No date is affixed to the divine song of yearning after home and the graves which make holier for every man old enough to have been a mourner the native land which holds them. The play on sound which distinguishes the last repetition of the burden is the crowning evidence that the subtlest effect of pathos and the most austere effect of sublimity may be conveyed through a trick of language familiar in their highest and most serious moods to Æschylus and to Shakespeare.

_EXIL_

Si je pouvais voir, ô patrie. Tes amandiers et tes lilas, Et fouler ton herbe fleurie, Hélas!

Si je pouvais,--mais, ô mon père, Ô ma mère, je ne peux pas,-- Prendre pour chevet votre pierre, Hélas!

Dans le froid cercueil qui vous gêne, Si je pouvais vous parler bas, Mon frère Abel, mon frère Eugène, Hélas!

Si je pouvais, ô ma colombe. Et toi, mère, qui t'envolas, M'agenouiller sur votre tombe, Hélas!

Oh! vers l'étoile solitaire, Comme je lèverais les bras! Comme je baiserais la terre, Hélas!

Loin de vous, ô morts que je pleure, Des flots noirs j'écoute le glas; Je voudrais fuir, mais je demeure, Hélas!

Pourtant le sort, caché dans l'ombre, Se trompe si, comptant mes pas, Il croit que le vieux marcheur sombre Est las.

The epic book is the most tragic and terrible of all existing poems of its kind; if indeed we may say that it properly belongs to any kind existing before its advent. The growing horror of the gradual vision of history, from Henri the Fourth to his bloody and gloomy son, from Louis the Thirteenth to the murderer and hangman of the Palatinate and the Cévennes, from Louis the Fourteenth to the inexpressible pollution of incarnate ignominy in his grandson, seems to heave and swell as a sea towards the coming thunder which was to break above the severed head of their miserable son.

And next year came _Torquemada_: one of the greatest masterpieces of the master poet of our century. The construction of this tragedy is absolutely original and unique: free and full of change as the wildest and loosest and roughest of dramatic structures ever flung together, and left to crumble or cohere at the pleasure of accident or of luck, by the rudest of primæval playwrights: but perfect in harmonious unity of spirit, in symmetry or symphony of part with part, as the most finished and flawless creation of Sophocles or of Phidias. Between some of the characters in this play and some of those in previous plays of Hugo's there is a certain resemblance as of kinship, but no touch or shadow of mere repetition or reproduction from types which had been used before: Ferdinand the Catholic has something in his lineaments of Louis the Just, and Gucho of L'Angely in _Marion de Lorme_: the Marquis of Fuentel has a touch of Gunich in _Les deux trouvailles de Gallus_, redeemed by a better touch of human tenderness for his recovered grandson. The young lovers are two of the loveliest figures, Torquemada is one of the sublimest, in all the illimitable world of dramatic imagination. The intensity of interest, anxiety, and terror, which grows by such rapid and subtle stages of development up to the thunder-stroke of royal decision at the close of the first act, is exchanged in the second for an even deeper and higher kind of emotion. The confrontation of the hermit with the inquisitor, magnificent enough already in its singleness of effect, is at once transfigured and completed by the apparition of the tremendous figure whose very name is tragedy, whose very shadow sufficed for the central and the crowning terror which darkened the stage of _Lucrèce Borgia._

LE CHASSEUR

Le hasard a pétri la cendre avec l'instant; Cet amalgame est l'homme. Or, moi-même n'étant Comme vous que matière, ah! je serais stupide D'être hésitant et lourd quand la joie est rapide, De ne point mordre en hâte au plaisir dans la nuit, Et de ne pas goûter à tout, puisque tout fuit! Avant tout, être heureux. Je prends à mon service Ce qu'on appelle crime et ce qu'on nomme vice. L'inceste, préjugé. Le meurtre, expédient. J'honore le scrupule en le congédiant. Est-ce que vous croyez que, si ma fille est belle, Je me gênerai, moi, pour être amoureux d'elle! Ah ça, mais je serais un imbécile. Il faut Que j'existe. Allez donc demander au gerfaut, À l'aigle, à l'épervier, si cette chair qu'il broie Est permise, et s'il sait de quel nid sort si proie. Parce que vous portez un habit noir ou blanc, Vous vous croyez forcé d'être inepte et tremblant, Et vous baissez les yeux devant cette offre immense Du bonheur, que vous fait l'univers en démence. Ayons donc de l'esprit. Profitons du temps. Rien Etant le résultat de la mort, vivons bien! La salle de bal croule et devient catacombe. L'âme du sage arrive en dansant dans la tombe. Servez-moi mon festin. S'il exige aujourd'hui Un assaisonnement de poison pour autrui, Soit. Qu'importe la mort des autres! J'ai la vie. Je suis une faim, vaste, ardente, inassouvie. Mort, je veux t'oublier; Dieu, je veux t'ignorer. Oui, le monde est pour moi le fruit à dévorer. Vivant, je suis en hâte heureux; mort, je m'échappe!

FRANÇOIS DE PAULE, à _Torquemada._

Qu'est-ce que ce bandit?

TORQUEMADA

Mon père, c'est le pape.

The third act revives again the more immediate and personal interest of the drama. Terror and pity never rose higher, never found utterance more sublime and piercing, in any work of any poet in the world, than here in the scene of the supplication of the Jews, and the ensuing scene of the triumph of Torquemada.

