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.