Part 3

Two years before the appearance of _Les Burgraves_ Victor Hugo had begun his long and glorious career as an orator by a speech of characteristically generous enthusiasm, delivered on his reception into the Academy. The forgotten playwright and versifier whom he succeeded had been a professional if not a personal enemy: the one memorable thing about the man was his high-minded opposition to the tyranny of Napoleon, his own personal friend before the epoch of that tyranny began: and this was the point at once seized and dwelt on by the orator in a tone of earnest and cordial respect. The fiery and rapturous eloquence with which, at the same time, he celebrated the martial triumphs of the empire, gave ample proof that he was now, as his father had prophesied that his mother's royalist boy would become when he grew to be a man, a convert to the views of that father, a distinguished though ill-requited soldier of the empire, and a faithful champion or mourner of its cause. The stage of Napoleonic hero-worship, single-minded and single-eyed if short-sighted and misdirected, through which Victor Hugo was still passing on towards the unseen prospect of a better faith, had been vividly illustrated and vehemently proclaimed in his letters on the Rhine, and was hereafter to be described with a fervent and pathetic fidelity in a famous chapter of _Les Misérables._ The same phase of patriotic prepossession inspired his no less generous tribute to the not very radiant memory of Casimir Delavigne, to whom he paid likewise the last and crowning honor of a funeral oration: an honor afterwards conferred on Frédéric Soulié, and far more deservedly bestowed on Honoré de Balzac. More generous his first political speech in the chamber of peers could not be, but there was more of reason and justice in its fruitless appeal for more than barren sympathy, for a moral though not material intervention, on behalf of Poland in 1846. His second speech as a peer is an edifying commentary on the vulgar English view of his character as defective in all the practical and rational qualities of a politician, a statesman, or a patriot. The subject was the consolidation and defense of the French coastline: a poet, of course, according to all reasonable tradition, if he ventured to open his unserviceable lips at all on such a grave matter of public business, ought to have remembered what was expected of him by the sagacity of blockheads, and carefully confined himself to the clouds, leaving facts to take care of themselves and proofs to hang floating in the air, while his vague and verbose declamation wandered at its own sweet will about and about the matter in hand, and never came close enough to grapple it. This, I regret to say, is exactly what the greatest poet of his age was inconsiderate enough to avoid, and most markedly to abstain from doing; a course of conduct which can only be attributed to his notorious and deplorable love of paradox. His speech, though not wanting in eloquence of a reserved and masculine order, was wholly occupied with sedate and business-like exposition of facts and suggestion of remedies, grounded on experience and study of the question, and resulting in a proposal at once scientific and direct for such research as might result, if possible, in an arrest of the double danger with which the coast was threatened by the advance of the Atlantic and the Channel to a gradual obstruction of the great harbors and by the withdrawal or subsidence of the Mediterranean from the seaports of the south; finally, the orator urged upon his audience as a crowning necessity the creation of fresh harbors of refuge in dangerous and neglected parts of the coast; insisting, with a simple and serious energy somewhat unlike the imaginary tone of the typical or traditional poet, on the plain fact that ninety-two ships had been lost on the same part of the coast within a space of seven years, which might have been saved by the existence of a harbor of refuge. To an Olympian or a Nephelococcygian intelligence such a paltry matter should have been even more indifferent than the claim of a family of exiles on the compassion of the country which had expelled them. To my own more humble and homely understanding it seems that there are not many more significant or memorable facts on record in the history of our age than this: that Victor Hugo was the advocate whose pleading brought back to France the banished race of which the future representative was for upwards of twenty years to keep him in banishment from France. On the evening of the same day on which the house of peers had listened to his speech in behalf of the Bonaparte family, Louis-Philippe, having taken cognizance of it, expressed his intention to authorize the return of the brood whose chief was hereafter to pick the pockets of his children. In the first fortnight of the following year the future author of the terrible _Vision of Dante_ saluted in words full of noble and fervent reverence the apostle of Italian resurrection and Italian unity in the radiant figure of Pope Pius the Ninth. When the next month's revolution had flung Louis-Philippe from his throne, Victor Hugo declined to offer himself to the electors as a candidate for a seat in the assembly about to undertake the charge of framing a constitution for the commonwealth; but, if summoned by his fellow-citizens to take his share of this task, he expressed himself ready to discharge the duty so imposed on him with the disinterested self-devotion of which his whole future career was to give such continuous and such austere evidence. From the day on which sixty thousand voices summoned him to redeem this pledge, he never stinted nor slackened his efforts to fulfill the charge he had accepted in the closing words of a short, simple, and earnest address, in which he placed before his electors the contrasted likenesses of two different