The Jews enter; men, women, and children all covered with ashes and clothed in rags, barefoot, with ropes round their necks, some mutilated and made infirm by torture, dragging themselves on crutches or on stumps; others, whose eyes have been put out, are led by children. And their spokesman pleads thus with the king and the queen of the kingdoms from whence they are to be driven by Christian jurisdiction.

MOÏSE-BEN-HABIB, _grand rabbin, à genoux._

Altesse de Castille, altesse d'Aragon, Roi, reine! ô notre maître, et vous, notre maîtresse, Nous, vos tremblants sujets, nous sommes en détresse, Et, pieds nus, corde au cou, nous prions Dieu d'abord, Et vous ensuite, étant dans l'ombre de la mort, Ayant plusieurs de nous qu'on va livrer aux flammes, Et tout le reste étant chassé, vieillards et femmes, Et, sous l'œil qui voit tout du fond du firmament, Rois, nous vous apportons notre gémissement. Altesses, vos décrets sur nous se précipitent, Nous pleurons, et les os de nos pères palpitent; Le sépulcre pensif tremble à cause de vous. Ayez pitié. Nos cœurs sont fidèles et doux; Nous vivons enfermés dans nos maisons étroites, Humbles, seuls; nos lois sont très simples et très droites, Tellement qu'un enfant les mettrait en écrit Jamais le juif ne chante et jamais il ne rit. Nous payons le tribut, n'importe quelles sommes. On nous remue à terre avec le pied; nous sommes Comme le vêtement d'un homme assassiné, Gloire à Dieu! Mais faut-il qu'avec le nouveau-né, Avec l'enfant qu'on tette, avec l'enfant qu'on sèvre, Nu, poussant devant lui son chien, son bœuf, sa chèvre, Israël fuie et coure épars dans tous les sens! Qu'on ne soit plus un peuple et qu'on soit des passants! Rois, ne nous faites pas chasser à coups des piques, Et Dieu vous ouvrira des portes magnifiques. Ayez pitié de nous. Nous sommes accablés. Nous ne verrons donc plus nos arbres et nos blés! Les mères n'auront plus de lait dans leurs mamelles! Les bêtes dans les bois sont avec leurs femelles, Les nids dorment heureux sous les branches blottis, On laisse en paix la biche allaiter ses petits, Permettez-nous de vivre aussi, nous, dans nos caves, Sous nos pauvres toits, presque au bagne et presque esclaves, Mais auprès des cercueils de nos pères! daignez Nous souffrir sous vos pieds de nos larmes baignés! Oh! la dispersion sur les routes lointaines, Quel deuil! Permettez-nous de boire à nos fontaines Et de vivre en nos champs, et vous prospérerez. Hélas! nous nous tordons les bras, désespérés! Epargnez-nous l'exil, ô rois, et l'agonie De la solitude âpre, éternelle, infinie! Laissez-nous la patrie et laissez-nous le ciel! Le pain sur qui l'on pleure en mangeant est du fiel. Ne soyez pas le vent si nous sommes la cendre. Voici notre rançon, hélas! daignez la prendre. Ô rois, protégez-nous. Voyez nos désespoirs. Soyez sur nous, mais non comme des anges noirs; Soyez des anges bons et doux, car l'aile sombre Et l'aile blanche, ô rois, ne font pas la même ombre. Révoquez votre arrêt. Rois, nous vous supplions Par vos aïeux sacrés, grands comme les lions, Par les tombeaux des rois, parles tombeaux des reines, Profonds et pénétrés de lumières sereines, Et nous mettons nos cœurs, ô maîtres des humains, Nos prières, nos deuils dans les petites mains De votre infante Jeanne, innocente, et pareille À la fraise des bois où se pose l'abeille. Roi, reine, ayez pitié!

After the sublime and inexpressible pathos of this appeal from age and innocence against the most execrable of all religions that ever infected earth and verified hell, it would have been impossible for any poet but one to find expression for the passion of unselfish faith in that infernal creed which should not merely horrify and disgust us. But when Hugo brings before us the figure of the grand inquisitor in contemplation of the supreme act of faith accomplished in defiance of king and queen to the greater glory of God, for the ultimate redemption of souls else condemned to everlasting torment, the rapture of the terrible redeemer, whose faith is in salvation by fire, is rendered into words of such magical and magnificent inspiration that the conscience of our fancy is well nigh conquered and convinced and converted for the moment as we read.

TORQUEMADA

Ô fête, ô gloire, ô joie! La clémence terrible et superbe flamboie! Délivrance à jamais! Damnés, soyez absous! Le bûcher sur la terre éteint l'enfer dessous. Sois béni, toi par qui l'âme au bonheur remonte, Bûcher, gloire du feu dont l'enfer est la honte, Issue aboutissant au radieux chemin, Porte du paradis rouverte au genre humain, Miséricorde ardente aux caresses sans nombre, Mystérieux rachat des esclaves de l'ombre, Auto-da-fé! Pardon, bonté, lumière, feu, Vie! éblouissement de la face de Dieu! Oh! quel départ splendide et que d'âmes sauvées! Juifs, mécréants, pécheurs, ô mes chères couvées, Un court tourment vous paie un bonheur infini; L'homme n'est plus maudit, l'homme n'est plus banni; Le salut s'ouvre au fond des cieux. L'amour s'éveille, Et voici son triomphe, et voici sa merveille, Quelle extase! entrer droit au ciel! ne pas languir!

