ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (continued 3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L'homme s'est vendu. Soit. A-t-on dans le louage Compris le lac, le bois, la ronce, le nuage? La nature revient, germe, fleurit, dissout, Féconde, croît, décroît, rit, passe, efface tout. La Suisse est toujours là, libre. Prend-on au piège La précipice, l'ombre et la bise et la neige? Signe-t-on des marchés dans lesquels il soit dit Que l'Orteler s'enrôle et devient un bandit? Quel poing cyclopéen, dites, ô roches noires, Pourra briser la Dent de Morde en vos mâchoires? Quel assembleur de bœufs pourra forger un joug Qui du pic de Glaris aille au piton de Zoug? C'est naturellement que les monts sont fidèles Et purs, ayant la forme âpre des citadelles, Ayant reçu de Dieu des créneaux où le soir, L'homme peut, d'embrasure en embrasure, voir Étinceler le fer de lance des étoiles. Est-il une araignée, aigle, qui dans ses toiles Puisse prendre la trombe et la rafale et toi? Quel chef recrutera le Salève? à quel roi Le Mythen dira-t-il: "Sire, je vais descendre! Qu'après avoir dompté l'Athos, quelque Alexandre, Sorte de héros monstre aux cornes de taureau, Aille donc relever sa robe à la Jungfrau! Comme la vierge, ayant l'ouragan sur l'épaule, Crachera l'avalanche à la face du drôle!

* * * * * *

Non, rien n'est mort ici. Tout grandit, et s'en vante. L'Helvétie est sacrée, et la Suisse est vivante; Ces monts sont des héros et des religieux; Cette nappe de neige aux plis prodigieux D'où jaillit, lorsqu'en mai la tiède brise ondoie, Toute une floraison folle d'air et de joie, Et d'où sortent des lacs et des flots murmurants, N'est le linceul de rien, excepté des tyrans.

This glorious poem of the first series finds a glorious echo in the twenty-fifth division of the second; even as the Pyrenean cycle which opened in the first series is brought in the second to fuller completion of equal and corresponsive achievement. It is wonderful, even in this vast world of poetic miracle where nothing is other than wonderful, that Masferrer should be equal to Aymenllot in frank majesty of beauty; that even after Le Parricide a fresh depth of tragic terror should be sounded by Gaïffer-Forge; and that after all he had already written on fatherhood and sonship, on duty and chivalry, on penitence and pride, Victor Hugo should have struck so new and so profound a note as rings in every fine of La Paternité.

But of all echoes and of all responses which reverberate from end to end of these three great sections of song, the very sweetest, and perhaps the very deepest, are those evoked by love of little children, and compassionate reverence for the poor. If but one division were to be left us out of all the second series, and fate or chance, comparatively compassionate in its cruelty, gave us our choice which this one should be, the best judgments might perhaps decide to preserve the twenty-third at all events. What the words "realism" and "naturalism" do naturally and really signify in matters of art, the blatant babblers who use them to signify the photography of all things abject might learn, if shallow insolence and unclean egotism were suddenly made capable of learning, by the study of only the two poems which set before us in two different forms the strength of weakness in the child whose love redeems his father from death, and the child who can find no comfort but in death for the lack of a father's love. There is nothing in Homer, in Dante, or in Shakespeare, the three only poets who can properly be cited for comparison, of a pathos more poignant in its bitter perfection of sweetness.

Among the many good things which seem, for the lovers of poetry, to have come out of one and so great an evil as the long exile of Hugo from his country, there is none better or greater than the spiritual inhalation of breeze and brine into the very heart of his genius, the miraculous impregnation of his solitary Muse by the sea-wind. This influence could not naturally but combine with the lifelong influence of all noble sympathies to attract his admiration and his pity towards the poor folk of the shore, and to produce from that sense of compassion for obscurer sorrows and brotherhood with humbler heroism than his own such work as the poem which describes the charity of a fisherman's wife towards the children of her dead neighbor. It has all the beautiful precision and accurate propriety of detail which distinguish the finest idyls of Theocritus or Tennyson, with a fervor of pathetic and imaginative emotion which Theocritus never attained, and which Tennyson has attained but once. All the horror of death, all the trouble and mystery of darkness, seem as we read to pass into our fancy with the breath of pervading night, and to vanish with the husband's entrance at sunrise before the smile with which the wife draws back the curtains of the cradle.

