Part 10
The motion of the sea was never till now so perfectly done into words as in these three last lines; but any one to whom the water was as dear or dearer than the land at its loveliest would have found a delight as of love no less conceivable than a passion as of hatred in the more visible and active life of waves, and at least as palpable to the "shaping spirit of imagination." It remains true, after all, for the greatest as for the humblest, that--in the words of one of the very few poets whose verses are fit to quote even after a verse of Hugo's--
we receive but what we give. And in our life alone doth nature live;
so far, at least, as her life concerns us, and is perceptible or appreciable by our spirit or our sense. A magnificent instance of purely dramatic vision, in which the lyric note is tempered to the circumstance of the speakers with a kind of triumphant submission and severe facility, is _La Chanson des Doreurs de Proues._ The poet's unequalled and unapproached variety in mastery of metre and majesty of color and splendid simplicity of style, no less exact than sublime, and no less accurate than passionate, could hardly be better shown than by comparison of the opening verses with the stanza cited above.
Nous sommes les doreurs de proues. Les vents, tournant comme des roues, Sur la verte rondeur des eaux Mêlent les lueurs et les ombres, Et dans les plis des vagues sombres Traînent les obliques vaisseaux.
La bourrasque décrit des courbes, Les vents sont tortueux et fourbes, L'archer noir souffle dans son cor, Ces bruits s'ajoutent aux vertiges, Et c'est nous qui dans ces prodiges Faisons rôder des spectres d'or.
Car c'est un spectre que la proue. Le flot l'étreint, l'air la secoue; Fière, elle sort de nos bazars Pour servir aux éclairs de cible, Et pour être un regard terrible Parmi les sinistres hasards.
It is more than fifty years since _Les Orientales_ rose, radiant upon the world of letters, and the hand which gave them to mankind has lost so little of its cunning that we are well-nigh tempted to doubt whether then, for all its skill and sureness of touch, it had quite the same strength and might of magnificent craftsmanship as now. There was fire as well as music on the lips of the young man, but the ardor of the old man's song seems even deeper and keener than the passion of his past. The fervent and majestic verses of June 2, 1883, strike at starting the note of measureless pity and immeasurable indignation which rings throughout the main part of the fifth and last volume almost louder and fuller, if possible, than it was wont. All Victor Hugo, we may say, is in this book; it is as one of those ardent evening skies in which sunrise and sunset seem one in the flush of overarching color which glows back from the west to the east with reverberating bloom and fervor of rose-blossom and fire. There is life enough in it, enough of the breath and spirit and life-blood of living thought, to vivify a whole generation of punier souls and feebler hearts with the heat of his fourscore years. It may be doubted whether there ever lived a poet and leader of men to whom these glorious verses would be so closely applicable as to their writer.
Un grand esprit en marche a ses rumeurs, ses houles, Ses chocs, et fait frémir profondément les foules, Et remue en passant le monde autour de lui. On est épouvanté si l'on n'est ébloui; L'homme comme un nuage erre et change de forme; Nul, si petit qu'il soit, échappe au souffle énorme; Les plus humbles, pendant qu'il parle, ont le frisson.
Ainsi quand, évadé dans le vaste horizon, L'aquilon qui se hâte et qui cherche aventure Tord la pluie et l'éclair, comme de sa ceinture Une fille défait en souriant le nœud, Quand l'immense vent gronde et passe, tout s'émeut, Pas un brin d'herbe au fond des ravins, que ne touche Cette rapidité formidable et farouche.
And this wind "bloweth where it listeth": now it comes to us charged with all the heart of all the roses in the world; its breath when it blows towards Greece has in it a murmur as of Shelley's _Epipsychidion_; the caress of its love-making has all the freedom and all the purity of Blake's; now it passes by us in darkness, from depth to depth of the bitter mystery of night. A vision of ruined worlds, the floating purgatorial prisons of ruined souls, adrift as hulks on the sea of darkness everlasting, shows us the harvest in eternity of such seed as was sown in time by the hands of such guides and rulers of men as we hear elsewhere speaking softly with each other in the shadows, within hail of the confessional and the scaffold. The loftiest words of counsel sound sweeter in the speech of this great spirit than the warmest whispers of pleasure; and again, the heaviest stroke of damning satire is succeeded by the tenderest touch of a compassion that would leave not a bird in captivity. The hand that opens the cage-door is the same which has just turned the key on the braggart swordsman, neither "victorious" nor "dead," but condemned to everlasting prison behind the bars of iron verse.
