Following in the footprints of Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo goes back to the Christian martyrs of ancient Rome, and in no fewer than four odes (Le repas libre, L'homme heureux, Le chant du cirque, Un chant de fête de Néron) describes the agonising triumph of the martyrs over the brutal and voluptuous cruelty to which they in outward appearance succumb. And the symbolism, too, is the same as in Chateaubriand's poetry; it is the death of the orthodox noble or priest which is represented under the form of the butcheries of the circus.
One of the finest of these poems of the Revolution is the oldest, written in memory of a little company of innocent young girls who, under the Reign of Terror, were executed after a long imprisonment without being brought to trial, on the vague and incorrect suspicion that they had testified pleasure when the Prussians entered their town (Les vierges de Verdun). Hugo paints the tribunal of the Convention blacker than is necessary, by crediting the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, with impure designs upon his victims and putting insulting proposals into his mouth; but even without the addition of unhistorical incidents, the sentence of these girls was so shameful, their fate so tragic, and their behaviour so beautiful and dignified, that they well deserved a poetic monument, even a better one than Hugo raised to them.[2]
The poet's pathos is entirely justifiable in cases like this, where the Revolution showed its dark and unjust side in its dealings with youth and innocence, but it becomes grating and false as soon as his dogmas come into play. His tone in writing of the monarchy and the glories of royalty is positively insufferable. In the Ode to Louis XVIII. God calls upon the seraphs, the prophets, and the archangels to do obeisance to the newly arrived heir to the throne: "Courbez-vous, c'est un Roi." And not content with this, the Deity Himself calls him by his title, not his name: "O Roi!" and reminds him that God's own Son was, like him, a king with a crown of thorns. In the poem on the occasion of the baptism of the Comte de Chambord, the language is even stronger: "God has given us one of His angels, as He gave us His Son in the days of old." We are reminded that the water of the river Jordan (brought home by Chateaubriand) in which the child has been baptized is the same in which Jesus was baptized; it is the will of Heaven, we are told, "that the reassured world should, even by the very water used for his baptism, recognise a Saviour." In La Vision the eighteenth century is summoned before the judgment-seat of God, and there accused of having in the pride of its knowledge mocked at the dogmas which are the support of the law and of morality. It timidly expresses the hope that the future will view its actions in a more favourable light, but it is mercilessly condemned; the "guilty century" is plunged into the abyss, pursued as it falls by the inexorable voice of the judge.
The standpoint from which Napoleon (who is always called Buonaparte) is viewed harmonises with that from which the Revolution is judged; he is the usurper, the savage soldier, the murderer of Enghien; and again and again it is impressed on us that lilies are better than laurels. Under the name of Colonel G. A. Gustaffson (livre iii. ode 5), Gustavus IV., who lived as an exile in France during the reign of Louis XVIII, is eulogised as the representative of the fallen kings. The personality and story of Gustavus are represented in a manner which witnesses to Hugo's remarkable ignorance of foreign history—the king's whole life is a model life; his great mind is like a temple, whence proceeds the voice of God; he dictates the history of the future; he is the successor of the ancient seers; actuated by disgust at seeing the monarchs bow their necks to Napoleon's yoke, he has voluntarily taken off his crown, and thereby raised his head high above all the other royal heads on earth. Could folly go farther than this? The wretched, insane Gustavus a model king! The Bourbons are of course exalted to the skies. All their family events—birth, baptism, death, ascension, consecration—are treated as of world-wide import. In a poem on the subject of the reprehensible war which France, at Chateaubriand's instigation, carried on with Spain in the interests of the European reaction, royalty, the royal power, is declared to be miraculous; and in the same poem the king is expressly described as the war-lord, supporting himself by the power of the sword; war is, we are told, the companion of royalty:
Il faut, comme un soldat, qu'un prince ait une épée;
Il faut, des factions quand l'astre impur a lui,
Que, nuit et jour, bravant leur attente trompée
Un glaive veille auprès de lui;
Ou que de son armée il se fasse un cortège;
Que son fier palais se protège
D'un camp au front étincelant;
Car de la Royauté la Guerre est la compagne:
On ne peut briser le sceptre de Charlemagne,
Sans briser le fer de Roland.
It is not surprising that all these odes should have mottoes taken either from the Bible or from religious works, notably Chateaubriand's Les Martyrs, a book by which men's minds were so powerfully impressed that the younger poets of the day took a pride in transposing whole pages of it into verse.[3] Lamartine addressed his ode Le Génie to Bonald; Hugo dedicates an ode with the same name to Chateaubriand, of whom he writes that "he suffers the double martyrdom of genius and virtue."
He addresses several poems to Lamartine—it is his desire, he writes, to go into battle on the same war-chariot as his friend, to manage the horses while Lamartine wields the spear—and these poems are among the most attractive of all, partly because they are remarkably beautiful, and testify to the respectful and yet at the same time brotherly feeling of the younger for the elder poet, partly because in them we have, along with Hugo's views on religious and social questions, the expression of his ideas on the subject of art. All the poems prove with what earnestness, but also with what exaggerated and almost offensive self-consciousness, the young poet has apprehended his mission—it is always called a prophet's mission; the poet is a seer, a shepherd of the people; of Lamartine, Hugo goes the length of declaring that one feels as if God had revealed Himself to him face to face. But it is in the poems to Lamartine that we perceive most clearly what is Hugo's conception of the position and relation of the new literature to that of the eighteenth century. It bears a remarkable resemblance to a kindred literary phenomenon in Denmark, namely, Oehlenschläger and his friends' conception of their position to Baggesen. Read, for example, the poem La Lyre et la Harpe (livre iv. ode 2). The lyre represents the frivolous, licentious poetry of the preceding century, which chants the praises of Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, and Eros, and inculcates an intellectual epicureanism, whereas in the tones of the harp we hear the admonition to watch and pray, to remember the seriousness of life, to think of death, to support and help our stumbling brethren. The poem is dedicated to "Alph. de L."; the word harp in itself pointed to Lamartine.
This offensive attitude towards the past is the first symptom of the approaching breach with that past's whole system of ideas, from which Hugo's significance as an author and leader of a literary movement dates.[4]
[1] Villemain, M. de Féletz et les salons de son temps.