This poem, which so many hearts must have treasured among their choicest memories for now so many years, has found at length its fellow in the final volume of the book. There is even more savor of the sea in the great lyric landscape called Les paysans au bord de la mer than in the idyllic interior called Les pauvres gens. There we felt the sea-wind and saw the sea-mist through the chinks of door and window; but here we feel all the sweep of the west wind's wings, and see all the rush of rain along the stormy shore that the flock of leaping waves has whitened with the shreddings of their fleece. We remember in Les Voix Intérieures the all but matchless music of the song of the sea-wind's trumpet, and in the notes of this new tune we find at last that music matched and deepened and prolonged. In the great lyric book which gives us the third of the four blasts blown from Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit, there are visions as august and melodies as austere as this; but outside the vast pale of the master's work we should look for the likeness of such songs in vain. The key of all its tenderness if not of all its terror is struck in these two first verses.

Les pauvres gens de la côte, L'hiver, quand la mer est haute Et qu'il fait nuit, Viennent où finit la terre Voir les flots pleins de mystère Et pleins de bruit. Ils sondent la mer sans bornes; Ils pensent aux écueils mornes Et triomphants; L'orpheline pâle et seule Crie: ô mon père! et l'aïeule Dit: mes enfants!

The verses which translate the landscape are as absolutely incomparable in their line as those which render the emotion of the watchers. Witness this:—

Et l'on se met en prières, Pendant que joncs et bruyères Et bois touffus, Vents sans borne et flots sans nombre, Jettent dans toute cette ombre Des cris confus.

Here, as usual, it is the more tragic aspect of the waters that would appear to have most deeply impressed the sense or appealed to the spirit of Victor Hugo. He seems to regard the sea with yet more of awe than of love, as he may be said to regard the earth with even more of love than of awe. He has put no song of such sweet and profound exultation, such kind and triumphant motherhood, into the speaking spirit of the sea as into the voice of the embodied earth. He has heard in the waves no word so bountiful and benignant as the message of such verses as these:—

La terre est calme auprès de l'océan grondeur; La terre est belle; elle a la divine pudeur De se cacher sous les feuillages; Le printemps son amant vient en mai la baiser; Elle envoie au tonnerre altier pour l'apaiser La fumée humble des villages. Ne frappe pas, tonnerre. Ils sons petits, ceux-ci. La terre est bonne; elle est grave et sévère aussi; Les roses sont pures comme elle; Quiconque pense, espère et travaille lui plaît; Et l'innocence offerte à tout homme est son lait, Et la justice est sa mamelle. La terre cache l'or et montre les moissons; Elle met dans le flanc des fuyantes saisons Le germe des saisons prochaines, Dans l'azur les oiseaux qui chuchotent: aimons! Et les sources au fond de l'ombre, et sur les monts L'immense tremblement des chênes.

The loving loveliness of these divine verses is in sharp contrast with the fierce resonance of those in which the sea's defiance is cast as a challenge to the hopes and dreams of mankind:—

Je suis la vaste mêlée, Reptile, étant l'onde, ailée, Étant le vent; Force et fuite, haine et vie, Houle immense, poursuivie Et poursuivant.

The motion of the sea was never till now so perfectly done into words as in these three last lines; but any one to whom the water was as dear or dearer than the land at its loveliest would have found a delight as of love no less conceivable than a passion as of hatred in the more visible and active life of waves, and at least as palpable to the "shaping spirit of imagination." It remains true, after all, for the greatest as for the humblest, that—in the words of one of the very few poets whose verses are fit to quote even after a verse of Hugo's—

we receive but what we give. And in our life alone doth nature live;

so far, at least, as her life concerns us, and is perceptible or appreciable by our spirit or our sense. A magnificent instance of purely dramatic vision, in which the lyric note is tempered to the circumstance of the speakers with a kind of triumphant submission and severe facility, is La Chanson des Doreurs de Proues. The poet's unequalled and unapproached variety in mastery of metre and majesty of color and splendid simplicity of style, no less exact than sublime, and no less accurate than passionate, could hardly be better shown than by comparison of the opening verses with the stanza cited above.

Nous sommes les doreurs de proues. Les vents, tournant comme des roues, Sur la verte rondeur des eaux Mêlent les lueurs et les ombres, Et dans les plis des vagues sombres Traînent les obliques vaisseaux. La bourrasque décrit des courbes, Les vents sont tortueux et fourbes, L'archer noir souffle dans son cor, Ces bruits s'ajoutent aux vertiges, Et c'est nous qui dans ces prodiges Faisons rôder des spectres d'or. Car c'est un spectre que la proue. Le flot l'étreint, l'air la secoue; Fière, elle sort de nos bazars Pour servir aux éclairs de cible, Et pour être un regard terrible Parmi les sinistres hasards.

It is more than fifty years since Les Orientales rose, radiant upon the world of letters, and the hand which gave them to mankind has lost so little of its cunning that we are well-nigh tempted to doubt whether then, for all its skill and sureness of touch, it had quite the same strength and might of magnificent craftsmanship as now. There was fire as well as music on the lips of the young man, but the ardor of the old man's song seems even deeper and keener than the passion of his past. The fervent and majestic verses of June 2, 1883, strike at starting the note of measureless pity and immeasurable indignation which rings throughout the main part of the fifth and last volume almost louder and fuller, if possible, than it was wont. All Victor Hugo, we may say, is in this book; it is as one of those ardent evening skies in which sunrise and sunset seem one in the flush of overarching color which glows back from the west to the east with reverberating bloom and fervor of rose-blossom and fire. There is life enough in it, enough of the breath and spirit and life-blood of living thought, to vivify a whole generation of punier souls and feebler hearts with the heat of his fourscore years. It may be doubted whether there ever lived a poet and leader of men to whom these glorious verses would be so closely applicable as to their writer.

Un grand esprit en marche a ses rumeurs, ses houles, Ses chocs, et fait frémir profondément les foules, Et remue en passant le monde autour de lui. On est épouvanté si l'on n'est ébloui; L'homme comme un nuage erre et change de forme; Nul, si petit qu'il soit, échappe au souffle énorme; Les plus humbles, pendant qu'il parle, ont le frisson. Ainsi quand, évadé dans le vaste horizon, L'aquilon qui se hâte et qui cherche aventure Tord la pluie et l'éclair, comme de sa ceinture Une fille défait en souriant le nœud, Quand l'immense vent gronde et passe, tout s'émeut, Pas un brin d'herbe au fond des ravins, que ne touche Cette rapidité formidable et farouche.

And this wind "bloweth where it listeth": now it comes to us charged with all the heart of all the roses in the world; its breath when it blows towards Greece has in it a murmur as of Shelley's Epipsychidion; the caress of its love-making has all the freedom and all the purity of Blake's; now it passes by us in darkness, from depth to depth of the bitter mystery of night. A vision of ruined worlds, the floating purgatorial prisons of ruined souls, adrift as hulks on the sea of darkness everlasting, shows us the harvest in eternity of such seed as was sown in time by the hands of such guides and rulers of men as we hear elsewhere speaking softly with each other in the shadows, within hail of the confessional and the scaffold. The loftiest words of counsel sound sweeter in the speech of this great spirit than the warmest whispers of pleasure; and again, the heaviest stroke of damning satire is succeeded by the tenderest touch of a compassion that would leave not a bird in captivity. The hand that opens the cage-door is the same which has just turned the key on the braggart swordsman, neither "victorious" nor "dead," but condemned to everlasting prison behind the bars of iron verse.

But the two long poems which dominate the book, like two twin summits clothed round with fiery cloud and crowned with stormy sunshine, tower equal in height and mass of structure with the stateliest in the two parts preceding. The voice that rolls throughout Les Quatre Jours d'Elciis the thunder of its burning words reawakens and prolongs the echo of Félibien's pity and wrath over the murdered corpse of a child unborn; we recognize in the speaker a kinsman of Welf's, the unconquerable old castellan of Osbor, delivered only by an act of charity into the treacherous hands of the princes whom his citadel had so long defied. Of Elciis, as of him, the poet might have said—

Si la mer prononçait des noms dans ses marées, Ô vieillard, ce serait des noms comme le tien.

Such names will no doubt provoke the soft superior smile of a culture too refined for any sort of enthusiasm but the elegant ecstasy of self-worship; and such simplicity will excite, on the other hand, a deep-mouthed bray of scorn from the whole school or church whose apostle in France was St. Joseph de Maistre, in England St. Thomas Coprostom, late of Craigenputtock and Chelsea; the literary lappers of imaginary blood, the inkhorn swordsmen and spokesmen of immaterial iron. The rage of their contempt for such as Hugo, the loathing of their scorn for such as Shelley, ought long since to have abashed the believers in principles which find no abler defenders or more effective champions than these.

For it is true that the main truths preached and enforced and insisted on by such fanatical rhetoricians as Milton, as Mazzini, or as Hugo, are as old as the very notion of right and wrong, as the rudest and crudest conception of truth itself; and it is undeniable that the Gospel according to St. Coprostom has the invaluable merit of pungent eccentricity and comparatively novel paradox. The evangelist of "golden silence"—whose own speech, it may be admitted, was "quite other" than "silvern"—is logically justified in his blatant but ineffable contempt for the dull old doctrines of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty that knows no higher law than duty, of duty that depends for its existence on the existence of liberty. Such a creed, in the phrase of a brother philosopher whose "reminiscences" may be gathered from Shakespeare, and whose views of his contemporaries were identical in tone and expression with the opinions of Mr. Carlyle on his, was mouldy before our grandsires had nails on their toes. It is far more intelligent, more original, more ingenious than all the old cant and rant against priests and kings and vow-breakers and blood-spillers, to discover the soul of goodness in Ratbert the Second or Napoleon the Third, and observingly distill it out into analytic and mono-dramatic blank verse. And it will never be said that this reaction against the puerile or senile preference of right to wrong and principle to prosperity has not been carried far enough in our time. Carlyle, the man of brass, and Musset, the man of clay, as far apart on all other points as two writers of genius could well be, have shown themselves at one in high-souled scorn for "principles of mere rebellion" such as Landor's and Milton's, or for such "belief in a new Brutus" as might disturb the dream of Augustulus. But, even as an old paradox becomes with time a commonplace, so does an old commonplace become in its turn a paradox; and a generation whose poets and historians have long blown the trumpet before the legitimacy of Romanoffs or the bastardy of Bonapartes may properly be startled and scandalized at the childish eccentricity of an old-world idealist who maintains his obsolete and preposterous belief that massacre is murder, that robbery is theft, and that perjury is treason. No newer doctrine, no sounder philosophy, no riper wisdom than this, can be gathered from the declamations of those idle old men—as Goneril, for example, would have called them—who speak this poet's mind again and again in verse which has no more variety of splendor or magnificence of music than the sea.

Hélas, on voit encor les astres se lever, L'aube sur l'Apennin jeter sa clarté douce, L'oiseau faire son nid avec des brins de mousse, La mer battre les rocs dans ses flux et reflux, Mais la grandeur des cœurs c'est ce qu'on ne voit plus.

There is nothing ingenious in that; it is no better, intellectually considered, than a passage of Homer or Isaiah.

But though every verse has the ring of tested gold, and every touch gives notice of the master's hand, yet the glory even of these Four Days is eclipsed by the Vision of Dante. Far apart and opposite as they stand in all matters of poetic style and method—Dante writing with the rigid and reserved concision of a Tacitus, Hugo with the rushing yet harmonious profusion of a Pindar—the later master is the only modern poet who could undertake without absurdity or presumption to put words worthy of Dante into Dante's mouth. The brazen clatter of Byron's Prophecy was not redeemed or brought into tune by the noble energy and sound insight of the political sympathies expressed in the accent of a stump-orator to the tune of a barrel-organ. But a verse of Hugo's falls often as solid and weighty and sure, as full in significance of perfect and pregnant sound, as even a verse of Alighieri's. He therefore, but he alone, had the power and the right to call up the spirit of Dante now thirty years ago, and bid it behold all the horrors of Europe in 1853; the Europe of Haynau and Radetzky, of Nicholas the First and Napoleon the last. Any great modern poet's notion of an everlasting hell must of course be less merely material than Dante's mechanism of hot and cold circles, fire and ice, ordure and mire; but here is the same absolute and equitable assent to justice, the same fierce and ardent fidelity to conscience, the same, logic and the same loyalty as his.

