Victor Hugo:L’annÉe Terrible.

The man who takes upon himself the task of commentary on a book of this rank feels something of the same hesitation and reluctance come upon him which fell upon the writer at starting. He cannot at once be sure whether he does right to go forward or not. It is not that he too feels the rising tide of the bitter waters of shame; it is not that he too sees a “star grow lesser in heaven.” It is, if I may take up the poet’s metaphor, that he sees the crowning star of a long night now dilated to a sun through the thunderclouds of the morning. He knows that this fire in heaven is indeed the fire of day; but he finds no fitting words of welcome or thanksgiving to salute so terrible a sunrise. Once more we receive from the hands of our supreme poet a book full of light and music; but a book written in tears and blood and characters of flame. We cannot but rejoice that it has been written, and grieve that ever it could have been. The child brought forth is visibly of divine birth, and his blood of the immortals; but he was brought forth with heartbreak and the pangs of “a terrible childbed.” The delight we take in the majesty and beauty of this “mighty line” has been dearly purchased by the bitter occasion which evoked it. Yet it cannot but be with delight that we receive so great a gift as this from the chief poet of an age, and of an age so full of light and storm, of high action and high passion, as is ours. For his hand has never been firmer, his note more clear than now;
ἔτι γὰρ θεόθεν καταπνείει πειθὼ μολπᾶν ἀλκᾷ ξύμφυτος αἰών·
and in these bitter and tragic pages there is a sweetness surpassing that of love-songs or songs of wine, a sweetness as of the roll of the book spread before Ezekiel , that was written within and without, “and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.—Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.”
It would be well that all students of this book should read together with it, as complement at once and commentary, the memorable collection, “Actes et Paroles, 1870—1871—1872.” By the light of that precious record, and by this light alone, can it be properly read. There all who will may see by what right even beyond the right of genius the greatest poet of his great nation speaks now to us as a prophet to his people: by what right of labour, by what right of sorrow, by what right of pity and of scorn, by what right of indignation and of love. None of those disciples who most honoured him in his time of banishment could have anticipated for their master a higher honour or a heavier suffering than those nineteen years of exile; but in his own country there was reserved for him a brighter crown of honour, with a deeper draught of suffering. To defend Paris against Versailles and against itself, and to behold it wasted on the one hand with fire which was quenched on the other hand in blood: to cast from him the obloquy of men who refused to hear his defence of Garibaldi  for the offence of coming to their aid, and to pass at once from the clamour of the Assembly to the silence of sudden death, beside the corpse of a beloved son; to offer shelter to his enemies, and to be hunted from that shelter himself: these were things he had yet to do and to endure.
The poem opens with a prelude at once prophetic and satiric, tender and wise and full of noble scorn and nobler pity; the verse which sets a crown on the head of the people and a brand on the face of the mob is such as it is given but to one man in an age to write, and that by no means in every age. Then, for the first and fatal month of August 1870, we have a poem terrible as the occasion which called it forth, fit alike to serve as prologue to the poems of the months which follow or as an epilogue to the “Châtiments” which went before. That nothing after Sedan  might be wanting to the fugitive assassin once elect of the party of Barabbas , the scourge of imperishable verse is added to the branding-iron of historic fact.
The poems of the siege at once demand and defy commentary; they should be studied in their order as parts of one tragic symphony. From the overture which tells of the old glory of Germany before turning to France with a cry of inarticulate love, to the sad majestic epilogue which seals up the sorrowftil record of the days of capitulation, the various and continuous harmony flows forward through light and shadow, with bursts of thunder and tempest and interludes of sunshine and sweet air. In that last poem for February we see as it were the agony of faith; before the sight of evil inseparable from good, of good inextricable from evil, the rallying cry of hope seems for the moment, and only for the moment seems, to falter even on the lips which uttered that sovereign song of resurrection, great as the greatest old Hebrew psalm, which crowns and closes the awful roll of the “Châtiments.” For that mighty hymn of a transcendent faith in the final conscience of the world called God, in the ultimate justice and universal vision of the eye and heart of things, we have but the grand unanswerable question: —
“Qui donc mesurera l’ombre d’un bout à l’autre, Et la vie et la tombe, espaces inouïs Où le monceau des jours meurt sous l’amas des nuits, Où de vagues éclairs dans les ténèbres glissent, Où les extrémités des lois s’évanouissent!”
In this tragic range of poems reaching from September to March there is an echo of all emotions in turn that the great spirit of a patriot and a poet could suffer and express by translation of suffering into song; the bitter cry of invective and satire, the clear trumpet-call to defence, the triumphal wail for those who fell for France, the passionate sob of a son on the stricken bosom of a mother, the deep note of thought that slowly opens into flower of speech, and through all and after all the sweet unspeakable music of natural and simple love. After the voice which reproaches the priestlike soldier we hear the voice which rebukes the militant priest: and a fire as the fire of Juvenal  is outshone by a light as the light of Lucretius . In the verses addressed “to the Bishop who calls me Atheist,” satire is dissolved in aspiration, and the keenest edge of scorn is molten in the highest ardour of worship. The necessity of perfect disbelief in the incredible and ignoble for every soul that would attain to perfect belief in the noble and credible was nevermore clearly expounded or more loftily proclaimed. The fiery love and faith of the patriot find again and ever again some fresh glory of speech, some new splendour of song, in which to array themselves for everlasting; words of hatred and horror for the greed and ravin of the enemy and his princes
“who feed on gold and blood Till with the stain their inmost souls are dyed;”
words of wrath and scorn for the renegade friends who had no word of comfort and no hand for help in the hour of the passion of France crucified, but were seen with hands outstretched from oversea
“Shaking the bloody fingers of her foes”
in the presence (as they thought it) of her corpse; words of living fire and light for love of the mother-land despised and rejected of men whose pity goes so far as to compassionate her children for the blush of shame to which their bitter fortune has condemned them, for the disgrace of being compelled to confess her for their mother:
“Ah! je voudrais, Je vondrais n’être pas Français pour pouvoir dire Que je te choisis, France, et que, dans ton martyre, Je te proclame, toi que ronge le vautour. Ma patrie et ma gloire et mon unique amour!”
Others who will may have the honour of that privilege, to cast the weight of their hearts upon the losing side, to bring tribute of love and trust and reverence rather to failure than to success, to a republic bound in chains of iron than to an empire bound in chains of gold; but men who have the lineal pulse of French blood in their veins and the traditional memories of French kindred and alliance in their hearts, men to whose forefathers in exile for their faith’s sake the mighty mother has once and again opened her arms for shelter in past ages, and fostered under her wings generation after generation as her children, cannot well read such words as these without a thrill of the blood and a kindling of the memory which neither the native of France nor the kindred foreigner can wholly share.
