ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

NEW YORK

WORTHINGTON CO., 747 BROADWAY

1886

TABLE DES MATIÈRES THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES

THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO

In the spring of 1616 the greatest Englishman of all time passed away with no public homage or notice, and the first tributes paid to his memory were prefixed to the miserably garbled and inaccurate edition of his works which was issued seven years later by a brace of players under the patronage of a brace of peers. In the spring of 1885 the greatest Frenchman of all time has passed away amid such universal anguish and passion of regret as never before accompanied the death of the greatest among poets. The contrast is of course not wholly due to the incalculable progress of humanity during the two hundred and sixty-nine years which divide the date of our mourning from the date of Shakespeare's death: nor even to the vast superiority of Frenchmen to Englishmen in the quality of generous, just, and reasonable gratitude for the very highest of all benefits that man can confer on mankind. For the greatest poet of this century has been more than such a force of indirect and gradual beneficence as every great writer must needs be. His spiritual service has been in its inmost essence, in its highest development, the service of a healer and a comforter, the work of a redeemer and a prophet. Above all other apostles who have brought us each the glad tidings of his peculiar gospel, the free gifts of his special inspiration, has this one deserved to be called by the most beautiful and tender of all human titles—the son of consolation. His burning wrath and scorn unquenchable were fed with light and heat from the inexhaustible dayspring of his love—a fountain of everlasting and unconsuming fire. We know of no such great poet so good, of no such good man so great in genius: not though Milton and Shelley, our greatest lyric singer and our single epic poet, remain with us for signs and examples of devotion as heroic and self-sacrifice as pure. And therefore it is but simply reasonable that not those alone should mourn for him who have been reared and nurtured on the fruits of his creative spirit: that those also whom he wrought and fought for, but who know him only as their champion and their friend—they that cannot even read him, but remember how he labored in their cause, that their children might fare otherwise than they—should bear no unequal part in the burden of this infinite and worldwide sorrow.

For us, who from childhood upwards have fostered and fortified whatever of good was born in us—all capacity of spiritual work, all seed of human sympathy, all powers of hope and faith, all passions and aspirations found loyal to the service of duty and of love—with the bread of his deathless word and the wine of his immortal song, the one thing possible to do in this first hour of bitterness and stupefaction at the sense of a loss not possible yet to realize, is not to declaim his praise or parade our lamentation in modulated effects or efforts of panegyric or of dirge: it is to reckon up once more the standing account of our all but incalculable debt. A brief and simple summary of his published works may probably lay before the student some points and some details not generally familiar to the run of English readers: and I know not what better service might be done them than to bring into their sight such aspects of the most multiform and many-sided genius that ever wrought in prose or verse as are least obvious and least notorious to the foreign world of letters.

Poet, dramatist, novelist, historian, philosopher, and patriot, the spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century was before all things and above all things a poet. Throughout all the various and ambitious attempts of his marvelous boyhood—criticism, drama, satire, elegy, epigram, and romance—the dominant vein is poetic. His example will stand forever as the crowning disproof of the doubtless more than plausible opinion that the most amazing precocity of power is a sign of ensuing impotence and premature decay. There was never a more brilliant boy than Victor Hugo; but there has never been a greater man. At any other than a time of mourning it might be neither unseasonable nor unprofitable to observe that the boy's early verse, moulded on the models of the eighteenth century, is an arsenal of satire on revolutionary principles or notions which might suffice to furnish forth with more than their natural equipment of epigram a whole army of reactionary rhymesters and pamphleteers. But from the first, without knowing it, he was on the road to Damascus: if not to be struck down by sudden miracle, yet by no less inevitable a process to undergo a no less unquestionable conversion. At sixteen he wrote for a wager in the space of a fortnight the chivalrous and heroic story of Bug-Jargal; afterwards recast and reinformed with fresh vigor of vitality, when the author had attained the maturer age of twenty-three. His tenderness and manliness of spirit were here made nobly manifest: his originality and ardor of imagination, wild as yet and crude and violent, found vent two years later in Han d'Islande. But no boyish work on record ever showed more singular force of hand, more brilliant variety of power: though the author's criticism ten years later admits that "il n'y a dans Han d'Islande qu'une chose sentie, l'amour du jeune homme; qu'une chose observée, l'amour de la jeune fille." But as the work of a boy's fancy or invention, touched here and there with genuine humor, terror, and pathos, it is not less wonderful than are the author's first odes for ease and force and freshness and fluency of verse imbued with simple and sincere feeling, with cordial and candid faith. And in both these boyish stories the hand of a soldier's son, a child of the camp, reared in the lap of war and cradled in traditions of daring, is evident whenever an episode of martial adventure comes in among the more fantastic, excursions of adolescent inventiveness. But it is in the ballads written between his twenty-second and his twenty-seventh year that Victor Hugo first showed himself, beyond all question and above all cavil, an original and a great poet. La Chasse du Burgrave and Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean would suffice of themselves to establish that. The fire, the music, the force, the tenderness, the spirit of these glorious little poems must needs, one would think, impress even such readers as might be impervious to the charm of their exquisitely vigorous and dexterous execution. Take for example this one stanza from the ballad last mentioned:—

La cohue, Flot de fer, Frappe, hue, Remplit l'air, Et, profonde, Tourne et gronde Comme une onde Sur la mer.

It will of course, I should hope, be understood once for all that when I venture to select for special mention any special poem of Hugo's I do not dream of venturing to suggest that others are not or may not be fully as worthy of homage, or that anything of this incomparable master's work will not requite our study or does not demand our admiration; I do but take leave to indicate in passing some of those which have been to me especially fruitful of enduring delight, and still are cherished in consequence with a peculiar gratitude.

At twenty-five the already celebrated lyric poet published his magnificent historic drama of Cromwell: a work sufficient of itself to establish the author's fame for all ages in which poetry and thought, passion and humor, subtle truth of character, stately perfection of structure, facile force of dialogue and splendid eloquence of style, continue to be admired and enjoyed. That the author has apparently confounded one earl of Rochester with another more famous bearer of the same title must not be allowed to interfere with the credit due to him for wide and various research. Any dullard can point the finger at a slip here and there in the history, a change or an error of detail or of date: it needs more care to appreciate the painstaking and ardent industry which has collected and fused-together a great mass of historic and legendary material, the fervent energy of inspiration which has given life, order, and harmony to the vast and versatile design. As to the executive part of the poem, the least that can be said by any competent judge of that matter is that Molière was already equalled and Corneille was already excelled in their respective provinces of verse by the young conqueror whose rule was equal and imperial over every realm of song. The comic interludes or episodes of the second and third acts, so admirably welded into the structure or woven into the thread of the action, would suffice to prove this when collated with the seventeenth scene of the third act and the great speech of Cromwell in the fifth.

Arrêtez! Que veut dire ceci? Pourquoi cette couronne? Que veut-on que j'en fasse? et qui donc me la donne? Est-ce un rêve? Est-ce bien le bandeau que je vois? De quel droit me vient-on confondre avec les rois? Qui mêle un tel scandale à nos pieuses fêtes Quoi! leur couronne, à moi qui fais tomber leurs têtes? S'est-on mépris au but de ces solennités?— Milords, messieurs, anglais, frères, qui m'écoutez, Je ne viens point ici ceindre le diadème, Mais retremper mon titre au sein du peuple même, Rajeunir mon pouvoir, renouveler mes droits. L'écarlate sacrée était teinte deux fois. Cette pourpre est au peuple, et, d'une âme loyale, Je la tiens de lui.—Mais la couronne royale! Quand l'ai-je demandée? Et qui dit que j'en veux? Je ne donnerais pas un seul de mes cheveux, De ces cheveux blanchis à servir l'Angleterre, Pour tous les fleurons d'or des princes de la terre. Ôtez cela d'ici! Remportez, remportez Ce hochet, ridicule entre les vanités! N'attendez pas qu'aux pieds je foule ces misères! Qu'ils me connaissent mal, les hommes peu sincères Qui m'osent affronter jusqu'à me couronner! J'ai reçu de Dieu plus qu'ils ne peuvent donner, La grâce inamissible; et de moi je suis maître. Une fois fils du ciel, peut-on cesser de l'être? De nos prospérités l'univers est jaloux. Que me faut-il de plus que le bonheur de tous? Je vous l'ai dit. Ce peuple est le peuple d'élite. L'Europe de cette île est l'humble satellite. Tout cède à notre étoile; et l'impie est maudit. Il semble, à voir cela, que le Seigneur ait dit: —Angleterre! grandis, et sois ma fille aînée. Entre les nations mes mains t'ont couronnée; Sois donc ma bien-aimée, et marche à mes côtés.— Il déroule sur nous d'abondantes bontés; Chaque jour qui finit, chaque jour qui commence, Ajoute un anneau d'or à cette chaîne immense. On croirait que ce Dieu, terrible aux philistins, À comme un ouvrier composé nos destins; Que son bras, sur un axe indestructible aux âges, De ce vaste édifice a scellé les rouages, Œuvre mystérieuse, et dont ses longs efforts Pour des siècles peut-être ont monté les ressorts. Ainsi tout va. La roue, à la roue enchaînée, Mord de sa dent de fer la machine entraînée; Les massifs balanciers, les antennes, les poids, Labyrinthe vivant, se meuvent à la fois; L'effrayante machine accomplit sans relâche Sa marche inexorable et sa puissante tâche; Et des peuples entiers, pris dans ses mille bras, Disparaîtraient broyés, s'ils ne se rangeaient pas. Et j'entraverais Dieu, dont la loi salutaire Nous fait un sort à part dans le sort de la terre! J'irais, du peuple élu foulant le droit ancien, Mettre mon intérêt à la place du sien! Pilote, j'ouvrirais la voile aux vents contraires!

(Hochant la tête.)

Non, je ne donne pas cette joie aux faux frères. Le vieux navire anglais est toujours roi des flots. Le colosse est debout. Que sont d'obscurs complots Contre les hauts destins de la Grande-Bretagne? Qu'est-ce qu'un coup de pioche aux flancs d'une montagne?

(Promenant des yeux de lynx autour de lui.)

Avis aux malveillants! on sait tout ce qu'ils font. Le flot est transparent, si l'abîme est profond. On voit le fond du piège où rampe leur pensée. La vipère parfois de son dard s'est blessée; Au feu qu'on allumait souvent on se brûla; Et les yeux du Seigneur vont courant çà et là.— Qui du peuple et des rois a signé le divorce? Moi.—Croit-on donc me prendre à cette vaine amorce? Un diadème!—Anglais, j'en brisais autrefois. Sans en avoir porté, j'en connais bien le poids. Quitter pour une cour le camp qui m'environne? Changer mon glaive en sceptre et mon casque en couronne? Allons! suis-je un enfant? me croit-on né d'hier? Ne sais-je pas que l'or pèse plus que le fer? M'édifier un trône! Eh! c'est creuser ma tombe. Cromwell, pour y monter, sait trop comme on en tombe. Et d'ailleurs, que d'ennuis s'amassent sur ces fronts Qui se rident sitôt, hérissés de fleurons! Chacun de ces fleurons cache une ardente épine. La couronne les tue; un noir souci les mine; Elle change en tyran le mortel le plus doux, Et, pesant sur le roi, le fait peser sur tous. Le peuple les admire, et, s'abdiquant lui-même, Compte tous les rubis dont luit le diadème; Mais comme il frémirait pour eux de leur fardeau, S'il regardait le front et non pas le bandeau! Eux, leur charge les trouble, et leurs mains souveraines De l'état chancelant mêlent bientôt les rênes.— Ah! remportez ce signe exécrable, odieux! Ce bandeau trop souvent tombe du front aux yeux.—

(Larmoyant.)

Et qu'en ferais-je enfin? Mal né pour la puissance, Je suis simple de cœur et vis dans l'innocence. Si j'ai, la fronde en main, veillé sur le bercail, Si j'ai devant l'écueil pris place au gouvernail, J'ai dû me dévouer pour la cause commune. Mais que n'ai-je vieilli dans mon humble fortune! Que n'ai-je vu tomber les tyrans aux abois, À l'ombre de mon chaume et de mon petit bois! Hélas! j'eusse aimé mieux ces champs où l'on respire, Le ciel m'en est témoin, que les soins de l'empire; Et Cromwell eût trouvé plus de charme cent fois À garder ses moutons qu'à détrôner des rois!

(Pleurant.)

Que parle-t-on de sceptre? Ah! j'ai manqué ma vie. Ce morceau de clinquant n'a rien qui me convie. Ayez pitié de moi, frères, loin d'envier Votre vieux général, votre vieil Olivier. Je sens mon bras faiblir, et ma fin est prochaine. Depuis assez longtemps suis-je pas à la chaîne? Je suis vieux, je suis las; je demande merci. N'est-il pas temps qu'enfin je me repose aussi? Chaque jour j'en appelle à la bonté divine. Et devant le Seigneur je frappe ma poitrine. Que je veuille être roi! Si frêle et tant d'orgueil! Ce projet, et j'en jure à côté du cercueil, Il m'est plus étranger, frères, que la lumière Du soleil à l'enfant dans le sein de sa mère! Loin ce nouveau pouvoir à mes vœux présenté! Je n'en accepte rien,—rien que l'hérédité.

The subtlety and variety of power displayed in the treatment of the chief character should be evident alike to those who look only on the upright side of it and those who can see only its more oblique aspect. The Cromwell of Hugo is as far from the faultless monster of Carlyle's creation and adoration as from the all but unredeemed villain of royalist and Hibernian tradition: he is a great and terrible poetic figure, imbued throughout with active life and harmonized throughout by imaginative intuition: a patriot and a tyrant, a dissembler and a believer, a practical humorist and a national hero.

The famous preface in which the batteries of pseudo classic tradition were stormed and shattered at a charge has itself long since become a classic. That the greatest poet was also the greatest prose-writer of his generation there could no longer be any doubt among men of any intelligence: but not even yet was more than half the greatness of his multitudinous force revealed. Two years later, at the age of twenty-seven, he published the superb and entrancing Orientales: the most musical and many-colored volume of verse that ever had glorified the language. From Le Feu du Ciel to Sara la Baigneuse, from the thunder-peals of exterminating judgment to the flute-notes of innocent girlish luxury in the sense of loveliness and life, the inexhaustible range of his triumph expands and culminates and extends. Shelley has left us no more exquisite and miraculous piece of lyrical craftsmanship than Les Djinns; none perhaps so rich in variety of modulation, so perfect in rise and growth and relapse and reiterance of music.

Murs, ville, Et port, Asile De mort, Mer grise Où brise La brise, Tout dort. Dans la plaine Naît un bruit. C'est l'haleine De la nuit. Elle brame Comme une âme Qu'une flamme Toujours suit.

Then the terrible music of the flight of evil spirits—"troupeau lourd et rapide"—grows as it were note by note and minute by minute up to its full height of tempest, and again relapses and recedes into the subsiding whisper of the corresponsive close.

Ce bruit vague Qui s'endort, C'est la vague Sur le bord; C'est la plainte Presque éteinte D'une sainte Pour un mort. On doute La nuit... J'écoute:— Tout fuit, Tout passe; L'espace Efface Le bruit.

And here, like Shelley, was Hugo already the poet of freedom, a champion of the sacred right and the holy duty of resistance. The husk of a royalist education, the crust of reactionary misconceptions, had already begun to drop off; not yet a pure republican, he was now ripe to receive and to understand the doctrine of human right, the conception of the common weal, as distinguished from imaginary duties and opposed to hereditary claims.

The twenty-eighth year of his life, which was illuminated by the issue of these passionate and radiant poems, witnessed also the opening of his generous and lifelong campaign or crusade against the principle of capital punishment. With all possible reverence and all possible reluctance, but remembering that without perfect straightforwardness and absolute sincerity I should be even unworthier than I am to speak of Victor Hugo at all, I must say that his reasoning on this subject seems to me insufficient and inconclusive: that his own radical principle, the absolute inviolability of human life, the absolute sinfulness of retributive blood-shedding, if not utterly illogical and untenable, is tenable or logical only on the ground assumed by those quaintest though not least pathetic among fanatics and heroes, the early disciples of George Fox. If a man tells you that supernatural revelation has forbidden him to take another man's life under all and any circumstances, he is above or beyond refutation; if he says that self-defense is justifiable, and that righteous warfare is a patriotic duty, but that to exact from the very worst of murderers, a parricide or a poisoner, a Philip the Second or a Napoleon the Third, the payment of a life for a life—or even of one infamous existence for whole hecatombs of innocent lives—is an offense against civilization and a sin against humanity, I am not merely unable to accept, but incompetent to understand his argument. We may most heartily agree with him that France is degraded by the guillotine, and that England is disgraced by the gallows, and yet our abhorrence of these barbarous and nauseous brutalities may not preclude us from feeling that a dealer (for example) in professional infanticide by starvation might very properly be subjected to vivisection without anæsthetics, and that all manly and womanly minds not distorted or distracted by prepossessions or assumptions might rationally and laudably rejoice in the prospect of this legal and equitable process. "The senseless old law of retaliation" (la vieille et inepte loi du talion) is inept or senseless only when the application of it is false to the principle: when justice in theory becomes unjust in practice. Another stale old principle or proverb—"abusus non tollit usum"—suffices to confute some of the arguments—I am very far from saying, all—adduced or alleged by the ardent eloquence of Victor Hugo in his admirable masterpiece of terrible and pathetic invention—Le dernier jour d'un condamné, and subsequently in the impressive little history of Claude Gueux, in the famous speech on behalf of Charles Hugo when impeached on a charge of insult to the laws in an article on the punishment of death, and in the fervent eloquence of his appeal on the case of a criminal executed in Guernsey, and of his protest addressed to Lord Palmerston against the horrible result of its rejection. That certain surviving methods of execution are execrable scandals to the country which maintains them, he has proved beyond all humane or reasonable question; and that all murderers are not alike inexcusable is no less indisputable a proposition; but beyond these two points the most earnest and exuberant advocacy can advance nothing likely to convince any but those already converted to the principle that human life must never be taken in punishment of crime—that there are not criminals whose existence insults humanity, and cries aloud on justice for mercy's very sake to cut it off.

The next year (1830) is famous forever beyond all others in the history of French literature: it was the year of Hernani, the date of liberation and transfiguration for the tragic stage of France. The battle which raged round the first acted play of Hugo's, and the triumph which crowned the struggles of its champions, are not these things written in too many chronicles to be for the thousandth time related here? And of its dramatic and poetic quality what praise could be uttered that must not before this have been repeated at least some myriads of times? But if there be any mortal to whom the heroic scene of the portraits, the majestic and august monologue of Charles the Fifth at the tomb of Charles the Great, the terrible beauty, the vivid pathos, the bitter sweetness of the close, convey no sense of genius and utter no message of delight, we can only say that it would simply be natural, consistent, and proper for such a critic to recognize in Shakespeare a barbarian, and a Philistine in Milton.

Nevertheless, if we are to obey the perhaps rather childish impulse of preference and selection among the highest works of the highest among poets, I will avow that to my personal instinct or apprehension Marion de Lorme seems a yet more perfect and pathetic masterpiece than even Hernani itself. The always generous and loyal Dumas placed it at the very head of his friend's dramatic works. Written, as most readers (I presume) will remember, before its predecessor on the stage, it was prohibited on the insanely fatuous pretext that the presentation of King Louis the Thirteenth was an indirect affront to the majesty of King Charles the Tenth. After that luckless dotard had been driven off his throne, it was at once proposed to produce the hitherto interdicted play before an audience yet palpitating with the thrill of revolution and resentment. But the chivalrous loyalty of Victor Hugo refused to accept a facile and factitious triumph at the expense of an exiled old man, over the ruins of a shattered old cause. The play was not permitted by its author to enter till the spring of the following year on its inevitable course of glory. It is a curious and memorable fact that the most tender-hearted of all great poets had originally made the hero of this tragedy leave the heroine unforgiven for the momentary and reluctant relapse into shame by which she had endeavored to repurchase his forfeited life; and that Prosper Mérimée should have been the first, Marie Dorval the second, to reclaim a little mercy for the penitent. It is to their pleading that we owe the sublime pathos of the final parting between Marion and Didier.

