Part 27

The Grave said to the Rose, "What of the dews of morn, Love's flower, what end is theirs?" "And what of souls outworn, Of them whereon doth close The tomb's mouth unawares?" The Rose said to the Grave.

The Rose said, "In the shade From the dawn's tears is made A perfume faint and strange, Amber and honey sweet." "And all the spirits fleet Do suffer a sky-change More strangely than the dew-- To God's own angels new," The Grave said to the Rose.

The majesty with which this great Frenchman would sometimes, in prose, condescend to be an acrobat walking the tight-rope of grandiloquence stretched over a bottomless abyss of the ridiculous, is well shown in his monograph on Shakespeare. This is accessible in a scholarlike English translation (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, publishers) by Melville B. Anderson. The following sentences will indicate what it is. No one familiar with Victor Hugo can doubt that the great presence of HIMSELF, the writer, was really the chief thing in his musing eye, when, in the latter part of this extract, he was ostensibly describing and vindicating romanticist Shakespeare:

Shakespeare, shuddering, has within himself winds, spirits, magic potions, vibrations; he sways in the passing breeze, obscure effluences pervade him, he is filled with the unknown sap of life. Thence his agitation, at the core of which is peace. It is this agitation which is lacking in Goethe, wrongly praised for his impassiveness, which is inferiority. All minds of the first order have this agitation. It is in Job, in AEschylus, in Alighieri. This agitation is humanity.... It seems at times as if Shakespeare terrified Shakespeare. He shudders at his own depth. This is the sign of supreme intelligence. It is his own vastness which shakes him and imparts to him strange and mighty oscillations. There is no genius without billows. An intoxicated savage, it may be. He has the savagery of the virgin forest; he has the intoxication of the high sea.

"He shudders at his own depth"--hardly could we resist the temptation to bracket in "[Victor Hugo]" after the pronoun "he." Every reader should do this mentally for himself; he otherwise will miss that important part of the true sense, which here is written between the lines. There never was genius with more inseparable, unescapable, tyrannizing consciousness of itself. You feel the personality even more than you feel the genius in reading Victor Hugo.

A considerable part of Victor Hugo's prose production, mostly fiction, has been translated into English. Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Co. publish six portly volumes in a uniform edition. From "Les Miserables" in this series we make extracts which will briefly represent Victor Hugo's prose at its very best, alike in style, in thought, and in spirit. In the first, the writer gives utterance to reflections inspired by the final event of the battle of Waterloo:

This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest bravery which ever astounded history--is that causeless? No. The shadow of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls surrendering their swords. Those who have conquered Europe have fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say or to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence. _Hoc erat in fatis._ That day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.

In the second, Victor Hugo contrasts the two leaders, the conqueror and the conquered, of that momentous day:

Waterloo is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God, who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of batallions, carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand, nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage, absolute regularity; on the other intuition, divination, military oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries of a profound soul, association with destiny; the stream, the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it. Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo; and on this occasion genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected Bluecher; he came.

It remains only to exemplify, as best in small space we can, Victor Hugo's portentous, his terrific, power in working up a tragic situation, and displaying it as in a calcium-light of intense imaginative description or narration. We shall then feel that this Titanic figure in French literature is at least by suggestive partial glimpses fairly before our readers. From "Les Miserables," we take the following passage, introduced by the original author as a first step only in the climax by which he represents the supreme agony of his hero in a great crisis of his life:

It sometimes happens that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a man, traveler or fisherman, while walking at low tide on the beach, far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is bird-lime....

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns toward the land, endeavors to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road: he halts to get his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand....

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him.... He is condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky.... The wretched man ... shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them; night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man!

