Part 9
And yet, it may be said or thought, the master of masters has shown himself even greater in _Ratbert_ than in _Eviradnus._ This most tragic of poems, lit up by no such lyric interlude, stands unsurpassed even by its author for tenderness, passion, divine magnificence of righteous wrath, august and pitiless command of terror and pity. From the kingly and priestly conclave of debaters more dark than Milton's to the superb admonition of loyal liberty in speech that can only be silenced by murder, and again from the heavenly and heroic picture of childhood worshipped by old age to the monstrous banquet of massacre, when the son of the prostitute has struck his perjured stroke of state, the poem passes through a change of successive pageants each fuller of splendor and wonder, of loveliness or of horror, than the last. But the agony of the hero over the little corpse of the child murdered with her plaything in her hand--the anguish that utters itself as in peal upon peal of thunder, broken by sobs of storm--the full crash of the final imprecation, succeeded again by such unspeakably sweet and piteous appeal to the little dead lips and eyes that would have answered yesterday--and at last the one crowning stroke of crime which calls down an answering stroke of judgment from the very height of heaven, for the comfort and refreshment and revival of all hearts--these are things of which no praise can speak aright. Shakespeare only, were he living, would be worthy to write on Hugo's Fabrice as Hugo has written on Shakespeare's Lear. History will forget the name of Bonaparte before humanity forgets the name of Ratbert.
But if this be the highest poem of all for passion and pathos and fire of terrible emotion, the highest in sheer sublimity of imagination is to my mind _Zim-Zizimi._ Again and again, in reading it for the first time, one thinks that surely now the utmost height is reached, the utmost faculty revealed, that can be possible for a spirit clothed only with human powers, armed only with human speech. And always one finds the next step forward to be yet once more a step upward, even to the very end and limit of them all. Neither in Homer nor in Milton, nor in the English version of Job or Ezekiel or Isaiah, is the sound of the roll and the surge of measured music more wonderful than here. Even after the vision of the tomb of Belus the miraculous impression of splendor and terror, distinct in married mystery, and diverse in unity of warning, deepens and swells onward like a sea till we reach the incomparable psalm in praise of the beauty and the magic of womanhood made perfect and made awful in Cleopatra, which closes in horror at the touch of a hand more powerful than Orcagna's. The walls of the Campo Santo are fainter preachers and feebler pursuivants of the triumph of death than the pages of the poem which yet again renews its note of menace after menace and prophecy upon prophecy till the end. There is probably not one single couplet in all this sweet and bitter roll of song which could have been written by any poet less than the best or lower than the greatest of all time.
Passants, quelqu'un veut-il voir Cléopâtre au lit? Venez; l'alcôve est morne, une brume l'emplit; Cléopâtre est couchée à jamais; cette femme Fut l'éblouissement de l'Asie, et la flamme Que tout le genre humain avait dans son regard; Quand elle disparut, le monde fut hagard; Ses dents étaient de perle et sa bouche était d'ambre; Les rois mouraient d'amour en entrant dans sa chambre; Pour elle Ephractæus soumit l'Atlas, Sapor Vint d'Ozymandias saisir les cercle d'or, Mamylos conquit Suse et Tentyris détruite Et Palmyre, et pour elle Antoine prit la fuite; Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient à la fois Il hésita, lâchant le monde dans son choix. Cléopâtre égalait les Junons éternelles; Une chaîne sortait de ses vagues prunelles; Ô tremblant cœur humain, si jamais tu vibras, C'est dans l'étreinte altière et douce de ses bras; Son nom seul enivrait; Strophus n'osait l'écrire; La terre s'éclairait de son divin sourire, À force de lumière et d'amour, effrayant; Sons corps semblait mêlé d'azur; en la voyant, Vénus, le soir, rentrait jalouse sous la nue; Cléopâtre embaumait l'Egypte; toute nue, Elle brûlait les yeux ainsi que le soleil; Les roses enviaient l'ongle de son orteil; Ô vivants, allez voir sa tombe souveraine; Fière, elle était déesse et daignait être reine; L'amour prenait pour arc sa lèvre aux coins moqueurs; Sa beauté rendait fous les fronts, les sens, les cœurs, Et plus que les lions rugissants était forte; Mais bouchez-vous le nez si vous passez la porte.
