The following essay is reprinted from The Claims of French Poetry: Nine Studies in the Greater French Poets. John C. Bailey. London: Archibald Constable and Company, 1907.

Perhaps no name in French literature stands for so much as that of Victor Hugo. He had a long life and a large personality. Born less than ten years after the Terror, he lived fourteen years after the Commune. A Royalist in his youth, both by inheritance and by temperament, he lived to be the voice, almost the incarnation, of the spirit of democracy. He knew the taste of exile, the bitterest cup of all that must be drained by the defeated politician, and he survived it to know in turn that of popular adulation, the most intoxicating and the most dangerous. He began life as a literary rebel, and died an accepted classic.

All these things, and the fact that he touched life so long and from so many sides, make him an embarrassingly large subject to attempt to treat in an essay. Yet no one writing on French poetry, whatever else he may be obliged to leave untouched, can dare to turn away from the most splendid figure of all. And perhaps the time has begun to come, now that he has been more than twenty years in the grave to which he was carried with such ostentatious simplicity, when we may try to set our hands to the work of posterity, and begin to strip him of what was ephemeral and unessential, and look only at the vital and immortal part by which he has his place among the undying glories of France. And this simplification of the problem of Hugo is at once an easier and a more necessary task in the case of us who are not Frenchmen. Neither the political nor the literary quarrels of the French matter very greatly to us. We at least shall not go to French poets for instruction in our political duty. And the other point is still more important. Half the pages that Frenchmen have written about Victor Hugo are not unnaturally given to the breach he made in the fortress of the French classical tradition. But a foreigner, unless he writes for specialists, ought to aim at a wider point of view. The most daring enjambement in the world, the most startlingly placed césure, even though they once robbed academicians of their sleep, will not interest posterity, and need not detain us. The fame of Sophocles and Euripides does not now depend on the innovations they made in the theatre of Athens. Schoolmasters and even scholars may occupy themselves with such matters: but for those who read the Greek tragedies as great poetry, it is other matters altogether that fill the mind. They are studying things of a very different order of importance to any questions of the technical development of the Attic stage. And so, if Hugo is to be read permanently by those who are not Frenchmen, his claims must be based on something altogether wider than any such achievements as the liberation of the Alexandrine verse from its ancient trammels, or the enrichment of the store of French rhymes. Foreigners will never be perfectly competent to judge with authority in these purely national questions, and they have the right as well as the duty of setting them aside. For, however interesting the answer to them may be, it is no answer to the question which is the only one urgently asked by the foreign lover of poetry: what is Victor Hugo's contribution to the poetic utterance of the heart and mind of the world?

Few poets have ever been so prodigal of verse as Hugo. The Edition Définitive of his works includes twenty-five volumes of poetry, over and above his plays. It will be a large enough task for us here if, putting aside the prose works and the dramas, we try to arrive at some notion of what it is in those many volumes of verse that has the final seal of greatness on it. The mere reading of so much is no light business. And of course the poet pays the penalty of this prodigious volubility. There is nothing which his amazing facility cannot turn into verse. His energy is inexhaustible. Never once, perhaps, in all the twenty-five volumes does he exhibit a trace of weariness. He often irritates by his violence, by his verbose declamation, by his lack of humour, by his colossal and immeasurable vanity: but by the flat dulness, born of those moments, which so few artists escape, when they have lost faith in themselves and delight in their work, never once, I think, in all his life. 'French of the French' as Tennyson called him, he has a great deal in him that is very uncongenial to Englishmen. We have all been Puritans, either in our own persons or those of our ancestors, and Hugo's lack of seriousness in the presence of the most serious things is profoundly distasteful to us. He is a sincere and passionate enemy of materialism and, in his own way, a sincere and passionate believer in God. But of the fear of God, of the awe and the sense of human littleness and sinfulness which we generally associate with those to whom belief in God has meant most, there is not in Hugo a single trace. The word 'Dieu' is everywhere in his poems, but every recurrence of it makes us more sure that, if it had meant more to him, it would have been less often on his page. Again and again it seems to be brought in only as a kind of rhetorical flourish to clench his argument, or silence his orthodox enemies. And even this rhetorical use of the holiest names is less distasteful to most people with English traditions than the familiar and free and easy use of them, which is also common with Hugo. Such a passage as this from the Chansons des Rues et des Bois shows that in France the blood of Voltaire runs a little even in the most unlikely veins. It is written during an illness with the possibility of death before him:

Mon ame se change en prunelle:

Ma raison sonde Dieu voile;

Je tate la porte eternelle,

Et j'essaie a la nuit ma cle.