republics; one, misnamed a commonweal, the rule of the red flag, of barbarism and blindness, communism and proscription and revenge; the other a commonwealth indeed, in which all rights should be respected and no duties evaded or ignored; a government of justice and mercy, of practicable principles and equitable freedom, of no iniquitous traditions and no utopian aims. To establish this kind of commonwealth and prevent the resurrection of the other, Hugo, at the age of forty-six, professed himself ready to devote his life. The work of thirty-seven years is now before all men's eyes for proof how well this promise has been kept. On dangerous questions of perverse or perverted socialism (June 20, 1848), on the freedom of the press, on the state of siege, its temporary necessity and its imminent abuse, on the encouragement of letters and the freedom of the stage, he spoke, in the course of a few months, with what seems to my poor understanding the most admirable good sense and temperance, the most perfect moderation and loyalty. I venture to dwell upon this division of Hugo's life and labors with as little wish of converting as I could have hope to convert that large majority whose verdict has established as a law of nature the fact or the doctrine that "every poet is a fool" when he meddles with practical politics; but not without a confidence grounded on no superficial study that the maintainers of this opinion, if they wish to cite in support of it the evidence supplied by Victor Hugo's political career, will do well to persevere in the course which I will do them the justice to admit that--as far as I know--they have always hitherto adopted; in other words, to assume the universal assent of all persons worth mentioning to the accuracy of this previous assumption, and dismiss with a quiet smile or an open sneer the impossible notion that any one but some single imbecile or eccentric can pretend to take seriously what seems to them ridiculous, or to think that ridiculous which to their wiser minds commends itself as serious. This beaten road of assumption, this well-worn highway of assertion, is a safe as well as a simple line of travel: and the practical person who keeps to it can well afford to dispense with argument as palpably superfluous, and with evidence as obviously impertinent. Should he so far forget that great principle of precaution as to diverge from it into the modest and simple course of investigation and comparison of theory with fact and probability with proof, his task maybe somewhat harder, and its result somewhat less satisfactory. I would not advise any but an honest and candid believer in the theory which identifies genius with idiocy--which at all events would practically define one special form of genius as a note of general idiocy--to study the speeches (they are nine in number, including two brief and final replies to the personal attacks of one Montalembert, whose name used to be rather popular among a certain class of English journalists as that of a practical worshipper of their great god Compromise, and a professional enemy of all tyranny or villainy that was not serviceable and obsequious to his Church)--to study, I say, the speeches delivered by Victor Hugo in the Legislative Assembly during a space of exactly two years and eight days. The first of these speeches dealt with the question of what in England we call pauperism--with the possibility, the necessity, and the duty of its immediate relief and its ultimate removal: the second, with the infamous and inexpiable crime which diverted against the Roman republic an expedition sent out under the plea of protecting Rome against the atrocities of Austrian triumph. A double-faced and double-dealing law, which under the name or the mask of free education aimed at securing for clerical instruction a monopoly of public support and national encouragement, was exposed and denounced by Hugo in a speech which insisted no less earnestly and eloquently on the spiritual duty and the spiritual necessity of faith and hope than on the practical necessity and duty of vigilant resistance to priestly pretension, and vigilant exposure of ecclesiastical hypocrisy and reactionary intrigue. Against "the dry guillotine" of imprisonment in a tropical climate added to transportation for political offences, the whole eloquence of a heart as great as his genius was poured forth in fervor of indignation and pity, of passion and reason combined. The next trick of the infamous game played by the conspirators against the commonwealth, who were now beginning to show their hand, was the mutilation of the suffrage. To this again Victor Hugo opposed the same steadfast front of earnest and rational resistance; and yet again to the sidelong attack of the same political gang on the existing freedom of the press. A year and eight days elapsed before the delivery of his next and last great speech in the Assembly which he would fain have saved from the shame and ruin then hard at hand--the harvest of its own unprincipled infatuation. The fruit of conspiracy, long manured with fraud and falsehood and all the furtive impurities of intrigue, was now ripe even to rottenness, and ready to fall into the hands already stretched towards it--into the lips yet open to protest that no one--the accuser himself must know it--that no one was dreaming of a second French empire. All that reason and indignation, eloquence and argument, loyalty and sincerity could do to save the commonwealth from destruction and the country from disgrace, was done: how utterly in vain is matter of history--of one among the darkest pages in the roll of its criminal records. The voice of truth and honor was roared and hooted down by the faction whose tactics would have discredited a den of less dishonest and more barefaced thieves; the stroke of state was ready for striking; and the orator's next address was the utterance of an exile.