Side by side with the ardent denunciations of German rapine and spoliation, of the hands found equally ready to seize a province or a purse, the purblind and devout incompetence of the defender who “would rather go with sir priest than sir knight,” the soldier who for all his personal courage was “inclined to charge the saints in heaven with the task of keeping off the danger,” is twice and thrice chastised with bitter and burning words of remonstrance. The keenest sarcasm however was in store for June, when an impertinence of this man’s drew down a memorable retort on the general whose sallies were reserved for the writer; he was somewhat chary of them during the time of the siege; a general who might as well have taken the offensive against the enemy instead.
In sharp and sweet contrast to these stand the poems of a finer excellence, such as the letter of January 10th sent by balloon from the besieged city with its bright brave message of affection and confidence, full of the clear light laughter of French heroism not less than of its high and fiery faith. But for perfect delight and strong charm of loveliness we return at each reading to the domestic poems as to the crowning splendour and wonder of this great book. All students have always known Victor Hugo for the supreme singer of childhood; of its works and ways, its gladness and sadness, its earthly weakness and heavenly beauty, its indefinable attraction lying deeper than all reason can sound or all analysis resolve. Even after Shakespeare’s portrait of Mamillius , and the divine cradle-songs of Blake, we are compelled to recognise in the living master the most perfect poet of little children. Circumstances have given to these present poems a colour and a pathos, a gentle glory and a luminous tenderness, which only such a framework of time and place could give. Out of the strong has come forth such sweetness, out of the lion’s mouth such honey, as no smaller or weaker thing can breed. Assuredly, as the Master has said himself in that majestic prose poem inscribed with the name of Shakespeare, the mightiest mountains can outmatch even for flowers the valleys whose whole business is to rear them; their blossoming ravines and hollows full of April can beat the meadows at their own trade; the strongest of singers are the sweetest, and no poet of the idyllic or elegiac kind can rival even on his own peculiar ground, for tender grace and delicacy of beauty, the most potent poets of a higher order, sovereigns of lyric and of tragic song. It is Æschylus, and not Euripides , who fills the bitter air of the Scythian ravine with music of wings and words more sweet than sleep to the weary, with notes of heavenly pity and love unsubduable by fear; who shows us with one touch of terrible tenderness the maiden agony of Iphigenia , smiting with the piteous dart of her eye each one of the ministers of sacrifice, in dumb show as of a picture striving to speak to them; who throws upon the most fearful scene in all tragedy a flash of pathos unspeakable, when Clytæmnestra  bares before the sword of her son the bosom that suckled him as he slept. What Euripidean overflow of tears and words can be matched for its own special and much vaunted quality of tender and pathetic sweetness against such instances as these of the awful sweetness and intensity of the pathos of Æschylus? what wailing outcry “in the measures of a hired Cissian  mourner” can be likened to these brief words that sting like tears of fire? what milder note of the lesser gods of song has in it such penetrative and piercing gentleness as the softened speech of the thunderbearer? Where, among the poets who have never gone up to the prophetic heights or down to the tragic depths of thought and passion, is there one who can put forth when he will verse of such sweet and simple perfection as the great tragic and prophetic poet of our own age? These are some of the first verses inscribed to the baby grandchild whose pretty presence is ever and anon recalled to our mind’s eye between the dark acts of the year-long tragedy.
“Vous ètes done hier on an, ma bien-aimée. Contente, vous jasez, comme, sous la ramée, Au fond du nid plus tiède ouvrant de vagues yeux. Les oiseaux nouveau-nes gazouillent, tout joyeux De sentir qu’il commence à leur pousser des plumes. Jeanne, ta bouche est rose; et dans les gros volumes Dont les images font ta joie, et que je dois. Pour te plaire, laisser chiffonner par tes doigts, On trouYe de beaux vers, mais pas un qui te vaille Quand tout ton petit corps en me voyant tressaille; Les plus fameux auteurs n’ont rien écrit de mieux Que la pensée éose à demi dans tes yeux, Et que ta rèerie obscure, éparse, étrange, Regardant l’homme avec l’ignorance de l’ange.”
As in the look and action of a little child, so in this verse itself there is something of dim and divine pathos, sensible in the very joy of its beauty; something which touches men not too much used to the melting mood with a smiling sense of tears, an inner pang of delight made up of compassion and adoration before that divine weakness. In the next month’s verses addressed to the child in a time of sickness the pathos is more direct and tangible; more tender and exquisite than this it could not be. Again, in January, we have a glimpse “between two bombardments” of the growing and changing charm of the newly weaned angel, now ambitious to feel its feet on earth instead of the wings it left in heaven; on terms of household intimacy with an actual kitten, and old enough to laugh at angels yet unweaned.
“À chaque pas qu’il fait, l’enfant derriè lui Laisse plusieurs petits fantômes de lui-même. On se souvient de tous, on les pleure, on les aime, Et ce seraient des morts s’il n’était vivant, lui.”
With the one eternal exception of Shakespeare, what other poet has ever strewn the intervals of tragedy with blossoms of such breath and colour? The very verse seems a thing of flowerlike and childlike growth, the very body of the song a piece of living nature like any bud that bursts or young life that comes forth in spring. We are reminded of the interlude in Macbeth made by the prattle of Macduff’s child between the scenes of incantation and of murder. Beside these the student will set in the high places of remembrance the lines on a shell falling where once were the Feuillantines —that garden of now immortal blossom, of unwithering flower and fruit undecaying, where the grey-haired Master was once a fair-haired child, and watched beyond the flight of doves at sunrise the opening in heaven of the chaliced flower of dawn—in the same heaven where now blazes over his head the horrible efflorescence of the bursting Shell. “Here his soul flew forth singing; here before his dreamy eyes sprang flowers that seemed everlasting. Here life was one thing with light; here, under the thickening foliage in April, walked his mother, whom he held by the skirt of her gown.” Here the crowding flowers “seemed to laugh as they warmed themselves in the sun, and himself also was a flower, being a child.”
After five months of siege comes a month of mourning, and after the general agony an individual anguish. Before this we are silent; only there rises once more in our ears the unforgotten music of the fourth book of the “Contemplations,” and holds us dumb in reverence before the renewal of that august and awful sorrow.
