Part 20

But all the theological trappings were, as one might say, only glued on to Lamartine's poetry. Or one might perhaps with more propriety liken them to a carelessly constructed raft, which for a time floats upon the bosom of the stream and then breaks up into its component parts and disappears. All this pious dogmatism soon resolved itself into love of nature, worship of nature, a sincerely religious philosophy of nature.

What really lived and breathed in those early poems was something independent of their religious dogmatism, namely, the whole emotional life of a gentle, yet dignified soul. The soul which found expression in them had this characteristic of the new century, that it loved solitude, and only in solitude found itself and felt itself rich. It was an unsociable soul, only disposed to vibrate in harmony with nature. It was sad and pathetically earnest; under no circumstances whatever cheerful or gay. And, finally, it was never erotic; one only of the poems was an expression of the happiness of satisfied love; the feeling pervading all the rest was sorrow over the loss of the loved one, whom death had claimed as his prey. The poetry of the eighteenth century had resolved love into gallantry, had taken neither it nor woman seriously, but in this new poetry love was the silent worship of a memory, and woman was adored and glorified as she had been in the days of the Minnesingers; only now it was woman as the departed one, as the spirit.

Never did Lamartine depict the wild grief of loss at the moment of the loss; in his poems grief has become a condition, a silent despair which blunts, stiffens, tortures, and at a rare time dissolves into tears.

This new song was song which flowed naturally from its fountain, plentiful and pure; it was music like harp-strains blended with the tones of celestial violins. And, borne on these tones, simple, familiar emotions communicated themselves to the reader's mind, such thoughts as that of the poem _La Retraite_--happiness awaits me nowhere; or of _L'Automne_--nature's autumnal mourning garb harmonises with my sorrow and is pleasant to my eyes; or of _Le Golfe de Baya_--this spot, once the scene of such great events, preserves not a trace of them; in like manner we ourselves shall disappear, leaving no trace behind. But, note well; a thought like this last was expressed in such wonderfully beautiful lines as the following:

Ainsi tout change, ainsi tout passe; Ainsi nous-mêmes nous passons, Hélas! sans laisser plus de trace Que cette barque où nous glissons Sur cette mer où tout s'efface.

There was never any systematic description of nature, or any attempt at painting; the momentary impression of nature was caught, even as it passed, by genius, and preserved for all time.

The poet is sitting at evening on the bare mountain side. Venus rises above the horizon (_Le Soir_). A ray from the star seems to glide across his brow and touch his eyes, and he feels as if the departed one, in whose companionship he had lived here, were hovering near him. He addresses the ray from Venus:

Mon cœur à ta clarté s'enflamme, Je sens des transports inconnus, Je songe à ceux qui ne sont plus: Douce lumière, es-tu leur âme?

Or, sitting on a rock by the lake (_Le Bourget_), where in bygone happy days he had sat by her side, he is painfully affected by the feeling of the mutability of everything human as compared with the unchangeableness of inanimate nature. This is the emotion to which he gives expression in his poem _Le Lac_, which, in spite of its extraordinary popularity, is probably the best he ever wrote. It is an excellent type of his poetry; flowing gently, with no exertion perceptible, not even that exertion which we call art, it is as naturally melodious as the rippling of the lake. The emotion which the poet desires to express is indicated with admirable precision in the metaphor with which the first verse concludes: Is it impossible to cast anchor on the ocean of time even for a single day? The lake is described with its waves breaking upon the rocks as they did a year ago, when the beloved one heard their murmur; and the bereaved lover recalls the words which she spoke in the stillness of night, as their boat floated on the waters--an invocation to time, that happy time, to stay its flight, a prayer to it to hasten for the unhappy and suffering, but to linger with those who love and are beloved. He repeats her concluding cry: Prayer is fruitless; let us love one another and enjoy the passing hour! For man there is no haven, time has no shore; it flows on and we disappear. On this memory of the thoughts of his dead love follows the poet's own invocation to nature. He invokes the lake, the silent rocks, the caves, the dark woods, the things which time spares and those which it re-animates, and beseeches them to preserve the remembrance of that night.