There are not, even in the whole work of Victor Hugo, many pages of deeper and more pathetic interest than those which explain to us "what exile is." Each of the three prefaces to the three volumes of his _Actes et Paroles_ is rich in living eloquence, in splendid epigram and description, narrative and satire and study of men and things: but the second, it seems to me, would still be first in attraction, if it had no other claim than this, that it contains the record of the death of Captain Harvey. No reverence for innocent and heroic suffering, no abhorrence of triumphant and execrable crime, can impede or interfere with our sense of the incalculable profit, the measureless addition to his glory and our gain, resulting from Victor Hugo's exile of nineteen years and nine months. Greater already than all other poets of his time together, these years were to make him greater than any but the very greatest of all time. His first task was of course the discharge of a direct and practical duty; the record or registration of the events he had just witnessed, the infliction on the principal agent in them of the simple and immediate chastisement consisting in the delineation of his character and the recapitulation of his work. There would seem to be among modern Englishmen an impression--somewhat singular, it appears to me, in a race which professes to hold in special reverence a book so dependent for its arguments and its effects on a continuous appeal to conscience and emotion as the Bible--that the presence of passion, be it never so righteous, so rational, so inevitable by any one not ignoble or insane, implies the absence of reason; that such indignation as inflamed the lips of Elijah with prophecy, and armed the hand of Jesus with a scourge, is a sign--except of course in Palestine of old--that the person affected by this kind of moral excitement must needs be a lunatic of the sentimental if not rather of the criminal type. The main facts recorded in the pages of _Napoléon le Petit_ and _L'Histoire d'un Crime_ are simple, flagrant, palpable, indisputable. The man who takes any other view of them than is expressed in these two books must be prepared to impugn and to confute the principle that perjury, robbery, and murder are crimes. But, we are told, the perpetual vehemence of incessant imprecation, the stormy insistence of unremitting obloquy, which accompanies every chapter, illuminates every page, underlines every sentence of the narrative, must needs impair the confidence of an impartial reader in the trustworthiness of a chronicle and a commentary written throughout as in characters of flaming fire. Englishmen are proud to prefer a more temperate, a more practical, a more sedate form of political or controversial eloquence. When I remember and consider certain examples of popular oratory and controversy now flagrant and flourishing among us, I am tempted to doubt the exact accuracy of this undoubtedly plausible proposition: but, be that as it may, I must take leave to doubt yet more emphatically the implied conclusion that the best or the only good witness procurable on a question of right and wrong is one too impartial to feel enthusiasm or indignation; that indifference alike to good and evil is the sign of perfect equity and trustworthiness in a judge of moral or political questions; that a man who has witnessed a deliberate massacre of unarmed men, women, and children, if he be indiscreet enough to describe his experience in any tone but that of a scientific or æsthetic serenity, forfeits the inherent right of a reasonable and an honorable man to command a respectful and attentive hearing from all honorable and reasonable men.