Then come the two most terrible months of the whole hideous year; the strange vision of that Commune in which heroes were jostled by ruffians, and martyrs fell side by side with murderers; the monstrous figure of that Assembly on whose head lies all the weight of the blood shed on either side, within the city as without; the spectral unspeakable aspect of that fratricidal agony, as of some Dantesque wrestle between devils and lost souls in hell. Against the madness of the besieged as against the atrocity of the besiegers the voice of the greatest among Frenchmen was lifted up in vain. In vain he prophesied, when first a threat of murder was put forth against the hostages, of the murderous reprisals which a crime so senseless and so shameless must assuredly provoke. In vain he reclaimed for Paris, in the face of Versailles, the right of municipal self-government by her own council; in vain rebuked the untimely and inopportune haste of Paris to revindicate this right for herself in a season of such unexampled calamity and peril. On the 23rd of April he wrote from Brussels, where the care of his fatherless grandchildren for the time detained him, a letter to the Rappel suppressed in their deaf and blind insanity by men who would not hear and could not see; in this letter he traced with the keen fidelity of science the disease to its head, and with the direct intelligence of simple reason tracked the torrent of civil war to its source; to the action of the majority, inspired by the terror and ignorance which ere long were to impel them to the conception and perpetration of even greater crimes than they had already provoked from the ignorance and passion of their antagonists. Above all, his faithful and fearless voice was raised before both parties alike against the accursed principle of reprisals. Now as of old, as ever throughout his life of glory and of good, he called upon justice by her other name of mercy; he claimed for all alike the equity of compassion; he stood up to plead for all his enemies, for all the enemies of his cause—to repudiate for himself and his fellow-sufferers of past time the use of such means as had been used against themselves—of banishment, imprisonment, lifelong proscription, murder in the mass or in detail. But the plague was not so to be stayed; and when the restored government had set itself steadily to outdo in cold blood the crimes of the conquered populace in its agony, the mighty voice which had appealed in vain against the assassins and incendiaries whose deeds had covered with just or unjust dishonour the name of the fallen party, who had confused in the sight of Europe their own evil works with the noble dreams and deeds of better men, and sullied with the fumes of blood and fire the once sublime and stainless name of “commune”—this same voice was heard to intercede for the outcasts of that party, to offer a refuge to fugitives from the grasp of a government yet guiltier of blood than theirs. This infamous crime had not long to wait for its reward; a night attack on the house of the criminal with paving-stones and levers and threats of instant death. The year before, in answer to his appeal against invasion, certain bloodhounds of the press in Germany had raised such another yell as these curs in Belgium, bidding “hang the poet at the mast-head;” this time the cry was “À la lanterne!” Never was the sanguinary frenzy of the men of revolution, as exemplified in Victor Hugo, set off in stronger relief by the mild wisdom and moderation of the men of order, as exemplified in his assailants. Moved by this consideration, the Belgian government naturally proceeded to expel the offender; but with a remarkable want of logic omitted to offer the slightest reward to the brave men who had vindicated law and order by leading a forlorn hope against a fortress garrisoned by an old man, four women, and two children, one twenty months of age, one two years and a half. It is almost incredible that some months later the son of a minister, who had taken a leading part in this heroic work, was condemned to a fine of not less than four pounds sterling. Considering that once at least he or another of the crew did very nearly succeed in beating out the brains of the child in arms with a well aimed flint, it is simply inexplicable that no mark of honour should have been conferred by royal or national gratitude on so daring a champion of law, so devoted a defender of social order against the horrors of imminent anarchy. In a case of this pressing danger, this mortal peril, it is not every man who would have put himself forward at such risk to protect against a force so formidable the threatened safety of society; not even the native land of these lion-hearted men can hope always to reproduce a breed of patriots ready to incur such hazards and undertake such feats as this in the sacred cause of their country. France has her Bayards  and her Dantons , England her Sidneys  and her Nelsons ; these are but common heroes, fit only to be classed with the heroes and patriots of old time, and such as their native soil might haply rear again at need; but the most ardent and sanguine lover of his country in all Belgium can hardly hope that his fatherland will ever again bring forth a race of men worthy to be called the seed of such fathers as these; men capable of exploits unexampled in the annals of vulgar patriotism, and from which the bravest of those above cited would assuredly have drawn back. It is hard to imagine those heroes of other countries inspired with the courage requisite to make war upon such enemies and under such conditions as could not suffice to daunt or divert from their purpose the heroes of Brussels.
Thus, as once before from Jersey, was Victor Hugo now driven from Belgium by a government which in the year of general shame contrived to attain the supreme crown of disgrace, to gather the final flower of ignominy; a distinction not easy to win from so many rivals in the infamous race; but theft and murder, under their magnified and multiplied forms of national robbery and civic massacre, are too common among a certain sort of conquerors to be marked out for such especial notice as an act of this singular and admirable baseness. From all unclean things, from the mouths of the priesthood and the press, from the tongues that lap blood and the throats that vomit falsehood, rose the cry of mockery and hatred; if the preacher of peace and righteousness, the counsellor of justice and of mercy, were not a madman, he would be a ruffian; but the punctilious equity of episcopal journals gave him the benefit of the doubt. Yet for all this, as the poet found on leaving Brussels, it is not everybody who can impose the doom of exile; to expulsion the foreigner may condemn you, to exile he cannot. Exile is from the fatherland alone; a man’s own country is the only one terrible to him who is cast out from it. In words full of the beauty of a divine sorrow the exile of many years has set down the difference.
From Vianden as from Brussels he continued to fulfil the duty of intercessor; to plead for the incendiary who could not read, for the terrible and pitiable woman dragged in triumph through the laughing and raging throngs of Versailles, dumb and bleeding, with foam flecked lips fast locked in bitterness of silence, in savage deafness that nothing can move or shake, with the look as of one “aweary of the sun,” with a kind of fierce affright in her eyes. For all such his appeal is made to their slayers on the old sacred plea, “Forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Their wretchedness and their ignorance, their great want and their little knowledge, left them conscious of all that they suffered, unconscious of all that they did.
Out of the darkness of these most tragic poems of all, one stands up with the light of a great deed on it, relieved against the rest in a glory as of sunrise. It is the poem which places on everlasting record the heroism of a child of twelve, condemned to be shot after all his companions, who asked leave to go first and take his watch home to his mother, promising to come back in time to die in his turn. They let him go, laughing at the infantine shallowness of the pretence; the little blackguard was afraid; off with you! He went, and returned. Even the soldiers of Thiers and Galifet could not slaughter that boy; the officer in command gave him his life, and the master-poet of his nation has given him immortality. The verses in which the greater of these two gifts is bestowed come like a draught of wine to the lips of one sick and faint amid all the pitiful and fearful record of evil inflicted and endured; they refresh, rekindle, reilluminate the sunken spirit with a flush and thrill of high delight.
But it is possible to meet death with another kind of fearlessness than this, a quality which is not of the light but of the darkness; not with divine defiance as a hero, but with desperate indifference as a slave: nor is any society sound or any state secure which has found out no way to cure this dismal readiness to be killed off, this grim facility in dying. Upon all these to whom we have made life so hard that old men and children alike are ready to leave it without a word or tear, in tragic disdain, as of men strangers to their own death, whose grave was long since ready dug in their heart; upon all to whom we have refused the right of the body to its meat and the right of the spirit to its food, to whom we have given neither bread nor light, corporeal nurture nor intellectual; upon the slaughtered and the banished, the hideous pits of quicklime into which the yet warm corpses of men and women were huddled, and the more hideous ships of transport between whose decks were huddled the living agonies of those condemned to the sufferings over which in the first years of the fallen empire men shuddered or wept, thinking of the innocent as well as the guilty lives crushed and worn out in that penal passage, killed by cold and heat and foul wretchedness—stifled in dens too low to stand upright in, with the sense overhead of the moving mass of the huge hurrying ship on its intolerable way; upon all these multitudinous miseries of all who do and suffer wrong, the single voice of charity and of reason invokes the equal dole and due of pity. At Vianden, amid all the sounds and shows of summer, the banished poet broods on the bloody problem that is not to be solved by file-firing and massacre at haphazard; all the light of the June days is reflected in his verse, but in his soul there is no reflection but of graves dug in the street for men shot down without trial, of murder feeling its way in the dark at random, and victims dispatched by chance instead of choice. With the intense and subtle beauty of this June landscape, where the witness could see no sympathy with the human trouble of the time, we may compare that former picture of the grim glory of a November sky after sunset, seen from the invested walls of Paris, when heaven did seem in harmony with the time, and the watcher saw there a reflection of war and mourning, from the west as white as a shroud to the east as black as a pall and along the line of horizon the likeness of a blood-red sword let fall from the hand of a god after some battle with a giant of equal stature.
