Part 5

Three years after the _Châtiments_ Victor Hugo published the _Contemplations_; the book of which he said that if the title did not sound somewhat pretentious it might be called "the memoirs of a soul." No book had ever in it more infinite and exquisite variety; no concert ever diversified and united such inexhaustible melodies with such unsurpassable harmonies. The note of fatherhood was never touched more tenderly than in the opening verses of gentle counsel, whose cadence is fresher and softer than the lapse of rippling water or the sense of falling dew: the picture of the poet's two little daughters in the twilight garden might defy all painters to translate it: the spirit, force, and fun of the controversial poems, overflowing at once with good humor, with serious thought, and with kindly indignation, give life and charm to the obsolete questions of wrangling schools and pedants; and the last of them, on the divine and creative power of speech, is at once profound and sublime enough to grapple easily and thoroughly with so high and deep a subject. The songs of childish loves and boyish fancies are unequalled by any other poets known to me for their union of purity and gentleness with a touch of dawning ardor arid a hint of shy delight: _Lise, La Coccinelle, Vieille chanson du jeune temps_, are such sweet miracles of simple perfection as we hardly find except in the old songs of unknown great poets who died and left no name. The twenty-first poem, a lyric idyl of but sixteen lines, has something more than the highest qualities of Theocritus; in color and in melody it does but equal the Sicilian at his best, but there are two lines at least in it beyond his reach for depth and majesty of beauty. _Childhood_ and _Unity_, two poems of twelve and ten lines respectively, are a pair of such flawless jewels as lie now in no living poet's casket. Among the twenty-eight poems of the second book, if I venture to name with special regard the second and the fourth, two songs uniting the subtle tenderness of Shelley's with the frank simplicity of Shakespeare's; the large and living land--scape in a letter dated from Tréport; the tenth and the thirteenth poems, two of the most perfect love-songs in the world, written (if the phrase be permissible) in a key of serene rapture; the "morning's note," with its vision of the sublime sweetness of life transfigured in a dream; _Twilight_, with its opening touches of magical and mystic beauty; above all, the mournful and tender magnificence of the closing poem, with a pathetic significance in the double date appended to the text: I am ready to confess that it is perhaps presumptuous to express a preference even for these over the others. Yet perhaps it may be permissible to select for transcription two of the sweetest and shortest among them.

Mes vers fuiraient, doux et frêles, Vers votre jardin si beau, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, Des ailes comme l'oiseau.

Ils voleraient, étincelles, Vers votre foyer qui rit, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, Des ailes comme l'esprit.

Près de vous, purs et fidèles, Ils accourraient nuit et jour, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, Des ailes comme l'amour.

Nothing of Shelley's exceeds this for limpid perfection of melody, renewed in the next lyric with something of a deeper and more fervent note of music.

Si vous n'avez rien à me dire, Pourquoi venir auprès de moi? Pourquoi me faire ce sourire Qui tournerait la tête au roi? Si vous n'avez rien à me dire, Pourquoi venir auprès de moi?

Si vous n'avez rien à m'apprendre, Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main? Sur le rêve angélique et tendre, Auquel vous songez en chemin, Si vous n'avez rien à m'apprendre, Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main?

Si vous voulez que je m'en aille, Pourquoi passez-vous par ici? Lorsque je vous vois, je tressaille, C'est ma joie et c'est mou souci. Si vous voulez que je m'en aille, Pourquoi passez-vous par ici?

In the third book, which brings us up to the great poet's forty-second year, the noble poem called _Melancholia_ has in it a foretaste and a promise of all the passionate meditation, all the studious and indefatigable pity, all the forces of wisdom and of mercy which were to find their completer and supreme expression in _Les Misérables._ In _Saturn_ we may trace the same note of earnest and thoughtful meditation on the mystery of evil, on the vision so long cherished by mankind of some purgatorial world, the shrine of expiation or the seat of retribution, which in the final volume of the _Légende des Siècles_ was toched again with a yet more august effect: the poem there called _Inferi_ resumes and expands the tragic thought here first admitted into speech and first clothed round with music. The four lines written beneath a crucifix may almost be said to sum up the whole soul and spirit of Christian faith or feeling in the brief hour of its early purity, revived in every age again for some rare and beautiful natures—and for these alone.