But the two long poems which dominate the book, like two twin summits clothed round with fiery cloud and crowned with stormy sunshine, tower equal in height and mass of structure with the stateliest in the two parts preceding. The voice that rolls throughout _Les Quatre Jours d'Elciis_ the thunder of its burning words reawakens and prolongs the echo of Félibien's pity and wrath over the murdered corpse of a child unborn; we recognize in the speaker a kinsman of Welf's, the unconquerable old castellan of Osbor, delivered only by an act of charity into the treacherous hands of the princes whom his citadel had so long defied. Of Elciis, as of him, the poet might have said--
Si la mer prononçait des noms dans ses marées, Ô vieillard, ce serait des noms comme le tien.
Such names will no doubt provoke the soft superior smile of a culture too refined for any sort of enthusiasm but the elegant ecstasy of self-worship; and such simplicity will excite, on the other hand, a deep-mouthed bray of scorn from the whole school or church whose apostle in France was St. Joseph de Maistre, in England St. Thomas Coprostom, late of Craigenputtock and Chelsea; the literary lappers of imaginary blood, the inkhorn swordsmen and spokesmen of immaterial iron. The rage of their contempt for such as Hugo, the loathing of their scorn for such as Shelley, ought long since to have abashed the believers in principles which find no abler defenders or more effective champions than these.
For it is true that the main truths preached and enforced and insisted on by such fanatical rhetoricians as Milton, as Mazzini, or as Hugo, are as old as the very notion of right and wrong, as the rudest and crudest conception of truth itself; and it is undeniable that the Gospel according to St. Coprostom has the invaluable merit of pungent eccentricity and comparatively novel paradox. The evangelist of "golden silence"--whose own speech, it may be admitted, was "quite other" than "silvern"--is logically justified in his blatant but ineffable contempt for the dull old doctrines of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty that knows no higher law than duty, of duty that depends for its existence on the existence of liberty. Such a creed, in the phrase of a brother philosopher whose "reminiscences" may be gathered from Shakespeare, and whose views of his contemporaries were identical in tone and expression with the opinions of Mr. Carlyle on his, was mouldy before our grandsires had nails on their toes. It is far more intelligent, more original, more ingenious than all the old cant and rant against priests and kings and vow-breakers and blood-spillers, to discover the soul of goodness in Ratbert the Second or Napoleon the Third, and observingly distill it out into analytic and mono-dramatic blank verse. And it will never be said that this reaction against the puerile or senile preference of right to wrong and principle to prosperity has not been carried far enough in our time. Carlyle, the man of brass, and Musset, the man of clay, as far apart on all other points as two writers of genius could well be, have shown themselves at one in high-souled scorn for "principles of mere rebellion" such as Landor's and Milton's, or for such "belief in a new Brutus" as might disturb the dream of Augustulus. But, even as an old paradox becomes with time a commonplace, so does an old commonplace become in its turn a paradox; and a generation whose poets and historians have long blown the trumpet before the legitimacy of Romanoffs or the bastardy of Bonapartes may properly be startled and scandalized at the childish eccentricity of an old-world idealist who maintains his obsolete and preposterous belief that massacre is murder, that robbery is theft, and that perjury is treason. No newer doctrine, no sounder philosophy, no riper wisdom than this, can be gathered from the declamations of those idle old men--as Goneril, for example, would have called them--who speak this poet's mind again and again in verse which has no more variety of splendor or magnificence of music than the sea.
Hélas, on voit encor les astres se lever, L'aube sur l'Apennin jeter sa clarté douce, L'oiseau faire son nid avec des brins de mousse, La mer battre les rocs dans ses flux et reflux, Mais la grandeur des cœurs c'est ce qu'on ne voit plus.
There is nothing ingenious in that; it is no better, intellectually considered, than a passage of Homer or Isaiah.