C'est Dieu que le fossoyeur creuse:

Mourir c'est 1'heure de savoir;

Je dis a la mort: Vieille ouvreuse,

Je viens voir le spectacle noir.

What is an ouvreuse? An old woman who shows you to your seat at a French theatre. Well, to be able to speak in that way, at that moment, of God and death is not a strength at all in our eyes: it is a weakness. And it is not merely a question of character or seriousness. It is a question of art. There is no principle of art more fundamental than that great words, except in deliberate comedy, ought only to be greatly used. It is one of which Victor Hugo knew nothing, as may be seen by such a passage as this as well as by his frequent use of the simile which degrades, which lowers the vitality of the subject he wishes to illustrate instead of heightening it.

And he is 'French of the French' also in a more natural and pardonable way. But still it is a way that is a drawback for us. We cannot be expected to think of France as the one nation that has really counted in the world since Greece and Rome, nor of Paris as occupying in the map of Europe the place of the sun in the solar system. Still less can we see in the universal brigandage of Napoleon a generous gift for which the peoples of Europe are for ever to love the generosity of the people of France. And not all the passionate eloquence of L'Annee Terrible will make the best lover of France amongst us feel that there was any new, unheard of, uniquely abominable, wickedness in the victorious Germans doing in 1871 what the French had done often before and would most assuredly have been doing then if they had been the victors and not the vanquished. Arnica Francia; magis amica--non Germania sed--veritas. French spectacles are pretty wear for a Frenchman, perhaps, but they sit uncomfortably on English noses, and the verses which cannot be read without them will never be read very willingly here.

One other word and the task of clearing the ground will be done. Matthew Arnold used to complain of French worship of the goddess Aselgeia; and many English people, because they are hypocrites, as Frenchmen often think, or, as is nearer the truth, because that goddess does not appear to them either a beautiful or an edifying object of worship, do not care for books in which they are likely to meet with her praises. Well, let it be said at once for those who know little of Hugo, that this fear need not frighten them. In all his thousands of poems there are few indeed that could not be placed in the hands of a girl of sixteen. It is not the least of Hugo's praises that, in an age and country where the most unlikely writers set decency at defiance, he kept the pages of its greatest poet pure.

And now to get back to our question: what is Hugo's contribution to the poetic utterance of the heart and mind of the world ? What is the English reader, bewildered by the prospect of the twenty-five volumes, to look for in particular? Why should he go to Hugo and what will he find? Such questions might meet with many different answers: specialists in language, students of metre, students of the French character, and so on, might all give one of their own: but the answer I am trying to get at here is that of no specialist at all, but of the plain lover of literature and especially of poetry, of those who find in poetry at once the most delightful of human arts, and the least imperfect utterance man has achieved of what he has in him at his greatest moments.

Well, man is never greater, we shall all agree, than when the whole world shines for his eyes in a sunlight of love. And songs of love which are among the very oldest of man's makings are still to-day among the most delightful. And who has given us more exquisite songs than Victor Hugo? Let him answer for himself, with the two wonderful songs from the Chants du Crépuscule:

S'il est un charmant gazon

Que le ciel arrose,

Ou brille en toute saison

Quelque fleur eclose,

Ou Ton cueille a pleine main

Lys, chevrefeuille et jasmin,

J'en veux faire le chemin

Ou ton pied se pose!

S'il est un sein bien aimant

Dont l'honneur dispose,

Dont le ferme devouement

N'ait rien de morose,

Si toujours ce noble sein

Bat pour un digne dessein

J'en veux faire le coussin

Ou ton front se pose!

S'il est un reve d'amour

Parfume de rose,

Ou Ton trouve chaque jour

Quelque douce chose,

Un reve que Dieu benit,

Ou l'ame a Tame s'unit,

Oh ! j'en veux faire le nid

Ou ton coeur se pose!

How it sings, every word of it, sets itself to music, and dances to its own tune! There are deeper songs in the world of poetry, songs whose time is beaten for them by the droppings of human tears, and some of them come from Victor Hugo: but where shall we find one in which the delightfulness of love's assurance gets more gracious utterance? Unless indeed it be this which follows it:

L'aube nait et ta porte est close.