Ô sentence! ô peine sans refuge! Tomber dans le silence et la brume à jamais! D'abord quelque clarté des lumineux sommets Vous laisse distinguer vos mains désespérées. On tombe, on voit passer des formes effarées, Bouches ouvertes, fronts ruisselants de sueur, Des visages hideux qu'éclaire une lueur. Puis on ne voit plus rien. Tout s'efface et recule. La nuit morne succède au sombre crépuscule. On tombe. On n'est pas seul dans ces limbes d'en bas; On sent frissonner ceux qu'on ne distingue pas; On ne sait si ce sont des hydres ou des hommes; On se sent devenir les larves que nous sommes; On entrevoit l'horreur des lieux inaperçus, Et l'abîme au-dessous, et l'abîme au-dessus. Puis tout est vide! on est le grain que le vent sème. On n'entend pas le cri qu'on à poussé soi-même; On sent les profondeurs qui s'emparent de vous; Les mains ne peuvent plus atteindre les genoux; On lève au ciel les yeux et l'on voit l'ombre horrible; On est dans l'impalpable, on est dans l'invisible; Des souffles par moments passent dans cette nuit. Puis on ne sent plus rien.—Pas un vent, pas un bruit, Pas un souffle; la mort, la nuit; nulle rencontre; Rien pas même une chute affreuse ne se montre Et l'on songe à la vie, au soleil, aux amours, Et l'on pense toujours, et l'on tombe toujours!

The resurrection of the victims to give evidence at the summons of the archangel—a heavy cloud of witnesses,

Triste, livide, énorme, ayant un air de rage—

men bound to the yoke like beasts, women with bosoms gashed by the whip, children with their skulls cleft open—is direful as any less real and actual vision of the elder hell.

Les cris d'enfant surtout venaient à mon oreille; Car, dans cette nuit-là, gouffre ou l'équité veille, La voix des innocents sur toute autre prévaut, C'est le cri des enfants qui monte le plus haut, Et le vagissement fait le bruit du tonnerre.

The appeal for justice which follows, with its enumeration of horrors unspeakable except by history and poetry, is followed in its turn by the evocation of the soldiers whom this army of martyrs has with one voice designated to the angel of judgment as their torturers and murderers. The splendid and sonorous verses in which the muster of these legions after legions, with their garments rolled in blood, is made to defile before the eyes of reader or hearer, can be matched only by the description of the Swiss mercenaries in Le Régiment du baron Madruce.

Un grand vautour doré les guidait comme un phare. Tant qu'ils étaient au fond de l'ombre, la fanfare, Comme un aigle agitant ses bruyants ailerons, Chantait claire et joyeuse au front des escadrons, Trompettes et tambours sonnaient, et des centaures Frappaient des ronds de cuivre entre leurs mains sonores; Mais, dès qu'ils arrivaient devant le flamboiement, Les clairons effarés se taisaient brusquement, Tout ce bruit s'éteignait. Reculant en désordre. Leurs chevaux se cabraient et cherchaient à les mordre, Et la lance et l'épée échappaient à leur poing.

Challenged to make answer, the assassins of Italy and Hungary plead that they were but the sword, their captains were the hand. These are summoned in their turn, and cast their crimes in turn upon the judges who bade them shed blood and applauded their blood-shedding in the name of law and justice. And the judges and lawgivers are summoned in their stead.

Ces hommes regardaient l'ange d'un air surpris: Comme, en lettres de feu, rayonnait sur sa face Son nom, Justice, entre eux ils disaient à voix basse: Que veut dire ce mot qu'il porte sur son front?

