r 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 V.
 
 STROUDSEURG pilBtiC 
 A'Ad 
 MONROE COUMTY LIBRARY 
 
 ^^V 

 
 NEW EDITIONS OF 
 
 SWINBURNE'S WORKS 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 WORTIIINGTON COMPANY. 
 
 SWINBURNE (Algernon Charles). Victor Hugo, i2mo, 
 
 cloth extra. Just published $i 25 
 
 A Midsummer Holiday and other Poems, i vol. i2mo. i 25 
 
 A Century of Roundels, and other Poems. i2mo. 
 
 cloth extra i 25 
 
 Tristram of Lyonesse, and other Poems. i2mo, cloth, i 25 
 
 Songs of the Spring Tides. i2mo, cloth, extra 
 
 gilt I 25 
 
 Studies in Song. i2mo, cloth extra, gilt top i 25 
 
 Mary Stuart. A Tragedy. i2mo, cloth extra, gilt 
 
 top I 25 
 
 Later Poems and Ballads. i2mo, cloth, beveled, 
 
 gilt top 125 
 
 A Study of Shakespeare. By Algernon Charles 
 
 Swinburne. i2mo, cloth extra, gilt top i 25 
 
 *^* The above volumes of Mr. Swinburne's Works have now 
 been reduced from $1.75 to $1.25, including the new work just 
 published, VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 *^* "The one faculty," says Stedman, "in which Swinburne excels any 
 living English poet is his miraculous gift of rhythm — h;s command over the un- 
 suspected sources of a language. Before the advent of Swinburne we did not 
 realize the full scope of English verse, in his hands it is like the violin of 
 Paganini. The range of his fantasias, ro^ilades. arias, new effects of measure and 
 sound, is incomparable with anything hitherto known. ... In his poetry we 
 discover qualities we did not know were m our language — a softness that seemed 
 Italian, a rugged strength we thought w.is German, a blithe and d6bonnaire 
 lightness we despaired of capturing from the French." — Clarence Stediiiati in 
 Victorian Poets.
 
 VICTOR HUGO 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 WORTHINGTON CO., 747 BROADWAY. 
 
 1886.
 
 COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 R. WORTHINGTON, 
 
 1886.
 
 777^ WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 In the spring of 1616 the greatest Englishman 
 of all time passed away with no public homage 
 or notice, and the first tributes paid to his mem- 
 ory were prefixed to the miserably garbled and 
 inaccurate edition of his works which was issued 
 seven years later by a brace of players under the 
 patronage of a brace of peers. In the spring of 
 1885 the greatest Frenchman of all time has 
 passed away amid such universal anguish and 
 passion of regret as never before accompanied 
 the death of the greatest among poets. The 
 contrast is of course not wholly due to the in- 
 calculable progress of humanity during the two 
 hundred and sixty-nine years which divide the 
 date of our mourning from the date of Shakes- 
 peare's death: nor even to the vast superiority of 
 Frenchmen to Englishmen in the quality of gen- 
 erous, just, and reasonable gratitude for the very 
 highest of all benefits that man can confer on
 
 6 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 mankind. For the greatest poet of this century- 
 has been more than such a force of indirect and 
 gradual beneficence as every great writer must 
 needs be. His spiritual service has been in its 
 inmost essence, in its highest development, the 
 service of a healer and a comforter, the work of 
 a redeemer and a prophet. Above all other 
 apostles who have brought us each the glad 
 tidings of his peculiar gospel, the free gifts of 
 his special inspiration, has this one deserved to 
 be called by the most beautiful and tender of all 
 human titles — the son of consolation. His burn- 
 ing wrath and scorn unquenchable were fed with 
 light and heat from the inexhaustible dayspring 
 of his love — a fountain of everlasting and uncon- 
 suming fire. We know of no such great poet so 
 good, of no such good man so great in genius: 
 not though Milton and Shelley, our greatest lyric 
 singer and our single epic poet, remain with us 
 for signs and examples of devotion as heroic and 
 self-sacrifice as pure. And therefore it is but 
 simply reasonable that not those alone should 
 mourn for him who have been reared and nur- 
 tured on the fruits of his creative spirit: that 
 those also whom he wrought and fought for, 
 but who know him only as their champion and
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 7 
 
 their friend — they that cannot even read him, 
 but remember how he labored in their cause, 
 that their children might fare otherwise than 
 they — should bear no unequal part in the burden 
 of this infinite and worldwide sorrow. 
 
 For us, who from childhood upwards have fos- 
 tered and fortified whatever of good was born in 
 us — all capacity of spiritual work, all seed of 
 human sympathy, all powers of hope and faith, 
 all passions and aspirations found loyal to the 
 service of duty and of love — with the bread of 
 his deathless word and the wine of his immortal 
 song, the one thing possible to do in this first 
 hour of bitterness and stupefaction at the sense 
 of a loss not possible yet to realize, is not to 
 declaim his praise or parade our lamentation in 
 modulated effects or efforts of panegyric or of 
 dirge: it is to reckon up once more the stand- 
 ing account of our all but incalculable debt. A 
 brief and simple summary of his published works 
 may probably lay before the student some points 
 and some details not generally familiar to the 
 run of English readers: and I know not what bet- 
 ter service might be done them than to bring 
 into their sight such aspects of the most multi- 
 form and many-sided genius that ever wrought
 
 8 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 in prose or verse as are least obvious and least 
 notorious to the foreign world of letters. 
 
 Poet, dramatist, novelist, historian, philosopher, 
 and patriot, the spiritual sovereign of the nine- 
 teenth century was before all things and above all 
 things a poet. Throughout all the various and 
 ambitious attempts of his marvellous boyhood — 
 criticism, drama, satire, elegy, epigram, and ro- 
 mance — the dominant vein is poetic. His example 
 will stand forever as the crowning disproof of the 
 doubtless more than plausible opinion that the 
 most amazing precocity of power is a sign of en- 
 suing impotence and premature decay. There was 
 never a more brilliant boy than Victor Hugo; but 
 there has never been a greater man. At any 
 other than a time of mourning it might be neither 
 unseasonable nor unprofitable to observe that the 
 boy's early verse, moulded on the models of the 
 eighteenth century, is an arsenal of satire on rev- 
 olutionary principles or notions which might suf- 
 fice to furnish forth with more than their natural 
 equipment of epigram a whole army of reaction- 
 ary rhymesters and pamphleteers. But from the 
 first, without knowing it, he was on the road to 
 Damascus: if not to be struck down by sudden 
 miracle, yet by no less inevitable a process to un-
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO 9 
 
 dergo a no less unquestionable conversion. At 
 sixteen he wrote for a wager in the space of a 
 fortnight the chivalrous and heroic story of Bng- 
 Jargal; afterwards recast and reinformed with 
 fresh vigor of vitality, when the author had at- 
 tained the maturer age of twenty-three. His ten- 
 derness and manliness of spirit were here made 
 nobly manifest: his originality and ardor of imagi- 
 nation, wild as yet and crude and violent, found 
 vent two years later in Han d'Islande. But no boy- 
 ish work on record ever showed more singular force 
 of hand, more brilliant variety of power: though 
 the author's criticism ten years later admits that 
 " il n'y a dans Han d' Islande qu'une chose sentie, 
 I'amour du jeune homme; qu'une chose observee, 
 I'amour de la jeune fiUe." But as the work of a 
 boy's fancy or invention, touched here and there 
 with genuine humor, terror, and pathos, it is not 
 less wonderful than are the author's first odes for 
 ease and force and freshness and fluency of verse 
 imbued with simple and sincere feeling, with 
 cordial and candid faith. And in both these boy- 
 ish stories the hand of a soldier's son, a child of 
 the camp, reared in the lap of war and cradled in 
 traditions of daring, is evident whenever an epi- 
 sode of martial adventure comes in amoncf the
 
 lo A src/nr of victor hi/go. 
 
 more fantastic excursions of adolescent inventive- 
 ness. But it is in the ballads written between his 
 twenty-second and his twenty-seventh year that 
 Victor Hugo first showed himself, beyond all 
 question and above all cavil, an original and a 
 great poet. La CJiasse du Biirgrai'e and Le Pas 
 cVArines du Rot Jean would suffice of themselves 
 to establish that. The fire, the music, the force, 
 the tenderness, the spirit of these glorious little 
 poems must needs, one would think, impress even 
 such readers as might be impervious to the charm 
 of their exquisitely vigorous and dexterous execu- 
 tion. Take for example this one stanza from the 
 ballad last mentioned: — 
 
 La cohue, 
 Flot de fer, 
 Frappe, hue, 
 Remplit I'air, 
 Et, profonde, 
 Tourne et gronde 
 Comme une onde 
 Sur la mer. 
 
 It will of course, I should hope, be understood 
 once for all that when I venture to select for 
 special mention any special poem of Hugo's I do 
 not dream of venturing to suggest that others 
 are not or may not be fully as worthy of homage,
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. n 
 
 or that anything of this incomparable master's 
 work will not requite our study or does not 
 demand our admiration; I do but take leave to 
 indicate in passing some »of those which have 
 been to me especially fruitful of enduring delight, 
 and still are cherished in consequence with a 
 peculiar gratitude. 
 
 At twenty-five the already celebrated lyric 
 poet published his magnificent historic drama of 
 Cronnvell: a work sufficient of itself to establish 
 the author's fame for all ages in which poetry 
 and thought, passion and humor, subtle truth 
 of character, stately perfection of structure, facile 
 force of dialogue and splendid eloquence of style, 
 continue to be admired and enjoyed. That the 
 author has apparently confounded one earl of 
 Rochester with another more famous bearer of 
 the same title must not be allowed to interfere 
 with the credit due to him for wide and various 
 research. Any dullard can point the finger at a 
 slip here and there in the history, a change or 
 an error of detail or of date: it needs more care 
 to appreciate the painstaking and ardent industry 
 which has collected and fused together a great 
 mass of historic and legendary material, the fer- 
 vent energy of inspiration which has given life,
 
 12 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 order, and harmony to the vast and versatile 
 
 design. As to the executive part of the poem, 
 
 the least that can be said by any competent 
 
 judge of that matter is that Moliere was already 
 
 equalled and Corneille was already excelled in 
 
 their respective provinces of verse by the young 
 
 conqueror whose rule was equal and imperial 
 
 over every realm of song. The comic interludes 
 
 or episodes of the second and third acts, so 
 
 admirably welded into the structure or woven 
 
 into the thread of the action, would suffice to 
 
 prove this when collated with the seventeenth 
 
 scene of the third act and the great speech of 
 
 Cromwell in the fifth. 
 
 Arretez ! 
 
 Que veut dire ceci ? Pourquoi cette couronne ? 
 
 Que veut-on que j'en fasse .? et qui done me la donne ? 
 
 Est-ce un reve ? Est-ce bien le bandeau que je vols ? 
 
 De quel droit me vienl-on confondre avec les rois? 
 
 Qui mele un tel scandale a nos pieuses fetes 
 
 Quoi ! leur couronne, a moi qui fais tomber leurs tetes ? 
 
 S'est-on mepris au but de ces solennitesi* — 
 
 Milords, messieurs, anglais, freres, qui m'ecoutez, 
 
 Je ne viens point ici ceindre le diademe, 
 
 Mais retremper men titre au sein du peuple meme, 
 
 Rajeunir men pouvoir, renouveler mes droits. 
 
 L'ecarlate sacree etait teinte deux fois. 
 
 Cette pourpre est au peuple, et, d'une ame loyale, 
 
 Je la tiens de lui. — Mais la couronne royale !
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 13 
 
 Quand I'ai-je demandee ? Et qui dit que j'en veux ? 
 Je ne donnerais pas un seul de mes cheveux, 
 De ces cheveux blanchis a servir I'Angleterre, 
 Pour tous les fleurons d'or des princes de la terre. 
 Oiez cela d'ici ! Remportez, remportez 
 Ce hochet, ridicule entre les vanites ! 
 N'attendez pas qu' aux pieds je foule ces miseres ! 
 Qu'ils me connaissent mal, les hommes peu sinceres 
 Qui m'osent affronter jusqu'a me couronner ! 
 J'ai rcfu de Dieu plus qu'ils ne peuvent donner. 
 La grace inamissible; et de moi je suis maitre. 
 Une fois fils du ciel, peut-on cesser de I'etre ? 
 De nos prosperites I'univers est jaloux. 
 Que me faut-il de plus que le bonheur de tous? 
 Je vous I'ai dit. Ce peuple est le peuple d'elite. 
 L'Europe de cette ile est I'humble satellite. 
 Tout cede a notre etoile; et I'impie est maudit. 
 U semble, a voir cela, que le Seigneur ait dit: 
 — Angleterre ! grandis, et sois ma fille ainee. 
 Entre les nations mes mains t'ont couronnee; 
 Sois done ma bien-aimee, et marche a mes coles. — 
 II deroule sur nous d'abondantes bontes; 
 Chaque jour qui finit, chaque jour qui commence, 
 Ajoute un anneau d'or a cette chaine immense. 
 On croirait que ce Dieu, terrible aux philistins, 
 A comme un ouvrier compose nos destins; 
 Que son bras, sur un axe indestructible aux ages, 
 De ce vaste edifice a scelle les rouages, 
 Q^^uvre mysterieuse, et dont scs longs efforts 
 Pour des siecles peut-etre ont monte les ressorts. 
 Ainsi tout va. La roue, a la roue enchainee, 
 Mord de sa dent de fer la machine entrainee;
 
 14 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Les massifs balanciers, les antennes, les poids, 
 Labyrinthe vivant, se meuvent a la fois; 
 L'effrayante machine accomplit sans relache 
 Sa marche inexorable et sa puissante tache; 
 Et des peuples entiers, pris dans ses mille bras, 
 Disparaitraient broyes, s'ils ne se rangeaient pas. 
 Et j'entraverais Dieu, dont la loi salutaire 
 Nous fait un sort a part dans le sort de la terre ! 
 J'irais, du peuple elu foulant le droit ancien, 
 Mettre mon interet a la place du sien ! 
 Pilote, j'ouvrirais la voile aux vents contraires ! 
 
 {Hochanl la ick.) 
 
 Non, je ne donne pas ceile juie aux faux freres. 
 Le vieux navire anglais est toujours roi des flots. 
 Le colosse est debout. Que sont d'obscurs complots 
 Conlre les hauts destins de la Grande-Bretagne ? 
 Qu est-ce qu'un coup de pioche aux flancs d'une mon- 
 tagne ? 
 
 {Prome7iant des yeux de lynx autour de ltd.) 
 
 Avis aux malveillants ! on sait tout ce qu'ils font. 
 
 Le flot est transparent, si I'abime est profond. 
 
 On voit le fond du piege ou rampe leur pensee. 
 
 La vipere parfois de son dard s'est blessee; 
 
 Au feu qu'on allumait souvent on se brula; 
 
 Et les yeux du Seigneur vont courant 9a et la. — 
 
 Qui du peuple et des rois a signe le divorce? 
 
 Moi. — Croit-on done me prendre a celte vaine amorce? 
 
 Un diademe ! — Anglais, j'en brisais autrefois. 
 
 Sans en avoir porte, j'en connais bien le poids. 
 
 Quitter pour une cour le camp qui m'environne?
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 15 
 
 Changer mon glaive en sceptre et mon casque en cour- 
 
 onne ? 
 Allons! suis-je un enfant? me croit-on ne d'hier? 
 Ne sais-je pas que Tor pese plus que le fer ? 
 M'edifier un trone ! Eh ! c'est creuser ma tombe. 
 Cromwell, pour y monter, saittrop comme on en tombe. 
 Et d'ailleurs, que d'ennuis s'amassent sur ces fronts 
 Qui se rident sitot, herisses de fleurons ! 
 Chacun de ces fleurons cache une ardente epine. 
 La couronne les tue; un noir souci les mine; 
 Elle change en tyran le mortel le plus doux, 
 Et, pesant sur le roi, le fait peser sur tous. 
 Le peuple les admire, et, s'abdiquant lui-meme, 
 Compte tous les rubis dont luit le diademe; 
 Mais comme il fremirait pour eux de leur fardeau, 
 S'il regardait le front et non pas le bandeau ! 
 Eux, leur charge les trouble, et leurs mains souveraines 
 De I'etat chancelant melent bientot les renes. — 
 Ah ! remportez ce signe execrable, odieux ! 
 Ce bandeau trop souvent tombe du front aux yeux. — 
 
 {Larmoyanl. ) 
 
 Et qu'en ferais-je enfin ? Mai ne pour la puissance, 
 
 Je suis simple de coeur et vis dans I'innocence. 
 
 Si j'ai, la fronde en main, veille sur le bercail. 
 
 Si j'ai devant I'ecueil pris place au gouvernail, 
 
 J'ai du me devouer pour la cause commune. 
 
 Mais que n'ai-je vieilli dans mon humble fortune ! 
 
 Que n'ai-je vu tomber les tyrans aux abois, 
 
 A I'ombre de mon chaume et de mon petit bois ! 
 
 Helas ! j'eusse aime mieux ces champs ou Ton respire, 
 
 Le ciel m en est lemoin, que les soins de lempire;
 
 1 6 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Et Cromwell eiit trouve plus de charme cent fois 
 A garder ses moutons qu'a detroner des rois 1 
 
 {Pkura7il. ) 
 
 Que parle-t-on de sceptre ? Ah \ j'ai manque ma vie. 
 
 Ce morceau de clinquant n'a rien qui me convie. 
 
 Ayez pitie de moi, freres, loin d'envier 
 
 Votrevieux general, votre vieil Olivier. 
 
 Je sens men bras faiblir, et ma fin est prochaine. 
 
 Depuis assez longtemps suis-je pas a la chaine ? 
 
 Je suis vieux, je suis las; je demande merci. 
 
 N'est-il pas temps qu'enfin je me repose aussi ? 
 
 Chaque jour j'en appelle a la bonte divine, 
 
 Et devant le Seigneur je frappe ma poitrine. 
 
 Que je veuille etre roi ! Si frele et tant d'orgueil ! 
 
 Ce projet, et j'en jure a cote du cercueil, 
 
 II m'est plus eiranger, freres, que la lumiere 
 
 Du soleil a I'enfant dans le sein de sa mere ! 
 
 Loin ce nouveau pouvoir a mes voeux presente ! 
 
 Je n'en accepte rien, — rien que I'heredite. 
 
 The subtlety and variety of power displayed in 
 the treatment of the chief character should be evi- 
 dent alike to those who look only on the upright 
 side of it and those who can see only its more 
 oblique aspect. The Cromwell of Hugo is as far 
 from the faultless monster of Carlyle's creation 
 and adoration as from the all but unredeemed vil- 
 lain of royalist and Hibernian tradition: he is a 
 great and terrible poetic figure, imbued through- 
 out with active life and harmonized throughout
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 17 
 
 by imaginative intuition: a patriot and a tyrant, a 
 dissembler and a believer, a practical humorist 
 and a national hero. 
 
 The famous preface in which the batteries of 
 pseudo classic tradition were stormed and shat- 
 tered at a charge has itself long since become a 
 classic. That the greatest poet was also the 
 greatest prose-writer of his generation there could 
 no longer be any doubt among men of any intel- 
 ligence: but not even yet was more than half 
 the greatnessof his multitudinous force revealed. 
 Two years later, at the age of twenty-seven, he 
 published the superb and entrancing Oricntalcs: 
 the most musical and many-colored volume of 
 verse that ever had glorified the language. From 
 Le Fell du Cicl to Sara la Baigneiise, from the 
 thunder-peals of exterminating judgment to the 
 flute-notes of innocent girlish luxury in the sense 
 of loveliness and life, the inexhaustible range of 
 his triumph expands and culminates and extends. 
 Shelley has left us no more exquisite and miracu- 
 lous piece of lyrical craftsmanship than Les Djinns ; 
 none perhaps so rich in variety of modulation, so 
 perfect in rise and growth and relapse and reiter- 
 ance of music.
 
 1 8 A SlUDV OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Murs, ville, 
 
 Et port, 
 
 Asile 
 
 De mort, 
 
 Mer grise 
 
 Ou brise 
 
 La brise, 
 
 Tout dort. 
 Dans la plaine 
 Nait un bruit. 
 C'est i'haleine 
 De la nuit. 
 Elle brame 
 Comme une ame 
 Qu'une flamme 
 Toujours suit. 
 
 Then the terrible music of the flight of evil 
 
 spirits — " troupeau lourd et rapide " — grows as it 
 
 were note by note and minute by minute up to 
 
 its full height of tempest, and again relapses and 
 
 recedes into the subsiding whisper of the corre- 
 
 sponsive close. 
 
 Ce bruit vague 
 Qui s'endort, 
 C'est la vague 
 Sur le bord; 
 C'est la plainte 
 Presque eteinte 
 D'une sainte 
 Pour un mort.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO, 19 
 
 On doute 
 La nuit . . . 
 Jecoute: — 
 Tout fuit. 
 Tout passe; 
 L'espace 
 Efface 
 Le bruit. 
 
 And here, like Shelley, w^s Hugo already the 
 poet of freedom, a champion of the sacred right 
 and the holy duty of resistance. The husk of a 
 royalist education, the crust of reactionary mis- 
 conceptions, had already begun to drop off; not 
 yet a pure republican, he was now ripe to receive 
 and to understand the doctrine of human right, 
 the conception of the common weal, as distin- 
 guished from imaginary duties and opposed to 
 hereditary claims. 
 
 The twenty-eighth year of his life, which was 
 illuminated by the issue of these passionate and 
 radiant poems, witnessed also the opening of his 
 generous and lifelong campaign or crusade 
 against the principle of capital punishment. With 
 all possible reverence and all possible reluctance, 
 but remembering that without perfect straight- 
 forwardness and absolute sincerity I should be 
 even unworthier than I am to speak of Victor
 
 20 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO, 
 
 Hugo at all, I must say that his reasoning on this 
 subject seems to me insufficient and inconclusive: 
 that his own radical principle, the absolute in- 
 violability of human life, the absolute sinfulness 
 of retributive bloodshedding, if not utterly illogi- 
 cal and untenable, is tenable or logical only on 
 the ground assumed by those quaintest though 
 not least pathetic among fanatics and heroes, the 
 early disciples of George Fox, If a man tells you 
 that supernatural revelation has forbidden him 
 to take another man's life under all and any cir- 
 cumstances, he is above or beyond refutation; if 
 he says that self-defence is justifiable, and that 
 righteous warfare is a patriotic duty, but that to 
 exact from the very worst of murderers, a parri- 
 cide or a poisoner, a Philip the Second or a Na- 
 poleon the Third, the payment of a life for a life — 
 or even of one infamous existence for whole hec- 
 atombs of innocent lives — is an offence against 
 civilization and a sin against humanity, I am not 
 merely unable to accept, but incompetent to un- 
 derstand his argument. We may most heartily 
 agree with him that France is degraded by the 
 guillotine, and that England is disgraced by the 
 gallows, and yet our abhorrence of these barbar- 
 ous and nauseous brutalities may not preclude us
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 21 
 
 from feeling that a dealer (for example) in pro- 
 fessional infanticide by starvation might very 
 properly be subjected to vivisection without an- 
 aesthetics, and that all manly and womanly minds 
 not distorted or distracted by prepossessions or 
 assumptions might rationally and laudably re- 
 joice in the prospect of this legal and equitable 
 process. "The senseless old law of retaliation" 
 {la vicille et inept e loi du talioii) is inept or sense- 
 less only when the application of it is false to the 
 principle: when justice in theory becomes unjust 
 in practice. Another stale old principle or prov- 
 erb — " abusus non tollit usum — suffices to confute 
 some of the arguments — I am very far from say- 
 ing, all — adduced or alleged by the ardent elo- 
 quence of Victor Hugo in his admirable master- 
 piece of terrible and pathetic invention — Le 
 dernier joiir d'un condanine, and subsequently in 
 the impressive little history of Claude Giieiix, in 
 the famous speech on behalf of Charles Hugo 
 when impeached on a charge of insult to the laws 
 in an article on the punishment of death, and in 
 the fervent eloquence of his appeal on the case of a 
 criminal executed in Guernsey, and of his protest 
 addressed to Lord Palmerston against the horrible 
 result of its rejection. That certain surviving
 
 2 2 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 methods of execution are execrable scandals to 
 the country which maintains them, he has proved 
 beyond all humane or reasonable question; and 
 that all murderers are not alike inexcusable is no 
 less indisputable a proposition; but beyond these 
 two points the most earnest and exuberant advo- 
 cacy can advance nothing likely to convince any 
 but those already converted to the principle that 
 human life must never be taken in punishment of 
 crime — that there are not criminals whose exist- 
 ence insults humanity, and cries aloud on justice 
 for mercy's very sake to cut it off. 
 
 The next year (1830) is famous forever beyond 
 all others in the history of French literature: 
 it was the year of Hcrnani, the date of libera- 
 tion and transfiguration for the tragic stage of 
 France. The battle which raged round the first 
 acted play of Hugo's, and the triumph which 
 crowned the struggles of its champions, are not 
 these things written in too many chronicles to be 
 for the thousandth time related here } And of its 
 dramatic and poetic quality what praise could be 
 uttered that must not before this have been re- 
 peated at least some myriads of times .'' But if 
 there be any mortal to whom the heroic scene of 
 the portraits, the majestic and august monologue
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 23 
 
 of Charles the Fifth at the tomb of Charles the 
 Great, the terrible beauty, the vivid pathos, the 
 bitter sweetness of the close, convey no sense of 
 genius and utter no message of delight, we can 
 only say that it would simply be natural, consist- 
 ent, and proper for such a critic to recognize in 
 Shakespeare a barbarian, and a Philistine in 
 Milton. 
 
 Nevertheless, if we are to obey the perhaps 
 rather childish impulse of preference and selection 
 among the highest works of the highest among\ 
 poets, I will avow that to my personal instinct or 
 apprehension Marion de Lornie seems a yet more 
 perfect and pathetic masterpiece than even Her-I 
 nani itself. The always generous and loyal Dumas 
 placed it at the very head of his friend's dramatic 
 works. Written, as most readers (I presume) will re- 
 member, before its predecessor on the stage, it was 
 prohibited on the insanely fatuous pretext that 
 the presentation of King Louis the Thirteenth 
 was an indirect affront to the majesty of King 
 Charles the Tenth. After that luckless dotard 
 had been driven off his throne, it was at once pro- 
 posed to produce the hitherto interdicted play 
 before an audience yet palpitating with the thrill 
 of revolution and resentment. But the chivalrous
 
 24 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 loyalty of Victor Hugo refused to accept a facile 
 and factitious triumph at the expense of an exiled 
 old man, over the ruins of a shattered old cause. 
 The play was not permitted by its author to enter 
 till the spring of the following year on its inevita- 
 ble course of glory. It is a curious and memora- 
 ble fact that the most tender-hearted of all great 
 poets had originally made the hero of this tragedy 
 leave the heroine unforgiven for the momentary 
 and reluctant relapse into shame by which she 
 had endeavored to repurchase his forfeited life; 
 and that Prosper Merimee should have been the 
 first, Marie Dorval the second, to reclaim a little 
 mercy for the penitent. It is to their pleading 
 that we owe the sublime pathos of the final part- 
 ing between Marion and Didier. 
 / In one point it seems to me that this immortal 
 masterpiece may perhaps be reasonably placed, 
 WiXh Le Rot s' amuse and Ruy Blas/xw triune su- 
 premacy at the head of Victor Hugo's plays. The 
 wide range of poetic abilities, the harmonious va- 
 riety of congregated powers, displayed in these 
 three great tragedies through almost infinite vari- 
 ations of terror and pity and humor and sublime 
 surprise, will seem to some readers, whose rever- 
 ence is no less grateful for other gifts of the same
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 25 
 
 great hand, unequalled at least till the advent in 
 his eighty-first year of Torqucynada. 
 
 Victor Hugo was not yet thirty when all these 
 triumphs lay behind him. In the twenty-ninth 
 year of a life which would seem fabulous and 
 incredible in the record of its achievements if 
 divided by lapse of time from all possible proof of 
 its possibility by the attestation of dates and 
 facts, he published in February Notre-Dame de 
 Pat-is, in November Les Feuilles d' Aiitomne : that 
 the two dreariest months of the year might not 
 only " smell April and May," but outshine July 
 and August. The greatest of all tragic romances 
 has a Grecian perfection of structure, with a Gothic 
 intensity of pathos. To attempt the praise of such 
 a work would be only less idle than to refuse it. 
 Terror and pity, with eternal fate for key-note to 
 the strain of story, never struck deeper to men's 
 hearts through more faultless evolution of com- 
 bining circumstance on the tragic stage of Athens. 
 Louis the Eleventh has been painted by many 
 famous hands, but Hugo's presentation of him, as 
 compared for example with Scott's, is as a por- 
 trait by Velasquez to a portrait by Vandyke. The 
 style was a new revelation of the supreme capaci- 
 ties of human speech: the touch of it on any sub-
 
 26 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 ject of description or of passion is as the touch of 
 the sun for penetrating irradiation and vivid evo- 
 cation of Hfe. 
 
 From the Autumn Leaves to the Songs of the 
 Twilight, and again from the Inner Voices to the 
 Sunbeams and Shadotus, the continuous jet of 
 lyric song through a space of ten fertile years was 
 so rich in serene and various beauty that the one 
 thing notable in a flying review of its radiant 
 course is the general equality of loveliness inform 
 and color, which is relieved and heightened at 
 intervals by some especial example of a beauty 
 more profound or more sublime. The first volume 
 of the four, if I mistake not, won a more immedi- 
 ate and universal homage than the rest: its unsur- 
 passed melody was so often the raiment of emo- 
 tion which struck home to all hearts a sense of 
 domestic tenderness too pure and sweet and simple 
 for perfect expression by any less absolute and 
 omnipotent lord of style, that it is no wonder if in 
 many minds — many mothers' minds especially — 
 there should at once have sprung up an all but 
 ineradicable conviction that no subsequent verse 
 must be allowed to equal or excel the volume 
 which contained such flower-like jewels of song as 
 the nineteenth and twentieth of these unwither-
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 27 
 
 ing and imperishable Leaves. But no error possi- 
 ble to a rational creature could be more serious 
 or more complete than the assumption of any 
 inferiority in the volume containing the two glo- 
 rious poems addressed to Admiral Canaris, the 
 friend (may I be forgiven the filial vanity or egot- 
 ism which impels me to record it ?) of the present 
 writer's father in his youth; the two first in date 
 of Hugo's finest satires, the lines that scourge a 
 backbiter and the lines that brand a traitor (the 
 resonant and radiant indignation of the latter 
 stands unsurpassed in the very Chdtiments them- 
 selves) ; the two most enchanting aubades or songs 
 of sunrise that ever had outsung the birds and 
 outsweetened the flowers of the dawn; and — for 
 here I can cite no more — the closing tribute of 
 lines more bright than the lilies whose name they 
 bear, offered by a husband's love at the sweet still 
 shrine of motherhood and wifehood. The first two 
 stanzas of the second aubadcare all that can here 
 be quoted. 
 
 L'aurore s'allume, 
 L'ombre epaisse fuit; 
 Le reve et la brume 
 Vent ou va la nuit; 
 Paupieres et roses 
 S'ouvrent demi-closes;
 
 28 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO, 
 
 Du reveil des choses 
 On entend le bruit. 
 
 Tout chante et murmure. 
 Tout parle a la fois, 
 Fumce et verdure, 
 Les nids et les toits; 
 Le vent parle aux chenes, 
 L'eau parle aux fontaines; 
 Toutes les haleines 
 Deviennent des voix. 
 
 And in each of the two succeeding volumes there 
 is, among- all their other things of price, a lyric 
 which may even yet be ranked with the highest 
 subsequent work of its author for purity of per- 
 fection, for height and fulness of note, for music 
 and movement and informing spirit of life. We 
 ought to have in English, but I fear — or rather I 
 am only too sure — we have not, a song in which 
 the sound of the sea is rendered as in that trans- 
 lation of the trumpet-blast of the night-wind, 
 with all its wails and pauses and fluctuations 
 and returns, done for once into human speech 
 and interpreted into spiritual sense forever. For 
 instinctive mastery of its means and absolute 
 attainment of its end, for majesty of living music 
 and fidelity of sensitive imagination, there is no
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 29 
 
 lyric poem in any language more wonderful or 
 more delightful. 
 
 UNE NUIT QU'ON ENTENDAIT LA MER 
 SANS LA VOIR. 
 
 Quels sent ces bruits sourds? 
 Ecoutez vers ronde 
 Cette voix profonde 
 Qui pleure toujours 
 Et qui toujours gronde, 
 Quoiqu'un son plus clair 
 Parfois rinterrompe . . . — 
 Le vent de la mer 
 Souffle dans sa trompe. 
 
 Comme il pleut ce soir ! 
 
 N'est-ce pas, mon bote ? 
 
 La-bas, a la cote, 
 
 Le ciel est bien noir, 
 
 La mer est bien haute 
 
 On dirait I'hiver; 
 
 Parfois on sy trompe . . . — 
 
 Le vent de la mer 
 
 Souffle dans sa trompe. 
 
 Oh ! marins perdus ! 
 
 Au loin, dans cetie ombre, 
 
 Sur la nef qui sombre, 
 
 Que de bras tendus 
 
 Vers la terre sombre ! 
 
 Pas d'ancre de fer 
 
 Que le flot ne rompe. —
 
 30 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO, 
 
 Le vent de la mer 
 Souffle dans sa trompe. 
 
 Nochers imprudents ! 
 Le vent dans la voile 
 Dechire la toile 
 Comme avec les dents ! 
 La-haut pas d'etoile ! 
 L'un luite avec I'air, 
 . L'autre est a la pompe. — • 
 Le vent de la mer 
 Souffle dans sa trompe. 
 
 C'est toi, c'est ton fsu 
 Que le nocher rtve, 
 Quand le flot s'eleve, 
 Chan lelier que Dieu 
 Pose sur la greve, 
 Phare au rouge eclair 
 Que la brume estompe ! — 
 Le vent de la mer 
 Souffle dans sa trompe. 
 
 A yet sweeter and sadder and more magical 
 sea-song there \vas yet to come years after — but 
 only from the lips of an exile. Of the ballad — so 
 to call it, if any term of definition may suffice — 
 which stands out as a crowning splendor among 
 Les Rayons et Ics Ombres, not even Hugo's own 
 eloquence, had it been the work (which is impos 
 sible) of any other great poet in all time, could 
 have said anything adequate at all. Not even
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 31 
 
 Coleridge and Shelley, the sole twin sovereigns 
 of English lyric poetry, could have produced this 
 little piece of lyric work by combination and by 
 fusion of their gifts. The pathetic truthfulness 
 and the simple manfulness of the mountain shep- 
 herd's distraction and devotion might have been 
 given in ruder phrase and tentative rendering by 
 the nameless ballad-makers of the border: but 
 here is a poem which unites something of the 
 charm of Clerk Saunders and The Wife of UsJier s 
 Well with something of the magic of Christabel 
 and the Ode to the West Wind; a thing, no doubt, 
 impossible; but none the less obviously accom- 
 plished.' 
 
 ' In the winter of the year which in spring had seen Lcs Rayons 
 ct h's Ombres come forth to kindle and refresh the hearts of readers, 
 Victor Hugo pubhshed an ode in the same key as those To the Col- 
 i:»in and To the Arch of Trinvtph, on the return and reinterment 
 of the dead Napoleon. Full of noble feeling and sonorous elo- 
 quence, the place of this poem in any collection of its author's 
 works is distinctly and unmistakably marked out by every quality 
 it has and by every quality it wants. In style and in sentiment, in 
 opinion and in rhythm, it is one with the national and political 
 poems which had already l>ecn published by the author since the 
 date of his Orientates: in other words, it is in every possible point 
 utterly and absolutely unlike the jioems long afterwards to be writ- 
 ten by the author in exile. Its old place, therefore, in all former 
 editions, at the end of the volume containing the poems previously 
 published in the same year, is obviously the only right one, and 
 rationally the only one possible. By what inexplicable and incon- 
 ceivable caprice it has been promoted to a place in the so-called
 
 32 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 The lyric work of these years would have been 
 enough for the energy of another man, for the 
 glory of another poet; it was but a part, it was 
 (I had well nigh said) the lesser part, of its au- 
 thor's labors — if labor be not an improper term for 
 the successive or simultaneous expressions or 
 effusions of his indefatigable spirit. The year 
 after Notre-Danic de Paris and Lcs Feuilles 
 iV Autoninc appeared one of the great crowning 
 tragedies of all time, Le Roi s amuse. As the 
 key-note of Marion de Lorine had been redemp- 
 tion by expiation, so the key-note of this play is 
 expiation by retribution. The simplicity, origin- 
 ality, and straightforwardness of the terrible 
 means through which this austere conception is 
 worked out would give moral and dramatic value 
 to a work less rich in the tenderest and sublimest 
 poetry, less imbued with the purest fire of pathet- 
 ic passion. After the magnificent pleading of the 
 
 edition dcflnitii^e, on the mighty roll of the Legcnde des Sicdes, at 
 the head of the fourth volume of that crowning work of modern 
 times, I am hopelessly and heljslessly at a loss to conjecture. But, 
 at all risk of impeachment on a charge of unbecoming presumption, 
 I must and do here enter my most earnest and strenuous protest 
 against the claim of an edition to be in any sense final and unalter- 
 able, which rejects from among the Chatiments the poem on the 
 death of Saint- Arnaud and admits into the Legende des Siecles the 
 poem on the reinterment of Napoleon.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. ii 
 
 Marquis dc Nangis in the preceding play, it must 
 have seerhed impossible that the poet should, 
 without a touch of repetition or reiterance, be 
 able again to confront a young king with an old 
 servant, pour forth again the denunciation and 
 appeal of a breaking heart, clothe again the 
 haughtiness of honor, the loyalty of grief, the 
 sanctity of indignation, in words that shine like 
 lightning and verses that thunder like the sea. 
 But the veteran interceding for a nephew's life is 
 a less tragic figure than he who comes to ask 
 account for a daughter's honor. Hugo never 
 merely repeats himself; his miraculous fertility 
 and force of utterance were not more indefatig- 
 able and inexhaustible than the fountains of 
 thought and emotion which fed that eloquence 
 with fire. 
 
 In the seventh scene of the fourth act oi Marion 
 de LormCy an old warrior of the days of Henri 
 Quatre comes to plead with the son of his old 
 comrade in arms for the life of his heir, con- 
 demned to death as a duelist by the edict of 
 Richelieu. 
 
 Le Marquis dk Nangis {se relevant). 
 
 Je dis qu'il est bien temps que vous y songiez, sire; 
 
 Que le cardinal-due a de sombres projets, 
 
 Et qu'il boit le meilleur du sang de vos sujets.
 
 34 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO, 
 
 Votre pere Henri, de memoire royale, 
 
 N'cut pas ainsi livre sa noblesse loyale; 
 
 11 ne la frappait point sans y fort regarder; 
 
 Et, bien garde par elle, ilia savait garden 
 
 II savait qu'on peut fiire avec des gens d'epees 
 
 Quelque chose de mieux que des tetes coupccs; 
 
 Qu'ils sont bons a la guerre. II ne I'ignorait point, 
 
 Lui dont plus d une balle a troue le pourpoint. 
 
 Ce temps eait le bon. J'en fus, et je Thonore. 
 
 Un peu de seigneurie y palpitait encore. 
 
 Jamais a des seigneurs un pretre n'tiit touclie. 
 
 On n'avait point alors de tete a bon marche. 
 
 Sire! en des jours mauvais comme.ceux ou nous 
 
 sommes, 
 Croyez un vieux, gardez un peu de gentilshommes. 
 Vous en aurez besoin peut-etre a votre tour. 
 Helas 1 vous gemirez peut-etre quelque jour 
 Que la place de Greve ait ete si fetee, 
 Et que tant de seigneurs de bravoure indomptee, 
 Vers qui se tourneront vos regrets envieux, 
 Soient morts depuis longtemps qui ne seraient pas 
 
 vieux ! 
 Car nous sommes tout chauds de la guerre civile, 
 Et le tocsin d'hier gronde encor dans la ville. 
 Soyez plus menager des peines du bourreau. 
 C'est lui qui doit garder son estoc au fourreau, 
 Non pas vous. D'echafauds montrez-vous econome. 
 Craignez d'avoir un jour a pleurer lel brave homme, 
 Tel vaillant de grand coeur, dont, a I'heure qu'il est, 
 Le squelette blanchit aux chain cs d'un gibet ! 
 Sire ! le sang n'est pas une bonne rosee; 
 Nulle moisson ne vient sur la Greve arrosee,
 
 THE WORK UF VICTOR HUGO. 35 
 
 Et le peuple des rois evile Ic balcon, 
 
 Quand aux depens du Louvre on peuple Montfaucon. 
 
 Meurent les courtisans, s'il faut que leur voix aille 
 
 Vous amuser, pendant que le bourreau travaille ! 
 
 Celte voix des flalteurs qui dit que tout est bon, 
 
 Qu'apres tout on est fils d'Henri Quatre, et Bourbon, 
 
 Si haute qu'elle soit, ne couvre pas sans peine 
 
 Le bruit sourd qu'en tombant fait une tcte humaine. 
 
 Je vous en donne avis, ne jouez pas ce jeu, 
 
 Roi, qui serez un jour face a face avcc Dieu. 
 
 Done, je vous dis, avant que rien ne s'accomplisse, 
 
 Qu a tout prendre il vaut mieux un combat qu'un sup- 
 
 plice. 
 Que ce n'est pas la joie et I'honneur des etats 
 De voir plus de besogne aux bourreaux qu'aux soldats, 
 Que c'est un pasteur dur pour la France o\x vous etes 
 Qu'un prctre qui se paye une dime de tetes, 
 Et que cet homme illustre entre les inhumains 
 Qui touche a votre sceptre — a du sang a ses mains I 
 
 In the fifth scene of the first act of Le Roi 
 s'amusc, an old nobleman whose life, forfeit on a 
 charge of friendship or relationship with rebels, 
 has been repurchased by his daughter from the 
 king at the price of her honor, is insulted by 
 the king's jester when he comes to speak with the 
 king, and speaks thus, without a glance at the 
 jester. 
 
 Une insulte de plus ! — Vous, sire, ecoutez-moi, 
 Comme vous le devez, puisque vous etes roi !
 
 36 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Vous m'avez fait un jour mener pieds nus en Greve; 
 
 La, vous m'avez fait grace, ainsi que dans un reve, 
 
 Et je vous ai beni, no sachant en efifet 
 
 Ce qu'un roi cache au fond d'une grace qu'il fait. 
 
 Or, vous aviez cache ma honte dans la mienne. — 
 
 Oui, sire, sans respect pour une race ancienne. 
 
 Pour le sang de Poitiers, noble depuis mille ans, 
 
 Tandis que, revenant de la Greve a pas lents, 
 
 Je priais dans mon coeur le dieu de la victoire 
 
 Qu'il vous donnat mcs jours de vie en jours de gloire, 
 
 Vous, Fran9ois de Valois, le soir du meme jour, 
 
 Sans crainte, sans pitie, sans pudeur, sans amour, 
 
 Dans votre lit, tombeau de la vertu des femmes, 
 
 Vous avez froidement, sous vos baisers infames, 
 
 Terni, fletri, souille, deshonore, bris6 
 
 Diane de Poitiers, comtesse de Breze ! 
 
 Quoi ! lorsque j'attendais I'arret qui me condamne, 
 
 Tu courais done au Louvre, 6 ma chaste Diane ! 
 
 Et lui, ce roi sacre chevalier par Bayard, 
 
 Jeune homme auquel il faut des plaisirs de vieillard, 
 
 Pour quelques jours de plus dont Dieu seul salt le compte, 
 
 Ton pcre sous ses pieds, te marchandait ta honte, 
 
 Et cet affreux treteau, chose horrible a. penser ! 
 
 Qu'un matin le bourreau vint en Greve dresser, 
 
 Avant la fin du jour devait etre, 6 miserc ! 
 
 Ou le lit de la fille, ou Techafaud du pere ! 
 
 O Dieu ! qui nous jugez ! qu'avez-vous dit la-haut, 
 
 Quand vos regards ont vu, sur ce meme echafaud, 
 
 Se vautrer, tribte et louche, et sanglanle, et souillee. 
 
 La luxure royale en clemence habillee? 
 
 Sire ! en faisant cela, vous avez mal agi. 
 
 Que du sang d'un vieillard le pave fut rougi,
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. Z7 
 
 C'^tait bien. Ce vieillard, peut-etre respectable, 
 
 Le meritait, 6tant de ceux du connetable. 
 
 Mais que pour le vieillard vous ayez pris I'enfant, 
 
 Que vous ayez broye sous un pied triomphant 
 
 La pauvre femme en pleurs, a s'effrayer trop prompte 
 
 Cast una chose impie, et dont vous rendrez compte ! 
 
 Vous avez depasse votre droit d'un grand pas. 
 
 Le pere e ait a vous, mais la fille non pas. 
 
 Ah ! vous m'avez fait grace ! — Ah ! vous nommez la 
 
 chose 
 Une grace ! et je suis un ingrat, je suppose ! 
 — Sire, au lieu d'abuser ma fille, bien plutot 
 Que n'etes-vous venu vous-meme en mon cachot, 
 Je vous aurais crie: — Faites-moi mourir, grace ! 
 Oh ! grace pour ma fille, et grace pour ma race 1 
 Oh ! faites-moi mourir ! la lombe, et non raff"ront! 
 Pas de tele plutot qu'une souillure au front ! 
 Oh ! monseigneur le roi, puisqu'ainsi Ton vous nomme, 
 Croyez-vous qu'un chretien, um comte, un gentil- 
 
 homme, 
 Soit moins decapite, repondez, monseigneur, 
 Quand au lieu de la tete il lui manque I'honneur? 
 — ^J'aurais dit cela, sire, et le soir, dans leglise, 
 Dans mon cercueil sanglant baisant ma barbe grise, 
 Ma Diane au coeur pur, ma fille au front sacre, 
 Honoree, eut prie pour son pere honore 1 
 — Sire, je ne viens pas redemander ma fille. 
 Quand on n'a plus d'honneur, on n'a plus de famille. 
 Qu'elle vous aime ou non d'un amour insense, 
 Je n'ai rien a reprendrc ou la honte a passe. 
 Gardez-la. — Seulement jc mc suis mis en tote 
 De venir vous troubler ainsi dans chaque fete,
 
 38 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Et jusqu'a ce qu'un pere, un frere, ou quelque epoux, 
 — La chose arrivera, — nous ait venges de vous. 
 Pale, a tous vos banquets, je reviendrai vous dire: 
 — Vous avez mal agi, vous avez mal fait, sire ! — 
 Et vous m'ecouterez, et votre front terni 
 Ne se relevera que quand j'aurai fini. 
 Vous voudrez, pour forcer ma vengeance a se taire, 
 Me rendre au bourreau. Non. Vous ne I'oserez faire, 
 De peur que ce ne soit mon spectre qui demain 
 
 {Monirant sa teie) 
 Revienne vous parler, — cette tete a la main ! 
 
 Marion de Lorme had been prohibited by Charles 
 the Tenth for an imaginary reflection on Charles 
 the Tenth; Le Roi s' amuse was prohibited by 
 Louis-Philippe the First — and Last — for an imag- 
 inary reflection on Citizen Philippe Egalite. Vic- 
 tor Hugo vindicated his meaning and reclaimed 
 his rights in a most eloquent, mo^st manly, and 
 most unanswerable speech before a tribunal which 
 durst not and could not but refuse him justice. 
 Early in the following year he brought out the 
 first of his three tragedies in prose — in a prose 
 which even the most loyal lovers of poetry, Theo- 
 phile Gautier at their head, acknowledged on trial 
 to be as good as verse. And assuredly it would 
 be, if any prose ever could: which yet I must con- 
 fess that I for one can never really feel to be pos- 
 sible. Liwrece Borgia, the first-born of these
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 39 
 
 three, is also the most perfect in structure as well 
 as the most sublime in subject. The plots of all 
 three are equally pure inventions of tragic fancy: 
 Gennaro and Fabiano, the heroic son of the Bor- 
 gia and the caitiff lover of the Tudor, are of course 
 as utterly unknown to history as is the self-devo- 
 tion of the actress Tisbe. It is more important 
 to remark and more useful to remember that the 
 master of terror and pity, the command of all pas- 
 sions and all powers that may subserve the pur- 
 pose of tragedy, is equally triumphant and infal- 
 lible in them all. Lucrccc Borgia and Marie 
 Tiidor appeared respectively in February and in 
 November of the year 1833; Angela, two years 
 later; and the year after this the exquisite and 
 melodious libretto of La Esmeralda, which should 
 be carefully and lovingly studied by all who would 
 appreciate the all but superhuman versatility and 
 dexterity of metrical accomplishment which would 
 have sufficed to make a lesser poet famous among 
 his peers forever, but may almost escape notice in 
 the splendor of Victor Hugo's other and sublimer 
 qualities. In his thirty-seventh year all these 
 blazed out once more together in the tragedy 
 sometimes apparently rated as his master-work 
 by judges whose verdict would on any such ques-
 
 40 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 tion be worthy at least of all considerate respect. 
 No one that I know of has ever been absurd 
 enough to make identity in tone of thought or 
 feeling, in quality of spirit or of style, the ground 
 for a comparison of Hugo with Shakespeare: they 
 are of course as widely different as are their re- 
 spective countries and their respective times: but 
 never since the death of Shakespeare had there 
 been so perfect and harmonious a fusion of the 
 highest comedy with the deepest tragedy as in 
 the five many-voiced and many-colored acts of 
 Ruy Bias. 
 
 At the age of forty Victor Hugo gave to the 
 stage which for thirteen years had been glorified 
 by his genius the last work he was ever to write 
 for it. There may perhaps be other readers be- 
 sides myself who take even more delight in Les 
 Biirgraves than in some of the preceding plays 
 which had been more regular in action, more 
 plausible in story, less open to the magnificent 
 reproach of being too good for the stage — as the 
 Hamlet which came finally from the recasting 
 hand of Shakespeare was found to be, in the judg- 
 ment even of Shakespeare's fellows; too rich in 
 lyric beauty, too superb in epic state. The pre- 
 vious year had seen the publication of the marvel-
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 4t 
 
 lously eloquent, copious, and vivid letters which 
 gave to the world the impressions received by its 
 greatest poet in a tour on the Rhine made five 
 years earlier — that is, in the year o{ Riiy Bias . In 
 this book, as Gautier at once observed, the inspi- 
 ration of Les Biirgraves is evidently and easily 
 traceable. Among numberless masterpieces of 
 description, from which I have barely time to 
 select for mention the view of Bishop Hatto's 
 tower by the appropriately Dantesque light of a 
 furnace at midnight — not as better than others, 
 but as an example of the magic by which the wri- 
 ter imbues and impregnates observation and re- 
 collection with feeling and with fancy — the most 
 enchanting legend of enchantment ever written 
 for children of all ages, sweet and strange enough 
 to have grown up among the fairy tales of the 
 past whose only known authors are the winds and 
 suns of their various climates, lurks like a flower 
 in a crevice of a crumbling fortress. The entranc- 
 ing and haunting beauty of Regina's words as 
 she watches the departing swallows — words which 
 it may seem that any one might have said, but to 
 which none other could have given the accent 
 and the effect that Hugo has thrown into the sim- 
 ple sound of them — was as surely derived, we can-
 
 42 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 not but think, from some such milder and brighter 
 vision of the remembered Rhineland solitudes, as 
 were the subHme and all but /Eschylean impreca- 
 tions of Guanhumara from the impression of their 
 darker and more savage memories or landscapes. 
 Otbert {ltd moiitrant lafenetre). 
 Voyez ce beau soleil ! 
 
 Regina. 
 
 Oui, le couchant s'enflamme. 
 Nous sommes en automne et nous sommes au soir. 
 Partout la feuille tombe et le l)ois devient noir. 
 
 Otbert. 
 Les feuilles renaitront. 
 
 Regina. 
 
 Oui. 
 
 {Revant et regardant le del. ) 
 
 Vite ! a tire-d'ailes ! — 
 — Oh ! c'est triste de voir s'enfuir les hirondelles ! — 
 Elles s'en vont la-bas, vers le midi dore. 
 
 Otbert. 
 
 Elles reviendront. 
 
 Regina. 
 Oui. — Mais moi je ne verrai 
 Ni I'oiseau revenir ni la feuille renaitre ! 
 
 Two years before the appearance of Les Bur- 
 graves Victor Hugo had begun his long and glo- 
 rious career as an orator by a speech of character-
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 43 
 
 istically generous enthusiasm, delivered on his 
 reception into the Academy. The forgotten play- 
 wright 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 rap- 
 turous 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 con- 
 vert 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 proclaim- 
 ed in his letters on the Rhine, and was hereafter 
 to be described with a fervent and pathetic fidel- 
 ity in a famous chapter of Les Miserablcs. The
 
 44 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 Fred- 
 eric Soulie, and far more deservedly bestowed on 
 Honore de Balzac. More generous his first poli- 
 tical 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 defence of the French coast- 
 line: 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 busi- 
 ness, ought to have remembered what was expect- 
 ed of him by the sagacity of blockheads, and 
 carefully confined himself to the clouds, leaving 
 facts to take care of thenr.selves and proofs to 
 hang floating in the air, while his vague and ver- 
 bose declamation wandered at its own sweet will
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 45 
 
 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 con- 
 duct which can only be attributed to his notori- 
 ous 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 pro- 
 posal at once scientific and direct for such re- 
 search 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 j^arts of the 
 coast; insisting, with a simple and serious energy 
 somewhat unlike the imaginary tone of the typi- 
 cal or traditional poet, on the plain fact that 
 ninety-two ships had been lost on the same part
 
 4 6 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 of the coast within a space of seven years, which 
 might have been saved by the existence of a har- 
 bor of refuge. To an Olympian or a Nephelo- 
 coccygian intelligence such a paltry matter should 
 have been even more indifferent than the claim of 
 a family of exiles on the compassion of the coun- 
 try which had expelled them. To my own more 
 humble and homely understanding it seems that 
 there are not many more significant or memora- 
 ble 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 in- 
 tention 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
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 47 
 
 had flung Louis-Philippe from his throne, Victor 
 Hugo decHned 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-devo- 
 tion of which his whole future career was to give 
 such continuous and such austere evidence. From 
 the day on which sixty thousand voices summon- 
 ed him to redeem this pledge, he never stinted 
 nor slackened his efforts to fulfil the charge he 
 had accepted in the closing words of a short, sim- 
 ple, and earnest address, in which he placed before 
 his electors the contrasted likenesses of two differ- 
 ent 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
 
 48 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 forty-six, professed himself ready to devote his 
 Hfe. 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 free- 
 dom of the press, on the state of siege, its tempo- 
 rary necessity and its imminent abuse, on the en- 
 couragement 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 with- 
 out 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 per- 
 severe 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
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 49 
 
 mentioning to the accuracy of this previous as- 
 sumption, 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 superflu- 
 ous, and with evidence as obviously impertinent. 
 Should he so far forget that great principle of pre- 
 caution 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 may be somewhat harder, and its result some- 
 what 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 journal-
 
 50 A STUDF OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 ists 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 Legis- 
 lative 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 ulti- 
 mate removal: the second, with the infamous and 
 inexpiable crime which diverted against the Ro- 
 man 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 na- 
 tional encouragement, was exposed and denounced 
 by Hugo in a speech which insisted no less earn- 
 estly 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 pretention, and vigilant exposure of 
 ecclesiastical hypocrisy and reactionary intrigue. 
 Against " the dry guillotine " of imprisonment in
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 51 
 
 a tropical climate added to transportation for po- 
 litical 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 com- 
 bined. The next trick of the infamous game 
 played by the conspirators against the common- 
 wealth, 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 Assem- 
 bly 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 false- 
 hood 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 argurnent, 
 loyalty and sincerity could do to save the com- 
 
 STROUDSDURG PUBLIC 
 MONROE COUNTY LBRARY
 
 52 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 monwealth 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 Vic- 
 tor Hugo, many pages of deeper and more pa- 
 thetic 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 measure- 
 less addition to his glory and our gain, resulting 
 from Victor Hugo's exile of nineteen years and
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 53 
 
 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 regis- 
 tration 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 recapitu- 
 lation of his work. There would seem to be 
 among modern Englishmen an impression — some- 
 what singular, it appears to me, ia a race which 
 professes to hold in sjoccial 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 Napoleon Ic Petit and L Histoire d'un
 
 54 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 per- 
 jury, robbery, and Imurder are crimes. But, we 
 are told, the perpetual vehemence of incessant 
 imprecation, the stormy insistence of unremitting 
 obloquy, which accompanies every chapter, illu- 
 minates 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 practi- 
 cal, a more sedate form of political or controver- 
 sial eloquence. When I remember and consider 
 certain examples of popular oratory and contro- 
 versy 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 em- 
 phatically 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
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 55 
 
 trustworthiness in a judge of moral or political 
 questions; that a man who has witnessed a de- 
 liberate 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 aesthetic serenity, forfeits the inherent right 
 of a reasonable and an honorable man to com- 
 mand 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 Littcrature ct PJiilosopJiie melees which had 
 been given to the world in 1834. From the crud-
 
 56 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 est impressions of the boy to the ripest convic- 
 tions of the man, one common quaHty informs and 
 harmonizes every stage of thought, every phase 
 of feeHng, 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 de- 
 stroyer 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 marvel- 
 lous life, to which well nigh every year brought 
 its additional aureole of glory, a point more im- 
 portant, a date more memorable, than the publi- 
 cation of the C/za/'/wcvz/j-. Between the prologue 
 Night and the epilogue Light the ninety-eight 
 poems that roll and break and lighten and thun-
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 57 
 
 dcr like waves of a visible sea fulfil 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 collec- 
 tion 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 dis- 
 gust 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
 
 58 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 ex- 
 ample of the fusion sometimes accomplished — or, 
 if this be thought a phrase too strong for accur- 
 acy, of the middle note sometimes touched, of the 
 middle way sometimes taken — between the pure- 
 ly 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 se- 
 rious diffidence, venture once more to indicate by 
 selection such poems as seem to me most es- 
 pecially notable among the greatest even of 
 these. In Lhc first book, besides the three already 
 mentioned, I take for examples the solemn utter- 
 ance 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
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 59 
 
 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, call- 
 ing 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 trium- 
 phant 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 majes- 
 ty of music. 
 
 Partout pleurs, sanglots, oris funebres. 
 
 Pourquoi dors-lu dans les tenebres ? 
 
 Je ne vcux pas que tu sois mort. 
 
 Pourquoi dors-tu dans les tenebres } 
 
 Ce n'est pas Tinstant ou Ton dort. 
 La pale Liberie ^it sanglante a 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 laisse Her de bandelettes .? 
 
 lis te mordent dans ton cerceuil ! 
 
 De tons les peuples on prepare 
 Le convoi , . . — 
 
 Lazare! Lazarc! Lazare ! 
 Levc-toi !
 
 6o A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 lis batissent des prisons neuves; 
 
 O dormeur sombre, entends les fleuves 
 
 Miirmurer, teints de sang vermeil; 
 
 Entends pleurer les pauvres veuves, 
 
 O noir dormeur au dur sommeil ! 
 Martyrs, adieu! le vent souffle, les pontons flottent, 
 
 Les meres au front gris sanglotent; 
 
 Leurs fils sont en proie aux vainqueurs; 
 
 Elles gemissent sur la route; 
 Les pleurs qui de leursyeuxs'echappentgoutteagoutte 
 
 Filtrent en haine dans nos coeurs. 
 
 Les juifs triomphent, groupe avare 
 Et sans foi . . . — 
 
 Lazare! Lazare Lazare ! 
 Leve-toi ! 
 
 Mais, il semble qu'on se reveille ! 
 
 Est-ce toi que j'ai dans I'oreille, 
 
 Bourdonnement du sombre essaim ? 
 
 Dans la ruche frcmit I'abeille; 
 
 J'entends sourdre un vague tocsin. 
 Les cesars, oubliant qu'il est des gemonies, 
 
 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 1 
 
 Et I'orgue leur chante; hosanna ! 
 
 Qui repond a cette fanfare ? 
 
 Le beffroi . . . — 
 
 Lazare! Lazare! Lazare ! 
 Leve-toi 1
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 6i 
 
 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 sor- 
 rows 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 I'abime, 
 Puisqu'on donne le sceptre au crime, 
 Puisque tons les droits sont trabis, 
 Puisque les plus fiers restent mornes, 
 Puisqu'on affiche au coin des homes 
 Le deshonneur de men pays ;
 
 62 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 O Republique de nos peres, 
 Grand Pantheon plein de lumieres, 
 Dome d'or dans le libre azur, 
 Temple des ombres immoitelles, 
 Puisqu'on vient avec des 6chelles 
 Coller I'empire sur ton mur ; 
 
 Puisque toute ame est affaiblie, 
 Puisqu'on rampe, puisqu'on oublie 
 Le vrai, le pur, le grand, le beau, 
 Les yeux indignes de I'liistoire, 
 L'honneur, la loi, le droit, la gloire, 
 Et ceux qui sont dans le tombeau ; 
 
 Je t'aime, exil! douleur, je t'aime 1 
 Tristesse, sois mon diademe ! 
 Je t'aime, altiere pauvrete ! 
 J'aime ma porte aux vents battue. 
 J'aime le deuil, grave statue 
 Qui vient s'asseoir a mon cote. 
 
 J'aime le malheur qui m eprouve, 
 
 Et cette ombre ou je vous retrouve, 
 
 O vous a qui mon coeur sourit, 
 
 Dignite, foi, vertu voilee, 
 
 Toi, liberte, fiere exilee, 
 
 Et toi, devouement, grand proscrit ! 
 
 J'aime cette lie solitaire, 
 Jersey, que la libre Angleterre 
 Couvre de son vieux pavilion, 
 L'eau noire, par moments accrue, 
 Le navire, errante charrue, 
 Le flot, myst6rieux sillon.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 63 
 
 J'aime ta mouette, 6 mcr profonde, 
 Qui secoue en perles ton onde 
 Sur son aile aux fauves couleurs, 
 Plonge dans les lames geantes. 
 El sort de ces gueules beantes 
 Comme Tame sort des douleurs. 
 
 J'aime la roche solennelle 
 D'ou j'entends la plaintc eternelle, 
 Sans treve comme le remords, 
 Toujours renaissant dans les ombres, 
 Des vagues sur les ecueils sombres, 
 Des meres sur leurs enfants morts. 
 
 The close of the third poem in the fourth book is 
 a nobler protest than ever has been uttered or 
 ever can be uttered in prose against the servile 
 sophism of a false democracy which affirms or 
 allows that a people has the divine right of voting 
 itself into bondage. There is nothing grander in 
 Juvenal, and nothing more true. 
 
 Ce droit, sachez-le bien, chiens du berger Maupas, 
 Et la France et le peuple eux-memes ne I'ont pas. 
 L'altiere Verite jamais ne tombe en cendre. 
 La Liberie n'est pas une guenille a vendre, 
 Jelee au tas, pendue au clou chez un fripier. 
 Quand un peuple se laisse au piege estropier, 
 Le droit sacre, toujours a soi-meme fidele, 
 Dans chaque citoyen trouve une citadelle ; 
 On s'illustre en bravant un lache conquerant, 
 Et le moindre du peuple en devient le plus grand.
 
 64 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Done, trouvez du bonheur, 6 plates creatures, 
 
 A vivre dans la fange et dans les pourritures, 
 
 Adorez ce fumier sous ce dais de brocart, 
 
 L'honnete homme recule et s'accoude a I'ecart. 
 
 Dans la chute d'autrui je ne veux pas descend re. 
 
 L'honneur n'abdique point. Nul n'a droit dc me prendre 
 
 Ma liberie, mon bien, mon ciel bleu, mon amour. 
 
 Tout I'univers aveugle est sans droit sur le jour. 
 
 Fut on cent millions d'esclaves, jj suis libre. 
 
 Ainsi parle Caton. Sur la Seine ou le Tibre, 
 
 Personne n'est tombe tant qu'un seul est debout. 
 
 Le vieux sang des aieux qui s'indigne et qui bout, 
 
 La verlu, la fierte, la justice, Thisioire, 
 
 Toute une nation avec toute sa gloire 
 
 Vit dans le dernier front qui ne veut pas plier. 
 
 Pour soutenir le temple il suffit d'un pdier ; 
 
 \5\\ fran^ais, c'est la France; un romain contieni Rome, 
 
 Et ce qui briseun peuple avorte auxpieds d'un homme. 
 
 The sixth and seventh poem 3 in this book are 
 each a superb example of its kind; the verses on 
 an interview between Abd-el-Kader and Bona- 
 parte are worthy of a place among the earlier 
 Oricntalcs for simplicity and fullness of effect in 
 lyric tone and color; and satire could hardly give 
 a finer and completer little study than that of the 
 worthy tradesman who for love of his own strong- 
 box would give his vote for a very Phalaris to 
 reign over him, and put up with the brazen bull 
 for love of the golden calf: an epigram which
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 65 
 
 sums up an epoch. The indignant poem of Joy- 
 euse Vie, .with its terrible photographs of subter- 
 ranean toil and want, is answered by the not less 
 terrible though ringing and radiant song of 
 L enipereur s'amuse; and this again by the four 
 solemn stanzas in which a whole world of deso- 
 late suffering is condensed and realized. The 
 verses of good counsel in which the imperial Ma- 
 caire is admonished not to take himself too seri- 
 ously, or trust in the duration of his fair and foul 
 good fortune, are unsurpassed for concentration 
 of contempt. The dialogue of the tyrannicide by 
 the starlit sea with all visible and invisible things 
 that impel or implore him to do justice is so 
 splendid and thrilling in its keen and ardent 
 brevity that we can hardly feel as though a suffi- 
 cient answer were given to the instinctive reason- 
 ing which finds inarticulate utterance in the cry 
 of the human conscience for retribution by a hu- 
 man hand, even when we read the two poems, at 
 once composed and passionate in their austerity, 
 which bid men leave God to deal with the su- 
 preme criminal of humanity. A Night's Lodging, 
 the last poem of the fourth book, is perhaps the 
 very finest and most perfect example of imagina- 
 tive and tragic satire that exists: if this rank be
 
 66 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 due to a poem at once the most vivid in presenta- 
 tion, the most subHme in scorn, the most intense 
 and absolute in condensed expression of abhor- 
 rence and in assured expression of beHef. 
 
 But in the fifth of these seven caskets of chis- 
 eled g'old and tempered steel there is a pearl of 
 greater price than in any of the four yet opened. 
 The song dated from sea, which takes farewell 
 of all good things and all gladness left behind — 
 of house and home, of the flowers and the sky, of 
 the betrothed bride with her maiden brow — the 
 song which has in its burden the heavy plashing 
 sound of the wave following on the wave that 
 swells and breaks against the bulwarks — the song 
 of darkening waters and darkened lives has in it 
 a magic, for my own ear at least, incomparable 
 in the whole wide world of human song. Even 
 to the greatest poets of all time such a godsend 
 as this — such a breath of instant inspiration — can 
 come but rarely and seem given as by miracle. 
 " There is sorrow on the sea," as the prophet 
 said of old; but when was there sorrow on sea 
 or land which found such piercing and such per- 
 fect utterance as this ? 
 
 Adieu, patrie ! 
 L'onde est en furie.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 67 
 
 Adieu, patrie, 
 Azur ! 
 
 Adieu, maison, treille au fruit miir 
 Adieu, les flours d'or du vieux mur! 
 
 Adieu, patrie ! 
 Ciel, foret, prairie ! 
 Adieu, patrie, 
 Azur ! 
 
 Adieu, patrie ! 
 L'onde est en furie. 
 Adieu, patrie, 
 Azur ! 
 
 Adieu, fiancee au front pur, 
 Le ciel est noir, le vent est dur. 
 
 Adieu, patrie ! 
 Lise, Anna, Marie ! 
 Adieu, patrie, 
 Azur ! 
 
 Adieu, patrie ! 
 L'onde est en furie. 
 Adieu, patrie, 
 Azur ! 
 
 Noire oeil, que vjDile un dcuil futur, 
 Va du flut sombre au sort obscur. 
 
 Adieu, patrie ! 
 Pour toi mon coeur prie. 
 Adieu, patrie, 
 Azur !
 
 68 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 The next poem is addressed to a disappointed 
 accomplice of the crime still triumphant and im- 
 perial in the eyes of his fellow-scoundrels, who 
 seems to have shown signs of a desire to break 
 away from them and a suspicion that even then 
 the ship of empire was beginning to leak — though 
 in fact it had still seventeen years of more or less 
 radiant rascality to float through before it found- 
 ered in the ineffable ignominy of Sedan. Full of 
 ringing and stinging eloquence, of keen and son- 
 orous lines or lashes of accumulating scorn, this 
 poem is especially noteworthy for its tribute to 
 the m.urdered republic of Rome. Certain pas- 
 sages in certain earlier works of Hugo, in Crovi- 
 zvcll for instance and in Marie Tudor, had given 
 rise to a natural and indeed inevitable suspicion 
 of some prejudice or even antipathy on the writ- 
 er's part which had not less unavoidably aroused 
 a feeling among Italians that his disposition or 
 tone of mind was anything but cordial or indeed 
 amicable towards their country: a suspicion prob- 
 ably heightened, and a feeling probably sharp- 
 ened, by his choice of such dramatic subjects 
 from Italian history or tradition as the domestic 
 eccentricities of the exceptional family of Borgia, 
 and the inquisitorial misdirection of the degen-
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 69 
 
 erate commonwealth of Venice. To the sense 
 that Hugo was hardly less than an enemy and 
 that Byron had been something more than a 
 well-wisher to Italy I have always attributed 
 the unquestionable and otherwise inexplicable 
 fact that Mazzini should have preferred the 
 pinchbeck and tinsel of Byron to the gold and 
 ivory of Hugo. But it was impossible that the 
 master poet of the world should not live to make 
 amends, if indeed amends were needed, to the 
 country of Mazzini and of Dante. 
 
 If I have hardly time to mention the simple 
 and vivid narrative of the martyrdom of Pauline 
 Roland, I must pause at least to dwell for a mo- 
 ment on so famous and so great a poem as 
 L Expiation; but not to pronounce, or presume 
 to endeavor to decide, which of its several pic- 
 tures is the most powerful, which of its epic or 
 lyric variations the most impressive and tri- 
 umphant in effect. The huge historic pageant 
 of ruin, from Moscow to Waterloo, from Water- 
 loo to St. Helena, with the posthumous interlude 
 of apotheosis which the poet had loudly and 
 proudly celebrated just twelve years earlier in 
 an ode, turned suddenly into the peep-show of 
 a murderous mountebank, the tawdry triumph of
 
 70 A • STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 buffoons besmeared with innocent blood, is so 
 tremendous in its anticlimax that not the sub- 
 limest and most miraculous climax imaginable 
 could make so tragic and sublime an impression 
 so indelible from the mind. The slow agony of 
 the great army under the snow; its rout and dis- 
 solution in the supreme hour of panic; the slower 
 agony, the more gradual dissolution, of the pris- 
 oner with a gaoler's eye intent on him to the 
 last; who can say which of these three is done 
 into verse with most faultless and sovereign 
 power of hand, most pathetic or terrific force 
 and skill ? And the hideous judicial dishonor of 
 the crowning retribution after death, the parody 
 of his empire and the prostitution of his name, is 
 so much more than tragic by reason of the very 
 farce in it that out of ignominy itself and utter- 
 most degradation the poet has made something 
 more august in moral impression than all page- 
 ants of battle or of death. 
 
 In the sixth book I can but rapidly remark the 
 peculiar beauty and greatness of the lyric lines 
 in which the sound of steady seas regularly break- 
 ing on the rocks at Rozel Tower is rendered with 
 so solemn and severe an echo of majestic strength 
 in sadness; the verses addressed to the people on
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 71 
 
 its likeness and unlikcness to the sea; the scorn- 
 ful and fiery appeal to the spirit of Juvenal; the 
 perfect idyllic picture of spring, with all the fruit- 
 less exultation of its blossoms and its birds, made 
 suddenly dark and dissonant by recollection of 
 human crime and shame; the heavenly hopeful- 
 ness of comfort in the message of the morning 
 star, conveyed into colors of speech and trans- 
 lated into cadences of sound which no painter or 
 musician could achieve. 
 
 Je m'etais endormi la nuit pres de la greve. 
 Un vent frais m'eveilla, je sortis de men reve, 
 J'ouvris les yeux, je vis Tetoile du matin. 
 EUe resplendissait au fond du ciel lointain 
 Dans une blancheur moUe, infinie et charmante. 
 Aquilon s'enfuyait emportant la tourmente. 
 L'astre eclatant changeait la nuee en duvet. 
 C'etait une clarte qui pensait, qui vivait; 
 Elle apaisait I'ecueil ou la vague deferle; 
 On croyait voir une ame a travers une perle. 
 II faisait nuit encor, Tombre regnait en vain, 
 Le ciel s'illuminait d'un sourire divin. 
 La lueur argentait le haut du mat qui penche; 
 Le navire etait noir, mais la voile etait blanche; 
 Des goelands debout sur un e?carpement, 
 Attentifs, contemplaient Tetoile gravement 
 Comme un oiseau celeste et fait dune etincelle: 
 L'ocean qui ressemble au peuple allait vers elle, 
 Et, rugissant tout bas, la regardait briller,
 
 72 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Et semblait avoir peur de la faire envoler. 
 
 Un ineffable amour emplissait I'etendue. 
 
 L'herbe verte a mes pieds frissonnait eperdue, 
 
 Les oiseaux se parlaient dans les nids; une fleur 
 
 Qui s'eveillait me dit: c'est I'etoile ma soeur. 
 
 Et pendant qu'a longs plis I'ombre levait son voile, 
 
 J'entendis une voix qui venait de I'etoile 
 
 Et qui disait: — Je suis I'astre qui vient d'abord. 
 
 Je suis celle qu'on croit dans la tombe et qui sort 
 
 J'ai lui sur le Sina, j'ai lui sur le Taygete; 
 
 Je suis le caillou d'or et de feu que Dieu jette, 
 
 Comme avec une fronde, au front noir de la nuit. 
 
 Je suis ce qui rcnait quand un monde est detruit, 
 
 O nations ! je suis la Poesie ardente. 
 
 J'ai brille sur Moise et j'ai brille sur Dante. 
 
 Le lion ocean est amoureux de moi. 
 
 J'arrive. Levez-vous, vertu, courage, foi ! 
 
 Penseurs, esprits ! montez sur la tour, sentinelles ! 
 
 Paupieres, ouvrez-vous; allumez-vous, prunelles; 
 
 Terre, emeus le sillon; vie, eveille le bruit; 
 
 Debout, vous qui dormez; car celui qui me suit, 
 
 Car celui qui m'envoie en avant la premiere, 
 
 C'est I'ange Liberte, c'est le geant Lumiere ! 
 
 The first poem of the seventh book, on the fall- 
 ing of the walls of Jericho before the seventh 
 trumpet-blast, is equally great in description and 
 in application; the third is one of the great lyric 
 masterpieces of all time, the triumphant ballad 
 of the Black Huntsman, unsurpassed in the world 
 for ardor of music and fitful change of note from
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 73 
 
 mystery and terror to rage and tempest and su- 
 preme serenity of exultation — " wind and storm 
 fulfilling his word," we may literally say of this 
 omnipotent sovereign of song. 
 
 The sewer of Rome, a final receptacle for dead 
 dogs and rotting Caesars, is painted line by line 
 and detail by detail in verse which touches with 
 almost frightful skill the very limit of the possible 
 or permissible to poetry in the way of realistic 
 loathsomeness or photographic horror; relieved 
 here and there by a rare and exquisite image, a 
 fresh breath or tender touch of loveliness from 
 the open air of the daylight world above. The 
 song on the two Napoleons is a masterpiece of 
 skilful simplicity in contrast of tones and colors. 
 But the song which follows, written to a tune of 
 Beethoven's, has in it something more than the 
 whole soul of music, the whole passion of self- 
 devoted hope and self-transfiguring faith; it gives 
 the final word of union between sound and spirit, 
 the mutual coronation and consummation of them 
 
 both. 
 
 PA TRIA. 
 
 La-haut qui sourit? 
 
 Esl-ce un esprit? 
 
 Est-ce une femme } 
 Quel front sombre et doux !
 
 74 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Peuple, a genoux ! 
 Est-ce notre ame 
 Qui vient a nous ? 
 
 Cette figure en deuil 
 Parait sur notre seuil, 
 Et notre antique orgueil 
 
 Sort du cercucil. 
 Ses fiers regards \ainqueurs 
 Reveillent tous Ics coeurs, 
 Les nids dans les buissons, 
 
 Et les chansons, 
 
 C'est I'ange du jour; 
 
 L'espoir, I'amour 
 
 Du coeur qui pense; 
 Du monde enchante 
 
 C'est la clarte. 
 
 Son nom est France 
 
 Ou Verite. 
 
 Bel ange, a ton miroir 
 Quand s'oifre un vil jiouvoir, 
 Tu viens, terrible a voir, 
 
 Sous le ciel noir. 
 Tu dis au monde: Allons ! 
 Eormcz vos bataillons ! 
 Et le monde ebloui 
 
 Te repond: Oui. 
 
 C'est I'ange de nuit. 
 RoiSj il vous suit, 
 Marquant d'avance 
 
 Le fatal moment
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 75 
 
 Au firmament 
 Son nom est France 
 Ou Chatiment. 
 
 Ainsi que nous voyons 
 En mai les alcyons, 
 Voguez, 6 nations, 
 
 Dans ses rayons ' 
 Son bras aux cieux dress6 
 Ferme le noir passe 
 Et les portes de fer 
 
 Du sombre enfer. 
 
 C'est I'ange de Dieu. 
 
 Dans le ciel bleu 
 
 Son aile immense 
 Couvre avec fierte 
 
 L'humanile. 
 
 Son nom est France 
 
 Ou Liberie ! 
 
 The Caravan, a magnificent picture, is also a 
 magnificent allegory and a magnificent hymn. 
 The poem following sums up in twenty-six lines 
 a whole world of terror and of tempest hurtling 
 and wailing round the wreck of a boat by night. 
 It is followed by a superb appeal against the in- 
 fliction of death on rascals whose reptile blood 
 would dishonor and defile the scaffold: and this 
 again by an admonition to their chief not to put 
 his trust in the chance of a high place of infamy
 
 76 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 among the more genuinely imperial hellhounds of 
 historic record. The next poem gives us in per- 
 fect and exquisite summary the opinions of a 
 contemporary conservative on a dangerous an- 
 archist of extravagant opinions and disreputable 
 character, whom for example's sake it was at 
 length found necessary to crucify. There is no 
 song more simply and nobly pitiful than that 
 which tells us in its burden how a man may die 
 for lack of his native country as naturally and 
 inevitably as for lack of his daily bread. I cite 
 only the last three stanzas by way of sample. 
 
 Les exiles: s'en vont pensifs. 
 Leur ame, helas ! n'est plus entiere. 
 lis regardant rombre des ifs 
 Sur les fosses du cimetiere; 
 L'un songe a rAllemagne altiere, 
 L'autre an beau pays iransalpin, 
 L'autre a sa Pologne cherie. 
 — On ne peut pas vivre sans pain; 
 On ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie. — 
 
 Un proscrit, lasse de souffrir, 
 Mourait; calme, il fermait son livre; 
 Et je lui dis: " Pourquoi mourir ?" 
 II me repondit: " Pourquoi vivre ?" 
 Puis il reprit: " Je me delivre. 
 Adieu ! je meurs. Neron Scapin 
 Met aux fers la France fletrie. . . ."
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 77 
 
 — On ne peut pas vivre sans pain; 
 Ou ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie. 
 
 ". . . Je meurs de ne plus voir les champs 
 Ou je regardais I'aube naitrc, 
 De ne plus entendre les chants 
 Que j'entendais de ma fenetre. 
 IMon ame est ou je ne puis etre. 
 Sons quatre planches de sapin 
 Enterrez-moi dans la prairie." 
 — On ne peut pas vivre sans pain; 
 On ne peut pas non plus vivre sans la patrie. 
 
 Then, in the later editions of the book, came the 
 great and terrible poem on the life and death of 
 the miscreant marshal who gave the watchword 
 of massacre in the streets of Paris, and died by 
 the visitation of disease before the walls of Sebas- 
 topol. There is hardly a more splendid passage 
 of its kind in all the Lc'gcndc dcs Sicclcs than the 
 description of the departure of the fleet in order 
 of battle from Constantinople for the Crimea; nor 
 a loftier passage of more pathetic austerity in all 
 this book of Chdtunciits than the final address of 
 the poet to the miserable soul, disembodied at 
 length after long and loathsome suffering, of the 
 murderer and traitor who had earned no soldier's 
 death.' 
 
 ' This poem on St-Arnaud is dated from Jersey, and must there- 
 fore have been written before the second of November, 1855 — a
 
 78 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 And then come those majestic "last words" 
 which will ring for ever in the ears of men till 
 manhood as well as poetry has ceased to have 
 honor among mankind. And then comes a poem 
 so great that I hardly dare venture to attempt a 
 word in its praise. We cannot choose but think, 
 as we read or repeat it, that "such music was 
 never made " since the morning stars sang to- 
 gether, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. 
 This epilogue of a book so bitterly and inflexibly 
 tragic begins as with a peal of golden bells, or an 
 outbreak of all April in one choir of sunbright 
 song; proceeds in a graver note of deep and 
 trustful exultation and yearning towards the fu- 
 ture; subsides again into something of a more 
 subdued key, while the poet pleads for his faith 
 in a God of righteousness with the righteous who 
 are ready to despair; and rises from that tone of 
 awe-stricken and earnest pleading to such a 
 height and rapture of inspiration as no Hebrew 
 psalmist or prophet ever soared beyond in his 
 divinest passion of aspiring trust and worship. 
 It is simply impossible that a human tongue 
 
 date of disgrace for Jersey, if not indeed for England. It appears 
 in the various later editions of the Chatiinetits, but has disappeared 
 from the so-caUed "edition definitive." All readers have aright 
 to ask why — and a right to be answered when they ask.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 79 
 
 should utter, a human hand should write, any- 
 thing of more supreme and transcendent beauty 
 than the last ten stanzas of the fourth division of 
 this poem. The passionate and fervent accumu- 
 lation of sublimities, of marvellous images and of 
 infinite appeal, leaves the sense too dazzled, the 
 soul too entranced and exalted, to appreciate at 
 first or in full the miraculous beauty of the lan- 
 guage, the superhuman sweetness of the song. 
 The reader impervious to such impressions may 
 rest assured that what he admires in the proph- 
 ecies or the psalms of Isaiah or of David is not 
 the inspiration of the text, but the warrant and 
 sign-manual of the councils and the churches 
 which command him to admire them on trust. 
 
 Ne possede-t-il pas toute la certitude.^ 
 
 Dieu ne remplit-il pas ce monde, notre eiude,. 
 
 Du nadir au zenith } 
 Notre sagesse aupres de la sienne est demence. 
 Et n'est-ce pas a lui que la clane commence, 
 
 Et que rombre finit } 
 
 Ne voit-il pas ramp r les hydres sur leurs ventres.-' 
 Ne regarde-t-il j-as jusqu'au fond de leurs antres 
 
 Alias et Pelion .? 
 Ne connait-il pas I'heure ou la cigogne emigre? 
 Sait il pas ton entree et ta sortie, o tigre, 
 
 Et ton antre, lion ?
 
 ) A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Hirondelle, reponds, aigle a I'aile sonore, 
 Parle, avez-vous des nids que TEiernel ignore? 
 
 O cerf, quand I'as-tu fui ? 
 Renard, ne vois-tu pas ses yeux dans la broussaille ? 
 Loup, quand tu sens la nuit une herbe qui tressaille, 
 
 Ne dis-tu pas: C'est lui ! 
 
 • 
 
 Puisqu'il salt tout cela, puisqu'il pout toute chose. 
 Que ses doigts font jaillir les effets de la cause 
 
 Comme un noyau d'un fruit, 
 Puisqu'il pent meltre unver dans les pommes de I'arbre, 
 Et faire disperser les colonnes de marbre 
 
 Par le vent de la nuit; 
 
 Puisqu'il bat I'ocean pareil au bceuf qui beugle, 
 Puisqu'il est le voyant et que rhomme est I'aveugle, 
 
 Puisqu'il est le milieu, 
 Puisque son bras nous porte, et puisqu'a son passage 
 La comete frissonne ainsi qu'en une cage 
 
 Tremble une etoupe en feu; 
 
 Puisque I'obscure nuit le connait, puisque I'ombre 
 Le voit, quand il lui plait, sauver la nef qui sombre, 
 
 Comment douterions-nous, 
 Nouis qui, formes et purs, fiers dans nos agonies, 
 Sommes debout devant toutes les tyrannies, 
 
 Pour lui seul, a genoux ! 
 
 D'ailleurs, pensons. Nos jours sont des jours d'amer- 
 
 tume, 
 Mais, quand nous etendons les bras dans cette brume, 
 
 Nous sentons une main; 
 Quand nous marchons, courbes, dans Tombre du martyre,
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 8i 
 
 Nous entendons quelqu'un derriere nous nous dire: 
 C'est ici le chemin. 
 
 O proscrits, I'avenir est aux peuples ! Paix, gloire, 
 Liberie, reviendront sur des chars de victoire 
 
 Aux R)udroyants essieux; 
 Ce crime qui triomphe est fumee et mensonge. 
 Voila ce que je puis aflirmer, moi qui songe 
 
 L'oeil fixe sur les cieux. 
 
 Les cesars sont plus fiers que les vagues marines, 
 Mais Dieu dit: — Je mettrai ma boucle en leurs narines, 
 
 Et dans leur bouche un mors, 
 Et je tes trainerai, qu'on cede ou bien qu'on lutte, 
 Eux et leurs liistrit)ns et leurs joueurs de flute, 
 
 Dans I'ombre ou sont les morts ! 
 
 Dieu dit; et le granit que foulait leur semelle 
 S'ecroule, et les voila disparus pele-mele 
 
 Dans leurs prosperites ! 
 Aquilon ! aquilon ! qui viens battre nos portes. 
 Oh ! dis-nous, si c'est toi, souffle, qui les emportes, 
 
 Oil les as-tu jetes ? 
 
 Three years after the CJidtinicnts Victor Hugo 
 published the Contemplations; the book of whicli 
 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 un- 
 surpassable harmonies. The note of fatherhood
 
 82 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 indigna- 
 tion, give life and charm to the obsolete ques- 
 tions 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 and 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
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 83 
 
 his best, but there are two Hnes 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 sim- 
 plicity of Shakespeare's; the large and living land- 
 scape in a letter dated from Treport; the tenth 
 and the thirteenth poems, two of the most per- 
 fect 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; Twi- 
 light, with its opening touches of magical and 
 mystic beauty; above all, the mournful and ten- 
 der 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 per- 
 haps 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 amoner them.
 
 84 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Mes vers fuiraient, doux et freles, 
 Vers votre jardin si beau, 
 Si mes vers avaient des ailes, 
 Des ailes comme I'oiseau. 
 
 lis voleraient, etincelles, 
 Vers votre foyer qui rit, 
 Si mes vers avaient des ailes, 
 Des ailes comme I'esprit. 
 
 Pres de vous, purs et fideles, 
 lis accourraient nuit et jour, 
 Si mes vers avaient des ailes, 
 Des ailes comme I'amour. 
 
 Nothing of Shelley's exceeds this for limpid per- 
 
 fection.of melody, renewed in the next lyric with 
 
 something of a deeper and more fervent note of 
 
 music. 
 
 Si vous n'avez rien a me dire, 
 Pourquoi venir aupres de moi ? 
 Pourquoi me faire ce sourire 
 Qui tournerait la tete au roi ? 
 Si vous n'avez rien a me dire, 
 Pourquoi venir aupres de moi? 
 
 Si vous n'avez rien a m'apprendre, 
 Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main ? 
 Sur le reve angelique et tendre, 
 Auquel vous songez en chemin, 
 Si vous n'avez rien a m'apprendre, 
 Pourquoi me pressez-vous la main ?
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 85 
 
 Si vous voulez que je m'en aille, 
 Pourquoi passez-vous par ici? 
 Lorsque je vous vcjis, je tressaille, 
 C'est ma joie et c'est mon 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 MelancJiolia 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 Mise'ra- 
 bles. 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 man- 
 kind of some purgatorial world, the shrine of ex- 
 piation or the seat of retribution, which in the 
 final volume of the Le'gende dcs Siecles 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 Chris- 
 tian faith or feeling in the brief hour of its early
 
 86 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 purity, revived in every age again for some rare 
 and beautiful natures — and for these alone. 
 
 Vous qui pleurez, venez a ce Dieu, car il pleure. 
 Vous qui souffrez, venez a lui, car il guerit. 
 Vous qui tremblez, venez a lui, car il sourit. 
 Vous qui passez, venez a lui, car il demeure. 
 
 La StaUte, 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 Ro- 
 man decadence which forms the eighth division 
 of the revised and completed Lcgende des Siccles. 
 The two delicately tender poems on the death of 
 a little child are well relieved by the more terri- 
 ble 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 pho- 
 tograph of vicious poverty, we find again the same 
 spirit of observant and vigilant compassion that 
 inspires and informs the great prose epic of suf- 
 fering which records the redemption of Jean Val- 
 jean: 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 re- 
 cognize the depth of noble pity which moved its
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. ^7 
 
 author to write Le Crapaud — a poem redeemed 
 in all rational men's eyes from the imminent im- 
 putation of repulsive realism by the profound and 
 pathetic beauty of the closing lines — and we may 
 recognize also the imaginative and childlike sym- 
 pathy with the traditional king of beasts which 
 inspired him long after to write L Epopee dii Lion 
 for the benefit of his grandchildren. Insomnic, a 
 record of the tribute exacted by the spirit from 
 the body, when the impulse to work and to cre- 
 ate 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
 
 88 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 shepherd's hearth confronting the star at sunset, 
 which may be compared with the Prayer for all 
 men in the Fciullcs iV Aiitoinnc; these at least de- 
 mand 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 acci- 
 dental 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 immor- 
 tal 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 commenta- 
 ry 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 etait dans son champ. 
 Elle allait a grands pas moissonnant et fauchant, 
 Noir squelette laissant passer le crepuscule. 
 Dans Tombre on Ton dirait que tout tremble et recule, 
 L'homme suivait des yeux les lueurs de sa faulx.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 89 
 
 Et les iriomphateurs sous les arcs triomphaux 
 Tombaient; elle changeait en desert Babylone, 
 Le trone en echafaud et 1 echafaud en trone, 
 Les roses en fumier, les enfants en oiseaux, 
 L'or en cendre, et les yeux des meres en ruisseaux. 
 Et les femmes criaient: Rends-nous ce petit etre. 
 Pour le faire mourir, pourquoi Tavoir fait naitre ? 
 Ce n etait qu'un sanglot sur terre, en haut, en has; 
 Des mains aux doigts osseux sortaint des noirs grabats; 
 Un vent froid bruisbait dans les linceuls sans nombre; 
 Les peuples eperdus semblaient sous la faulx sombre 
 Un troupeau frissonnant qui dans I'ombre s'enfuit: 
 Tout etait sous ses pieds deuil, epouvante et nuit. 
 Derriere elle, le front baigne de douces flammes, 
 Un ange souriant portait la gerbe d ames. 
 
 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, ad- 
 dressed 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 sim- 
 ple 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 admira-
 
 90 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 ble 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 imbe- 
 cile 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 im- 
 agination, in feeling, and in expression, as the 
 finest page in the CJidtimcnts. 
 
 £CRIT EN iSsS- 
 
 J'ajoute un post-scriptum apres neuf ans. J'ecoute; 
 Etes-vous toujours la? Vous etes mort sans doute, 
 Marquis; mais d'ou je suis on peut parler aux morts. 
 Ah ! votre cercueil s'ouvre: — Ou done es tu ? — Dehors. 
 Comme vous. — Es-lu mort? — Presque. J'habite rombre. 
 Je suis sur un rocher qu'environne I'eau sombre, 
 Ecueil rongc des flots, de tenebres charge, 
 Oii s'assied, ruisselant, le bleme naufrage. 
 — Eh bien, me dites-vous, apres ?— La solitude 
 Autour de moi toujours a la meme attitude; 
 Je ne vois que I'abime, et la mcr, et les cieux, 
 Et les nuagesnoirs qui vont silencieux; 
 Mon toit, la nuit, frissonne, et I'ouragan le mele 
 Aux souffles effrenes de I'onde et de la grele; 
 Quelqu'un semble clouer un crepe a I'horizon; 
 L'insulte dat de loin le seuil de ma maison;
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 91 
 
 Le roc croule sous moi des 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'a demi 
 L'adieu mysterieux que me jette un ami. 
 La rumeur des vivants s'eteint diminuee. 
 Tout ce que j'ai reve s'est envole, nuee ! 
 Sur mes jours devenus fant6me«, pale et seul, 
 Je regarde tomber I'infini, ce linceul. — 
 Et vous dites: — Apres ? — Sous un montqui surplombe, 
 Pres des flots, j'ai marque la place de ma tombe; 
 Ici, le bruit du gouffre est tout ce qu'on entend; 
 Tout est horreur et nuit^Apres ? — 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 ut- 
 terance of serene and sublime resignation, of 
 loyal and affectionate sincerity: but those ad- 
 dressed 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 fa- 
 mous and faultless little poem Aux Fciiillantines, 
 fragrant with the memory and musical as the 
 laugh of childhood; the memorial verses recurr- 
 ing here and there, with such infinite and subtle 
 variations on the same deep theme of mourning
 
 92 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 al- 
 legory couched in verse of such majestic reson- 
 ance, 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 simplic- 
 ity of insight and of style. 
 
 APPARITION. 
 
 Je vis un ange blanc qui passait sur ma lete; 
 
 Son vol eblouissant apaisait la tempcte, 
 
 Et faisait taire au loin la mer pleine de bruit. 
 
 — Qu'es:-ce que tu viens faire, ange, dans cette nuit.? 
 
 Lui dis-je. II repondit: — Je viens prendre ton ame. — 
 
 Et j'eus peur, car je vis que cetait une femme; 
 
 Et je lui dis, tremblant et lui tendant les bras: 
 
 — Que me restera-t-il } car.tu t'envolcras. — 
 
 II ne repondit pas; le ciel que Tombre assiege 
 
 S'eteignait. . . . — Si tu prends men ame, m'ecriai-je, 
 
 Ou remporteras-tu } montre-moi dans quel lieu. 
 
 II se taisait toujours.— O passant du ciel bleu,
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 93 
 
 Es-tu la mort? lui dis-je, ou bien es-tu la vie? — 
 Et la nuit augmentait sur mon ame ravie, 
 Et I'ange devint noir, et dit: — Je suis ramour. 
 Mais son front sombre ctait plus charmant que le jour, 
 Et je voyais, dans I'ombre ou brillaient ses prunelles, 
 Les astres a travers les plumes de ses ailes. 
 If nothing were left of Hugo but the sixth book 
 of the ContcDi^Jations, it would yet be indisput- 
 able 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 
 pretence 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 in- 
 solent 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 in- 
 iquity, 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
 
 94 A STUDV OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 puts forward, no vainly egotistic arrogance that 
 he displays; but the right of a reasonable con- 
 science 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 con- 
 science can be said to exist at all. If there beany 
 truth in the notion of any difference between evil 
 and good more serious than the conventional and 
 convenient fabrications of doctrine and assump- 
 tion, then assuredly the meanest of his creatures 
 in whom the perception of this difference was not 
 utterly extinct would have aright to denounce an 
 omnipotent evil-doer as justly amenable to the 
 sentence inflicted by the thunders of his own un- 
 righteous 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 po- 
 lemical passion of his prophetic testimony to that 
 need for faith in a central conscience and a cen- 
 tral 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
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 95 
 
 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 in- 
 forms with immortal life every line of the great 
 religious poem called Pleiirs dans la unit. In 
 this he touches the highest point of poetic med- 
 itation, as in the epilogue to the Chdtiments, 
 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 per- 
 fect in its harmony of composition, it seems pre- 
 sumptuous to indicate any special miracle of in- 
 spired workmanship: yet, as Hugo in his various 
 notes on mediaeval architecture was wont to 
 select for exceptional attention and peculiar el- 
 oquence 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
 
 96 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 imbedded may envy the life and covet the suffer- 
 ing 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 mediaeval 
 painter or sculptor could achieve. 
 
 Le soir vient; rhorizon s'emplit d'inquictude; 
 L'herbe tremble at bruit comrae une multitude; 
 
 Le fleuve blanc reluit; 
 Le paysage obscur prend les veinesdes marbres; 
 Ces hydres que, le jour, on appelle des arbres, 
 
 Se tordent dans la nuit. 
 
 Le ^nort est seul. II sent la nuit qui le devore. 
 Quand nait le doux matii, tout I'azur de I'aurore, 
 
 Tous ses rayons si beaux. 
 Tout Tamourdes oiseaux ei leurs chansons sans nombre, 
 Vent aux berceaux dores ; et, la nuit, toute Tombre 
 
 Aboutit aux tombeaux. 
 II entend des soupirs dans les fosses voisines ; 
 II sent la chevelure affreuse des racines 
 
 Entrer dans son cercueil ; 
 II est I'etre vaincu dent s'empare la chose ; 
 II sent un doigt obscur, sous sa paupiere close, 
 
 Lui retirer son oeil. 
 II a froid ; car le soir qui mele a son haleine 
 Les tenebres, I'horreur, le spectre et le phalene, 
 
 Glacc ces durs grabats ;
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 97 
 
 Le cadavre, lie de bandelettes blanches, 
 Grelotte, et dans sa biere entend les quatre planches 
 Qui lui parlent tout bas. 
 
 L'une dit : — Je fermais ton coffre-fort. — Et I'autre 
 Dit : — J'ai servi de porte au toit qui fut le notre. — 
 
 L'autre dit : — Aux beaux jours, 
 La table oia rit I'ivresse et que le vin encombre, 
 C etait moi. — L'autre dit : — J'etais le chevet sombre 
 
 Du lit de tes amours. 
 
 Among all the poems which follow, some ex- 
 quisite in their mystic tenderness as the elegiac 
 stanzas on Claire and the appealing address to a 
 friend unknown {A celle qui est voilee'), 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 utter- 
 ly incomparable magic of interpretation. 
 
 Les ^toiles, points d'or, percent les branches noires ; 
 Le flot huileux et lourd decompose ses moires 
 
 Sur I'ocean blemi ; 
 Les nuages ont I'air d'oiseaux prenant la fuite ;
 
 98 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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, in- 
 scribed '• to the angels who see us." 
 
 — Passant, qu'es-tu ? j^ te connais. 
 Mais, etant spectre, ombre et nuage, 
 Tu n'as plus de sexe ni d'age. 
 — Je suis ta mere, et je venais ! 
 
 — Et toi dont I'aile hesite et brille, 
 Dont I'oeil est noye de douceur, 
 Qu'es-iu, passant? — Je suis ta soeur. 
 — Et toi, qu'es-tu ? — Je suis ta fiUe. 
 
 — Et toi, qu'es-tu, passant ? — Je suis 
 Celle a qui tu disais : Je t'aime ! 
 — Et toi ? — Je suis ton ame meme. — 
 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,
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 99 
 
 EN FRAPPANT A UNE PORTE. 
 
 J'ai perdu mon pere et ma mere, 
 Mon premier-ne, bien jeune, helas I 
 Et pour moi la nature entiere 
 Sonne le glas. 
 
 Je dormais entre mes deux freres; 
 Enfants, noii5 etions trois oiseaux; 
 Helas ! le sort change en deux bieres 
 Leurs deux berceaux. 
 
 Je t'ai perdue, 6 fille chere, 
 Toi qui remplis, 6 mon orgueil, 
 Tout mon destin de la lumiere 
 De ton cercueil ! 
 
 J'ai su monier, j'ai su descendre. 
 J'ai vu I'aubc et I'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 tete des orfraies; 
 Jai sur tous mes travaux raffront, 
 Au pied la poudre, au coeur des plaies, 
 L'epine au front. 
 
 J'ai des pleurs a mon oeil qui pense, 
 Des trous a ma robe en lambeau; 
 Je n'ai rien a la conscience; 
 Ouvre, lombeau.
 
 loo A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 har- 
 monies of unlimited and illimitable hope. The 
 epilogue which dedicates the book to the daugh- 
 ter whose grave was now forbidden ground to 
 her father — so long wont to keep there the au- 
 tumnal 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. 
 
 Not till the thirtieth year from the publication 
 of these two volumes was the inexhaustible labor 
 of the spirit which inspired them to cease for a 
 moment — and then, among us at least, for ever. 
 Three years afterwards appeared the first series 
 of the Legende des Siccles, to be followed nine- 
 teen years later by the second, and by the final 
 complementary volume six years after that: so 
 that between the inception and the conclusion of 
 the greatest single work accomplished in the 
 course of our century a quarter of that century
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. loi 
 
 had elapsed — with stranger and more tragic evo- 
 lution of events than any poet or any seer could 
 have foretold or foreseen as possible. Three 
 years again from this memorable date appeared 
 the great epic and tragic poem of contemporary 
 life and of eternal humanity which gave us all the 
 slowly ripened fruit of the studies and emotions, 
 the passions and the thoughts, the aspiration and 
 the experience, brought finally to their full and 
 perfect end in Les Miserables. As the key-note 
 of Notre-Dame de Paris was doom — the human 
 doom of suffering to be nobly or ignobly en- 
 dured — so the key-note of its author's next ro- 
 mance was redemption by acceptance of suffering 
 and discharge of duty in absolute and entire 
 obedience to the utmost exaction of conscience 
 when it calls for atonement, of love when it calls 
 for sacrifice of all that makes life more endurable 
 than death. It is obvious that no account can 
 here be given of a book which if it required a sen- 
 tence would require a volume to express the 
 character of its quality or the variety of its excel- 
 lence — the one unique, the latter infinite as the 
 unique and infinite spirit whose intelligence and 
 whose goodness gave it life. 
 
 Two years after Lcs Miserables appeared the
 
 I02 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 magnificent book of meditations on the mission 
 of art in the world, on the duty of human thought 
 towards humanity, inscribed by Victor Hugo with 
 the name of William Shakespeare. To allow 
 that it throws more light on the greatest genius 
 of our own century than on the greatest genius 
 of the age of Shakespeare is not to admit that it 
 is not rich in valuable and noble contemplations 
 or suggestions on the immediate subject of 
 Shakespeare's work; witness the admirably 
 thoughtful and earnest remarks on Macbeth, the 
 admirably passionate and pathetic reflections on 
 Lear. The splendid eloquence and the heroic 
 enthusiasm of Victor Hugo never found more 
 noble and sustained expression than in this vol- 
 ume — the spontaneous and inevitable expansion 
 of a projected preface to his son's incomparable 
 translation of Shakespeare. The preface actually 
 prefixed to it is admirable for concision, for in- 
 sight, and for grave historic humor. It appeared 
 a year after the book which (so to speak) had 
 grown out of it; and in the same year appeared 
 the Chansons des Rues et des Bois. The miracu- 
 lous dexterity of touch, the dazzling mastery of 
 metre, the infinite fertility in variations on the 
 same air of frolic and thoughtful fancy, would
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 103 
 
 not apparently allow the judges of the moment 
 to perceive or to appreciate the higher and 
 deeper qualities displayed in this volume of lyric 
 idyls. The prologue is a superb example of 
 the power peculiar to its author above all other 
 poets; the power of seizing on some old symbol 
 or image which may have been in poetic use ever 
 since verse dawned upon the brain of man, and 
 informing it again as with life, and transforming 
 it anew as by fire. Among innumerable exercises 
 and excursions of dainty but indefatigable fancy 
 there are one or two touches of a somewhat 
 deeper note than usual which would hardly be 
 misplaced in the gravest and most ambitious 
 works of imaginative genius. The twelve lines 
 (of four syllables each) addressed A la belle bn- 
 perieiise are such, for example, as none but a 
 great poet of passion, a master of imaginative 
 style, could by any stroke of chance or at any 
 cost of toil have written. 
 
 L'amour, panique 
 De la raison, 
 Se communique 
 Par le frisson. 
 
 Laissez-moi dire, 
 N accordez rien.
 
 104 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Si je soupire, 
 Chantez, c'est bien. 
 
 Si je demeure, 
 Triste, a vos pieds, 
 Et si je pleure, 
 C'est bien, riez. 
 
 Un homme semble 
 Souvent trompeur. 
 Mais si je tremble, 
 Belle, ayez pour. 
 
 The sound of the songs of a whole woodland 
 seems to ring like audible spring sunshine through 
 the adorable song of love and youth rejoicing 
 among the ruins of an abbey. 
 
 Seuls tous deux, ravis, chantants ! 
 
 Comme on s'aime ! 
 Comme on cueille le printemps 
 
 Que Dieu seme ! 
 
 Quels rires etincelants 
 
 Dans ces ombres 
 Pleinesjadis de fronts blancs, 
 
 De coeurs sombres ! 
 
 On est tout frais mari6s. 
 
 On s'envoie 
 Les charmants cris varies 
 
 De la joie. 
 
 Purs ebats meles au vent 
 Qui frissonne !
 
 THE ]yORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 105 
 
 Gaites que le noir couvent 
 Assaisonne ! 
 
 On effeuille des jasmins 
 
 Sur la pierre 
 Oil I'abbesse joint ses mains 
 
 En priere. 
 
 Ses tombeaux, de croix marqu6s, 
 
 Font parti e 
 De ces jeux, un peu piques 
 
 Par I'ortie. 
 
 Or se cherche, on se poursuit, 
 
 On sent croitre 
 Ton aube, amour, dans la nuit 
 
 Du vieux cloitre. 
 
 On s'en va se becquetant, 
 
 On s'adore, 
 On s'embrasse a chaque instant, 
 
 Puis encore, 
 
 Sous les piliers, les arceaux, 
 
 Et les marbres. 
 C'est I'histoire des oiseaux 
 
 Dans les arbres. 
 
 The inexhaustible exuberance of fancies lav- 
 ished on the study of the natural church, built by 
 the hawthorn and the nettle in the depth of the 
 living wood, with foliage and wind and flowers, 
 leaves the reader not unfit for such readins: act-
 
 io6 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 ually dazzled with delight. In a fiar different 
 key, the Souvenir des vicillcs giicrres is one of 
 Hugo's most pathetic and characteristic studies 
 of homely and heroic life. The dialogue which 
 follows, between the irony of scepticism and the 
 enthusiasm of reason, on the progressive ascen- 
 sion of mankind, is at once sublime and subdued 
 in the fervent tranquillity of its final tone : and 
 the next poem, on the so-called " great age " and 
 its dwarf of a Caesar with the sun for a periwig, 
 has in it a whole volume of history and of satire 
 condensed into nine stanzas of four lines of five 
 syllables apiece. 
 
 LE GRAND SikCLE. 
 
 Ce siecle a la forme 
 D'un monstrueux char. 
 Sa croissance enorme 
 Sous un nain cesar. 
 
 Son air de prodige, 
 Sa gloire qui ment, 
 Melent le vertige 
 A r^crasement. 
 
 Louvois pour ministre, 
 Scarron pour griffon, 
 C'est un chant sinistre 
 Sur un air bouffon.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 107 
 
 Sur sa double roue 
 Le grand char descend; 
 L'une est dans la boue, 
 L'autre est dans le sang. 
 
 La mort au carrosse 
 Attelle— ou va-t-il? — 
 Lavrilliere atroce, 
 Roquelaure vil. 
 
 Comme un geai dans I'arbre, 
 Le roi s'y tient fier; 
 Son cceur est de marbre. 
 Son ventre est de chair. 
 
 On a pour sa nuque 
 Et son front vermeil 
 Fait une perruque 
 Avec le soleil. 
 
 II regne et vegete, 
 Effrayant zero 
 Sur qui se projette 
 L'ombre du bourreau. 
 
 Ce trone est la tombe; 
 Et sur le pave 
 Quelque chose en tombe 
 Qu'on n'a point lave. 
 
 The exquisite poem on the closure of the church 
 already described for the winter is as radiant with 
 humor as with tenderness: and the epilogue re-
 
 io8 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 sponds in cadences of august antiphony to the 
 moral and imaginative passion which imbues 
 with life and fire the magnificent music of the 
 prologue. 
 
 In the course of the next four years Victor 
 Hugo published the last two great works which 
 were to be dated from the haven of his exile. It 
 would be the very ineptitude of impertinence for 
 any man's presumption to undertake the classifi- 
 cation or registry of his five great romances in 
 positive order of actual merit: but I may perhaps 
 be permitted to say without fear of deserved re- 
 buke that none is to me personally a treasure of 
 greater price than Les Travaillejirs de la Mcr. 
 The splendid energy of the book makes the su- 
 perhuman energy of the hero seem not only pos- 
 sible but natural, and his triumph over all phys- 
 ical impossibilities not only natural but inevitable. 
 Indeed, when glancing at the animadversions of 
 a certain sort of critics on certain points or pas- 
 sages in this and in the next romance of its 
 author, I am perpetually inclined to address 
 them in the spirit — were it worth while to ad- 
 dress them in any wise at all — after the fashion 
 if not after the very phrase of Mirabeau's reply 
 to a less impertinent objector. Victor Hugo's
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 109 
 
 acquaintance with navigation or other sciences 
 may or may not have been as imperfect as 
 Shakespeare's acquaintance with geography and 
 natural history; the knowledge of such a- man's 
 ignorance or inaccuracy in detail is in either case 
 of exactly equal importance: and the importance 
 of such knowledge is for all men of sense and 
 candor exactly equivalent to zero. 
 
 Between the tragedy of Gilliatt and the tragedy 
 of Gwynplaine Victor Hugo published nothing 
 but the glorious little poem on the slaughter of 
 Mentana, called La Voix de Guernesey, and (in 
 the same year) the eloquent and ardent effusion 
 of splendid and pensive enthusiasm prefixed to 
 the manual or guide-book which appeared on the 
 occasion of the international exhibition at Paris 
 three years before the collapse of the government 
 which then kept out of France the Frenchmen 
 most regardful of her honor and their own. In 
 the year preceding that collapse he published 
 L" Homme qui Kit; a book which those who read 
 it aright have always ranked and will always 
 rank among his masterpieces. A year and eight 
 months after the fall of the putative Bonaparte 
 he published the terrible register oi L Annee Ter- 
 rible. More sublime wisdom, more compassionate
 
 no A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 equity, more loyal self-devotion never found ex- 
 pression in verse of more varied and impassioned 
 and pathetic magnificence. The memorial poem 
 in which Victor Hugo so royally repaid, with 
 praise beyond all price couched in verse beyond 
 all praise, the loyal and constant devotion of 
 Thcophile Gautier, bears the date of All Souls' 
 Day in the autumn of 1872. For tenderness and 
 nobility of mingling aspiration and recollection, 
 recollection of combatant and triumphant youth, 
 aspiration towards the serene and sovereign as- 
 cension out of age through death, these majestic 
 lines are worthy not merely of eternal record, but 
 far more than that — of a distinct and a distin- 
 guished place among the poems of Victor Hugo. 
 They are not to be found in the edition ne 
 varietur: which, I must needs repeat, will have 
 to be altered or modified by more variations than 
 one before it can be accepted as a sufficient or 
 standard edition of the complete and final text. 
 In witness of this I cite the closing lines of a 
 poem now buried in " the tomb of Theophile 
 Gautier" — a beautiful volume which has long 
 been out of print. 
 
 Ami, je sens du sort la sombre plenitude; 
 J'ai commence la mort par dc la solitude,
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 1 1 1 
 
 Je vois mon profond soir vaguement s'etoiler. 
 
 Voici I'heure ou je vais, aussi nioi, m'en aller. 
 
 Mon fil troplong frissonne et louche presqueau glaive; 
 
 Le vent qui t'emporta doucement me souleve, 
 
 Et je vais suivre ceux qui m'aimaient, moi banni. 
 
 Leur ceil fixe m'attire au fond de I'infini. 
 
 Yy cours. Ne fermez pas la porte funeraire. 
 
 Passons, car c'est la loi: nul ne peut s'y soustraire; 
 
 Tout penche; et ce grand siecle avec tons ses rayons 
 
 Entre en cette ombre immense oia, pales, nous fuyons. 
 
 Oh ! quel farouche bruit font dans le crepuscule 
 
 Les chenes qu'on abat pour le bucher d'Hercule I 
 
 Les chevaux de la IMort se mettent a hennir, 
 
 Et sont joyeux, car I'age eclatant va finir; 
 
 Ce siecle altier qui sut dompter le vent contraire. 
 
 Expire . . . — O Gauiier, toi, leur egal et leur frere, 
 
 Tu pars apres Dumas, Lamartine et IMusset. 
 
 L'onde antique est tarie oii Ton rajeunissait; 
 
 Comme il n'est plus de Styx il n'est plus de Jouvence. 
 
 Le dur faucher avec sa large lame avance 
 
 Pensif et pas a pas vers le reste du ble; 
 
 C'est mon tour; et la nuit emplit mon oeil trouble 
 
 Qui, devinant, helas, I'avenir des colombes, 
 
 Pleure sur des berceaux et sourit a des tombes. 
 
 Two years after the year of terror, the poet 
 who had made its memory immortal by his rec- 
 ord of its changes and its chances gave to the 
 world his heroic and epic romance of Quatrevingt- 
 trcize; instinct with all the passion of a deeper
 
 112 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 and wider chivalry than that of old, and touched 
 with a more than Homeric tenderness for mother- 
 hood and childhood. This book was written in 
 the space of five months and twenty-seven days. 
 The next year witnessed only the collection of 
 the second series of his Actes ct Paroles {Pendant 
 rExil), and the publication of two brief and mem- 
 orable pamphlets: the one a simple and pathetic 
 record of the two beloved sons taken from him in 
 such rapid succession, the other a terse and earn- 
 est plea with the judges who had spared the life 
 of a marshal condemned on a charge of high 
 treason to spare likewise the life of a private 
 soldier condemned for a transgression of military 
 discipline. Most readers will be glad to remem- 
 ber that on this occasion at least the voice of the 
 intercessor was not uplifted in vain. A year after- 
 wards he published the third series of Actes et 
 Paroles {Depiiis PExil), with a prefatory essay 
 full of noble wisdom, of pungent and ardent 
 scorn, of thoughtful and composed enthusiasm, 
 on the eternal contrast and the everlasting bat- 
 tle between the spirit of clerical Rome and the 
 spirit of republican Paris. 
 