At every successive stage of his task, the man who undertakes to glance over this great cycle of poems must needs incessantly call to mind the most worn and hackneyed of all quotations from its author's works--"J'en passe, et des meilleurs." There is here no room, as surely there should nowhere now be any need, to speak at any length of the poems in which Roland plays the part of protagonist; first as the beardless champion of a five days' fight, and again as the deliverer whose hand could clear the world of a hundred human wolves in one continuous sword-sweep. There is hardly time allowed us for one poor word or two of tribute to such a crowning flower of song as _La Rose de L'Infante_, with its parable of the broken Armada made manifest in a wrecked fleet of drifting petals; to the superb and sonorous chant of the buccaneers, in which all the noise of lawless battle and stormy laughter passes off into the carol of mere triumphant love and trust; or even to the whole inner cycle of mystic and primæval legend which seeks utterance for the human sense of oppression or neglect by jealous or by joyous gods; for the wild profound revolt of riotous and trampled nature, the agony and passion and triumph of invincible humanity, the protest and witness of enduring earth against the passing shades of heaven, the struggle and the plea of eternal manhood against all transient forces of ephemeral and tyrannous godhead. Within the orbit of this epicycle one poem only of the first part, a star of strife and struggle, can properly be said to revolve; but the light of that planet has fire enough to animate with its reflex the whole concourse of stormy stars which illuminate the world-wide wrestle of the giants with the gods. The torch of revolt borne by the transfigured satyr, eyed like a god and footed like a beast, kindles the lamp of hopeful and laborious rebellion which dazzles us in the eye of the Titan who has seen beyond the world. In the song that struck silence through the triumph of amazed Olympus there is a sound and air as of the sea or the Book of Job. There may be something of Persian or Indian mysticism, there is more of universal and imaginative reason, in the great allegoric myth which sets forth here how the half-brute child of one poor planet has in him the seed, the atom, the principle of life everlasting, and dilates in force of it to the very type and likeness of the eternal universal substance which is spirit or matter of life; and before the face of his transfiguration the omnipresent and omnipotent gods who take each their turn to shine and thunder are all but shadows that pass away. Since the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind no ear has heard the burst of such a song; but this time it is the world that answers out of its darkness the lords and gods of creed and oracle, who have mastered and have not made it. And in the cry of its protest and the prophecy of its advance there is a storm of swelling music which is as the sound of the strength of rollers after the noise of the rage of breakers.
It is noticeable that the master of modern poets should have in the tone and color of his genius more even of the Hebrew than the Greek. In his love of light and freedom, reason and justice, he is not of Jerusalem, but of Athens; but in the bent of his imagination, in the form and color of his dreams, in the scope and sweep of his wide-winged spiritual flight, he is nearer akin to the great insurgent prophets of deliverance and restoration than to any poet of Athens except only their kinsman Æschylus. It is almost wholly of the Persian war, the pass of Thermopylae, the strait of Euripus, that he sings when he sings of Hellas. All his might of hand, all his cunning of color, all his measureless resources of sound and form and symbol, are put forth in the catalogue of nations and warriors subject to Xerxes. There is nothing in poetry so vast and tremendous of its kind as this pageant of immense and monstrous invasion. But indeed the choice of gigantic themes, the predominance of colossal effects, the prevalence of superhuman visions over the types and figures of human history or legend, may be regarded as a distinctive point of difference between the second and the first series. A typical example of the second is the poem which has added an eighth wonder built by music to the seven wonders of the world, which it celebrates in verse more surely wrought for immortality than they. Another is the song of the worm which takes up in answer to their chant of life and light and pride of place, and prolongs through measure after measure of rolling and reverberating