17 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 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 sorrowful 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 transcendant 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 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 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 : hear the 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 never more 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 66 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 voudrais n'être pas Français pour pouvoir dire Ma patrie et ma gloire et mon unique amour !" 1 I may cite here, as in echo of this cry, the noble words just now addressed by the greatest of American voices to "the star, the ship of France, beat back and baffled long--dim, smitten star-star |