For all this, notwithstanding, the watchword of the poem is hope, and not despair. “All this horror has hope in it; the ice-cold morning chills the sky-line as with fear; at times the day begins with such a shudder that the rising sun seems a masked attack.—The coming wave of the unknown has but a dull and livid transparence, into which the light comes but by degrees; what it shows us, seems to float and drift in folds immeasurable. The expansion of form and number appals us, and it is horrible to see to-day in the darkness what ought only to be seen to-morrow.” By the parable of the robin’s nest found in the hollow of the brazen mouth of the Waterloo lion, we are bidden see and hear the future in the womb of the present, hope in the jaws of despair, the song of peace in the very throat of war. Thus it is but natural that the poet should hearken rather to the higher voice than to the voice of expediency, to the counsellor whose name is Reason, whose forename is Interest; to the friendly admonition which reminds him that truth which is over true is all but falsehood; that in seeking the ideal you find the visionary, and become a dreamer through being too much a thinker; that the wise man does not wish to be unjust, but fears on the other hand to be too just, and seeks a middle course between falsehood, which is the first danger, and truth, which is the second; that Right in the rough is merely the ore from which in its crude state we have to extract the pure gold of Law that too much light is as sure to blind you as too much darkness, and if necessary you should not open the shutter more than halfway; that war and the scaffold are detestable in theory, and practically serviceable: that the shop must be set up against the temple, though the money-changers were once on a time driven out of it—for the fault of Jesus was to be something too much a God; that in all things wisdom is moderation, and from its quiet corner can remark and reprehend the flaws and excesses of the universe; as for instance that though the sun be splendid and the spring be sweet; the one has too many beams and the other has too many roses; this is the inconvenience of all things of the kind, and God is by no means free from exaggeration; to imitate him is to fall into perfection—a grave risk; all work is done better after a lesser model, and God does not always set the best example to follow. What is the use of being inaccessible? Jesus goes too far in declining to take the offer of Beelzebub  into consideration; not that I say he ought to close with it; but it is stupid for God to be rude when the devil is civil; it would have been better to say, “I’ll think it over, my good friend.” After all, man is man; he is not wicked, and he is not good by no means white as snow, but by no means black as coal; black and white, piebald, striped, dubious, sceptical. Seeing that men are small and their conscience dwarfish, the statesman takes their measure before he ventures anything: he astonishes them, but without any thunderclaps of genius or daring which might make their heads giddy; he gets them up prodigies proportioned to their size. The voice of wisdom then proceeds to recapitulate all the troubles which a contrary line of conduct has brought on the scorner who still turns a deaf ear to her counsel: he has got himself stoned out of Brussels; the rattlesnakes of the press shake their rattles at him, the clerical and imperial gazettes have brought to light all his secret sins, drunkenness, theft, avarice, inhospitality, the bad wine and lenten fare set before his guests, and so forth; M. Veuillot  is so witty as to call him pumpkin-head; it is all his own fault; to resist evil is doubtless a good thing, but it is a bad thing to stand alone; to rate and rebuke success, to be rough with those who have the upper hand, is really a blockhead’s trick; all conquerors are in the right, and all that glitters is gold: the god of the winds is God, and the weathercock is the symbol of his worship.—And then there is always some little admixture of positive right in actual fact, some little residue of good discoverable in all evil, which it should be your business to seek out. If Torquemada  is in power you warm yourself at the stake.—It is better to look for the real than for the true; the reality will help you to live, the truth will be the ruin of you; the reality is afraid of the truth.—A man’s duty is just to make use of facts; you (says the voice of good counsel) have read it wrong: you are like a man who should take a star out of heaven to light him when a candle would serve better to see the way by. To this sound advice we see too plainly that the hearer on whom it is wasted prefers the dictation of the voice which speaks in answer, admitting that this low sort of light may have its partisans, may be found excellent and may really be useful to avoid a shock, ward off a projectile, walk well nigh straight by in the dark cross-roads, and find your whereabouts among small duties; it serves publicans very well as a lamp for their counters; it has on its side, very naturally, the purblind, the clever, the cunning, the prudent, the discreet, those who can only see things close, those who scrutinize a spider’s web. But there must be somebody on the side of the stars! somebody to stand up for brotherhood, for mercy, for honour, for right, for freedom, and for the solemn splendour of absolute truth. With all their sublimity and serenity, flowers as they are of summer everlasting, the shining constellations have need that the world they guide should bear them witness that they shine, and some man’s voice be raised in every age to reassure his brothers by such cry of testimony uttered across the night; for nothing would be so terrible as an ultimate equality of good and evil, of light and darkness, in the sight of the supreme and infinite unknown world; nothing would bring so heavy an indictment against God as the mad and senseless waste of light unprofitably lost and scattered about the hollow deep of heaven without the direction of a will. This absence of will, this want of conscience in the world, the prophet of belief refuses to accept as possible. In the last poem of the book he rejects the conception of evil as triumphant in the end, of nature as a cheat so ghastly and so base that God ought to hide himself for shame, of a heaven which shelters from sight a divine malefactor, of some one hiding behind the starry veil of the abyss who premeditates a crime, of man as having given all, the days of his life, the tears of his eyes, the blood of his heart, only to be made the august plaything of treacherous omnipotence: it would not be worth while for the winds to stir the stormy tide of our lives, for the morning to come forth of the sea and dazzle the blinded flowers with broadcast seed of diamond, for the bird to sing, or for the world to be, if fate were but a hunter on the trail of his prey, if all man’s efforts brought forth but vanity, if the darkness were his child and his mother were the dust, if he rowed on night and day, putting forth his will, pouring out his blood, discovering and creating, to no end but a frightful arrival nowhither; then might man, nothing as he is, rise up in judgement against God and take to witness the skies and stars on his behalf. But it is not so; whence morning rises, the future shall surely rise; the dawn is a plighted word of everlasting engagement; the visible firmament is as it were a divine promise to pay; and the eternal and infinite God is not bankrupt
In the strength of this faith a man may well despise all insult and all falsehood thrown up at him, all railing and mockery of his country or his creed from the unclean lips of church pamphleteers and other such creatures of the darkness and the dirt as in all lands alike are bred from the obscurer and obscener parts of literature. These are to him no more than the foul bog-water at its foot is to the oak whose boughs are the whole forest’s dome; than the unlovely insects of the dust that creep beneath it are to the marble giant, august in its mutilation—to the colossal Sphinx of rose-tinged granite, grim and great, that sits with hands on knees all through the night wherein the shaken palm-trees shiver, waiting for its moment to speak to the sunrise, and unconscious if any reptile beslaver its base. The god has never known that a toad was stirring; while a worm slides over him, he keeps in silence his awful mystery of hidden sound and utterance withheld; and the swarming of centipedes without number cannot take from Memnon , suddenly struck radiant, the great and terrible voice that makes answer to the sun. Those minute and multitudinous creatures who revile and defame the great—and thereby, says Blake, “blaspheme God, for there is no other God”—have no more power to disturb the man defamed than the judges who try the Revolution at their bar and give sentence against it have power to undo its work; their wrath and their mourning are in vain; the long festival of the ravenous night is over, the world of darkness is in the throes of death; the dreadful daylight has come; the flitter-mouse is blind, the polecat strays about squealing, the glowworm has lost his glory, the fox, alas, sheds tears; the beasts that used to go out hunting in the evening at the time when little birds go to sleep are at their last gasp; the desolation of the wolves fills the woods full of howling; the persecuted spectres know not what to do; if this goes on, if this light persists in dazzling and dismaying the night-hawk and the raven, the vampire will die of hunger in the grave; the pitiless sunbeam catches and consumes the dark.—It is to judge the crimes of the sunrise that these judges sit in session.