But though every verse has the ring of tested gold, and every touch gives notice of the master's hand, yet the glory even of these _Four Days_ is eclipsed by the _Vision of Dante._ Far apart and opposite as they stand in all matters of poetic style and method--Dante writing with the rigid and reserved concision of a Tacitus, Hugo with the rushing yet harmonious profusion of a Pindar--the later master is the only modern poet who could undertake without absurdity or presumption to put words worthy of Dante into Dante's mouth. The brazen clatter of Byron's _Prophecy_ was not redeemed or brought into tune by the noble energy and sound insight of the political sympathies expressed in the accent of a stump-orator to the tune of a barrel-organ. But a verse of Hugo's falls often as solid and weighty and sure, as full in significance of perfect and pregnant sound, as even a verse of Alighieri's. He therefore, but he alone, had the power and the right to call up the spirit of Dante now thirty years ago, and bid it behold all the horrors of Europe in 1853; the Europe of Haynau and Radetzky, of Nicholas the First and Napoleon the last. Any great modern poet's notion of an everlasting hell must of course be less merely material than Dante's mechanism of hot and cold circles, fire and ice, ordure and mire; but here is the same absolute and equitable assent to justice, the same fierce and ardent fidelity to conscience, the same, logic and the same loyalty as his.
Ô sentence! ô peine sans refuge! Tomber dans le silence et la brume à jamais! D'abord quelque clarté des lumineux sommets Vous laisse distinguer vos mains désespérées. On tombe, on voit passer des formes effarées, Bouches ouvertes, fronts ruisselants de sueur, Des visages hideux qu'éclaire une lueur. Puis on ne voit plus rien. Tout s'efface et recule. La nuit morne succède au sombre crépuscule. On tombe. On n'est pas seul dans ces limbes d'en bas; On sent frissonner ceux qu'on ne distingue pas; On ne sait si ce sont des hydres ou des hommes; On se sent devenir les larves que nous sommes; On entrevoit l'horreur des lieux inaperçus, Et l'abîme au-dessous, et l'abîme au-dessus. Puis tout est vide! on est le grain que le vent sème. On n'entend pas le cri qu'on à poussé soi-même; On sent les profondeurs qui s'emparent de vous; Les mains ne peuvent plus atteindre les genoux; On lève au ciel les yeux et l'on voit l'ombre horrible; On est dans l'impalpable, on est dans l'invisible; Des souffles par moments passent dans cette nuit. Puis on ne sent plus rien.--Pas un vent, pas un bruit, Pas un souffle; la mort, la nuit; nulle rencontre; Rien pas même une chute affreuse ne se montre Et l'on songe à la vie, au soleil, aux amours, Et l'on pense toujours, et l'on tombe toujours!
The resurrection of the victims to give evidence at the summons of the archangel--a heavy cloud of witnesses,
Triste, livide, énorme, ayant un air de rage--
men bound to the yoke like beasts, women with bosoms gashed by the whip, children with their skulls cleft open--is direful as any less real and actual vision of the elder hell.
Les cris d'enfant surtout venaient à mon oreille; Car, dans cette nuit-là, gouffre ou l'équité veille, La voix des innocents sur toute autre prévaut, C'est le cri des enfants qui monte le plus haut, Et le vagissement fait le bruit du tonnerre.
The appeal for justice which follows, with its enumeration of horrors unspeakable except by history and poetry, is followed in its turn by the evocation of the soldiers whom this army of martyrs has with one voice designated to the angel of judgment as their torturers and murderers. The splendid and sonorous verses in which the muster of these legions after legions, with their garments rolled in blood, is made to defile before the eyes of reader or hearer, can be matched only by the description of the Swiss mercenaries in _Le Régiment du baron Madruce._
Un grand vautour doré les guidait comme un phare. Tant qu'ils étaient au fond de l'ombre, la fanfare, Comme un aigle agitant ses bruyants ailerons, Chantait claire et joyeuse au front des escadrons, Trompettes et tambours sonnaient, et des centaures Frappaient des ronds de cuivre entre leurs mains sonores; Mais, dès qu'ils arrivaient devant le flamboiement, Les clairons effarés se taisaient brusquement, Tout ce bruit s'éteignait. Reculant en désordre. Leurs chevaux se cabraient et cherchaient à les mordre, Et la lance et l'épée échappaient à leur poing.
Challenged to make answer, the assassins of Italy and Hungary plead that they were but the sword, their captains were the hand. These are summoned in their turn, and cast their crimes in turn upon the judges who bade them shed blood and applauded their blood-shedding in the name of law and justice. And the judges and lawgivers are summoned in their stead.
Ces hommes regardaient l'ange d'un air surpris: Comme, en lettres de feu, rayonnait sur sa face Son nom, Justice, entre eux ils disaient à voix basse: Que veut dire ce mot qu'il porte sur son front?
Charged with their complicity in all the public crime and shame and horror of their period, these in turn cast the burden of their wrong-doing on the princes who commanded them and they obeyed, seeing how the priests and soothsayers had from all time assured them that kings were the images of God. The images of God are summoned, and appear, in the likeness of every form of evil imaginable by man.