Victor Hugo's hero was involved thus in a quicksand--but the quicksand in his case was underground, and dark as Erebus; it was a quicksand composed of the unspeakable foulness and fetor of a cess-pool--he was wading up to his very chin in the noisome Styx of the great Paris sewer. All this to rescue, upborne in his arms above his head, a man unconscious, perhaps already dead from wounds received, and a man whom he, the rescuer, hated. There is Victor Hugo for you, Victor Hugo in his glory. For the glory of Victor Hugo as novelist is in climaxes of agony, lashed together and reared like an endless ladder reaching to heaven. This his strength is his weakness. All is said that need be said in hostile criticism of Victor Hugo's writings, when it is said that he is always to the last degree egotistic and to the last degree theatric. Effect is every thing, truth nothing, with him.

That Victor Hugo willed to be buried exactly like a pauper did not prevent the occurrence of certain very important contrasts between his obsequies and the rites of an ordinary pauper funeral; perhaps, indeed, such a will on his part contributed to create the difference which at all events existed. The funeral attendance was said to be the most numerous ever seen in France. A million spectators were present. Three large wagons headed the procession filled with floral gifts. A beautiful diadem of Irish lilies was contributed by Tennyson, inscribed "To the World's Greatest Poet."

The French apotheosis of a national idol would not be complete without tribute from the theater. Accordingly, the Theatre Francais produced a drama by M. Renan entitled "_Mort_," in which the shades of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Voltaire, and Diderot hold a dialogue about human progress in the century to follow them, and, Corneille asking, "What poet will sing in that era, as sweet and tender as Racine, as logical as Boileau, as clear in style as Voltaire," the genius of the age lyrically answers, "Hugo," at the same time placing a crown on Hugo's bust.

Victor Hugo the man, especially as he mellowed with old age, was a sunny, sweet, benignant nature. He was a hearty, one might almost say a partisan, believer in God--atheism was so offensive to him. Unfortunately, however, Victor Hugo's theism was not such as to enforce departure, in his own personal practice, from that deplorable tradition of his country which has rendered so many distinguished French authors, from the earliest to the latest, offenders against the laws of marriage and of chastity.

2. SAINTE-BEUVE.

Sainte-Beuve is an instance of the half-malicious sportiveness of nature or of fortune. What he chiefly desired was the fame of a poet. What he chiefly got was the fame of a critic. But Sainte-Beuve's fame as a critic was far more in fact, if far less to his mind, than any fame that he could have achieved as a poet. In poetry, he never could have risen higher than to be a poet of the second or of the third rank. He is admitted to be a critic of the first rank. Nay, in the opinion of many, Sainte-Beuve constitutes a rank by himself, having no peers.

Sainte-Beuve's range of subjects was very wide. He exercised himself to be equally open and fair toward all schools of taste and of opinion alike. At the outset, he was of the coterie of the romanticists. But he soon broke with these, either personally repelled by antipathies, or else unconsciously attracted by a secret sympathy of his own, too strong for his contrary will to resist, toward the classical standards respesented in the seventeenth-century writers. He never seems to feel himself more entirely in his element than when he is appreciating the literature of the French golden age.

As to religion, Sainte-Beuve, having had his phase of pietism even, ended by becoming a blank unbeliever. But his own antipathetic personal attitude of intellect and of heart toward Christianity he would not in the least allow to disturb the urbanity and serenity of his tolerance for the most orthodox Christian writers. Such, at any rate, was his standard and ideal.

But at this point, as at all points, the complaisance of Sainte-Beuve's writing is a manner with him, rather than a spirit. It does not penetrate deeply. He loves his "insinuations." That is his own word. He is willing to write a whole essay in criticism for the sake of the "insinuations" which his deceitful blandness will sheathe. Or, rather, he would sooner give up the whole essay than forego a phrase, or perhaps a single word, containing his insinuation. It was partly his critical conscience, no doubt, instinctively nice about shades of opinion and of expression; but then a something very like malice was mingled with his critical conscience. With all that must be conceded to the value of Sainte-Beuve's critical work, readers are conscious, in concluding the perusal of almost any one of his essays, that the result to them is a sapor remaining on their literary palate, rather than substance of nutriment entered into their mental digestion. Their food has been refined into a flavor.

For our illustration of Sainte-Beuve, we go to a paper of his on Bossuet. But we need to prepare our readers. Sainte-Beuve is a writer for the few, instead of for the many. To profit from him requires some effort of attention. One must study a little, as well as simply read. Sainte-Beuve does not deal in heavy strokes. His lines are most of them fine, many of them hair-lines vanishing almost into invisibility. He escapes you like Proteus. Very different is he, by this elusive quality of his, from his countryman, M. Taine, whose bold crayon sketches are at once appreciable to all.

In the choice indicated of specimen, we draw from a series of short criticisms which the author called _Causeries du Lundi_; "Monday-Chats," Mr. William Matthews, who has a volume of select translations from them, not unhappily renders the title. These were originally published as Monday articles in the columns of two Paris journals, the _Constitutionel_ and the _Moniteur_. Mr. Matthews's volume is introduced by a most readable biographical sketch and literary appreciation of Sainte-Beuve himself from the pen of the translator. M. Sainte-Beuve, we ought to say, in addition to his very considerable body of criticism, ranging, as we have intimated, over a wide field of literature, wrote an extended historical monograph on Port Royal, which is constantly referred to by writers as an authority on its subject.

The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding traits:

The simple idea of order, of authority, of unity, of the continual government of Providence, Bossuet, among the moderns, has grasped more completely than any other man, and he applies it on all occasions without effort, and, as it were, by an irrefutable deduction. Bossuet is the Hebrew genius, expanded, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the gains of the human intelligence, but acknowledging something of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely at the point where its light ceases. In mien and in tone he resembles a Moses; there are mingled in his speech traits characteristic of the Prophet-King, touches of a pathos ardent and sublime; there sounds the voice eloquent by eminence, the simplest, the strongest, the most abrupt, the most familiar, the most suddenly outbursting in thunder. Even where he holds his course unbending, in an imperious flood, he bears along with him treasures of eternal human morality. And it is by all these qualities that he is for us a unique man, and that, whatever may be the employment he makes of his speech, he remains the model of eloquence the most exalted, and of language the most beautiful.

Sainte-Beuve is so much a critic that he cannot help criticising by the way, or even sometimes perhaps a little out of the way. But it will be quite to our purpose if we admit here what Sainte-Beuve incidentally says of Lamartine:

[Bossuet] was early distinguished for surprising gifts of memory and of understanding. He knew Virgil by heart, as, a little later, he knew Homer. "Less easy to understand is it," says M. de Lamartine, "_how he was infatuated all his life_ with the Latin poet, Horace, spirit exquisite, but the reverse of spontaneous and natural, who strings his lyre with only the softest fibers of the heart; a careless voluptuary," etc. M. de Lamartine, who has so well discerned the great features of the eloquence and of the talent of Bossuet, has studied a little too lightly his life, and he has here proposed to himself a difficulty which does not exist; there is nowhere mention made in fact of that _inexplicable predilection_ of Bossuet for Horace, _the least divine of all the poets_. M. de Lamartine must have inadvertently read "Horace" instead of "Homer." ... It was Fenelon (and not Bossuet) who read and relished Horace more than any other poet, who knew him by heart.... The great pagan preference of Bossuet (if one may use such an expression) was quite naturally for Homer; after him for Virgil; Horace, in his judgment and in his liking, came far behind them. But the book by eminence which gave early direction to the genius and to the entire career of Bossuet, and which dominated all within him, was the Bible; it is said that the first time he read it he was illuminated and transported by it. He had found in it the source whence his own genius was destined to flow, like one of the four great rivers in Genesis.

