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.