La Légende des Siècles

by Victor Hugo

A travers l'âpre nuit, pousse, emporte et ramène

Sur tout l'écueil divin toute la mer humaine.

(L'Année Terrible.)

See too the beautiful lines written when to public disaster was added private grief for the loss of his son Charles, especially the passage, too long to quote here, in L'Enterrement, beginning 'Quand le jeune lutteur....'

If, passing from the underlying conception to the actual material of the Légende, we ask to what extent the poems can be regarded as history, the answer must be that they are not history at all in the ordinary sense of the word. In his Préface Hugo remarks: 'C'est l'aspect légendaire qui prévaut dans ces deux volumes.' As a matter of fact, there is not a single poem in any of the series which is a narrative based upon actual fact. Of the pieces in the present volume, Le Mariage de Roland, Aymerillot, and Bivar are founded on legends. Éviradnus and La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice are inventions, and the others are mostly embroideries woven upon ancient themes rather than historical or even legendary pictures. These latter, of which La Conscience is the best instance in this volume, suggest De Vigny's conception: 'Une pensée philosophique, mise en scène sous une forme épique ou dramatique.' Of accuracy in detail and local colour, Hugo was utterly careless. He possessed a capacious, but not an exact, memory, and, provided the general impression produced by a description was the true one, he did not stop to inquire whether every detail was correct. Nor did he always enjoy an extensive knowledge of the epoch which he delineated. But he possessed to the full the poet's faculty of building the whole form and feature of a past age out of a few stray fragments of information. The historical colour of Ruy Blas is said to be based on two French books, carelessly consulted, yet of Ruy Blas M. Paul de Saint-Victor, after making a close study of the period, wrote: 'Ce fragment de siècle que je venais d'exhumer de tant de recherches, je le retrouvais, vivant et mouvant, dans l'harmonie d'un drame admirable. Le souffle d'un grand poète ressuscitait subitement l'ossuaire des faits et des choses que j'avais péniblement rajusté.'[³]

Footnote 3:[ (return) ] Quoted in Eugène Rigal's Victor Hugo, poète épique.

Moreover, inaccurate as Hugo often is, it is never the inaccuracy that falsifies. He has been severely criticized for having in Au Lion d'Androclès assigned to a single epoch events and personages which are really separated by centuries. But all the facts are typical of the spirit which dominated Imperial Rome, and combine therefore to form a description which has poetic and imaginative, if not historical, truth. And if, with greater licence, he has accumulated upon the head of a single Mourad all the crimes of a long line of Sultans it is because in drawing Mourad he is drawing the Turkish nation. Mourad is to him the typical Turk, the embodiment of Oriental cruelty and lust. If again, to pass to a larger subject, he has chosen legend rather than history as the basis of many of his poems, it is not only because of his own innate love of the marvellous and romantic, but because he cared for the truth embodied in legend more than the truth embodied in chronicle. If he mingled fiction with his history, it was because he conceived of the fiction as being as true a representation of the facts of an era as annals and records. It may be true that Hugo made imagination do duty for study, but it is also true that an imagination, such as Hugo's, may be as sure an instrument as study in reconstructing the past. He may have mistaken the date of Crassus by several centuries, but readers of Suetonius will hardly deny the faithfulness of his delineation of at least one side of the civilization of ancient Rome; he may have invented a Spanish princess, but his carefully stippled portrait of Philip II is true to the life, even if it be Philip in his darkest moods. His inaccuracies are in truth of small account. Who that reads Le Cimetière d'Eylau cares whether there was a place of burial in the battlefield or not? or what lover of Booz endormi seeks to know how closely the flora of Palestine has been studied? A more serious criticism than the charge of inaccuracy is that of partial vision, and from this Hugo cannot be entirely exculpated. He saw with his heart, and seeing with the heart must always mean partial vision. For at the root of Hugo's nature lay an immense pity, pity not merely for the suffering, but for what is base or criminal, or what is ugly or degraded. It was this pity which is the keynote of Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables; it is this pity which inspired much of the Légende des Siècles.

The defence of the weak by the strong is one of his constant themes, as witness Éviradnus, Le Petit Roi de Galice, Les Pauvres Gens. The contrast of the weak and the strong is one of his favourite artistic effects, as witness Booz endormi, La Confiance du Marquis Falrice. An act of pity redeemed Sultan Mourad, an act of pity made the poor ass greater than all the philosophers. It was this absorbing pity for the defenceless that made Hugo so merciless to the oppressor and so incapable of seeing anything but the deepest black in the picture of the tyrant. One-sided the poet may be, but it is the one-sidedness of a generous nature; he may err, but his errors at least lean to the side of virtue.

It would be impossible in the brief space of an introduction such as this to discuss at any length the characteristics of Hugo as a literary artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume. It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet's extraordinary fecundity of words and images. Occasionally, especially in his later works, this degenerates into diffuseness, and he exhibits a tendency to repetition and a fondness for long enumeration of names and details. On the other hand, he constantly shows how well he understood the power of brevity and compression. There is not a superfluous word nor a poetic image in La Conscience, the severe and simple style of which is well suited to the sternness of the subject. The story of Après la Bataille is related with telling conciseness, while in the highly finished work of Booz endormi there are no redundant phrases. The many variations on the same theme in Aymerillot may be criticized as tedious, but there underlies them the artistic purpose of intensifying the reader's sense of the cowardice of the nobles by an accumulation of examples. A like criticism and a like defence may be made of the long list of the crimes of Sultan Mourad, though here perhaps the poet's torrent of facts goes beyond the point at which the amassing of details is effective. On the other hand, the swiftness of the narrative of the Mariage de Roland, and the soldierly brevity of the Cimetière d'Eylau, a piece not included in this volume, are alike admirable, and show Hugo at his best as a story-teller.

One of the most marked features of Hugo's poetry is his custom of attributing human desires and volition to inanimate objects. To Hugo, the whole universe seemed to be alive, both as a whole and in each of its separate parts, and his way of humanizing the inanimate is not so much a conscious literary artifice as the natural habit of his imagination. The tendency is not confined to his poetry; readers of his romances will remember the gargoyles of Notre-Dame and the cannon which got loose in the hold of the Claymore and became 'une bête surnaturelle.' But the instances in his romantic poetry are naturally more numerous and more vivid. The swords of the heroes are always alive; in the duel between Roland and Olivier: