________________________________________________
_ LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES
BY VICTOR HUGO
EDITED BY G. F. BRIDGE, M.A.
GENERAL PREFACE
Encouraged by the favourable reception accorded to the 'Oxford Modern French Series,' the Delegates of the Clarendon Press determined, some time since, to issue a 'Higher Series' of French works intended for Upper Forms of Public Schools and for University and Private Students, and have entrusted me with the task of selecting and editing the various volumes that will be issued in due course.
The titles of the works selected will at once make it clear that this series is a new departure, and that an attempt is made to provide annotated editions of books which have hitherto been obtainable only in the original French texts. That Madame de Stael, Madame de Girardin, Daniel Stern, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert, Gautier are among the authors whose works have been selected will leave no doubt as to the literary excellence of the texts included in this series. Works of such quality, intended only for advanced scholars, could not be annotated in the way hitherto usual, since those for whom they have been prepared are familiar with many things and many events of which younger students have no knowledge. Geographical and mythological notes have therefore been generally omitted, as also historical events either too well known to require elucidation or easily found in the ordinary books of reference.
By such omissions a considerable amount of space has been saved which has allowed of the extension of the texts, and of their equipment with notes less elementary than usual, and at the same time brighter and more interesting, whilst great care has been taken to adapt them to the special character of each volume.
The Introductions are also a novel feature of the present series. Originally they were to be exclusively written in English, but as it was desired that they should be as characteristic as possible, and not merely extracted from reference books, but real studies of the various authors and their works, it was decided that the editors should write them in their own native language.
Whenever it has been possible each volume has been adorned with a portrait of the author at the time he wrote his book.
In conclusion, I wish to repeat here what I have said in the General Preface to the 'Oxford Modern French Series,' that 'those who speak a modern language best invariably possess a good literary knowledge of it.' This has been endorsed by the best teachers in this and other countries, and is a generally admitted fact. The present series by providing works of high literary merit will certainly facilitate the acquisition of the French language--a tongue which perhaps more than any other offers a variety of literary specimens which, for beauty of style, depth of sentiment, accuracy and neatness of expression, may be equalled but not surpassed.
LEON DELBOS.
OXFORD, _December_, 1905.
INTRODUCTION
Victor Hugo's conception of the scheme of the series of poems to which he gave the title of _La Legende des Siecles_ is thus described in the preface to the first scenes: 'Exprimer l'humanite dans une espece d'oeuvre cyclique; la peindre successivement et simultanement sous tous ses aspects, histoire, fable, philosophie, religion, science, lesquels se resument en un seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la lumiere; faire apparaitre, dans une sorte de miroir sombre et clair--que l'interruption naturelle de travaux terrestres brisera probablement avant qu'il ait la dimension revee par l'auteur--cette grande figure une et multiple, lugubre et rayonnante, faible et sacree, L'Homme.' The poet thus dreamt of a vast epic, of which the central figure should be no mythical or legendary hero, but Man himself, conceived as struggling upwards from the darkness of barbarism to the light of a visionary golden age. Every epoch was to be painted in its dominant characteristic, every aspect of human thought was to find its fitting expression. The first series could pretend to no such completeness, but the poet promised that the gaps should be filled up in succeeding volumes. It cannot be said that this stupendous design was ever carried out. The first volumes, which were published in 1859, and from which the poems contained in this selection are taken, left great spaces vacant in the ground-plan of the work, and little attempt was made in the subsequent series, which appeared in 1877 and 1883, to fill up those spaces. In fact, Hugo has left large tracts of human history untrod. He has scarcely touched the civilization of the East, he has given us no adequate picture of ancient Greece. _L'Aide offerte a Majorien_ can hardly be regarded as a sufficient picture of the wanderings of the nations, nor _Le Regiment du Baron Madruce_ as an adequate embodiment of the spirit of the eighteenth century. The Reformation, and, what is stranger still, the French Revolution, are not handled at all, though the heroism of the Napoleonic era finds fitting description in _Le Cimetiere d'Eylau_. The truth is that Hugo set himself a task which was perhaps beyond the power of any single poet to accomplish, and was certainly one for which he was not altogether well fitted. He did not possess that capacity for taking a broad and impartial view of history which was needed in the author of such an epic as he designed. His strong predilections on the one hand, and his violent antipathies on the other, swayed his choice of subjects, narrowed his field of vision, and influenced his manner of presentment. The series cannot therefore pretend to philosophic completeness. It is a gallery of pictures painted by a master-hand, and pervaded by a certain spirit of unity, yet devoid of any strict arrangement, and formed on no carefully maintained principle. It is a set of cameos, loosely strung upon a thread, a structure with countless beautiful parts, which do not however cohere into any symmetrical whole. The poems are cast in many forms; allegory, narrative, vision, didactic poetry, lyric poetry, all find a place. There is little history, but much legend, some fiction, and a good deal of mythology. The series was not designed as a whole. _La Chanson des Aventuriers de la Mer_ was written in or before 1840, _Le Mariage de Roland_, _Aymerillot_, and _La Conscience_ in or about 1846, and other pieces at intervals between 1849 and 1858, the date at which the poet appears to have begun the task of building these fragments into an epic structure. Nor is there in these poems any dispassionate attempt to portray the character of the successive ages in the life of the race. For Hugo there was no 'emancipation du moi.' The _Legende_ is less a revelation of history than it is a revelation of the poet. His choice of themes was dictated less by a careful search after what was most characteristic of each epoch than by his own strong predilections. He loved the picturesque, the heroic, the enormous, the barbarous, the grotesque. Hence _Eviradnus_, _Ratbert_, _Le Mariage de Roland_. He loved also the weak, the poor, the defenceless, the old man and the little child. Hence _Les Pauvres Gens_, _Booz endormi_, _Petit Paul_. He delighted in the monstrous, he revelled in extremes, and he had little perception of the lights and shades which make up ordinary human character. Neither his poems nor his romances show much trace of that psychological analysis which is the peculiar feature of so much modern literature. Child of the nineteenth century, as he was in so many respects, in many of the features of his art he belongs to no era, and conforms to no tendency, except that of his own Titanic genius. He could see white and he could see black, but he could not see grey, and never tried to paint it. He does not allow Philip II even his redeeming virtues of indefatigable industry and unceasing devotion to duty, while in his Rome of the decadence would assuredly be found scarce five good men. His vision is curiously limited to the darker side of history; he hears humanity uttering in all ages a cry of suffering, and but rarely a shout of laughter. He sees the oppression of the tyrant more vividly than the heroism of the oppressed. Has he to write of the power of Spain? It is in the portrayal of the tyrant of Spain rather than the men who overcame Spain that his genius finds scope. Does he wish to paint the era of religious persecution? It is the horror of the Inquisition rather than the heroism of its victims that is pictured on his canvas. Delineations of heroic virtue there are indeed in the _Legende_, but it is noteworthy that they occur usually in fictions such as _Eviradnus_, _Le Petit Roi de Galice_, and _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice._[1] He has given us no historical portraits of noble characters which can be put side by side with those of Philip II and Sultan Mourad. As in his dramas, his kings and rulers are always drawn in dark colours. His heroes belong to the classes that he loved, poor people, common soldiers, old men, children, and, be it added, animals. He is always the man of great heart and strong prejudices, never the dramatist or the philosopher.
[Footnote 1: It is interesting to observe how frequently his heroes are old men, as Eviradnus, Booz, Fabrice.]
Hugo himself says sadly in his Preface, 'Les tableaux riants sont rares dans ce livre; cela tient a ce qu'ils ne sont pas frequents dans l'histoire,' but in truth the tinge of gloom which lies upon the _Legende_ is rather the impress upon the volume of history of the poet's own puissant individuality. He was no scientist and no _savant_, he had none of that spirit of imperturbable calm with which Shakespeare surveyed all mankind, none of that impartial sympathy with which Browning investigated the psychology of saints and sinners alike. He loved deeply and he hated fiercely, and his poetry was the voice of his love and his hate. The intensity of his own poetic vision made the past stand before him as clearly as the present; the note of personal feeling is as clear and strong in _Sultan Mourad_ and _Bivar_ as in _Les Chatiments_ or _Le Retour de l'Empereur_. His great qualities of heart and mind and his singular defects are written large upon every page of the _Legende_. His passionate hatred of injustice and his passionate love of liberty, his reverence for the virtues of the home, and especially for filial obedience and respect, his love for little children, his antagonism to war and his admiration for what is great in war which was ever struggling with that antagonism, his patriotic feeling for the triumphs of the Napoleonic era, to him the heroic age of French history, his exaggerated belief in the wickedness of kings and the innocence of poor people, the exaltation of pity into the greatest of all virtues--these and many other characteristic traits find ample illustration in his legend of the centuries. It is ever Hugo that is speaking to us, however many be the masks that he wears.
Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that no general conception of the history and destiny of mankind is to be found in the work, or that the author had no sense of an increasing purpose running through the ages. The conception is no doubt that of a poet and a seer, not of a historian or a philosopher, but it is clear and vivid, and is expressed with Titanic force. Hugo pictured the history of mankind as a long struggle upwards towards the light. Man has in all ages been oppressed by many evils--by war, by tyranny, by materiality, by mental and moral darkness. He has sinned greatly, he has suffered greatly; he has been burdened with toil and surrounded by shadow, tormented by his rulers and misled by his priests. Paganism was merely material; Rome was strong, cruel, and repressive; 'a winding-sheet of the nations,' he calls her in _Changement d'Horizon_[2]; Judaism, his view of which must be sought rather in _Dieu_ than in the _Legende_, cold and harsh, could influence man only by keeping him within the strait-waistcoat of a narrow law; the life of the founder of Christianity was only a momentary gleam of light in the darkness; the Middle Age was a confused turmoil of rude heroism and cunning savagery; the Renaissance a relapse into heathenism and the worship of nature. Yet with the modern ages comes a rift in the blackness; the poets reveal a new spirit; their songs are the songs of peace and not of war:
Le poete a la mort dit: Meurs, guerre, ombre, Envie!--
Et chasse doucement les hommes vers la vie;
Et l'on voit de ses vers, goutte a goutte, des pleurs
Tomber sur les enfants, les femmes et les fleurs;
Et des astres jaillir de ses strophes volantes;
Et son chant fait pousser des bourgeons verts aux plantes;
Et ses reves sont faits d'aurore, et dans l'amour,
Sa bouche chante et rit, toute pleine de jour.
(_Changement d'Horizon_.)
[Footnote 2: For a fuller development of this view see _La Fin de Satan: Le Gibet_, I, i.]
Gentleness and humanity are the characteristic virtues of the later age. It is a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that such pieces as _Le Crapaud_, _Apres la Bataille_, and _Les Pauvres Gens_ have no connexion with any epoch. In Hugo's view, that tenderness for the weak and the defenceless which is their keynote was the peculiar mark of the age in which he lived, and a foretaste of the glory that was to come. For the great purpose which his reading of human history reveals to him is the increase of the love of man to man, the widening of the bounds of liberty, the growth of brotherly feeling. Suffering and oppression behind, freedom and joy in front, so does Hugo's imagination picture world-history, and his love of violent antitheses made him paint the past in the darkest colours in order that his vision of the future might shine with the greater radiance. Troubled as he was, no doubt, by the sombre events of 1850-1, and by the slow progress that the principles of peace seemed to be making in the world, yet the inspiration of that vision was never lost, and in the apocalyptic vision of the poem _Plein Ciel_ he gave superb lyrical expression to the thought that man will find his heaven, not above the clouds, but in a regenerated earth, penetrated with the spirit of light and love.
This underlying conception was expressed again in the poem entitled _La Vision d'ou est sorti ce livre_, which was written at Guernsey in 1857, but published only in 1877. In this vision the history of man appears to the poet in the form of a gigantic wall, on which are seen the crimes and sufferings of all the ages. Two spirits pass by, the spirit of Fate (_Fatalite_), which is the enemy of man, and the spirit of God (Dieu), which is the friend of man. This wall is shivered into fragments, by which the seer understands the destruction of pain and evil, and the closing of the long volume of human history. That volume, the end of which the dreamer foresees, the poet proposes to write:
Ce livre, c'est le reste effrayant de Babel;
C'est la lugubre Tour des Choses, l'edifice
Du bien, du mal, des pleurs, des deuils, des sacrifices,
Fier jadis, dominant les lointains horizons,
Aujourd'hui n'ayant plus que de hideux troncons
Epars, couches, perdus dans l'obscure vallee;
C'est l'epopee humaine, apre, immense--ecroulee.
The poet's view of the problem of evil and the destiny of humanity becomes clearer if the _Legende_ is read in connexion with the two poems mentioned in the Preface to the volume of 1859, as designed to form with it an immense trilogy: _Dieu_ and _La Fin de Satan_. Neither was published till after the poet's death, and the latter was left in an unfinished condition. But they were both planned in the days when, isolated on his rock and severed from active life, the poet meditated on the deep questions of life and death. They were meant to be, the one the prelude, and the other the sequel of his poem of humanity. The leading thought of _Dieu_ is the falseness of all the positive systems of religion which have burdened or inspired humanity, and the truth that
'Dieu n'a qu'un front: Lumiere; et n'a qu'un nom: Amour,'
though it is only death which will fully reveal that light.
The theme of _La Fin de Satan_ is the final reconciliation of good and evil. As Satan falls from heaven, a feather drops from his wing, and from that feather the Almighty creates the angel Liberty, who is thus the child equally of the spirit of Good and the spirit of Evil; that angel finally brings about the pardon of Satan, when the demon finds that it is impossible for him to live without the presence of the Almighty. Man is endowed with liberty, this child of good and ill, and his spirit hovers therefore ever between the exalted and the mean. So humanity appears to the seer in _Dieu_:
Et je vis apparaitre une etrange figure;
Un etre tout seme de bouches, d'ailes, d'yeux,
Vivant, presque lugubre et presque radieux;
Vaste, il volait; plusieurs des ailes etaient chauves.
En s'agitant, les cils de ses prunelles fauves
Jetaient plus de rumeur qu'une troupe d'oiseaux,
Et ses plumes faisaient un bruit de grandes eaux.
Cauchemar de la chair ou vision d'apotre,
Selon qu'il se montrait d'une face ou de l'autre,
Il semblait une bete ou semblait un esprit.
Il paraissait, dans l'air ou mon vol le surprit,
Faire de la lumiere, et faire des tenebres.
To Hugo, therefore, evil is not an equal force with good, nor is it eternal. It was created in time, it will end in time. It is a mistake to suppose that he accepted any kind of Manichaeism as his solution of the problem of the universe. In reality his thought is much more permeated with Christian feeling than with Manichaeism. Though he rejected dogmatic Catholicism, and indeed assailed it with Voltairian mockery, yet his vision of the Eternal as the embodiment of that mercy and goodness which is greater than justice is in its essence a Christian conception. Inspired, in part at least, by Christian thought seems also to be his conception of the eventual reconciliation of good and evil, and that belief in the restoration of all things which finds expression in the concluding lines of _L'Ane_:
Dieu ne veut pas que rien, meme l'obscurite,
Meme l'Erreur qui semble ou funeste ou futile,
Que rien puisse, en criant: Quoi, j'etais inutile!
Dans le gouffre a jamais retomber eperdu;
Et le lien sacre du service rendu,
A travers l'ombre affreuse et la celeste sphere,
Joint l'echelon de nuit aux marches de lumiere.
Hope is indeed the keynote of Hugo's poetry. In the darkest days of 1871, when France was tearing out her own vitals and Paris was destroying itself, he could write thus:
Les recits montrent l'un apres l'autre leurs tetes,
Car les evenements ont leur cap des Tempetes,
Derriere est la clarte. Ces flux et ces reflux,
Ces recommencements, ces combats sont voulus,
Au-dessus de la haine immense, quelqu'un aime.
Ayons foi. Ce n'est pas sans quelque but supreme
Que sans cesse, en ce gouffre ou revent les sondeurs,
Un prodigieux vent soufflant des profondeurs,
A travers l'apre nuit, pousse, emporte et ramene
Sur tout l'ecueil divin toute la mer humaine.
(_L'Annee Terrible._)
See too the beautiful lines written when to public disaster was added private grief for the loss of his son Charles, especially the passage, too long to quote here, in _L'Enterrement_, beginning 'Quand le jeune lutteur....'
If, passing from the underlying conception to the actual material of the _Legende_, we ask to what extent the poems can be regarded as history, the answer must be that they are not history at all in the ordinary sense of the word. In his _Preface_ Hugo remarks: 'C'est l'aspect legendaire qui prevaut dans ces deux volumes.' As a matter of fact, there is not a single poem in any of the series which is a narrative based upon actual fact. Of the pieces in the present volume, _Le Mariage de Roland, Aymerillot_, and _Bivar_ are founded on legends. _Eviradnus_ and _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice_ are inventions, and the others are mostly embroideries woven upon ancient themes rather than historical or even legendary pictures. These latter, of which _La Conscience_ is the best instance in this volume, suggest De Vigny's conception: 'Une pensee philosophique, mise en scene sous une forme epique ou dramatique.' Of accuracy in detail and local colour, Hugo was utterly careless. He possessed a capacious, but not an exact, memory, and, provided the general impression produced by a description was the true one, he did not stop to inquire whether every detail was correct. Nor did he always enjoy an extensive knowledge of the epoch which he delineated. But he possessed to the full the poet's faculty of building the whole form and feature of a past age out of a few stray fragments of information. The historical colour of _Ruy Blas_ is said to be based on two French books, carelessly consulted, yet of _Ruy Blas_ M. Paul de Saint-Victor, after making a close study of the period, wrote: 'Ce fragment de siecle que je venais d'exhumer de tant de recherches, je le retrouvais, vivant et mouvant, dans l'harmonie d'un drame admirable. Le souffle d'un grand poete ressuscitait subitement l'ossuaire des faits et des choses que j'avais peniblement rajuste.'[3]
[Footnote 3: Quoted in Eugene Rigal's _Victor Hugo, poete epique_.]
Moreover, inaccurate as Hugo often is, it is never the inaccuracy that falsifies. He has been severely criticized for having in _Au Lion d'Androcles_ assigned to a single epoch events and personages which are really separated by centuries. But all the facts are typical of the spirit which dominated Imperial Rome, and combine therefore to form a description which has poetic and imaginative, if not historical, truth. And if, with greater licence, he has accumulated upon the head of a single Mourad all the crimes of a long line of Sultans it is because in drawing Mourad he is drawing the Turkish nation. Mourad is to him the typical Turk, the embodiment of Oriental cruelty and lust. If again, to pass to a larger subject, he has chosen legend rather than history as the basis of many of his poems, it is not only because of his own innate love of the marvellous and romantic, but because he cared for the truth embodied in legend more than the truth embodied in chronicle. If he mingled fiction with his history, it was because he conceived of the fiction as being as true a representation of the facts of an era as annals and records. It may be true that Hugo made imagination do duty for study, but it is also true that an imagination, such as Hugo's, may be as sure an instrument as study in reconstructing the past. He may have mistaken the date of Crassus by several centuries, but readers of Suetonius will hardly deny the faithfulness of his delineation of at least one side of the civilization of ancient Rome; he may have invented a Spanish princess, but his carefully stippled portrait of Philip II is true to the life, even if it be Philip in his darkest moods. His inaccuracies are in truth of small account. Who that reads _Le Cimetiere d'Eylau_ cares whether there was a place of burial in the battlefield or not? or what lover of _Booz endormi_ seeks to know how closely the flora of Palestine has been studied? A more serious criticism than the charge of inaccuracy is that of partial vision, and from this Hugo cannot be entirely exculpated. He saw with his heart, and seeing with the heart must always mean partial vision. For at the root of Hugo's nature lay an immense pity, pity not merely for the suffering, but for what is base or criminal, or what is ugly or degraded. It was this pity which is the keynote of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ and _Les Miserables_; it is this pity which inspired much of the _Legende des Siecles_.
The defence of the weak by the strong is one of his constant themes, as witness _Eviradnus_, _Le Petit Roi de Galice_, _Les Pauvres Gens._ The contrast of the weak and the strong is one of his favourite artistic effects, as witness _Booz endormi_, _La Confiance du Marquis Falrice._ An act of pity redeemed Sultan Mourad, an act of pity made the poor ass greater than all the philosophers. It was this absorbing pity for the defenceless that made Hugo so merciless to the oppressor and so incapable of seeing anything but the deepest black in the picture of the tyrant. One-sided the poet may be, but it is the one-sidedness of a generous nature; he may err, but his errors at least lean to the side of virtue.
It would be impossible in the brief space of an introduction such as this to discuss at any length the characteristics of Hugo as a literary artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume. It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet's extraordinary fecundity of words and images. Occasionally, especially in his later works, this degenerates into diffuseness, and he exhibits a tendency to repetition and a fondness for long enumeration of names and details. On the other hand, he constantly shows how well he understood the power of brevity and compression. There is not a superfluous word nor a poetic image in _La Conscience_, the severe and simple style of which is well suited to the sternness of the subject. The story of _Apres la Bataille_ is related with telling conciseness, while in the highly finished work of _Booz endormi_ there are no redundant phrases. The many variations on the same theme in _Aymerillot_ may be criticized as tedious, but there underlies them the artistic purpose of intensifying the reader's sense of the cowardice of the nobles by an accumulation of examples. A like criticism and a like defence may be made of the long list of the crimes of Sultan Mourad, though here perhaps the poet's torrent of facts goes beyond the point at which the amassing of details is effective. On the other hand, the swiftness of the narrative of the _Mariage de Roland_, and the soldierly brevity of the _Cimetiere d'Eylau_, a piece not included in this volume, are alike admirable, and show Hugo at his best as a story-teller.
One of the most marked features of Hugo's poetry is his custom of attributing human desires and volition to inanimate objects. To Hugo, the whole universe seemed to be alive, both as a whole and in each of its separate parts, and his way of humanizing the inanimate is not so much a conscious literary artifice as the natural habit of his imagination. The tendency is not confined to his poetry; readers of his romances will remember the gargoyles of Notre-Dame and the cannon which got loose in the hold of the _Claymore_ and became 'une bete surnaturelle.' But the instances in his romantic poetry are naturally more numerous and more vivid. The swords of the heroes are always alive; in the duel between Roland and Olivier:
Durandal heurte et suit Closamont.
In the combat between Roland and his enemies in the _Petit Roi de Galice_, the hero staggers and Froila leaps forward to crush him:
Mais Durandal se dresse et jette Froila
Sur Pacheco, dont l'ame en ce moment hurla.
The statues in the hall at Final are moved at the gentle tread of Fabrice and his little ward, and seem to bow to them as they pass.
Chaque statue, emue a leur pas doux et sombre,
Vibre, et toutes ont l'air de saluer dans l'ombre,
Les heros le vieillard, et les anges l'enfant.
But the most striking instance of this tendency occurs in _Eviradnus_, where, from beginning to end, all that surrounds the actors in the story lives with a passionate life. The trees that overhear the plot of Sigismond and Ladislas tremble and moan, and the words that issue from the lips of the miscreants are dark with shadow or red with blood. The half-ruined castle of Corbus fights with the winter, like a strong man with his enemies; the gargoyles on its towers bark at the winds, the graven monsters on the ramparts snarl and snort, the sculptured lions claw and bite the wind and rain[4]. In the gloomy halls the griffins seize with their teeth the great beams of the roofs, and the door is afraid of the noise of its own opening. The very shadows feel fear and the pillars are chilled with terror. The armour of the horses and the men is terribly alive, and charger and knight make but one monster, clothed in scales of steel.
[Footnote 4: With this picture in verse of the fight between the castle and the storm should be compared the prose picture of the fight between the fire and the water in _Le Rhin_ (Lettre xix).]
Hugo loves especially to endow with life objects that suggest a struggle. It is the wrecked and broken ship of _Pleine Mer_ rather than the triumphant vessel of _Plein Ciel_ that is animate.
Ce Titan se rua, joyeux, dans la tempete;
* * * * *
Quand il marchait, fumant, grondant, couvert de toile,
Il jetait un tel rale a l'air epouvante
Que toute l'eau tremblait.
* * * * *
Et pour l'ame il avait dans sa cale un enfer.
Allied with this habit of vivifying the inanimate is the more subtle artifice of transfiguring or magnifying concrete objects, so that they become symbolic without ceasing to be real. This blending of the actual and the figurative is seen in the description of the King and Emperor in _Eviradnus:_
Leurs deux figures sont lugubrement grandies
Par de rouges reflets de sacs et d'incendies.
* * * * *
Leurs ongles monstrueux, crispes sur des rapines,
Egratignent le pale et triste continent.
In _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice_ the reality of the wine and the suggestion of the blood are very artfully mingled
Quelque chose de rouge entre les dalles fume,
Mais, si tiede que soit cette douteuse ecume,
Assez de barils sont eventres et creves
Pour que ce soit du vin qui court les paves.
Another remarkable feature of Hugo's literary art is the feeling for light and shade which it displays. He likes to wrap his poems in a physical atmosphere of brightness or gloom, corresponding to the sentiment which pervades them. How, for instance, in _Les Orientales_, that exquisite little gem, _Sarah la Baigneuse_, flashes and sparkles with light! How striking in _La Fin de Satan_ is the contrast between the murky atmosphere in which the maker of crosses works and the bright sunshine in which Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem is bathed! With what consummate art the darkness of the Crucifixion is made to accentuate the horror of the event!
L'ombre immense avait l'air d'une accusation;
Le monde etait couvert d'une nuit infamante;
C'etait l'accablement plus noir que la tourmente,
La morne extinction de l'haleine et du bruit.
Contrast the radiance of the dawn in which the Satyr, the emblem of strong and joyous Nature, is first seen:
C'etait l'heure ou sortaient les chevaux du soleil;
Le ciel tout fremissant du glorieux reveil,
Ouvrant les deux battants de sa porte sonore,
Blancs, ils apparaissaient formidables d'aurore;
Derriere eux, comme un orbe effrayant, couvert d'yeux,
Eclatait la rondeur du char radieux
* * * * *
Les quatre ardents chevaux dressaient leur poitrail d'or;
Faisant leurs premiers pas, ils se cabraient encor
Entre la zone obscure et la zone enflammee;
De leurs crins, d'ou semblait sortir une fumee
De perles, de saphirs, d'onyx, de diamants,
Dispersee et fuyante au fond des elements,
Les trois premiers, l'oeil fier, la narine embrasee,
Secouaient dans le jour des gouttes de rosee;
Le dernier secouait des astres dans la nuit.
In _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice_ light and shadow are very skilfully managed. We see the little princess Isora making her toilet in the early morning, when everything is fresh and bright. It is in the dawn that she loves to play. But the banquet of death takes place at night in a dimly lighted hall, when the lack of clear light adds to the horror of the scene. Note the Rembrandtesque effects in such phrases: 'aux tremblantes clartes,' 'l'ombre indistincte,' 'a travers l'ombre, on voit toutes les soifs infames,' and it ends in 'le triomphe de l'ombre,' a phrase in which the literal and the figurative are subtly blended together. On the other hand, how everything sparkles and gleams in _Le Mariage de Roland_! Olivier's sword-point glitters like the eye of a demon, while Durandal shines as he falls on his foeman's head; the sunshine is all round them in the day, and the night passes quickly; sparks fly from the weapons as they strike one another, and light up the very shadows with a dull flash. Take again _La Rose de l'Infante_. Everything round the little princess is bright: 'le profond jardin rayonnant et fleuri,' 'un grand palais comme au fond d'une gloire,' 'de clairs viviers,' 'des paons etoiles.' The very grass, too, seems to sparkle with diamonds and rubies. But Philip is a dark shadow, half hidden in mist:
On voit d'en bas une ombre, au fond d'une vapeur,
De fenetre a fenetre errer, et l'on a peur.
He is always dressed in black:
Toujours vetu de noir, ce tout-puissant terrestre
Avait l'air d'etre en deuil de ce qu'il existait.
No light is ever seen in his palaces:
L'Escurial, Burgos, Aranjuez, ses repaires,
Jamais n'illuminaient leurs livides plafonds.
His eye shines, it is true, but it is a gleam that suggests a darkness beneath:
Sa prunelle
Luit comme un soupirail de caverne.
Note again the oppressive darkness of the opening lines of _Pleine Mer_, in which the only touch of light is the winding-sheet of the waves, and contrast it with the atmosphere of light which surrounds the ship in _Plein Ciel_, where even the night is bright:
La Nuit tire du fond des gouffres inconnus
Son filet ou luit Mars, ou rayonne Venus.
_Le Crapaud_ is wrapped in the light of sunset:
Le couchant rayonnait dans les nuages roses;
C'etait la fin d'un jour d'orage, et l'occident
Changeait l'ondee en flamme en son brasier ardent.
* * * * *
Les feuilles s'empourpraient dans les arbres vermeils;
L'eau miroitait, melee a l'herbe, dans l'orniere.
And this because sunset is the hour for gentle thoughts and quiet feeling:
Dans la serenite du pale crepuscule,
La brute par moments pense et sent qu'elle est soeur
De la mysterieuse et profonde douceur.
So strong is Hugo's feeling for light and shadow that he often seems to solidify them, as it were, into concrete objects. When the trap-door in the hall of Corbus is opened
Il en sort de l'ombre, ayant l'odeur du crime,
and in the pit are seen
D'ombres tatant le mur et de spectres reptiles.
In _Les Pauvres Gens_
La morte ecoute l'ombre avec stupidite.
In _Fabrice_
L'aieul semble d'ombre et de pierre construit.
The light seems solid in this line from _Le Satyre_:
Son pied fourchu faisait des trous dans la lumiere.
Again, in _La Conscience_, shadow is vast and oppressive:
L'ombre des tours faisait la nuit dans les campagnes.
And in _Au Lion d'Androcles_ it is the fitting emblem of the human race in a degenerate age:
La creature humaine, importune au ciel bleu,
Faisait une ombre affreuse a la cloison de Dieu.
Very curious is the connexion between the legends of a countryside and the smoke of its cottages in the lines:
Les legendes toujours melent quelque fantome
A l'obscure vapeur qui sort des toits de chaume,
L'atre enfante le reve, et l'on voit ondoyer
L'effroi dans la fumee errante du foyer. (_Eviradnus_.)
Of the infinite variety of Hugo's poetic gifts such a selection as is contained in this volume can of course give but a very inadequate idea. The extraordinary versatility and fecundity of his genius can be appreciated only by those who have read all, or at least much, of his output. But the first series of the _Legende_ is perhaps that part of the poet's work in which substance and beauty, original thought and vivid expression, are found in the most perfect combination. Written in middle life, it stands midway between his earlier poetry with its more lyric note and his later work with its deeper and more prophetic tones. In point of expression the poet's powers had attained their full development; he has perfect command of rime; the versification is free and shows no trace of the stilted style of his first volumes; the language is copious and eloquent, but exhibits few signs of that verbosity and tendency to vain repetition which, as has been already remarked, marred some of his later poetry. In the _Legende_, no doubt, are a thousand extravagances, _bizarreries_, anachronisms, and negligences. But the greatest poet is not, like the greatest general, he who makes fewest mistakes, but he who expresses the noblest and truest feeling in the noblest and truest language. So judged, the _Legende_ will take its place amongst the best that the nineteenth century produced in poetry.
G. F. BRIDGE.
LONDON, _March_, 1907. _
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