And here, like Shelley, was Hugo already the poet of freedom, a champion of the sacred right and the holy duty of resistance. The husk of a royalist education, the crust of reactionary misconceptions, had already begun to drop off; not yet a pure republican, he was now ripe to receive and to understand the doctrine of human right, the conception of the common weal, as distinguished from imaginary duties and opposed to hereditary claims.
The twenty-eighth year of his life, which was illuminated by the issue of these passionate and radiant poems, witnessed also the opening of his generous and lifelong campaign or crusade against the principle of capital punishment. With all possible reverence and all possible reluctance, but remembering that without perfect straightforwardness and absolute sincerity I should be even unworthier than I am to speak of Victor Hugo at all, I must say that his reasoning on this subject seems to me insufficient and inconclusive: that his own radical principle, the absolute inviolability of human life, the absolute sinfulness of retributive blood-shedding, if not utterly illogical and untenable, is tenable or logical only on the ground assumed by those quaintest though not least pathetic among fanatics and heroes, the early disciples of George Fox. If a man tells you that supernatural revelation has forbidden him to take another man's life under all and any circumstances, he is above or beyond refutation; if he says that self-defense is justifiable, and that righteous warfare is a patriotic duty, but that to exact from the very worst of murderers, a parricide or a poisoner, a Philip the Second or a Napoleon the Third, the payment of a life for a life—or even of one infamous existence for whole hecatombs of innocent lives—is an offense against civilization and a sin against humanity, I am not merely unable to accept, but incompetent to understand his argument. We may most heartily agree with him that France is degraded by the guillotine, and that England is disgraced by the gallows, and yet our abhorrence of these barbarous and nauseous brutalities may not preclude us from feeling that a dealer (for example) in professional infanticide by starvation might very properly be subjected to vivisection without anæsthetics, and that all manly and womanly minds not distorted or distracted by prepossessions or assumptions might rationally and laudably rejoice in the prospect of this legal and equitable process. "The senseless old law of retaliation" (la vieille et inepte loi du talion) is inept or senseless only when the application of it is false to the principle: when justice in theory becomes unjust in practice. Another stale old principle or proverb—"abusus non tollit usum"—suffices to confute some of the arguments—I am very far from saying, all—adduced or alleged by the ardent eloquence of Victor Hugo in his admirable masterpiece of terrible and pathetic invention—Le dernier jour d'un condamné, and subsequently in the impressive little history of Claude Gueux, in the famous speech on behalf of Charles Hugo when impeached on a charge of insult to the laws in an article on the punishment of death, and in the fervent eloquence of his appeal on the case of a criminal executed in Guernsey, and of his protest addressed to Lord Palmerston against the horrible result of its rejection. That certain surviving methods of execution are execrable scandals to the country which maintains them, he has proved beyond all humane or reasonable question; and that all murderers are not alike inexcusable is no less indisputable a proposition; but beyond these two points the most earnest and exuberant advocacy can advance nothing likely to convince any but those already converted to the principle that human life must never be taken in punishment of crime—that there are not criminals whose existence insults humanity, and cries aloud on justice for mercy's very sake to cut it off.
The next year (1830) is famous forever beyond all others in the history of French literature: it was the year of Hernani, the date of liberation and transfiguration for the tragic stage of France. The battle which raged round the first acted play of Hugo's, and the triumph which crowned the struggles of its champions, are not these things written in too many chronicles to be for the thousandth time related here? And of its dramatic and poetic quality what praise could be uttered that must not before this have been repeated at least some myriads of times? But if there be any mortal to whom the heroic scene of the portraits, the majestic and august monologue of Charles the Fifth at the tomb of Charles the Great, the terrible beauty, the vivid pathos, the bitter sweetness of the close, convey no sense of genius and utter no message of delight, we can only say that it would simply be natural, consistent, and proper for such a critic to recognize in Shakespeare a barbarian, and a Philistine in Milton.
Nevertheless, if we are to obey the perhaps rather childish impulse of preference and selection among the highest works of the highest among poets, I will avow that to my personal instinct or apprehension Marion de Lorme seems a yet more perfect and pathetic masterpiece than even Hernani itself. The always generous and loyal Dumas placed it at the very head of his friend's dramatic works. Written, as most readers (I presume) will remember, before its predecessor on the stage, it was prohibited on the insanely fatuous pretext that the presentation of King Louis the Thirteenth was an indirect affront to the majesty of King Charles the Tenth. After that luckless dotard had been driven off his throne, it was at once proposed to produce the hitherto interdicted play before an audience yet palpitating with the thrill of revolution and resentment. But the chivalrous loyalty of Victor Hugo refused to accept a facile and factitious triumph at the expense of an exiled old man, over the ruins of a shattered old cause. The play was not permitted by its author to enter till the spring of the following year on its inevitable course of glory. It is a curious and memorable fact that the most tender-hearted of all great poets had originally made the hero of this tragedy leave the heroine unforgiven for the momentary and reluctant relapse into shame by which she had endeavored to repurchase his forfeited life; and that Prosper Mérimée should have been the first, Marie Dorval the second, to reclaim a little mercy for the penitent. It is to their pleading that we owe the sublime pathos of the final parting between Marion and Didier.
