there is the very note of conscience done into speech, cast into form, forged into substance.
Avec de l'équité condensée en airain.
But this couplet for immensity of imaginative range, is of one birth with the sublimest verses in the Book of Job:—
Et toute l'épouvante éparse au ciel est sœur
De cet impénétrable et morne avertisseur.
From the magnificent overture to the second series, in which the poet has embodied in audible and visible symbol the vision whence this book was conceived—a vision so far surpassing the perhaps unconsciously imitative inspiration of the Apocalypse, with its incurably lame and arduously prosaic efforts to reproduce the effect or mimic the majesty of earlier prophecies, that we are amazed if not scandalized to find that book actually bracketed in one sublime passage of this prelude with the greatest spiritual poem in the world, the Oresteia of Æschylus—the reader would infer that any student wishing to give a notion of the Légende des Siècles ought to have dwelt less than I have done upon a few of its innumerable beauties, and more than I have done upon the impression of its incomparable grandeur. But samples of pure sweetness and beauty are more easily and perhaps more profitably detached for quotation from their context than samples of a sublimity which can only be felt by full and appreciative study of an entire and perfect poem. And it is rather from the prelude itself than from any possible commentary on it that a thoughtful and careful reader will seek to gather the aim and meaning of the book. It is there likened to a vast disjointed ruin lit by gleams of light—"le reste effrayant de Babel"—a palace and a charnel in one, built by doom for death to dwell in:—
Où se posent pourtant parfois, quand elles l'osent,
De la façon dont l'aile et le rayon se posent,
La liberté, lumière, et l'espérance, oiseau.
But over and within this book—
traduit
Du passé, du tombeau, du gouffre et de la nuit—
faith shines as a kindling torch, hope breathes as a quickening wind, love burns as a cleansing fire. It is tragic, not with the hopeless tragedy of Dante or the all but hopeless tragedy of Shakespeare. Whether we can or cannot share the infinite hope and inviolable faith to which the whole active and suffering life of the poet has borne such unbroken and imperishable witness, we cannot in any case but recognize the greatness and heroism of his love for mankind. As in the case of Æschylus, it is the hunger and thirst after righteousness, the deep desire for perfect justice in heaven as on earth, which would seem to assure the prophet's inmost heart of its final triumph by the prevalence of wisdom and of light over all claims and all pleas established or asserted by the children of darkness, so in the case of Victor Hugo is it the hunger and thirst after reconciliation, the love of loving kindness, the master passion of mercy, which persists in hope and insists on faith even in face of the hardest and darkest experience through which a nation or a man can pass. When evil was most triumphant throughout Europe, he put forth in a single book of verse, published with strange difficulty against incredible impediments, such a protest as would entitle him to say, in the very words he has given to the Olympian of old—
Quand, dans le saint paean par les mondes chanté,
L'harmonie amoindrie avorte ou dégénère,
Je rends le rhythme aux cieux par un coup de tonnerre: