Chapter 5

Their enthusiasm was not all irrational. Hugo's supremacy was not that he was the greatest artist in essentials, for here Dumas was immeasurably his superior. It was not that he knew best the heart of man, or had apprehended most thoroughly the conditions of life; for Balzac so far surpassed him in these sciences that comparison was impossible. It was not that he sang the truest song or uttered the deepest word, for Musset is the poet of _Rolla_ and the _Nuits_ in verse and the poet of _Fantasio_ and _Lorenzaccio_ and _Carmosine_ in prose. But the epoch Hugo represented was interested in the manner rather than the substance of things: the revolution at whose front he had been set and whose most shining figure he became was largely a revolution of externals. With an immense amount of enthusiasm there was, as Sainte-Beuve confessed, an incredible amount of ignorance--so that _Cromwell_ was supposed to be historical; and with a passionate delight in form there co-existed a strangely imperfect understanding of material--so that _Hernani_ was supposed to be Shakespearean. To this ignorance and to this imperfect understanding Hugo owed a certain part of his authority; the other and greater he got from his unrivalled mastery of style, from his extraordinary skill as an artist in words. To the opposing faction his innovations were horrible: his verse was poison, his example an outrage, his prosody a violation of all laws, his rhymes and tropes and metaphors so many offences against Heaven and the Muse. But to the ardent youngsters who fought beneath his banner it was his to give a something priceless and unique--a something glorious to France and never before exampled in her literature. For the distichs of Boileau--'strong, heavy, useful, like pairs of tongs,'--he found them alexandrines with the leap and sparkle of sea waves and the sound of clashing swords and the colours of sunset and the dawn. They were tired of whitewash and cold distemper; and he gave them hangings of brocade and tapestries of price and tissues stiff with gold and glowing with new dyes. He flung them handfuls of jewels where his rivals scattered handfuls of marbles. And they paid him for his gifts with an intemperance of worship, a fury of belief, a rapture of admiration, such as no other man has known. The substance was striking, was peculiar, was novel and full of charm; but the manner was all this and something besides--was magnificent, was intoxicating, was irresistible; and Victor Hugo by virtue of it became the foremost man of literary France. The great battle of _Hernani_ was merely a battle of style. From Dumas the artist of _Henri Trois_ and _Antony_, the language of Boileau was safe enough; and his triumph, all-important and significant as it was, seemed neither fatal nor abominable. It was another matter with _Hernani_. Its success meant ruin for the Academy and destruction for the idiom of Delille and M. de Jouy; and the classicists mustered in force, and did their utmost to stay the coming wrath and arrest the impending doom. They failed of course; for they fought with a vague yet limited apprehension of the question at issue, they had nothing to give in place of the thing they hated. And Victor Hugo was made captain of the victorious host, while the men who might have been in a certain sort his rivals took service as lieutenants, and accepted his ensign for their own.

His Diary.

All his life long he was addicted to attitude; all his life long he was a _poseur_ of the purest water. He seems to have considered the affectation of superiority an essential quality in art; for just as the cock in Mrs. Poyser's apothegm believed that the sun got up to hear him crow, so to the poet of the _Legende_ and the _Contemplations_ it must have seemed as if the human race existed but to consider the use he made of his 'oracular tongue.' How tremendous his utterances sometimes were--informed with what majesty yet with what brilliance--is one of the things that every schoolboy knows. One no more needs to insist upon the merits of his best manner than to emphasise the faults of his worst. At his best as at his worst, however, he was always an artist in his way. His speech was nothing if not artificial--in the good sense of the word sometimes and sometimes in the bad. Simplicity (it seemed) was impossible to him. In the quest of expression, the cult of antithesis, the pursuit of effect, he sacrificed directness and plainness with not less consistency than complacency. In that tissue of 'apocalyptic epigram' which to him was style there was no room for truth and soberness. His Patmos was a place of mirrors, and before them he draped himself in his phrases like Frederick in the mantle of Ruy Blas. That this grandiosity was unnatural and unreal was proved by the publication of _Choses Vues_. When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours? Hugo expressing himself in the fearless old fashion of pre-romantic ages? A page of commonplace from Mr. Meredith, a book for boarding-schools by M. Zola, were not more startling.

For and Against.