Vous qui pleurez, venez à ce Dieu, car il pleure. Vous qui souffrez, venez à lui, car il guérit. Vous qui tremblez, venez à lui, car il sourit. Vous qui passez, venez à lui, car il demeure.

_La Statue_, with its grim swift glance over the worldwide rottenness of imperial Rome, finds again an echo yet fuller and more sonorous than the note which it repeats in the poem on Roman decadence which forms the eighth division of the revised and completed _Légende des Siècles._ The two delicately tender poems on the death of a little child are well relieved by the more terrible tenderness of the poem on a mother found dead of want among her four little children. In this and the next poem, a vivid and ghastly photograph of vicious poverty, we find again the same spirit of observant and vigilant compassion that inspires and informs the great prose epic of suffering which records the redemption of Jean Valjean: and in the next, suggested by the sight (a sorrowful sight always, except perhaps to very small children or adults yet more diminutive in mental or spiritual size) of a caged lion, we recognize the depth of noble pity which moved its author to write _Le Crapaud_--a poem redeemed in all rational men's eyes from the imminent imputation of repulsive realism by the profound and pathetic beauty of the closing lines--and we may recognize also the imaginative and childlike sympathy with the traditional king of beasts which inspired him long after to write _L'Épopée du Lion_ for the benefit of his grandchildren. _Insomnie_, a record of the tribute exacted by the spirit from the body, when the impulse to work and to create will not let the weary workman take his rest, but enforces him, reluctant and recalcitrant, to rise and gird up his loins for labor in the field of imaginative thought, is itself a piece of work well worth the sacrifice even of the happiness of sleep. The verses on music, suggested by the figure of a flute-playing shepherd on a bas-relief; the splendid and finished picture of spring, softened rather than shadowed by the quiet thought of death; the deep and tender fancy of the dead child's return to its mother through the gateway of a second birth; the grave sweetness and gentle fervor of the verses on the outcast and detested things of the animal and the vegetable world; and, last, the nobly thoughtful and eloquent poem on the greatness of such little things as the fire on the shepherd's hearth confronting the star at sunset, which may be compared with the _Prayer for all men_ in the _Feuilles d'Automne_; these at least demand a rapid word of thankful recognition before we close the first volume of the _Contemplations._

The fourth book, as most readers will probably remember, contains the poems written in memory of Victor Hugo's daughter, drowned by the accidental capsizing of a pleasure-boat, just six months and seventeen days after her marriage with the young husband who chose rather to share her death than to save himself alone. These immortal songs of mourning are almost too sacred for critical appreciation of even the most reverent and subdued order. There are numberless touches in them of such thrilling beauty, so poignant in their simplicity and so piercing in their truth, that silence is perhaps the best or the only commentary on anything so "rarely sweet and bitter." One only may perhaps be cited apart from its fellows: the sublime little poem headed _Mors._

Je vis cette faucheuse. Elle était dans son champ. Elle allait à grands pas moissonnant et fauchant, Noir squelette laissant passer le crépuscule. Dans l'ombre où l'on dirait que tout tremble et recule, L'homme suivait des yeux les lueurs de sa faulx. Et les triomphateurs sous les arcs triomphaux Tombaient; elle changeait en désert Babylone, Le trône en échafaud et l'échafaud en trône, Les roses en fumier, les enfants en oiseaux, L'or en cendre, et les yeux des mères en ruisseaux. Et les femmes criaient: Rends-nous ce petit être. Pour le faire mourir, pourquoi l'avoir fait naître? Ce n'était qu'un sanglot sur terre, en haut, en bas; Des mains aux doigts osseux sortaient des noirs grabats; Un vent froid bruissait dans les linceuls sans nombre; Les peuples éperdus semblaient sous la faulx sombre Un troupeau frissonnant qui dans l'ombre s'enfuit: Tout était sous ses pieds deuil, épouvante et nuit. Derrière elle, le front baigné de douces flammes, Un ange souriant portait la gerbe d'âmes.