Charged with their complicity in all the public crime and shame and horror of their period, these in turn cast the burden of their wrong-doing on the princes who commanded them and they obeyed, seeing how the priests and soothsayers had from all time assured them that kings were the images of God. The images of God are summoned, and appear, in the likeness of every form of evil imaginable by man.

Devant chaque fantôme, en la brume glacée. Ayant le vague aspect d'une croix renversée, Venait un glaive nu, ferme et droit dans le vent, Qu'aucun bras ne tenait et qui semblait vivant.

Strange shapes of winged and monstrous beasts were harnessed to the chariots on which the thrones of the earth were borne forward. The figure seated on the last of them will be recognizable beyond all possibility of mistake by any reader whose eyes have ever rested on a face which beyond most human faces bore the visible image and superscription of the soul behind it.

Les trônes approchaient sous les lugubres cieux; On entendait gémir autour des noirs essieux La clameur de tous ceux qu'avaient broyés leurs roues; Ils venaient, ils fendaient l'ombre comme des proues; Sous un souffle invisible ils semblaient se mouvoir; Rien n'était plus étrange et plus farouche à voir Que ces chars effrayants tourbillonnant dans l'ombre. Dans le gouffre tranquille où l'humanité sombre, Ces trônes de la terre apparaissaient hideux. Le dernier qui venait, horrible au milieu d'eux, Était à chaque marche encombré de squelettes Et de cadavres froids aux bouches violettes, Et le plancher rougi fumait, de sang baigné; Le char qui le portait dans l'ombre était traîné Par un hibou tenant dans sa griffe une hache. Un être aux yeux de loup, homme par la moustache, Au sommet de ce char s'agitait étonné, Et se courbait furtif, livide et couronné. Pas un de ces césars à l'allure guerrière Ne regardait cet homme. A l'écart, et derrière, Vêtu d'un noir manteau qui semblait un linceul, Espèce de lépreux du trône, il venait seul; Il posait les deux mains sur sa face morose Comme pour empêcher qu'on y vît quelque chose; Quand parfois il ôtait ses mains en se baissant, En lettres qui semblaient faites avec du sang On lisait sur son front ces trois mots:—Je le jure.

It is a fearful thing, said the Hebrew, to fall into the hands of the living God; and it is a fearful thing for a malefactor to fall into the hands of an ever-living poet. The injured Caesars of Rome—Tiberius, for example, and Domitian—have not even yet been delivered by the most conscientious efforts of German and Anglo-German Cæsarists out of the prison whose keys are kept by Juvenal; and a greater than Juvenal is here.

Summoned to make answer to the charge of the angel of judgment, even these also have their resource for evasion, and cast all their crimes upon the Pope.

Il nous disait: Je suis celui qui parle aux rois; Quiconque me résiste et me brave est impie, Ce qu'ici-bas j'écris, là-haut Dieu le copie. L'église, mon épouse, éclose au mont Thabor, A fait de la doctrine une cage aux fils d'or, Et comme des oiseaux j'y tiens toutes les âmes.

This man had blessed the murderers in their triumph, and cursed their victims in the grave:—

Sa ceinture servait de corde à nos potences. Il liait de ses mains l'agneau sons nos sentences; Et quand on nous criait: Grâce! il nous criait: Feu! C'est à lui que le mal revient. Voilà, grand Dieu, Ce qu'il a fait: voilà ce qu'il nous a fait faire. Cet homme était le pôle et l'axe de la sphère; Il est le responsable et nous le dénonçons! Seigneur, nous n'avons fait que suivre ses leçons. Seigneur, nous n'avons fait que suivre son exemple.

And the pontiff whose advent and whose promises had been hailed with such noble trust and acclaimed with such noble thankfulness by those who believed in him as a deliverer—by Landor among others, and by Hugo himself—the Caiaphas-Iscariot whose benediction and consecrated massacre and anointed perjury with the rancid oil of malodorous gladness above its fellows in, empire and in crime—is summoned out of darkness to receive sentence by the sevenfold sounding of trumpets.