Some primary qualities of his genius are pretty evenly balanced by some primary faults. Thus, for breadth and brilliance of conception, for energy and sweep of imagination, for the power of dealing as a master with the greater forces of nature, he is unsurpassed among modern men. But the conception is too often found to be empty as well as spacious; the imagination is too often tainted with insincerity; in his dramas of the elements there are too many such falsehoods as abound in his dramas of the emotions. Again, he is sometimes grand and often grandiose; but he has a trick of affecting the grandiose and the grand which is constant and intolerable. He had the genius of style in such fulness as entitles him to rank with the great artists in words of all time. His sense of verbal colour and verbal music is beyond criticism; his rhythmical capacity is something prodigious. He so revived and renewed the language of France that in his hands it became an instrument not unworthy to compete with Shakespeare's English and the German of Goethe and Heine; and in the structure and capacity of all manner of French metrical forms he effected such a change that he may fairly be said to have received the orchestra of Rameau from his predecessors and to have bequeathed his heirs the orchestra of Berlioz. On the other hand; in much of his later work his mannerisms in prose and in verse are discomfortably glaring; the outcome of his unsurpassable literary faculty is often no more than a parade or triumph of the vocables; there were times when his brain appears to have become a mere machine for the production of antitheses and sterile conceits. What is perhaps more damning than all, his work is saturate in his own remarkable personality, and is objective only here and there. His dramas are but five-act lyrics, his epics the romance of an egoist, his history is confession, his criticism the opinions of Victor Hugo. Even his lyrics, the 'fine flower' of his genius, the loveliest expression of the language, have not escaped reproach as a 'Psalter of Subjectivity.' Even his essays in prose romance--a form of art on which he has stamped his image and superscription in a manner all his own, the work by which he is best known to humanity at large--are vitiated by the same defect. For one that believes in Bishop Myriel as Bishop Myriel there are a hundred who see in him only a pose of Victor Hugo; it is the same with Ursel and Javert, with Cimourdain and Lantenac and Josiane; the very _pieuvre_ of _les Travailleurs_ is a Hugolater at heart. It is a proof of his commanding personality, that in spite of these objections he held in enchantment the hearts and minds of men for over sixty years. He is almost a literature in himself; and if it be true that his work is as wholly lacking in the radiant sanity of Shakespeare's as it is in the exquisite good sense of Voltaire's, it is also true that he left the world far richer than he found it.

What Lives of Him.

To select an anthology from his work were surely the pleasantest of tasks. One richer in grace and passion and sweetness might he chosen out of Musset; one wrought more truly of the finer stuff of humanity as well as more bountifully touched with tact and dignity and temper from the work of Tennyson. But the Hugo selection would combine the rarest technical merits with a set of interests all its own. It would give, for instance, the _Stella_ of the _Chatiments_ and the _Pauvres Gens_ of the _Legende_. On one page would be found that admirable _Souvenir de la Nuit du Quatre_, which is at once the impeachment and the condemnation of the Coup d'Etat; and on another the little epic of _Eviradnus_, with its immortal serenade, a culmination of youth and romance and love:

'Si tu veux, faisons un reve. Montons sur deux palefrois. Tu m'emmenes, je t'enleve. L'oiseau chante dans les bois.

. . . . .

Allons-nous-en par l'Autriche! Nous aurons l'aube a nos fronts. Je serai grand et toi riche, Puisque nous nous aimerons.

. . . . .

Tu seras dame et moi comte. Viens, mon oeeur s'epanouit. Viens, nous conterons ce conte Aux etoiles de la nuit.'

Here, a summary of all the interests of romanticism, would be the complaint of Gastibelza:

'Un jour d'ete, ou tout etait lumiere, Vie et douceur, Elle s'en vint jouer dans la riviere Avec sa soeur. Je vis le pied de sa jeune compagne Et son genou . . .-- Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne Me rendra fou!'--

here the adorable _Vieille Chanson du Jeune Temps_:

'Rose, droite sur ses hanches, Leva son beau bras tremblant Pour prendre une mure aux branches: Je ne vis pas son bras blanc.

Une eau courait, fraiche et creuse, Sur les mousses de velours; Et la nature amoureuse Dormait dans les grands bois sourds.'--

and here, not unworthy to be remembered with _Proud Maisie_, that wonderful harmony of legend and superstition and the facts and dreams of common life, the death-song of Fantine:

'Nous acheterons de bien belles choses, En nous promenant le long de faubourgs.

La Vierge-Marie aupres de mon poele Est venue hier, en manteau brode, Et m'a dit: Voici, cache sous mon voile, Le petit qu'un jour tu m'as demande. Courez a la ville; ayez de la toile, Achetez du fil, achetez un de.

Les bluets sont bleus, les roses sont roses, Les bluets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.'