Ma belle, pourquoi sommeiller?

A l'heure ou s'eveille la rose

Ne vas-tu pas te reveiller?

O ma charmante,

Ecoute ici

L'amant qui chante

Et pleure aussi!

Tout frappe a ta porte benie.

L'aurore dit: je suis le jour!

L'oiseau dit: je suis l'harmonie!

Et mon cceur dit: je suis l'amour!

O ma charmante

Ecoute ici

L'amant qui chante

Et pleure aussi!

Je t'adore ange et t'aime femme.

Dieu qui par toi m'a complete

A fait mon amour pour ton ame

Et mon regard pour ta beaute.

O ma charmante,

Ecoute ici

L'amant qui chante

Et pleure aussi!

Is not the poise and balance of that refrain, as it seems to hang in the air, lingering to enjoy its own delightfulness, one of the greatest triumphs which the art of making music out of human speech has ever achieved? As for the thought in either of the songs, it is of course simple and obvious enough. And indeed those who search for the untrodden ways of the human intellect must not walk with Hugo. Strangeness of word or phrase, and especially of names and places, and strangeness of fancy, especially in the days of Les Orientales they will find in him in abundance: but strangeness of thought seldom or never. He walks in the great highway of human thought and feeling, and rarely quits it. But as Wordsworth, himself the discoverer of a new world of poetry, once said: 'New thoughts, however deep, are not the staple of poetry, but old thoughts, presented with immortal freshness, and a kind of inspired felicity of diction.' And, in any case, wherever else adventurous ingenuity of thought may be wanted, it is not here in such songs as these. All curious thinking would be out of harmony with the primal simplicity of these divine moments: when they are upon us we do not ask to think, but to unite our voices to the paean of joy which then seems to us to be the world's universal song. We rejoice in the gladness of the world, and all living things rejoice in ours, so that, as he says in another poem, birds and butterflies are full of our happiness.

L'oiseau, que les hivers desolent,

Le frais papillon rajetmi,

Toutes les choses qui s'envolent,

En murmurent dans l'infini.

That is a poet's fancy, perhaps: but there is no true poet in whom fancy is not close akin to faith. And Hugo never wavered in his faith that love was the greatest thing in all the world, the key to all mysteries, the cure of all ills, a king whose greatest conquests were yet before him, a discoverer who, if we would but let him set sail, had a whole new world to find for us. The dream of a mysterious unity lying behind the varied manifestations which the eye sees and the hand handles, the dream to which the brooding spirit of Virgil first gave poetic utterance, and of which our own Wordsworth was the inspired prophet, was also for Hugo, in his vaguer way, an inextinguishable faith. It is not merely the exhilaration of a great artist in splendid verse that rings through such things as his Mugitus-que Bourn: it is the ecstasy of those who see further and deeper and higher than the rest of us, those who are the prophet eyes of humanity seeing for us what we cannot see for ourselves. He stands listening as the darkness comes on, and what he seems to hear is such voices as these:

Vivez! croissez! semez le grain a l'aventure!

Ou'on sente frissonner dans toute la nature,

Sous la feuille des nids, au seuil blanc des maisons,

Dans l'obscur tremblement des profonds horizons,

Un vaste emportement d'aimer, dans l'herbe verte,

Dans l'antre, dans l'etang, dans la clairiere ouverte,

D'aimer sans fin, d'aimer toujours, d'aimer encor,

Sous la serenite des sombres astres d'or!

Faites tressaillir l'air, le riot, Paile, la bouche,

O palpitations du grand amour farouche!

Ou'on sente le baiser de l'etre illimite!

Et paix, vertu, bonheur, esperance, bonte,

O fruits divins, tombez des branches eternelles!

Ainsi vous parliez, voix, grandes voix solennelies:

Et Virgile ecoutait comme j'ecoute, et l'eau

Voyait passer le cygne auguste, et le bouleau,

Le vent, et le rocher, Pecume, et le ciel sombre.

L'homme. . . . O nature! abime! immensite de l'ombre!