_Cris dans le brasier._

Entendez-vous Satan hurler de les voir fuir? Que l'éternel forçat pleure en l'éternel bouge! J'ai poussé de mes poings l'énorme porte rouge. Oh! comme il a grincé lorsque je refermais Sur lui les deux battants hideux, Toujours, Jamais! Sinistre, il est resté, derrière le mur sombre.

_Il regarde le ciel._

Oh! j'ai pansé la plaie effrayante de l'ombre. Le paradis souffrait; le ciel avait au flanc. Cet ulcère, l'enfer brûlant, l'enfer sanglant; J'ai posé sur l'enfer la flamme bienfaitrice, Et j'en vois dans l'immense azur la cicatrice. C'était ton coup de lance au côté, Jésus-Christ! Hosanna! la blessure éternelle guérit. Plus d'enfer. C'est fini. Les douleurs sont taries.

_Il regarde le quemadero._

Rubis de la fournaise! ô braises! pierreries! Flambez, tisons! brûlez, charbons! feu souverain, Pétille! luis, bûcher! prodigieux écrin D'étincelles qui vont devenir des étoiles! Les âmes, hors des corps comme hors de leurs voiles, S'en vont, et le bonheur sort du bain de tourments! Splendeur! magnificence ardente! flamboiements! Satan, mon ennemi, qu'en dis-tu?

_En extase._

Feu! lavage De toutes les noirceurs par la flamme sauvage! Transfiguration suprême! acte de foi! Nous sommes deux sous l'œil de Dieu, Satan et moi. Deux porte-fourches, lui, moi. Deux maîtres des flammes. Lui perdant les humains, moi secourant les âmes; Tous deux bourreaux, faisant par le même moyen Lui l'enfer, moi le ciel, lui le mal, moi le bien; Il est dans le cloaque et je suis dans le temple, Et le noir tremblement de l'ombre nous contemple.

_Il se retourne vers les suppliciés._

Ah! sans moi, vous étiez perdus, mes bien-aimés! La piscine de feu vous épure enflammés. Ah! vous me maudissez pour un instant qui passe, Enfants! mais tout à l'heure, oui, vous me rendrez grâce Quand vous verrez à quoi vous avez échappé; Car, ainsi que Michel-Archange, j'ai frappé; Car les blancs séraphins, penchés au puits de souffre, Raillent le monstrueux avortement du gouffre; Car votre hurlement de haine arrive au jour, Bégaie, et, stupéfait, s'achève enchant d'amour! Oh! comme j'ai souffert de vous voir dans les chambres De torture, criant, pleurant, tordant vos membres, Maniés par l'étau d'airain, par le fer chaud! Vous voilà délivrés, partez, fuyez là-haut! Entrez au paradis!

_Il se penche et semble regarder sous terre._

Non, tu n'auras plus d'âmes!

_Il se redresse._

Dieu nous donne l'appui que nous lui demandâmes, Et l'homme est hors du gouffre. Allez, allez, allez! À travers l'ombre ardente et les grands feux ailés, L'évanouissement de la fumée emporte Là-haut l'esprit vivant sauvé de la chair morte! Tout le vieux crime humain de l'homme est arraché; L'un avait son erreur, l'autre avait son péché, Faute ou vice, chaque âme avait son monstre en elle Qui rongeait sa lumière et qui mordait son aile; L'ange expirait en proie au démon. Maintenant Tout brûle, et le partage auguste et rayonnant Se fait devant Jésus dans la clarté des tombes. Dragons, tombez en cendre; envolez-vous, colombes! Vous que l'enfer tenait, liberté! liberté! Montez de l'ombre au jour. Changez d'éternité!

The last act would indeed be too cruel for endurance if it were not too beautiful for blame. But not the inquisition itself was more inevitably inexorable than is the spiritual law, the unalterable and immitigable instinct, of tragic poetry at its highest. Dante could not redeem Francesca, Shakespeare could not rescue Cordelia. To none of us, we must think, can the children of a great poet's divine imagination seem dearer or more deserving of mercy than they seemed to their creator: but when poetry demands their immolation, they must die, that they may live for ever.

Once more, but now for the last time, the world was to receive yet another gift from the living hand of the greatest man it had seen since Shakespeare. Towards the close of his eighty-second year he bestowed on us the crowning volume of his crowning work, the imperishable and inappreciable _Légende des Siècles._ And at the age of eighty-three years, two months, and twenty-six days, he entered into rest for ever, and into glory which can perish only with the memory of all things memorable among all races and nations of mankind.

I have spoken here--and no man can know so well or feel so deeply as myself with what imperfection of utterance and inadequacy of insight I have spoken--of Victor Hugo as the whole world knew and as all honorable or intelligent men regarded and revered him. But there are those among his friends and mine who would have a right to wonder if no word were here to be said of the unsolicited and unmerited kindness which first vouchsafed to take notice of a crude and puerile attempt to render some tribute of thanks for the gifts of his genius just twenty-three years ago; of the kindness which was always but too ready to recognize and requite a gratitude which had no claim on him but that of a very perfect loyalty; of the kindness which many years afterwards received me as a guest under his roof with the welcome of a father to a son. Such matters, if touched on at all, unquestionably should not be dwelt on in public: but to give them no word whatever of acknowledgment at parting would show rather unthankfulness than reserve in one who was honored so far above all possible hope or merit by the paternal goodness of Victor Hugo.