Meantime, amid all the alternations of troubled hope with horror and the travail of an age in labour that has not strength to bring forth, there are present things of comfort and reassurance. “The children we have always with us;” they are no more troubled about what we do than the bird that twitters beneath the hornbeam, or the star that breaks into flower of light on the black sky-line; they ask God for nothing but his sun; it is enough for little Jeanne that the sky should be blue. Over his son’s and their father’s grave the poet sees two little figures darkened by the dim shadow and gilded by the vague light of the dead. He speaks to them sweet and sublime words of blessing and of prophecy; of the glad heavenly ignorance that is theirs now, of the sad great knowledge that must be one day theirs. With the last and loftiest notes of that high soft music in our ears, we will leave off our labour of citation and exposition. “They will live to know,” he says, “how man must live with his fate at the mercy of chance, in such fashion that he may find hereafter the truth of things conform to his vision of them here.”
“Moi-même un jour, aprés la mort, je connaîtrai Mon destin que j’ignore, Et je me pencherai sur vous, tout pénétré De mystère et d’aurore.
Je saurai le secret de Pexil, du linceul Jeté sur votre enfuice, Et pourquoi la justice et la douceur d’un seul Semble à tous une offense.
Je comprendrai pourquoi, tandis que vous chantiez, Dans mes branches funèbres, Moi qui pour tous les maux veux toutes les pitiés, J’avais tant de ténèbres.
Je saurai pourquoi Fombre implacable est sur moi, Pourquoi tant d’hécatombes, Pourquoi l’hiver sans fin m’enveloppe, pourquoi Je m’accroîs sur des tombes;
Pourquoi tant de combats, de larmes, de regrets, Et tant de tristes choses; Et pourquoi Dieu voulut que je fusse un cypres Quand vous étiez des roses.”
A poem having in it any element of greatness is likely to arouse many questions with regard to the poetic art in general, and certain in that case to illustrate them with fresh lights of its own. This of Victor Hugo’s at once suggests two points of frequent and fruitless debate between critics of the higher kind. The first, whether poetry and politics are irreconcilable or not; the second, whether art should prefer to deal with things immediate or with things remote. Upon both sides of either question it seems to me that even wise men have ere now been led from errors of theory to errors of decision. The well known formula of art for art’s sake,opposed as it has ever been to the practice of the poet who was so long credited with its authorship, has like other doctrines a true side to it and an untrue. Taken as an affirmative, it is a precious and everlasting truth. No work of art has any worth or life in it that is not done on the absolute terms of art; that is not before all things and above all things a work of positive excellence as judged by the laws of the special art to whose laws it is amenable. If the rules and conditions of that art be not observed, or if the work done be not great and perfect enough to rank among its triumphs, the poem, picture, statue, is a failure irredeemable and inexcusable by any show or any proof of high purpose and noble meaning. The rule of art is not the rule of morals; in morals the action is judged by the intention, the doer is applauded, excused, or condemned, according to the motive which induced his deed; in art, the one question is not what you mean but what you do. Therefore, as I have said elsewhere, the one primary requisite of art is artistic worth; “art for art’s sake first, and then all things shall be added to her—or if not, it is a matter of quite secondary importance; but from him that has not this one indispensable quality of the artist, shall be taken away even that which he has; whatever merit of aspiration, sentiment, sincerity, he may naturally possess, admirable and serviceable as in other lines of work it might have been and yet may be, is here unprofitable and unpraiseworthy.” Thus far we are at one with the preachers of “art for art;” we prefer for example Goethe  to Körner  and Sappho  to Tyrtaeus ; we would give many patriots for one artist, considering that civic virtue is more easily to be had than lyric genius, and that the hoarse monotony of verse lowered to the level of a Spartan understanding, however commendable such verse may be for the doctrine delivered and the duty inculcated upon all good citizens, is of less than no value to art, while there is a value beyond price and beyond thought in the Lesbian music which spends itself upon the record of fleshly fever and amorous malady. We admit then that the worth of a poem has properly nothing to do with its moral meaning or design; that the praise of a Caesar as sung by Virgil, of a Stuart as sung by Dryden, is preferable to the most magnanimous invective against tyranny which love of country and of liberty could wring from a Bavius  or a Settle ; but on the other hand we refuse to admit that art of the highest kind may not ally itself with moral or religious passion, with the ethics or the politics of a nation or an age. It does not detract from the poetic supremacy of Æchylus and of Dante, of Milton and of Shelley, that they should have been pleased to put their art to such use; nor does it de-etract from the sovereign greatness of other poets that they should have had no note of song for any such theme. In a word, the doctrine of art for art is true in the positive sense, false in the negative; sound as an affirmation, unsound as a prohibition. If it be not true that the only absolute duty of art is the duty she owes to herself, then must art be dependent on the alien conditions of subject and of aim; whereas she is dependent on herself alone, and on nothing above her or beneath; by her own law she must stand or fall, and to that alone she is responsible; by no other law can any work of art be condemned, by no other plea can it be saved. But while we refuse to any artist on any plea the license to infringe in the least article the letter of this law, to overlook or overpass it in the pursuit of any foreign purpose, we do not refuse to him the liberty of bringing within the range of it any subject that under these conditions may. be so brought and included within his proper scope of work. This liberty the men who take “art for art” as their motto, using the words in an exclusive sense, would refuse to concede; they see with perfect clearness and accuracy that art can never be a “handmaid” of any “lord,” as the moralist, pietist, or politician would fain have her be; and therefore they will not allow that she can properly be even so much as an ally of anything else. So on the one side we have the judges who judge of art by her capacity to serve some other good end than the production of good work; these would leave us for instance King John, but would assuredly deprive us of As You Like It; the national devotion and patriotic fire of King Henry V. would suffice in their estimation to set it far above the sceptic and inconclusive meditations of Hamlet, the pointless and aimless beauty of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. On the other side we have the judges who would ostracise every artist found guilty of a moral sense, of the political faith or the religious emotion of patriots and heroes; whose theory would raze the Persæ  from the scroll of Æschylus, and leave us nothing of Dante but the Vita Nuova, of Milton but the Allegro and Penseroso, of Shelley but the Skylark and the Cloud. In consistency the one order of fanatics would expel from the poetic commonwealth such citizens as Coleridge  and Keats , the other would disfranchise such as Burns and Byron The simple truth is that the question at issue between them is that illustrated by the old child’s parable of the gold and silver shield. Art is one, but the service of art is diverse. It is equally foolish to demand of