But valuable and precious as all such readers will always hold these two book of immediate and implacable history, they will not, I presume, be rated among the more important labors of their author's literary life. No one who would know fully or would estimate aright the greatest genius born into the world in our nineteenth century can afford to pass them by with less than careful and sympathetic study: for without moral sympathy no care will enable a student to form any but a trivial and a frivolous judgment on writings which make their primary appeal to the conscience--to the moral instinct and the moral intelligence of the reader. They may perhaps not improperly be classed, for historic or biographic interest, with the _Littérature et Philosophie mêlées_ which had been given to the world in 1834. From the crudest impressions of the boy to the ripest convictions of the man, one common quality informs and harmonizes every stage of thought, every phase of feeling, every change of spiritual outlook, which has left its mark on the writings of which that collection is composed; the quality of a pure, a perfect, an intense and burning sincerity. Apart from this personal interest which informs them all, two at least are indispensable to any serious and thorough study of Hugo's work: the fervent and reiterated intercession on behalf of the worse than neglected treasures of mediaeval architecture then delivered over for a prey to the claws of the destroyer and the paws of the restorer; the superb essay on Mirabeau, which remains as a landmark or a tidemark in the history of his opinions and the development of his powers. But the highest expression of these was not to be given in prose--not even in the prose of Victor Hugo.

There is not, it seems to me, in all this marvelous life, to which well nigh every year brought its additional aureole of glory, a point more important, a date more memorable, than the publication of the _Châtiments._ Between the prologue _Night_ and the epilogue _Light_ the ninety-eight poems that roll and break and lighten and thunder like waves of a visible sea fulfill the choir of their crescent and refluent harmonies with hardly less depth and change and strength of music, with no less living force and with no less passionate unity, than the waters on whose shores they were written. Two poems, the third and the sixth, in the first of the seven books into which the collection is divided, may be taken as immediate and sufficient instances of the two different keys in which the entire book is written; of the two styles, one bitterly and keenly realistic, keeping scornfully close to shameful fact--one higher in flight and wider in range of outlook, soaring strongly to the very summits of lyric passion--which alternate in terrible and sublime antiphony throughout the living pages of this imperishable record. A second Juvenal might have drawn for us with not less of angry fidelity and superb disgust the ludicrous and loathsome inmates of the den infested by holy hirelings of the clerical press; no Roman satirist could have sung, no Roman lyrist could have thundered, such a poem as that which has blasted for ever the name and the memory of the prostitute archbishop Sibour. The poniard of the priest who struck him dead at the altar he had desecrated struck a blow less deep and deadly than had been dealt already on the renegade pander of a far more infamous assassin. The next poem is a notable and remarkable example of the fusion sometimes accomplished--or, if this be thought a phrase too strong for accuracy, of the middle note sometimes touched, of the middle way sometimes taken--between the purely lyric and the purely satiric style or method. But it would be necessary to dwell on every poem, to pause at every page, if adequate justice were to be done to this or indeed to any of the volumes of verse published from this time forth by Victor Hugo. I will therefore, not without serious diffidence, venture once more to indicate by selection such poems as seem to me most especially notable among the greatest even of these. In the first book, besides the three already mentioned, I take for examples the solemn utterance of indignant mourning addressed to the murdered dead of the fourth of December; the ringing song in praise of art which ends in a note of noble menace; the scornful song that follows it, with a burden so majestic in its variations; the fearful and faithful "map of Europe" in 1852, with its closing word of witness for prophetic hope and faith; and the simple perfection of pathos in the song of the little forsaken birds and lambs and children. In the second book, the appeal "To the People," with a threefold cry for burden, calling on the buried Lazarus to rise again in words that seem to reverberate from stanza to stanza like peal upon peal of living thunder, prolonged in steadfast cadence from height to height across the hollows of a range of mountains, is one of the most wonderful symphonies of tragic and triumphant verse that ever shook the hearts of its hearers with rapture of rage and pity. The first and the two last stanzas seem to me absolutely unsurpassed and unsurpassable for pathetic majesty of music.