And Lamartine, so spiritual in his expression of the grief and loneliness of the bereaved lover, is almost as spiritual when for once he gives expression to happy love. This he does in _Chant d'amour_, a poem which he himself naïvely describes as a modern Song of Solomon, quieter in tone and less Oriental in colouring than the old, but which in reality has as little resemblance to that song as the chastest spirituality of the West has to the glowing sensuality of the East. Here, as elsewhere, the chord which he touches is the chord of plaintive tenderness, gradually modulating into that of religious devotion.

Of Lamartine's youthful verse these purely human poems are all that we really care for nowadays. We are terribly bored by the vapid compositions which, following the prescribed rule for religious poetry, consist of nothing but adoration of the Deity as he reveals himself in his works.

The poet whose acquaintance we make in the human poems is unmistakably very vain, much engrossed with himself and his own lovableness, and at times too honeyed in his language. But his vanity is so childlike and innocent that it does not affect us unpleasantly; and we are favourably impressed by the fact that it is not literary vanity. Lamartine rejoices that he is good-looking, a favourite with distinguished women, a good horseman, in course of time an eloquent orator; but he is not conceited about his poetical gifts, not even proud of them. The man whose talent was that of the true improvisatore with proud humility describes himself in his prefaces and memoirs as one who cultivates art for his pleasure, and who does not belong to the number of the specially initiated. And he really is the dilettante in so far as he is too careless to be called a true artist. He has unconscious technique, he has flexibility and ease, but along with these an inclination to long-windedness and repetition which at times spoils his effects, and a want of the power of self-criticism which makes it difficult, nay, almost impossible, for him to correct and improve. Nevertheless, all his life long he was a poet, a true poet--in spite of his artistic defects one of the most genuine whom France has produced. It was not his fault that he made his appearance in literature under the unpropitious planet of the reaction period.

It was under the influence of the same planet that the man destined to become the most famous French poet of the nineteenth century won a name for himself. Victor Hugo, born in 1802, is for a long period of his life as good a Catholic and royalist as Lamartine, his senior by twelve years. Hugo's literary career corresponds closely with the political career of the French nation. He is an adherent of the Bourbons as long as they are the reigning family. When the Revolution of July takes place, he sympathises with it, and he is an adherent of the new monarchy from the moment it is founded. During the reign of King Louis Philippe, at whose court he is a frequent guest, he becomes an enthusiastic eulogist of Napoleon when the cult of Napoleon is revived in France. He warmly supports the candidature of Louis Napoleon for the post of President of the Republic, continues to lend him his support when he occupies that post, and is even favourable to the idea of an empire, until the feeling that he is despised as a politician estranges him from the Prince-President, and resentment at the _coup d'état_ drives him into the camp of the extreme Republicans. His life may be said to mirror the political movements of France during the first half of the century. He was, as is so often the case with poets, not a leading spirit, but an organ.

In the last preface to his _Odes et Ballades_ Hugo, in his pompous manner, writes of his own career: "History goes into ecstasies over Michel Ney, who, born a cooper, became a marshal of France, and over Murat, who, born an ostler, became a king. The obscurity of their origin is considered to give them an additional claim to respect, and to add to the glory of the position to which they have attained. Of all the ladders which lead from darkness to light, the one which it is most difficult and most meritorious to mount by is undoubtedly that which leads from the position of loyal aristocrat to that of democrat. To rise from a hut to a palace is, no doubt, an uncommon and admirable achievement, but to rise from error to truth is more uncommon and more admirable. In the case of the first ascent, the man gains something, increases his comfort, his power, his wealth, with every upward step; in the case of the second, exactly the opposite happens ... he must pay for his spiritual growth with one sacrifice of temporal well-being after another ... and if it is true that Murat could with pride lay his postillion's whip beside his sceptre, saying: 'This is what I began with,' then certainly the poet may with more justifiable pride and greater inward satisfaction point to the royalist odes which he wrote as a child and youth, and lay them beside the democratic poems and works which he has written as a grown man. And the pride is perhaps especially justifiable in one who at the end of his ascent, on the topmost step of the ladder of light, has found banishment, in the man who can date this preface from exile."

Victor Hugo was the son of one of Napoleon's officers who had originally been a violent revolutionist, and as such had exchanged his Christian name, Joseph, for that of Brutus, which, however, he dropped again when the Revolution was at an end. Joseph Hugo was at Besançon, in command of a battalion, when his famous son was born. A few weeks later he was sent to Corsica. From Corsica he was transferred to Elba, thence to Genoa and the Italian army. He entered the service of Napoleon's brother Joseph when Joseph became King of Naples, and at Naples his wife and children joined him in October 1807. When in 1808 Joseph was made King of Spain, Colonel Hugo followed him to that country, sending his wife and three little sons to Paris, where they lived from 1808 till 1811. In the spring of 1811 they accompanied a strong detachment of troops to Madrid, but Hugo thought it prudent to send them back to Paris in the following year, while he himself, who had been promoted with extraordinary rapidity to be aide-de-camp to the King, major-domo of the palace, general, Count of Cisuentes, inspector-general of the Peninsular army, and governor of three provinces, took part in the war until the defeat of Vittoria, in June 1813, obliged Joseph to abdicate. Napoleon, who could not bear General Hugo, and always treated him badly, refused to confirm his appointment as general and his title as count (his other preferments he had lost), and ordered him to enter the French army again with the rank of major. In 1814 and 1815 Joseph Hugo distinguished himself by his able defence of the fortress of Thionville. His son writes of him as if he had been an ardent votary of Napoleon. This he most certainly was not, and when the Bourbons returned they at once gained his complete allegiance by restoring him to his rank of general, with promotion dating from 1809, the year in which he had received it from King Joseph. Thus it was not only Victor Hugo's mother, the daughter of a loyal shipowner of the Breton town of Nantes, who was a devoted royalist; his father, too, was strongly attached to the restored royal house. Causes entirely unconnected with politics produced a misunderstanding between the parents, and they separated. The sons, Abel, Eugène, and Victor, remained with their mother in Paris.

All three possessed literary ability, though only the youngest lived long enough to display his full power and win fame. All three were, to begin with, champions of royalty and the church. Victor said as a boy: "I will be Chateaubriand, or no one."

After winning prizes for their poems in Paris and at Toulouse, the three brothers, with the view of earning a living, started a literary periodical (in 1819). Chateaubriand was at this time editing the extreme Conservative newspaper _Le Conservateur_. The brothers named their venture _Le Conservateur littéraire_, and Chateaubriand gave it a warm welcome. The new periodical came out twice a month until March 1821, and Victor Hugo alone supplied more poems and articles than all the other contributors together. In _Le Conservateur littéraire_ are already to be found some of his most famous odes--_Les Vierges de Verdun_, the odes on the fate of La Vendée, on the death of the Duke of Berri, on the birth of the Duke of Bordeaux, and the beautiful, more personal song of rejoicing on the occasion of the restoration of the statue of Henry IV. And in it we also find, to the number of over a hundred, his first essays in criticism, of which only a few, and these much tampered with, have been included in the collection entitled _Littérature et Philosophie mêlées_.

At this period poetry is to Victor Hugo the daughter of religion. Apropos of an ode on the existence of God, he writes: "The desire to thank a bountiful God in language worthy of Him begat poetry. From its birth it shared in the triumphs of religion, which united the earliest societies and began the civilisation of the world. At the present day, when, in order to demolish society, men attack religion, the only bridle upon man, the only lasting tie which holds societies together, it is not surprising that they should seek to make an ally of poetry. But the divine muse does not allow herself to be inspired by that which is nought."