And from this masterpiece of simple and direct emotion, which to me has always seemed the high-water mark of Hugo's lyrical achievement as well as the most human of his utterances, one might pass on to masterpieces of another inspiration: to the luxurious and charming graces of _Sara la Baigneuse_; to the superb crescendo and diminuendo of _les Djinns_; to 'Si vous n'avez rien a me dire,' that daintiest of songlets; to the ringing rhymes and gallant spirit of the _Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean_:

'Sus, ma bete, De facon Que je fete Ce grison! Je te baille Pour ripaille Plus de paille, Plus de son,

Qu'un gros frere, Gai, friand, Ne peut faire, Mendiant Par les places Ou tu passes, De grimaces En priant!'--

to the melodious tenderness of 'Si tu voulais, Madelaine'; to the gay music of the _Stances a Jeanne_:

'Je ne me mets pas en peine Du clocher ni du beffroi. Je ne sais rien de la reine, Et je ne sais rien du roi.'--

to the admirable song of the wind of the sea:

'Quels sont les bruits sourds? Ecoutez vers l'onde Cette voix profonde Qui pleure toujours, Et qui toujours gronde,

Quoiqu'un son plus claire Parfois l'interrompe . . . Le vent de la mer Souffle dans sa trompe.'--

to the _Romance Mauresque_, to the barbaric fury of _les Reitres_, to the magnificent rodomontade of the _Romancero du Cid_. 'J'en passe, et des meilleurs,' as Ruy Gomez observes of his ancestors. Here at any rate are jewels enough to furnish forth a casket that should be one of the richest of its kind! The worst is, they are most of them not necessaries but luxuries. It is impossible to conceive of life without Shakespeare and Burns, without _Paradise Lost_ and the _Intimations_ ode and the immortal pageant of the _Canterbury Tales_; but (the technical question apart) to imagine it wanting Hugo's lyrics is easy enough. The largesse of which he was so prodigal has but an arbitrary and conventional value. Like the magician's money much has changed, almost in the act of distribution, into withered leaves; and such of it as seems minted of good metal is not for general circulation.

HEINE

The Villainy Translation.

Heine had a light hand with the branding-iron, and marked his subjects not more neatly than indelibly. And really he alone were capable of dealing adequate vengeance upon his translators. His verse has only violent lovers or violent foes; indifference is impossible. Once read as it deserves, it becomes one of the loveliest of our spiritual acquisitions. We hate to see it tampered with; we are on thorns as the translator approaches, and we resent his operations as an individual hurt, a personal affront. What business has he to be trampling among our borders and crushing our flowers with his stupid hobnails? Why cannot he carry his zeal for topsy-turvy horticulture elsewhere? He comes and lays a brutal hand on our pet growths, snips off their graces, shapes them anew according to his own ridiculous ideal, paints and varnishes them with a villainous compound of his contrivance, and then bids us admire the effect and thank him for its production! Is any name too hard for such a creature? and could any vengeance be too deadly? If he walked into your garden and amused himself so with your cabbages, you could put him in prison. But into your poets he can stump his way at will, and upon them he can do his pleasure. And he does it. How many men have brutalised the elegance, the grace, the winning urbanity of Horace! By how many coarse and stupid fingers has Catullus been smudged and fumbled and mauled! To turn _Faust_ into English (in the original metres) is a fashionable occupation; there are more perversions of the _Commedia_ than one cares to recall; there is scarce a great or even a good work of the human mind but has been thus bedevilled and deformed. _Don Quixote_, _le Pere Goriot_, _The Frogs_, _The Decameron_--the trail of the translator is over them all. Messrs. Payne and Lang and Swinburne have turned poor Villon into a citizen of Bedford Park, Fitzgerald and Florence Macarthy have Englished Calderon, Messrs. Pope, Gladstone and others have done their worst with Homer. If Rossetti had not succeeded with _la Vita Nuova_, if Fitzgerald had not ennobled Omar, if Mr. Lang had not bettered upon Banville and Gerard de Nerval, the word 'translator' would be odious as the word 'occupy.' And 'occupy' on the authority of Mrs. Dorothy Tearsheet is an odious word indeed.

The Proof of It.

The fact is, the translator too often forgets the difference between his subject and himself; he is too often a common graveyard mason that would play the sculptor. And it is not nearly enough for him to be a decent craftsman. To give an adequate idea of an artist's work a man must be himself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original. The typical translator makes clever enough verses, but Heine's accomplishment is remote from him as Heine's genius. He perverts his author as rhyme and rhythm will. No charge of verbal inaccuracy need therefore be made, for we do not expect a literal fidelity in our workman. Let him convey the spirit of his original, and that, so far as meaning goes, is enough. But we do expect of him a something that shall recall his author's form, his author's personality, his author's charm of diction and of style; and here it is that such an interpreter as Sir Theodore Martin (say) fails with such assurance and ill-fortune. The movement of Heine's rhythms, simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poet laboured at his cadences as at his meanings. Artificial he is, but he has the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial. His verses dance and sway like the nixies he loved. Their every motion seems informed with the perfect suavity and spontaneity of pure nature. They tinkle down the air like sunset bells, they float like clouds, they wave like flowers, they twitter like skylarks, they have in them something of the swiftness and the certainty of exquisite physical sensations. In such a transcript as Sir Theodore's all this is lost: Heine becomes a mere prentice-metrist; he sets the teeth on edge as surely as Browning himself; the verse that recalled a dance of naiads suggests a springless cart on a Highland road; Terpsichore is made to prance a hobnailed breakdown. The poem disappears, and in its place you have an indifferent copy of verses. You look at the pages from afar, and your impression is that they are not unlike Heine; you look into them, and Heine has vanished. The man is gone, and only an awkward, angular, clumsily articulated, entirely preposterous lay-figure remains to show that the translator has been by.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

His Verse.