Devant chaque fantôme, en la brume glacée. Ayant le vague aspect d'une croix renversée, Venait un glaive nu, ferme et droit dans le vent, Qu'aucun bras ne tenait et qui semblait vivant.
Strange shapes of winged and monstrous beasts were harnessed to the chariots on which the thrones of the earth were borne forward. The figure seated on the last of them will be recognizable beyond all possibility of mistake by any reader whose eyes have ever rested on a face which beyond most human faces bore the visible image and superscription of the soul behind it.
Les trônes approchaient sous les lugubres cieux; On entendait gémir autour des noirs essieux La clameur de tous ceux qu'avaient broyés leurs roues; Ils venaient, ils fendaient l'ombre comme des proues; Sous un souffle invisible ils semblaient se mouvoir; Rien n'était plus étrange et plus farouche à voir Que ces chars effrayants tourbillonnant dans l'ombre. Dans le gouffre tranquille où l'humanité sombre, Ces trônes de la terre apparaissaient hideux.
Le dernier qui venait, horrible au milieu d'eux, Était à chaque marche encombré de squelettes Et de cadavres froids aux bouches violettes, Et le plancher rougi fumait, de sang baigné; Le char qui le portait dans l'ombre était traîné Par un hibou tenant dans sa griffe une hache. Un être aux yeux de loup, homme par la moustache, Au sommet de ce char s'agitait étonné, Et se courbait furtif, livide et couronné.
Pas un de ces césars à l'allure guerrière Ne regardait cet homme. A l'écart, et derrière, Vêtu d'un noir manteau qui semblait un linceul, Espèce de lépreux du trône, il venait seul; Il posait les deux mains sur sa face morose Comme pour empêcher qu'on y vît quelque chose; Quand parfois il ôtait ses mains en se baissant, En lettres qui semblaient faites avec du sang On lisait sur son front ces trois mots:--Je le jure.
It is a fearful thing, said the Hebrew, to fall into the hands of the living God; and it is a fearful thing for a malefactor to fall into the hands of an ever-living poet. The injured Caesars of Rome--Tiberius, for example, and Domitian--have not even yet been delivered by the most conscientious efforts of German and Anglo-German Cæsarists out of the prison whose keys are kept by Juvenal; and a greater than Juvenal is here.
Summoned to make answer to the charge of the angel of judgment, even these also have their resource for evasion, and cast all their crimes upon the Pope.
Il nous disait: Je suis celui qui parle aux rois; Quiconque me résiste et me brave est impie, Ce qu'ici-bas j'écris, là-haut Dieu le copie. L'église, mon épouse, éclose au mont Thabor, A fait de la doctrine une cage aux fils d'or, Et comme des oiseaux j'y tiens toutes les âmes.
This man had blessed the murderers in their triumph, and cursed their victims in the grave:--
Sa ceinture servait de corde à nos potences. Il liait de ses mains l'agneau sons nos sentences; Et quand on nous criait: Grâce! il nous criait: Feu! C'est à lui que le mal revient. Voilà, grand Dieu, Ce qu'il a fait: voilà ce qu'il nous a fait faire. Cet homme était le pôle et l'axe de la sphère; Il est le responsable et nous le dénonçons! Seigneur, nous n'avons fait que suivre ses leçons. Seigneur, nous n'avons fait que suivre son exemple.
And the pontiff whose advent and whose promises had been hailed with such noble trust and acclaimed with such noble thankfulness by those who believed in him as a deliverer--by Landor among others, and by Hugo himself--the Caiaphas-Iscariot whose benediction and consecrated massacre and anointed perjury with the rancid oil of malodorous gladness above its fellows in, empire and in crime--is summoned out of darkness to receive sentence by the sevenfold sounding of trumpets.
Vêtu de lin plus blanc qu'un encensoir qui fume, Il avait, spectre blême aux idoles pareil, Les baisers de la foule empreints sur son orteil, Dans sa droite un bâton comme l'antique archonte, Sur son front la tiare, et dans ses yeux la honte.
De son cou descendait un long manteau doré, Et dans son poignet gauche il tenait, effaré, Comme un voleur surpris par celui qu'il dérobe, Des clefs qu'il essayait de cacher sous sa robe. Il était effrayant à force de terreur.