Sainte-Beuve speaks of the relation of the Hotel de Rambouillet to the future great man:

The young Bossuet was conducted thither one evening to preach there an improvised sermon. In lending himself to these singular exercises and to these tournaments where his person and his gifts were challenged, treated as an intellectual virtuoso in the salons of the Hotel de Rambouillet and the Hotel de Nevers, it does not appear that Bossuet was in consequence subjected to the slightest charge of vanity, and there is no example of a precocious genius so praised, caressed by the world, and remaining so perfectly exempt from all self-love and from all coquetry.

In the following passage, Sainte-Beuve appreciates, not without insinuated criticism, the younger eloquence of Bossuet the preacher. Conceive this atheist critic, for such in effect Sainte-Beuve was, entering into the spirit of the orthodox Christian, exclusively for the purpose of justly judging and enjoying a strain of pulpit eloquence! But that is Sainte-Beuve:

When he portrays to us Jesus purposing to clothe himself with a flesh like our own, and when he sets forth the motives for this according to the Scriptures, with what bold relief and what saliency he does it! He exhibits that Saviour who above all seeks out misery and distress, shunning to take on the angelic nature which would have exempted him from this, leaping over, in some sense, and tasking himself to pursue, to _apprehend_ wretched human nature, precisely because it is wretched, clinging to it and running after it, although it flies from him, although it recoils from being assumed by him; aiming to secure for himself real human flesh, real human blood, with the qualities and the weaknesses of our own, and that for what reason? _In order to be compassionate._ Although in all this Bossuet only makes use of the terms of the Apostle and perhaps of those of Chrysostom, he employs them with a delight, a luxury, a gust for reduplication, which bespeaks vivacious youth: "He has," says the apostle, "_apprehended_ human nature; it flew away, it would have nothing of the Saviour; what did he do? He ran after it with headlong speed, leaping over the mountains, that is to say, the ranks of the angels.... He ran like a giant, with great strides and immeasurable, passing in a moment from heaven to earth.... There he overtook that fugitive nature; he seized it, he apprehended it, body and soul." Let us study the youthful eloquence of Bossuet, even in his risks of taste, as one studies the youthful poetry of the great Corneille.

Sainte-Beuve cannot let Lamartine alone. In the clause following, italicized by us, our readers are to recognize an irony on the part of the critic:

M. de Lamartine, who, _with that second sight which is granted to poets_, knew how to see Bossuet distinctly as he was when young, etc.

Having quoted, with significant italics disposed here and there, a highly realistic imaginary picture of the youthful Bossuet from the hand of Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve says:

Here is a primitive Bossuet much toned down and mollified, so it seems to me, a Bossuet drawn very much at will, to resemble Jocelyn and Fenelon, in order that it may be said afterward [by Lamartine]: "The soul evidently in this great man was of one temper, and the genius of another. Nature had made him tender; dogma had made him hard." I do not believe in this contradiction in Bossuet, a nature having the most perfect harmony, and the least at war with itself, that we know. But what for me is not less certain is, that the illustrious biographer [Lamartine] here treats literary history absolutely as history is treated in an historical romance; there you lightly invent your character, where your information fails, or where dramatic interest demands it. And without refusing the praise which certain ingenious and delicate touches of this portrait merit, I will permit myself to ask more seriously: Is it proper, is it becoming, thus to paint Bossuet as a youth, to fondle thus with the brush, as one would a Greek dancing-woman or a beautiful child of the English aristocracy, him who never ceased to grow under the shadow of the temple, that serious youth who gave promise of the simple great man, all genius and all eloquence? Far, far from him [Bossuet] these fondlings and these physiological feats of a brush which amuses itself with carmine and with veins....

You feel, with regard to the foregoing criticism, that it is as just as it is penetrative. Lamartine fairly provoked it.

Here is a trait of Bossuet's that pertained remarkably also to Daniel Webster:

Bossuet is not one of those ingenious men of talent who have the art of treating commonplace subjects excellently, and of introducing into them foreign materials; but let the subject presented to him be vast, lofty, majestic, he is at his ease, and, the higher the theme, the more is he equal to its demands, on his proper plane, and in his element.