verse, the note of a funereal and universal triumph, the protest and the proclamation of death. Another, attuned to that mighty music of meditation which rings through so many of the poems written in exile and loneliness, is the stately prophetic hymn which bears the superscription of _All the Past and all the Future._ This might seem to belong to the sixth book of the _Contemplations_, in which the same note of proud and ardent faith was struck so often with such sovereignty of hand. As much might be said of the great "abysmal" poem which closes the second series with a symphony of worlds and spirits. Other groups of poems, in like manner, bear signs of common or of diverse kinship to former works of a creator whose spirit has put life into so many of the same likeness, yet with no more sign of repetition or weary monotony than is traceable in the very handiwork of nature. The book of idyls is of one inspiration with the _Chansons des Rues et des Bois_; in both cases, as in so many of the poet's earlier lyric volumes, his incomparable fertility of speech and superb facility of verse leave almost an impression as of work done by way of exercise, as though he were writing to keep his hand in, or to show for a wager with incredulous criticism how long he could keep up the golden ball of metre, carve arabesques of the same pattern, play variations in the same key. But the _Old Man's Idyl_ which closes the book belongs by kinship to another work of the poet's, more beloved and more precious to the inmost heart, if not more eminent for strength and cunning of hand, than any of these. In "the voice of a child a year old" there is the same welling and bubbling melody which flows and laughs and murmurs and glitters through the adorable verses of _L'Art d'être Grand-père_, making dim with love and delight the reader's or the hearer's eyes. At last the language of babies has found its interpreter; and that, as might have been expected, in the greatest poet of his age.
L'enfant apporte un peu de ce ciel dont il sort; Il ignore, il arrive; homme, tu le recueilles. _Il a le tremblement des herbes et des feuilles._ La jaserie avant le langage est la fleur Qui précède le fruit, moins beau qu'elle, et meilleur, Si c'est être meilleur qu'être plus nécessaire.
A conclusion which may be doubted when we consider as follows:
L'enfant fait la demande et l'ange la réponse; Le babil puéril dans le ciel bleu s'enfonce, Puis s'en revient, avec les hésitations Du moineau qui verrait planer les alcyons.
Can language or can thought be lovelier? if so, the one possible instance is to be sought in these succeeding verses:
Quand l'enfant jase avec l'ombre qui le bénit, La fauvette, attentive, au rebord de son nid Se dresse, et ses petits passent, pensifs et frêles, Leurs têtes à travers les plumes de ses ailes; La mère semble dire à sa couvée: Entends, Et tâche de parler aussi bien.
It seems and is not strange that the lips which distill such honey as this should be the same so often touched with a coal of fire from that "altar of Righteousness" where Æschylus was wont to worship. The twenty-first section of the second series is in the main a renewal or completion of the work undertaken in the immortal _Châtiments._ Even in that awful and incomparable book of judgment such poems as _La Colère du Bronze_, and the two following on the traffic of servile clerical rapacity in matters of death and burial, would have stood high among the stately legions of satire which fill its living pages with the sound and the splendor of righteous battle for the right; but the verses with which Hugo has branded the betrayer of Metz and Strasburg are hardly to be matched except by those with which, half a century ago, he branded the betrayer of the Duchess of Berry. Truly may all who read them cry out with the poet at their close,
Et qui donc maintenant dit qu'il s'est évadé?
In _Le Cimetière d'Eylau_, a poem to which we have now in the third series of the book a most noble and exquisite pendant (_Paroles de mon Oncle_), all the Homeric side of a poet born of warlike blood comes out into proud and bright relief. There is no better fighting in the Iliad; it has the martial precision and practical fellow-feeling which animate in his battle-pieces the lagging verse of Walter Scott; and it has, of course, that omnipresent breath and light and fire of perfect poetry which a Scott or a Byron is never quite permitted to attain. Beside or even above these two poems, that other which commemorates the devotion of a Vendean peasant chief will be set in the hearts of all readers competent to appreciate either heroic action or heroic song.
