ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (continued 2)

In the third book, which brings us up to the great poet's forty-second year, the noble poem called Melancholia has in it a foretaste and a promise of all the passionate meditation, all the studious and indefatigable pity, all the forces of wisdom and of mercy which were to find their completer and supreme expression in Les Misérables. In Saturn we may trace the same note of earnest and thoughtful meditation on the mystery of evil, on the vision so long cherished by mankind of some purgatorial world, the shrine of expiation or the seat of retribution, which in the final volume of the Légende des Siècles was toched again with a yet more august effect: the poem there called Inferi resumes and expands the tragic thought here first admitted into speech and first clothed round with music. The four lines written beneath a crucifix may almost be said to sum up the whole soul and spirit of Christian faith or feeling in the brief hour of its early purity, revived in every age again for some rare and beautiful natures—and for these alone.

Vous qui pleurez, venez à ce Dieu, car il pleure. Vous qui souffrez, venez à lui, car il guérit. Vous qui tremblez, venez à lui, car il sourit. Vous qui passez, venez à lui, car il demeure.

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

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

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

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

ÉCRIT EN 1855

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

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

APPARITION

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

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

Le soir vient; l'horizon s'emplit d'inquiétude; L'herbe tremble et bruit comme une multitude; Le fleuve blanc reluit; Le paysage obscur prend les veines des marbres; Ces hydres que, le jour, on appelle des arbres, Se tordent dans la nuit. Le mort est seul. Il sent la nuit qui le dévore. Quand naît le doux matin, tout l'azur de l'aurore, Tous ses rayons si beaux, Tout l'amour des oiseaux et leurs chansons sans nombre, Vont aux berceaux dorés; et, la nuit, toute l'ombre Aboutit aux tombeaux. Il entend des soupirs dans les fosses voisines; Il sent la chevelure affreuse des racines Entrer dans son cercueil; Il est l'être vaincu dont s'empare la chose; Il sent un doigt obscur, sous sa paupière close, Lui retirer son œil. Il a froid; car le soir qui mêle à son haleine Les ténèbres, l'horreur, le spectre et le phalène, Glace ces durs grabats; Le cadavre, lié de bandelettes blanches, Grelotte, et dans sa bière entend les quatre planches Qui lui parlent tout bas. L'une dit:—Je fermais ton coffre-fort—Et l'autre Dit:—J'ai servi de porte au toit qui fut le nôtre.— L'autre dit:—Aux beaux jours, La table où rit l'ivresse et que le vin encombre. C'était moi.—L'autre dit:—J'étais le chevet sombre Du lit de tes amours.

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

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

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

—Passant, qu'es-tu? je te connais. Mais, étant spectre, ombre et nuage, Tu n'as plus de sexe ni d'âge. —Je suis ta mère, et je venais! —Et toi dont l'aile hésite et brille, Dont l'œil est noyé de douceur, Qu'es-tu, passant?—Je suis ta sœur. —Et toi, qu'es-tu?—Je suis ta fille. —Et toi, qu'es-tu, passant?—Je suis Celle à qui tu disais: Je t'aime! —Et toi?—Je suis ton âme même.— Oh! cachez-moi, profondes nuits!/

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

EN FRAPPANT À UNE PORTE

J'ai perdu mon père et ma mère, Mon premier-né, bien jeune, hélas! Et pour moi la nature entière Sonne le glas. Je dormais entre mes deux frères; Enfants, nous étions trois oiseaux; Hélas! le sort change en deux bières Leurs deux berceaux. Je t'ai perdue, ô fille chère, Toi qui remplis, ô mon orgueil, Tout mon destin de la lumière De ton cercueil! J'ai su monter, j'ai su descendre. J'ai vu l'aube et l'ombre en mes cieux. J'ai connu la pourpre, et la cendre Qui me va mieux. J'ai connu les ardeurs profondes, J'ai connu les sombres amours; J'ai vu fuir les ailes, les ondes, Les vents, les jours. J'ai sur ma tête des orfraies; J'ai sur tous mes travaux l'affront, Au pied la poudre, au cœur des plaies, L'épine au front. J'ai des pleurs à mon œil qui pense, Des trous à ma robe en lambeau; Je n'ai rien à la conscience; Ouvre, tombeau.