a Goethe, a Keats, or a Coleridge, the proper and natural work of a Dante, a Milton, or a Shelley, as to invert the demand; to arraign the Divina Commedia in the name of Faust, the Sonnet on the Massacres in Piedmont in the name of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, or the Ode to Liberty in the name of Kubla Khan. I know nothing stranger in the history of criticism than the perversity even of eminent and exquisite critics in persistent condemnation of one great artist for his deficiency in the qualities of another. It is not that critics of the higher kind expect to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles; but they are too frequently surprised and indignant that they cannot find grapes on a fig-tree or figs on a vine. M. Auguste Vacquerie  has remarked before me on this unreasonable expectation and consequent irritation of the critical mind, with his usual bright and swift sense of the truth—a quality which we are sure to find when a good artist has occasion to speak of his own art and the theories current with respect to it. In this matter proscription and prescription are alike unavailing; it is equally futile to bid an artist forego the natural bent of his genius or to bid him assume the natural office of another. If the spirit or genius proper to himself move him for instance to write political poetry, he will write it; if it bid him abstain from any such theme and write only on personal or ideal subjects, then also he will obey; or if ever he attempt to force his genius into unnatural service, constrain it to some alien duty, the most praiseworthy purpose imaginable will not suffice to put life or worth into the work so done. Art knows nothing of choice between the two kinds or preference of the one to the other; she asks only that the artist shall “follow his star” with the faith and the fervour of Dante, whether it lead him on a path like or unlike the way of Dante’s work; the ministers of either tribe, the savours of either sacrifice, are equally excellent in her sight
The question whether past or present afford the highest matter for high poetry and offer the noblest reward to the noble workman has been as loudly and as long debated, but is really less debatable on any rational ground than the question of the end and aim of art. It is but lost labour that the champions on one side summon us to renounce the present and all its works, and return to bathe our spirits in the purer air and living springs of the past; it is but waste of breath for the champions of the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast off the bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turn from the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or romantic, classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we live and move and have our being, to send forth our souls and songs in search of the wonderful and doubtful future. Art knows nothing of time; for her there is but one tense, and all ages in her sight are alike present; there is nothing old in her sight, and nothing new. It is true, as the one side urges, that she fears not to face the actual aspect of the hour, to handle if it please her the intermediate matters of the day; it is true, as the other side insists, that she is free to go back when she will to the very beginnings of tradition and fetch her subject from the furthest of ancient days; she cannot be vulgarised by the touch of the present or deadened by the contact of the past. In vain, for instance, do the first poetess of England and the first poet of America agree to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty of confronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time, its meaning and its need; such work is worthy of a poet, but no worthier than any other work that has in it the principle of life. And a poem of the past, if otherwise as good, has in it as much of this principle as a poem of the present If a poem cast in the mould of classic or feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval romance, be lifeless and worthless, it is not because the subject or the form was ancient, but because the poet was inadequate to his task, incompetent to do better than a flat and feeble imitation; had he been able to fill the old types of art with new blood and breath, the remoteness of subject and the antiquity of form would in no wise have impaired the worth and reality of his work; he would have brought close to us the far-off loveliness and renewed for us the ancient life of his models, not by mechanical and servile transcript as of a copying clerk, but by loving and reverent emulation as of an original fellow-craftsman. No form is obsolete, no subject out of date, if the right man be there to rehandle it. To the question “Can these bones live?” there is but one answer; if the spirit and breath of art be breathed upon them indeed, and the voice prophesying upon them be indeed the voice of a prophet, then assuredly will the bones “come together, bone to his bone;” and the sinews and the flesh will come up upon them, and the skin cover them above, and the breath come into them, and they will live. For art is very life itself, and knows nothing of death; she is absolute truth, and takes no care of fact; she sees that Achilles  and Ulysses  are even now more actual by far than Wellington  and Talleyrand ; not merely more noble and more interesting as types and figures, but more positive and real; and thus it is (as Victor Hugo has himself so finely instanced it) “that Trimalchio  is alive, while the late M. Romieu  is dead.” Vain as is the warning of certain critics to beware of the present and abstain from its immediate vulgarities and realities, not less vain, however nobly meant or nobly worded, is the counter admonition to “mistrust the poet” who “trundles back his soul” some centuries to sing of chiefs and ladies “as dead as must be, for the greater part, the poems made on their heroic bones;” for if he be a poet indeed, these will at once be reclothed with instant flesh and reinspired with immediate breath, as present and as true, as palpable and as precious, as anything most near and real; and if the heroic bones be still fleshless and the heroic poems lifeless, the fault is not in the bones but in the poems, not in the theme but in the singer. As vain it is, not indeed to invite the muse to new spheres and fresher fields whither also she will surely and gladly come, but to bid her “migrate from Greece and Ionia, cross out those immensely overpaid accounts, that matter of Troy, and Achilles ’ wrath, and Æneas ’, Odysseus ’ wanderings;” forsake her temples and castles of old for the new quarters which doubtless also suit herwell and make her welcome; for neither epic nor romance of chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there is nothing in the past extinct; no scroll is “closed for ever,” no legend or vision of Hellenic or feudal faith “dissolved utterly like an exhalation:” all that ever had life in it has life in it for ever; those themes only are dead which never were other than dead. “She has left them all, and is here;” so the prophet of the new world vaunts himself in vain; she is there indeed, as he says, “by thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismayed—smiling and pleased, with palpable intent to stay;” but she has not needed for that to leave her old abodes; she is not a dependent creature of time or place, “servile to all the skiey influences;” she need not climb mountains or cross seas to bestow on all nations at once the light of her countenance; she is omnipresent and eternal, and forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut  nor Crusader, to dwell as she does with equal good-will among modem appliances in London and New York. All times and all places are one to her; the stuff she deals with is eternal, and eternally the same; no time or theme is inapt for her, no past or present preferable.