And at this period, too, he proclaims the superiority of Corneille and Racine to Shakespeare and Schiller: "We have never understood the difference alleged to exist between classic and romantic art. Shakespeare's and Schiller's dramas differ from Corneille's and Racine's only in being more faulty."

The first edition of Victor Hugo's _Odes_ appeared in 1822. Louis XVIII., who read them over and over again, settled an annuity of 1000 francs a year on the poet out of his private purse; in the following year the Ministry of the Interior conferred on him a pension of 2000 francs; and in 1826 the King, on being applied to, increased the amount of his yearly grant.

The King had good reason to show approval, for these first poems of Victor Hugo contain the whole system of orthodox political and religious principles valid under the Bourbon monarchy. They are a faithful image of the period during which they were written.

They pass in review the history of France from 1789 to 1825. In those of them which treat of the Revolution we observe, as in the corresponding poems by Lamartine, that two words occur more frequently than any others--executioners and victims. In the history of the Revolution Hugo sees nothing else. For its leading spirits he has but this one designation--executioners; the Convention he describes as a creation of the devil (livre i. ode 4); and, little as he loves heathen mythology, he cannot resist using the expression, _Hydra_ of anarchy, when he wishes to depict the horrors of the revolutionary period. For the enemies of the Revolution victims is the stereotyped designation; the revolt of La Vendée is eulogised in every second poem, and odes are addressed to its heroes and heroines (_La Vendée, Quiberon, Mlle. Sombreuil_). The guillotine is always present to the poet's imagination, and is the constant object of his anathemas, except when, as in the ode _Le Dévouement_ (livre iv. ode 4), he is carried away to the extent of desiring martyrdom for himself, "because the martyrs' angel is the most beautiful of all the angels who bear the souls of men to heaven."

Following in the footprints of Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo goes back to the Christian martyrs of ancient Rome, and in no fewer than four odes (_Le repas libre, L'homme heureux, Le chant du cirque, Un chant de fête de Néron_) describes the agonising triumph of the martyrs over the brutal and voluptuous cruelty to which they in outward appearance succumb. And the symbolism, too, is the same as in Chateaubriand's poetry; it is the death of the orthodox noble or priest which is represented under the form of the butcheries of the circus.

One of the finest of these poems of the Revolution is the oldest, written in memory of a little company of innocent young girls who, under the Reign of Terror, were executed after a long imprisonment without being brought to trial, on the vague and incorrect suspicion that they had testified pleasure when the Prussians entered their town (_Les vierges de Verdun_). Hugo paints the tribunal of the Convention blacker than is necessary, by crediting the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, with impure designs upon his victims and putting insulting proposals into his mouth; but even without the addition of unhistorical incidents, the sentence of these girls was so shameful, their fate so tragic, and their behaviour so beautiful and dignified, that they well deserved a poetic monument, even a better one than Hugo raised to them.[2]

The poet's pathos is entirely justifiable in cases like this, where the Revolution showed its dark and unjust side in its dealings with youth and innocence, but it becomes grating and false as soon as his dogmas come into play. His tone in writing of the monarchy and the glories of royalty is positively insufferable. In the Ode to Louis XVIII. God calls upon the seraphs, the prophets, and the archangels to do obeisance to the newly arrived heir to the throne: "Courbez-vous, c'est un Roi." And not content with this, the Deity Himself calls him by his title, not his name: "O Roi!" and reminds him that _God's own Son was, like him, a king with a crown of thorns_. In the poem on the occasion of the baptism of the Comte de Chambord, the language is even stronger: "God has given us one of His angels, _as He gave us His Son in the days of old_." We are reminded that the water of the river Jordan (brought home by Chateaubriand) in which the child has been baptized is the same in which Jesus was baptized; it is the will of Heaven, we are told, "that the reassured world should, even by the very water used for his baptism, recognise a _Saviour_." In _La Vision_ the eighteenth century is summoned before the judgment-seat of God, and there accused of having in the pride of its knowledge mocked at the dogmas which are the support of the law and of morality. It timidly expresses the hope that the future will view its actions in a more favourable light, but it is mercilessly condemned; the "guilty century" is plunged into the abyss, pursued as it falls by the inexorable voice of the judge.