Vêtu de lin plus blanc qu'un encensoir qui fume, Il avait, spectre blême aux idoles pareil, Les baisers de la foule empreints sur son orteil, Dans sa droite un bâton comme l'antique archonte, Sur son front la tiare, et dans ses yeux la honte. De son cou descendait un long manteau doré, Et dans son poignet gauche il tenait, effaré, Comme un voleur surpris par celui qu'il dérobe, Des clefs qu'il essayait de cacher sous sa robe. Il était effrayant à force de terreur. Quand surgit ce vieillard, on vit dans la lueur L'ombre et le mouvement de quelqu'un qui se penche. À l'apparition de cette robe blanche, Au plus noir de l'abîme un tonnerre gronda.

Then from all points of the immeasurable spaces, from the womb of the cloud and the edge of the pit, is witness given against Pope Pius IX. by the tyrants and the victims, mothers and children and old men, the judges and the judged, the murderers mingling with the murdered, great and small, obscure and famous.

Tous ceux que j'avais vus passer dans les ténèbres, Avançant leur front triste, ouvrant leur œil terni, Fourmillement affreux qui peuplait l'infini, Tous ces spectres, vivant, parlant, riant naguère, Martyrs, bourreaux, et gens du peuple et gens de guerre, Regardant l'homme blanc d'épouvante ébloui, Elevèrent la main et crièrent: C'est lui. Et pendant qu'ils criaient, sa robe devint rouge. Au fond du gouffre où rien ne tressaille et ne bouge Un écho répéta:—C'est lui!—Les sombres rois Dirent:—C'est lui! c'est lui! c'est lui! voilà sa croix! Les clefs du paradis sont dans ses mains fatales.— Et l'homme-loup, debout sur les cadavres pâles Dont le sang tiède encor tombait dans l'infini, Cria d'une voix rauque et sourde:—Il m'a béni!

A judgment less terrible than what follows is that by which Dante long ago made fast the gates of hell upon Nicholas and Boniface and Clement with one stroke of his inevitable hand. The ghastly agony of the condemned is given with all the bitterest realism of the great elder anti-papist who sent so many vicars of Christ to everlasting torment for less offenses than those of Mastai-Ferretti.

Lui se tourna vers l'ange en frissonnant, Et je vis le spectacle horrible et surprenant D'un homme qui vieillit pendant qu'on le regarde. L'agonie éteignit sa prunelle hagarde, Sa bouche bégaya, son jarret se rompit, Ses cheveux blanchissaient sur son front décrépit, Ses tempes se ridaient comme si les années S'étaient subitement sur sa face acharnées, Ses yeux pleuraient, ses dents claquaient comme au gibet Les genoux d'un squelette, et sa peau se plombait, Et, stupide, il baissait, à chaque instant plus pâle, Sa tête qu'écrasait la tiare papale.

From the sentence passed upon him after the avowal extorted by the angel of doom that he has none in the world above him but God alone on whom to cast the responsibility of his works, not a word may be taken away for the purpose of quotation, as not a word could have been added to it by Dante or by Ezekiel himself. But about the eternity of his damnation there is not, happily for the human conscience, any manner of doubt possible; it must endure as long as the poem which proclaims it: in other words, as long as the immortality of poetry itself.

This great and terrible poem, the very crown or coping-stone of all the Châtiments, has a certain affinity with two others in which the poet's yearning after justice and mercy has borne his passionate imagination as high and far as here. In Sultan Mourad his immeasurable and incomparable depth of pity and charity seems well nigh to have swallowed up all sense of necessary retribution: it is perhaps because the portentous array of crimes enumerated is remote in time and place from all experience of ours that conscience can allow the tenderness and sublimity of its inspiration to justify the moral and ratify the sentence of the poem:—

Viens! tu fus bon un jour, sois à jamais heureux. Entre, transfiguré! tes crimes ténébreux, Ô roi, derrière toi s'effacent dans les gloires; Tourne la tête, et vois blanchir tes ailes noires.

But in the crowning song of all the great three cycles every need and every instinct of the spirit may find the perfect exaltation of content. The vast and profound sense of ultimate and inevitable equity which animates every line of it is as firm and clear as the solid and massive splendor of its articulate expression. The date of it is outside and beyond the lapse of the centuries of time; but the rule of the law of righteousness is there more evident and indisputable than ever during the flight of these. Hardly in the Hebrew prophecies is such distinct and vivid sublimity, as of actual and all but palpable vision, so thoroughly impregnated with moral and spiritual emotion. Not a verse of all that strike root into the memory forever but is great alike by imagination and by faith. In such a single line as this—

Que qui n'entendit pas le remords l'entendrait—

there is the very note of conscience done into speech, cast into form, forged into substance.