[Footnote 1: In the winter of the year which in spring had seen _Les Rayons et les Ombres_ come forth to kindle and refresh the hearts of readers, Victor Hugo published au ode in the same key as those _To the Column_ and _To the Arch of Triumph_, on the return and reinterment of the dead Napoleon. Full of noble feeling and sonorous eloquence, the place of this poem in any collection of its author's works is distinctly and unmistakably marked out by every quality it has and by every quality it wants. In style and in sentiment, in opinion and in rhythm, it is one with the national and political poems which had already been published by the author since the date of his _Orientales_: in other words, it is in every possible point utterly and absolutely unlike the poems long afterwards to be written by the author in exile. Its old place, therefore, in all former editions, at the end of the volume containing the poems previously published in the same year, is obviously the only right one, and rationally the only one possible. By what inexplicable and inconceivable caprice it has been promoted to a place in the so-called _édition définitive_, on the mighty roll of the _Légende des Siècles_, at the head of the fourth volume of that crowning work of modern times, I am hopelessly and helplessly at a loss to conjecture. But, at all risk of impeachment on a charge of unbecoming presumption, I must and do here enter my most earnest and strenuous protest against the claim of an edition to be in any sense final and unalterable, which rejects from among the _Châtiments_ the poem on the death of Saint-Arnaud and admits into the _Légende des Siècles_ the poem on the reinterment of Napoleon.]

[Footnote 2: This poem on St-Arnaud is dated from Jersey, and must therefore have been written before the second of November 1855—a date of disgrace for Jersey, if not indeed for England. It appears in the various later editions of the _Châtiments_, but has disappeared from the so-called "édition définitive." All readers have aright to ask why--and a right to be answered when they ask.]

_LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES_

1883

"Chacun a sa manière. Quant à moi, qui parle ici, j'admire tout, comme une brute.--N'espérez donc aucune critique.--Je ne chicane point ces grands bienfaiteurs-là. Ce que vous qualifiez défaut, je le qualifie accent. Je reçois et je remercie.--Ayant eu l'honneur d'être appelé "niais" par plusieurs écrivains et critiques distingués, je cherche à justifier l'épithète."

The greatest work of the century is now at length complete. It is upwards of twenty-four years since the first part of it was sent home to France from Guernsey. Eighteen years later we received a second installment of the yet unexhausted treasure. And here, at the age of eighty-one, the sovereign poet of the world has placed the copings-tone on the stateliest of spiritual buildings that ever in modern times has been reared for the wonder and the worship of mankind.

Those only to whom nothing seems difficult because nothing to them seems greater than themselves could find it other than an arduous undertaking to utter some word of not unworthy welcome and thanksgiving when their life is suddenly enriched and brightened by such an addition to its most precious things as the dawn of a whole new world of song--and a world that may hold its own in heaven beside the suns created or evoked by the fiat of Shakespeare or of Dante. To review the _Divine Comedy_, to dispose of _Hamlet_ in the course of a leading article, to despatch in a few sentences the question of _Paradise Lost_ and its claim to immortality, might seem easy to judges who should feel themselves on a level with the givers of these gifts; for others it could be none the less difficult to discharge this office because the gift was but newly given. One minor phase of the difficulty which presents itself is this: the temporary judge, self-elected to pass sentence on any supreme achievement of human power, must choose on which horn of an inevitable dilemma he may prefer to run the risk of impalement. If, recognizing in this new master-work an equal share of the highest qualities possible to man with that possessed and manifested by any previous writer of now unquestioned supremacy, he takes upon himself to admit, simply and honestly, that he does recognize this, and cannot choose but recognize it, he must know that his judgment will be received with no more tolerance or respect, with no less irritation and derision, than would have been, in Dante's time, the judgment of a critic who should have ventured to rank Dante above Virgil, in Shakespeare's time of a critic who should have dared to set Shakespeare beside Homer. If, on the other hand, he should abstain with all due discretion from any utterance or any intimation of a truth so ridiculous and untimely, he runs the sure and certain risk of leaving behind him a name to be ranked, by all who remember it at all, with those which no man mentions without a smile of compassion or of scorn, according to the quality of error discernible in the critic's misjudgment: innocent and incurable as the confidence of a Johnson or a Jeffrey, venomous and malignant as the rancor of Sainte-Beuve or Gifford. Of these two dangers I choose the former; and venture to admit, in each case with equal diffidence, that I do upon the whole prefer Dante to any Cino or Cecco, Shakespeare to all the Greenes and Peeles and Lillys, Victor Hugo to all or any, of their respective times. The reader who has no tolerance for paradox or presumption has therefore fair warning to read no further.