In one point it seems to me that this immortal masterpiece may perhaps be reasonably placed, with Le Roi s'amuse and Ruy Blas, in triune supremacy at the head of Victor Hugo's plays. The wide range of poetic abilities, the harmonious variety of congregated powers, displayed in these three great tragedies through almost infinite variations of terror and pity and humor and sublime surprise, will seem to some readers, whose reverence is no less grateful for other gifts of the same great hand, unequalled at least till the advent in his eighty-first year of Torquemada.
Victor Hugo was not yet thirty when all these triumphs lay behind him. In the twenty-ninth year of a life which would seem fabulous and incredible in the record of its achievements if divided by lapse of time from all possible proof of its possibility by the attestation of dates and facts, he published in February Notre-Dame de Paris, in November Les Feuilles d'Automne: that the two dreariest months of the year might not only "smell April and May," but outshine July and August. The greatest of all tragic romances has a Grecian perfection of structure, with a Gothic intensity of pathos. To attempt the praise of such a work would be only less idle than to refuse it. Terror and pity, with eternal fate for key-note to the strain of story, never struck deeper to men's hearts through more faultless evolution of combining circumstance on the tragic stage of Athens. Louis the Eleventh has been painted by many famous hands, but Hugo's presentation of him, as compared for example with Scott's, is as a portrait by Velasquez to a portrait by Vandyke. The style was a new revelation of the supreme capacities of human speech: the touch of it on any subject of description or of passion is as the touch of the sun for penetrating irradiation and vivid evocation of life.
From the Autumn Leaves to the Songs of the Twilight, and again from the Inner Voices to the Sunbeams and Shadows, the continuous jet of lyric song through a space of ten fertile years was so rich in serene and various beauty that the one thing notable in a flying review of its radiant course is the general equality of loveliness inform and color, which is relieved and heightened at intervals by some especial example of a beauty more profound or more sublime. The first volume of the four, if I mistake not, won a more immediate and universal homage than the rest: its unsurpassed melody was so often the raiment of emotion which struck home to all hearts a sense of domestic tenderness too pure and sweet and simple for perfect expression by any less absolute and omnipotent lord of style, that it is no wonder if in many minds—many mothers' minds especially—there should at once have sprung up an all but ineradicable conviction that no subsequent verse must be allowed to equal or excel the volume which contained such flower-like jewels of song as the nineteenth and twentieth of these unwithering and imperishable Leaves. But no error possible to a rational creature could be more serious or more complete than the assumption of any inferiority in the volume containing the two glorious poems addressed to Admiral Canaris, the friend (may I be forgiven the filial vanity or egotism which impels me to record it?) of the present writer's father in his youth; the two first in date of Hugo's finest satires, the lines that scourge a backbiter and the lines that brand a traitor (the resonant and radiant indignation of the latter stands unsurpassed in the very Châtiments themselves); the two most enchanting aubades or songs of sunrise that ever had out-sung the birds and out-sweetened the flowers of the dawn; and—for here I can cite no more—the closing tribute of lines more bright than the lilies whose name they bear, offered by a husband's love at the sweet still shrine of motherhood and wifehood. The first two stanzas of the second aubade are all that can here be quoted.
L'aurore s'allume,
L'ombre épaisse fuit;
Le rêve et la brume
Vont où va la nuit;
Paupières et roses
S'ouvrent demi-closes;
Du réveil des choses
On entend le bruit.
Tout chante et murmure,
Tout parle à la fois,
Fumée et verdure,
Les nids et les toits;
Le vent parle aux chênes,
L'eau parie aux fontaines;
Toutes les haleines
Deviennent des voix.
And in each of the two succeeding volumes there is, among all their other things of price, a lyric which may even yet be ranked with the highest subsequent work of its author for purity of perfection, for height and fulness of note, for music and movement and informing spirit of life. We ought to have in English, but I fear—or rather I am only too sure—we have not, a song in which the sound of the sea is rendered as in that translation of the trumpet-blast of the night-wind, with all its wails and pauses and fluctuations and returns, done for once into human speech and interpreted into spiritual sense forever. For instinctive mastery of its means and absolute attainment of its end, for majesty of living music and fidelity of sensitive imagination, there is no lyric poem in any language more wonderful or more delightful.