In one point it seems to me that this immortal masterpiece may perhaps be reasonably placed, with Le Roi s'amuse and Ruy Blas, in triune supremacy at the head of Victor Hugo's plays. The wide range of poetic abilities, the harmonious variety of congregated powers, displayed in these three great tragedies through almost infinite variations of terror and pity and humor and sublime surprise, will seem to some readers, whose reverence is no less grateful for other gifts of the same great hand, unequalled at least till the advent in his eighty-first year of Torquemada.

Victor Hugo was not yet thirty when all these triumphs lay behind him. In the twenty-ninth year of a life which would seem fabulous and incredible in the record of its achievements if divided by lapse of time from all possible proof of its possibility by the attestation of dates and facts, he published in February Notre-Dame de Paris, in November Les Feuilles d'Automne: that the two dreariest months of the year might not only "smell April and May," but outshine July and August. The greatest of all tragic romances has a Grecian perfection of structure, with a Gothic intensity of pathos. To attempt the praise of such a work would be only less idle than to refuse it. Terror and pity, with eternal fate for key-note to the strain of story, never struck deeper to men's hearts through more faultless evolution of combining circumstance on the tragic stage of Athens. Louis the Eleventh has been painted by many famous hands, but Hugo's presentation of him, as compared for example with Scott's, is as a portrait by Velasquez to a portrait by Vandyke. The style was a new revelation of the supreme capacities of human speech: the touch of it on any subject of description or of passion is as the touch of the sun for penetrating irradiation and vivid evocation of life.

From the Autumn Leaves to the Songs of the Twilight, and again from the Inner Voices to the Sunbeams and Shadows, the continuous jet of lyric song through a space of ten fertile years was so rich in serene and various beauty that the one thing notable in a flying review of its radiant course is the general equality of loveliness inform and color, which is relieved and heightened at intervals by some especial example of a beauty more profound or more sublime. The first volume of the four, if I mistake not, won a more immediate and universal homage than the rest: its unsurpassed melody was so often the raiment of emotion which struck home to all hearts a sense of domestic tenderness too pure and sweet and simple for perfect expression by any less absolute and omnipotent lord of style, that it is no wonder if in many minds—many mothers' minds especially—there should at once have sprung up an all but ineradicable conviction that no subsequent verse must be allowed to equal or excel the volume which contained such flower-like jewels of song as the nineteenth and twentieth of these unwithering and imperishable Leaves. But no error possible to a rational creature could be more serious or more complete than the assumption of any inferiority in the volume containing the two glorious poems addressed to Admiral Canaris, the friend (may I be forgiven the filial vanity or egotism which impels me to record it?) of the present writer's father in his youth; the two first in date of Hugo's finest satires, the lines that scourge a backbiter and the lines that brand a traitor (the resonant and radiant indignation of the latter stands unsurpassed in the very Châtiments themselves); the two most enchanting aubades or songs of sunrise that ever had out-sung the birds and out-sweetened the flowers of the dawn; and—for here I can cite no more—the closing tribute of lines more bright than the lilies whose name they bear, offered by a husband's love at the sweet still shrine of motherhood and wifehood. The first two stanzas of the second aubade are all that can here be quoted.

L'aurore s'allume, L'ombre épaisse fuit; Le rêve et la brume Vont où va la nuit; Paupières et roses S'ouvrent demi-closes; Du réveil des choses On entend le bruit. Tout chante et murmure, Tout parle à la fois, Fumée et verdure, Les nids et les toits; Le vent parle aux chênes, L'eau parie aux fontaines; Toutes les haleines Deviennent des voix.

And in each of the two succeeding volumes there is, among all their other things of price, a lyric which may even yet be ranked with the highest subsequent work of its author for purity of perfection, for height and fulness of note, for music and movement and informing spirit of life. We ought to have in English, but I fear—or rather I am only too sure—we have not, a song in which the sound of the sea is rendered as in that translation of the trumpet-blast of the night-wind, with all its wails and pauses and fluctuations and returns, done for once into human speech and interpreted into spiritual sense forever. For instinctive mastery of its means and absolute attainment of its end, for majesty of living music and fidelity of sensitive imagination, there is no lyric poem in any language more wonderful or more delightful.

UNE NUIT QU'ON ENTENDAIT LA MER SANS LA VOIR

Quels sont ces bruits sourds? Écoutez vers l'onde Cette voix profonde Qui pleure toujours Et qui toujours gronde, Quoiqu'un son plus clair Parfois l'interrompe...— Le vent de la mer Souffle dans sa trompe. Comme il pleut ce soir! N'est-ce pas, mon hôte? Là-bas, à la côte, Le ciel est bien noir, La mer est bien haute On dirait l'hiver; Parfois on s'y trompe...— Le vent de la mer Souffle dans sa trompe. Oh! marins perdus! Au loin, dans cette ombre. Sur la nef qui sombre, Que de bras tendus Vers la terre sombre! Pas d'ancre de fer Que le flot ne rompe.— Le vent de la mer Souffle dans sa trompe. Nochers imprudents! Le vent dans la voile Déchire la toile Comme avec les dents! Là-haut pas d'étoile! L'un lutte avec l'air, L'autre est à la pompe.— Le vent de la mer Souffle dans sa trompe. C'est toi, c'est ton feu Que le nocher rêve, Quand le flot s'élève, Chandelier que Dieu Pose sur la grève, Phare au rouge éclair Que la brume estompe!— Le vent de la mer Souffle dans sa trompe.

A yet sweeter and sadder and more magical sea-song there was yet to come years after—but only from the lips of an exile. Of the ballad—so to call it, if any term of definition may suffice—which stands out as a crowning splendor among Les Rayons et les Ombres, not even Hugo's own eloquence, had it been the work (which is impossible) of any other great poet in all time, could have said anything adequate at all. Not even Coleridge and Shelley, the sole twin sovereigns of English lyric poetry, could have produced this little piece of lyric work by combination and by fusion of their gifts. The pathetic truthfulness and the simple manfulness of the mountain shepherd's distraction and devotion might have been given in ruder phrase and tentative rendering by the nameless ballad-makers of the border: but here is a poem which unites something-of the charm of Clerk Saunders and The Wife of Usher's Well with something of the magic of Christabel and the Ode to the West Wind; a thing, no doubt, impossible; but none the less obviously accomplished.[1]

The lyric work of these years would have been enough for the energy of another man, for the glory of another poet; it was but a part, it was (I had well nigh said) the lesser part, of its author's labors—if labor be not an improper term for the successive or simultaneous expressions or effusions of his indefatigable spirit. The year after Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Feuilles d'Automne appeared one of the great crowning tragedies of all time, Le Roi s'amuse. As the key-note of Marion de Lorme had been redemption by expiation, so the key-note of this play is expiation by retribution. The simplicity, originality, and straightforwardness of the terrible means through which this austere conception is worked out would give moral and dramatic value to a work less rich in the tenderest and sublimest poetry, less imbued with the purest fire of pathetic passion. After the magnificent pleading of the Marquis de Nangis in the preceding play, it must have seemed impossible that the poet should, without a touch of repetition or reiterance, be able again to confront a young king with an old servant, pour forth again the denunciation and appeal of a breaking heart, clothe again the haughtiness of honor, the loyalty of grief, the sanctity of indignation, in words that shine like lightning and verses that thunder like the sea. But the veteran interceding for a nephew's life is a less tragic figure than he who comes to ask account for a daughter's honor. Hugo never merely repeats himself; his miraculous fertility and force of utterance were not more indefatigable and inexhaustible than the fountains of thought and emotion which fed that eloquence with fire.

In the seventh scene of the fourth act of Marion de Lorme, an old warrior of the days of Henri Quatre comes to plead with the son of his old comrade in arms for the life of his heir, condemned to death as a duelist by the edict of Richelieu.

LE MARQUIS DE NANGIS (se relevant).

Je dis qu'il est bien temps que vous y songiez, sire; Que le cardinal-duc a de sombres projets, Et qu'il boit le meilleur du sang de vos sujets. Votre père Henri, de mémoire royale, N'eût pas ainsi livré sa noblesse loyale; Il ne la frappait point sans y fort regarder; Et, bien gardé par elle, il la savait garder. Il savait qu'on peut faire avec des gens d'épées Quelque chose de mieux que des têtes coupées; Qu'ils sont bons à la guerre. Il ne l'ignorait point, Lui dont plus d'une balle a troué le pourpoint. Ce temps était le bon. J'en fus, et je l'honore, Un peu de seigneurie y palpitait encore. Jamais à des seigneurs un prêtre n'eût touché. On n'avait point alors de tête à bon marché. Sire! en des jours mauvais comme ceux où nous sommes, Croyez un vieux, gardez un peu de gentilshommes. Vous en aurez besoin peut-être à votre tour. Hélas! vous gémirez peut-être quelque jour Que la place de Grève ait été si fêtée, Et que tant de seigneurs de bravoure indomptée, Vers qui se tourneront vos regrets envieux, Soient morts depuis longtemps qui ne seraient pas vieux! Car nous sommes tout chauds de la guerre civile, Et le tocsin d'hier gronde encor dans la ville. Soyez plus ménager des peines du bourreau. C'est lui qui doit garder son estoc au fourreau, Non pas vous. D'échafauds montrez-vous économe. Craignez d'avoir un jour à pleurer tel brave homme, Tel vaillant de grand cœur, dont, à l'heure qu'il est, Le squelette blanchit aux chaînes d'un gibet! Sire! le sang n'est pas une bonne rosée; Nulle moisson ne vient sur la Grève arrosée, Et le peuple des rois évite le balcon, Quand aux dépens du Louvre on peuple Montfaucon. Meurent les courtisans, s'il faut que leur voix aille Vous amuser, pendant que le bourreau travaille! Cette voix des flatteurs qui dit que tout est bon, Qu'après tout on est fils d'Henri Quatre, et Bourbon, Si haute qu'elle soit, ne couvre pas sans peine Le bruit sourd qu'en tombant fait une tête humaine. Je vous en donne avis, ne jouez pas ce jeu, Roi, qui serez un jour face à face avec Dieu. Donc, je vous dis, avant que rien ne s'accomplisse, Qu'à tout prendre il vaut mieux un combat qu'un supplice, Que ce n'est pas la joie et l'honneur des états De voir plus de besogne aux bourreaux qu'aux soldats, Que c'est un pasteur dur pour la France où vous êtes Qu'un prêtre qui se paye une dîme de têtes, Et que cet homme illustre entre les inhumains Qui touche à votre sceptre—a du sang à ses mains!

