Victor Hugo

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

ÉCRIT EN 1855

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

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

APPARITION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EN FRAPPANT À UNE PORTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LE GRAND SIÈCLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I

CHANSON D'AUTREFOIS

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