POETRY AND CHILDHOOD

Which is the language of poetry? For each, perhaps, the language that first named for him a flock of sheep, a hill, a mountain river, or whatever thing touched a child’s mind with a remote and yet familiar love. The poets who have for him a lifelong advantage over all others are the poets who write that tongue. No other word than theirs will be to him the very name of what he finds so fresh. Thus, for my own part, reading again the Chants du Crépuscule, the Feuilles d’Automne, Contemplations, and Voix Intérieures, I own the power of the poet who knows the true name of an orchard, and so calls it ‘le verger’. ‘Le verger’ is purely yonder steep field of fruit-trees round and soft above their separate shadows. In another tongue the name is translated, and therefore removed by one step; it has no longer the shape and figure and spirit which the name first known has for the child learning the thing and the word in one.

Besides, Victor Hugo falls in with the mood of one who has profound childish memories connected with his common words, by writing so closely of infantine things as though to secure the charm for all a reader’s lifetime to come, and to establish the authority of his French precisely 111upon those names of childish import that are most subject to such an early spell.

A reader who, when he had learnt that there are birds, had learnt their English name, and had, moreover, received his father, his mother, his bed, his sleep, his nurse’s song, his little breakfast, in English, has not, I think, an equal poet to rehearse for him those words, those things rather, in his later years. For there seems to be no poet in our master-poetry to do for him that singular office, and to sing the language of his first nurse to a great and authentic lyre. He may learn all nature with our poets, and he hears the Gospel first in an incomparable tongue; and his first sense of Greece doubtless comes with an adequate word. But he has no august poet to resume his ancient lullabies, heard once in ancient regions between sleeping and waking, the immemorial night-light, the homely language of antiquity and old romance as children have the sense of them in their little words at play upon the floor, at play upon the moss. He has not had Victor Hugo’s French.

Furthermore still, an English reader whose childish life was uttered in French has half forgotten, amid later English, some of the daily words of that time, unused by grown men and women. These Victor Hugo sings to him. They return to him out of the past and out of his poetic page at once. They had but dropped to sleep in imperishable 112memory; they wake again, and they are more fresh to his heart than swallows, and than torrents from the Alps.

Here, then, is the tongue of poetry for him. The child and the poet know it together. They meet, they understand, they have the way of it together. And if they meet again across age and change and disuse, how close, how light, how natural is this encounter, how sudden and how old the intimacy! Poet and child have their traffic, no doubt, in every life; but what incomparable traffic is this of Victor Hugo and an English reader who had a French childhood! How ingenious is fortune to bring their communion to pass! Many are the things, small and all-important, known fully, and more than known—recognized, known after estrangement—between these two only of all the pairs of poet and child, in the world. Where else can there be just such a commerce? In the first place that poet is unique. He, too, breathes the breath of the moss closely; he has not only the child’s sense of it, but also the child’s inexpert and invaluable word. And the reader, on his part, has, as I have said, a peculiar experience both of memory and of oblivion. For him, then, the French language has that grace of election which makes it wholly, invincibly successful—the grace of each man’s first tongue; and in overplus it has the powers of the tongue in which Victor Hugo was wont to 113write of children, and, again, the powers of the tongue of a great romance. Of a word in that language, therefore, it may be said, as of the elect lady in a violent world—

Her gentle step to go or come

Gains her more merit than a martyrdom.

The word of poetry in after-life is sublime and tragic by will, by force and conquest; the word, in the French of Hugo, has for me but to be uttered. ‘Le verger’ possesses not only a young child’s sight of trees under the sun and moon, a young child’s touch of the grass, but also the genius of the South of France, of ancient agriculture and of early song.

Assuredly those to whom the word first learnt was ‘the orchard’ must be content with something less than this.

A reading of later French persuades one easily that Victor Hugo was alone, and is alone, the speaker of what has become so mysterious and so intelligible, so surcharged and so buoyant a language:

Oh, ’tis not Spanish, but ’tis Heaven she speaks!

cries Crashaw. Victor Hugo speaks not so much French as childhood, and a peculiar childhood; Romance, and a unique Romance; nature, too, as no eyes of Latin race had seen it until then, with insight as well as with perception—in Emerson’s phrase, ‘a little wildly, or with the flower of the mind’.

114Apart from all this which makes the lyrics of this great poet so dear, for exclusive and accidental reasons, to one reader among many, I have no praise for the French poetic tongue. It is true that the word ‘souffle’ is for my ear all a summer wind at night—it has more merit than a martyrdom of description; that is by chance. It is by genius, however, that Victor Hugo makes this word so fresh and dark.

What I have to suggest is that the poets, since he ceased to write (ceased as a lyrist, not as a rhetorician), have done little more for the enlargement of their language than he did in the distant days when his work was a very revolution; and this in spite of their metrical liberty, which seems to have no bounds. The freedom he claimed from the bonds of the preceding century or so was precisely no more than his art needed. Nothing was done for the sake of liberty, for the sake of others, for the sake of pioneership, or for any other of the causes that mediocrity is fond of. All was purely for his own poetry, and because, being Victor Hugo, he could not write within the laws that held Boileau content. Where he found no need of change he obeyed Boileau or another, or La Harpe or another, with a cheerful docility that has left his verse to-day far behind the reforms of modern French prosody, ‘reforms’ that seem to have been inspired by the revolt of a Walt Whitman, and make easy havoc of the 115whole order, the whole law. Even in the enlarged liberty made for French poetry by Victor Hugo’s advance, the wave of verse met salutary bars and measures as strong as rocks. But his successors have spilt their art thinly over all boundaries, and the flat country is already under shallow water.

I have under my hand the volume of a little recent symbolist, side by side with Les Voix Intérieures, and the comparison persuades me that not all this new licence is able to make the French language a really liberal instrument. What has been written here must be the proof that if I have a prejudice it is for French, and that for me magic and the caprice of destiny are on that side. But there are disabilities; and it is not metrical liberty, or the chance medley of masculine and feminine endings, or the ignoring of the e mute, or rhymes that are but the suggestion of a jingle, or any other of these later liberties that can make this language sufficient. It lacks the second part, the other side, the splendour of alternative. It has the strangest blanks. It cannot so much as call an author shallow, nor a teacup, nor a sea.

As it has no alternative of derivation, French has none of time; no place apart for poems and prayers, but the whole language is at the disposal of the daily grocer and the trade-circular. The French of commerce, merely exaggerated, has tempted poets to make that ready eloquence resound, when the lyric could do no more, for lack of strings.

116A word as to syllables—those great units of verse—and their motions. The Italian syllables dance, springing from their double consonants and long vowels; the English walk, with all variety of gait, and fly with all variety of wing; the French trot. ‘Égalisez les syllabes.’ The Frenchman who speaks right Parisian equalizes the syllables not only of his own language but of every other. Hear him speak Italian thus; hear him, as a good pastor in England, read the English Testament.

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