We do not therefore rate this present book higher or lower because it deals with actual politics and matter of the immediate day. It is true that to all who put their faith and hope in the republican principle it must bring comfort and encouragement, a sense of strength and a specialty of pleasure, quite apart from the delight in its beauty and power; but it is not on this ground that we would base its claim to the reverent study and thankful admiration of men. The first and last thing to be noted in it is the fact of its artistic price and poetic greatness. Those who share the faith and the devotion of the writer have of course good reason to rejoice that the first poet of a great age, the foremost voice of a great nation, should speak for them in the ears of the world; that the highest poetry of their time should take up the cause they have at heart, and set their belief to music. To have with us Victor Hugo in the present as we have Milton and Shelley in the past is not a matter to be lightly prized. Whether or not we may be at one with the master-singer on all points is a matter of less weight; whether we have learnt to look to Rome or to Paris, regenerate and redeemed from imperial or sacerdotal damnation, for the future light and model of republican Europe, we can receive with equal sympathy the heroic utterance of the greatest Frenchman’s trust in the country and the city of the Revolution. Not now, after so many days of darkness, after so many stages of terror and pity, can any lover of France be inclined to cavil at the utmost expression of loyalty, the utmost passion of worship, which the first of her sons may offer in the time of her sore need. All men’s mouths were opened against the sins and shames of Paris; stricken of her enemies, forsaken of her friends, the great city was naked to all assault of hostile hands or tongues; she was denied and renounced of Europe; it was time for the poet to take her part. We need not recall, though we cannot but remember, the source of all her ills; the first and foulest crime of a fruitful and baneful series, the murder of the Roman republic by the hands of French republicans; a crime which naturally and perforce brought forth at once its counterpart and its retribution in the minor though monstrous crime of December; which overthrew the triumvirate in Rome, and founded the empire in Paris. For that infamous expedition against right and freedom the nation which perpetrated and the nations which permitted it have since had heavily to pay. Not from the chief criminal alone, but from all accomplices who stood silent by to watch with folded hands the violation of all international conscience and the consummation of all international treason, has time exacted the full price of blood in blood and gold and shame. For the commission by France and the consummation by Europe of the crime which reinthralled a people and reinstalled a priesthood, even the infliction of the second empire was not found too costly an atonement to be exacted by the terrible equity of fate. But that the scourge fell first and heaviest on those Frenchmen who had protested and struggled with all the strength of their conscience and their soul against the sin and the shame of their country, men might have watched almost “with a bitter and severe delight” the assassination in its turn of republican France while yet red-handed from the blood of republican Rome. But it was not for the greatest of those among her sons who had resisted that execrable wrong, and being innocent of bloodguiltiness had suffered in expiation of it for nineteen years of exile—it was not for Hugo, and it is not for us, to cast in her teeth the reproach of her sin now that it has been atoned for by a heroic agony. Yet in reading these ardent and profuse invocations of France as prophetess and benefactress, fountain of light and symbol of right, we must feel now and then that some recognition of past wrong-doing, some acknowledgment of treason and violence done against the right and the light of the world, would have added weight and force to the expression of a patriotism which in default of it may be open to the enemy’s charge of vulgar and uncandid partisanship, of blind and one-sided provinciality. From these as from all other charges of narrowness or shallowness, want of culture, of judgement, and of temperance, we would fain see the noble ardour and loving passion of his faith as demonstrably clear in all men’s eyes as in the main it is at bottom to those who can read it aright. To have admitted that the empire was not simply a crime and a shame imposed on France as though by accident, but an inevitable indemnity demanded for her sin against her own high mission and honour, for the indulgence of greed and envy, of the lust after mean renown and unrighteous power which is the deformed and vicious parody of that virtue of patriotism whose name it takes in vain to make it hateful, of the arrogant and rancorous jealousy which impelled her baser politicians to play the game of the Catholic faction and let loose upon free Italy the soldiers of the Republic as the bloodhounds of the Church—to have avowed and noted this as the first and strongest link in the fatal chain of cause and effect wound up from Mentana to Sedan, could but have given fresh point and fresh profit to the fiery proclamation of France rearisen and redeemed. Then the philosophy and patriotism of the poet would not have been liable to the imputation of men who are now led to confound them with the common cries and conceits of that national egotism which has led to destruction the purblind and rapacious policy of sword-play and tongue-play. As it is, if ever tempted to find fault with the violence of devotion which insists on exalting above all names the name of Paris—Paris entire, and Paris alone—without alloy or reserve of blame or regret for its follies and falsities, its windy vanities and rootless restless mobility of mind, to qualify the praise of its faith and ardour in pursuit of the light, we may do well to consider that this hymn of worship is raised rather to the ideal city, the archetypal nation, the symbolic people, of which he has prophesied in that noble dithyrambic poem in prose prefixed originally to the book called “Paris Guide.” Whether or not that prophecy be accepted as a prediction, the speaker cannot fairly be accused of making his voice the mere echo of the blatant ignorance and strident self-assertion of the platform. Not but that some sharper word of warning or even of rebuke might perhaps have profitably tempered the warmth of his loyal and filial acclamation. With this, and with some implied admission of those good as well as evil elements in the composition of the German empire and army which gave his enemies their strength, the intellectual and historical aspect of the poem would be complete and unassailable. From all other points of view it stands out in perfect unity of relief, as an absolute type of what poetry can do with a tragic or epic subject of the poet’s own time. For a continuous epic or tragedy he gives us in appearance a series of lyric episodes which once completed and harmonized are seen to fulfil the conditions and compose the structure of a great and single work of art. Thus only can such a work be done in simple and sensible accordance with that unwritten law of right which is to the artist as a natural and physical instinct.