The love of all high things which finds one form of expression in warlike sympathy with warriors who can live and die for something higher than personal credit or success takes another and as natural a shape in the poems which are inspired by love and worship of nature and her witness for liberty and purity and truth in the epic evangel of august and indomitable mountains. The sublimest cry of moral passion ever inspired by communion in spirit with these is uttered in the great poem on the Swiss mercenaries of the seventeenth century, which even among its fellows stands out eminent and radiant as an Alp at sunrise. Mountain and cataract, the stars and the snows, never yet in any language found such a singer and interpreter as this. Two or three verses, two or three words, suffice for him to bring before us, in fresh and actual presence, the very breath of the hills or the sea, the very lights and sounds and spaces of clouded or sunlit air. Juvenal is not so strong in righteousness, nor Pindar so sublime in illustration, as the poet who borrowed from nature her highest symbols to illustrate the glory and the duty of righteous wrath and insuppressible insurrection against wrong-doing, when he wrote _Le Régiment du baron Madruce._
L'homme s'est vendu. Soit. A-t-on dans le louage Compris le lac, le bois, la ronce, le nuage? La nature revient, germe, fleurit, dissout, Féconde, croît, décroît, rit, passe, efface tout. La Suisse est toujours là, libre. Prend-on au piège La précipice, l'ombre et la bise et la neige? Signe-t-on des marchés dans lesquels il soit dit Que l'Orteler s'enrôle et devient un bandit? Quel poing cyclopéen, dites, ô roches noires, Pourra briser la Dent de Morde en vos mâchoires? Quel assembleur de bœufs pourra forger un joug Qui du pic de Glaris aille au piton de Zoug? C'est naturellement que les monts sont fidèles Et purs, ayant la forme âpre des citadelles, Ayant reçu de Dieu des créneaux où le soir, L'homme peut, d'embrasure en embrasure, voir Étinceler le fer de lance des étoiles. Est-il une araignée, aigle, qui dans ses toiles Puisse prendre la trombe et la rafale et toi? Quel chef recrutera le Salève? à quel roi Le Mythen dira-t-il: "Sire, je vais descendre! Qu'après avoir dompté l'Athos, quelque Alexandre, Sorte de héros monstre aux cornes de taureau, Aille donc relever sa robe à la Jungfrau! Comme la vierge, ayant l'ouragan sur l'épaule, Crachera l'avalanche à la face du drôle!
* * * * * *
Non, rien n'est mort ici. Tout grandit, et s'en vante. L'Helvétie est sacrée, et la Suisse est vivante; Ces monts sont des héros et des religieux; Cette nappe de neige aux plis prodigieux D'où jaillit, lorsqu'en mai la tiède brise ondoie, Toute une floraison folle d'air et de joie, Et d'où sortent des lacs et des flots murmurants, N'est le linceul de rien, excepté des tyrans.
This glorious poem of the first series finds a glorious echo in the twenty-fifth division of the second; even as the Pyrenean cycle which opened in the first series is brought in the second to fuller completion of equal and corresponsive achievement. It is wonderful, even in this vast world of poetic miracle where nothing is other than wonderful, that _Masferrer_ should be equal to _Aymenllot_ in frank majesty of beauty; that even after _Le Parricide_ a fresh depth of tragic terror should be sounded by _Gaïffer-Forge_; and that after all he had already written on fatherhood and sonship, on duty and chivalry, on penitence and pride, Victor Hugo should have struck so new and so profound a note as rings in every fine of _La Paternité._
But of all echoes and of all responses which reverberate from end to end of these three great sections of song, the very sweetest, and perhaps the very deepest, are those evoked by love of little children, and compassionate reverence for the poor. If but one division were to be left us out of all the second series, and fate or chance, comparatively compassionate in its cruelty, gave us our choice which this one should be, the best judgments might perhaps decide to preserve the twenty-third at all events. What the words "realism" and "naturalism" do naturally and really signify in matters of art, the blatant babblers who use them to signify the photography of all things abject might learn, if shallow insolence and unclean egotism were suddenly made capable of learning, by the study of only the two poems which set before us in two different forms the strength of weakness in the child whose love redeems his father from death, and the child who can find no comfort but in death for the lack of a father's love. There is nothing in Homer, in Dante, or in Shakespeare, the three only poets who can properly be cited for comparison, of a pathos more poignant in its bitter perfection of sweetness.