In the fifth scene of the first act of Le Roi s'amuse, an old nobleman whose life, forfeit on a charge of friendship or relationship with rebels, has been repurchased by his daughter from the king at the price of her honor, is insulted by the king's jester when he comes to speak with the king, and speaks thus, without a glance at the jester.

Une insulte de plus!—Vous, sire, écoutez-moi, Comme vous le devez, puisque vous êtes roi! Vous m'avez fait un jour mener pieds nus en Grève; Là, vous m'avez fait grâce, ainsi que dans un rêve, Et je vous ai béni, ne sachant en effet Ce qu'un roi cache au fond d'une grâce qu'il fait. Or, vous aviez caché ma honte dans la mienne.— Oui, sire, sans respect pour une race ancienne, Pour le sang de Poitiers, noble depuis mille ans, Tandis que, revenant de la Grève à pas lents, Je priais dans mon cœur le dieu de la victoire Qu'il vous donnât mes jours de vie en jours de gloire, Vous, François de Valois, le soir du même jour, Sans crainte, sans pitié, sans pudeur, sans amour, Dans votre lit, tombeau de la vertu des femmes, Vous avez froidement, sous vos baisers infâmes, Terni, flétri, souillé, déshonoré, brisé Diane de Poitiers, comtesse de Brézé! Quoi! lorsque j'attendais l'arrêt qui me condamne, Tu courais donc au Louvre, ô ma chaste Diane! Et lui, ce roi sacré chevalier par Bayard, Jeune homme auquel il faut des plaisirs de vieillard, Pour quelques jours de plus dont Dieu seul sait le compte, Ton père sous ses pieds, te marchandait ta honte, Et cet affreux tréteau, chose horrible à penser! Qu'un matin le bourreau vint en Grève dresser, Avant la fin du jour devait être, ô misère! Ou le lit de la fille, ou l'échafaud du père! Ô Dieu! qui nous jugez! qu'avez-vous dit là-haut, Quand vos regards ont vu, sur ce même échafaud, Se vautrer, triste et louche, et sanglante, et souillée, La luxure royale en clémence habillée? Sire! en faisant cela, vous avez mal agi. Que du sang d'un vieillard le pavé fût rougi, C'était bien. Ce vieillard, peut-être respectable, Le méritait, étant de ceux du connétable. Mais que pour le vieillard vous ayez pris l'enfant, Que vous ayez broyé sous un pied triomphant La pauvre femme en pleurs, à s'effrayer trop prompte C'est une chose impie, et dont vous rendrez compte! Vous avez dépassé votre droit d'un grand pas. Le père é ait à vous, mais la fille non pas. Ah! vous m'avez fait grâce!—Ah! vous nommez la chose Une grâce! et je suis un ingrat, je suppose! —Sire, au lieu d'abuser ma fille, bien plutôt Que n'êtes-vous venu vous-même en mon cachot, Je vous aurais crié:—Faites-moi mourir, grâce! Oh! grâce pour ma fille, et grâce pour ma race! Oh! faites-moi mourir! la tombe, et non l'affront! Pas de tête plutôt qu'une souillure au front! Oh! monseigneur le roi, puisqu'ainsi l'on vous nomme, Croyez-vous qu'un chrétien, um comte, un gentilhomme, Soit moins décapité, répondez, monseigneur, Quand au lieu de la tête il lui manque l'honneur? —J'aurais dit cela, sire, et le soir, dans l'église, Dans mon cercueil sanglant baisant ma barbe grise, Ma Diane au cœur pur, ma fille au front sacré, Honorée, eût prié pour son père honoré! —Sire, je ne viens pas redemander ma fille. Quand on n'a plus d'honneur, on n'a plus de famille. Qu'elle vous aime ou non d'un amour insensé, Je n'ai rien à reprendre où la honte a passé. Gardez-la.—Seulement je me suis mis en tête De venir vous troubler ainsi dans chaque fête, Et jusqu'à ce qu'un père, un frère, ou quelque époux, —La chose arrivera,—nous ait vengés de vous, Pâle, à tous vos banquets, je reviendrai vous dire: —Vous avez mal agi, vous avez mal fait, sire!— Et vous m'écouterez, et votre front terni Ne se relèvera que quand j'aurai fini. Vous voudrez, pour forcer ma vengeance à se taire, Me rendre au bourreau. Non. Vous ne l'oserez faire, De peur que ce ne soit mon spectre qui demain

(Montrant sa tête)

Revienne vous parler,—cette tête à la main!

Marion de Lorme had been prohibited by Charles the Tenth for an imaginary reflection on Charles the Tenth; Le Roi s'amuse was prohibited by Louis-Philippe the First—and Last—for an imaginary reflection on Citizen Philippe Egalité. Victor Hugo vindicated his meaning and reclaimed his rights in a most eloquent, most manly, and most unanswerable speech before a tribunal which durst not and could not but refuse him justice. Early in the following year he brought out the first of his three tragedies in prose—in a prose which even the most loyal lovers of poetry, Théophile Gautier at their head, acknowledged on trial to be as good as verse. And assuredly it would be, if any prose ever could: which yet I must confess that I for one can never really feel to be possible. Lucrèce Borgia, the first-born of these three, is also the most perfect in structure as well as the most sublime in subject. The plots of all three are equally pure inventions of tragic fancy: Gennaro and Fabiano, the heroic son of the Borgia and the caitiff lover of the Tudor, are of course as utterly unknown to history as is the self-devotion of the actress Tisbe. It is more important to remark and more useful to remember that the master of terror and pity, the command of all passions and all powers that may subserve the purpose of tragedy, is equally triumphant and infallible in them all. Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor appeared respectively in February and in November of the year 1833; Angelo, two years later; and the year after this the exquisite and melodious libretto of La Esmeralda, which should be carefully and lovingly studied by all who would appreciate the all but superhuman versatility and dexterity of metrical accomplishment which would have sufficed to make a lesser poet famous among his peers forever, but may almost escape notice in the splendor of Victor Hugo's other and sublimer qualities. In his thirty-seventh year all these blazed out once more together in the tragedy sometimes apparently rated as his master-work by judges whose verdict would on any such question be worthy at least of all considerate respect. No one that I know of has ever been absurd enough to make identity in tone of thought or feeling, in quality of spirit or of style, the ground for a comparison of Hugo with Shakespeare: they are of course as widely different as are their respective countries and their respective times: but never since the death of Shakespeare had there been so perfect and harmonious a fusion of the highest comedy with the deepest tragedy as in the five many-voiced and many-colored acts of Ruy Blas.

At the age of forty Victor Hugo gave to the stage which for thirteen years had been glorified by his genius the last work he was ever to write for it. There may perhaps be other readers besides myself who take even more delight in Les Burgraves than in some of the preceding plays which had been more regular in action, more plausible in story, less open to the magnificent reproach of being too good for the stage—as the Hamlet which came finally from the recasting hand of Shakespeare was found to be, in the judgment even of Shakespeare's fellows; too rich in lyric beauty, too superb in epic state. The previous year had seen the publication of the marvelously eloquent, copious, and vivid letters which gave to the world the impressions received by its greatest poet in a tour on the Rhine made five years earlier—that is, in the year of Ruy Blas. In this book, as Gautier at once observed, the inspiration of Les Burgraves is evidently and easily traceable. Among numberless masterpieces of description, from which I have barely time to select for mention the view of Bishop Hatto's tower by the appropriately Dantesque light of a furnace at midnight—not as better than others, but as an example of the magic by which the writer imbues and impregnates observation and recollection with feeling and with fancy—the most enchanting legend of enchantment ever written for children of all ages, sweet and strange enough to have grown up among the fairy tales of the past whose only known authors are the winds and suns of their various climates, lurks like a flower in a crevice of a crumbling fortress. The entrancing and haunting beauty of Régina's words as she watches the departing swallows—words which it may seem that any one might have said, but to which none other could have given the accent and the effect that Hugo has thrown into the simple sound of them—was as surely derived, we cannot but think, from some such milder and brighter vision of the remembered Rhineland solitudes, as were the sublime and all but Æschylean imprecations of Guanhumara from the impression of their darker and more savage memories or landscapes.

OTBERT (lui montrant la fenêtre).

Voyez ce beau soleil!

RÉGINA

Oui, le couchant s'enflamme.

Nous sommes en automne et nous sommes au soir. Partout la feuille tombe et le bois devient noir.

OTBERT

Les feuilles renaîtront.

RÉGINA

Oui.

(Rêvant et regardant le ciel.)

Vite! à tire-d'ailes!—

—Oh! c'est triste de voir s'enfuir les hirondelles!— Elles s'en vont là-bas, vers le midi doré.

OTBERT

Elles reviendront.

RÉGINA

Oui.—Mais moi je ne verrai

Ni l'oiseau revenir ni la feuille renaître!