It is the business of the poet to give new life to life itself. If he has the right voice and we are the right hearers, all that we do and feel takes an added, heightened, glorified vitality while we listen. And not only does the old become new, and the ordinary extraordinary, but the non-existent finds existence, and all that was not is. All that we felt vaguely and half unconsciously, we now feel with ecstatic clearness: all that we did not feel finds strange and sudden birth in us, all that we did not see bursts in magical freshness upon our opened and astonished eyes. That is an ideal, only accomplished in perfection when the poet is at his very highest moment of speech, and we at our fittest of hearing. But is there not more than a partial realisation of it in such things as I have quoted? Will any but the dullest fail to feel some dance of love in him as he listens to those songs: will any but the blindest fail to see some of the magic that unites old and new, memory and discovery, together in what the poet saw as he watched

Dans l'obscur tremblement des profonds horizons?

And will any that have ever learnt to make poetic ventures fail to go their part of the way with him as he draws the great conclusion in which he scarcely wavered even in his saddest hours?

O splendeur! o douceur! l'etendue infinie

Est un balancement d'amour et d'harmonie.

Contemplons a genoux.

Une voix sort du ciel et dans nos fibres passe;

De Ià nos chants profonds: le rythme est dans l'espace,

Et la lyre est en nous.

There is a sentiment here which is rather French than English: but what an ardour of ecstasy shines through it! We may miss, perhaps, the Tennysonian gruffness of conviction that, if there were not Love behind Nature, life would be intolerable and suicide the only solution: but if Hugo will not be quite sure that life has no good things in it even without a key to its mysteries, he is most abundantly sure that it gains a thousandfold on every side when that key is in the hand. And, for poets and those who believe in poetry, that is a long way towards conviction of its truth. For, in the fine phrase of Maeterlinck, 'le moment ou l'objet nous parait le plus admirable est celui ou nous avons le plus de chance d'apercevoir sa vérité.'

But, whatever the philosophic truth of these high dreamings may be, the poetic point is that we have them, all of us, or all of us who are likely to touch poetry. And therefore to express them with the power and beauty, and moving ecstasy, of Victor Hugo is precisely, in the words of our own definition, to vivify life itself, and to make a real contribution to the poetic utterance of the heart and mind of the world.

In fact Victor Hugo's great claim lies just there: that he is a kind of spokesman of humanity, and in particular that he more than any one else is the poetic voice of the whole nineteenth century. It is the characteristic of the great Epic poets that they have gathered up the whole of their age into a single poem. All the various activities of the earliest Greek civilisation find their place in Homer: the whole of Virgil's age, the dying Republic, the young Empire, the new instinct of universal humanity, the sympathies and yearnings that were making the way straight for the march of Christianity, all are in the twelve books of the Æneid and in the Divina Commedia there is scarcely any virtue or vice, any art or activity, any religious dream or political aspiration of the Middle Age on which Dante does not somewhere throw the awful light of Heaven and Hell. Victor Hugo wrote no Epic Poem. But he came nearer to doing the work of the great Epic poets than any one else in his day. And that in two ways. He gave us in his vast and wonderful novel Les Misérables what is more like a great Epic than any other single work printed in the nineteenth century. And in a different way he achieved something of the same universal and representative kind by the amazing variety of his poetical productions. He is perhaps the most universal poet the world has known since Shakespeare. Many poets have utterly surpassed him in particular fields: none, I think, has touched so many and failed nowhere. Most of the rest, if we may say it with due reverence, have such obvious limitations. Milton does not care for love, nor Goethe for politics: Leopardi, for all his grave beauty, has hardly more than a single note, that of despair; Wordsworth knows man only, as it were, in his elemental moments, Byron knows him only, or chiefly, in his worst: Shelley, unique master of the world of spirit, sees clouds in place of solid earth and ideal abstractions instead of men and women. Tennyson seemed at times hardly to know that poetry was a thing of passion, or Browning that it was a mystery brooding over a mystery, or Arnold that it was a trumpet song of faith and power. And in Hugo's own country no fallen angel like De Musset, no Eastern dreamer like Leconte de Lisle, no painter of gorgeous pictures, as motionless as they are beautiful, like Heredia, can compare with him as the spokesman of a varied century. No doubt that does not prove that Hugo is greater than these men. Indeed Milton unquestionably, and Goethe and Wordsworth, in spite of their limitations, almost certainly, are greater men than he. It is not the bulk but the quality of a poet's work that gives him his final rank: and no one can yet say whether one or other, named or unnamed, of the rest who covered so much less ground than Hugo, but covered it so much more completely, may not have grown flowers that will ultimately outlive the vast product of Hugo's multitudinous energies. But that is not the point. The claim that Hugo is the most universal poet since Shakespeare is not a claim that he is greater than any other, but that he touches life on more sides, and has more varied poetic gifts. He has, in a greater or less degree, the special gift of each: and then he has so many other things beside. To make the comparison, for instance, with two only of the long line, Milton and Tennyson. The two great gifts of Milton were his assured possession of the most unfailingly majestic utterance that has come from the lips of men since the fall of the ancient world, and the soaring sublimity of an imagination that ranged at ease from Heaven to Hell. Well, of course Hugo is not in the same world with Milton as a master of godlike speech: but then who is? And if Hugo is not an artist in language after the order of Milton, he is still the greatest his race has produced. If Milton could touch nothing without leaving on it a stamp of greatness, Hugo, who touched everything, never once perhaps failed to call forth some music of verse, even out of the silence of the darkest and deadest things. And if he cannot rise to Heaven on such wings as those of Milton's 'sphere-born harmonious sisters,' his Vision de Dante, even if it stood alone, is enough to show that hardly Dante or Milton can go deeper into Hell. He takes, then, his humbler place in Milton's own glorious world. But what of the worlds Milton never entered? The landscapes of Milton are among the noblest in poetry: but where in them all is that sense of the mystery of Nature, of the voice that knows the secret and can whisper it through the silence but can never tell it plain, which Hugo gives us again and again with such sympathy of imagination, with such murmuring beauty of verse? Where indeed are any of the things that poetry could not learn till Christianity, or at least till Virgil, came to reveal them? The mystery that hangs over human life, the lacrima rerum, is as alien to Milton's page as the mystery that hangs over the dying or the dawning light. And each alike is woven into the very stuff of Hugo. Where again in Milton is Hugo's wondering delight in the innocence and beauty, the joy and mystery for it is mystery once more that poetry can never again fail to see in the face of a child? Where is the tender universal sympathy, not with heroes alone or saints, but with the weak, the obscure, the poor, with the whole of our failing and suffering humanity? Where is Milton's drama? He wrote, indeed, in the form of drama, a poem incomparably greater than any play of Hugo's, but it has almost all great qualities in it except the dramatic, and it is not, nor ever was meant to be, a work for the stage. In Gastibelza Hugo created one of the most magical ballads in the world: where in Milton is, not its equal, but any fragment or fraction of its equal? Where, above all, are Milton's lyrics of love, and where are they not in Hugo!