In every page of Arnold the poet there is something to return upon and to admire. There are faults, and these of a kind this present age is ill- disposed to condone. The rhymes are sometimes poor; the movement of the verse is sometimes uncertain and sometimes slow; the rhythms are obviously simple always; now and then the intention and effect are cold even to austerity, are bald to uncomeliness. But then, how many of the rarer qualities of art and inspiration are represented here, and here alone in modern work! There is little of that delight in material for material's sake which is held to be essential to the composition of a great artist; there is none of that rapture of sound and motion and none of that efflorescence of expression which are deemed inseparable from the endowment of the true singer. For any of those excesses in technical accomplishment, those ecstasies in the use of words, those effects of sound which are so rich and strange as to impress the hearer with something of their author's own emotion of creation--for any, indeed, of the characteristic attributes of modern poetry--you shall turn to him in vain. In matters of form this poet is no romantic but a classic to the marrow. He adores his Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shakespeare's fashions. For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentiment and distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk for talking's sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, to embody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount of richness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. In his scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent and Shakespearean--for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Human and interesting in themselves, the ideas apparelled in his verse are completely apprehended; natural in themselves, the experiences he pictures are intimately felt and thoroughly perceived. They have been resolved into their elements by the operation of an almost Sophoclean faculty of selection, and the effect of their presentation is akin to that of a gallery of Greek marbles.

His Failure.

Other poets say anything--say everything that is in them. Browning lived to realise the myth of the Inexhaustible Bottle; Mr. William Morris is nothing: if not fluent and copious; Mr. Swinburne has a facility that would seem impossible if it were not a living fact; even the Laureate is sometimes prodigal of unimportant details, of touches insignificant and superfluous, of words for words' sake, of cadences that have no reason of being save themselves. Matthew Arnold alone says only what is worth saying. In other words, he selects: from his matter whatever is impertinent is eliminated and only what is vital is permitted to remain. Sometimes he goes a little astray, and his application of the principle on which Sophocles and Homer wrought results in failure. But in these instances it will always be found, I think, that the effect is due not to the principle nor the poet's application of it but to the poet himself, who has exceeded his commission, and attempted more than is in him to accomplish. The case is rare with Arnold, one of whose qualities--and by no means the least Hellenic of them--was a fine consciousness of his limitations. But that he failed, and failed considerably, it were idle to deny. There is _Merope_ to bear witness to the fact; and of _Merope_ what is there to say? Evidently it is an imitation Greek play: an essay, that is, in a form which ceased long since to have any active life, so that the attempt to revive it--to create a soul under the ribs of very musty death--is a blunder alike in sentiment and in art. As evidently Arnold is no dramatist. Empedocles, the Strayed Reveller, even the Forsaken Merman, all these are expressions of purely personal feeling--are so many metamorphoses of Arnold. In _Merope_ there is no such basis of reality. The poet was never on a level with his argument. He knew little or nothing of his characters--of Merope or AEpytus or Polyphontes, of Arcas or Laias or even the Messenger; at every step the ground is seen shifting under his feet; he is comparatively void of matter, and his application of the famous principle is labour lost. He is winnowing the wind; he is washing not gold but water.

His Triumphs.

It is other-guess work with _Empedocles_, the _Dejaneira_ fragment, _Sohrab and Rustum_, the _Philomela_, his better work in general, above all with the unique and unapproached _Balder Dead_. To me this last stands alone in modern art for simple majesty of conception, sober directness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness--the only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation--for which the similitudes of the 'Ionian father of his race' are pre-eminently distinguished:--

'And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers Brushes across a tired traveller's face Who shuffles through the deep dew-moistened dust On a May evening, in the darken'd lanes, And starts him, that he thinks a ghost went by-- So Hoder brushed by Hermod's side.'

Here is Homer's direct and moving because most human and comprehensive touch in narrative:--

'But from the hill of Lidskialf Odin rose, The throne, from which his eye surveys the world; And mounted Sleipner, and in darkness rode To Asgard. And the stars came out in heaven, High over Asgard, to light home the king. But fiercely Odin gallop'd, moved in heart; And swift to Asgard, to the gate, he came. And terribly the hoofs of Sleipner rang Along the flinty floor of Asgard streets, And the Gods trembled on their golden beds Hearing the wrathful Father coming home-- For dread, for like a whirlwind Odin came. And to Valhalla's gate he rode, and left Sleipner; and Sleipner went to his own stall; And in Valhalla Odin laid him down.'