Two years before the appearance of Les Burgraves Victor Hugo had begun his long and glorious career as an orator by a speech of characteristically generous enthusiasm, delivered on his reception into the Academy. The forgotten playwright and versifier whom he succeeded had been a professional if not a personal enemy: the one memorable thing about the man was his high-minded opposition to the tyranny of Napoleon, his own personal friend before the epoch of that tyranny began: and this was the point at once seized and dwelt on by the orator in a tone of earnest and cordial respect. The fiery and rapturous eloquence with which, at the same time, he celebrated the martial triumphs of the empire, gave ample proof that he was now, as his father had prophesied that his mother's royalist boy would become when he grew to be a man, a convert to the views of that father, a distinguished though ill-requited soldier of the empire, and a faithful champion or mourner of its cause. The stage of Napoleonic hero-worship, single-minded and single-eyed if short-sighted and misdirected, through which Victor Hugo was still passing on towards the unseen prospect of a better faith, had been vividly illustrated and vehemently proclaimed in his letters on the Rhine, and was hereafter to be described with a fervent and pathetic fidelity in a famous chapter of Les Misérables. The same phase of patriotic prepossession inspired his no less generous tribute to the not very radiant memory of Casimir Delavigne, to whom he paid likewise the last and crowning honor of a funeral oration: an honor afterwards conferred on Frédéric Soulié, and far more deservedly bestowed on Honoré de Balzac. More generous his first political speech in the chamber of peers could not be, but there was more of reason and justice in its fruitless appeal for more than barren sympathy, for a moral though not material intervention, on behalf of Poland in 1846. His second speech as a peer is an edifying commentary on the vulgar English view of his character as defective in all the practical and rational qualities of a politician, a statesman, or a patriot. The subject was the consolidation and defense of the French coastline: a poet, of course, according to all reasonable tradition, if he ventured to open his unserviceable lips at all on such a grave matter of public business, ought to have remembered what was expected of him by the sagacity of blockheads, and carefully confined himself to the clouds, leaving facts to take care of themselves and proofs to hang floating in the air, while his vague and verbose declamation wandered at its own sweet will about and about the matter in hand, and never came close enough to grapple it. This, I regret to say, is exactly what the greatest poet of his age was inconsiderate enough to avoid, and most markedly to abstain from doing; a course of conduct which can only be attributed to his notorious and deplorable love of paradox. His speech, though not wanting in eloquence of a reserved and masculine order, was wholly occupied with sedate and business-like exposition of facts and suggestion of remedies, grounded on experience and study of the question, and resulting in a proposal at once scientific and direct for such research as might result, if possible, in an arrest of the double danger with which the coast was threatened by the advance of the Atlantic and the Channel to a gradual obstruction of the great harbors and by the withdrawal or subsidence of the Mediterranean from the seaports of the south; finally, the orator urged upon his audience as a crowning necessity the creation of fresh harbors of refuge in dangerous and neglected parts of the coast; insisting, with a simple and serious energy somewhat unlike the imaginary tone of the typical or traditional poet, on the plain fact that ninety-two ships had been lost on the same part of the coast within a space of seven years, which might have been saved by the existence of a harbor of refuge. To an Olympian or a Nephelococcygian intelligence such a paltry matter should have been even more indifferent than the claim of a family of exiles on the compassion of the country which had expelled them. To my own more humble and homely understanding it seems that there are not many more significant or memorable facts on record in the history of our age than this: that Victor Hugo was the advocate whose pleading brought back to France the banished race of which the future representative was for upwards of twenty years to keep him in banishment from France. On the evening of the same day on which the house of peers had listened to his speech in behalf of the Bonaparte family, Louis-Philippe, having taken cognizance of it, expressed his intention to authorize the return of the brood whose chief was hereafter to pick the pockets of his children. In the first fortnight of the following year the future author of the terrible Vision of Dante saluted in words full of noble and fervent reverence the apostle of Italian resurrection and Italian unity in the radiant figure of Pope Pius the Ninth. When the next month's revolution had flung Louis-Philippe from his throne, Victor Hugo declined to offer himself to the electors as a candidate for a seat in the assembly about to undertake the charge of framing a constitution for the commonwealth; but, if summoned by his fellow-citizens to take his share of this task, he expressed himself ready to discharge the duty so imposed on him with the disinterested self-devotion of which his whole future career was to give such continuous and such austere evidence. From the day on which sixty thousand voices summoned him to redeem this pledge, he never stinted nor slackened his efforts to fulfill the charge he had accepted in the closing words of a short, simple, and earnest address, in which he placed before his electors the contrasted likenesses of two different republics; one, misnamed a commonweal, the rule of the red flag, of barbarism and blindness, communism and proscription and revenge; the other a commonwealth indeed, in which all rights should be respected and no duties evaded or ignored; a government of justice and mercy, of practicable principles and equitable freedom, of no iniquitous traditions and no utopian aims. To establish this kind of commonwealth and prevent the resurrection of the other, Hugo, at the age of forty-six, professed himself ready to devote his life. The work of thirty-seven years is now before all men's eyes for proof how well this promise has been kept. On dangerous questions of perverse or perverted socialism (June 20, 1848), on the freedom of the press, on the state of siege, its temporary necessity and its imminent abuse, on the encouragement of letters and the freedom of the stage, he spoke, in the course of a few months, with what seems to my poor understanding the most admirable good sense and temperance, the most perfect moderation and loyalty. I venture to dwell upon this division of Hugo's life and labors with as little wish of converting as I could have hope to convert that large majority whose verdict has established as a law of nature the fact or the doctrine that "every poet is a fool" when he meddles with practical politics; but not without a confidence grounded on no superficial study that the maintainers of this opinion, if they wish to cite in support of it the evidence supplied by Victor Hugo's political career, will do well to persevere in the course which I will do them the justice to admit that—as far as I know—they have always hitherto adopted; in other words, to assume the universal assent of all persons worth mentioning to the accuracy of this previous assumption, and dismiss with a quiet smile or an open sneer the impossible notion that any one but some single imbecile or eccentric can pretend to take seriously what seems to them ridiculous, or to think that ridiculous which to their wiser minds commends itself as serious. This beaten road of assumption, this well-worn highway of assertion, is a safe as well as a simple line of travel: and the practical person who keeps to it can well afford to dispense with argument as palpably superfluous, and with evidence as obviously impertinent. Should he so far forget that great principle of precaution as to diverge from it into the modest and simple course of investigation and comparison of theory with fact and probability with proof, his task maybe somewhat harder, and its result somewhat less satisfactory. I would not advise any but an honest and candid believer in the theory which identifies genius with idiocy—which at all events would practically define one special form of genius as a note of general idiocy—to study the speeches (they are nine in number, including two brief and final replies to the personal attacks of one Montalembert, whose name used to be rather popular among a certain class of English journalists as that of a practical worshipper of their great god Compromise, and a professional enemy of all tyranny or villainy that was not serviceable and obsequious to his Church)—to study, I say, the speeches delivered by Victor Hugo in the Legislative Assembly during a space of exactly two years and eight days. The first of these speeches dealt with the question of what in England we call pauperism—with the possibility, the necessity, and the duty of its immediate relief and its ultimate removal: the second, with the infamous and inexpiable crime which diverted against the Roman republic an expedition sent out under the plea of protecting Rome against the atrocities of Austrian triumph. A double-faced and double-dealing law, which under the name or the mask of free education aimed at securing for clerical instruction a monopoly of public support and national encouragement, was exposed and denounced by Hugo in a speech which insisted no less earnestly and eloquently on the spiritual duty and the spiritual necessity of faith and hope than on the practical necessity and duty of vigilant resistance to priestly pretension, and vigilant exposure of ecclesiastical hypocrisy and reactionary intrigue. Against "the dry guillotine" of imprisonment in a tropical climate added to transportation for political offences, the whole eloquence of a heart as great as his genius was poured forth in fervor of indignation and pity, of passion and reason combined. The next trick of the infamous game played by the conspirators against the commonwealth, who were now beginning to show their hand, was the mutilation of the suffrage. To this again Victor Hugo opposed the same steadfast front of earnest and rational resistance; and yet again to the sidelong attack of the same political gang on the existing freedom of the press. A year and eight days elapsed before the delivery of his next and last great speech in the Assembly which he would fain have saved from the shame and ruin then hard at hand—the harvest of its own unprincipled infatuation. The fruit of conspiracy, long manured with fraud and falsehood and all the furtive impurities of intrigue, was now ripe even to rottenness, and ready to fall into the hands already stretched towards it—into the lips yet open to protest that no one—the accuser himself must know it—that no one was dreaming of a second French empire. All that reason and indignation, eloquence and argument, loyalty and sincerity could do to save the commonwealth from destruction and the country from disgrace, was done: how utterly in vain is matter of history—of one among the darkest pages in the roll of its criminal records. The voice of truth and honor was roared and hooted down by the faction whose tactics would have discredited a den of less dishonest and more barefaced thieves; the stroke of state was ready for striking; and the orator's next address was the utterance of an exile.

There are not, even in the whole work of Victor Hugo, many pages of deeper and more pathetic interest than those which explain to us "what exile is." Each of the three prefaces to the three volumes of his Actes et Paroles is rich in living eloquence, in splendid epigram and description, narrative and satire and study of men and things: but the second, it seems to me, would still be first in attraction, if it had no other claim than this, that it contains the record of the death of Captain Harvey. No reverence for innocent and heroic suffering, no abhorrence of triumphant and execrable crime, can impede or interfere with our sense of the incalculable profit, the measureless addition to his glory and our gain, resulting from Victor Hugo's exile of nineteen years and nine months. Greater already than all other poets of his time together, these years were to make him greater than any but the very greatest of all time. His first task was of course the discharge of a direct and practical duty; the record or registration of the events he had just witnessed, the infliction on the principal agent in them of the simple and immediate chastisement consisting in the delineation of his character and the recapitulation of his work. There would seem to be among modern Englishmen an impression—somewhat singular, it appears to me, in a race which professes to hold in special reverence a book so dependent for its arguments and its effects on a continuous appeal to conscience and emotion as the Bible—that the presence of passion, be it never so righteous, so rational, so inevitable by any one not ignoble or insane, implies the absence of reason; that such indignation as inflamed the lips of Elijah with prophecy, and armed the hand of Jesus with a scourge, is a sign—except of course in Palestine of old—that the person affected by this kind of moral excitement must needs be a lunatic of the sentimental if not rather of the criminal type. The main facts recorded in the pages of Napoléon le Petit and L'Histoire d'un Crime are simple, flagrant, palpable, indisputable. The man who takes any other view of them than is expressed in these two books must be prepared to impugn and to confute the principle that perjury, robbery, and murder are crimes. But, we are told, the perpetual vehemence of incessant imprecation, the stormy insistence of unremitting obloquy, which accompanies every chapter, illuminates every page, underlines every sentence of the narrative, must needs impair the confidence of an impartial reader in the trustworthiness of a chronicle and a commentary written throughout as in characters of flaming fire. Englishmen are proud to prefer a more temperate, a more practical, a more sedate form of political or controversial eloquence. When I remember and consider certain examples of popular oratory and controversy now flagrant and flourishing among us, I am tempted to doubt the exact accuracy of this undoubtedly plausible proposition: but, be that as it may, I must take leave to doubt yet more emphatically the implied conclusion that the best or the only good witness procurable on a question of right and wrong is one too impartial to feel enthusiasm or indignation; that indifference alike to good and evil is the sign of perfect equity and trustworthiness in a judge of moral or political questions; that a man who has witnessed a deliberate massacre of unarmed men, women, and children, if he be indiscreet enough to describe his experience in any tone but that of a scientific or æsthetic serenity, forfeits the inherent right of a reasonable and an honorable man to command a respectful and attentive hearing from all honorable and reasonable men.