Avec de l'équité condensée en airain.

But this couplet for immensity of imaginative range, is of one birth with the sublimest verses in the Book of Job:—

Et toute l'épouvante éparse au ciel est sœur De cet impénétrable et morne avertisseur.

From the magnificent overture to the second series, in which the poet has embodied in audible and visible symbol the vision whence this book was conceived—a vision so far surpassing the perhaps unconsciously imitative inspiration of the Apocalypse, with its incurably lame and arduously prosaic efforts to reproduce the effect or mimic the majesty of earlier prophecies, that we are amazed if not scandalized to find that book actually bracketed in one sublime passage of this prelude with the greatest spiritual poem in the world, the Oresteia of Æschylus—the reader would infer that any student wishing to give a notion of the Légende des Siècles ought to have dwelt less than I have done upon a few of its innumerable beauties, and more than I have done upon the impression of its incomparable grandeur. But samples of pure sweetness and beauty are more easily and perhaps more profitably detached for quotation from their context than samples of a sublimity which can only be felt by full and appreciative study of an entire and perfect poem. And it is rather from the prelude itself than from any possible commentary on it that a thoughtful and careful reader will seek to gather the aim and meaning of the book. It is there likened to a vast disjointed ruin lit by gleams of light—"le reste effrayant de Babel"—a palace and a charnel in one, built by doom for death to dwell in:—

Où se posent pourtant parfois, quand elles l'osent, De la façon dont l'aile et le rayon se posent, La liberté, lumière, et l'espérance, oiseau.

But over and within this book—

traduit Du passé, du tombeau, du gouffre et de la nuit—

faith shines as a kindling torch, hope breathes as a quickening wind, love burns as a cleansing fire. It is tragic, not with the hopeless tragedy of Dante or the all but hopeless tragedy of Shakespeare. Whether we can or cannot share the infinite hope and inviolable faith to which the whole active and suffering life of the poet has borne such unbroken and imperishable witness, we cannot in any case but recognize the greatness and heroism of his love for mankind. As in the case of Æschylus, it is the hunger and thirst after righteousness, the deep desire for perfect justice in heaven as on earth, which would seem to assure the prophet's inmost heart of its final triumph by the prevalence of wisdom and of light over all claims and all pleas established or asserted by the children of darkness, so in the case of Victor Hugo is it the hunger and thirst after reconciliation, the love of loving kindness, the master passion of mercy, which persists in hope and insists on faith even in face of the hardest and darkest experience through which a nation or a man can pass. When evil was most triumphant throughout Europe, he put forth in a single book of verse, published with strange difficulty against incredible impediments, such a protest as would entitle him to say, in the very words he has given to the Olympian of old—

Quand, dans le saint paean par les mondes chanté, L'harmonie amoindrie avorte ou dégénère, Je rends le rhythme aux cieux par un coup de tonnerre:

and now more than ever would the verses that follow befit the lips of their author, if speaking in his own person:—

Mon crâne plein d'échos, plein de lueurs, plein d'yeux, Est l'antre éblouissant du grand Pan radieux; En me voyant on croit entendre le murmure De la ville habitée et de la moisson mûre, Le bruit du gouffre au chant de l'azur réuni, L'onde sur l'océan, le vent dans l'infini, Et le frémissement des deux ailes du cygne.

It is held unseemly to speak of the living as we speak of the dead; when Victor Hugo has joined the company of his equals, but apparently not till then, it will seem strange to regard the giver of all the gifts we have received from him with less than love that deepens into worship, than worship that brightens into love. Meantime it is only in the phrase of one of his own kindred, poet and exile and prophet of a darker age than his, that the last word should here be spoken of the man by whose name our century will be known forever to all ages and nations that keep any record or memory of what was highest and most memorable in the spiritual history of the past:—

Onorate l'altissimo poeta.