Puisqu' ici-bas toute ame

Donne a quelqu'un

Sa musique, sa flamme,

Ou son parfum;

Puisqu' avril donne aux chenes

Un bruit charmant;

Que la nuit donne aux peines

L'oubli dormant;

Puisque lorsqu'elle arrive

S'y reposer,

L'onde amere a la rive

Donne un baiser;

Je te donne, a cette heure,

Penche sur toi,

La chose la meilleure

Que j'aie en moi!

Regois mes voeux sans nombre,

O mes amours!

Regois la flamme ou l'ombre

De tous mes jours!

Ma muse, que les heures

Bercent revant,

Qui, pleurant quand tu pleures,

Pleure souvent!

Reçois, mon bien celeste,

ma beauté,

Mon coeur, dont rien ne reste

L'amour oté!

How wide a world away such stanzas as these are, with their exquisite grace of fancy and movement and form, from anything Milton has left us! Well, it is the measure of Hugo's universality that such a poem as this, with the very spirit of love and airy lightness in it, is by the same author as the Vision de Dante, as the great ode on Napoleon in Les Feuilles d'Automne as the tremendous series of the Legende des Siecles, as the solemn and beautiful elegies with which the death of his daughter filled the second volume of Les Contemplations.

To press the comparison further would be tedious. As it is, an Englishman with a tithe of the reverence he ought to feel in the presence of Milton must have a guilty sense, after drawing such a parallel, of having laid rude hands on his father Parmenides. But Milton's greatness is of an order so high and splendid that he of all men suffers least from the acknowledgment that it is not universal.