The fifth book opens most fitly with an address to the noble poet who was the comrade of the author's exile and the brother of his self-devoted son-in-law. Even Hugo never wrote anything of more stately and superb simplicity than this tribute of fatherly love and praise, so well deserved and so royally bestowed. The second poem, addressed to the son of a poet who had the honor to receive the greatest of all his kind as a passing guest in the first days of his long exile, is as simple and noble as it is gentle and austere. The third, written in reply to the expostulations of an old friend and a distant kinsman, is that admirable vindication of a man's right to grow wiser, and of his duty to speak the truth as he comes to see it better, which must have imposed silence and impressed respect on all assailants if respect for integrity and genius were possible to the imbecile or the vile, and if silence or abstinence from insult were possible to the malignant or the fool The epilogue, appended nine years later to this high-minded and brilliant poem, is as noble in imagination, in feeling, and in expression, as the finest page in the _Châtiments._

_ÉCRIT EN 1855_

J'ajoute un post-scriptum après neuf ans. J'écoute; Êtes-vous toujours là? Vous êtes mort sans doute, Marquis; mais d'où je suis on peut parler aux morts. Ah! votre cercueil s'ouvre:--Où donc es tu?--Dehors. Comme vous.--Es-tu mort?--Presque. J'habite l'ombre. Je suis sur un rocher qu'environne l'eau sombre, Écueil rongé des flots, de ténèbres chargé, Où s'assied, ruisselant, le blême naufragé. --Eh bien, me dites-vous, après?--La solitude Autour de moi toujours a la même attitude; Je ne vois que l'abîme, et la mer, et les cieux, Et les nuages noirs qui vont silencieux; Mon toit, la nuit, frissonne, et l'ouragan le mêle Aux souffles effrénés de l'onde et de la grêle; Quelqu'un semble clouer un crêpe à l'horizon; L'insulte dat de loin le seuil de ma maison; Le roc croule sous moi dès que mon pied s'y pose; Le vent semble avoir peur de m'approcher, et n'ose Me dire qu'en baissant la voix et qu'à demi L'adieu mystérieux que me jette un ami. La rumeur des vivants s'éteint diminuée. Tout ce que j'ai rêvé s'est envolé, nuée! Sur mes jours devenus fantômes, pâle et seul, Je regarde tomber l'infini, ce linceul.-- Et vous dites:--Après?--Sous un mont qui surplombe, Près des flots, j'ai marqué la place de ma tombe; Ici, le bruit du gouffre est tout ce qu'on entend; Tout est horreur et nuit--Après?--Je suis content.

The verses addressed to friends whose love and reverence had not forsaken the exile--to Jules Janin, to Alexandre Dumas, above all to Paul Meurice--are models of stately grace in their utterance of serene and sublime resignation, of loyal and affectionate sincerity: but those addressed to the sharers of his exile--to his wife, to his children, to their friend--have yet a deeper spiritual music in the sweet and severe perfection of their solemn cadence. I have but time to name with a word of homage in passing the famous and faultless little poem _Aux Feuillantines_, fragrant with the memory and musical as the laugh of childhood; the memorial verses recurring here and there, with such infinite and subtle variations on the same deep theme of mourning or of sympathy; the great brief studies of lonely landscape, imbued with such grave radiance and such noble melancholy, or kindled with the motion and quickened by the music of the sea: but two poems at all events I must select for more especial tribute of more thankful recognition: the sublime and wonderful vision of the angel who was neither life nor death, but love, more strong than either; and the all but sublimer allegory couched in verse of such majestic resonance, which shows us the star of Venus in heaven above the ruin of her island on earth. The former and shorter of these is as excellent an example as could be chosen of its author's sovereign simplicity of insight and of style.

_APPARITION_

Je vis un ange blanc qui passait sur ma tête; Son vol éblouissant apaisait la tempête, Et faisait taire au loin la mer pleine de bruit. --Qu'est-ce que tu viens faire, ange, dans cette nuit? Lui dis-je. Il répondit:--Je viens prendre ton âme.-- Et j'eus peur, car je vis que c'était une femme; Et je lui dis, tremblant et lui tendant les bras: --Que me restera-t-il? car tu t'envoleras.-- Il ne répondit pas; le ciel que l'ombre assiège S'éteignait...--Si tu prends mon âme, m'écriai-je. Où l'emporteras-tu? montre-moi dans quel lieu. Il se taisait toujours.--O passant du ciel bleu, Es-tu la mort? lui dis-je, ou bien es-tu la vie?-- Et la nuit augmentait sur mon âme ravie, Et l'ange devint noir, et dit:--Je suis l'amour. Mais son front sombre était plus charmant que le jour, Et je voyais, dans l'ombre où brillaient ses prunelles, Les astres à travers les plumes de ses ailes.

