A careful study of the Orientales shows us how they came into being. They were not written in the order in which they stand in the book. The first poem in order of production is No. 23, "La ville prise," written in 1824; next come poems written in 1826 and 1827 upon incidents in the War of Liberation, and not until 1828 is the poet's imagination thoroughly fired. The horizon widens; all the elements which tend, by reason of a close or distant connection of ideas, to crystallise round the Turkish war, group themselves round that nucleus.
If we examine the little poem, "La ville prise," which is an outcome of the powerful emotion produced in the poet by the martyrdom of Greece, we are struck by the identity of its standpoint with the standpoint of the French Romantic school of painting. In 1824 Eugène Delacroix exhibits his famous picture of the "Massacre of Scio," a bold and masterly delineation, glowing with flaming colour and intense feeling, of a horrible incident, destitute of the slightest element of conventional poetic justice. Very soon after this Hugo writes his little poem. It purports to be the intelligence brought by a humble slave. Standing with his hands crossed on his breast, he says:
"La flamme par ton ordre, ô Roi, luit et dévore.
De ton peuple en grondant elle étouffe les cris;
Et, rougissant les toits comme une sombre aurore,
Semble en son vol joyeux danser sur leurs débris.
Le meurtre aux mille bras comme un géant se lève;
Les palais embrasés se changent en tombeaux;
Pères, femmes, époux, tout tombe sous le glaive;
Autour de la cité s'appellent les corbeaux.
Les mères ont frémi! les vierges palpitantes,
O calife! ont pleuré leurs jeunes ans flétris;
Et les coursiers fougueux ont traîné hors des tentes
Leurs corps vivans, de coups et de baisers meurtris!
Les tout petits enfans, écrasés sous les dalles,
Ont vécu: de leur sang le fer s'abreuve encor...—
Ton peuple baise, ô Roi, la poudre des sandales
Qu'à ton pied glorieux attache un cercle d'or!"
This is the first chord which Hugo strikes in these poems; it rings sharp and shrill; but the poem is not quite good, because it is not quite true. It was not thus the slave spoke; we are sensible of the poet's own indignation in the narrative. The next poems, "Les têtes du Sérail," "Enthousiasme," and "Navarin," bear additional evidence to the modern Greek influence to which we originally owe Les Orientales. But then the poet makes a great artistic advance; he transports himself to the standpoint of the Turks, writes himself into their frame of mind.
"La douleur du Pacha" is the first, half-ironic attempt. Dervishes and bombardiers, odalisques and slaves, one after the other, each from his or her own point of view, try to imagine what can be the reason of the Pacha's sitting musing in his tent with his eyes full of tears. But none of the reasons that occur to them is the true one. It is not that his favourite concubine has been unfaithful, nor yet that there has been a head too few in the fellah's sack. No, he is grieving over the death of his favourite Nubian tiger.
But this is still only an attempt. The poet has not yet entirely got rid of himself, got outside of himself; we are conscious of him in one weak spot, which disturbs and dissolves the mental picture. But now comes the "Marche turque," and we are in the East.
Though the refrain of this masterly poem is a very barbarous one, its general tone is not savage; it is serious, full of a piety which is not the less heartfelt, and of ideas of honour which are not the less sincere because they are different from ours:
"Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.
J'aime le vrai soldat, effroi de Bélial;
Son turban évasé rend son front plus sévère;
Il baise avec respect la barbe de son père,
Il voue à son vieux sabre un amour filial,
Et porte un doliman percé dans les mêlées
De plus de coups que n'a de taches étoilées
La peau du tigre impérial.
Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Celui qui d'une femme aime les entretiens;
Celui qui ne sait pas dire dans une orgie
Quelle est d'un beau cheval la généalogie;
Qui cherche ailleurs qu'en soi force, amis et soutiens,
Sur de soyeux divans se couche avec mollesse,
Craint le soleil, sait lire, et par scrupule laisse
Tout le vin de Chypre aux chrétiens;
Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.
Celui-là, c'est un lâche, et non pas un guerrier.
Ce n'est pas lui qu'on voit dans la bataille ardente
Pousser un fier cheval, à la housse pendante,
La sabre en main, debout sur le large étrier;
Il n'est bon qu'à presser des talons une mule,
En murmurant tout bas quelque vaine formule,
Comme un prêtre qui va prier!
Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle."
There is nothing Greek in this, nor yet any European satire of Turkish barbarity; the poet has become the dramatist within the Turkish intellectual and emotional pale; in this local colouring there is the genuine brutality which no northern poet has ever attained in handling such themes. This is true masculine savagery.
These are not sentimental, but robust major chords; and the major key predominates in all the poems, even where woman and love entwine their rhythms among the harsh, masculine ones. There are cruel, heartless women, like the Jewish sultana who demands the heads of her rivals; and there are refined, musical daughters of Eve, like the captive who longs for her own country and yet loves the sight of Smyrna's fairy palaces, and rejoices in breathing the soft air of the East in winter and in summer, by day and at night when the full moon shines upon the sea. There is the charming woman depicted in "Les adieux de l'hôtesse Arabe." The love which finds expression in this last-named poem is sad in its feeling of unrequitedness, repressed and chaste; it is a mixture of sisterly care, childlike superstition, and submissive worship, which reveals itself with plastic grace in a noble, proud character.