Partout pleurs, sanglots, cris funèbres. Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres? Je ne veux pas que tu sois mort. Pourquoi dors-tu dans les ténèbres? Ce n'est pas l'instant où l'on dort. La pâle Liberté gît sanglante à ta porte. Tu le sais, toi mort, elle est morte. Voici le chacal sur ton seuil, Voici les rats et les belettes, Pourquoi t'es-tu laissé lier de bandelettes? Ils te mordent dans ton cercueil! De tous les peuples on prépare Le convoi...-- Lazare! Lazare! Lazare! Lève-toi!

* * * * * *

Ils bâtissent des prisons neuves; Ô dormeur sombre, entends les fleuves Murmurer, teints de sang vermeil; Entends pleurer les pauvres veuves, Ô noir dormeur au dur sommeil! Martyrs, adieu! le vent souffle, les pontons flottent, Les mères au front gris sanglotent; Leurs fils sont en proie aux vainqueurs; Elles gémissent sur la route; Les pleurs qui de leurs yeux s'échappent goutte à goutte Filtrent en haine dans nos cœurs. Les juifs triomphent, groupe avare Et sans foi...-- Lazare! Lazare! Lazare! Lève-toi!

Mais, il semble qu'on se réveille! Est-ce toi que j'ai dans l'oreille, Bourdonnement du sombre essaim? Dans la ruche frémit l'abeille; J'entends sourdre un vague tocsin. Les césars, oubliant qu'il est des gémonies, S'endorment dans les symphonies, Du lac Baltique au mont Etna; Les peuples sont dans la nuit noire; Dormez, rois; le clairon dit aux tyrans: victoire! Et l'orgue leur chante; hosanna! Qui répond à cette fanfare? Le beffroi...-- Lazare! Lazare! Lazare! Lève-toi!

If ever a more superb structure of lyric verse was devised by the brain of man, it must have been, I am very certain, in a language utterly unknown to me. Every line, every pause, every note of it should be studied and restudied by those who would thoroughly understand the lyrical capacity of Hugo's at its very highest point of power, in the fullest sweetness of its strength.

About the next poem--'Souvenir de la nuit du 4'--others may try, if they please, to write, if they can; I can only confess that I cannot. Nothing so intolerable in its pathos, I should think, was ever written.

The stately melody of the stanzas in which the exile salutes in a tone of severe content the sorrows that environ and the comforts that sustain him, the island of his refuge, the sea-birds and the sea-rocks and the sea, closes aptly with yet another thought of the mothers weeping for their children.

Puisque le juste est dans l'abîme, Puisqu'on donne le sceptre au crime, Puisque tous les droits sont trahis, Puisque les plus fiers restent mornes, Puisqu'on affiche au coin des bornes Le déshonneur de mon pays;

Ô République de nos pères, Grand Panthéon plein de lumières. Dôme d'or dans le libre azur, Temple des ombres immortelles, Puisqu'on vient avec des échelles Coller l'empire sur ton mur;

Puisque toute âme est affaiblie, Puisqu'on rampe, puisqu'on oublie Le vrai, le pur, le grand, le beau. Les yeux indignés de l'histoire, L'honneur, la loi, le droit, la gloire, Et ceux qui sont dans le tombeau;

Je t'aime, exil! douleur, je t'aime! Tristesse, sois mon diadème! Je t'aime, altière pauvreté! J'aime ma porte aux vents battue. J'aime le deuil, grave statue Qui vient s'asseoir à mon côté.