 " Moi qu'un petit enfant rend tout a fait stu- 
 pide," I do not propose to undertake a review of
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 113 
 
 L Art d'etre Grandpere. It must suffice here to reg- 
 ister the fact that the most absolutely and adora- 
 bly beautiful book ever written appeared a year 
 after the volume just mentioned, and some months 
 after the second series of the Le'gende des Siecles; 
 that there is not a page in it which is not above 
 all possible eulogy or thanksgiving; that nothing 
 was ever conceived more perfect than such poems 
 — to take but a small handful for samples — as Un 
 manque, La sieste, Glioses dii soir, Ce que dit le 
 public (at the Jardin des Plantes or at the Zo- 
 ological Gardens; ages of public ranging from five, 
 which is comparatively young, to seven, which is 
 positively old), CJiant siir le berceau, the song for 
 a round dance of children, Le pot cassc. La viise en 
 liberte, Jeanne endormie, the delicious Chanson 
 de grandpere, the glorious Chanson dancetre, or 
 the third of the divine and triune poems on the 
 sleep of a little child; that after reading these — 
 to say nothing of the rest — it seems natural to feel 
 as though no other poet had ever known so fully 
 or enjoyed so wisely or spoken so sweetly and so 
 well the most precious of truths, the loveliest of 
 loves, the sweetest and the best of doctrines. 
 
 The first of all to see the light appeared in a 
 magazine which has long ago collapsed under the
 
 114 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 influence of far other writers than the greatest of 
 the century. Every word of the thirty-eight lines 
 which compose La Sicstc de Jeanne — if any speech 
 or memory of man endure so long — will be trea- 
 sured as tenderly by generations as remote from 
 the writer's as now treasure up with thankful won- 
 der and reverence every golden fragment and jew- 
 elled spar from the wreck of SimOnides or of 
 Sappho. It has all the subtle tenderness which 
 invests the immortal song of Danae; and the 
 union of perfect grace with living passion, as it 
 were the suffusion of human flesh and blood with 
 heavenly breath and fire, brings back once again 
 upon our thoughts the name which is above every 
 name in lyric song. There is not one line which 
 could have been written and set where it stands 
 by the hand of any lesser than the greatest among 
 poets. For once even the high priest and even 
 the high priestess of baby-worship who have made 
 their names immortal among our own by this 
 especial and most gracious attribute — even Wil- 
 liam Blake and Christina Rossetti for once are 
 distanced in the race of song, on their own sweet 
 ground, across their own peculiar field of Para- 
 dise. Not even in the pastures that heard his 
 pipe keep time to the " Songs of Innocence," or
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 115 
 
 on the " wet bird-haunted English lawn " set 
 ringing as from nursery windows at summer sun- 
 rise to the faultless joyous music and pealing bird- 
 like laughter of her divine " Sing-Song," has there 
 sounded quite such a note as this from the heaven 
 of heavens in which little babies are adored by 
 great poets, the frailest by the most potent of 
 divine and human kind. And above the work in 
 this lovely line of all poets in all time but one, 
 there sits and smiles eternally the adorable baby 
 who helps us for ever to forget all passing pervers- 
 ities of Christianized socialism or bastard Caesar- 
 ism which disfigure and diminish the pure propor- 
 tions and the noble charm of "Aurora Leigh." 
 Even the most memorable children born to art 
 in Florence, begotten upon stone or canvas by 
 Andrea del Sarto or by Luca della Robbia's very 
 self, must yield to that one the crown of sinless 
 empire and the palm of powerless godhead which 
 attest the natural mystery of their omnipotence; 
 and which haply may help to explain why no ac- 
 cumulated abominations of cruelty and absurdity 
 which inlay the record of its history and in- 
 crust the fabric of its creed can utterly corrode 
 the natal beauty or corrupt the primal charm of 
 a faith which centres at its opening round the wor- 
 ship of a new-born child.
 
 ii6 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 The most accurate and affectionate description 
 that I ever saw or heard given of a baby's incom- 
 parable smile, when graciously pleased to permit 
 with courtesy and accept with kindness the votive 
 touch of a reverential finger on its august little 
 cheek, was given long since in the text accompa- 
 nying a rich and joyous design of childish revel by 
 Richard Doyle. A baby in arms is there contem- 
 plating the riotous delights of its elders, fallen 
 indeed from the sovereign state of infancy, but 
 not yet degenerate into the lower life of adults, 
 with that bland and tacit air of a large-minded 
 and godlike tolerance which the devout observer 
 will not fail to have remarked in the aspect of 
 babies when unvexed and unincensed by any cross 
 accident or any human shortcoming on the part 
 of their attendant ministers. Possibly a hand 
 which could paint that inexpressible smile might 
 not fail also of the ability to render in mere words 
 some sense of the ineffable quality which rests 
 upon every line and syllable of this most divine 
 poem. There are lines in it — but after all this is 
 but an indirect way of saying that it is a poem by 
 Victor Hugo — which may be taken as tests of the 
 uttermost beauty, the extreme perfection, the su- 
 preme capacity and charm, to which the language
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 1 1 7 
 
 of men can attain. It might seem as if the Fates 
 could not allow two men capable of such work to 
 live together in one time of the world; and that 
 Shelley therefore had to die in his thirtieth year 
 as soon as Hugo had attained his twentieth. 
 
 Elle fait au milieu du jour son petit somme; 
 
 Car I'enfant a besoin du reve plus que Thomme, 
 
 Cette terre est si laide alors qu'on vient du ciel ! 
 
 L'enfant cherche a revoir Cherubin, Ariel, 
 
 Les camarades, Puck, Titania, Ics fees, 
 
 Et ses mains quand il dort sont par Dieu rechauffees. 
 
 Oh ! comme nous serions surpris si nous voyions, 
 
 Au fond de ce sommeil sacre, plein de rayons, 
 
 Ces paradis ouverts dans I'ombre, ct ces passages 
 
 D'etoiles qui font signe aux enfants d'etre sages, 
 
 Ces apparitions, ces eblouissements ! 
 
 Done, a I'heure ou les feux du soleil sont calmants, 
 
 Quand tout la nature ecoute et se recueille. 
 
 Vers midi, quand les nids se taisent, quand la feuille 
 
 La plus tremblante oublie un instant de fremir, 
 
 Jeanne a cette habitude aimable de dormir; 
 
 Et la mere un moment respire et se repose, 
 
 Car on se lasse, meme a scrvir une rose. 
 
 Ses beaux petits pieds nus dont le pas est peu sur 
 
 Dorment; et son berceau, qu'entoure un vague azur 
 
 Ainsi qu'une aureole entoure une immortelle, 
 
 Semble un nuage fait avec de la denielle; 
 
 On croit, en la voyant dans ce frais berceau-la, 
 
 Voir une lueur rose au fond d'un falbala; 
 
 On la contcmple, on rit, on sent fuir la tristesse.
 
 ii8 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO, 
 
 Et c'est un astre, ayant de plus la petitesse; 
 L'ombre, amoreuse d'elle, a I'air de I'adorer; 
 Le vent retient son souffle et n'ose respirer. 
 Soudain dans 1 'humble et chaste alcove matemelle, 
 Versant tout le matin qu'elle a dans sv prunelle, 
 Elle ouvre la paupiere, etend un bras charmant, 
 Agite un pied, puis I'autre, et, si divinement 
 Que des fronts dans I'azur se penchent pour I'entendre, 
 Elle gazouille. . . — Alors, de sa voix la plus tendre, 
 Couvant des yeux I'enfant que Dieu fait rayonner, 
 Cherchant le plus doux nom quelle puisse donner 
 A sa joie, a son ange en fleur, a sa chimere: 
 — Te voila reveillee, horreur ! lui dit sa mere. 
 
 If the last word on so divine a subject could 
 ever be said, it surely might well be none other 
 than this. But with workmen of the very highest 
 order there is no such thing as a final touch, a 
 point at which they like others are compelled to 
 draw bridle, a summit on which even their genius 
 also may abide but while a man takes breath, 
 and halt without a hope or aspiration to pass 
 beyond it. 
 
 Far different in the promise or the menace of 
 its theme, the poet's next work, issued in the fol- 
 lowing year, was one in spirit with the inner spirit 
 of this book. In sublime simplicity of conception 
 and in sovereign accomplishment of its design, 
 Le Papc is excelled by no poem of Hugo's or of
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 119 
 
 man's. In the glory of pure pathos it is perhaps 
 excelled, as in the divine long-suffering of all- 
 merciful wisdom it can be but equalled, by the 
 supreme utterance of La Pitie Siipreme. In splen- 
 dor of changeful music and imperial magnificence 
 of illustration the two stand unsurpassed for ever, 
 side by side. A third poem, -attacking at once 
 the misbelief or rather the infidelity which studies 
 and rehearses " the grammar of assent" to creeds 
 and articles of religion, and the blank disbelief or 
 denial which rejects all ideals and all ideas of 
 spiritual life, is not so rich even in satire as in 
 reason, so earnest even in rejection of false doc- 
 trine as in assertion of free belief.' Upon this 
 book no one can hope to write anything so nearly 
 adequate and so thoroughly worth reading as is 
 the tribute paid to it by Theodore de Banville — 
 the Simonides Melicertes of France. 
 
 In the midst of our confused life, turbulent and flat, 
 bustling and indifferent, where books and plays, dreams 
 and poems, driven down a wind of oblivion, are like the 
 leaves which November sweeps away, and fly past, without 
 giving us time to tell one from another, in a vague whirl 
 and rush, at times there appears a new book by Victor 
 Hugo, and lights up, resounds, murmurs, and sings at 
 once everything. 
 
 The shining, sounding, fascinating verse, with its thou-
 
 I20 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 sand surprises of sound, of color, of harmony, breaks 
 forth hke a rich concert, and ever newly stirred, dazzled 
 and astonished, as if we were hearing verses for the first 
 time, we remain stupefied with wonder before the persist- 
 ent prodigy of the great seer, the great thinker, the un- 
 heard-of artist, self-transfigured without ceasing, always 
 new and always like himself. It would be impertinent 
 to say of him that he makes progress; and yet I find no 
 other word to express the fact that every hour, every 
 minute, he adds something new, something yet more 
 exact and yet more caressing, to that swing of syllables, 
 that melodious play of rhyme renascent of itself, which is 
 the grace and the invincible power of French poetry, — if 
 English ears could but learn or would but hear it; where- 
 as usually they have never been taught even the rudi- 
 ments of French prosody, and receive the most perfect 
 cadences of the most glorious or the most exquisite 
 French poetry as a schoolboy who has not yet learnt 
 scansion might receive the melodies of Catullus or of 
 Virgil. 
 
 Let me be forgiven a seeming blasphemy; but since 
 the time of periphrasis is over the real truih of things 
 must be said of them. Well, then, the great peril of 
 poclry is the risk it runs of becoming a weariness: for it 
 may be almost sublime, and yet perfectly wearisome: but, 
 on the contrary, with all its bewildering flight, its vast 
 circumference, and the rage of its genius grown drunk 
 with things immeasurable, the poetry of Victor Hugo is 
 of itself amusing into the bargain — amusing as a fairy tale, 
 as a many-colored festival, as a lawless and charming 
 comedy; for in them words play unexpected parts, take 
 on themselves a special and intense life, put on strange or
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 121 
 
 graceful faces, clash one against another either cymbals of 
 gold or urns of crystal, exchange flashes of living light 
 and dawn. 
 
 And let no one suspect in my choice of an epithet any 
 idea of diminution; a garden-box on the window-sill may 
 be thoroughly wearisome, and an immense forest may be 
 amusing, with its shades wherein the nightingale sings, its 
 giant trees with the blue sky showing through them, its 
 mossy shelters where the silver brooklet hums its tune 
 through the moistened greener}'. Ay, — this is one of its 
 qualities, — the poetry of Hugo can be read, can be de- 
 voured as one devours a new novel, because it is varied, 
 surprising, full of the unforeseen, clear of commonplaces, 
 like nature itself; and of such a limpid clearness as to be 
 within the reach of every creature who can read, even when 
 it soars to the highest summits of philosophy and ideal- 
 ism. In fact, to be obscure, confused, unintelligible, is 
 not a rare quality, nor one difficult to acquire; and the 
 first fool you may fall in with can easily attain to it. In 
 this magnificent poem which has just appeared — as, for 
 that matter, in all his other poems — what Victor Hugo 
 does is just to dispel and scatter to the winds of heaven 
 those lessons, those fogs, those rubbish-heaps, those clouds 
 of dark bewildered words with which the sham wise men 
 of all ages have overlaid the plain evidence of truth. 
 
 " The words of Mercury are harsh after the 
 songs of Apollo "; and I, who cannot pretend even 
 to the gift of eloquence proper to the son of Maia, 
 will not presume to add a word of less valuable 
 homage to the choicer tribute of Banville. The
 
 122 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 three poems last mentioned were respectively 
 published in three successive years: and in the 
 same year with Religions et Religion Victor Hugo 
 published a fourth volume, L'Ane, in which the 
 questions of human learning and of human train- 
 ing were handled with pathetic ardor and sympa- 
 thetic irony. It would be superfluous if not inso- 
 lent to add that the might of hand, the magic of 
 utterance, the sovereign charm of sound, and the 
 superb expression of sense, are equal and incom- 
 parable in all. 
 
 And next year Victor Hugo gave us Les Quatre 
 VeJits de t Esprit. In the first division, the book 
 of satire, every page bears witness that the hand 
 which wrote the CJidtiments had neither lost its 
 strength nor forgotten its cunning; it is full of 
 keen sense, of wise wrath, of brilliant reason and 
 of merciful equity. The double drama which fol- 
 lows is one of the deepest and sweetest and rich- 
 est in various effect among the masterpieces of its 
 author. In Margarita we breathe again the same 
 fresh air of heroic mountain-ranges and wood- 
 lands inviolable, of winds and flowers and all fair 
 things and thoughts, which blows through all the 
 brighter and more gracious interludes of the Le- 
 gcnde des Siecles: the figures of Gallus, the liber-
 
 THE WORK OF VIC I OR HUGO. 123 
 
 tine by philosophy, and Gunich, the philosopher 
 of profligacy — the former a true man and true 
 lover at heart, the latter a cynic and a courtier to 
 the core — are as fresh in their novelty as the fig- 
 ures of noble old age and noble young love are 
 fresh in their renewal and reimpression of types 
 familiar to all hearts since the sunrise of Hernani. 
 The tragedy which follows this little romantic 
 comedy is but the more penetrative and piercing 
 in its pathos and its terror for its bitter and burn- 
 ing vein of realism and of humor. The lyric book 
 is a casket of jewels rich enough to outweigh the 
 whole wealth of many a poet. After the smiling 
 song of old times, the stately song of to-day with 
 its other stars and its other roses, in sight of the 
 shadow where grows the deathless flower of 
 death, pale and haggard, with its shadowy per- 
 fume: the song of all sweet waking dreams and 
 visions, and sweetest among them all the vision 
 of a tyrant loyally slain: the song on hearing a 
 princess sing, sweeter than all singing and simple 
 as " the very virtue of compassion ": the song of 
 evening and rest from trouble, and prayer in sor- 
 row, and hope in death: the many-colored and 
 sounding song of seaside winter nights: the song 
 of three nests, the reed-warbler's and the mart-
 
 124 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 let's made with moss and straw, in the wall or on 
 the water, and love's with glances and smiles, in 
 the lover's inmost heart: the song of the watcher 
 by twilight on the cliff, which strikes a note after- 
 wards repeated and prolonged in the last issue of 
 the Lc'gcndc des Sieclcs, full of mystery and mourn- 
 ing and fear and faith: the brief deep note of be- 
 wildered sorrow that succeeds it: the great wild 
 vision of death and night, cast into words which 
 have the very sound of wind and storm and water, 
 the very shape and likeness of things actually 
 touched or seen: the soft and sublime song of 
 dawn as it rises on the thinker deep sunk in med- 
 itation on death and on life to come: the strange 
 dialogue underground, grim and sweet, between 
 the corpse and the rose-tree: the song of exile in 
 May, sweet as flowers and bitter as tears: the 
 lofty poem of suffering which rejects the old Ro- 
 man refuge of stoic suicide: the light swift song of 
 a lover's quarrel between the earth and the sun in 
 winter time: the unspeakably sweet song of the 
 daisy that smiles at coming winter, the star that 
 smiles at coming night, the soul that smiles at 
 coming death: the most pathetic and heroic song 
 of all, the cry of exile towards the graves of the 
 beloved over sea, that weeps and is not weary:
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 125 
 
 the simple and sublime verses on the mountain 
 desolation to which truth and conscience were the 
 guides: the four magnificent studies of sea and 
 land, Promenades dans les rockers: the admirable 
 verses on that holy mystery of terror perceptible 
 in the most glorious works alike of nature and of 
 poetry: all these and more are fitly wound up by 
 the noble hymn on planting the oak of the United 
 States of Europe in the garden of the house of 
 exile. A few of the briefer among these may here 
 be taken as examples of a gift not merely une- 
 qualled but unapproached by any but the great- 
 est among poets. And first we may choose the 
 following unsurpassable psalm of evensong. 
 
 Un hymne harmonieux sort des feuilles du tremble; 
 
 Les voyageurs craintifs, qui vont la nuit ensemble, 
 
 Haussent la voix dans I'ombre oh Ton doit se hater 
 
 Laissez tout ce qui tremble 
 
 Chanter. 
 
 Les marins fatigues sommeillent sur le gouffre. 
 La mer bleue ou Vesuve epand ses Acts de soufre 
 Se tait des qu'il s'eteint, et cesse de gemir. 
 Laissez tout ce qui souffre 
 Dormir. 
 
 Quand la vie est mauvaise on la reve meilleure. 
 Les yeux en pleurs au ciel se levent a toute heure; 
 L'espoir vers Dieu se tourne et Dieu Ten tend crier.
 
 126 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Laissez tout ce qui pleure 
 Prier. 
 
 C'est pour renaitre ailleurs qu'ici-bas on succombe. 
 Tout ce qui tourbillonne appartient a la tombe. 
 11 faut dans le grand tout tot ou tard s'absorber. 
 Laissez tout ce qui tombe 
 Tomber ! 
 
 Next, we may take two songs of earlier and later 
 life, whose contrast is perfect concord. 
 
 I. 
 
 CHANSON D'A UTREFOIS. 
 Jamais elle ne raille, 
 Etant un calme esprit; 
 Mais toujours elle rit. — 
 Voici des brins de mousse avec des brins de paille; 
 Fauvette des roseaux, 
 Fais ton nid sur les eaux. 
 
 Quand sous la clarte douce 
 Qui sort de tes beaux yeux 
 On passe, on est joyeux. — 
 Voici des brins de paille avec des brins de mousse; 
 Martinet de I'azur, 
 Fais ton nid dans mon mur. 
 
 Dans I'aube avril se mire, 
 Et les rameaux fleuris 
 Sont pleins de petits oris. — 
 Voici de son regard, voici de son sourire; 
 Amour, 6 doux vainqueur, 
 Fais ton nid dans moncoeur.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO, 127 
 
 II. 
 
 CHANSON' UA UJOURUHUI. 
 
 Je disais: — Dieu qu'aucun suppliant n'importune, 
 Quand vous m'eprouverez dans votre volonte, 
 Laissez mon libre choix choisir dans la fortune 
 L'un ou I'autre cote; 
 
 Entre un riche esclavage et la pauvrete franche 
 Laissez-moi choisir, Dieu du cedre et du roseau; 
 Entre Tor de la cage et le vert de la branche 
 Faites juge I'oiseau. — 
 
 INIaintenant je suis libre et la nuit me reclame; 
 J'ai choisi lapre exil; j'habite un bois obscur; 
 Mais je vols s'<dlumer les etoiles de I'ame 
 Dans mon sinistre azur. 
 
 If this can be surpassed for outward and inward 
 sweetness, the following poem may perhaps have 
 been equaled for sensible and spiritual terror in 
 the range of lyric song. 
 
 EN MARCH ANT LA NUIT DANS UN BOIS. 
 I. 
 
 II grele, il pleut. Neige et brume; 
 
 Fondriere a chaque pas. 
 
 Le torrent veut, crie, ecume, 
 
 Et le rocher ne veut pas. 
 
 Le sabbat a notre oreille 
 Jette ses vagues hourras. 
 Un fagot sur une vieille 
 Passe en agitant les bras.
 
 128 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Passants hideux, claries blanches; 
 II semble, en ces noirs chemins, 
 Que les hommes ont des branches. 
 Que les arbres ont des mains. 
 
 II. 
 
 On entend passer un coche, 
 Le lourd coche de la mort, 
 II vient, il roule, il approche, 
 L'eau hurle et la bise mord. 
 
 Le dur cocher, dans la plaine 
 Aux aspects noirs et changeants, 
 Conduit sa voiture pleine 
 De toute sorte de gens. 
 
 Novembre souffle, la terre 
 Fremit, la bourrasque fond; 
 Les fleches du sagittaire 
 Sifflent dans le ciel profond. 
 
 III. 
 — Cocher, d'ou viens-tu? dit I'arbre. 
 — Ou vas-tu ? dit l'eau qui fuit. 
 Le cocher est fait de marbre 
 Et le coche est fait de nuit 
 
 II emporte beaute, gloire, 
 Joie, amour, plaisirs bruyants; 
 La voiture est toute noire, 
 Les chevaux sont effrayants. 
 
 L'arbreen frissonnant s'incline, 
 L'eau sent les joncs se dresser.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 129 
 
 Le buisson sur la col line 
 Grimpe pour le voir passer. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Le brin d'hcrbe sur la roche, 
 Le nuage dans le ciel, 
 Regarde marcher ce coche, 
 Kt croit voir rouler Babel, 
 
 Sur sa morne silhouette, 
 Baitant de I'ailea grands oris, 
 Volenl i'orage, chouette, 
 El I'ombre, chauve-souris. 
 
 Vent glace, tu nous secoues ! 
 Le char roule, et I'oeil tremblant, 
 A travers ses grandes roues, 
 Voit un crepuscule blanc. 
 
 V. 
 
 La nuit, sinistre merveille, 
 Repand son effroi sacre; 
 Toute la foret s'eveille, 
 Cornme un dormeur effare. 
 
 Apres les oiseaux,. les ames ! 
 Volez sous les cieux blafards. 
 L'etang, miroir, rit aux femmes 
 Qui sortent des nenuphars. 
 
 L'air sanglote, et le vent rale, 
 Et, sous I'obscur firmament, 
 La nuit sombre et la mort pale 
 Se regardant fixement.
 
 ISO A S'lUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 But the twenty-fifth poem in this book of lyrics 
 has assuredly never been excelled since first the 
 impulse of articulate song awoke in the first re- 
 corded or unrecorded poet. 
 
 Proscrit, regaide les roses; 
 Mai joyeux, de I'aube en pleurs 
 Les re9oit toutes ecloses; 
 Present, regarde les fleurs. 
 
 — Je pense 
 Aux roses que je semai. 
 Le mois de mai sans la France, 
 Ce n'est pas le mois de mai. 
 
 Proscrit, regarde les tombes; 
 Mai, qui rit aux cieux si beaux, 
 Sous les baisers des colombes 
 Fait palpiter les tombeaux. 
 
 — Je pense 
 Aux yeux chers que je fermai. 
 Le mois de mai sans la France. 
 Ce n'est pas le mois de mai. 
 
 Proscrit, regarde les branches, 
 Les branches ou sont les nids; 
 Mai les remplit d'ailes blanches 
 Et de soupirs infinis. 
 
 — Je pense 
 
 Aux nids charmants oil j'aimai. 
 
 Le mois de mai sans la France, 
 
 Ce n'est pas le mois de mai. 
 Mai 1854.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 131 
 
 In October of the same year — the second year 
 of his long exile — a loftier note of no less heav- 
 enly melody was sounded by the lyric poet who 
 alone of all his nation has taken his place beside 
 Coleridge and Shelley. The word " passant," as 
 addressed by the soul to the body, is perhaps the 
 very finest expression of his fervent faith in im- 
 mortality to be found in all the work of Victor 
 Hugo. 
 
 II est un peu tard pour faire la belle, 
 Reine marguerite; aux champs defleuris 
 Bieniot vont souffler le givre et la grele. 
 — Passant, I'hiver vient, etje lui souris. 
 
 II est un peu tard pour faire la belle, 
 Etoile du soir; les rayons taris 
 Sont tous reiournes a I'aube eternelle. 
 — Passant, la nuit vient, et je lui souris. 
 
 II est un peu tard pour faire la belle, 
 Mon ame; joyeuse en mes noirs debris, 
 Tu m eblouis, fiere et rouvrant ton alie. 
 — Passint, la mort vient, et je lui souris. 
 
 No date is affixed to the divine song of yearn- 
 ing after home and the graves which make holier 
 for every man old enough to have been a mourner 
 the native land which holds them. The play on 
 sound which distinguishes the last repetition of
 
 132 A STUDK OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 the burden is the crowning evidence that the sub- 
 tlest effect of pathos and the most austere effect 
 of subhmity may be conveyed through a trick of 
 language familiar in their highest and most se- 
 rious moods to ^schylus and to Shakespeare. 
 
 EXIL. 
 
 Si je pouvais voir, 6 patrie, 
 
 Tes amandiers et tes lilas, 
 
 Et fouler ton herbe fleurie, 
 
 Helas ! 
 
 Si je pouvais, — mais, 6 mon pere, 
 O ma mere, je ne peux pas, — 
 Prendre pour chevet votre pierre, 
 Helas ! 
 
 Dans le froid cercueil qui vous gene, 
 Si je pouvais vous parler bas, 
 Mon frere Abel, mon frere Eugene, 
 Helas ! 
 
 Si je pouvais, 6 ma colombe, 
 Et toi, mere, qui t'envolas, 
 M'agenouiller sur votre tombe, 
 Helas ! 
 
 Oh ! vers I'etoile solitaire, 
 Comme je leveraisles bras ! 
 Commc je baiserais la terre, 
 Helas ! 
 
 Loin de vous, 6 morts que je pleure, 
 Des Hots noirs j ecoute le glas;
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 133 
 
 Je voudrais fuir, mais je demeure, 
 Helas ! 
 
 Pourtant le sort, cache dans Tombre, 
 Se trompe si, comptant mes pas, 
 II croit que le vieux marcheur sombre 
 Est las. 
 
 The epic book is the most tragic and terrible 
 of all existing poems of its kind; if indeed we 
 may say that it properly belongs to any kind ex- 
 isting before its advent. The growing horror of 
 the gradual vision of history, from Henri the 
 Fourth to his bloody and gloomy son, from Louis 
 the Thirteenth to the murderer and hangman of 
 the Palatinate and the Cevennes, from Louis the 
 Fourteenth to the inexpressible pollution of in- 
 carnate ignominy in his grandson, seems to heave 
 and swell as a sea towards the coming thunder 
 which was to break above the severed head of 
 their miserable son. 
 
 And next year came Torqiieviada : one of the 
 greatest masterpieces of the master poet of our 
 century. The construction of this tragedy is ab- 
 solutely original and unique : free and full of 
 change as the wildest and loosest and roughest of 
 dramatic structures ever flung together, and left 
 to crumble or cohere at the pleasure of accident
 
 134 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 or of luck, by the rudest of primaeval playwrights : 
 but perfect in harmonious unity of spirit, in sym- 
 metry or symphony of part with part, as the most 
 finished and flawless creation of Sophocles or of 
 Phidias. Between some of the characters in this 
 play and some of those in previous plays of Hugo's 
 there is a certain resemblance as of kinship, but 
 no touch or shadow of mere repetition or repro- 
 duction from types which had been used before : 
 Ferdinand the Catholic has something in his linea- 
 ments of Louis the Just, and Gucho of L'Angely 
 in Marion de Loi-mc : the Marquis of Fuentel has 
 a touch of Gunich in Les deux trouvailles de Gallus, 
 redeemed by a better touch of human tenderness 
 for his recovered grandson. The young lovers 
 are two of the loveliest figures, Torquemada is 
 one of the sublimest, in all the illimitable world 
 of dramatic imagination. The intensity of inter- 
 est, anxiety, and terror, which grows by such 
 rapid and subtle stages of development up to the 
 thunderstroke of royal decision at the close of the 
 first act, is exchanged in the second for an even 
 deeper and higher kind of emotion. The con- 
 frontation of the hermit with the inquisitor, mag- 
 nificent enough already in its singleness of effect, 
 is at once transfigured and completed by the ap-
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 135 
 
 parition of the tremendous figure whose very 
 name is tragedy, whose very shadow sufficed for 
 the central and the crowning terror which dar- 
 kened the stage of Liicrece Borgia. 
 
 Le Chasseur. 
 
 Le hasard a petri la cendre avec 1 'instant; 
 Cet amalgame est rhomme. Or, moi-meme n'etant 
 Comme vous que matiere, ah ! je serais stupide 
 D'etre hesitant et lourd quand la joie est rapide, 
 De ne point mordre en hate au plaisir dans la nuit, 
 Et de ne pas gouter a tout, puisque tout fuit ! 
 Avant tout, etre heureux. Je prends a mon service 
 Ce qu'on appelle crime et ce qu'on nomme vice. 
 L'inceste, prejuge. Le meurtre, expedient. 
 J'honore le scrupule en le congediant. 
 Est-ce que vous croyez que, si ma fiUe est belle, 
 Je me general, moi, pour etre amoureux d'elle ! 
 Ah 9a, mais je serais un imbecile. II faut 
 Que j'existe. Allez done demander au gerfaut, 
 A I'aigle, a I'epervier, si cette chair qu"il broie 
 Est permise, et s'il sait de quel nid sort si proie. 
 Parce que vous portez un habit noir ou blanc, 
 Vous vous croyez force d'etre inepte et tremblant, 
 Et vous baissez les yeux devant cette offre immense 
 Du bonheur, que vous fait I'univers en demence. 
 Ayons done de I'esprit. Profitons du temps. Rien 
 Etant le resultat de la mort, vivons bien I 
 La salle de bal croule et devient catacombe. 
 L'ame du sage arrive en dansant dans la tombe. 
 Servez-moi mon festin. S'il exige aujourd'hui
 
 136 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Un assalsonnement de poison pour autrui, 
 
 Soit. Qu'importe la mort des autres ! J'ai la vie. 
 
 Jc suis une faim, vaste, ardente, inassouvie. 
 
 Mort, je veux t'oublier; Dieu, je veux t'ignorer. 
 
 Qui, le monde est pour moi le fruit a devorer. 
 
 Vivant, je suis en hate heureux; mort, je mechappe! 
 
 FRAN901S DE Paule, a Torqiiemada. 
 Qu'est-ce que ce bandit ? 
 
 TORQUEMADA. 
 
 Mon pere, c'ert le pape. 
 
 The third act revives again the more immedi- 
 ate and personal interest of the drama. Terror 
 and pity never rose higher, never found utterance 
 more sublime and piercing, in any work of any 
 poet in the world, than here in the scene of the 
 supplication of the Jews, and the ensuing scene 
 of the triumph of Torquemada. 
 
 The Jews enter; men, women, and children all 
 covered with ashes and clothed in rags, barefoot, 
 with ropes round their necks, some mutilated and 
 made infirm by torture, dragging themselves on 
 crutches or on stumps; others, whose eyes have 
 been put out, are led by children. And their 
 spokesman pleads thus with the king and the 
 queen of the kingdoms from whence they are to 
 be driven by Christian jurisdiction.
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 137 
 
 Moise-ben-Habib, grand rabbin, agenoux. 
 
 Altesse de Castille, altesse d'Aragon, 
 
 Roi, reine ! 6 notre maitre, et vous, notre maitresse, 
 
 Nous, vos tremblants sujets, nous sommes en detresse, 
 
 Et, pieds nus, corde au cou, nous prions Dieu d'abord, 
 
 Et vous ensuite, eiant dans I'ombre de la mort, 
 
 Ayant plusieurs de nous qu'on va livrer aux flammes, 
 
 Et tout le reste etant chasse, vieillards et femmes, 
 
 Et, sous I'oeil qui voit tout du fond du firmament, 
 
 Rois, nous vous apportons notre gemissement. 
 
 Altesses, vos d^crets surnous se precipitent, 
 
 Nous pleurons, et les os de nos peres palpitent; 
 
 Le sepulcre pensif tremble a cause de vous. 
 
 Ayez pitie. Nos coeurs sont fideles et doux; 
 
 Nous vivons enfermes dans nos maisons etroites, 
 
 Humbles, seuls; nos lois sont tres simples et tres droites, 
 
 Tellement qu'un enfant les meitrait en ecrit. 
 
 Jamais le juif ne chante et jamais il ne rit. 
 
 Nous payons le tribut, n'importe quelles sommes. 
 
 On nous rem ue a terre avec le pied; nous sommes 
 
 Comme le vetement d'un homme assassine, 
 
 Gloire a Dieu ! Mais faut-il qu' avec le nouveau-ne, 
 
 Avec I'enfant qu'on tette, avec I'enfant qu'on sevre, 
 
 Nu, poussant devant lui son chien, son boeuf, sachevre, 
 
 Israel fuie et coure epars dans tous les sens ! 
 
 Qu'on ne soit plus un peuple et qu'on soil des passants ! 
 
 Rois, ne nous faites pas chasser a coups des piques, 
 
 Et Dieu vous ouvrira des portes magnifiques. 
 
 Ayez pitie de nous. Nous sommes accables. 
 
 Nous ne verrons done plus nos arbres et nos bles ! 
 
 Les meres n'auront plus de lait dans leurs mamelles !
 
 138 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Les betes dans les bois sont avec leurs femelles, 
 Les nids dorment heureux sous les branches blottis, 
 On laisse en paix la biche allaiterses petits, 
 Permettez-nous de vivre aussi, nous, dans nos caves, 
 Sous nos pauvres toits, presque au bagne et presque 
 
 esclaves, 
 Mais aupies des cercueils de nos p^res ! daignez 
 Nous souffrir sous vos pieds de nos larmes baignes ! 
 Oh ! la dispersion sur les routes lointaines, 
 Quel deuil ! Permettez-nous de boire a nos Fontaines 
 Et de vivre en nos champs, et vous prospererez. 
 Helas ! nous nous tordons les bras, desesperes ! 
 Epargnez-nous I'exil, 6 rois, et I'agonie 
 De la solitude apre, 6ternelle, infinie ! 
 Laissez-nous la patrie et laissez-n )us le ciel ! 
 Le pain sur qui Ton pleure en mangeant est du fiel. 
 Ne soyez pas le vent si nous sommes la cendre. 
 Vici notre ran9on, helas ! daignez la prendre. 
 O rois, protegez-nous. Voyez nos desespoirs. 
 Soyez sur nous, mais non comme des anges noirs; 
 Soyez des anges bons et doux, car I'aile sombre 
 Et I'aile blanche, 6 rois, ne font pas la meme ombre. 
 Revoquez votre arret. Rois, nous vous supplions 
 Par vos aieux sacres, grands comme les lions, 
 Par les tombeaux des rois, par les tombeaux des reines, 
 Piofonds et penetres de lumieres sereines, 
 Et nous mettons nos coeurs, 6 maiires des humains, 
 Nos prieres, nos deuils dans les petites mains 
 De votre infante Jeanne, innocente, et pareille 
 A la fraise des bois oia se pose I'abeille. 
 Roi, reine, ayez pitie !
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 139 
 
 After the sublime and inexpressible pathos of 
 this appeal from age and innocence against the 
 most execrable of all religions that ever infected 
 earth and verified hell, it would have been im- 
 possible for any poet but one to find expression 
 for the passion of unselfish faith in that infernal 
 creed which should not merely horrify and dis- 
 gust us. But when Hugo brings before us the 
 figure of the grand inquisitor in contemplation of 
 the supreme act of faith accomplished in defiance 
 of king and queen to the greater glory of God, for 
 the ultimate redemption of souls else condemned 
 to everlasting torment, the rapture of the terrible 
 redeemer, whose faith is in salvation by fire, is 
 rendered into words of such magical and magnifi- 
 cent inspiration that the conscience of our fancy 
 is well nigh conquered and convinced and con- 
 verted for the moment as we read. 
 
 TORQUEMADA. 
 
 O fete, 6 gloire, 6 joie ! 
 La clemence terrible et superbe flamboie ! 
 Delivrance a jamais 1 Damnes, soyez absous I 
 Le bucher sur la terre eteint I'enfer dessous. 
 Sois beni, toi par qui lame au bonheur remonte, 
 Bucher, gloire du feu dont I'enfer est la honte, 
 Issue aboutissant au radieux chemin, 
 Porte du paradis rouverle au genre humain,
 
 140 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Misericorde ardente aux caresses sans nombre, 
 
 Mysterieux rachat des esclaves de I'ombre, 
 
 Auto-da-fe ! Pardon, bonte, lumiere, feu, 
 
 Vie ! eblouissement de la face de Dieu ! 
 
 Oh ! quel depart splendide et que d ames sauv6es 1 
 
 Juifs, mecreants, pecheurs, 6 mes cheres couvees, 
 
 Un court tourment vous paie un bonheur infini; 
 
 L'homme n'est plus maudit, I'homme n'est plus banni; 
 
 Le salut s'ouvre au fond des cieux. L'amour s'eveille, 
 
 Et voici son triomphe, et voici sa merveille, 
 
 Quelle extase ! entrer droit au ciel ! ne pas languir 1 
 
 Cris dans le hrasier, 
 Entendez-vous Satan burler de les voir fuir ? 
 Que I'etemel for9at pleure en I'eternel bouge ! 
 J'ai pousse de mes poings 1 enorme porte rouge. 
 Oh ! comme il a grince lorsque je refermais 
 Sur lui les deux battanls hideux, Toujours, Jamais 1 
 Sinisire, il estreste, derriere le mur sombre. 
 
 // regarde le del. 
 Oh ! j'ai panse la plaie effrayante de I'ombre. 
 Le paradis souffrait; le ciel avait au flanc. 
 Get ulcere, I'enfer brulant, I'enfer sanglant; 
 J'ai pose sur 1 enfer la flamme bienfaitrice, 
 Et j'en vois dans I'immense azur la cicatrice. 
 ■ C'etait ton coup de lance au cote, Jesus-Christ ! 
 Hosanna ! la blessure eternelle guerit. 
 Plus d'enfer. C'est fini. Les douleurs sont taries. 
 
 // regarde le quemadero. 
 Rubis de la fournaise ! 6 braises ! pierreries ! 
 Flambez, tisons ! brulez, charbons ! feu souverain, 
 Petille ! luis, bucher ! prodigieux ecrin
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 141 
 
 DY'tincelles qui vont devenir des ^toiles ! 
 Les ames, hors des corps comme hors de leurs voiles, 
 S'en vont, et le bonheur sort du bain de tourments ! 
 Splendeur ! magnificence ardente ! flamboiements ! 
 Satan, mon ennemi, qu'en dis-tu ? 
 
 En extase. 
 
 Feu ! lavage 
 De toutes les noirceurs par la flamme sauvage I 
 Transfiguration supreme ! acte de foi ! 
 Nous sommes deux sous I'oeil de Dieu, Satan et moi. 
 Deux porte-fourches, lui, moi. Deux maitres des 
 
 flammes. 
 Lui perdant les humains, moi secourant les ames; 
 Tous deux bourreuax, faisant par le meme moyen 
 Lui I'enfer, moi le ciel, lui le mal, moi le bien; 
 II est dans le cloaque et je suis dans le temple, 
 Et le noir tremblement de I'ombre nous contemple. 
 
 // se reiourne vers les supplicies. 
 
 Ah ! sans moi, vous etiez perdus, mes bien-aimes 1 
 La piscine de feu vous epure enflammes. 
 Ah ! vous me maudissez pour un instant qui passe, 
 Enfants ! mais tout a I'heure, oui, vous me rendrez 
 
 grace 
 Quand vous verrez a quoi vous avez echappe; 
 Car, ainsi que Michel-Archange, j'ai frappe; 
 Car les blancs seraphins, penches au puits de soufFre, 
 Raillent le monstrueux avortement du gouffre; 
 Car votre hurlement de haine arrive au jour, 
 Begaie, et, stupefait, s'acheve enchant d'amour ! 
 Oh ! comme j'ai souffert de vous voir dans les chambres 
 De torture, criant, pleurant, tordantvos membres.
 
 142 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Manics parl'etau d'airain, par le fer chaud ! 
 Vous voi'a delivres, partez, fuyez la-haut I 
 Entrez au paradis ! 
 
 // se penche et scmhk regarJer sous ierre. 
 
 Non, tu n'auras plus d'ames ! 
 // se redresse. 
 
 Dieu nous donne I'appui que nous lui demandames, 
 Et rhomrae est hors du gouffre. Allez, allez, allez! 
 A travers Tombre ardente et les grands feux ailes, 
 Levanouissement de la fumee emporte 
 La-haut I'esprit vivant sauv6 de la chair morte ! 
 Tout le vieux crime humain de rhomme est arrach^; 
 L'un avait son erreur, I'autre avait son peche, 
 Faute ou vice, chaque ame avait son monstre enelle 
 Qui rungeait sa lumiere ct qui mordait son aile; 
 L'ange expirait en proie au demon. Maintenant 
 Toutbrule, et le partage auguste et rayonnant 
 Se fait devant Jesus dans la clarte dts lombes. 
 Dragons, tombez en cendre; envolvez-vous, colombes ! 
 Vous que I'enfer tenait, liberte ! libcrte ! 
 Montez de I'ombre au jour. Changez d'eternitd ! 
 
 The last act would indeed be too cruel for en- 
 durance if it were not too beautiful for blame. 
 But not the inquisition itself was more inevitably 
 inexorable than is the spiritual law, the unaltera- 
 ble and immitigable instinct, of tragic poetry at 
 its highest. Dante could not redeem Francesca, 
 Shakespeare could not rescue Cordelia. To none 
 of us, we must think, can the children of a great
 
 THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO. 143 
 
 poet's divine imagination seem dearer or more de- 
 serving of mercy than they seemed to their crea- 
 tor: but when poetry demands their immolation, 
 they must die, that they may Hve for ever. 
 
 Once more, but now for the last time, the world 
 was to receive yet another gift from the living 
 hand of the greatest man it had seen since Shake- 
 speare. Towards the close of his eighty-second 
 year he bestowed on us the crowning volume of 
 his crowning work, the imperishable and inappre- 
 ciable Le'gcnde dcs Sihics. And at the age of 
 eighty-three years, two months, and twenty-six 
 days, he entered into rest for ever, and into glory 
 which can perish only with the memory of all 
 things memorable among all races and nations of 
 mankind. 
 
 I have spoken here — and no man can know so 
 well or feel so deeply as myself with what imperfec- 
 tion of utterance and inadequacy of insight I have 
 spoken — of Victor Hugo as the whole world knew 
 and as all honorable or intelligent men regarded 
 and revered him. But there are those among his 
 friends and mine who would have a right to won- 
 der if no word were here to be said of the unso- 
 licited and unmerited kindness which first vouch- 
 safed to take notice of a crude and puerile attempt
 
 144 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 to render some tribute of thanks for the gifts of 
 his genius just twenty-three years ago; of the 
 kindness which was always but too ready to re- 
 cognize and requite a gratitude which had no 
 claim on him but that of a very perfect loyalty; of 
 the kindness which many years afterwards re- 
 ceived me as a guest under his roof with the wel- 
 come of a father to a son. Such matters, if touched 
 on at all, unquestionably should not be dwelt on 
 in public: but to give them no word whatever of 
 acknowledgment at parting would show rather 
 unthankfulness than reserve in one who was hon- 
 ored so far above all possible hope or merit by 
 the paternal goodness of Victor Hugo.
 
 LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES. 
 
 1883. 
 
 " Chacun a sa maniere. Quant S, moi, qui parle ici, j'admire 
 tout, comme une brute. — N'espcrcz done aucune critique. — ^Je ne 
 chicane point ces grands bienfaiteurs-1^. Ce que vous qualifiez 
 defaut, je le qualifie accent. Je re9ois et je remercie.- — Ayant eu 
 I'honneur d'etre appele "niais" par plusieurs ecrivains et 
 critiques distingues, je cherche a justifier I'epithete." 
 
 The greatest work of the century is now at 
 length complete. It is upwards of twenty-four 
 years since the first part of it was sent home to 
 France from Guernsey. Eighteen years later we 
 received a second instalment of the yet unex- 
 hausted treasure. And here, at the age of eighty- 
 one, the sovereign poet of the world has placed 
 the copingstone on the stateliest of spiritual 
 buildings that ever in modern times has been 
 reared for the wonder and the worship of man- 
 kind. 
 
 Those only to whom nothing seems difficult be- 
 cause nothimj to them seems greater than them-
 
 146 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 selves could find it other than an arduous under- 
 taking to utter some word of not unworthy wel- 
 come and thanksgiving when their life is suddenly- 
 enriched and brightened by such an addition to 
 its most precious things as the dawn of a whole 
 new world of song — and a world that may hold 
 its own in heaven beside the suns created or 
 jvoked by the fiat of Shakespeare or of Dante. 
 To review the Dhnne Comedy, to dispose oi Ham- 
 let in the course of a leading article, to despatch 
 in a few sentences the question of Paradise Lost 
 and its claim to immortality, might seem easy to 
 judges who should feel themselves on a level 
 with the givers of these gifts; for others it could 
 be none the less difficult to discharge this office 
 because the gift was but newly given. One minor 
 phase of the difficulty which presents itself is this: 
 the temporary judge, self-elected to pass sentence 
 on any supreme achievement of human power, 
 must choose on which horn of an inevitable dilem- 
 ma he may prefer to run the risk of impalement. If, 
 recognizing in this new master-work an equal 
 share of the highest qualities possible to man 
 with that possessed and manifested by any pre- 
 vious writer of now unquestioned supremacy, he 
 takes upon himself to admit, simply and honestly,
 
 LA LEGEND E DES SIECLES. 147 
 
 that he does recognize this, and cannot choose 
 but recognize it, he must know that his judgment 
 will be received with no more tolerance or respect, 
 with no less irritation and derision, than would 
 have been, in Dante's time, the judgment of a critic 
 who should have ventured to rank Dante above 
 Virgil, in Shakespeare's time of a critic who should 
 have dared to set Shakespeare beside Homer. If, 
 on the other hand, he should abstain with all due 
 discretion from any utterance or any intimation of 
 a truth so ridiculous and untimely, he runs the 
 sure and certain risk of leaving behind him a 
 name to be ranked, by all who remember it at all, 
 with those which no man mentions without a 
 smile of compassion or of scorn, according to the 
 quality of error discernible in the critic's mis- 
 judgment: innocent and incurable as the confi- 
 dence of a Johnson or a Jeffrey, venomous and 
 malignant as the rancor of Sainte-Beuve or Gif- 
 ford. Of these two dangers I choose the former; 
 and venture to admit, in each case with equal dif- 
 fidence, that I do upon the whole prefer Dante to 
 any Cino or Cecco, Shakespeare to all the Greenes 
 and Peeles and Lillys, Victor Hugo to all or any, 
 of their respective times. The reader who has no 
 tolerance for paradox or presumption has there- 
 fore fair warning to read no further.
 
 148 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Auguste Vacquerie, of all poets and all men 
 living the most worthy to praise the greatest poet 
 of his century, has put on record long ago, with 
 all the vivid ardor of his admirable style, an ex- 
 perience of which I now am but too forcibly re- 
 minded. He was once invited by Victor Hugo 
 to choose among the manuscripts of the master's 
 unpublished work, from the drawers containing 
 respectively some lyric or dramatic or narrative 
 masterpiece, of which among the three kinds he 
 would prefer to have a sample first. Unable to 
 select, he touched a drawer at random, which con- 
 tained the opening chapters of a yet unfinished 
 story — Lcs Aliserablcs. If it is no less hard to 
 choose where to begin in a notice of the Legende 
 des Sicclcs — to decide what star in all this thronged 
 and living heaven should first attract the direc- 
 tion of our critical telescope — it is on the other 
 hand no less certain that on no side can the tele- 
 scope be misdirected. From the miraculous music 
 of a legendary dawn, when the first woman felt 
 first within her the movement of her first-born 
 child, to the crowning vision of ultimate justice 
 made visible and material in the likeness of the 
 trumpet of doom, no radiance or shadow of days 
 or nights intervening, no change of light or ca-
 
 LA LEG END E DES SLECLES. 149 
 
 dence cf music in all the tragic pageant of the 
 centuries, finds less perfect expression and re- 
 sponse, less absolute refraction or reflection, than 
 all that come and go before or after it. History 
 and legend, fact and vision, are fused and harmon- 
 ized by the mastering charm of moral unity in 
 imaginative truth. There is no more possibility 
 of discord or default in this transcendent work of 
 human power than in the working of those pow- 
 ers of nature which transcend humanity. In the 
 first verses of the overture we hear such depth and 
 height of music, see such breadth and splendor of 
 beauty, that we know at once these cannot but 
 continue to the end ; and from the end, when we 
 arrive at the goal of the last line, we look back 
 and perceive that it has been so. Were this over- 
 ture but a thought less perfect, a shade less tri- 
 umphant, we might doubt if what was to follow 
 it could be as perfect and triumphant as itself. 
 We might begin — and indeed, as it is, there are 
 naturally those who have begun — to debate with 
 ourselves or to dispute with the poet as to the 
 details of his scheme, the selection of his types, 
 the propriety of his method, the accuracy of his 
 title. There are those who would seem to infer 
 from the choice of this title that the book is, in
 
 1 50 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 the most vulgar sense, of a purely legendary cast; 
 who object, for example, that a record of unself- 
 ish and devoted charity shown by the poor to the 
 poor is, happily, no " legend." Writers in whom 
 such self-exposure of naked and unashamed ignor- 
 ance with respect to the rudiments of language 
 is hardly to be feared have apparently been in- 
 duced or inclined to expect some elaborate and 
 orderly review of history, some versified chronicle 
 of celebrated events and significant epochs, such 
 as might perhaps be of subsidiary or supplement- 
 ary service in the training of candidates for a 
 competitive examination ; and on finding some- 
 thing very different from this have tossed head 
 and shrugged shoulder in somewhat mistimed im- 
 patience, as at some deception or misnomer on 
 the great author's part which they, as men of 
 culture and understanding, had a reasonable right 
 to resent. The book, they affirm, is a mere ag- 
 glomeration of unconnected episodes, irrelevant 
 and incoherent, disproportionate and fortuitous, 
 chosen at random by accident or caprice; it is not 
 one great palace of poetry, but a series or conge- 
 ries rather of magnificently accumulated frag- 
 ments. It may be urged in answer to this im- 
 peachment that the unity of the book is not logic-
 
 LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES. 151 
 
 al but spiritual ; its diversity is not accidental or 
 chaotic, it is the result and expression of a spon- 
 taneous and perfect harmony, as clear and as 
 profound as that of the other greatest works 
 achieved by man. To demonstrate this by rule 
 and line of syllogism is no present ambition of 
 mine. A humbler, a safer, and perhaps a more 
 profitable task would be to attempt some flying 
 summary, some glancing revision of the three 
 great parts which compose this mightiest poem 
 of our age; or rather, if this also should seem too 
 presumptuous an aspiration, to indicate here and 
 there the points to which memory and imagina- 
 tion are most fain to revert most frequently and 
 brood upon them longest, with a deeper delight, 
 a more rapturous reverence, than waits upon the 
 rest. Not that I would venture to assert or to 
 insinuate that there is in any poem of the cycle 
 any note whatever of inferiority or disparity; but 
 having neither space nor time nor power to 
 speak, however inadequately, of each among the 
 hundred and thirty-eight poems which compose 
 the now perfect book, I am compelled to choose, 
 not quite at random, an example here and there 
 of its highest and most typical qualities. In the 
 first book, for instance, of the first series, the di-
 
 152 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 vine poem on Ruth and Boaz may properly be 
 taken as representative of that almost indefinable 
 quality which hitherto has seemed more especially 
 the gift of Dante: a fusion, so to speak, of sub- 
 limity with sweetness, the exaltation of loveli- 
 ness into splendor and simplicity into mystery, 
 such as glorifies the close of his Purgatory and 
 the opening of his Paradise. Again, the majestic 
 verses which bring Mahomet before us at his end 
 strike a deeper impression into the memory than 
 is left by the previous poem on the raising of 
 Lazarus ; and when we pass into the cycle of 
 heroic or chivalrous legend we find those poems 
 the loftiest and the loveliest which have in them 
 most of that prophetic and passionate morality 
 which makes the greatest poet, in this as in some 
 other ages, as much a seer as a singer, an evan- 
 gelist no less than an artist. Hugo, for all his 
 dramatic and narrative mastery of effect, will al ■ 
 ways probably remind men rather of such poets 
 as Dante or Isaiah than of such poets as Sopho- 
 cles or Shakespeare. We cannot of course im- 
 agine the Florentine or the Hebrew endowed 
 with his infinite variety of sympathies, of interests, 
 and of powers; but as little can we imagine in the 
 Athenian such height and depth of passion, in
 
 LA LEGENDS DES SIECLES 153 
 
 the Englishman such unquenchable and sleepless 
 fire of moral and prophetic faith. And hardly in 
 any one of these, though Shakespeare may per- 
 haps be excepted, can we recognize the same 
 buoyant and childlike exultation in such things 
 as are the delight of a high-hearted child — in free 
 glory of adventure and ideal daring, in the tri- 
 umph and rapture of reinless imagination, which 
 gives now and then some excess of godlike em- 
 pire and superhuman kingship to their hands 
 whom his hands have created, to the lips whose 
 life is breathed into them from his own. By the 
 Homeric stature of the soul he measures the heroic 
 capacity of the sword. And indeed it is hardly in 
 our century that men who do not wish to provoke 
 laughter should venture to mock at a poet who 
 puts a horde to flight before a hero, or strikes 
 down strongholds by the lightning of-a single will. 
 No right and no power to disbelieve in the arm of 
 Hercules or the voice of Jesus can rationally re- 
 main with those who have seen Garibaldi take a 
 kingdom into the hollow of his hand, and not one 
 man but a whole nation arise from the dead at the 
 sound of the word of Mazzini. 
 
 Two out of the five heroic poems which com- 
 pose the fourth book of the first series will always
 
 154 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 remain types of what the genius of Hugo could 
 achieve in two opposite Hnes. All the music of 
 morning, all the sunshine of romance, all the 
 sweetness and charm of chivalry, will come back 
 upon all readers at the gracious and radiant name 
 of Ayvicrillot; all the blackness of darkness rank 
 with fumes of blood and loud with cries of tor- 
 ment, which covers in so many quarters the his- 
 tory, not romantic but actual, of the ages called 
 ages of faith, will close in upon the memory which 
 reverts to the direful Day of Kings. The sound 
 of the final note struck in the latter poem remains 
 in the mind as the echo of a crowning peal of 
 thunder in the ear of one entranced and spell- 
 stricken by the magnetism of storm. The Pyre- 
 nees belong to Hugo as the western coasts of 
 Italy, Neapolitan or Tuscan, belong to Shelley; 
 they can never again be done into words and 
 translated into music as for once they have been 
 by these. It can hardly be said that he who 
 knows the Pyrenees has read Victor Hugo; but 
 certainly it may be said that he who knows Vic- 
 tor Hugo has seen the Pyrenees. From the au- 
 thor's prefatory avowal that his book contains 
 few bright or smiling pictures, a reader would 
 never have inferred that so many of its pages are
 
 LA LEGEJSDE DBS SIECLES. 155 
 
 fragrant with all the breath and radiant with all 
 the bloom of April or May among the pine-woods 
 and their mountain lawns, ablaze with ardent 
 blossom and astir with triumphant song. Tragedy 
 may be hard at hand, with all the human train of 
 sorrows and passions and sins; but the glory of 
 beauty, the loveliness of love, the exultation of 
 noble duty and lofty labor in a stress of arduous 
 joy, these are the influences that pervade the 
 world and permeate the air of the poems which 
 deal with the Christian cycle of heroic legend, 
 whose crowning image is the ideal figure of the 
 Cid. To this highest and purest type of mediaeval 
 romance or history the fancy of the great poet 
 whose childhood was cradled in Spain turns and 
 returns throughout the course of his threefold 
 masterpiece with an almost national pride and 
 passion of sublime delight. Once in the first part 
 and once in the third his chosen hero is set be- 
 fore us in heroic verse, doing menial service for 
 his father in his father's house, and again, in a 
 king's palace, doing for humanity the sovereign 
 service of tyrannicide. But in the second part it 
 seems as though the poet could hardly, with his 
 fullest effusion of lyric strength and sweetness, do 
 enough to satisfy his loving imagination of the
 
 156 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 perfect knight, most faithful and most gentle and 
 most terrible, whom he likens even to the very 
 Pic du Midi in its majesty of solitude. Each fresh 
 blast of verse has in it the ring of a golden clar- 
 ion which proclaims in one breath the honor of 
 the loyal soldier and the dishonor of the disloyal 
 king. There can hardly be in any language a 
 more precious and wonderful study of technical 
 art in verse of the highest kind of simplicity than 
 this Rotnancero dii Cid, with its jet of luminous 
 and burning song sustained without lapse or break 
 through sixteen " fyttes " of plain brief ballad 
 metre. It is hard to say whether the one only 
 master of all forms and kinds of poetry that ever 
 left to all time the proof of his supremacy in all 
 has shown most clearly by his use of its highest 
 or his use of its simplest forms the innate and 
 absolute equality of the French language as an in- 
 strument for poetry with the Greek of yEschylus 
 and of Sappho, the English of Milton and of 
 Shelley. 
 
 But among all Hugo's romantic and tragic 
 poems of mediaeval history or legend the two 
 greatest are in my mind Eviradmis and Ratbert. 
 I cannot think it would be rash to assert that the 
 loveliest love-song in the world, the purest and
 
 LA LEG END E DLS SIECLES. 157 
 
 keenest rapture of lyric fancy, the sweetest and 
 
 clearest note of dancing or dreaming music, is that 
 
 which rings forever in the ear which has once 
 
 caught the matchless echo of such lines as these 
 
 that must once more be quoted, as though all the 
 
 world of readers had not long since known them 
 
 by heart: — 
 
 Viens, sois tendre, je suis ivre. 
 O les verts taillis mouilles ! 
 Ton souffle te fera suivre 
 Des papillons reveilles. 
 