But valuable and precious as all such readers will always hold these two book of immediate and implacable history, they will not, I presume, be rated among the more important labors of their author's literary life. No one who would know fully or would estimate aright the greatest genius born into the world in our nineteenth century can afford to pass them by with less than careful and sympathetic study: for without moral sympathy no care will enable a student to form any but a trivial and a frivolous judgment on writings which make their primary appeal to the conscience—to the moral instinct and the moral intelligence of the reader. They may perhaps not improperly be classed, for historic or biographic interest, with the Littérature et Philosophie mêlées which had been given to the world in 1834. From the crudest impressions of the boy to the ripest convictions of the man, one common quality informs and harmonizes every stage of thought, every phase of feeling, every change of spiritual outlook, which has left its mark on the writings of which that collection is composed; the quality of a pure, a perfect, an intense and burning sincerity. Apart from this personal interest which informs them all, two at least are indispensable to any serious and thorough study of Hugo's work: the fervent and reiterated intercession on behalf of the worse than neglected treasures of mediaeval architecture then delivered over for a prey to the claws of the destroyer and the paws of the restorer; the superb essay on Mirabeau, which remains as a landmark or a tidemark in the history of his opinions and the development of his powers. But the highest expression of these was not to be given in prose—not even in the prose of Victor Hugo.

There is not, it seems to me, in all this marvelous life, to which well nigh every year brought its additional aureole of glory, a point more important, a date more memorable, than the publication of the Châtiments. Between the prologue Night and the epilogue Light the ninety-eight poems that roll and break and lighten and thunder like waves of a visible sea fulfill the choir of their crescent and refluent harmonies with hardly less depth and change and strength of music, with no less living force and with no less passionate unity, than the waters on whose shores they were written. Two poems, the third and the sixth, in the first of the seven books into which the collection is divided, may be taken as immediate and sufficient instances of the two different keys in which the entire book is written; of the two styles, one bitterly and keenly realistic, keeping scornfully close to shameful fact—one higher in flight and wider in range of outlook, soaring strongly to the very summits of lyric passion—which alternate in terrible and sublime antiphony throughout the living pages of this imperishable record. A second Juvenal might have drawn for us with not less of angry fidelity and superb disgust the ludicrous and loathsome inmates of the den infested by holy hirelings of the clerical press; no Roman satirist could have sung, no Roman lyrist could have thundered, such a poem as that which has blasted for ever the name and the memory of the prostitute archbishop Sibour. The poniard of the priest who struck him dead at the altar he had desecrated struck a blow less deep and deadly than had been dealt already on the renegade pander of a far more infamous assassin. The next poem is a notable and remarkable example of the fusion sometimes accomplished—or, if this be thought a phrase too strong for accuracy, of the middle note sometimes touched, of the middle way sometimes taken—between the purely lyric and the purely satiric style or method. But it would be necessary to dwell on every poem, to pause at every page, if adequate justice were to be done to this or indeed to any of the volumes of verse published from this time forth by Victor Hugo. I will therefore, not without serious diffidence, venture once more to indicate by selection such poems as seem to me most especially notable among the greatest even of these. In the first book, besides the three already mentioned, I take for examples the solemn utterance of indignant mourning addressed to the murdered dead of the fourth of December; the ringing song in praise of art which ends in a note of noble menace; the scornful song that follows it, with a burden so majestic in its variations; the fearful and faithful "map of Europe" in 1852, with its closing word of witness for prophetic hope and faith; and the simple perfection of pathos in the song of the little forsaken birds and lambs and children. In the second book, the appeal "To the People," with a threefold cry for burden, calling on the buried Lazarus to rise again in words that seem to reverberate from stanza to stanza like peal upon peal of living thunder, prolonged in steadfast cadence from height to height across the hollows of a range of mountains, is one of the most wonderful symphonies of tragic and triumphant verse that ever shook the hearts of its hearers with rapture of rage and pity. The first and the two last stanzas seem to me absolutely unsurpassed and unsurpassable for pathetic majesty of music.

Partout pleurs, sanglots, cris funèbres. Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres? Je ne veux pas que tu sois mort. Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres? Ce n'est pas l'instant où l'on dort. La pâle Liberté gît sanglante à ta porte. Tu le sais, toi mort, elle est morte. Voici le chacal sur ton seuil, Voici les rats et les belettes, Pourquoi t'es-tu laissé lier de bandelettes? Ils te mordent dans ton cercueil! De tous les peuples on prépare Le convoi...— Lazare! Lazare! Lazare! Lève-toi!

* * * * * *

Ils bâtissent des prisons neuves; Ô dormeur sombre, entends les fleuves Murmurer, teints de sang vermeil; Entends pleurer les pauvres veuves, Ô noir dormeur au dur sommeil! Martyrs, adieu! le vent souffle, les pontons flottent, Les mères au front gris sanglotent; Leurs fils sont en proie aux vainqueurs; Elles gémissent sur la route; Les pleurs qui de leurs yeux s'échappent goutte à goutte Filtrent en haine dans nos cœurs. Les juifs triomphent, groupe avare Et sans foi...— Lazare! Lazare! Lazare! Lève-toi! Mais, il semble qu'on se réveille! Est-ce toi que j'ai dans l'oreille, Bourdonnement du sombre essaim? Dans la ruche frémit l'abeille; J'entends sourdre un vague tocsin. Les césars, oubliant qu'il est des gémonies, S'endorment dans les symphonies, Du lac Baltique au mont Etna; Les peuples sont dans la nuit noire; Dormez, rois; le clairon dit aux tyrans: victoire! Et l'orgue leur chante; hosanna! Qui répond à cette fanfare? Le beffroi...— Lazare! Lazare! Lazare! Lève-toi!

If ever a more superb structure of lyric verse was devised by the brain of man, it must have been, I am very certain, in a language utterly unknown to me. Every line, every pause, every note of it should be studied and restudied by those who would thoroughly understand the lyrical capacity of Hugo's at its very highest point of power, in the fullest sweetness of its strength.

About the next poem—'Souvenir de la nuit du 4'—others may try, if they please, to write, if they can; I can only confess that I cannot. Nothing so intolerable in its pathos, I should think, was ever written.

The stately melody of the stanzas in which the exile salutes in a tone of severe content the sorrows that environ and the comforts that sustain him, the island of his refuge, the sea-birds and the sea-rocks and the sea, closes aptly with yet another thought of the mothers weeping for their children.

Puisque le juste est dans l'abîme, Puisqu'on donne le sceptre au crime, Puisque tous les droits sont trahis, Puisque les plus fiers restent mornes, Puisqu'on affiche au coin des bornes Le déshonneur de mon pays; Ô République de nos pères, Grand Panthéon plein de lumières. Dôme d'or dans le libre azur, Temple des ombres immortelles, Puisqu'on vient avec des échelles Coller l'empire sur ton mur; Puisque toute âme est affaiblie, Puisqu'on rampe, puisqu'on oublie Le vrai, le pur, le grand, le beau. Les yeux indignés de l'histoire, L'honneur, la loi, le droit, la gloire, Et ceux qui sont dans le tombeau; Je t'aime, exil! douleur, je t'aime! Tristesse, sois mon diadème! Je t'aime, altière pauvreté! J'aime ma porte aux vents battue. J'aime le deuil, grave statue Qui vient s'asseoir à mon côté. J'aime le malheur qui m'éprouve, Et cette ombre où je vous retrouve, Ô vous à qui mon cœur sourit, Dignité, foi, vertu voilée, Toi, liberté, fière exilée, Et toi, dévouement, grand proscrit! J'aime cette île solitaire, Jersey, que la libre Angleterre Couvre de son vieux pavillon, L'eau noire, par moments accrue, Le navire, errante charrue, Le flot, mystérieux sillon. J'aime ta mouette, ô mer profonde, Qui secoue en perles ton onde Sur son aile aux fauves couleurs, Plonge dans les lames géantes, Et sort de ces gueules béantes Comme l'âme sort des douleurs. J'aime la roche solennelle D'où j'entends la plainte éternelle, Sans trêve comme le remords, Toujours renaissant dans les ombres, Des vagues sur les écueils sombres, Des mères sur leurs enfants morts.

The close of the third poem in the fourth book is a nobler protest than ever has been uttered or ever can be uttered in prose against the servile sophism of a false democracy which affirms or allows that a people has the divine right of voting itself into bondage. There is nothing grander in Juvenal, and nothing more true.

Ce droit, sachez-le bien, chiens du berger Maupas, Et la France et le peuple eux-mêmes ne l'ont pas. L'altière Vérité jamais ne tombe en cendre. La Liberté n'est pas une guenille à vendre, Jetée au tas, pendue au clou chez un fripier. Quand un peuple se laisse au piège estropier, Le droit sacré, toujours à soi-même fidèle, Dans chaque citoyen trouve une citadelle; On s'illustre en bravant un lâche conquérant, Et le moindre du peuple en devient le plus grand. Donc, trouvez du bonheur, ô plates créatures, À vivre dans la fange et dans les pourritures, Adorez ce fumier sous ce dais de brocart, L'honnête homme recule et s'accoude à l'écart. Dans la chute d'autrui je ne veux pas descendre. L'honneur n'abdique point. Nul n'a droit de me prendre Ma liberté, mon bien, mon ciel bleu, mon amour. Tout l'univers aveugle est sans droit sur le jour. Fût on cent millions d'esclaves, je suis libre. Ainsi parle Caton. Sur la Seine ou le Tibre, Personne n'est tombé tant qu'un seul est debout. Le vieux sang des aïeux qui s'indigne et qui bout, La vertu, la fierté, la justice, l'histoire, Toute une nation avec toute sa gloire Vit dans le dernier front qui ne veut pas plier. Pour soutenir le temple il suffit d'un pilier; Un français, c'est la France; un romain contient Rome, Et ce qui brise un peuple avorte aux pieds d'un homme.

