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.