Auguste Vacquerie, of all poets and all men living the most worthy to praise the greatest poet of his century, has put on record long ago, with all the vivid ardor of his admirable style, an experience of which I now am but too forcibly reminded. He was once invited by Victor Hugo to choose among the manuscripts of the master's unpublished work, from the drawers containing respectively some lyric or dramatic or narrative masterpiece, of which among the three kinds he would prefer to have a sample first. Unable to select, he touched a drawer at random, which contained the opening chapters of a yet unfinished story--_Les Misérables._ If it is no less hard to choose where to begin in a notice of the _Légende des Siècles_--to decide what star in all this thronged and living heaven should first attract the direction of our critical telescope--it is on the other hand no less certain that on no side can the telescope be misdirected. From the miraculous music of a legendary dawn, when the first woman felt first within her the movement of her first-born child, to the crowning vision of ultimate justice made visible and material in the likeness of the trumpet of doom, no radiance or shadow of days or nights intervening, no change of light or cadence of music in all the tragic pageant of the centuries, finds less perfect expression and response, less absolute refraction or reflection, than all that come and go before or after it. History and legend, fact and vision, are fused and harmonized by the mastering charm of moral unity in imaginative truth. There is no more possibility of discord or default in this transcendent work of human power than in the working of those powers of nature which transcend humanity. In the first verses of the overture we hear such depth and height of music, see such breadth and splendor of beauty, that we know at once these cannot but continue to the end; and from the end, when we arrive at the goal of the last line, we look back and perceive that it has been so. Were this overture but a thought less perfect, a shade less triumphant, we might doubt if what was to follow it could be as perfect and triumphant as itself. We might begin--and indeed, as it is, there are naturally those who have begun--to debate with ourselves or to dispute with the poet as to the details of his scheme, the selection of his types, the propriety of his method, the accuracy of his title. There are those who would seem to infer from the choice of this title that the book is, in the most vulgar sense, of a purely legendary cast; who object, for example, that a record of unselfish and devoted charity shown by the poor to the poor is, happily, no "legend." Writers in whom such self-exposure of naked and unashamed ignorance with respect to the rudiments of language is hardly to be feared have apparently been induced or inclined to expect some elaborate and orderly review of history, some versified chronicle of celebrated events and significant epochs, such as might perhaps be of subsidiary or supplementary service in the training of candidates for a competitive examination; and on finding something very different from this have tossed head and shrugged shoulder in somewhat mistimed impatience, as at some deception or misnomer on the great author's part which they, as men of culture and understanding, had a reasonable right to resent. The book, they affirm, is a mere agglomeration of unconnected episodes, irrelevant and incoherent, disproportionate and fortuitous, chosen at random by accident or caprice; it is not one great palace of poetry, but a series or congeries rather of magnificently accumulated fragments. It may be urged in answer to this impeachment that the unity of the book is not logical but spiritual; its diversity is not accidental or chaotic, it is the result and expression of a spontaneous and perfect harmony, as clear and as profound as that of the other greatest works achieved by man. To demonstrate this by rule and line of syllogism is no present ambition of mine. A humbler, a safer, and perhaps a more profitable task would be to attempt some flying summary, some glancing revision of the three great parts which compose this mightiest poem of our age; or rather, if this also should seem too presumptuous an aspiration, to indicate here and there the points to which memory and imagination are most fain to revert most frequently and brood upon them longest, with a deeper delight, a more rapturous reverence, than waits upon the rest. Not that I would venture to assert or to insinuate that there is in any poem of the cycle any note whatever of inferiority or disparity; but having neither space nor time nor power to speak, however inadequately, of each among the hundred and thirty-eight poems which compose the now perfect book, I am compelled to choose, not quite at random, an example here and there of its highest and most typical qualities. In the first book, for instance, of the first series, the divine poem on Ruth and Boaz may properly be taken as representative of that almost indefinable quality which hitherto has seemed more especially the gift of Dante: a fusion, so to speak, of sublimity with sweetness, the exaltation of loveliness into splendor and simplicity into mystery, such as glorifies the close of his _Purgatory_ and the opening of his _Paradise._ Again, the majestic verses which bring Mahomet before us at his end strike a deeper impression into the memory than is left by the previous poem on the raising of Lazarus; and when we pass into the cycle of heroic or chivalrous legend we find those poems the loftiest and the loveliest which have in them most of that prophetic and passionate morality which makes the greatest poet, in this as in some other ages, as much a seer as a singer, an evangelist no less than an artist. Hugo, for all his dramatic and narrative mastery of effect, will always probably remind men rather of such poets as Dante or Isaiah than of such poets as Sophocles or Shakespeare. We cannot of course imagine the Florentine or the Hebrew endowed with his infinite variety of sympathies, of interests, and of powers; but as little can we imagine in the Athenian such height and depth of passion, in the Englishman such unquenchable and sleepless fire of moral and prophetic faith. And hardly in any one of these, though Shakespeare may perhaps be excepted, can we recognize the same buoyant and childlike exultation in such things as are the delight of a high-hearted child--in free glory of adventure and ideal daring, in the triumph and rapture of reinless imagination, which gives now and then some excess of godlike empire and superhuman kingship to their hands whom his hands have created, to the lips whose life is breathed into them from his own. By the Homeric stature of the soul he measures the heroic capacity of the sword. And indeed it is hardly in our century that men who do not wish to provoke laughter should venture to mock at a poet who puts a horde to flight before a hero, or strikes down strongholds by the lightning of a single will. No right and no power to disbelieve in the arm of Hercules or the voice of Jesus can rationally remain with those who have seen Garibaldi take a kingdom into the hollow of his hand, and not one man but a whole nation arise from the dead at the sound of the word of Mazzini.