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

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

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

L'amour, panique De la raison, Se communique Par le frisson. Laissez-moi dire, N'accordez rien. Si je soupire, Chantez, c'est bien. Si je demeure, Triste, à vos pieds, Et si je pleure, C'est bien, riez. Un homme semble Souvent trompeur. Mais si je tremble, Belle, ayez peur.

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

Seuls tous deux, ravis, chantants! Comme on s'aime! Comme on cueille le printemps Que Dieu sème! Quels rires étincelants Dans ces ombres Pleines jadis de fronts blancs. De cœurs sombres! On est tout frais mariés. On s'envoie Les charmants cris variés De la joie. Purs ébats mêlés au vent Qui frissonne! Gaîtés que le noir couvent Assaisonne! On effeuille des jasmins Sur la pierre Où l'abbesse joint ses mains En prière. Ses tombeaux, de croix marqués, Font partie De ces jeux, un peu piqués Par l'ortie. Ou se cherche, on se poursuit, On sent croître Ton aube, amour, dans la nuit Du vieux cloître. On s'en va se becquetant, On s'adore, On s'embrasse à chaque instant, Puis encore, Sous les piliers, les arceaux, Et les marbres. C'est l'histoire des oiseaux Dans les arbres.

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

LE GRAND SIÈCLE

Ce siècle a la forme D'un monstrueux char. Sa croissance énorme Sous un nain césar. Son air de prodige, Sa gloire qui ment, Mêlent le vertige À l'écrasement. Louvois pour ministre, Scarron pour griffon, C'est un chant sinistre Sur un air bouffon. Sur sa double roue Le grand char descend; L'une est dans la boue, L'autre est dans le sang. La mort au carrosse Attelle—où va-t-il?— Lavrillière atroce, Roquelaure vil. Comme un geai dans l'arbre, Le roi s'y tient fier; Son cœur est de marbre Son ventre est de chair. On a pour sa nuque Et son front vermeil Fait une perruque Avec le soleil. Il règne et végète, Effrayant zéro Sur qui se projette L'ombre du bourreau. Ce trône est la tombe; Et sur le pavé Quelque chose en tombe Qu'on n'a point lavé.

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

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

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

Ami, je sens du sort la sombre plénitude; J'ai commencé la mort par de la solitude, Je vois mon profond soir vaguement s'étoiler. Voici l'heure où je vais, aussi moi, m'en aller. Mon fil trop long frissonne et touche presque au glaive; Le vent qui t'emporta doucement me soulève, Et je vais suivre ceux qui m'aimaient, moi banni: Leur œil fixe m'attire au fond de l'infini. J'y cours. Ne fermez pas la porte funéraire. Passons, car c'est la loi: nul ne peut s'y soustraire; Tout penche; et ce grand siècle avec tous ses rayons Entre en cette ombre immense où, pâles, nous fuyons. Oh! quel farouche bruit font dans le crépuscule Les chênes qu'on abat pour le bûcher d'Hercule! Les chevaux de la Mort se mettent à hennir, Et sont joyeux, car l'âge éclatant va finir; Ce siècle altier qui sut dompter le vent contraire. Expire...—O Gautier, toi, leur égal et leur frère, Tu pars après Dumas, Lamartine et Musset. L'onde antique est tarie où l'on rajeunissait; Comme il n'est plus de Styx il n'est plus de Jouvence. Le dur faucher avec sa large lame avance Pensif et pas à pas vers le reste du blé; C'est mon tour; et la nuit emplit mon œil troublé Qui, devinant, hélas, l'avenir des colombes, Pleure sur des berceaux et sourit à des tombes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Un hymne harmonieux sort des feuilles du tremble; Les voyageurs craintifs, qui vont la nuit ensemble. Haussent la voix dans l'ombre où l'on doit se hâter Laissez tout ce qui tremble Chanter. Les marins fatigués sommeillent sur le gouffre. La mer bleue ou Vésuve épand ses flots de soufre Se tait dès qu'il s'éteint, et cesse de gémir. Laissez tout ce qui souffre Dormir. Quand la vie est mauvaise on la rêve meilleure. Les yeux en pleurs au ciel se lèvent à toute heure; L'espoir vers Dieu se tourne et Dieu l'entend crier. Laissez tout ce qui pleure Prier. C'est pour renaître ailleurs qu'ici-bas on succombe. Tout ce qui tourbillonne appartient à la tombe. Il faut dans le grand tout tôt ou tard s'absorber. Laissez tout ce qui tombe Tomber!

