*

oppressed by the strong, the child cast out of his heritage by violent men, the innocent entrapped by the crafty, the light-hearted girl led blindfold to her doom, old age insulted and thrust away by youth, the fratricide, the parricide, the venal priest on one side of the throne, and the harlot queening it on the other, the tables full of vomit and filthiness, the righteous sold for silver, the wicked bending their bow to cast down the poor and needy. While he gazes, the two passions which had filled "Les Châtiments" from the beginning to the end, the passions of Hatred and of Hope, condense and materialize themselves, and take upon them two forms-the one, that of the tyrant, the proud wrong-doer; the other, that of the Justiciary, the irresistible avenger of wrong." "La Légende des Siècles" is the imaginative record of the crimes and the overthrow of tyrants. If no collection of Victor Hugo's poetry formed itself so quietly and truly, gathering drop by drop, as "Les Contemplations," there is none which is so much the product of resolution and determined energy as this, "La Légende des Siècles," which next followed. These poems are not lyrical outflowings of sorrow and of joy. The poet, with the design. of shaping a great whole out of many parts, chooses from a wide field the subject of each brief epic; having chosen his subject, he attacks it with the utmost vigour and audacity, determined to bring it into complete subjection to his imagination. Breaking into a new and untried province of art now when his sixtieth year was not distant, Victor Hugo never displayed more ambition or

* M. Emile Montégut has already somewhere called attention to the parts these two figures play in "La Légende des Siècles."

greater strength.

The alexandrine in his hands becomes.

capable of any and every achievement; its even stepping is heard only when the poet chooses; now it is a winged thing and flies; now it advances with the threatening tread of Mozart's commandatore.

Occasional episodes, joyous or graciously tender, there are in "La Légende des Siècles." The rapture of creation when the life of the first man-child was assured, the sleep of Boaz, Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary, the calm death of the eastern prophet, the gallantry of the little page Aymerillot who took Narbonne, the Infanta with the rose in her tiny hand, the fisherman who welcomes the two orphan children, and will toil for them as for his own-these relieve the gloom. But the prominent figures (and sometimes they assume Titanic size) are those of the great criminals and the great avengers-Cain, pursued by the eye of God, Canute, the seven evil uncles of the little King of Galicia, Joss the great and Zeno the little, but equal in the instincts of the tiger, Ratbert and his court of titled robbers and wanton women, Philip the Second, the Spanish inquisitors and baptizers of mountains-where shall we look for moral support against the cruelty and the treachery and the effrontery of these? Only in the persons of the avengers, Roland whirling Durandal in the narrow gorge, Eviradnus standing over the body of the sleeping countess, or shooting the corpses of the two defeated wretches down their hideous oubliette-only in these and in the future when all dark shadows of crime and of sorrow shall have passed for ever away.

It is to be noted of "La Légende des Siècles" that the

aspect of nature as an antagonist of the will of man, or as Victor Hugo would grandiosely express it, as "one form of the triple ȧváyzn," that aspect presented with such force and infinite detail in "Les Travailleurs de la Mer," and in the earlier chapters of." L'Homme qui Rit," appears distinctly in some of these brief epic records of human struggle and human victory or defeat.

La Légende des Siècles" and the volume which next followed become each more striking by the contrast they present. Victor Hugo has somewhere told us how one day he went to see the lion of Waterloo; the solitary and motionless figure stood dark against the sky, and the poet stepped up the little hillock and stood within its shadow. Suddenly he heard a song; it was the voice of a robin who had built her nest in the great mouth of the lion. "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois" viewed in relation to " La Légende des Siècles" resembles this nest in the lion's mouth. The volume was indeed a piquant surprise to those who had watched the poet's career through its later period, and who took the trouble to surmise about his forthcoming works. After the tragic legends came these slight caprices. The songs (while their tone and colour are very different from those of Victor Hugo's youth) are a return to youth by the subjects of many of them, and by the circumstance that once again, as in the "Odes" and "Les Orientales," style becomes a matter of more importance than the idea. These later feats of style are the more marvellous through their very slightness and curious delicacy. Pegasus, who has been soaring, descends and performs to a miracle the most exquisite circus accomplishments. Language, metre, and meaning

seem recklessly to approach the brink of irretrievable confusion; yet the artist never practised greater strictness, or attained greater precision, because here more than elsewhere these were indispensable. All styles meet in mirthful reunion. Virgil walks side by side with Villon; Lalage and Jeanneton pour the wine; King David is seen behind the trees staring at Diana, and Actæon from the housetop at Bathsheba; the spider spins his web to catch the flying rhymes from Minerva's indignant nose to the bald head of St. Paul.

Yet all the while an ideal of beauty floats over this Kermesse; the goddesses do not lose their heavenly splendour; the sky bends overhead; the verse, while it sips its coffee, retains the fragrance of the dew. As to idea-the idea of such songs as these is that they shall have no idea. Enough of the mystery of life and death, the ascending scale of beings, the searching in darkness, the judicial pursuit of evil! Enough of visions on the mountain heights, of mysterious sadness by the sea! Let us live, and adjourn all these; adjourn this measureless task, adjourn Satan, and Medusa, and say to the Sphinx

'Go by, I am gossiping with the rose." Friend, this interlude displeases you. What is to be done? The woods are golden. Up goes the notice-board, "Out for a holiday." I want to laugh a little in the fields. What must I question the corn-cockle about eternity? Must I show

a brow of night to the lily and the butterfly? Must I terrify the elm and the lime, the reeds and rushes, by

hanging huge problems over the nests of little birds?

Should I not be a hundred leagues from good sense if I were to go explaining to the wagtails the Latin of the

The Poetry of Victor Hugo.

40rsity CHIGAN

Ja

Dies Ira? Such is the mirthful spirit of the book; not mirth in the "happy, prompt, instinctive way of youth;" but the wilfulness prepense of one who seeks relief from thought and passion. The apparent recrudescence of sensuality in some of these songs is not an affair of the senses at all, but of the fancy or if the eye is inquisitive and eager, it is because the vague bewildering consciousness of youthful pleasure is absent.

Such songs as these could be no more than an interlude in the literary life of Victor Hugo. But the transition becomes tragic when we pass from "Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois" to "L'Année terrible." The holiday in the woods is indeed over, and all laughter and sportive ways. The fields are trampled by the steady battalions of the invaders. The streets have a grave and anxious air. Paris, the heroic city, the city of liberty, the capital of the world, where Danton thundered, and Molière shone, and Voltaire jested, Paris is enduring her agony. But the empire has fallen. The imperial bandit "passes along the highway naked, bowed down, trembling, as the grass trembles to the wind, under the' execration of the whole human race." And Victor Hugo stands in republican France.

"L'Année terrible" is a record for the imagination, complete in every important particular, of the history of Paris, from August 1870 to July 1871; and with the life of Paris, the personal life of the poet is intertwined inseparably, and for ever. Great joy, the joy of an exile restored to his people, the joy of a patriot who has witnessed the overthrow of a corrupt and enervating despotism, and who is proud of the heroic attitude of the