It would of course be still easier to demonstrate the same thing in the case of Tennyson. Hugo is a journalist by his side in such a matter as the curiosa felicitas in which Tennyson came near to rivalling Horace. He had neither the patience nor the artistic conscience, nor the stern self-restraint which goes to building up such things as Ulysses or The Lotos- Eaters, or the lyrics in Maud and The Princess or the lines to Virgil. He is fond of talking of Horace, but never two poets were less alike. The Horatian felicity will not be married to such facility as that of Hugo. And in all that order of things, as well as in manliness and a kind of greatness of soul, Tennyson leaves him far behind. But where in Tennyson is Hugo's inexhaustible abundance of poetic speech and fancy, where except once or twice in Maud and some early lyrics is Hugo's airy grace and lightness as of a leaf dancing in the air or a boat on the waves, where in his Olympian wisdom is Hugo's passionate outpouring of love and sympathy, when shall we connect children, or the sea, or the suffering and surging heart of the people, with Tennyson as they are for ever inseparably connected with Hugo? Where does Tennyson give us the sense, as Hugo does so often, of a torrent in flood, sweeping all barriers before it, and compelling all who find themselves there to follow in its triumphant flow?

It is unnecessary to pursue the comparison. Milton is one of the acknowledged giants of poetry. Tennyson is, perhaps, the only poet among the contemporaries of Hugo's manhood who rivalled him in immediate and visible popularity. If the French poet can in this particular point more than hold his own against such men as these two, there can be no doubt that he has an exceptionally wide range of interest. The object of the remainder of this essay will be to try to illustrate this in some detail, and for that purpose I shall not hesitate to quote freely. For that I make no apology. Few people possessing any large acquaintance with critical studies will deny that in the long run the critic who will not quote is a mere beater of the air. People will not look up references; and yet the work of bringing out the essential qualities of a poet can no more be done in the case of a poet without his verses than it can in the case of an artist without his pictures. Quotation, and liberal quotation, is therefore a necessity as well as a pleasure. And the necessity can seldom be greater than it is with a poet who covers so much ground as Hugo.

We have already seen something of his work in one particular field, that of the love lyric. Let us now look at something quite different. Let us see his imagination working, as it were, in repose. What an amazing painter of pictures he is, pictures of all sorts, portraits, groups, but above all, landscapes! He sees everything when he chooses as a painter sees it. His almost unique eye for form gives him an astonishing mastery of outline and colour, and fills him with an unrivalled storehouse of metaphors and similes. But he is never a realist: the imagination is always at work as well as the eye: the bare fact he knows to belong to the man of science, not to the poet: and he gives it to us not bare and naked but richly clothed, new coloured, new formed, new created, heightened to glory or darkened to gloom, touched and transformed to fit the imaginative purpose he has in hand. So that even when he is giving us such 'choses vues' as the studies of clouds in Toute la Lyre there is a suggestion if nothing else of more than the eye can see. Here is one passage where we get the strange lights which sometimes accompany a thundercloud, passing in and out of the blackness:

Comme si, sous le souffle de Dieu,

De grands poissons de flamme aux ecailles de feu,

Vastes formes dans l'ombre au hasard remuées,

En ce sombre ocean de brume et de nuées

Nageaient, et dans les flots du lourd nuage noir

Se laissaient par instants vaguement entrevoir.

There is the simple picture, seen and painted, with little more than metaphor and suggestion to heighten it. We will not stay to discuss its beauty, but go on to another still more beautiful, where we feel as well as see. What have not poets done to show us the wonder of the night which we care so little to go out to see? And who has done more than Hugo in his lovely Nuits de Juin?

L'ete, lorsque le jour a fui, de fleurs couverte

La plaine verse au loin un parfum enivrant:

Les yeux fermes, Poreille aux rumeurs entr'ouverte,

On ne dort qu'a demi d'un sommeil transparent.

Les astres sont plus purs, Pombre parait meilleure;

Un vague demi-jour teint le dome eternel:

Et l'aube douce et pale, en attendant son heure,

Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel.

Can one ever be out on a summer night again with out recalling that last wonderful line? The little poem is a landscape by Corot: and this, with its more definite outline, and its tender sympathy not now with the poetic dreamer, but with the man who works and believes, will bring up at once the thought of Francois Millet. It is the sower, using the last hour of daylight:

Sa haute silhouette noire

Domine les profonds labours.

On sent a quel point il doit croire

A la fuite utile des jours.

II marche dans la plaine immense,

Va, vient, lance la graine au loin,

Rouvre sa main, et recommence,

Et je medite, obscur temoin,

Pendant que, deployant ses voiles,

L'ombre, ou se mele une rumeur,

Semble elargir jusqu'aux etoiles

Le geste auguste du semeur.