We accept then without reserve this great gift, for which the student can pay but thanks to the master whose payment from the world is the hatred of base men and the love of noble. In the mighty roll of his works we recognise at once that it must hold a high place for ever. That intense moral passion which may elsewhere have overflowed the bounds and “o’er-informed the tenement” of drama or romance has here a full vent in its proper sphere. This sovereign quality of the prophet is a glorious and dangerous quality for a poet. The burning impulse and masterful attraction of the soul towards ideas of justice and mercy, which make a man dedicate his genius to the immediate office of consolation and the immediate service of right, must be liable at times to divert the course of his work and impair the process of his art. To those who accused him of not imitating in his plays the method of that supreme dramatist in whom he professed his faith, Victor Hugo has well answered that it was not his part to imitate Shakespeare or any man; that the proof of vitality and value in the modem drama was that it had a life and a form, a body and a soul of its own. Nevertheless we may notice, with all reverence for the glorious dramatic work and fame of the first poet of our age, that on one point he might in some men’s judgment have done well to follow as far as was possible to his own proper genius the method of Shakespeare. The ideal dramatist, an archetype once incarnate and made actual in the greatest of all poets, has no visible preferences; in his capacity of artist he is incapable of personal indignation or predilection; as Keats  with subtle truth and sovereign insight has remarked, he “has as much delight in conceiving an Iago  as an Imogen .” For the time being, throughout the limits of his design, he maintains in awful equanimity of apparent abstraction the high indifference of nature or of God. Evil and good, and things and men, are in his hands as day in the potter’s, and he moulds them to the use and purpose of his art alone. What men are, and what their doings and their sufferings, he shows you face to face, and not as in a glass darkly; to you he leaves it to comment on the action and passion set before you, to love or hate, applaud or condemn, the agents and the patients of his mundane scheme, wide as time and space, hell-deep and heaven-high. It is for you, if you please, to take part with Imogen or Desdemona  against Iago or Iachimo , with Arthur  or Cordelia  against Goneril  or King John ; he is for all men, inasmuch as all are creatures and parcels of himself as artist, and of that art which “itself is nature;” he is not more for Brutus than for Antony , for Portia  or Volumnia  than for Cleopatra . This supreme office, it is evident, can scarcely be fulfilled by a poet of whom it is possible for his most loving disciple and the son of his adoption to say, as Auguste Vacquerie  has said of Victor Hugo, that all his works are acts of public virtue and charity, that his books are consecrated to the study and the relief of all sufferings, that his plays are dedicated to all the outcast and disinherited of the world. It is the general presence and predominance of this predeterminate and prepense design which has exposed his marvellous work to the charge of too deliberate and mechanical preparation, too studious premeditation of effect, too careful preoccupation of result. This in fact is the sum and sense of those imputations of calculated extravagance or preconcerted pathos and puppetry of passion done to order, outer heat of artificial fire with inner frost of spiritual cold, cast upon him by the only two famous men, among many infamous and obscure, who have attempted to impugn his greatness. But the most devout believer in Goethe’s or in Heine ’s judgment, if not blind as well as devout, must allow that the edge of their criticism is somewhat blunted by the fact that in the same breath they decry with loud and acrid violence of accent the man generally acknowledged as chief poet of his age and country, and extol in his place the names of such other Frenchmen as no countryman of their own outside their private social set or literary party could hear cited as his rivals without a smile. If fault be found in our hearing by any critic of general note and repute with some alleged shortcoming in the genius or defect in the workmanship of Shakespeare, of Michel Angelo , or of Handel , the force of the objection will be somewhat taken off when we find that the eminent fault-finder proposes to exalt in their stead as preferable objects of worship the works of Racine, of Guido, or of Rossini; and in like manner we are constrained to think less of the objections taken to Hugo by the Jupiter  of Weimar and the Aristophanes  of Germany, when we find that Goethe  offers us as a substitute for his Titanic sculptures the exquisite jewellery and faultless carvings of Prosper Mérimée ; as though one should offer to supplant the statuary “in that small chapel of the dim St. Laurence,” not by that of the Panathenaic series, but by the white marble shrine of Orcagna  in which the whole legend of the life of Mary is so tenderly and wonderfully wrought in little; while Heine would give us, for the sun of that most active and passionate genius, its solar strength and heat, its lightning and its light, the intermittent twinkle of a planet now fiery as a shooting star, now watery as a waning moon—sweet indeed and bright for the space of its hour, and anon fallen as an exhalation in some barren and quaking bog; would leave to France, in lieu of the divine and human harmony and glory of Hugo’s mighty line, the fantastic tenderness and ardent languor, the vacuous monotonous desire and discontent, the fitful and febrile beauty of Alfred de Musset. 
But whether or not there be reason in the objection that even such great works as “Marion de Lorme” and “Ruy Bias” are comparatively discoloured by this moral earnestness and strenuous preference of good to evil, or that besides this alleged distortion and diversion of art from its proper line of work, too much has been sacrificed or at least subordinated to the study of stage surprises conveyed in a constant succession of galvanic shocks, as though to atone for neglect or violation of dramatic duty and the inner law of artistic growth and poetic propriety by excess of outward and theatrical observance of effect; whether or not these and such-like deductions may be made from the fame of this great poet as dramatist or as novelist, in such a book as that now before us this quality is glorious only and dangerous no more. The partisanship which is the imperfection of a play is the perfection of a war-song or other national lyric, be it of lamentation, of exhortation, or of triumph. This book of song takes its place beyond question beside the greatest on that lyric list which reaches from the “Odes et Ballades” to the “Chansons des Rues et des Bois;” such a list of labours and triumphs as what other lyrist can show? First come the clear boyish notes of prelude, songs of earliest faith and fancy, royalist and romantic; then the brilliant vivid ballads, full already of supple harmonies and potent masteries of music, of passion and sentiment, force and grace; then the auroral resonance and radiance of the luminous “Orientales,” the high and tender cadences of the “Feuilles d’Automne,” the floating and changing melodies of the “Chants du Crépuscule,” the fervent and intimate echoes of the “Voix Intérieures,” the ardent and subtle refractions of “Les Rayons et les Ombres;” each in especial of these two latter books of song crowned by one of the most perfect lyrics in all the world of art for sweetness and sublimity—the former by those stanzas on the sound of the unseen sea by night, which have in them the very heart and mystery of darkness, the very music and the very passion of wave and wind; the other by that most wonderful and adorable poem in which all the sweet and bitter madness of love strong as death is distilled into deathless speech, the little lyric tragedy of Gastibelza: next, after many silent or at least songless years, the pealing thunders and blasting sunbeams of the “Châitiments:” then a work yet wider and higher and deeper than all these, the marvellous roll of the “Contemplations,” having in it all the stored and secret treasures of youth and age, of thought and faith, of love and sorrow, of life and death; with the mystery of the stars and the sepulchres above them and beneath: then the terrible and splendid chronicle of human evil and good, the epic and lyric “Légende des Siècles,” with its infinite variety of action and passion infernal and divine: then the subtle and full-throated carols of vigorous and various fancy built up in symmetrical modulation of elaborate symphonies by vision or by memory among the woods and streets: and now the sorrowful and stormy notes of the giant organ whose keys are the months of this “Année Terrible.” And all these make up but one division of the work of one man’s life: and we know that in the yet unsounded depth of his fathomless genius, as in the sunless treasure-houses of the sea, there are still jewels of what price we know not that must in their turn see light and give light. For these we have a prayer to put up that the gift of them may not be long delayed. There are few delights in any life so high and rare as the subtle and strong delight of sovereign art and poetry; there are none more pure and more sublime. To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life. As we pity ourselves for the loss of poems and pictures which have perished, and left of Sappho  but a fragment and of Zeuxis  but a name, so are we inclined to pity the dead who died too soon to enjoy the great works that we have enjoyed At each new glory that “swims into our ken” we surely feel that it is something to have lived to see this too rise. Those who might have had such an addition to the good things of their life, and were defrauded of it by delay, have reason to utter from the shades their ghostly complaint and reproach against the giver who withheld his gift from the world till they had passed out of it, and so made their lives less by one good thing, and that good thing a pleasure of great price. We know that our greatest poet living has kept back for many years some samples of his work; and much as he has given, we are but the more impelled by consideration of that imperial munificence to desire and demand its perfect consummation. Let us not have to wait longer than must needs be for the gift of our promised treasures; for the completion of that social and historic trilogy which has yet two parts to accomplish; for the plays whose names are now to us as the names of the lost plays of Æschylus, for the poems which are as the lost poems of Pindar ; for the light and sustenance, the glory and the joy, which the world has yet to expect at the hands of Victor Hugo.
1872.