La Legende des Siecles by Victor Hugo

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LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES

BY VICTOR HUGO

EDITED BY G. F. BRIDGE, M.A.

GENERAL PREFACE

Encouraged by the favourable reception accorded to the 'Oxford Modern
French Series,' the Delegates of the Clarendon Press determined, some
time since, to issue a 'Higher Series' of French works intended for
Upper Forms of Public Schools and for University and Private Students,
and have entrusted me with the task of selecting and editing the various
volumes that will be issued in due course.

The titles of the works selected will at once make it clear that this
series is a new departure, and that an attempt is made to provide
annotated editions of books which have hitherto been obtainable only in
the original French texts. That Madame de Stael, Madame de Girardin,
Daniel Stern, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Flaubert, Gautier are among the
authors whose works have been selected will leave no doubt as to the
literary excellence of the texts included in this series. Works of such
quality, intended only for advanced scholars, could not be annotated in
the way hitherto usual, since those for whom they have been prepared are
familiar with many things and many events of which younger students have
no knowledge. Geographical and mythological notes have therefore been
generally omitted, as also historical events either too well known to
require elucidation or easily found in the ordinary books of reference.

By such omissions a considerable amount of space has been saved which
has allowed of the extension of the texts, and of their equipment with
notes less elementary than usual, and at the same time brighter and
more interesting, whilst great care has been taken to adapt them to the
special character of each volume.

The Introductions are also a novel feature of the present series.
Originally they were to be exclusively written in English, but as it
was desired that they should be as characteristic as possible, and not
merely extracted from reference books, but real studies of the various
authors and their works, it was decided that the editors should write
them in their own native language.

Whenever it has been possible each volume has been adorned with a
portrait of the author at the time he wrote his book.

In conclusion, I wish to repeat here what I have said in the General
Preface to the 'Oxford Modern French Series,' that 'those who speak a
modern language best invariably possess a good literary knowledge of
it.' This has been endorsed by the best teachers in this and other
countries, and is a generally admitted fact. The present series by
providing works of high literary merit will certainly facilitate the
acquisition of the French language--a tongue which perhaps more than any
other offers a variety of literary specimens which, for beauty of style,
depth of sentiment, accuracy and neatness of expression, may be equalled
but not surpassed.

LEON DELBOS.

OXFORD, _December_, 1905.

