Victor Hugo

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Victor Hugo

Sharp Ink Publishing

2024

Contact: info@sharpinkbooks.com

ISBN 978-80-282-3584-0

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

NEW YORK

WORTHINGTON CO., 747 BROADWAY

1886

TABLE DES MATIÈRES

THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO

LA LÉGENDE DES SIÈCLES

THE WORK OF VICTOR HUGO

In the spring of 1616 the greatest Englishman of all time passed away with no public homage or notice, and the first tributes paid to his memory were prefixed to the miserably garbled and inaccurate edition of his works which was issued seven years later by a brace of players under the patronage of a brace of peers. In the spring of 1885 the greatest Frenchman of all time has passed away amid such universal anguish and passion of regret as never before accompanied the death of the greatest among poets. The contrast is of course not wholly due to the incalculable progress of humanity during the two hundred and sixty-nine years which divide the date of our mourning from the date of Shakespeare's death: nor even to the vast superiority of Frenchmen to Englishmen in the quality of generous, just, and reasonable gratitude for the very highest of all benefits that man can confer on mankind. For the greatest poet of this century has been more than such a force of indirect and gradual beneficence as every great writer must needs be. His spiritual service has been in its inmost essence, in its highest development, the service of a healer and a comforter, the work of a redeemer and a prophet. Above all other apostles who have brought us each the glad tidings of his peculiar gospel, the free gifts of his special inspiration, has this one deserved to be called by the most beautiful and tender of all human titles—the son of consolation. His burning wrath and scorn unquenchable were fed with light and heat from the inexhaustible dayspring of his love—a fountain of everlasting and unconsuming fire. We know of no such great poet so good, of no such good man so great in genius: not though Milton and Shelley, our greatest lyric singer and our single epic poet, remain with us for signs and examples of devotion as heroic and self-sacrifice as pure. And therefore it is but simply reasonable that not those alone should mourn for him who have been reared and nurtured on the fruits of his creative spirit: that those also whom he wrought and fought for, but who know him only as their champion and their friend—they that cannot even read him, but remember how he labored in their cause, that their children might fare otherwise than they—should bear no unequal part in the burden of this infinite and worldwide sorrow.

For us, who from childhood upwards have fostered and fortified whatever of good was born in us—all capacity of spiritual work, all seed of human sympathy, all powers of hope and faith, all passions and aspirations found loyal to the service of duty and of love—with the bread of his deathless word and the wine of his immortal song, the one thing possible to do in this first hour of bitterness and stupefaction at the sense of a loss not possible yet to realize, is not to declaim his praise or parade our lamentation in modulated effects or efforts of panegyric or of dirge: it is to reckon up once more the standing account of our all but incalculable debt. A brief and simple summary of his published works may probably lay before the student some points and some details not generally familiar to the run of English readers: and I know not what better service might be done them than to bring into their sight such aspects of the most multiform and many-sided genius that ever wrought in prose or verse as are least obvious and least notorious to the foreign world of letters.

Poet, dramatist, novelist, historian, philosopher, and patriot, the spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century was before all things and above all things a poet. Throughout all the various and ambitious attempts of his marvelous boyhood—criticism, drama, satire, elegy, epigram, and romance—the dominant vein is poetic. His example will stand forever as the crowning disproof of the doubtless more than plausible opinion that the most amazing precocity of power is a sign of ensuing impotence and premature decay. There was never a more brilliant boy than Victor Hugo; but there has never been a greater man. At any other than a time of mourning it might be neither unseasonable nor unprofitable to observe that the boy's early verse, moulded on the models of the eighteenth century, is an arsenal of satire on revolutionary principles or notions which might suffice to furnish forth with more than their natural equipment of epigram a whole army of reactionary rhymesters and pamphleteers. But from the first, without knowing it, he was on the road to Damascus: if not to be struck down by sudden miracle, yet by no less inevitable a process to undergo a no less unquestionable conversion. At sixteen he wrote for a wager in the space of a fortnight the chivalrous and heroic story of Bug-Jargal; afterwards recast and reinformed with fresh vigor of vitality, when the author had attained the maturer age of twenty-three. His tenderness and manliness of spirit were here made nobly manifest: his originality and ardor of imagination, wild as yet and crude and violent, found vent two years later in Han d'Islande. But no boyish work on record ever showed more singular force of hand, more brilliant variety of power: though the author's criticism ten years later admits that "il n'y a dans Han d'Islande qu'une chose sentie, l'amour du jeune homme; qu'une chose observée, l'amour de la jeune fille." But as the work of a boy's fancy or invention, touched here and there with genuine humor, terror, and pathos, it is not less wonderful than are the author's first odes for ease and force and freshness and fluency of verse imbued with simple and sincere feeling, with cordial and candid faith. And in both these boyish stories the hand of a soldier's son, a child of the camp, reared in the lap of war and cradled in traditions of daring, is evident whenever an episode of martial adventure comes in among the more fantastic, excursions of adolescent inventiveness. But it is in the ballads written between his twenty-second and his twenty-seventh year that Victor Hugo first showed himself, beyond all question and above all cavil, an original and a great poet. La Chasse du Burgrave and Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean would suffice of themselves to establish that. The fire, the music, the force, the tenderness, the spirit of these glorious little poems must needs, one would think, impress even such readers as might be impervious to the charm of their exquisitely vigorous and dexterous execution. Take for example this one stanza from the ballad last mentioned:—

La cohue,

Flot de fer,

Frappe, hue,

Remplit l'air,

Et, profonde,

Tourne et gronde

Comme une onde

Sur la mer.