Among the many good things which seem, for the lovers of poetry, to have come out of one and so great an evil as the long exile of Hugo from his country, there is none better or greater than the spiritual inhalation of breeze and brine into the very heart of his genius, the miraculous impregnation of his solitary Muse by the sea-wind. This influence could not naturally but combine with the lifelong influence of all noble sympathies to attract his admiration and his pity towards the poor folk of the shore, and to produce from that sense of compassion for obscurer sorrows and brotherhood with humbler heroism than his own such work as the poem which describes the charity of a fisherman's wife towards the children of her dead neighbor. It has all the beautiful precision and accurate propriety of detail which distinguish the finest idyls of Theocritus or Tennyson, with a fervor of pathetic and imaginative emotion which Theocritus never attained, and which Tennyson has attained but once. All the horror of death, all the trouble and mystery of darkness, seem as we read to pass into our fancy with the breath of pervading night, and to vanish with the husband's entrance at sunrise before the smile with which the wife draws back the curtains of the cradle.
This poem, which so many hearts must have treasured among their choicest memories for now so many years, has found at length its fellow in the final volume of the book. There is even more savor of the sea in the great lyric landscape called _Les paysans au bord de la mer_ than in the idyllic interior called _Les pauvres gens._ There we felt the sea-wind and saw the sea-mist through the chinks of door and window; but here we feel all the sweep of the west wind's wings, and see all the rush of rain along the stormy shore that the flock of leaping waves has whitened with the shreddings of their fleece. We remember in _Les Voix Intérieures_ the all but matchless music of the song of the sea-wind's trumpet, and in the notes of this new tune we find at last that music matched and deepened and prolonged. In the great lyric book which gives us the third of the four blasts blown from _Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit_, there are visions as august and melodies as austere as this; but outside the vast pale of the master's work we should look for the likeness of such songs in vain. The key of all its tenderness if not of all its terror is struck in these two first verses.
Les pauvres gens de la côte, L'hiver, quand la mer est haute Et qu'il fait nuit, Viennent où finit la terre Voir les flots pleins de mystère Et pleins de bruit.
Ils sondent la mer sans bornes; Ils pensent aux écueils mornes Et triomphants; L'orpheline pâle et seule Crie: ô mon père! et l'aïeule Dit: mes enfants!
The verses which translate the landscape are as absolutely incomparable in their line as those which render the emotion of the watchers. Witness this:--
Et l'on se met en prières, Pendant que joncs et bruyères Et bois touffus, Vents sans borne et flots sans nombre, Jettent dans toute cette ombre Des cris confus.
Here, as usual, it is the more tragic aspect of the waters that would appear to have most deeply impressed the sense or appealed to the spirit of Victor Hugo. He seems to regard the sea with yet more of awe than of love, as he may be said to regard the earth with even more of love than of awe. He has put no song of such sweet and profound exultation, such kind and triumphant motherhood, into the speaking spirit of the sea as into the voice of the embodied earth. He has heard in the waves no word so bountiful and benignant as the message of such verses as these:--
La terre est calme auprès de l'océan grondeur; La terre est belle; elle a la divine pudeur De se cacher sous les feuillages; Le printemps son amant vient en mai la baiser; Elle envoie au tonnerre altier pour l'apaiser La fumée humble des villages.
Ne frappe pas, tonnerre. Ils sons petits, ceux-ci. La terre est bonne; elle est grave et sévère aussi; Les roses sont pures comme elle; Quiconque pense, espère et travaille lui plaît; Et l'innocence offerte à tout homme est son lait, Et la justice est sa mamelle.
La terre cache l'or et montre les moissons; Elle met dans le flanc des fuyantes saisons Le germe des saisons prochaines, Dans l'azur les oiseaux qui chuchotent: aimons! Et les sources au fond de l'ombre, et sur les monts L'immense tremblement des chênes.
The loving loveliness of these divine verses is in sharp contrast with the fierce resonance of those in which the sea's defiance is cast as a challenge to the hopes and dreams of mankind:--
Je suis la vaste mêlée, Reptile, étant l'onde, ailée, Étant le vent; Force et fuite, haine et vie, Houle immense, poursuivie Et poursuivant.