Two out of the five heroic poems which compose the fourth book of the first series will always remain types of what the genius of Hugo could achieve in two opposite lines. All the music of morning, all the sunshine of romance, all the sweetness and charm of chivalry, will come back upon all readers at the gracious and radiant name of _Aymerillot_; all the blackness of darkness rank with fumes of blood and loud with cries of torment, which covers in so many quarters the history, not romantic but actual, of the ages called ages of faith, will close in upon the memory which reverts to the direful _Day of Kings._ The sound of the final note struck in the latter poem remains in the mind as the echo of a crowning peal of thunder in the ear of one entranced and spell-stricken by the magnetism of storm. The Pyrenees belong to Hugo as the western coasts of Italy, Neapolitan or Tuscan, belong to Shelley; they can never again be done into words and translated into music as for once they have been by these. It can hardly be said that he who knows the Pyrenees has read Victor Hugo; but certainly it may be said that he who knows Victor Hugo has seen the Pyrenees. From the author's prefatory avowal that his book contains few bright or smiling pictures, a reader would never have inferred that so many of its pages are fragrant with all the breath and radiant with all the bloom of April or May among the pine-woods and their mountain lawns, ablaze with ardent blossom and astir with triumphant song. Tragedy may be hard at hand, with all the human train of sorrows and passions and sins; but the glory of beauty, the loveliness of love, the exultation of noble duty and lofty labor in a stress of arduous joy, these are the influences that pervade the world and permeate the air of the poems which deal with the Christian cycle of heroic legend, whose crowning image is the ideal figure of the Cid. To this highest and purest type of mediæval romance or history the fancy of the great poet whose childhood was cradled in Spain turns and returns throughout the course of his threefold masterpiece with an almost national pride and passion of sublime delight. Once in the first part and once in the third his chosen hero is set before us in heroic verse, doing menial service for his father in his father's house, and again, in a king's palace, doing for humanity the sovereign service of tyrannicide. But in the second part it seems as though the poet could hardly, with his fullest effusion of lyric strength and sweetness, do enough to satisfy his loving imagination of the perfect knight, most faithful and most gentle and most terrible, whom he likens even to the very Pic du Midi in its majesty of solitude. Each fresh blast of verse has in it the ring of a golden clarion which proclaims in one breath the honor of the loyal soldier and the dishonor of the disloyal king. There can hardly be in any language a more precious and wonderful study of technical art in verse of the highest kind of simplicity than this _Romancero du Cid_, with its jet of luminous and burning song sustained without lapse or break through sixteen "fyttes" of plain brief ballad metre. It is hard to say whether the one only master of all forms and kinds of poetry that ever left to all time the proof of his supremacy in all has shown most clearly by his use of its highest or his use of its simplest forms the innate and absolute equality of the French language as an instrument for poetry with the Greek of Æschylus and of Sappho, the English of Milton and of Shelley.

But among all Hugo's romantic and tragic poems of mediæval history or legend the two greatest are in my mind _Eviradnus_ and _Ratbert._ I cannot think it would be rash to assert that the loveliest love-song in the world, the purest and keenest rapture of lyric fancy, the sweetest and clearest note of dancing or dreaming music, is that which rings forever in the ear which has once caught the matchless echo of such lines as these that must once more be quoted, as though all the world of readers had not long since known them by heart:--

Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre. Ô les verts taillis mouillés! Ton souffle te fera suivre Des papillons réveillés.

* * * * * *

Allons-nous-en par l'Autriche! Nous aurons l'aube à nos fronts; Je serai grand, et toi riche, Puisque nous nous aimerons.

* * * * * *

Tu seras dame, et moi comte; Viens, mon cœur s'épanouit. Viens, nous conterons ce conte Aux étoiles de la nuit.

The poet would be as sure of a heavenly immortality in the hearts of men as any lyrist of Greece itself, who should only have written the fourteen stanzas of the song from which I have ventured to choose these three. All the sounds and shadows of a moonlit wilderness, all the dews and murmurs and breaths of midsummer midnight, have become for once articulate in such music as was never known even to Shakespeare's forest of Arden. In the heart of a poem so full of tragedy and terror that Hugo alone could have brightened it with his final touch of sunrise, this birdlike rapture breaks out as by some divine effect of unforbiden and blameless magic.

And yet, it may be said or thought, the master of masters has shown himself even greater in _Ratbert_ than in _Eviradnus._ This most tragic of poems, lit up by no such lyric interlude, stands unsurpassed even by its author for tenderness, passion, divine magnificence of righteous wrath, august and pitiless command of terror and pity. From the kingly and priestly conclave of debaters more dark than Milton's to the superb admonition of loyal liberty in speech that can only be silenced by murder, and again from the heavenly and heroic picture of childhood worshipped by old age to the monstrous banquet of massacre, when the son of the prostitute has struck his perjured stroke of state, the poem passes through a change of successive pageants each fuller of splendor and wonder, of loveliness or of horror, than the last. But the agony of the hero over the little corpse of the child murdered with her plaything in her hand--the anguish that utters itself as in peal upon peal of thunder, broken by sobs of storm--the full crash of the final imprecation, succeeded again by such unspeakably sweet and piteous appeal to the little dead lips and eyes that would have answered yesterday--and at last the one crowning stroke of crime which calls down an answering stroke of judgment from the very height of heaven, for the comfort and refreshment and revival of all hearts--these are things of which no praise can speak aright. Shakespeare only, were he living, would be worthy to write on Hugo's Fabrice as Hugo has written on Shakespeare's Lear. History will forget the name of Bonaparte before humanity forgets the name of Ratbert.

