Victor Hugo

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

But if this be the highest poem of all for passion and pathos and fire of terrible emotion, the highest in sheer sublimity of imagination is to my mind Zim-Zizimi. Again and again, in reading it for the first time, one thinks that surely now the utmost height is reached, the utmost faculty revealed, that can be possible for a spirit clothed only with human powers, armed only with human speech. And always one finds the next step forward to be yet once more a step upward, even to the very end and limit of them all. Neither in Homer nor in Milton, nor in the English version of Job or Ezekiel or Isaiah, is the sound of the roll and the surge of measured music more wonderful than here. Even after the vision of the tomb of Belus the miraculous impression of splendor and terror, distinct in married mystery, and diverse in unity of warning, deepens and swells onward like a sea till we reach the incomparable psalm in praise of the beauty and the magic of womanhood made perfect and made awful in Cleopatra, which closes in horror at the touch of a hand more powerful than Orcagna's. The walls of the Campo Santo are fainter preachers and feebler pursuivants of the triumph of death than the pages of the poem which yet again renews its note of menace after menace and prophecy upon prophecy till the end. There is probably not one single couplet in all this sweet and bitter roll of song which could have been written by any poet less than the best or lower than the greatest of all time.

Passants, quelqu'un veut-il voir Cléopâtre au lit?
Venez; l'alcôve est morne, une brume l'emplit;
Cléopâtre est couchée à jamais; cette femme
Fut l'éblouissement de l'Asie, et la flamme
Que tout le genre humain avait dans son regard;
Quand elle disparut, le monde fut hagard;
Ses dents étaient de perle et sa bouche était d'ambre;
Les rois mouraient d'amour en entrant dans sa chambre;
Pour elle Ephractæus soumit l'Atlas, Sapor
Vint d'Ozymandias saisir les cercle d'or,
Mamylos conquit Suse et Tentyris détruite
Et Palmyre, et pour elle Antoine prit la fuite;
Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient à la fois
Il hésita, lâchant le monde dans son choix.
Cléopâtre égalait les Junons éternelles;
Une chaîne sortait de ses vagues prunelles;
Ô tremblant cœur humain, si jamais tu vibras,
C'est dans l'étreinte altière et douce de ses bras;
Son nom seul enivrait; Strophus n'osait l'écrire;
La terre s'éclairait de son divin sourire,
À force de lumière et d'amour, effrayant;
Sons corps semblait mêlé d'azur; en la voyant,
Vénus, le soir, rentrait jalouse sous la nue;
Cléopâtre embaumait l'Egypte; toute nue,
Elle brûlait les yeux ainsi que le soleil;
Les roses enviaient l'ongle de son orteil;
Ô vivants, allez voir sa tombe souveraine;
Fière, elle était déesse et daignait être reine;
L'amour prenait pour arc sa lèvre aux coins moqueurs;
Sa beauté rendait fous les fronts, les sens, les cœurs,
Et plus que les lions rugissants était forte;
Mais bouchez-vous le nez si vous passez la porte.

At every successive stage of his task, the man who undertakes to glance over this great cycle of poems must needs incessantly call to mind the most worn and hackneyed of all quotations from its author's works—"J'en passe, et des meilleurs." There is here no room, as surely there should nowhere now be any need, to speak at any length of the poems in which Roland plays the part of protagonist; first as the beardless champion of a five days' fight, and again as the deliverer whose hand could clear the world of a hundred human wolves in one continuous sword-sweep. There is hardly time allowed us for one poor word or two of tribute to such a crowning flower of song as La Rose de L'Infante, with its parable of the broken Armada made manifest in a wrecked fleet of drifting petals; to the superb and sonorous chant of the buccaneers, in which all the noise of lawless battle and stormy laughter passes off into the carol of mere triumphant love and trust; or even to the whole inner cycle of mystic and primæval legend which seeks utterance for the human sense of oppression or neglect by jealous or by joyous gods; for the wild profound revolt of riotous and trampled nature, the agony and passion and triumph of invincible humanity, the protest and witness of enduring earth against the passing shades of heaven, the struggle and the plea of eternal manhood against all transient forces of ephemeral and tyrannous godhead. Within the orbit of this epicycle one poem only of the first part, a star of strife and struggle, can properly be said to revolve; but the light of that planet has fire enough to animate with its reflex the whole concourse of stormy stars which illuminate the world-wide wrestle of the giants with the gods. The torch of revolt borne by the transfigured satyr, eyed like a god and footed like a beast, kindles the lamp of hopeful and laborious rebellion which dazzles us in the eye of the Titan who has seen beyond the world. In the song that struck silence through the triumph of amazed Olympus there is a sound and air as of the sea or the Book of Job. There may be something of Persian or Indian mysticism, there is more of universal and imaginative reason, in the great allegoric myth which sets forth here how the half-brute child of one poor planet has in him the seed, the atom, the principle of life everlasting, and dilates in force of it to the very type and likeness of the eternal universal substance which is spirit or matter of life; and before the face of his transfiguration the omnipresent and omnipotent gods who take each their turn to shine and thunder are all but shadows that pass away. Since the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind no ear has heard the burst of such a song; but this time it is the world that answers out of its darkness the lords and gods of creed and oracle, who have mastered and have not made it. And in the cry of its protest and the prophecy of its advance there is a storm of swelling music which is as the sound of the strength of rollers after the noise of the rage of breakers.