How the poet has seen it, not with the eye only, that geste auguste du semeur! He abounds in single lines which call up a whole picture, too often overwhelmed in the complete poem by his profuse exuberance! What a tremendous effect, for instance, is produced, in the great picture of the sea slowly and calmly rising over the doomed primeval city, by that wonderful line,

Comme un grave ouvrier qui sait qu'il a le temps;

what a Shakespearian touch it is! One draws one's breath with awe to watch for the end. The poem itself, 'La Ville Disparue,' is a fine thing, one of many which show with what majestic ease the imagination of Hugo moved among the remote beginnings of the world. Of the same kind is the great 'Feu du Ciel' of Les Orientales, a thing of amazing force and fiery energy. The cloud of sulphur, on its errand of doom, passes over the sea, and the happy cities of the sea, and over Egypt, and over the desert, and over the towers of Babel, and at each it asks if its task lies there, and at each is told to go further, till at last it reaches the two cities of the plain. There they lie in their monstrous splendour:

dormant dans la brume des nuits,

Avec leurs dieux, leur peuple, et leurs chars, et leurs bruits.

We see all their barbaric glory as the cloud is poised above them:

Des jardins suspendus, pleins de fleurs et d'arcades

Et d'arbres noirs penches sur de vastes cascades;

Des plafonds d'un seul bloc couvrant de vastes salles,

Ou, sans jamais lever leurs tetes colossales,

Veillaient, assis en cercle, et se regardant tous,

Des dieux d'airain, posant leurs mains sur leurs genoux.

There they were, a stain on the earth, with their hideous gods and monstrous vices: and yet,

Tout dormait cependant : au front des deux cites,

A peine encore glissaient quelques pales clartes,

Lampes de la debauche, en naissant disparues,

Derniers feux des festins oublies dans les rues.

De grands angles de mur, par la lune blanchis,

Coupaient Pombre, ou tremblaient dans une eau reflechis.

Peut-etre on entendait vaguement dans les plaines

S'etouffer des baisers, se meler des haleines,

Et les deux villes sceurs, lasses des feux du jour,

Murmurer mollement d'une etreinte d'amour;

Et le vent, soupirant sous le frais sycomore,

Allait tout parfumd de Sodome a Gomorrhe.

If there is any one who does not feel the beauty of these verses, French poetry, or that large part of it which is written in the great French metre, is a closed book to him. There have scarcely been a dozen poets in the history of the world who have united the imaginative power that conceives such a scene as this with the power of expression that paints it to such perfection that the reader sees it too! But even this is not the loveliest picture in Hugo's gallery. He has challenged and rivalled--if romantic poet can ever rival classical--the great scenes of Milton's Eden, the ' bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring ' which Tennyson loved even better than the scenes in Hell. Let us take the great dawn in Paradise, with which the Legende des Siecles opens:

L'aurore apparaissait; quelle aurore? Un abime

D'eblouissement, vaste, insondable, sublime;

Une ardente lueur de paix et de bonte.

C'etait aux premiers temps du globe; et la clarté

Brillait sereine au front du ciel inaccessible,

Etant tout ce que Dieu peut avoir de visible;

Tout s'illuminait, l'ombre et le brouillard obscur;

Des avalanches d'or s'ecroulaient dans l'azur;

Le jour en flamme, au fond de la terre ravie,

Embrasait les lointains splendides de la vie;

Les horizons, pleins d'ombre et de rocs chevelus

Et d'arbres effrayants que rhomme ne voit plus,

Luisaient, comme le songe et comme le vertige,

Dans une profondeur d'eclair et de prodige:

L'Eden pudique et nu s'eveillait mollement;

Les oiseaux gazouillaient un hymne si charmant,

Si frais, si gracieux, si suave et si tendre,

Que les anges distraits se penchaient pour l'entendre;

La priere semblait à la clarté melée:

Et sur cette nature encore immaculée

Qui du verbe éternel avait garde l'accent,

Sur ce monde celeste, angelique, innocent,

Le matin, murmurant une sainte parole,

Souriait, et l'aurore etait une aureole.