 Allons-nous-en par I'Autriche ! 
 Nous aurons I'aube a nos fronts; 
 Je serai grand, et toi riche, 
 Puisque nous nous aimerons. 
 
 Tu seras dame, et moi comte; 
 Viens, men cceur s'epanouit, 
 Viens, nous conterons ce conte 
 Aux etoiles de la nuit. 
 
 The poet would be as sure of a heavenly immor- 
 tality in the hearts of men as any lyrist of Greece 
 itself, who should only have written the fourteen 
 stanzas of the song from which I have ventured 
 to choose these three. All the sounds and shad- 
 ows of a moonlit wilderness, all the dews and
 
 158 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 murmurs and breaths of midsummer midnight, 
 have become for once articulate in such music as 
 was never known even to Shakespeare's forest of 
 Arden. In the heart of a poem so full of tragedy 
 and terror that Hugo alone could have brightened 
 it with his final touch of sunrise, this birdlike rap- 
 ture breaks out as by some divine effect of unfor- 
 bidden and blameless magic. 
 
 And yet, it may be said or thought, the master 
 of masters has shown himself even greater in Rat- 
 bcrt than in Eviradmts. 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 rath, 
 august and pitiless command of terror and pity. 
 From the kingly and priestly conclave of debaters 
 more dark than Milton's to the superb admoni- 
 tion 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
 
 LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES. 159 
 
 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 ap- 
 peal 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 Shake- 
 speare'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 pas- 
 sion and pathos and fire of terrible emotion, the 
 highest in sheer sublimity of imagination is to my 
 mind Zim-Zizinii. 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 for-
 
 i6o A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 ward 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 won- 
 derful than here. Even after the vision of the 
 tomb of Belus the miraculous impression of splen- 
 dor 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 Cleo- 
 patra, 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 fee- 
 bler 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 Cleopatre au lit ? 
 Venez; lalcove est morne, une brume I'emplit; 
 Cleopatre est couchee a jamais; cette femme
 
 LA LEGEND E DES SIECLES. i6i 
 
 Fut 1 eblouissement de I'Asie, et la flamme 
 
 Que tout le genre humain avait dans son regard; 
 
 Quand elle disparut, le monde fut hagard; 
 
 Ses dents etaient de perle et sa bouche etait d'ambre; 
 
 Les rois mouraient d'amour en etrant dans sa chambre; 
 
 Pour elle Ephractaeus soumit I'Atlas, Sapor 
 
 Vint d'Ozymandias saisir les cercle d'or, 
 
 Mamylos conquit Suse et Tentyris detruite 
 
 Et Palmyre, et pour elle Antoine prit la fuite; 
 
 Entre elle et I'univers qui s'offraient a la fois 
 
 II hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix. 
 
 Cleopatre egalait les Junons eternelles; 
 
 Une chaine sortait de ses vagues prunelles; 
 
 O tremblant coeur humain, si jamais tu vibras, 
 
 C'est dans I'etreinte altiere et douce de ses bras; 
 
 Son nom seul enivrait; Strophus n'osait I'ecrire; 
 
 La terre s'eclairait de son divin sourire, 
 
 A force de lumiere et d'amour, effrayant; 
 
 Sons corps semblait meled'azur; en la voyant, 
 
 Venus, le soir, rentrait jalouse sous la nue; 
 
 Cleopatre embaumait I'Egj-pte; toute nue, 
 
 Elle brulait les yeux ainsi que le soleil; 
 
 Les roses enviaient I'ongle de son orteil; 
 
 O vivants, allez voir sa tombe souveraine; 
 
 Fiere, elle 6tait deesse et daignait etre reine; 
 
 L'amour prenait pour arc sa levre aux coins moqueurs; 
 
 Sa beaute rendait fous les fronts, les sens, les coeurs, 
 
 Et plus que les lions rugissants dtait 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
 
 1 62 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 no- 
 where now be any need, to speak at any length of 
 the poems in which Roland plays the part of pro- 
 tagonist; 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 law- 
 less 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 primaeval 
 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 tri- 
 umph of invincible humanity, the protest and 
 witness of enduring earth against the passing 
 shades of heaven, the struggle and the plea of
 
 LA LEGEND E DES SIECLES. 163 
 
 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 uni- 
 versal substance which is spirit or matter of life; 
 and before the face of his transfiguration the om- 
 nipresent and omnipotent gods who take each 
 their turn to shine and thunder are all but shad-
 
 i64 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 ows 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 an- 
 swers 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 vEschylus. 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
 
 LA LEGEND E DES SIECLES. 165 
 
 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 loneli- 
 ness, 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
 
 1 66 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 said of the great " absymal" 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 Chan- 
 sons des Rues et des Bois; in both cases, as in so 
 many of the poet's earlier lyric volumes, his in- 
 comparable fertility of speech and superb facility 
 of verse leave almost an impression as of work 
 done by way of exercise, as though he were writ- 
 ing 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 in- 
 most 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
 
 LA LEGEND E DES SLECLES. 167 
 
 of LArt cVctre Grandpere, making dim with love 
 and delig-ht the reader's or the hearer's eyes. At 
 last the language of babies has found its inter- 
 preter; and that, as might have been expected, in 
 the greatest poet of his age. 
 
 L'enfant apporte un peu de ce del dent il sort; 
 
 II ignore, il arrive; homme, tu le recueilles. 
 
 // a le tremblevient des herbes et dcs feidlles. 
 
 La jaserie avant le langage est la fleur 
 
 Qui precede le fruit, moins beau qu'elle, et meilleur, 
 
 Si c'est etre meilleur qu'etre plus necessaire. 
 
 A conclusion which may be doubted when we 
 consider as follows: 
 
 L'enfant fait la demande et I'ange la reponse; 
 Le babil pueril dans le ciel bleu s'enfonce, 
 Puis s'en revient, avec les hesitations 
 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 I'ombre qui le benit, 
 La fauvette, attentive, au rebord de son nid 
 Se dresse, et scs petits passent, pensifs et freles, 
 Leurs tetes a travers les plumes de ses ailes; 
 La mere semble dire a sa couvee: Entends, 
 Et tache de parler aussi bien.
 
 1 68 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 It seems and is not strange that the lips which 
 distil such honey as this should be the same so 
 often touched with a coal of fire from that "altar 
 of Righteousness " where ^schylus 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 Chdtiments. 
 Even in that awful and incomparable book of 
 judgment such poems as La Colere dii 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 cen- 
 tury 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 done maintenant dit qu'il s'est evade? 
 
 In Le Cimetiere d'Eylmi, 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
 
 LA LEG END E DES SIECLES. 169 
 
 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 com- 
 memorates the devotion of a Vendean peasant 
 chief will be set in the hearts of all readers com- 
 petent 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 an- 
 other 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 moun- 
 tains. The sublimest cry of moral passion ever 
 inspired by communion in spirit with these is ut- 
 tered in the great poem on the Swiss mercenaries 
 of the seventeenth century, which even among 
 its fellows stands out eminent and radiant as an
 
 1 70 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 Regiment dii 
 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, 
 F^conde, croit, decroit, rit, passe, efface tout. 
 La Suisse est toujours la, libre. Prend-on au piege 
 La precipice, I'ombre et la bise et la neige ? 
 Signe-t-on des marches dans lesquels il soit dit 
 Que rOrteler s'enrole et devient un bandit? 
 Quel poing cyclopeen, diies, 6 roches noires, 
 Pourra briser la Dent de Morcle en vos machoires ? 
 Quel assembleur de bceufs pourra forger un joug 
 Qui du pic de Claris aille au piton de Zoug ? 
 C'est naturellement que les monts sont fideles 
 Et purs, ayant la forme apre des citadelles,
 
 LA LEGENDS DES SIECLES. 171 
 
 Ayant regu de Dieu des creneaux ou le soir, 
 L'homme peut, d'embrasure en embrasure, voir 
 Eiinceler le fer de lance des etoiles. 
 Est-il une araignee, aigle, qui dans ses toiles 
 Puisse prendre la trombe et la rafale et toi ? 
 Quel chef recrutera le Saleve ? a quel roi 
 Le jNIythen dira-t-il: " Sire, je vais descendre I 
 Qu'apres avoir dompte I'Athos, quelque Alexandre, 
 Sorte de heros monstre aux cornes de taureau, 
 Aille done relever sa robe a la Jungfrau ! 
 Comme la vierge, ayant I'ouragan sur I'epaule, 
 Crachera I'avalanche a la face du drole ! 
 
 Non, rien n'est mort ici. Tout grandit, et s'en vante. 
 
 L'Helvetie est sacree, et la Suisse est vivante; 
 
 Ces monts sont des heros et des religieux; 
 
 Cette nappe de neige aux plis prodigieux 
 
 D'ou jaillit, lorsqu'en mai la tiede brise ondoie, 
 
 Toute une floraison folle d'air et de joie, 
 
 Et d'oij sortent des lacs et des flots murmurants, 
 
 N'est le linceul de rien, excepte 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 open- 
 ed 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
 
 172 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 to Aymerillot in frank majesty of beauty; that 
 even 2S.\.qx Le Parricide -a. fresh depth of tragic ter- 
 ror should be sounded by Gdiffer-Jorge; 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 line of 
 La Patertiite. 
 
 But of all echoes and of all responses which re- 
 verberate 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 lit- 
 tle 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, compar- 
 atively compassionate in its cruelty, gave us our 
 choice which this one should be, the best judg- 
 ments 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 bab- 
 blers who use them to signify the photography of 
 all things abject might learn, if shallow insolence 
 and unclean egotism were suddenly made capa- 
 ble of learning, by the study of only the two 
 poems which set before us in two different forms
 
 LA LEGENDE DBS SIECLES. 173 
 
 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 im- 
 pregnation 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 chari- 
 ty of a fisherman's wife towards the children of 
 her dead neighbor. It has all the beautiful pre- 
 cision and accurate propriety of detail which dis- 
 tinguish the finest idyls of Theocritus or Tenny-
 
 174 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 son, 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 an bordde la mer than in the idyllic in- 
 terior called Les paiivres 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 shred- 
 dings of their fleece. We remember in Les Voix 
 Intcrieures 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
 
 LA LEGEXDE DES SIECEES. 175 
 
 which gives us the third of the four blasts blown 
 from Les Quatre Vents de V Esprit, there are vis- 
 ions 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 ter- 
 ror is struck in these two first verses. 
 
 Les pauvres gens de la cote, 
 L'hiver, quand la mer est haute 
 
 Et qu'il fait nuit, 
 Viennent ou finit la terre 
 Voir les flots pleins de mystere 
 
 Et pleins de bruit, 
 
 lis sondent la mer sans bornes; 
 lis pensent aux ecueils mornes 
 
 Et triomphants; 
 L'orpheline pale et seule 
 Crie: 6 men pere ! et I'aieule 
 
 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. Wit- 
 ness this: — 
 
 Et Ton se met en prieres, 
 Pendant que joncs et bruyeres 
 Et bois touffus,
 
 176 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 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 aupres de I'ocean 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 aliier pour I'apaiser 
 
 La fum6e humble des villages. 
 
 Ne frappe pas, tonnerre. lis sonts petits, ceux-ci. 
 La terre est bonne; elle est grave et severe aussi; 
 
 Les roses sont pares comme elle; 
 Quiconque pense, espere et travaille lui plait;
 
 LA LmENDE DES SINGLES i^j 
 
 Et I'innocence offerte a tout homme est son lait, 
 Et la justice est sa mamelle. 
 
 La terre cache Tor et montre les moissons; 
 Elle met dans le flanc des fuyantes saisons 
 
 Le germe des saisons prochaines, 
 Dans I'azur les oiseaux qui chuchotent: aimons ! 
 Et les sources au fond de I'omhre, et sur les monts 
 
 L'immense tremblement des chenes. 
 
 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 chal- 
 lenge to the hopes and dreams of mankind: — 
 
 Je suis la vaste melee. 
 Reptile, etant I'onde, ail^e, 
 
 Etant le vent; 
 Force et fuite, haine et vie, 
 Houle immense, poursuivie 
 
 Et poursuivant. 
 
 The motion of the sea was never till now so 
 perfectly done into words as in these three last 
 lines; but any one to whom the water was as 
 dear or dearer than the land at its loveliest would 
 have found a delight as of love no less conceiv- 
 able than a passion as of hatred in the more vis- 
 ible and active life of waves, and at least as 
 palpable to the " shaping spirit of imagination."
 
 178 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 It remains true, after all, for the greatest as for 
 the humblest, that — in the words of one of the 
 very few poets whose verses are fit to quote even 
 after a verse of Hugo's — 
 
 we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone doth nature live; 
 
 so far, at least, as her life concerns us, and is per- 
 ceptible or appreciable by our spirit or our sense. 
 A magnificent instance of purely dramatic vision, 
 in which the lyric note is tempered to the circum- 
 stance of the speakers with a kind of triumphant 
 submission and severe facility, is La Chanso7i des 
 Doreiirs de Proues. The poet's unequalled and 
 unapproached variety in mastery of metre and 
 majesty of color and splendid simplicity .of style, 
 no less exact than sublime, and no less accurate 
 than passionate, could hardly be better shown 
 than by comparison of the opening verses with 
 the stanza cited above. 
 
 Nous sommes les doreurs de proues. 
 Les vents, tournant comme des roues, 
 Sur la verte rondeur des eaux 
 Melent les lueurs et les ombres, 
 Et dans les plis des vagues sombres 
 Trainent les obliques vaisseaux.
 
 LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES. 179 
 
 La bouirasque decrit des courbes, 
 Les vents sont tortueux et fourbes, 
 L'archer noir souffle dans son cor, 
 Ces bruits s'ajoutent aux vertiges, 
 Et c'est nous qui dans ces prodiges 
 Faisons roder des spectres d'or. 
 
 Car c'est un spectre que la proue. 
 Le {lot I'etreint, I'air la secoue; 
 Fiere, elle sort de nos bazars 
 Pour servir aux eclairs de cible, 
 Et pour etre un regard terrible 
 Parmi les sinistres hasards. 
 
 It is more than fifty years since Les Orientales 
 rose, radiant upon the world of letters, and the 
 hand which gave them to mankind has lost so 
 little of its cunning that we are well-nigh tempted 
 to doubt whether then, for all its skill and sure- 
 ness of touch, it had quite the same strength and 
 might of magnificent craftsmanship as now. 
 There was fire as well as music on the lips of the 
 young man, but the ardor of the old man's song 
 seems even deeper and keener than the passion of 
 his past. The fervent and majestic verses of June 
 2, 1883, strike at starting the note of measureless 
 pity and immeasurable indignation which rings 
 throughout the main part of the fifth and last vol- 
 ume almost louder and fuller, if possible, than it
 
 i8o A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 was wont. All Victor Hugo, we may say, is in 
 this book; it is as one of those ardent evening 
 skies in which sunrise and sunset seem one in the 
 flush of overarching color which glows back from 
 the Avest to the east with reverberating bloom and 
 fervor of rose-blossom and fire. There is life 
 enough in it, enough of the breath and spirit and 
 life-blood of living thought, to vivify a whole gen- 
 eration of punier souls and feebler hearts with the 
 heat of his fourscore years. It may be doubted 
 whether there ever lived a poet and leader of men 
 to whom these glorious verses would be so closely 
 applicable as to their writer. 
 
 Un grand esprit en marche a ses rumeurs, ses houles, 
 
 Ses chocs, et fait fremir profondement les foules, 
 
 Et remue en passant le monde autour de lui. 
 
 On est epouvante si Ton n'est ebloui; 
 
 L'homme comme un nuage erre et change de forme; 
 
 Nul, si petit qu'il soit, echappe au souffle enorme; 
 
 Les plus humbles, pendant qu'il parle, ont le frisson. 
 
 Ainsi quand, 6vade dans le vaste horizon, 
 L'aquilon qui se hate et qui cherche aventure 
 Tord la pluie et Teclair, comme de sa ceinture 
 Une fille d^fait en souriant le noeud, 
 Quand I'immense vent gronde et passe, tout s'emeut. 
 Pas un brin d'herbe au fond des ravins, que ne touche 
 Cette rapid ite formidable et farouche.
 
 LA LEGENDS DES SIECLES. i8i 
 
 And this wind " bloweth where it listeth": now 
 it comes to us charged with all the heart of all 
 the roses in the world; its breath when it blows 
 towards Greece has in it a murmur as of Shelley's 
 Epipsychidion; the caress of its love-making has 
 all the freedom and all the purity of Blake's; now 
 it passes by us in darkness, from depth to depth 
 of the bitter mystery of night. A vision of ruined 
 worlds, the floating purgatorial prisons of ruined 
 souls, adrift as hulks on the sea of darkness ever- 
 lasting, shows us the harvest in eternity of such 
 seed as was sown in time by the hands of such 
 guides and rulers of men as we hear elsewhere 
 speaking softly with each other in the shadows, 
 within hail of the confessional and the scaffold. 
 The loftiest words of counsel sound sweeter in 
 the speech of this great spirit than the warmest 
 whispers of pleasure; and again, the heaviest 
 stroke of damning satire is succeeded by the ten- 
 derest touch of a compassion that would leave 
 not a bird in captivity. The hand that opens 
 the cage-door is the same which has just turned 
 the key on the braggart swordsman, neither "vic- 
 torious " nor "dead," but condemned to everlast- 
 ing prison behind the bars of iron verse. 
 
 But the two long poems which dominate the
 
 1 82 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 book, like two twin summits clothed round with 
 fiery cloud and crowned with stormy sunshine, 
 tower equal in height and mass of structure with 
 the stateliest in the two parts preceding. The 
 voice that rolls throughout Les Qiuitre Jours 
 d'Elciis the thunder of its burning words reawak- 
 ens and prolongs the echo of Feli-bien's pity and 
 wrath over the murdered corpse of a child un- 
 born; we recognize in the speaker a kinsman of 
 Welfs, the unconquerable old castellan of Osbor, 
 delivered only by an act of charity into the 
 treacherous hands of the princes whom his cit- 
 adel had so long defied. Of Elciis, as of him, 
 the poet might have said — 
 
 Si la mer prononfait des noms dans ses mardes, 
 O vieil'ard, ce serait des noms comme le tien. 
 
 Such names will no doubt provoke the soft 
 superior smile of a culture too refined for any sort 
 of enthusiasm but the elegant ecstasy of self- 
 worship; and such simplicity will excite, on the 
 other hand, a deep-mouthed bray of scorn from 
 the whole school or church whose apostle in 
 France was St. Joseph de Maistre, in England 
 St. Thomas Coprostom, late of Craigenputtock 
 and Chelsea; the literary lappers of imaginary 
 blood, the inkhorn swordsmen and spokesmen of
 
 LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES. 183 
 
 immaterial iron. The rage of their contempt for 
 such as Hugo, the loathing of their scorn for such 
 as Shelley, ought long since to have abashed the 
 believers in principles which find no abler defend- 
 ers or more effective champions than these. 
 
 For it is true that the main truths preached and 
 enforced and insisted on by such fanatical rhetor- 
 icians as Milton, as Mazzini, or as Hugo, are as 
 old as the very notion of right and wrong, as the 
 rudest and crudest conception of truth itself; and 
 it is undeniable that the Gospel according to St. 
 Coprostom has the invaluable merit of pungent 
 eccentricity and comparatively novel paradox. 
 The evangelist of " golden silence " — whose own 
 speech, it may be admitted, was "quite other" 
 than "silvern" — is logically justified in his blatant 
 but ineffable contempt for the dull old doctrines 
 of mere mercy and righteousness, of liberty that 
 knows no higher law than duty, of duty that de- 
 pends for its existence on the existence of lib- 
 erty. Such a creed, in the phrase of a brother 
 philosopher whose " reminiscences " may be gath- 
 ered from Shakespeare, and whose views of his 
 contemporaries were identical in tone and ex- 
 pression with the opinions of Mr. Carlyle on his, 
 was mouldy before our grandsires had nails on
 
 1 84 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 their toes. It is far more intelligent, more ori- 
 ginal, more ingenious than all the old cant and 
 rant against priests and kings and vow-breakers 
 and blood-spillers, to discover the soul of good- 
 ness in Ratbert the Second or Napoleon the 
 Third, and observingly distil it out into analytic 
 and monodramatic blank verse. And it will never 
 be said that this reaction against the puerile or 
 senile preference of right to wrong and principle 
 to prosperity has not been carried far enough in 
 our time. Carlyle, the man of brass, and Musset, 
 the man of clay, as far apart on all other points 
 as two writers of genius could well be, have shown 
 themselves at one in high-souled scorn for "prin- 
 ciples of mere rebellion " such as Landor's and 
 Milton's, or for such "belief in a new Brutus" as 
 might disturb the dream of Augustulus. But, 
 even as an old paradox becomes with time a 
 commonplace, so does an old commonplace be- 
 come in its turn a paradox; and a generation 
 whose poets and historians have long blown the 
 trumpet before the legitimacy of Romanoffs or 
 the bastardy of Bonapartes may properly be star- 
 tled and scandalized at the childish eccentricity 
 of an old-world idealist who maintains his obso- 
 lete and preposterous belief that massacre is mur-
 
 LA LEG END E DES SIECLES. 185 
 
 der, that robbery is theft, and that perjury is 
 treason. No newer doctrine, no sounder phi- 
 losophy, no riper wisdom than this, can be gath- 
 ered from the declamations of those idle old men 
 — as Goneril, for example, would have called 
 them — who speak this poet's mind again and 
 again in verse which has no more variety of 
 splendor or magnificence of music than the sea. 
 
 Helas, on voit encor les astres se lever, 
 L'aube sur I'Apennin jeter sa clarte douce, 
 L'oiseau faire son nid avec des brins de mousse. 
 La mcr battre les rocs dans ses flux et reflux, 
 Mais la grandeur des coeurs C'est ce qu'on ne voit plus. 
 
 There is nothing ingenious in that; it is no bet- 
 ter, intellectually considered, than a passage of 
 Homer or Isaiah. 
 
 But though every verse has the ring of tested 
 gold, and every touch gives notice of the master's 
 hand, yet the glory even of these Four Days is 
 eclipsed by the Vi'swn of Da7ite. Far apart and 
 opposite as they stand in all matters of poetic 
 style and method — Dante writing with the rigid 
 and reserved concision of a Tacitus, Hugo with 
 the rushing yet harmonious profusion of a Pindar 
 — the later master is the only modern poet who 
 could undertake without absurdity or presumption
 
 1 86 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 to put words worthy of Dante into Dante's mouth. 
 The brazen clatter of Byron's Prophecy was not 
 redeemed or brought into tune by the noble en- 
 ergy and sound insight of the political sympathies 
 expressed in the accent of a stump-orator to the 
 tune of a barrel-organ. But a verse of Hugo's 
 falls often as solid and weighty and sure, as full 
 in significance of perfect and pregnant sound, as 
 even a verse of Alighieri's. He therefore, but he 
 alone, had the power and the right to call up the 
 spirit of Dante now thirty years ago, and bid it 
 behold all the horrors of Europe in 1853; the 
 Europe of Haynau and Radetzky, of Nicholas 
 the First and Napoleon the' last. Any great 
 modern poet's notion of an everlasting hell must 
 of course be less merely material than Dante's 
 mechanism of hot and cold circles, fire and ice, 
 ordure and mire; but here is the same absolute 
 and equitable assent to justice, the same fierce 
 and ardent fidelity to conscience, the same logic 
 and the same loyalty as his. 
 
 O sentence ! 6 peine sans refuge ! 
 Tomber dans le silence et la brume a jamais ! 
 D'abord quelque clarte des lumineux sommets 
 Vous laisse distinguer vos mains desesperees. 
 On tombe, on voit passer des formes effarees,
 
 LA LEG END E DES SIECLES. 187 
 
 Bouches ouvertes, fronts ruisselants de sueur, 
 
 Des visages hideux qu'eclaire ude lueur. 
 
 Puis on ne voit plus rien. Tout s'efface et recule. 
 
 La nuit morne succede au sombre crepuscule. 
 
 On tombe. On n'est pas seul dans ces limbes d'en bas; 
 
 On sent frissonner ceux qu'on no distingue pas; 
 
 On ne sait si ce sont des hydres ou des hommes; 
 
 On se sent devenir les larves que nous sommes; 
 
 On entrevoit I'liorreur des lieux inaper9us, 
 
 Et I'abime au-dessous, et Tabime au-dessus. 
 
 Puis tout est vide ! on est le grain que le vent seme. 
 
 On n'entend pas le cri qu'on a pouse soi-meme; 
 
 On sent les profondeurs qui s'emparent de vous; 
 
 Les mains ne peuvent plus atteindre les genoux; 
 
 On leve au del les yeux et Ton voit I'ombre horrible; 
 
 On est dans I'impalpable, on est dans I'invisible; 
 
 Des souffles par moments passent dans cette nuit. 
 
 Puis on ne sent plus rien. — Pas un vent, pas un bruit, 
 
 Pas un souffle; la mort, la nuit; nulle rencontre; 
 
 Rien pas meme une chute affreuse ne se montre 
 
 Et I'on songe a la vie, au soleil, aux amours, 
 
 Et Ton pense toujours, et Ton tombe toujours ! 
 
 The resurrection of the victims to give evidence 
 at the summons of the archangel — a heavy cloud 
 of witnesses, 
 
 Triste, livide, enorme, ayant un air de rage — 
 
 men bound to the yoke like beasts, women with 
 bosoms gashed by the whip, children with their
 
 1 88 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 skulls cleft open — is direful as any less real and 
 actual vision of the elder hell. 
 
 Les oris d'enfant surtout venaient a men oreille; 
 Car, dans cette nuit-la, gouffre ou I'equite veille, 
 La voix del innocents sur toute autre prevaut, 
 C'est le cri des enfants qui monte le plus haut, 
 Et le vagissement fait le bruit du tonnerre. 
 
 The appeal for justice which follows, with its 
 enumeration of horrors unspeakable except by 
 history and poetry, is followed in its turn by the 
 evocation of the soldiers whom this army of mar- 
 tyrs has with one voice designated to the angel 
 of judgment as their torturers and murderers. 
 The splendid and sonorous verses in which the 
 muster of these legions after legions, with their 
 garments rolled in blood, is made to defile before 
 the eyes of reader or hearer, can be matched only 
 by the description of the Swiss mercenaries in Le 
 Regiment dii baron Madruce. 
 
 Un grand vautour dore les guidait comme un phare. 
 Tant qu'ils etaient au fond de I'ombre, la fanfare, 
 Comme un aigle agitant ses bruyants ailerons, 
 Chantait claire et joyeuse au front des escadrons, 
 Trompeites et tambours sonnaient, et des centaures 
 Frappaient des rends de cuivre entre leurs mains sonores; 
 Mais, des qu'ils arrivaient devant le flamboiement, 
 Les clairons effares se taisaient brusquement,
 
 LA LEGEND E DES SIECLES. 189 
 
 Tout ce bruit s eteignait. Reculant en desordre, 
 Leurs chevaux se cabraient et cherchaient a les mordre, 
 Et la lance et I'epee echappaient a leur poing. 
 
 Challenged to make answer, the assassins of 
 Italy and Hungary plead that they were but the 
 sword, their captains were the hand. These are 
 summoned in their turn, and cast their crimes in 
 turn upon the judges who bade them shed blood 
 and applauded their blood-shedding in the name 
 of law and justice. And the judges and lawgivers 
 are summoned in their stead. 
 
 Ces hommes regardaient I'ange d'un air surpris: 
 Comme, en lettres de feu, rayonnait sur sa face 
 Son nom, Justice, entre eux ils disaient a voix basse: 
 Que veut dire ce mot qu'il porta sur son front ? 
 
 Charged with their complicity in all the public 
 crime and shame and horror of their period, these 
 in turn cast the burden of their wrong-doing on 
 the princes who commanded them and they 
 obeyed, seeing how the priests and soothsayers 
 had from all time assured them that kings were 
 the images of God. The images of God are sum- 
 moned, and appear, in the likeness of every form 
 of evil imaginable by man. 
 
 Devant chaque fantome, en la brume glacce, 
 Ayant le vague aspect d'une croix renversee,
 
 190 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Venait un glaive nu, ferme et droit dans le vent, 
 Qu'aucun bras ne tenait etqui semblait vivant. 
 
 Strange shapes of winged and monstrous beasts 
 were harnessed to the chariots on which the 
 thrones of the earth were borne forward. The 
 figure seated on the last of them will be recog- 
 nizable beyond all possibility of mistake by any 
 reader whose eyes have ever rested on a face 
 which beyond most human faces bore the visible 
 image and superscription of the soul behind it. 
 