The sixth and seventh poems in this book are each a superb example of its kind; the verses on an interview between Abd-el-Kader and Bonaparte are worthy of a place among the earlier Orientales for simplicity and fullness of effect in lyric tone and color; and satire could hardly give a finer and completer little study than that of the worthy tradesman who for love of his own strong-box would give his vote for a very Phalaris to reign over him, and put up with the brazen bull for love of the golden calf: an epigram which sums up an epoch. The indignant poem of Joyeuse Vie, with its terrible photographs of subterranean toil and want, is answered by the not less terrible though ringing and radiant song of L'empereur s'amuse; and this again by the four solemn stanzas in which a whole world of desolate suffering is condensed and realized. The verses of good counsel in which the imperial Macaire is admonished not to take himself too seriously, or trust in the duration of his fair and foul good fortune, are unsurpassed for concentration of contempt. The dialogue of the tyrannicide by the starlit sea with all visible and invisible things that impel or implore him to do justice is so splendid and thrilling in its keen and ardent brevity that we can hardly feel as though a sufficient answer were given to the instinctive reasoning which finds inarticulate utterance in the cry of the human conscience for retribution by a human hand, even when we read the two poems, at once composed and passionate in their austerity, which bid men leave God to deal with the supreme criminal of humanity. A Night's Lodging, the last poem of the fourth book, is perhaps the very finest and most perfect example of imaginative and tragic satire that exists: if this rank be due to a poem at once the most vivid in presentation, the most sublime in scorn, the most intense and absolute in condensed expression of abhorrence and in assured expression of belief.

But in the fifth of these seven caskets of chiseled gold and tempered steel there is a pearl of greater price than in any of the four yet opened. The song dated from sea, which takes farewell of all good things and all gladness left behind—of house and home, of the flowers and the sky, of the betrothed bride with her maiden brow—the song which has in its burden tile heavy plashing sound of the wave following on the wave that swells and breaks against the bulwarks—the song of darkening waters and darkened lives has in it a magic, for my own ear at least, incomparable in the whole wide world of human song. Even to the greatest poets of all time such a godsend as this—such a breath of instant inspiration—can come but rarely and seem given as by miracle. "There is sorrow on the sea," as the prophet said of old; but when was there sorrow on sea or land which found such piercing and such perfect utterance as this?

Adieu, patrie! L'onde est en furie. Adieu, patrie, Azur! Adieu, maison, treille au fruit mûr Adieu, les fleurs d'or du vieux mur! Adieu, patrie! Ciel, forêt, prairie! Adieu, patrie, Azur! Adieu, patrie! L'onde est en furie. Adieu, patrie, Azur! Adieu, fiancée au front pur. Le ciel est noir, le vent est dur. Adieu, patrie! Lise, Anna, Marie! Adieu, patrie. Azur! Adieu, patrie! L'onde est en furie. Adieu, patrie, Azur! Notre œil, que voile un deuil futur. Va du flot sombre au sort obscur. Adieu, patrie! Pour toi mon cœur prie. Adieu, patrie, Azur!

The next poem is addressed to a disappointed accomplice of the crime still triumphant and imperial in the eyes of his fellow-scoundrels, who seems to have shown signs of a desire to break away from them and a suspicion that even then the ship of empire was beginning to leak—though in fact it had still seventeen years of more or less radiant rascality to float through before it foundered in the ineffable ignominy of Sedan. Full of ringing and stinging eloquence, of keen and sonorous lines or lashes of accumulating scorn, this poem is especially noteworthy for its tribute to the murdered republic of Rome. Certain passages in certain earlier works of Hugo, in Cromwell for instance and in Marie Tudor, had given rise to a natural and indeed inevitable suspicion of some prejudice or even antipathy on the writer's part which had not less unavoidably aroused a feeling among Italians that his disposition or tone of mind was anything but cordial or indeed amicable towards their country: a suspicion probably heightened, and a feeling probably sharpened, by his choice of such dramatic subjects from Italian history or tradition as the domestic eccentricities of the exceptional family of Borgia, and the inquisitorial misdirection of the degenerate commonwealth of Venice. To the sense that Hugo was hardly less than an enemy and that Byron had been something more than a well-wisher to Italy I have always attributed the unquestionable and otherwise inexplicable fact that Mazzini should have preferred the pinchbeck and tinsel of Byron to the gold and ivory of Hugo. But it was impossible that the master poet of the world should not live to make amends, if indeed amends were needed, to the country of Mazzini and of Dante.

If I have hardly time to mention the simple and vivid narrative of the martyrdom of Pauline Roland, I must pause at least to dwell for a moment on so famous and so great a poem as L'Expiation; but not to pronounce, or presume to endeavor to decide, which of its several pictures is the most powerful, which of its epic or lyric variations the most impressive and triumphant in effect. The huge historic pageant of ruin, from Moscow to Waterloo, from Waterloo to St. Helena, with the posthumous interlude of apotheosis which the poet had loudly and proudly celebrated just twelve years earlier in an ode, turned suddenly into the peep-show of a murderous mountebank, the tawdry triumph of buffoons besmeared with innocent blood, is so tremendous in its anticlimax that not the sublimest and most miraculous climax imaginable could make so tragic and sublime an impression so indelible from the mind. The slow agony of the great army under the snow; its rout and dissolution in the supreme hour of panic; the slower agony, the more gradual dissolution, of the prisoner with a gaoler's eye intent on him to the last; who can say which of these three is done into verse with most faultless and sovereign power of hand, most pathetic or terrific force and skill? And the hideous judicial dishonor of the crowning retribution after death, the parody of his empire and the prostitution of his name, is so much more than tragic by reason of the very farce in it that out of ignominy itself and uttermost degradation the poet has made something more august in moral impression than all pageants of battle or of death.

In the sixth book I can but rapidly remark the peculiar beauty and greatness of the lyric lines in which the sound of steady seas regularly breaking on the rocks at Rozel Tower is rendered with so solemn and severe an echo of majestic strength in sadness; the verses addressed to the people on its likeness and unlikeness to the sea; the scornful and fiery appeal to the spirit of Juvenal; the perfect idyllic picture of spring, with all the fruitless exultation of its blossoms and its birds, made suddenly dark and dissonant by recollection of human crime and shame; the heavenly hopefulness of comfort in the message of the morning star, conveyed into colors of speech and translated into cadences of sound which no painter or musician could achieve.

Je m'étais endormi la nuit près de la grève. Un vent frais m'éveilla, je sortis de mon rêve, J'ouvris les yeux, je vis l'étoile du matin. Elle resplendissait au fond du ciel lointain Dans une blancheur molle, infinie et charmante. Aquilon s'enfuyait emportant la tourmente. L'astre éclatant changeait la nuée en duvet. C'était une clarté qui pensait, qui vivait; Elle apaisait l'écueil où la vague déferle; On croyait voir une âme à travers une perle. Il faisait nuit encor, l'ombre régnait en vain, Le ciel s'illuminait d'un sourire divin. La lueur argentait le haut du mât qui penche; Le navire était noir, mais la voile était blanche; Des goëlands debout sur un escarpement, Attentifs, contemplaient l'étoile gravement Comme un oiseau céleste et fait d'une étincelle: L'océan qui ressemble au peuple allait vers elle, Et, rugissant tout bas, la regardait briller, Et semblait avoir peur de la faire envoler. Un ineffable amour emplissait l'étendue. L'herbe verte à mes pieds frissonnait éperdue, Les oiseaux se parlaient dans les nids; une fleur Qui s'éveillait me dit: c'est l'étoile ma sœur. Et pendant qu'à longs plis l'ombre levait son voile, J'entendis une voix qui venait de l'étoile Et qui disait:—Je suis l'astre qui vient d'abord. Je suis celle qu'on croit dans la tombe et qui sort. J'ai lui sur le Sina, j'ai lui sur le Taygète; Je suis le caillou d'or et de feu que Dieu jette, Comme avec une fronde, au front noir de la nuit. Je suis ce qui renaît quand un monde est détruit. Ô nations! je suis la Poésie ardente. J'ai brillé sur Moïse et j'ai brillé sur Dante. Le lion océan est amoureux de moi. J'arrive. Levez-vous, vertu, courage, foi! Penseurs, esprits! montez sur la tour, sentinelles! Paupières, ouvrez-vous; allumez-vous, prunelles; Terre, émeus le sillon; vie, éveille le bruit; Debout, vous qui dormez; car celui qui me suit, Car celui qui m'envoie en avant la première, C'est l'ange Liberté, c'est le géant Lumière!

The first poem of the seventh book, on the falling of the walls of Jericho before the seventh trumpet-blast, is equally great in description and in application; the third is one of the great lyric masterpieces of all time, the triumphant ballad of the Black Huntsman, unsurpassed in the world for ardor of music and fitful change of note from mystery and terror to rage and tempest and supreme serenity of exultation—"wind and storm fulfilling his word," we may literally say of this omnipotent sovereign of song.

The sewer of Rome, a final receptacle for dead dogs and rotting Cæsars, is painted line by line and detail by detail in verse which touches with almost frightful skill the very limit of the possible or permissible to poetry in the way of realistic loathsomeness or photographic horror; relieved here and there by a rare and exquisite image, a fresh breath or tender touch of loveliness from the open air of the daylight world above. The song on the two Napoleons is a masterpiece of skilful simplicity in contrast of tones and colors. But the song which follows, written to a tune of Beethoven's, has in it something more than the whole soul of music, the whole passion of self-devoted hope and self-transfiguring faith; it gives the final word of union between sound and spirit, the mutual coronation and consummation of them both.

PATRIA

La-haut qui sourit? Est-ce un esprit? Est-ce une femme? Quel front sombre et doux! Peuple, à genoux! Est-ce notre âme Qui vient à nous? Cette figure en deuil Paraît sur notre seuil, Et notre antique orgueil Sort du cercueil. Ses fiers regards vainqueurs Réveillent tous les cœurs, Les nids dans les buissons, Et les chansons. C'est l'ange du jour; L'espoir, l'amour Du cœur qui pense; Du monde enchanté C'est la clarté. Son nom est France Ou Vérité. Bel ange, à ton miroir Quand s'offre un vil pouvoir, Tu viens, terrible à voir, Sous le ciel noir. Tu dis au monde: Allons! Formez vos bataillons! Et le monde ébloui Te répond: Oui. C'est l'ange de nuit. Rois, il vous suit. Marquant d'avance Le fatal moment Au firmament. Son nom est France Ou Châtiment. Ainsi que nous voyons En mai les alcyons, Voguez, ô nations, Dans ses rayons Son bras aux deux dressé Ferme le noir passé Et les portes de fer Du sombre enfer. C'est l'ange de Dieu. Dans le ciel bleu Son aile immense Couvre avec fierté L'humanité. Son nom est France Ou Liberté!