It will of course, I should hope, be understood once for all that when I venture to select for special mention any special poem of Hugo's I do not dream of venturing to suggest that others are not or may not be fully as worthy of homage, or that anything of this incomparable master's work will not requite our study or does not demand our admiration; I do but take leave to indicate in passing some of those which have been to me especially fruitful of enduring delight, and still are cherished in consequence with a peculiar gratitude.

At twenty-five the already celebrated lyric poet published his magnificent historic drama of Cromwell: a work sufficient of itself to establish the author's fame for all ages in which poetry and thought, passion and humor, subtle truth of character, stately perfection of structure, facile force of dialogue and splendid eloquence of style, continue to be admired and enjoyed. That the author has apparently confounded one earl of Rochester with another more famous bearer of the same title must not be allowed to interfere with the credit due to him for wide and various research. Any dullard can point the finger at a slip here and there in the history, a change or an error of detail or of date: it needs more care to appreciate the painstaking and ardent industry which has collected and fused-together a great mass of historic and legendary material, the fervent energy of inspiration which has given life, order, and harmony to the vast and versatile design. As to the executive part of the poem, the least that can be said by any competent judge of that matter is that Molière was already equalled and Corneille was already excelled in their respective provinces of verse by the young conqueror whose rule was equal and imperial over every realm of song. The comic interludes or episodes of the second and third acts, so admirably welded into the structure or woven into the thread of the action, would suffice to prove this when collated with the seventeenth scene of the third act and the great speech of Cromwell in the fifth.

Arrêtez!

Que veut dire ceci? Pourquoi cette couronne?

Que veut-on que j'en fasse? et qui donc me la donne?

Est-ce un rêve? Est-ce bien le bandeau que je vois?

De quel droit me vient-on confondre avec les rois?

Qui mêle un tel scandale à nos pieuses fêtes

Quoi! leur couronne, à moi qui fais tomber leurs têtes?

S'est-on mépris au but de ces solennités?—

Milords, messieurs, anglais, frères, qui m'écoutez,

Je ne viens point ici ceindre le diadème,

Mais retremper mon titre au sein du peuple même,

Rajeunir mon pouvoir, renouveler mes droits.

L'écarlate sacrée était teinte deux fois.

Cette pourpre est au peuple, et, d'une âme loyale,

Je la tiens de lui.—Mais la couronne royale!

Quand l'ai-je demandée? Et qui dit que j'en veux?

Je ne donnerais pas un seul de mes cheveux,

De ces cheveux blanchis à servir l'Angleterre,

Pour tous les fleurons d'or des princes de la terre.

Ôtez cela d'ici! Remportez, remportez

Ce hochet, ridicule entre les vanités!

N'attendez pas qu'aux pieds je foule ces misères!

Qu'ils me connaissent mal, les hommes peu sincères

Qui m'osent affronter jusqu'à me couronner!

J'ai reçu de Dieu plus qu'ils ne peuvent donner,

La grâce inamissible; et de moi je suis maître.

Une fois fils du ciel, peut-on cesser de l'être?

De nos prospérités l'univers est jaloux.

Que me faut-il de plus que le bonheur de tous?

Je vous l'ai dit. Ce peuple est le peuple d'élite.

L'Europe de cette île est l'humble satellite.

Tout cède à notre étoile; et l'impie est maudit.

Il semble, à voir cela, que le Seigneur ait dit:

—Angleterre! grandis, et sois ma fille aînée.

Entre les nations mes mains t'ont couronnée;

Sois donc ma bien-aimée, et marche à mes côtés.—

Il déroule sur nous d'abondantes bontés;

Chaque jour qui finit, chaque jour qui commence,

Ajoute un anneau d'or à cette chaîne immense.

On croirait que ce Dieu, terrible aux philistins,

À comme un ouvrier composé nos destins;

Que son bras, sur un axe indestructible aux âges,

De ce vaste édifice a scellé les rouages,

Œuvre mystérieuse, et dont ses longs efforts

Pour des siècles peut-être ont monté les ressorts.

Ainsi tout va. La roue, à la roue enchaînée,

Mord de sa dent de fer la machine entraînée;

Les massifs balanciers, les antennes, les poids,

Labyrinthe vivant, se meuvent à la fois;

L'effrayante machine accomplit sans relâche

Sa marche inexorable et sa puissante tâche;

Et des peuples entiers, pris dans ses mille bras,

Disparaîtraient broyés, s'ils ne se rangeaient pas.

Et j'entraverais Dieu, dont la loi salutaire

Nous fait un sort à part dans le sort de la terre!

J'irais, du peuple élu foulant le droit ancien,

Mettre mon intérêt à la place du sien!

Pilote, j'ouvrirais la voile aux vents contraires!

(Hochant la tête.)

Non, je ne donne pas cette joie aux faux frères.

Le