It is noticeable that the master of modern poets should have in the tone and color of his genius more even of the Hebrew than the Greek. In his love of light and freedom, reason and justice, he is not of Jerusalem, but of Athens; but in the bent of his imagination, in the form and color of his dreams, in the scope and sweep of his wide-winged spiritual flight, he is nearer akin to the great insurgent prophets of deliverance and restoration than to any poet of Athens except only their kinsman Æschylus. It is almost wholly of the Persian war, the pass of Thermopylae, the strait of Euripus, that he sings when he sings of Hellas. All his might of hand, all his cunning of color, all his measureless resources of sound and form and symbol, are put forth in the catalogue of nations and warriors subject to Xerxes. There is nothing in poetry so vast and tremendous of its kind as this pageant of immense and monstrous invasion. But indeed the choice of gigantic themes, the predominance of colossal effects, the prevalence of superhuman visions over the types and figures of human history or legend, may be regarded as a distinctive point of difference between the second and the first series. A typical example of the second is the poem which has added an eighth wonder built by music to the seven wonders of the world, which it celebrates in verse more surely wrought for immortality than they. Another is the song of the worm which takes up in answer to their chant of life and light and pride of place, and prolongs through measure after measure of rolling and reverberating verse, the note of a funereal and universal triumph, the protest and the proclamation of death. Another, attuned to that mighty music of meditation which rings through so many of the poems written in exile and loneliness, is the stately prophetic hymn which bears the superscription of All the Past and all the Future. This might seem to belong to the sixth book of the Contemplations, in which the same note of proud and ardent faith was struck so often with such sovereignty of hand. As much might be said of the great "abysmal" poem which closes the second series with a symphony of worlds and spirits. Other groups of poems, in like manner, bear signs of common or of diverse kinship to former works of a creator whose spirit has put life into so many of the same likeness, yet with no more sign of repetition or weary monotony than is traceable in the very handiwork of nature. The book of idyls is of one inspiration with the Chansons des Rues et des Bois; in both cases, as in so many of the poet's earlier lyric volumes, his incomparable fertility of speech and superb facility of verse leave almost an impression as of work done by way of exercise, as though he were writing to keep his hand in, or to show for a wager with incredulous criticism how long he could keep up the golden ball of metre, carve arabesques of the same pattern, play variations in the same key. But the Old Man's Idyl which closes the book belongs by kinship to another work of the poet's, more beloved and more precious to the inmost heart, if not more eminent for strength and cunning of hand, than any of these. In "the voice of a child a year old" there is the same welling and bubbling melody which flows and laughs and murmurs and glitters through the adorable verses of L'Art d'être Grand-père, making dim with love and delight the reader's or the hearer's eyes. At last the language of babies has found its interpreter; and that, as might have been expected, in the greatest poet of his age.

L'enfant apporte un peu de ce ciel dont il sort;
Il ignore, il arrive; homme, tu le recueilles.
Il a le tremblement des herbes et des feuilles.
La jaserie avant le langage est la fleur
Qui précède le fruit, moins beau qu'elle, et meilleur,
Si c'est être meilleur qu'être plus nécessaire.

A conclusion which may be doubted when we consider as follows:

L'enfant fait la demande et l'ange la réponse;
Le babil puéril dans le ciel bleu s'enfonce,
Puis s'en revient, avec les hésitations
Du moineau qui verrait planer les alcyons.

Can language or can thought be lovelier? if so, the one possible instance is to be sought in these succeeding verses:

Quand l'enfant jase avec l'ombre qui le bénit,
La fauvette, attentive, au rebord de son nid
Se dresse, et ses petits passent, pensifs et frêles,
Leurs têtes à travers les plumes de ses ailes;
La mère semble dire à sa couvée: Entends,
Et tâche de parler aussi bien.

It seems and is not strange that the lips which distill such honey as this should be the same so often touched with a coal of fire from that "altar of Righteousness" where Æschylus was wont to worship. The twenty-first section of the second series is in the main a renewal or completion of the work undertaken in the immortal Châtiments. Even in that awful and incomparable book of judgment such poems as La Colère du Bronze, and the two following on the traffic of servile clerical rapacity in matters of death and burial, would have stood high among the stately legions of satire which fill its living pages with the sound and the splendor of righteous battle for the right; but the verses with which Hugo has branded the betrayer of Metz and Strasburg are hardly to be matched except by those with which, half a century ago, he branded the betrayer of the Duchess of Berry. Truly may all who read them cry out with the poet at their close,