If nothing were left of Hugo but the sixth book of the _Contemplations_, it would yet be indisputable among those who know anything of poetry that he was among the foremost in the front rank of the greatest poets of all time. Here, did space allow, it would be necessary for criticism with any pretense to adequacy to say something of every poem in turn, to pause for observation of some beauty beyond reach of others at every successive page. In the first poem a sublime humility finds such expression as should make manifest to the dullest eye not clouded by malevolence and insolent conceit that when this greatest of modern poets asserts in his own person the prerogative and assumes for his own spirit the high office of humanity, to confront the darkest problem and to challenge the utmost force of intangible and invisible injustice as of visible and tangible iniquity, of all imaginable as of all actual evil, of superhuman indifference as well as of human wrongdoing, it is no merely personal claim that he puts forward, no vainly egotistic arrogance that he displays; but the right of a reasonable conscience and the duty of a righteous faith, common to ail men alike in whom intelligence of right and wrong, perception of duty or conception of conscience can be said to exist at all. If there be any truth in the notion of any difference between evil and good more serious than the conventional and convenient fabrications of doctrine and assumption, then assuredly the meanest of his creatures in whom the perception of this difference was not utterly extinct would have a right to denounce an omnipotent evil-doer as justly amenable to the sentence inflicted by the thunders of his own unrighteous judgment. How profound and intense was the disbelief of Victor Hugo in the rule or in the existence of any such superhuman malefactor could not be better shown than by the almost polemical passion of his prophetic testimony to that need for faith in a central conscience and a central will on which he has insisted again and again as a crowning and indispensable, requisite for moral and spiritual life. From the sublime daring, the self-confidence born of self-devotion, which finds lyrical utterance in the majestic verses headed _Ibo_, through the humble and haughty earnestness of remonstrance and appeal--"humble to God, haughty to man"--which pervades the next three poems, the meditative and studious imagination of the poet passes into the fuller light and larger air of thought which imbues and informs with immortal life every line of the great religious poem called _Pleurs dans la nuit._ In this he touches the highest point of poetic meditation, as in the epilogue to the _Châtiments_, written four months earlier, he had touched the highest point of poetic rapture possible to the most ardent of believers in his faith and the most unapproachable master of his art. Where all is so lofty in its coherence of construction, so perfect in its harmony of composition, it seems presumptuous to indicate any special miracle of inspired workmanship: yet, as Hugo in his various notes on mediaeval architecture was wont to select for exceptional attention and peculiar eloquence of praise this or that part or point of some superb and harmonious building, so am I tempted to dwell for a moment on the sublime imagination, the pathetic passion, of the verses which render into music the idea of a terrene and material purgatory, with its dungeons of flint and cells of clay wherein the spirit imprisoned and imbedded may envy the life and covet the suffering of the meanest animal that toils on earth; and to set beside this wonderful passage that other which even in a poem so thoroughly imbued with hope and faith finds place and voice for expression of the old mysterious and fantastic horror of the grave, more perfect than ever any mediæval painter or sculptor could achieve.

Le soir vient; l'horizon s'emplit d'inquiétude; L'herbe tremble et bruit comme une multitude; Le fleuve blanc reluit; Le paysage obscur prend les veines des marbres; Ces hydres que, le jour, on appelle des arbres, Se tordent dans la nuit.

Le mort est seul. Il sent la nuit qui le dévore. Quand naît le doux matin, tout l'azur de l'aurore, Tous ses rayons si beaux, Tout l'amour des oiseaux et leurs chansons sans nombre, Vont aux berceaux dorés; et, la nuit, toute l'ombre Aboutit aux tombeaux.

Il entend des soupirs dans les fosses voisines; Il sent la chevelure affreuse des racines Entrer dans son cercueil; Il est l'être vaincu dont s'empare la chose; Il sent un doigt obscur, sous sa paupière close, Lui retirer son œil.