Les vents et les rayons semaient de tels delires

Que les forets vibraient comme de grandes lyres;

De l'ombre a la clarte, de la base au sommet,

Une fraternite venerable germait;

Une harmonic égale a la clarté, versant

Une extase divine au globe adolescent,

Semblait sortir du cceur mysterieux du monde;

L'herbe en etait emue, et le nuage, et l'onde,

Et meme le rocher qui songe et qui se tait;

L'arbre, tout penetre de lumiere, chantait;

Chaque fleur, echangeant son souffle et sa pensée

Avec le ciel serein d'ou tombe la rosée,

Recevait une perle et donnait un parfum;

L'Etre resplendissait, Un dans Tout, Tout dans Un;

Le paradis brillait sous les sombres ramures

De la vie ivre d'ombre et pleine de murmures,

Et la lumiere etait faite de verite;

Et tout avait la grace, ayant la purete.

Tout etait flamme, hymen, bonheur, douceur, clemence,

Tant ces immenses jours avaient une aube immense!

You can never bring the classical and romantic poet to the same measure, any more than you can a man and a woman. Those who love the great manner, its calm, its self-possession, the poet's clear views and perfect mastery of his subject, will never quite feel that they have any compensation for their absence in all this ecstasy of words. They will have a sense that for them the poet is a little lost in the enthusiasm of his own eloquence and in this bewildering exuberance of detail. They will regret the severe concentration of the classics. Milton knows and chooses every step of his stately way: and you cannot change a word of his poem without loss. You could change many in Hugo: the eager ecstasy cannot stay to adjust its robes. But what a rare thing ecstasy is, and what a rare ecstasy is this! Has there ever been any other poet, except Shelley, who could have mingled in such mystical union the the Paradise of nature and the Paradise of spirit?

Or take another picture: no longer from La Legende, but still of Eve, a little later, taking her place now with Adam among Les Malheureux:--

Ils venaient tous les deux s'asseoir sur une pierre,

En presence des monts fauves et soucieux,

Et de I'eternite formidable des cieux.

Leur ceil triste rendait la nature farouche.

Et la, sans qu'il sortit un souffle de leur bouche.

Les mains sur leurs genoux, et se tournant le dos,

Accables comme ceux qui portent des fardeaux,

Sans autre mouvement de vie exterieure

Que de baisser plus bas la tete d'heure en heure,

Dans une stupeur morne et fatale absorbes,

Froids, livides, hagards, ils regardaient, courbes

Sous Petre illimite sans figure et sans nombre,

L'un decroitre le jour, et Pautre, grandir l'ombre.

Et, tandis que montaient les constellations,

Et que la premiere onde aux premiers alcyons

Donnait sous 1'infini le long baiser nocturne,

Et qu'ainsi que des fleurs tombant a flots d'une urne

Les astres fourmillants emplissaient le ciel noir,

Ils songeaient et, reveurs, sans entendre, sans voir,

Sourds aux rumeurs des mers d'ou l'ouragan s'elance,

Toute la nuit, dans Fombre, ils pleuraient en silence,

Ils pleuraient tous les deux, aieux du genre humain,

Le pere sur Abel, la mere sur Cain.

If it is part of the business of poetry, as I was saying, to make us see things new and old, our mother earth, our common humanity, in a light of strange and unforgettable beauty, who has performed it better than Hugo here? Where better than here can we see, as in a picture, the silent and indifferent splendours of Nature in their eternal contrast with the sorrows of humanity?

But Hugo is far from being, like the poets of the school of Leconte de Lisle, a mere painter of pictures. His imagination can see the world in action as well as the world in repose. The whole Légende des Siecles, for instance, is not only the greatest attempt made by a poet in the nineteenth century to bring the whole of humanity--dead and living--to his judgment as Dante brought it in the Commedia: it is also an amazing series of scenes from the life of man in all the multifarious forms his activity has taken from the innocence of Eden to the crimes of Pio Nono and Napoleon III. And the whole is carried through with an unflagging energy which only belongs to the giants, and executed in spite of the grave faults, diffuseness, rhetoric, want of dignity, want of the sense of proportion with an energy, a picturesqueness, a mastery of language and of verse, which are a veritable triumph, silencing everything else in amazed admiration. And the most striking thing in it as a whole is the range of interest and imagination. It slides off, no doubt, far too easily into the poet's besetting sin of vague declamation about things in general: but a book containing such things of beauty as the Eden scenes I have quoted, the wonderful sea-piece in Le Phare, or again 'les Jardins de Babylone' in Les Sept Merveilles du Monde, such things of terror as the tale of Canute and the Vision de Dante, such tales mingled of terror and beauty as Eviradnus, such ballads as La Chanson des Aventuriers de la Mer