VICTOR HUGO

EDITED BY G. F. BRIDGE, M.A.

GENERAL PREFACE

Encouraged by the favourable reception accorded to the 'Oxford Modern French Series,' the Delegates of the Clarendon Press determined, some time since, to issue a 'Higher Series' of French works intended for Upper Forms of Public Schools and for University and Private Students, and have entrusted me with the task of selecting and editing the various volumes that will be issued in due course.

The titles of the works selected will at once make it clear that this series is a new departure, and that an attempt is made to provide annotated editions of books which have hitherto been obtainable only in the original French texts. That Madame de Staël, Madame de Girardin, Daniel Stern, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert, Gautier are among the authors whose works have been selected will leave no doubt as to the literary excellence of the texts included in this series. Works of such quality, intended only for advanced scholars, could not be annotated in the way hitherto usual, since those for whom they have been prepared are familiar with many things and many events of which younger students have no knowledge. Geographical and mythological notes have therefore been generally omitted, as also historical events either too well known to require elucidation or easily found in the ordinary books of reference.

By such omissions a considerable amount of space has been saved which has allowed of the extension of the texts, and of their equipment with notes less elementary than usual, and at the same time brighter and more interesting, whilst great care has been taken to adapt them to the special character of each volume.

The Introductions are also a novel feature of the present series. Originally they were to be exclusively written in English, but as it was desired that they should be as characteristic as possible, and not merely extracted from reference books, but real studies of the various authors and their works, it was decided that the editors should write them in their own native language.

Whenever it has been possible each volume has been adorned with a portrait of the author at the time he wrote his book.

In conclusion, I wish to repeat here what I have said in the General Preface to the 'Oxford Modern French Series,' that 'those who speak a modern language best invariably possess a good literary knowledge of it.' This has been endorsed by the best teachers in this and other countries, and is a generally admitted fact. The present series by providing works of high literary merit will certainly facilitate the acquisition of the French language—a tongue which perhaps more than any other offers a variety of literary specimens which, for beauty of style, depth of sentiment, accuracy and neatness of expression, may be equalled but not surpassed.

LEON DELBOS. OXFORD, December, 1905.

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugo loves especially to endow with life objects that suggest a struggle. It is the wrecked and broken ship of Pleine Mer rather than the triumphant vessel of Plein Ciel that is animate.

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

In La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice the reality of the wine and the suggestion of the blood are very artfully mingled

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

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

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

He is always dressed in black:

No light is ever seen in his palaces:

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

Note again the oppressive darkness of the opening lines of Pleine Mer, in which the only touch of light is the winding-sheet of the waves, and contrast it with the atmosphere of light which surrounds the ship in Plein Ciel, where even the night is bright:

Le Crapaud is wrapped in the light of sunset:

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

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

and in the pit are seen

In Les Pauvres Gens

In Fabrice

The light seems solid in this line from Le Satyre:

Again, in La Conscience, shadow is vast and oppressive:

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

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

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

G. F. BRIDGE. LONDON, March, 1907.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

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

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

PRÉFACE DE LA PREMIÈRE SÉRIE

Hauteville-House, Septembre 1857,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cet ensemble, que sera-t-il?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or l'intention de ce livre est bonne.

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

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH PRÉFACE DE LA PREMIÈRE SÉRIE

LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES

NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY