Victor Hugo

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Les pauvres gens de la côte,
L'hiver, quand la mer est haute
Et qu'il fait nuit,
Viennent où finit la terre
Voir les flots pleins de mystère
Et pleins de bruit.
Ils sondent la mer sans bornes;
Ils pensent aux écueils mornes
Et triomphants;
L'orpheline pâle et seule
Crie: ô mon père! et l'aïeule
Dit: mes enfants!

The verses which translate the landscape are as absolutely incomparable in their line as those which render the emotion of the watchers. Witness this:—

Et l'on se met en prières,
Pendant que joncs et bruyères
Et bois touffus,
Vents sans borne et flots sans nombre,
Jettent dans toute cette ombre
Des cris confus.

Here, as usual, it is the more tragic aspect of the waters that would appear to have most deeply impressed the sense or appealed to the spirit of Victor Hugo. He seems to regard the sea with yet more of awe than of love, as he may be said to regard the earth with even more of love than of awe. He has put no song of such sweet and profound exultation, such kind and triumphant motherhood, into the speaking spirit of the sea as into the voice of the embodied earth. He has heard in the waves no word so bountiful and benignant as the message of such verses as these:—

La terre est calme auprès de l'océan grondeur;
La terre est belle; elle a la divine pudeur
De se cacher sous les feuillages;
Le printemps son amant vient en mai la baiser;
Elle envoie au tonnerre altier pour l'apaiser
La fumée humble des villages.
Ne frappe pas, tonnerre. Ils sons petits, ceux-ci.
La terre est bonne; elle est grave et sévère aussi;
Les roses sont pures comme elle;
Quiconque pense, espère et travaille lui plaît;
Et l'innocence offerte à tout homme est son lait,
Et la justice est sa mamelle.
La terre cache l'or et montre les moissons;
Elle met dans le flanc des fuyantes saisons
Le germe des saisons prochaines,
Dans l'azur les oiseaux qui chuchotent: aimons!
Et les sources au fond de l'ombre, et sur les monts
L'immense tremblement des chênes.

The loving loveliness of these divine verses is in sharp contrast with the fierce resonance of those in which the sea's defiance is cast as a challenge to the hopes and dreams of mankind:—

Je suis la vaste mêlée,
Reptile, étant l'onde, ailée,
Étant le vent;
Force et fuite, haine et vie,
Houle immense, poursuivie
Et poursuivant.

The motion of the sea was never till now so perfectly done into words as in these three last lines; but any one to whom the water was as dear or dearer than the land at its loveliest would have found a delight as of love no less conceivable than a passion as of hatred in the more visible and active life of waves, and at least as palpable to the "shaping spirit of imagination." It remains true, after all, for the greatest as for the humblest, that—in the words of one of the very few poets whose verses are fit to quote even after a verse of Hugo's—

we receive but what we give.
And in our life alone doth nature live;

so far, at least, as her life concerns us, and is perceptible or appreciable by our spirit or our sense. A magnificent instance of purely dramatic vision, in which the lyric note is tempered to the circumstance of the speakers with a kind of triumphant submission and severe facility, is La Chanson des Doreurs de Proues. The poet's unequalled and unapproached variety in mastery of metre and majesty of color and splendid simplicity of style, no less exact than sublime, and no less accurate than passionate, could hardly be better shown than by comparison of the opening verses with the stanza cited above.