The Caravan, a magnificent picture, is also a magnificent allegory and a magnificent hymn. The poem following sums up in twenty-six lines a whole world of terror and of tempest hurtling and wailing round the wreck of a boat by night. It is followed by a superb appeal against the infliction of death on rascals whose reptile blood would dishonor and defile the scaffold: and this again by an admonition to their chief not to put his trust in the chance of a high place of infamy among the more genuinely imperial hellhounds of historic record. The next poem gives us in perfect and exquisite summary the opinions of a contemporary conservative on a dangerous anarchist of extravagant opinions and disreputable character, whom for example's sake it was at length found necessary to crucify. There is no song more simply and nobly pitiful than that which tells us in its burden how a man may die for lack of his native country as naturally and inevitably as for lack of his daily bread. I cite only the last three stanzas by way of sample.

Les exilés: s'en vont pensifs. Leur âme, hélas! n'est plus entière. Ils regardent l'ombre des ifs Sur les fosses du cimetière; L'un songe à l'Allemagne altière, L'autre an beau pays transalpin, L'autre à sa Pologne chérie. —On ne peut pas vivre sans pain; On ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie.— Un proscrit, lassé de souffrir, Mourait; calme, il fermait son livre; Et je lui dis: "Pourquoi mourir?" Il me répondit: "Pourquoi vivre?" Puis il reprit: "Je me délivre. Adieu! je meurs. Néron Scapin Met aux fers la France flétrie..." —On ne pent pas vivre sans pain; Où ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie. "...Je meurs de ne plus voir les champs Où je regardais l'aube naître, De ne plus entendre les chants Que j'entendais de ma fenêtre. Mon âme est où je ne puis être. Sons quatre planches de sapin Enterrez-moi dans la prairie." —On ne peut pas vivre sans pain; On ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie.

Then, in the later editions of the book, came the great and terrible poem on the life and death of the miscreant marshal who gave the watchword of massacre in the streets of Paris, and died by the visitation of disease before the walls of Sebastopol. There is hardly a more splendid passage of its kind in all the Légende des Siècles than the description of the departure of the fleet in order of battle from Constantinople for the Crimea; nor a loftier passage of more pathetic austerity in all this book of Châtiments than the final address of the poet to the miserable soul, disembodied at length after long and loathsome suffering, of the murderer and traitor who had earned no soldier's death.[2]

And then come those majestic "last words" which will ring for ever in the ears of men till manhood as well as poetry has ceased to have honor among mankind. And then comes a poem so great that I hardly dare venture to attempt a word in its praise. We cannot choose but think, as we read or repeat it, that "such music was never made" since the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. This epilogue of a book so bitterly and inflexibly tragic begins as with a peal of golden bells, or an outbreak of all April in one choir of sunbright song; proceeds in a graver note of deep and trustful exultation and yearning towards the future; subsides again into something of a more subdued key, while the poet pleads for his faith in a God of righteousness with the righteous who are ready to despair; and rises from that tone of awe-stricken and earnest pleading to such a height and rapture of inspiration as no Hebrew psalmist or prophet ever soared beyond in his divinest passion of aspiring trust and worship. It is simply impossible that a human tongue should utter, a human hand should write, anything of more supreme and transcendent beauty than the last ten stanzas of the fourth division of this poem. The passionate and fervent accumulation of sublimities, of marvelous images and of infinite appeal, leaves the sense too dazzled, the soul too entranced and exalted, to appreciate at first or in full the miraculous beauty of the language, the superhuman sweetness of the song. The reader impervious to such impressions may rest assured that what he admires in the prophecies or the psalms of Isaiah or of David is not the inspiration of the text, but the warrant and sign-manual of the councils and the churches which command him to admire them on trust.

Ne possède-t-il pas toute la certitude? Dieu ne remplit-il pas ce monde, notre étude, Du nadir au zénith? Notre sagesse auprès de la sienne est démence. Et n'est-ce pas à lui que la clarté commence, Et que l'ombre finit? Ne voit-il pas ramp r les hydres sur leurs ventres? Ne regarde-t-il pas jusqu'au fond de leurs antres Atlas et Pélion? Ne connaît-il pas l'heure où la cigogne émigre? Sait-il pas ton entrée et ta sortie, ô tigre, Et ton antre, ô lion? Hirondelle, réponds, aigle à l'aile sonore, Parle, avez-vous des nids que l'Eternel ignore? Ô cerf, quand l'as-tu fui? Renard, ne vois-tu pas ses yeux dans la broussaille? Loup, quand tu sens la nuit une herbe qui tressaille, Ne dis-tu pas: C'est lui! Puisqu'il sait tout cela, puisqu'il peut toute chose, Que ses doigts font jaillir les effets de la cause Comme un noyau d'un fruit, Puisqu'il peut mettre un ver dans les pommes de l'arbre, Et faire disperser les colonnes de marbre Par le vent de la nuit; Puisqu'il bat l'océan pareil au bœuf qui beugle, Puisqu'il est le voyant et que l'homme est l'aveugle, Puisqu'il est le milieu, Puisque son bras nous porte, et puisqu'à son passage La comète frissonne ainsi qu'en une cage Tremble une étoupe en feu; Puisque l'obscure nuit le connaît, puisque l'ombre Le voit, quand il lui plaît, sauver la nef qui sombre, Comment douterions-nous, Nous qui, fermes et purs, fiers dans nos agonies, Sommes debout devant toutes les tyrannies, Pour lui seul, à genoux! D'ailleurs, pensons. Nos jours sont des joursd'amertume, Mais, quand nous étendons les bras dans cette brume, Nous sentons une main; Quand nous marchons, courbés, dans l'ombre du martyre, Nous entendons quelqu'un derrière nous nous dire: C'est ici le chemin. Ô proscrits, l'avenir est aux peuples! Paix, gloire, Liberté, reviendront sur des chars de victoire Aux foudroyants essieux; Ce crime qui triomphe est fumée et mensonge. Voilà ce que je puis affirmer, moi qui songe L'œil fixé sur les cieux. Les césars sont plus fiers que les vagues marines, Mais Dieu dit:—Je mettrai ma boucle en leurs narines. Et dans leur bouche un mors, Et je tes traînerai, qu'on cède ou bien qu'on lutte, Eux et leurs histrions et leurs joueurs de flûte, Dans l'ombre où sont les morts! Dieu dit; et le granit que foulait leur semelle S'écroule, et les voilà disparus pêle-mêle Dans leurs prospérités! Aquilon! aquilon! qui viens battre nos portes, Oh! dis-nous, si c'est toi, souffle, qui les emportes, Où les as-tu jetés?

Three years after the Châtiments Victor Hugo published the Contemplations; the book of which he said that if the title did not sound somewhat pretentious it might be called "the memoirs of a soul." No book had ever in it more infinite and exquisite variety; no concert ever diversified and united such inexhaustible melodies with such unsurpassable harmonies. The note of fatherhood was never touched more tenderly than in the opening verses of gentle counsel, whose cadence is fresher and softer than the lapse of rippling water or the sense of falling dew: the picture of the poet's two little daughters in the twilight garden might defy all painters to translate it: the spirit, force, and fun of the controversial poems, overflowing at once with good humor, with serious thought, and with kindly indignation, give life and charm to the obsolete questions of wrangling schools and pedants; and the last of them, on the divine and creative power of speech, is at once profound and sublime enough to grapple easily and thoroughly with so high and deep a subject. The songs of childish loves and boyish fancies are unequalled by any other poets known to me for their union of purity and gentleness with a touch of dawning ardor arid a hint of shy delight: Lise, La Coccinelle, Vieille chanson du jeune temps, are such sweet miracles of simple perfection as we hardly find except in the old songs of unknown great poets who died and left no name. The twenty-first poem, a lyric idyl of but sixteen lines, has something more than the highest qualities of Theocritus; in color and in melody it does but equal the Sicilian at his best, but there are two lines at least in it beyond his reach for depth and majesty of beauty. Childhood and Unity, two poems of twelve and ten lines respectively, are a pair of such flawless jewels as lie now in no living poet's casket. Among the twenty-eight poems of the second book, if I venture to name with special regard the second and the fourth, two songs uniting the subtle tenderness of Shelley's with the frank simplicity of Shakespeare's; the large and living land—scape in a letter dated from Tréport; the tenth and the thirteenth poems, two of the most perfect love-songs in the world, written (if the phrase be permissible) in a key of serene rapture; the "morning's note," with its vision of the sublime sweetness of life transfigured in a dream; Twilight, with its opening touches of magical and mystic beauty; above all, the mournful and tender magnificence of the closing poem, with a pathetic significance in the double date appended to the text: I am ready to confess that it is perhaps presumptuous to express a preference even for these over the others. Yet perhaps it may be permissible to select for transcription two of the sweetest and shortest among them.

Mes vers fuiraient, doux et frêles, Vers votre jardin si beau, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, Des ailes comme l'oiseau. Ils voleraient, étincelles, Vers votre foyer qui rit, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, Des ailes comme l'esprit. Près de vous, purs et fidèles, Ils accourraient nuit et jour, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, Des ailes comme l'amour.

Nothing of Shelley's exceeds this for limpid perfection of melody, renewed in the next lyric with something of a deeper and more fervent note of music.

Si vous n'avez rien à me dire, Pourquoi venir auprès de moi? Pourquoi me faire ce sourire Qui tournerait la tête au roi? Si vous n'avez rien à me dire, Pourquoi venir auprès de moi? Si vous n'avez rien à m'apprendre, Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main? Sur le rêve angélique et tendre, Auquel vous songez en chemin, Si vous n'avez rien à m'apprendre, Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main? Si vous voulez que je m'en aille, Pourquoi passez-vous par ici? Lorsque je vous vois, je tressaille, C'est ma joie et c'est mou souci. Si vous voulez que je m'en aille, Pourquoi passez-vous par ici?