And I feel his stoicism, and at the same time read an apology for his unproductiveness, in those words in the poem on the wolf which dies without uttering a sound:
"À voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce que l'on laisse,
Seul le silence est grand, tout le reste est faiblesse."
Granted that there is a little affected rigidity in this attitude of his, still it is his pride, his spiritual nobility, his desire to perpetuate in his poetry the purity and austerity of his spirit, which impel him to assume it.
The poet who undertook the further development of Chénier's lyrical style was a man of different intellectual stamp from both him and De Vigny—a man intoxicated with self-confidence. Victor Hugo was three-and-twenty, "the bright dawn illumining his spring." In one of his poems ("À Mademoiselle J.," in Chants du Crépuscule) he has himself described the certainty of victory with which he made his début as a lyric poet:
"Alors je disais aux étoiles:
O mon astre, en vain tu te voiles.
Je sais que tu brilles là-haut!
Alors je disais à la rive:
Vous êtes la gloire, et j'arrive.
Chacun de mes jours est un flot!
Je disais au bois: forêt sombre,
J'ai comme toi des bruits sans nombre.
À l'aigle: contemple mon front!
Je disais aux coupes vidées:
Je suis plein d'ardentes idées
Dont les âmes s'enivreront!
Alors, du fond de vingt calices,
Rosée, amour, parfum, délices,
Se répandaient sur mon sommeil;
J'avais des fleurs plein mes corbeilles;
Et comme un vif essaim d'abeilles
Mes pensées volaient au soleil!
La terre me disait: Poète!
Le ciel me répétait: Prophète!
Marche! parle! enseigne! bénis!
Penche l'urne des chants sublimes!
Verse aux vallons noirs comme aux cimes,
Dans les aires et dans les nids!"
Victor Hugo took the verse which André Chénier had created, that pellucid medium of pure beauty, and when he had breathed upon it, it gleamed with all the colours of the rainbow. Strangely enough it was again from Greece that the inspiration came; but this time from modern Greece. Under the impression produced by the Greek War of Liberation Hugo set to work to write his Orientales. But what a different use of language! The words painted; the words shone, "gilded by a sunbeam" like the beautiful Jewess of the poems; they sang, as if to a secret accompaniment of Turkish music.
First had come Oehlenschläger's East. This was the East of the child, of the fairy-tale book, of the Thousand and One Nights—half Persia, half Copenhagen. It was dreams of genii in lamps and rings, of diamonds and sapphires by the bushel, the illimitable splendours of imagination all grouped round a few imperishable poetic types.
Then came Byron's East, a great decorative background for passion in its recklessness and melancholy.
The third in order was Goethe's, the East of the West-östlicher Divan, the refuge of the old man. He took the reposeful, the contemplative element of Oriental philosophy and wove German Lieder into it. Rückert, the great word-artist, followed in his steps.
But Hugo's East was different from all of these; it was the brightly variegated, outward, barbaric East, the land of light and colour. Sultans and muftis, dervishes and caliphs, hetmans, pirates, Klephts—delicious sounds in his ears, delightful pictures before his eyes. Time is a matter of indifference—far back antiquity, Middle Ages, or to-day; race is a matter of indifference—Hebrew, Moor, or Turk; place is a matter of indifference—Sodom and Gomorrah, Granada, Navarino; creed is a matter of indifference. "No one," he tells us in his preface, "has a right to ask the poet whether he believes in God or in gods, in Pluto, in Satan, or in nothing." His province is to paint. He is possessed by a genius which leaves him no peace until the East, as he feels it, is before him upon paper.