 Les trones approchaient sous les lugubres cieux; 
 On entendait gemir autour des nuirs essieux 
 La clameur de tous ceiix qu'avaient broyes leurs roues; 
 lis venaient, ils fendaient rombre comme des proues; 
 Sous un souffle invisible ils semblaient se mouvoir; 
 Rien n'eiait plus 6trange et plus farouche a voir 
 Que ces chars effrayants tourbillonnant dans rombre. 
 Dans le gouffre tranquille ovi I'humanite sombre, 
 Ces trones de la terre apparaissaient hideux. 
 
 Le dernier qui venait, horrible au milieu d'eux, 
 Etait a chaque marche encombre de squelettes 
 Et de cadavres froids aux bouches violettes, 
 Et le plancher rougi fumait, de sang baigne; 
 Le char qui le portait dans Tombre etait train6 
 Par un hibou tenant dans sa grifFe une hache. 
 Un etre aux yeux de loup, homme par la moustache, 
 Au sommet de ce char s'agitait etonne, 
 Et se courbait furtif. livide et couronnd
 
 LA LEG END E DES SIECLES. 191 
 
 Pas un deces cesars a I'allure guerriere 
 Ne regardait cet homme. A I'ecart, et derriere, 
 Vetu d'un noir manteau qui semblait un linceul, 
 Espece de lepreux du trone, il venait seul; 
 II posait les deux mains sur sa face morose 
 Comme pour empccher qu'on y vit quelque chose; 
 Quand parfuis il otait ses mains en se baissant, 
 En lettres qui semblaient faites avec du sang 
 On lisait sur son front ces trois mots: — Je le jure. 
 
 It is a fearful thing, said the Hebrew, to fall 
 into the hands of the living God; and it is a fear- 
 ful thing for a malefactor to fall into the hands of 
 an ever-living poet. The injured Caesars of Rome 
 — Tiberius, for example, and Domitian — have not 
 even yet been delivered by the most conscientious 
 efforts of German and Anglo-German Cssarists 
 out of the prison whose keys are kept by Juvenal; 
 and a greater than Juvenal is here. 
 
 Summoned to make answer to the charge of 
 the angel of judgment, even these also have their 
 resource for evasion, and cast all their crimes 
 upon the Pope. 
 
 II nous disait: Je suis celui qui parle aux rois; 
 Quiconque me resiste et me brave est impie, 
 Ce qu'ici-bas j'ecris, la-haut Dieu le copie. 
 L'eglise, mon epouse, eclose au mont Thabor, 
 A fait de la doctrine une cage aux fils d'or, 
 Et comme des oiseaux j'y tiens toutes les ames.
 
 192 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 This man had blessed the murderers in their 
 triumph, and cursed their victims in the grave: — 
 
 Sa ceinlure servait de corde a nos potences. 
 II liait de ses mains I'agneau sous nos sentences; 
 Et quand on nous criait: Grace ! il nous criait: Feu I 
 C'est a lui que le mal revient. Voila, grand Dieu, 
 Ce qu'il a fait: voila ce qu'il nous a fait faire. 
 Cet homme etait le pole et I'axe de la sphere; 
 II est le responsable et nous le denon9ons ! 
 Seigneur, nous n'avons fait que suivre ses legons, 
 Seigneur, nous n'avons fait que suivre son exemple. 
 
 And the pontiff whose advent and whose prom- 
 ises had been hailed with such noble trust and 
 acclaimed with such noble thankfulness by those 
 who believed in him as a deliverer — by Lander 
 among others, and by Hugo himself — the Caia- 
 phas-Iscariot whose benediction and consecrated 
 massacre and anointed perjury with the rancid 
 oil of malodorous gladness above its fellows in 
 empire and in crime — is summoned out of dark- 
 ness to receive sentence by the sevenfold sound- 
 ing of trumpets. 
 
 Vetu de lin plus blanc qu'un encensoir qui fume, 
 II avait, spectre bleme aux idoles pareil, 
 Les baisers de la foule empreints sur son orteil, 
 Dans sa droite un baton comme I'antique archonte, 
 Sur son front la tiare, et dans ses yeux la honte.
 
 LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES. 193 
 
 De son cou descendait un long manteau dor^, 
 Et dans son poignet gauche il tenait, effare, 
 Comme un voleur surpris par celui qu'il derobe, 
 Des clefs qu'il essayait de cacher sous sa robe. 
 II eiait effrayant a force de terreur. 
 
 Quand surgit ce vieillard, on vit dans la lueur 
 L'ombre et le mouvement de quelqu'un qui se penche. 
 A I'apparition de cette robe blanche, 
 Au plus noir de Tabime un tonnerre gronda. 
 
 Then from all points of the immeasurable 
 spaces, from the womb of the cloud 7lx\A the 
 edge of the pit, is witness given against Pope 
 Pius IX. by the tyrants and the victims, mothers 
 and children and old men, the judges and the 
 judged, the murderers mingling with the mur- 
 dered, great and small, obscure and famous. 
 
 Tous ceux que j'avais vus passer dans les tenebres, 
 Avancant leur front triste, ouvrant leur oeil terni, 
 Fourmillement affreux qui peuplait I'infini, 
 Tous ces spectres, vivant, parlant, riant naguere, 
 Martyrs, bourreaux, et gens du peuple et gens de guerre, 
 Regardant rhomme blanc d'epouvante ebloui, 
 Eleverent la main et crierent: C'est lui. 
 
 Et pendant qu'ils criaient, sa robe devint rouge. 
 
 Au fond du goufFre ou rien ne tressaille et ne bouge 
 Un echo repeta: — C'est lui ! — Les sombres rois 
 Dirent: — C'est lui ! c'est lui ! c'est lui ! voila sa croix !
 
 194 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Les clefs du paradis sont dans ses mains fatales. — 
 Et I'homme-loup, debout sur les cadavres pales 
 Dont le sang tiede encor tombait dans I'infini, 
 Criad'une voix rauque et sourde: — 11 m'a beni ! 
 
 A judgment less terrible than what follows is 
 that by which Dante longago made fast the gates 
 of hell upon Nicholas and Boniface and Clement 
 with one stroke of his inevitable hand. The ghast- 
 ly agony of the condemned is given with all the 
 bitterest realism of the great elder anti-papist 
 who sent so many vicars of Christ to everlasting 
 torment for less offences than those of Mastai- 
 Ferretti. 
 
 Lui se tourna vers I'ange en frissonnant, 
 Er je vis le spectacle horrible et surprenant 
 D'un homme qui vieillit pendant qu'on le regarde. 
 L'agonie eteignit sa prunelle hagarde, 
 Sa bouche begaya, son jarret se rompit, 
 Ses cheveux blanchissaient sur son front decrepit, 
 Ses tempos se ridaient comme si les annees 
 S'etaienl subitement sur sa face acharnees, 
 Ses } eux pleuraient, ses dents claquaient comme au gibet 
 Les genoux d'un squelette, et sa peau se plombait, 
 Etj stupide, il baissait, a chaque instant plus pale, 
 S a tete qu'ecrasait la tiare papale. 
 
 From the sentence passed upon him after the 
 avowal extorted by the angel of doom that he 
 has none in the world above him but God alone
 
 LA LEGEND E DES SIECLES. 195 
 
 on whom to cast the responsibility of his works, 
 not a word may be taken away for the purpose of 
 quotation, as not a word could have been added 
 to it by Dante or by Ezekiel himself. But about 
 the eternity of his damnation there is not, happi- 
 ly for the human conscience, any manner of doubt 
 possible; it must endure as long as the poem 
 which proclaims it: in other words, as long as the 
 immortality of poetry itself 
 
 This great and terrible poem, the very crown or 
 coping-stone of all the Clidtiincnts, has a certain 
 affinity with two others in which the poet's yearn- 
 ing after justice and mercy has borne his passion- 
 ate imagination as high and far as here. In 
 Siiltan Mourad his immeasurable and incompara- 
 ble depth of pity and charity seems well nigh to 
 have swallowed up all sense of necessary retribu- 
 tion: it is perhaps because the portentous array 
 of crimes enumerated is remote in time and place 
 from all experience of ours that conscience can 
 allow the tenderness and sublimity of its inspira- 
 tion to justify the moral and ratify the sentence of 
 the poem: — 
 
 Viens ! tu fus bon un jour, sois a jamais heureux. 
 Entre, transfigure ! tes crimes tenebreux, 
 O roi, derriere toi s'effacent dans les gloires; ' 
 Toume la tete, et vois blanchir tes ailes noires.
 
 196 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 But in the crowning song of all the great three 
 cycles every need and every instinct of the spirit 
 may find the perfect exaltation of content. The 
 vast and profound sense of ultimate and inevita- 
 ble equity which animates every line of it is as 
 firm and clear as the solid and massive splendor 
 of its articulate expression. The date of it is out- 
 side and beyond the lapse of the centuries of time; 
 but the rule of the law of righteousness is there 
 more evident and indisputable than ever during 
 the flight of these. Hardly in the Hebrew prophe- 
 cies is such distinct and vivid sublimity, as of 
 actual and all but palpable vision, so thoroughly 
 impregnated with moral and spiritual emotion. 
 Not a verse of all that strike root into the mem- 
 ory forever but is great alike by imagination and 
 by faith. In such a single line as this — 
 
 Que qui n'entendit pas le remords I'entendrait — 
 
 there is the very note of conscience done into 
 speech, cast into form, forged into substance. 
 
 Avec de I'equite condensee en airain. 
 
 But this couplet for immensity of imaginative 
 range, is of one birth with the sublimest verses in 
 the Book of Job: —
 
 LA LEGEND E DES SIECLES. 197 
 
 Et toute I'epouvante eparse au ciel est sceur 
 De cet impenetrable et morne avertisseur. 
 
 From the magnificent overture to the second 
 series, in which the poet has embodied in audible 
 and visible symbol the vision whence this book 
 was conceived — a vision so far surpassing the per- 
 haps unconsciously imitative inspiration of the 
 Apocalypse, with its incurably lame and arduously 
 prosaic efforts to reproduce the effect or mimic 
 the majesty of earlier prophecies, that we are 
 amazed if not scandalized to find that book actu- 
 ally bracketed in one sublime passage of this pre- 
 lude with the greatest spiritual poem in the 
 world, the Oresteia of ^schylus— the reader 
 would infer that any student wishing to give a 
 notion of the Legende des Siecles ought to have 
 dwelt less than I have done upon a few of its in- 
 numerable beauties, and more than I have done 
 upon the impression of its incomparable grandeur. 
 But samples of pure sweetness and beauty are 
 more easily and perhaps more profitably detach- 
 ed for quotation from their context than sam- 
 ples of a sublimity which can only be felt by full 
 and appreciative study of an entire and perfect 
 poem. And it is rather from the prelude itself 
 than from any possible commentary on it that a
 
 198 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 thoughtful and careful reader will seek to gather 
 the aim and meaning of the book. It is there 
 likened to a vast disjointed ruin lit by gleams of 
 light — " le reste effrayant de Babel" — a palace 
 and a charnel in one, built by doom for death to 
 dwell in: — 
 
 Oia se posent pourtant parfois, quand elles resent, 
 De la fafon dont Taile et le rayon se posent, 
 La liberte, lumierc, et Tesperance, oiseau. 
 
 But over and within this book — 
 
 traduit 
 Du passe, du tombeau, du goufifre et de la nuit — - 
 
 faith shines as a kindling torch, hope breathes as 
 a quickening wind, love burns as a cleansing fire. 
 It is tragic, not with the hopeless tragedy of 
 •Dante or the all but hopeless tragedy of Shake- 
 speare. Whether we can or cannot share the 
 infinite hope and inviolable faith to which the 
 whole active and suffering life of the poet has 
 borne such unbroken and imperishable witness, 
 we cannot in any case but recognize the greatness 
 and heroism of his love for mankind. As in the 
 case of yEschylus, it is the hunger and thirst after 
 ■ righteousness, the deep desire for perfect justice 
 in heaven as on earth, which would seem to assure
 
 LA LEG END E DES SIECLES. 199 
 
 the prophet's inmost heart of its final triumph by 
 the prevalence of wisdom and of light over all 
 claims and all pleas established or asserted by the 
 children of darkness, so in the case of Victor Hugo 
 is it the hunger and thirst after reconciliation, the 
 love of loving kindness, the master passion of 
 mercy, which persists in hope and insists on faith 
 even in face of the hardest and darkest experience 
 through which a nation or a man can pass. When 
 evil was most triumphant throughout Europe, he 
 put forth in a single book of verse, published with 
 strange difficulty against incredible impediments, 
 such a protest as v/ould entitle him to say, in the 
 very words he has given to the Olympian of old — 
 
 Quand, dans le saint paean par les mondes chante, 
 
 L'harmonie amoindrie avorte ou degenere, 
 
 Je rends le rhythme aux cieux par un coup de tonnerre: 
 
 and now more than ever would the verses that 
 follow befit the lips of their author, if speaking in 
 his own person: — 
 
 ]\Ion crane plein d'echos, plein de Incurs, plein d'yeux. 
 Est I'antre eblouissant du grand Pan radieux; 
 En me voyant on croit entendre le murmure 
 De la ville habitee et de la moisson miire, 
 Le bruit du goufFre au chant de I'azur reuni,
 
 200 A STUDY OF VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 L'onde sur I'ocdan, le vent dans Tiniini, 
 Et le fremissement des deux ailes du cygne. 
 
 It is held unseemly to speak of the living as we 
 speak of the dead; when Victor Hugo has joined 
 the company of his equals, but apparently not till 
 then, it will seem strange to regard the giver of 
 all the gifts we have received from him with less 
 than love that deepens into worship, than wor- 
 ship that brightens into love. Meantime it is 
 only in the phrase of one of his own kindred, 
 poet and exile and prophet of a darker age than 
 his, that the last word should here be spoken of 
 the man by whose name our century will be 
 known forever to all ages and nations that keep 
 any record or memory of what was highest and 
 most memorable in the spiritual history of the 
 
 past: — 
 
 Onorate raltissimo poeta.
 
 PRESS NOTICES 
 
 OF SOME OK THE 
 
 Publications of Wortliini[ton Co. 
 
 Trom The CHURCHMAN'. 
 
 WoRTHiNGTONS Annual FOR 1 885, the most beautiful 
 Holiday Book for children, of the year. 4to, chrorno 
 cover, $1.50; cloth, extra gilt, $2.50. 
 The Churchman, the most widely circulated weekly in 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church, says of the "Annual" : 
 We have examined this volume, page by page, and it 
 is one of the best children's annuals that have ever come 
 under our notice, and is well worthy to be called by the 
 enterprising publisher's name. The engravings and 
 colored plates, the latter brilliant, all fine, were made 
 expressly for the work ; the text, nearly all original, was 
 written by the well-known litterateur, E. O. Chapman, 
 and the paper, type, binding, press- work, and the whole 
 make-up of the volume prove that no expense or pains 
 has been spared . to make it worthy of the wide con- 
 stituency which it is bound to have. It is in every way 
 creditable to author and publisher, and will be hailed 
 with delight by armies of children. We commend it 
 heartily. 
 
 The H". Y. CHRISTIAN" ADVOCATE. 
 
 A more beautiful child's book than Worthington's 
 Annual we could not expect to see. It is a surprise foi 
 the price, in the quality and quantity of matter and 
 engraving. It has an illuminated cover, a brilliant full- 
 page frontispiece, and several full-page colored plates. 
 It is something more than a mass of pretty pictures. It 
 has interesting stories, biographies, papers on natural 
 history, and these are helped by more than 300 engrav- 
 ings.
 
 Prom Th3 CHRISTIAN INTELLlGiilNCER. 
 
 "Cat's-Cradle " will be recognized as the name for 
 the little game of collusive legerdemain practiced be- 
 tween cniall children and their elders, by means of 
 strings and fingers. This title is given to a book of de- 
 lightful odds and ends, of which Edward VVillet has 
 strung together the rhymes, and Charles Kendrick has 
 plied his fingers to illustrate them. It is an indescribably 
 charming book, bright in theme as well as in color, var- 
 ied and simple. The children and the kittens are as 
 cunning as can be. The whole is equal to anything we 
 have seen, and superior to almost all, in the way of illus- 
 trated books for and about the little ones, R. Worth- 
 ington. 
 
 rrom The EVENING MAIL AND EXPRESS. 
 
 Mr. Archibald Hamilton McCalman has produced an 
 excellent "History of England" from the time of the 
 ancient Britons down to 1880; published by R. Worth- 
 ington, of New York. This work, in a single octavo 
 volume, is a marvel of terse and vigorous statement. 
 The author commences with a short account of the 
 ancient Britons and their conquest by the Romans, then 
 continues with the advent of the Angles and the Saxons, 
 then the Danes, then the restoration of the Saxons, and 
 finally the conquest of the Normans. He then groups 
 the Plantagenets, the Tudors and the Stuarts, and gives 
 us a panorama of the principal events and characteristic 
 features of each house. His survey brings us down to 
 the England of to-day, or June, 1880. The method of 
 the author is to furnish a historical survey, than a table 
 of the rulers, and illustrations wherever needed. His 
 description of England in the nineteenth century is alone 
 worth the price of the volume. The statistics and 
 minute information cannot be found anywhere else, so 
 far as we have been able to learn. The tables of popu- 
 lation and national debt of the British empire possess 
 great interest to all who would reach a thorough under- 
 standing of the present condition of England and her 
 dependencies. Mr. R. H. Stoddard, the poet, furnishes 
 an excellent and appreciative introduction.
 
 From The JOURNAL OF COMMERCE, N. Y. 
 
 Worthington's Annual. — Among Mr. Worthlngton's 
 many excellent works for children, his "Annual" is per- 
 haps the most admired. It is a perfect child's book. 
 Its cover is bright and beautiful. Its literary contents 
 are little fairy stories, scraps of simple verse, wonderful 
 anecdotes of dogs, cats and birds, charades and other 
 puzzles not too hard to guess, with three hundred 
 engravings on wood by the best artists, and many col- 
 ored full plates, and the volume is of a size easilv held 
 and kept open in the lap. No child, however fastidious 
 it has become through excess of holiday presents, can 
 help enjoying and treasuring Worthington's Annual. 
 
 From The LIVING CHURCH, Chicago. 
 
 Chatterbox Junior. New York : R. Worthington. 
 Price, $1.25. 
 
 There is certainly one point in which we cannot laud 
 the days of our fathers as compared with our own; that 
 is in juvenile literature. This demands and receives 
 nearly, if "ot quite, as much skill and ability in artistic 
 construction as any other class of books published. 
 "Chatterbox Junior" belongs to that class of books 
 which has become, in the last few years, the children's 
 best and most welcome friend. It is just the book to 
 delight a small child, and an admirable thing for a 
 number six Christmas stocking. 
 
 From The TIMES-STAR, Cincinnati, O. 
 
 There was a Little Girl. By Henry Wadsworth 
 Longfellow, illustrated by Bertha M. Schaeffer. R. 
 Worthington, N. Y. 
 
 This story in rhyme of "The Little Girl Who had 
 the Little Curl," is one of the happiest tokens of that 
 genial and simple-hearted temper, which made the 
 great poet the most lovable and beloved of men. The 
 drawing and coloring are in admirable style. The 
 design and execution of the whole work, especially the 
 initials of the versicles and silhouettes, are entirely 
 original.
 
 FroxQ The CHUjaCHMAN. 
 
 F1CTURESQU2 TouRS IN AMERICA Of the juniot United 
 Tourist Oub. Edited by the Rev. Edward T. 
 Bromfield. New York : R. Worthingt' >n. Pp. 200. 
 
 Under the fiction of a club or class making a tour of 
 the most picturesque parts of America, the? author has 
 given us an iiitercsting volume. Its facts and dates are 
 reliable, and it is written in a style which will £ommend 
 it to those for whose use it is chiefly intended. There 
 are in the volume one hundred and seventeen illustra- 
 tions, besides initial letters, and are made from correct 
 drawings, and are faithful pictures of the scenes theyj 
 represent. The tours begin on the Pacific coast, and, 
 traveling eastward, the club visits nearly every place in 
 the United States notable for picturesqueness and beauty; 
 and the book will be attractive to those who have, and 
 those who have not been able to take the same journey. 
 It is handsomely bound, and will be a welcome holiday 
 present for the young. 
 
 From The SUN. 
 
 Around the House, — One of the most noteworthy or 
 the illustrated books for children of the present season 
 is "Around the House," with bright, jingling rhymes, 
 by Mr. Edward Willet, and pictures in colors from de- 
 signs by Mr. Charles Kendrick. In making books oi 
 this class, it too frequently happens that all the at- 
 tention is given to the pictures, to the great neglect of 
 the text. In this book, equal pains have been taken 
 with both. Mr. Willet is one of the best known of the 
 young journalists of New York, and in using his leisure 
 from more serious work to write these taking rhymes 
 for little ones, he has shown an appreciation of their fan- 
 cies and tastes, which is rare indeed among writers. 
 Mr. Kendrick's versatile pencil is tested weekly on our 
 illustrated papers, but he has never done better work 
 than in these dainty bits of child life. The book is pub- 
 lished by R. Worthington, New York
 
 Prom The N. Y. EVENING EXPRESS. 
 
 Swinburne's "Studies in Song"' demands and will 
 more than repay careful reading. Mr. Stedman, who is 
 one of the best poetical critics, calls Swinburne the 
 sovereign rhythmist of our time, and says he far excels 
 all recent poets, of any tongue, in one faculty — "his 
 miraculous gift of rhythm;" his "unprecedented melody 
 and freedom." "Words in his hands are like the ivory 
 balls of a juggler, and all words seem to be in his 
 hands." "The first emotion of one who studies his 
 works is that of wonder at the freedom and richness of 
 his diction, the susurrus of his rhythm, his unconscious 
 alliterations, the endless change of his syllabic har- 
 monies." The chief poem in the volume is devoted to 
 Landor, who, like Swinburne, was enamored of Greek 
 art and culture, and seems to have had a Greek head 
 on his English shoulders. Published by R. Worthing- 
 ton, 770 Broadway. 
 
 From The BOSTON GliOBE. 
 
 /he Story of Chinese Gordon. — Charles George 
 Gordon is the great figure of the Christian soldier, 
 absolutely trusting in God and bold and fearless in 
 enforcing right and justice. He is represented also as 
 "an incomparable blending of masterfulness and tender- 
 ness, of strength and sweetness." The purpose of Mr. 
 Hake's book is to narrate Gordon's military career in the 
 light of his character, and to show the harmony between 
 them, and it differs in this respect from all of the books 
 that the interest in Gordon's campaign in the Soudan 
 has caused to be issued. While it thus becomes a 
 tribute to his moral worth it is not at the sacrifice of any 
 detail in his history during his service in the Crimea, 
 China, Africa, India, the Cape of Good Hope and the 
 Soudan, in each of which places the same Christian and 
 soldierly qualities have impressed his countrymen. On 
 the other hand, the record of his service in garrison and 
 in the field is particularly complete. It is an inspiring 
 story of one who could ill be spared, for the influence 
 his character has upon the peoples to whom his mission 
 sends him. New York : R. Worthington.
 
 From The GLOBE, Boston. 
 
 Seven L,ittle Maids. Pictures and Verses by Maiy A. 
 Lathbury. 
 
 The familiar couplets attributing certain qualities, 
 according as one is born on this or that day of the 
 week, suggest seven poems descriptive of young girls 
 born upon the successive days of the week, which, in 
 turn, are descriptive of seven illustrations of the young 
 girls themselves. The pictures are finely drawn and 
 colored, and are effective. Fringed covers, decorated 
 with taste, inclose the leaflets, one of which groups the 
 seven little maids in a pleasing way. This is as good of 
 its kind as " Jack-in-the-Pulpit," noticed elsewhere, and 
 should be examined by holiday buyers. 
 
 From The INTER-OCEAN. 
 
 The Kabbala (R. Worthington) is a disquisition on the 
 true science of light, designed to be an introductron to 
 the philosophy and theosophy of the ancient sages. It 
 contains a chapter, also, on light in the vegetable king- 
 dom. It is by S. Pancoast, M. D. , a man held in high 
 esteem in the medical profession. This book is evidently 
 the result of profound study, long sust-^ined. It breathes 
 the spirit of reverence, while unfettered by dogmas. It 
 is withal eminently practical. A great many important 
 sanitary suggestions are made, and some suggestions 
 more mechanical or artistic than medical. 
 
 " The Kabbala, or the True Science of Light," is a 
 curiosity in literature. The author, Dr. S. Pancoast, 
 holds that the old Kabbala is not only the source of all 
 religious beliefs, but that it is, in fact, an authorized, 
 divinely illuminated commentary on the Bible and 
 nature, and that the Bible is a translation into words 
 of the Kabbala ; that is, that they are identical and of 
 divine origin, revealing the work, will, and purposes of 
 God, as 'well as his character and attributes. This 
 theory is elucidated at some length, as a foundation for 
 another theory of the remedial properties of light, to 
 prove which is the author's main purpose.
 
 Prom The GIjOBE, Boston, 
 
 Jack-in-the-Pulpit. — A fine poem by Miss Smith, of 
 Medford, which introduces common flowers of New 
 England, was sent to J. G. Whittier, the poet, when he 
 was compiling "Child Life." Under his editorship, 
 with his autograph letter, it now appears in leaflets in 
 fringed covers. It furnishes subjects for some as 
 perfectly-colored illustrations of familiar flowers as will 
 be issued this season. Jack-in-the-Pulpit, lilies, ane- 
 mones, violets, buttercups, clover blossoms, daisies, 
 dandelions, and columbines have their season's fresh- 
 ness and charm. Both covers have beautiful designs, 
 the front one bearing a likeness of Whittier, New 
 Vork : R, Worthington, 
 
 From The BOSTON" GAZETTB. 
 
 "Through Cities and Prairie Lands.' by Lady Duff'us 
 Hardy, relates in a spirited and sketchy manner the in- 
 cidents of a journey across this country. It is a breezy 
 and highly entertaining book. The descriptive portions 
 are full of picturesqueness, and the style generally is 
 sprightly and remarkably attractive. The work is in- 
 teresting and readable from cover to over. Published 
 by R. Worthington, New York. 
 
 From The ALBANY AftQUS, 
 
 A Century OF Roundels and Otkzr Poems, By Alger- 
 non Charles Swinburne. New York : R. Worthing- 
 ton, Price $1.75. 
 
 The rythmic melody of his verses has a most won- 
 derful fascination, and when his genius finds voice in 
 the roundel the perfection of poetic form is reached. 
 One is surprised to find in the works of a young man 
 such tender and beautiful allusions to childhood as Mr. 
 Swinburne's poems show. It is useless to pass general 
 criticism upon this book. We have to take each 
 roundel by itself, study the structure, dwell upon the 
 music that lingers in the language, and saturate our 
 souls with the delicate sentiments that inspired the poet.
 
 Prom The MAIL AND EXPRESS. 
 
 Theophile Gautier. — ^That Theophile Gautier is a 
 master in many arts is known to all who are familiar 
 with modern literature the world over. After his mas- 
 ter, Hugo, whose extravagance he has been wise enough 
 to avoid, and after the greater, Balzac, who wrote the 
 Human. Comedy, he is the mightiest force of recent 
 French fiction, possessed of every quality that ensures 
 success, clear-sighted, strong-willed, felicitous and 
 audacious, with a style that is the despair of his contem- 
 poraries, and will be the delight of posterity, as pict- 
 uresque as Shakespeare or Homer, as intense as 
 ^schylus, as ardent as Sappho — he is an astonishing 
 and extraordinary writer, who has many followers, but 
 only one true disciple, Georg Ebers, who breathes the 
 breath of life into the mummies who died before 
 Pharaoh, and creates souls under the robes of death. 
 Such is Theophile Gautier, six of whose fantastic 
 romances have just been done into English by Lafcadio 
 Heam, and published handsomely, in a keepsake form, 
 by R. Worthington. These romances illustrate many 
 times, lands, persons, customs, Egyptian, Roman, 
 Greek, Christian. Their tides are : One of Cleopatra's 
 Nights ; Clarimonde ; Auria Marcella, a Souvenir of 
 Pompeii ; The Mummy's Foot ; Omphale, a Ro- 
 coco Story ; and King Candaules. There is nothing 
 like the perfection of these masterpieces, outside of 
 Shakespeare, of whom the Cleopatra study perpetually 
 reminds us, the Shakespeare who drew so skilfully the 
 world's enchantress, and her Herculean Roman, and 
 who paintec both with the matchless pencil of Nature. 
 It is as Art, pure and simple, one and indivisible, that 
 we must approach these noble works, which now sug- 
 gest Titian and Giorgione ; again, Velasquez and Car- 
 ravaggio ; and again, Jerome, Coumans, Leys, and the 
 existing Belgian painters. It is to a gallery that this 
 book admits us, and we follow it delightedly. R. 
 Worthington.
 
 STROUDSCl/RG P'CDllC 
 MONROE cmjY LIBRARY