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

I

CHANSON D'AUTREFOIS

Jamais elle ne raille, Étant un calme esprit; Mais toujours elle rit.— Voici des brins de mousse avec des brins de paille; Fauvette des roseaux, Fais ton nid sur les eaux. Quand sous la clarté douce Qui sort de tes beaux yeux On passe, on est joyeux.— Voici des brins de paille avec des brins de mousse; Martinet de l'azur, Fais ton nid dans mon mur. Dans l'aube avril se mire, Et les rameaux fleuris Sont pleins de petits cris.— Voici de son regard, voici de son sourire; Amour, ô doux vainqueur, Fais ton nid dans mon cœur.

II

CHANSON D'AUJOURD'HUI

Je disais:—Dieu qu'aucun suppliant n'importune, Quand vous m'éprouverez dans votre volonté, Laissez mon libre choix choisir dans la fortune L'un ou l'autre côté; Entre un riche esclavage et la pauvreté franche Laissez-moi choisir, Dieu du cèdre et du roseau; Entre l'or de la cage et le vert de la branche Faites juge l'oiseau.— Maintenant je suis libre et la nuit me réclame; J'ai choisi l'âpre exil; j'habite un bois obscur; Mais je vois s'allumer les étoiles de l'âme Dans mon sinistre azur.

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

EN MARCHANT LA NUIT DANS UN BOIS

I

Il grêle, il pleut. Neige et brume; Fondrière à chaque pas. Le torrent veut, crie, écume, Et le rocher ne veut pas. Le sabbat à notre oreille Jette ses vagues hourras. Un fagot sur une vieille Passe en agitant les bras. Passants hideux, clartés blanches; Il semble, en ces noirs chemins, Que les hommes ont des branches. Que les arbres ont des mains.

II

On entend passer un coche, Le lourd coche de la mort, Il vient, il roule, il approche, L'eau hurle et la bise mord. Le dur cocher, dans la plaine Aux aspects noirs et changeants, Conduit sa voiture pleine De toute sorte de gens. Novembre souffle, la terre Frémit, la bourrasque fond; Les flèches du sagittaire Sifflent dans le ciel profond.

III

—Cocher, d'où viens-tu? dit l'arbre. —Où vas-tu? dit l'eau qui fuit. Le cocher est fait de marbre Et le coche est fait de nuit. Il emporte beauté, gloire, Joie, amour, plaisirs bruyants; La voiture est toute noire, Les chevaux sont effrayants. L'arbre en frissonnant s'incline, L'eau sent les joncs se dresser. Le buisson sur la colline Grimpe pour le voir passer.

IV

Le brin d'herbe sur la roche, Le nuage dans le ciel, Regarde marcher ce coche, Et croit voir rouler Babel. Sur sa morne silhouette, Battant de l'aile à grands cris, Volent l'orage, chouette, Et l'ombre, chauve-souris. Vent glacé, tu nous secoues! Le char roule, et l'œil tremblant, À travers ses grandes roues, Voit un crépuscule blanc.

V

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.

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.