But if this be the highest poem of all for passion and pathos and fire of terrible emotion, the highest in sheer sublimity of imagination is to my mind _Zim-Zizimi._ Again and again, in reading it for the first time, one thinks that surely now the utmost height is reached, the utmost faculty revealed, that can be possible for a spirit clothed only with human powers, armed only with human speech. And always one finds the next step forward to be yet once more a step upward, even to the very end and limit of them all. Neither in Homer nor in Milton, nor in the English version of Job or Ezekiel or Isaiah, is the sound of the roll and the surge of measured music more wonderful than here. Even after the vision of the tomb of Belus the miraculous impression of splendor and terror, distinct in married mystery, and diverse in unity of warning, deepens and swells onward like a sea till we reach the incomparable psalm in praise of the beauty and the magic of womanhood made perfect and made awful in Cleopatra, which closes in horror at the touch of a hand more powerful than Orcagna's. The walls of the Campo Santo are fainter preachers and feebler pursuivants of the triumph of death than the pages of the poem which yet again renews its note of menace after menace and prophecy upon prophecy till the end. There is probably not one single couplet in all this sweet and bitter roll of song which could have been written by any poet less than the best or lower than the greatest of all time.

Passants, quelqu'un veut-il voir Cléopâtre au lit? Venez; l'alcôve est morne, une brume l'emplit; Cléopâtre est couchée à jamais; cette femme Fut l'éblouissement de l'Asie, et la flamme Que tout le genre humain avait dans son regard; Quand elle disparut, le monde fut hagard; Ses dents étaient de perle et sa bouche était d'ambre; Les rois mouraient d'amour en entrant dans sa chambre; Pour elle Ephractæus soumit l'Atlas, Sapor Vint d'Ozymandias saisir les cercle d'or, Mamylos conquit Suse et Tentyris détruite Et Palmyre, et pour elle Antoine prit la fuite; Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient à la fois Il hésita, lâchant le monde dans son choix. Cléopâtre égalait les Junons éternelles; Une chaîne sortait de ses vagues prunelles; Ô tremblant cœur humain, si jamais tu vibras, C'est dans l'étreinte altière et douce de ses bras; Son nom seul enivrait; Strophus n'osait l'écrire; La terre s'éclairait de son divin sourire, À force de lumière et d'amour, effrayant; Sons corps semblait mêlé d'azur; en la voyant, Vénus, le soir, rentrait jalouse sous la nue; Cléopâtre embaumait l'Egypte; toute nue, Elle brûlait les yeux ainsi que le soleil; Les roses enviaient l'ongle de son orteil; Ô vivants, allez voir sa tombe souveraine; Fière, elle était déesse et daignait être reine; L'amour prenait pour arc sa lèvre aux coins moqueurs; Sa beauté rendait fous les fronts, les sens, les cœurs, Et plus que les lions rugissants était forte; Mais bouchez-vous le nez si vous passez la porte.

At every successive stage of his task, the man who undertakes to glance over this great cycle of poems must needs incessantly call to mind the most worn and hackneyed of all quotations from its author's works--"J'en passe, et des meilleurs." There is here no room, as surely there should nowhere now be any need, to speak at any length of the poems in which Roland plays the part of protagonist; first as the beardless champion of a five days' fight, and again as the deliverer whose hand could clear the world of a hundred human wolves in one continuous sword-sweep. There is hardly time allowed us for one poor word or two of tribute to such a crowning flower of song as _La Rose de L'Infante_, with its parable of the broken Armada made manifest in a wrecked fleet of drifting petals; to the superb and sonorous chant of the buccaneers, in which all the noise of lawless battle and stormy laughter passes off into the carol of mere triumphant love and trust; or even to the whole inner cycle of mystic and primæval legend which seeks utterance for the human sense of oppression or neglect by jealous or by joyous gods; for the wild profound revolt of riotous and trampled nature, the agony and passion and triumph of invincible humanity, the protest and witness of enduring earth against the passing shades of heaven, the struggle and the plea of eternal manhood against all transient forces of ephemeral and tyrannous godhead. Within the orbit of this epicycle one poem only of the first part, a star of strife and struggle, can properly be said to revolve; but the light of that planet has fire enough to animate with its reflex the whole concourse of stormy stars which illuminate the world-wide wrestle of the giants with the gods. The torch of revolt borne by the transfigured satyr, eyed like a god and footed like a beast, kindles the lamp of hopeful and laborious rebellion which dazzles us in the eye of the Titan who has seen beyond the world. In the song that struck silence through the triumph of amazed Olympus there is a sound and air as of the sea or the Book of Job. There may be something of Persian or Indian mysticism, there is more of universal and imaginative reason, in the great allegoric myth which sets forth here how the half-brute child of one poor planet has in him the seed, the atom, the principle of life everlasting, and dilates in force of it to the very type and likeness of the eternal universal substance which is spirit or matter of life; and before the face of his transfiguration the omnipresent and omnipotent gods who take each their turn to shine and thunder are all but shadows that pass away. Since the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind no ear has heard the burst of such a song; but this time it is the world that answers out of its darkness the lords and gods of creed and oracle, who have mastered and have not made it. And in the cry of its protest and the prophecy of its advance there is a storm of swelling music which is as the sound of the strength of rollers after the noise of the rage of breakers.