Quand surgit ce vieillard, on vit dans la lueur L'ombre et le mouvement de quelqu'un qui se penche. À l'apparition de cette robe blanche, Au plus noir de l'abîme un tonnerre gronda.
Then from all points of the immeasurable spaces, from the womb of the cloud and the edge of the pit, is witness given against Pope Pius IX. by the tyrants and the victims, mothers and children and old men, the judges and the judged, the murderers mingling with the murdered, great and small, obscure and famous.
Tous ceux que j'avais vus passer dans les ténèbres, Avançant leur front triste, ouvrant leur œil terni, Fourmillement affreux qui peuplait l'infini, Tous ces spectres, vivant, parlant, riant naguère, Martyrs, bourreaux, et gens du peuple et gens de guerre, Regardant l'homme blanc d'épouvante ébloui, Elevèrent la main et crièrent: C'est lui.
Et pendant qu'ils criaient, sa robe devint rouge.
Au fond du gouffre où rien ne tressaille et ne bouge Un écho répéta:--C'est lui!--Les sombres rois Dirent:--C'est lui! c'est lui! c'est lui! voilà sa croix! Les clefs du paradis sont dans ses mains fatales.-- Et l'homme-loup, debout sur les cadavres pâles Dont le sang tiède encor tombait dans l'infini, Cria d'une voix rauque et sourde:--Il m'a béni!
A judgment less terrible than what follows is that by which Dante long ago made fast the gates of hell upon Nicholas and Boniface and Clement with one stroke of his inevitable hand. The ghastly agony of the condemned is given with all the bitterest realism of the great elder anti-papist who sent so many vicars of Christ to everlasting torment for less offenses than those of Mastai-Ferretti.
Lui se tourna vers l'ange en frissonnant, Et je vis le spectacle horrible et surprenant D'un homme qui vieillit pendant qu'on le regarde. L'agonie éteignit sa prunelle hagarde, Sa bouche bégaya, son jarret se rompit, Ses cheveux blanchissaient sur son front décrépit, Ses tempes se ridaient comme si les années S'étaient subitement sur sa face acharnées, Ses yeux pleuraient, ses dents claquaient comme au gibet Les genoux d'un squelette, et sa peau se plombait, Et, stupide, il baissait, à chaque instant plus pâle, Sa tête qu'écrasait la tiare papale.
From the sentence passed upon him after the avowal extorted by the angel of doom that he has none in the world above him but God alone on whom to cast the responsibility of his works, not a word may be taken away for the purpose of quotation, as not a word could have been added to it by Dante or by Ezekiel himself. But about the eternity of his damnation there is not, happily for the human conscience, any manner of doubt possible; it must endure as long as the poem which proclaims it: in other words, as long as the immortality of poetry itself.
This great and terrible poem, the very crown or coping-stone of all the _Châtiments_, has a certain affinity with two others in which the poet's yearning after justice and mercy has borne his passionate imagination as high and far as here. In _Sultan Mourad_ his immeasurable and incomparable depth of pity and charity seems well nigh to have swallowed up all sense of necessary retribution: it is perhaps because the portentous array of crimes enumerated is remote in time and place from all experience of ours that conscience can allow the tenderness and sublimity of its inspiration to justify the moral and ratify the sentence of the poem:--
Viens! tu fus bon un jour, sois à jamais heureux. Entre, transfiguré! tes crimes ténébreux, Ô roi, derrière toi s'effacent dans les gloires; Tourne la tête, et vois blanchir tes ailes noires.
But in the crowning song of all the great three cycles every need and every instinct of the spirit may find the perfect exaltation of content. The vast and profound sense of ultimate and inevitable equity which animates every line of it is as firm and clear as the solid and massive splendor of its articulate expression. The date of it is outside and beyond the lapse of the centuries of time; but the rule of the law of righteousness is there more evident and indisputable than ever during the flight of these. Hardly in the Hebrew prophecies is such distinct and vivid sublimity, as of actual and all but palpable vision, so thoroughly impregnated with moral and spiritual emotion. Not a verse of all that strike root into the memory forever but is great alike by imagination and by faith. In such a single line as this--
Que qui n'entendit pas le remords l'entendrait--
there is the very note of conscience done into speech, cast into form, forged into substance.
Avec de l'équité condensée en airain.
But this couplet for immensity of imaginative range, is of one birth with the sublimest verses in the Book of Job:--
Et toute l'épouvante éparse au ciel est sœur De cet impénétrable et morne avertisseur.