Victor Hugo

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

NEW YORK

WORTHINGTON CO., 747 BROADWAY

1886

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[a]TABLE DES MATIÈRES]
[THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO]
[LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES]

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[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.