It is noticeable that the master of modern poets should have in the tone and color of his genius more even of the Hebrew than the Greek. In his love of light and freedom, reason and justice, he is not of Jerusalem, but of Athens; but in the bent of his imagination, in the form and color of his dreams, in the scope and sweep of his wide-winged spiritual flight, he is nearer akin to the great insurgent prophets of deliverance and restoration than to any poet of Athens except only their kinsman Æschylus. It is almost wholly of the Persian war, the pass of Thermopylae, the strait of Euripus, that he sings when he sings of Hellas. All his might of hand, all his cunning of color, all his measureless resources of sound and form and symbol, are put forth in the catalogue of nations and warriors subject to Xerxes. There is nothing in poetry so vast and tremendous of its kind as this pageant of immense and monstrous invasion. But indeed the choice of gigantic themes, the predominance of colossal effects, the prevalence of superhuman visions over the types and figures of human history or legend, may be regarded as a distinctive point of difference between the second and the first series. A typical example of the second is the poem which has added an eighth wonder built by music to the seven wonders of the world, which it celebrates in verse more surely wrought for immortality than they. Another is the song of the worm which takes up in answer to their chant of life and light and pride of place, and prolongs through measure after measure of rolling and reverberating verse, the note of a funereal and universal triumph, the protest and the proclamation of death. Another, attuned to that mighty music of meditation which rings through so many of the poems written in exile and loneliness, is the stately prophetic hymn which bears the superscription of _All the Past and all the Future._ This might seem to belong to the sixth book of the _Contemplations_, in which the same note of proud and ardent faith was struck so often with such sovereignty of hand. As much might be said of the great "abysmal" poem which closes the second series with a symphony of worlds and spirits. Other groups of poems, in like manner, bear signs of common or of diverse kinship to former works of a creator whose spirit has put life into so many of the same likeness, yet with no more sign of repetition or weary monotony than is traceable in the very handiwork of nature. The book of idyls is of one inspiration with the _Chansons des Rues et des Bois_; in both cases, as in so many of the poet's earlier lyric volumes, his incomparable fertility of speech and superb facility of verse leave almost an impression as of work done by way of exercise, as though he were writing to keep his hand in, or to show for a wager with incredulous criticism how long he could keep up the golden ball of metre, carve arabesques of the same pattern, play variations in the same key. But the _Old Man's Idyl_ which closes the book belongs by kinship to another work of the poet's, more beloved and more precious to the inmost heart, if not more eminent for strength and cunning of hand, than any of these. In "the voice of a child a year old" there is the same welling and bubbling melody which flows and laughs and murmurs and glitters through the adorable verses of _L'Art d'être Grand-père_, making dim with love and delight the reader's or the hearer's eyes. At last the language of babies has found its interpreter; and that, as might have been expected, in the greatest poet of his age.

L'enfant apporte un peu de ce ciel dont il sort; Il ignore, il arrive; homme, tu le recueilles. _Il a le tremblement des herbes et des feuilles._ La jaserie avant le langage est la fleur Qui précède le fruit, moins beau qu'elle, et meilleur, Si c'est être meilleur qu'être plus nécessaire.

A conclusion which may be doubted when we consider as follows:

L'enfant fait la demande et l'ange la réponse; Le babil puéril dans le ciel bleu s'enfonce, Puis s'en revient, avec les hésitations Du moineau qui verrait planer les alcyons.

Can language or can thought be lovelier? if so, the one possible instance is to be sought in these succeeding verses:

Quand l'enfant jase avec l'ombre qui le bénit, La fauvette, attentive, au rebord de son nid Se dresse, et ses petits passent, pensifs et frêles, Leurs têtes à travers les plumes de ses ailes; La mère semble dire à sa couvée: Entends, Et tâche de parler aussi bien.

It seems and is not strange that the lips which distill such honey as this should be the same so often touched with a coal of fire from that "altar of Righteousness" where Æschylus was wont to worship. The twenty-first section of the second series is in the main a renewal or completion of the work undertaken in the immortal _Châtiments._ Even in that awful and incomparable book of judgment such poems as _La Colère du Bronze_, and the two following on the traffic of servile clerical rapacity in matters of death and burial, would have stood high among the stately legions of satire which fill its living pages with the sound and the splendor of righteous battle for the right; but the verses with which Hugo has branded the betrayer of Metz and Strasburg are hardly to be matched except by those with which, half a century ago, he branded the betrayer of the Duchess of Berry. Truly may all who read them cry out with the poet at their close,

Et qui donc maintenant dit qu'il s'est évadé?

In _Le Cimetière d'Eylau_, a poem to which we have now in the third series of the book a most noble and exquisite pendant (_Paroles de mon Oncle_), all the Homeric side of a poet born of warlike blood comes out into proud and bright relief. There is no better fighting in the Iliad; it has the martial precision and practical fellow-feeling which animate in his battle-pieces the lagging verse of Walter Scott; and it has, of course, that omnipresent breath and light and fire of perfect poetry which a Scott or a Byron is never quite permitted to attain. Beside or even above these two poems, that other which commemorates the devotion of a Vendean peasant chief will be set in the hearts of all readers competent to appreciate either heroic action or heroic song.

The love of all high things which finds one form of expression in warlike sympathy with warriors who can live and die for something higher than personal credit or success takes another and as natural a shape in the poems which are inspired by love and worship of nature and her witness for liberty and purity and truth in the epic evangel of august and indomitable mountains. The sublimest cry of moral passion ever inspired by communion in spirit with these is uttered in the great poem on the Swiss mercenaries of the seventeenth century, which even among its fellows stands out eminent and radiant as an Alp at sunrise. Mountain and cataract, the stars and the snows, never yet in any language found such a singer and interpreter as this. Two or three verses, two or three words, suffice for him to bring before us, in fresh and actual presence, the very breath of the hills or the sea, the very lights and sounds and spaces of clouded or sunlit air. Juvenal is not so strong in righteousness, nor Pindar so sublime in illustration, as the poet who borrowed from nature her highest symbols to illustrate the glory and the duty of righteous wrath and insuppressible insurrection against wrong-doing, when he wrote _Le Régiment du baron Madruce._