The standpoint from which Napoleon (who is always called Buonaparte) is viewed harmonises with that from which the Revolution is judged; he is the usurper, the savage soldier, the murderer of Enghien; and again and again it is impressed on us that lilies are better than laurels. Under the name of Colonel G. A. Gustaffson (livre iii. ode 5), Gustavus IV., who lived as an exile in France during the reign of Louis XVIII, is eulogised as the representative of the fallen kings. The personality and story of Gustavus are represented in a manner which witnesses to Hugo's remarkable ignorance of foreign history--the king's whole life is a model life; his great mind is like a temple, whence proceeds the voice of God; he dictates the history of the future; he is the successor of the ancient seers; actuated by disgust at seeing the monarchs bow their necks to Napoleon's yoke, he has voluntarily taken off his crown, and thereby raised his head high above all the other royal heads on earth. Could folly go farther than this? The wretched, insane Gustavus a model king! The Bourbons are of course exalted to the skies. All their family events--birth, baptism, death, ascension, consecration--are treated as of world-wide import. In a poem on the subject of the reprehensible war which France, at Chateaubriand's instigation, carried on with Spain in the interests of the European reaction, royalty, the royal power, is declared to be miraculous; and in the same poem the king is expressly described as the war-lord, supporting himself by the power of the sword; war is, we are told, the companion of royalty:

Il faut, comme un soldat, qu'un prince ait une épée; Il faut, des factions quand l'astre impur a lui, Que, nuit et jour, bravant leur attente trompée Un glaive veille auprès de lui; Ou que de son armée il se fasse un cortège; Que son fier palais se protège D'un camp au front étincelant; _Car de la Royauté la Guerre est la compagne:_ On ne peut briser le sceptre de Charlemagne, Sans briser le fer de Roland.

It is not surprising that all these odes should have mottoes taken either from the Bible or from religious works, notably Chateaubriand's _Les Martyrs_, a book by which men's minds were so powerfully impressed that the younger poets of the day took a pride in transposing whole pages of it into verse.[3] Lamartine addressed his ode _Le Génie_ to Bonald; Hugo dedicates an ode with the same name to Chateaubriand, of whom he writes that "he suffers the double martyrdom of genius and virtue."

He addresses several poems to Lamartine--it is his desire, he writes, to go into battle on the same war-chariot as his friend, to manage the horses while Lamartine wields the spear--and these poems are among the most attractive of all, partly because they are remarkably beautiful, and testify to the respectful and yet at the same time brotherly feeling of the younger for the elder poet, partly because in them we have, along with Hugo's views on religious and social questions, the expression of his ideas on the subject of art. All the poems prove with what earnestness, but also with what exaggerated and almost offensive self-consciousness, the young poet has apprehended his mission--it is always called a prophet's mission; the poet is a seer, a shepherd of the people; of Lamartine, Hugo goes the length of declaring that one feels as if God had revealed Himself to him face to face. But it is in the poems to Lamartine that we perceive most clearly what is Hugo's conception of the position and relation of the new literature to that of the eighteenth century. It bears a remarkable resemblance to a kindred literary phenomenon in Denmark, namely, Oehlenschläger and his friends' conception of their position to Baggesen. Read, for example, the poem _La Lyre et la Harpe_ (livre iv. ode 2). The lyre represents the frivolous, licentious poetry of the preceding century, which chants the praises of Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, and Eros, and inculcates an intellectual epicureanism, whereas in the tones of the harp we hear the admonition to watch and pray, to remember the seriousness of life, to think of death, to support and help our stumbling brethren. The poem is dedicated to "Alph. de L."; the word harp in itself pointed to Lamartine.