Il a froid; car le soir qui mêle à son haleine Les ténèbres, l'horreur, le spectre et le phalène, Glace ces durs grabats; Le cadavre, lié de bandelettes blanches, Grelotte, et dans sa bière entend les quatre planches Qui lui parlent tout bas.

L'une dit:--Je fermais ton coffre-fort--Et l'autre Dit:--J'ai servi de porte au toit qui fut le nôtre.-- L'autre dit:--Aux beaux jours, La table où rit l'ivresse et que le vin encombre. C'était moi.--L'autre dit:--J'étais le chevet sombre Du lit de tes amours.

Among all the poems which follow, some exquisite in their mystic tenderness as the elegiac stanzas on _Claire_ and the appealing address to a friend unknown (_À celle qui est voilée_), others possessed with the same faith and wrestling with the same questions as beset and sustained the writer of the poem at which we have just rapidly and reverently glanced, there are three at least which demand--at any rate one passing word of homage. The solemn song of meditation "at the window by night" seems to me to render in its first six lines the aspects and sounds of sea and cloud and wind and trees and stars with an utterly incomparable magic of interpretation.

Les étoiles, points d'or, percent les branches noires; Le flot huileux et lourd décompose ses moires Sur l'océan blêmi; Les nuages ont l'air d'oiseaux prenant la fuite; Par moments le vent parle, et dit des mots sans suite, Comme un homme endormi.

No poet but one could have written the three stanzas, so full of infinite sweetness and awe, inscribed "to the angels who see us."

--Passant, qu'es-tu? je te connais. Mais, étant spectre, ombre et nuage, Tu n'as plus de sexe ni d'âge. --Je suis ta mère, et je venais!

--Et toi dont l'aile hésite et brille, Dont l'œil est noyé de douceur, Qu'es-tu, passant?--Je suis ta sœur. --Et toi, qu'es-tu?--Je suis ta fille.

--Et toi, qu'es-tu, passant?--Je suis Celle à qui tu disais: Je t'aime! --Et toi?--Je suis ton âme même.-- Oh! cachez-moi, profondes nuits!

Nor could any other hand have achieved the pathetic perfection of the verses in which just thirty years since, twelve years to a day after the loss of his daughter, and fifteen years to a day before the return of liberty which made possible the return of Victor Hugo to France, his claims to the rest into which he now has entered, and his reasons for desiring the attainment of that rest, found utterance unexcelled for divine and deep simplicity by any utterance of man on earth.

_EN FRAPPANT À UNE PORTE_

J'ai perdu mon père et ma mère, Mon premier-né, bien jeune, hélas! Et pour moi la nature entière Sonne le glas.

Je dormais entre mes deux frères; Enfants, nous étions trois oiseaux; Hélas! le sort change en deux bières Leurs deux berceaux.

Je t'ai perdue, ô fille chère, Toi qui remplis, ô mon orgueil, Tout mon destin de la lumière De ton cercueil!

J'ai su monter, j'ai su descendre. J'ai vu l'aube et l'ombre en mes cieux. J'ai connu la pourpre, et la cendre Qui me va mieux.

J'ai connu les ardeurs profondes, J'ai connu les sombres amours; J'ai vu fuir les ailes, les ondes, Les vents, les jours.

J'ai sur ma tête des orfraies; J'ai sur tous mes travaux l'affront, Au pied la poudre, au cœur des plaies, L'épine au front.

J'ai des pleurs à mon œil qui pense, Des trous à ma robe en lambeau; Je n'ai rien à la conscience; Ouvre, tombeau.

Last comes the magnificent and rapturous hymn of universal redemption from suffering as from sin, the prophetic vision of evil absorbed by good, and the very worst of spirits transfigured into the likeness of the very best, in which the daring and indomitable faith of the seer finds dauntless and supreme expression in choral harmonies of unlimited and illimitable hope. The epilogue which dedicates the book to the daughter whose grave was now forbidden ground to her father--so long wont to keep there the autumnal anniversary of his mourning--is the very crown and flower of the immortal work which it inscribes, if we may say so, rather to the presence than to the memory of the dead.