Nous sommes les doreurs de proues.
Les vents, tournant comme des roues,
Sur la verte rondeur des eaux
Mêlent les lueurs et les ombres,
Et dans les plis des vagues sombres
Traînent les obliques vaisseaux.
La bourrasque décrit des courbes,
Les vents sont tortueux et fourbes,
L'archer noir souffle dans son cor,
Ces bruits s'ajoutent aux vertiges,
Et c'est nous qui dans ces prodiges
Faisons rôder des spectres d'or.
Car c'est un spectre que la proue.
Le flot l'étreint, l'air la secoue;
Fière, elle sort de nos bazars
Pour servir aux éclairs de cible,
Et pour être un regard terrible
Parmi les sinistres hasards.
It is more than fifty years since Les Orientales rose, radiant upon the world of letters, and the hand which gave them to mankind has lost so little of its cunning that we are well-nigh tempted to doubt whether then, for all its skill and sureness of touch, it had quite the same strength and might of magnificent craftsmanship as now. There was fire as well as music on the lips of the young man, but the ardor of the old man's song seems even deeper and keener than the passion of his past. The fervent and majestic verses of June 2, 1883, strike at starting the note of measureless pity and immeasurable indignation which rings throughout the main part of the fifth and last volume almost louder and fuller, if possible, than it was wont. All Victor Hugo, we may say, is in this book; it is as one of those ardent evening skies in which sunrise and sunset seem one in the flush of overarching color which glows back from the west to the east with reverberating bloom and fervor of rose-blossom and fire. There is life enough in it, enough of the breath and spirit and life-blood of living thought, to vivify a whole generation of punier souls and feebler hearts with the heat of his fourscore years. It may be doubted whether there ever lived a poet and leader of men to whom these glorious verses would be so closely applicable as to their writer.
Un grand esprit en marche a ses rumeurs, ses houles,
Ses chocs, et fait frémir profondément les foules,
Et remue en passant le monde autour de lui.
On est épouvanté si l'on n'est ébloui;
L'homme comme un nuage erre et change de forme;
Nul, si petit qu'il soit, échappe au souffle énorme;
Les plus humbles, pendant qu'il parle, ont le frisson.
Ainsi quand, évadé dans le vaste horizon,
L'aquilon qui se hâte et qui cherche aventure
Tord la pluie et l'éclair, comme de sa ceinture
Une fille défait en souriant le nœud,
Quand l'immense vent gronde et passe, tout s'émeut,
Pas un brin d'herbe au fond des ravins, que ne touche
Cette rapidité formidable et farouche.
And this wind "bloweth where it listeth": now it comes to us charged with all the heart of all the roses in the world; its breath when it blows towards Greece has in it a murmur as of Shelley's Epipsychidion; the caress of its love-making has all the freedom and all the purity of Blake's; now it passes by us in darkness, from depth to depth of the bitter mystery of night. A vision of ruined worlds, the floating purgatorial prisons of ruined souls, adrift as hulks on the sea of darkness everlasting, shows us the harvest in eternity of such seed as was sown in time by the hands of such guides and rulers of men as we hear elsewhere speaking softly with each other in the shadows, within hail of the confessional and the scaffold. The loftiest words of counsel sound sweeter in the speech of this great spirit than the warmest whispers of pleasure; and again, the heaviest stroke of damning satire is succeeded by the tenderest touch of a compassion that would leave not a bird in captivity. The hand that opens the cage-door is the same which has just turned the key on the braggart swordsman, neither "victorious" nor "dead," but condemned to everlasting prison behind the bars of iron verse.
But the two long poems which dominate the book, like two twin summits clothed round with fiery cloud and crowned with stormy sunshine, tower equal in height and mass of structure with the stateliest in the two parts preceding. The voice that rolls throughout Les Quatre Jours d'Elciis the thunder of its burning words reawakens and prolongs the echo of Félibien's pity and wrath over the murdered corpse of a child unborn; we recognize in the speaker a kinsman of Welf's, the unconquerable old castellan of Osbor, delivered only by an act of charity into the treacherous hands of the princes whom his citadel had so long defied. Of Elciis, as of him, the poet might have said—
Si la mer prononçait des noms dans ses marées,
Ô vieillard, ce serait des noms comme le tien.
Such names will no doubt provoke the soft superior smile of a culture too refined for any sort of enthusiasm but the elegant ecstasy of self-worship; and such simplicity will excite, on the other hand, a deep-mouthed bray of scorn from the whole school or church whose apostle in France was St. Joseph de Maistre, in England St. Thomas Coprostom, late of Craigenputtock and Chelsea; the literary lappers of imaginary blood, the inkhorn swordsmen and spokesmen of immaterial iron. The rage of their contempt for such as Hugo, the loathing of their scorn for such as Shelley, ought long since to have abashed the believers in principles which find no abler defenders or more effective champions than these.
For it is true that the main truths preached and enforced and insisted on by such fanatical rhetoricians as Milton, as Mazzini, or as Hugo, are as old as the very notion of right and wrong, as the rudest and crudest conception of truth itself; and it is undeniable that the Gospel according to St. Coprostom has the invaluable merit of pungent eccentricity and comparatively novel paradox. The evangelist of "golden silence"—whose own speech, it may be admitted, was "quite other" than "silvern"—is logically justified in his blatant but ineffable contempt for the dull old doctrines of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty that knows no higher law than duty, of duty that depends for its existence on the existence of liberty. Such a creed, in the phrase of a brother philosopher whose "reminiscences" may be gathered from Shakespeare, and whose views of his contemporaries were identical in tone and expression with the opinions of Mr. Carlyle on his, was mouldy before our grandsires had nails on their toes. It is far more intelligent, more original, more ingenious than all the old cant and rant against priests and kings and vow-breakers and blood-spillers, to discover the soul of goodness in Ratbert the Second or Napoleon the Third, and observingly distill it out into analytic and mono-dramatic blank verse. And it will never be said that this reaction against the puerile or senile preference of right to wrong and principle to prosperity has not been carried far enough in our time. Carlyle, the man of brass, and Musset, the man of clay, as far apart on all other points as two writers of genius could well be, have shown themselves at one in high-souled scorn for "principles of mere rebellion" such as Landor's and Milton's, or for such "belief in a new Brutus" as might disturb the dream of Augustulus. But, even as an old paradox becomes with time a commonplace, so does an old commonplace become in its turn a paradox; and a generation whose poets and historians have long blown the trumpet before the legitimacy of Romanoffs or the bastardy of Bonapartes may properly be startled and scandalized at the childish eccentricity of an old-world idealist who maintains his obsolete and preposterous belief that massacre is murder, that robbery is theft, and that perjury is treason. No newer doctrine, no sounder philosophy, no riper wisdom than this, can be gathered from the declamations of those idle old men—as Goneril, for example, would have called them—who speak this poet's mind again and again in verse which has no more variety of splendor or magnificence of music than the sea.
Hélas, on voit encor les astres se lever,
L'aube sur l'Apennin jeter sa clarté douce,
L'oiseau faire son nid avec des brins de mousse,
La mer battre les rocs dans ses flux et reflux,
Mais la grandeur des cœurs c'est ce qu'on ne voit plus.
There is nothing ingenious in that; it is no better, intellectually considered, than a passage of Homer or Isaiah.