VICTOR HUGO.
What freshness and fecundity in the veteran poet who signalizes his seventy-sixth birthday by publishing the "Légende des Siècles"! Hugoesque alike in its grand apostrophes and its gentle idyls, in its resounding declamation and its simple pathos, this new outcome of an old mint has every coin stamped with the image and superscription of its creator—Hugo's in thought, feeling, audacious style, easy versification, quaint novelty of metaphor; Hugo's in its cadence by turns joyous and mournful, now in sonorous, thrilling ballads of battle, anon in charming genre fireside pictures, here riotous in rhetoric, there pedantic in research, everywhere lofty in aspiration, though pushing oddity almost to madness.
Through all his works, what a mixture of genius and grotesqueness, of majesty and absurdity in that wonderful man! Take his "Ninety-Three"—a novel monstrously nonsensical and surprisingly splendid—a novel demonstrating that to pass from the ridiculous to the sublime, as well as the other way, needs but a step. With what magnetic power one of its first incidents, the rushing about of the loose gun on shipboard, is wrought out! You begin by despising the frivolity of the scene, and momentarily wait to see the writer ludicrously break down in his preposterous attempt at imposing on your credulity. By degrees the situation is filled in till each successive objection of skepticism is somehow spirited away, and even the foreign reader, sympathetically following the working of the French mind, is startled at his own yielding. This episode of the roving cannon ranks with the devil-fish scene in the "Toilers of the Sea," where also the reader finds appreciative horror overcoming his first impulse of contemptuous incredulity.
Or, again, if you take the boat scene in "Ninety-Three," between the sailor and count, you agree, at the end, that it is not overstrained. Yet think of that frail skiff in the open British Channel, with the waves running high, and say if the scene was possible. When Halmalo put down his oars and the old man stood up at full height in the bow, the boat must have swung into the trough of the sea and capsized in an instant; if lack of steering failed to upset her, the old man's performance would have done so; but we forget that trifle in the dramatic intensity of the situation. The learned Sergeant Hill, talking with a young law student regarding the will of "Clarissa Harlowe," told him, "You will find that not one of the uses or trusts in it can be supported." A sergeant of artillery would be equally severe on the evolutions and skirmishes in "Ninety-Three"; but the genius of Hugo triumphs over such blunders, like Shakespeare's over the seaports in Bohemia.
"A poet is a world shut up in a man," says the "Légende," whose own variety of theme helps to justify the definition. We have here the majestic conceptions of the "Mur des Siècles," the "Vanished City," the "Hymn to Earth," the "Epic of the Worm"; therewith we also have the music and beauty of the "Groupe des Idylles." On one page the reader is touched with sympathy by the "Cemetery of Eylau" and the "Guerre Civile"; on another he is stirred by the scorn in the "Anger of the Bronze," or by the hate in "Napoleon III. after Sedan":
Cet homme a pour prison l'ignominic immense,
On pouvait le tuer, mais on fût sans clémence.
The city whose praise Victor Hugo never tires of sounding, and that has adored and lampooned him for almost half a century, breaks out in a prolonged concord of eulogy for these old-age strains, which recall no little of the force, fire, and finish of twenty, forty years ago. Well may the Parisians laud this man of mingled ruggedness and delicacy, whose imagination has not yet lost its boldness with age, nor the heart its warmth—the bard, in mockery of whom, nevertheless, they were lately repeating with gusto the comical parody of a local wit:
Oh, huho, Hugo! où huchera-t-on ton nom
Justice encore rendue que ne t'a-t-on?