INTRODUCTION

Victor Hugo's conception of the scheme of the series of poems to which
he gave the title of _La Legende des Siecles_ is thus described in
the preface to the first scenes: 'Exprimer l'humanite dans une espece
d'oeuvre cyclique; la peindre successivement et simultanement sous tous
ses aspects, histoire, fable, philosophie, religion, science, lesquels
se resument en un seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la lumiere;
faire apparaitre, dans une sorte de miroir sombre et clair--que
l'interruption naturelle de travaux terrestres brisera probablement
avant qu'il ait la dimension revee par l'auteur--cette grande figure une
et multiple, lugubre et rayonnante, faible et sacree, L'Homme.' The poet
thus dreamt of a vast epic, of which the central figure should be no
mythical or legendary hero, but Man himself, conceived as struggling
upwards from the darkness of barbarism to the light of a visionary
golden age. Every epoch was to be painted in its dominant
characteristic, every aspect of human thought was to find its fitting
expression. The first series could pretend to no such completeness,
but the poet promised that the gaps should be filled up in succeeding
volumes. It cannot be said that this stupendous design was ever carried
out. The first volumes, which were published in 1859, and from which the
poems contained in this selection are taken, left great spaces vacant
in the ground-plan of the work, and little attempt was made in the
subsequent series, which appeared in 1877 and 1883, to fill up those
spaces. In fact, Hugo has left large tracts of human history untrod. He
has scarcely touched the civilization of the East, he has given us no
adequate picture of ancient Greece. _L'Aide offerte a Majorien_ can
hardly be regarded as a sufficient picture of the wanderings of the
nations, nor _Le Regiment du Baron Madruce_ as an adequate embodiment
of the spirit of the eighteenth century. The Reformation, and, what is
stranger still, the French Revolution, are not handled at all, though
the heroism of the Napoleonic era finds fitting description in _Le
Cimetiere d'Eylau_. The truth is that Hugo set himself a task which
was perhaps beyond the power of any single poet to accomplish, and was
certainly one for which he was not altogether well fitted. He did not
possess that capacity for taking a broad and impartial view of history
which was needed in the author of such an epic as he designed. His
strong predilections on the one hand, and his violent antipathies on the
other, swayed his choice of subjects, narrowed his field of vision,
and influenced his manner of presentment. The series cannot therefore
pretend to philosophic completeness. It is a gallery of pictures painted
by a master-hand, and pervaded by a certain spirit of unity, yet devoid
of any strict arrangement, and formed on no carefully maintained
principle. It is a set of cameos, loosely strung upon a thread, a
structure with countless beautiful parts, which do not however cohere
into any symmetrical whole. The poems are cast in many forms; allegory,
narrative, vision, didactic poetry, lyric poetry, all find a place.
There is little history, but much legend, some fiction, and a good deal
of mythology. The series was not designed as a whole. _La Chanson des
Aventuriers de la Mer_ was written in or before 1840, _Le Mariage de
Roland_, _Aymerillot_, and _La Conscience_ in or about 1846, and other
pieces at intervals between 1849 and 1858, the date at which the poet
appears to have begun the task of building these fragments into an epic
structure. Nor is there in these poems any dispassionate attempt to
portray the character of the successive ages in the life of the race.
For Hugo there was no 'emancipation du moi.' The _Legende_ is less a
revelation of history than it is a revelation of the poet. His choice
of themes was dictated less by a careful search after what was most
characteristic of each epoch than by his own strong predilections. He
loved the picturesque, the heroic, the enormous, the barbarous, the
grotesque. Hence _Eviradnus_, _Ratbert_, _Le Mariage de Roland_. He
loved also the weak, the poor, the defenceless, the old man and the
little child. Hence _Les Pauvres Gens_, _Booz endormi_, _Petit Paul_. He
delighted in the monstrous, he revelled in extremes, and he had little
perception of the lights and shades which make up ordinary human
character. Neither his poems nor his romances show much trace of that
psychological analysis which is the peculiar feature of so much modern
literature. Child of the nineteenth century, as he was in so many
respects, in many of the features of his art he belongs to no era, and
conforms to no tendency, except that of his own Titanic genius. He could
see white and he could see black, but he could not see grey, and never
tried to paint it. He does not allow Philip II even his redeeming
virtues of indefatigable industry and unceasing devotion to duty, while
in his Rome of the decadence would assuredly be found scarce five good
men. His vision is curiously limited to the darker side of history; he
hears humanity uttering in all ages a cry of suffering, and but rarely
a shout of laughter. He sees the oppression of the tyrant more vividly
than the heroism of the oppressed. Has he to write of the power of
Spain? It is in the portrayal of the tyrant of Spain rather than the men
who overcame Spain that his genius finds scope. Does he wish to paint
the era of religious persecution? It is the horror of the Inquisition
rather than the heroism of its victims that is pictured on his canvas.
Delineations of heroic virtue there are indeed in the _Legende_, but it
is noteworthy that they occur usually in fictions such as _Eviradnus_,
_Le Petit Roi de Galice_, and _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice._[1] He
has given us no historical portraits of noble characters which can be
put side by side with those of Philip II and Sultan Mourad. As in his
dramas, his kings and rulers are always drawn in dark colours. His
heroes belong to the classes that he loved, poor people, common
soldiers, old men, children, and, be it added, animals. He is always the
man of great heart and strong prejudices, never the dramatist or the
philosopher.

[Footnote 1: It is interesting to observe how frequently his heroes are
old men, as Eviradnus, Booz, Fabrice.]

Hugo himself says sadly in his Preface, 'Les tableaux riants sont
rares dans ce livre; cela tient a ce qu'ils ne sont pas frequents
dans l'histoire,' but in truth the tinge of gloom which lies upon the
_Legende_ is rather the impress upon the volume of history of the poet's
own puissant individuality. He was no scientist and no _savant_, he
had none of that spirit of imperturbable calm with which Shakespeare
surveyed all mankind, none of that impartial sympathy with which
Browning investigated the psychology of saints and sinners alike. He
loved deeply and he hated fiercely, and his poetry was the voice of his
love and his hate. The intensity of his own poetic vision made the past
stand before him as clearly as the present; the note of personal feeling
is as clear and strong in _Sultan Mourad_ and _Bivar_ as in _Les
Chatiments_ or _Le Retour de l'Empereur_. His great qualities of heart
and mind and his singular defects are written large upon every page of
the _Legende_. His passionate hatred of injustice and his passionate
love of liberty, his reverence for the virtues of the home, and
especially for filial obedience and respect, his love for little
children, his antagonism to war and his admiration for what is great
in war which was ever struggling with that antagonism, his patriotic
feeling for the triumphs of the Napoleonic era, to him the heroic age of
French history, his exaggerated belief in the wickedness of kings and
the innocence of poor people, the exaltation of pity into the greatest
of all virtues--these and many other characteristic traits find ample
illustration in his legend of the centuries. It is ever Hugo that is
speaking to us, however many be the masks that he wears.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that no general conception of the
history and destiny of mankind is to be found in the work, or that the
author had no sense of an increasing purpose running through the ages.
The conception is no doubt that of a poet and a seer, not of a historian
or a philosopher, but it is clear and vivid, and is expressed with
Titanic force. Hugo pictured the history of mankind as a long struggle
upwards towards the light. Man has in all ages been oppressed by many
evils--by war, by tyranny, by materiality, by mental and moral darkness.
He has sinned greatly, he has suffered greatly; he has been burdened
with toil and surrounded by shadow, tormented by his rulers and misled
by his priests. Paganism was merely material; Rome was strong, cruel,
and repressive; 'a winding-sheet of the nations,' he calls her in
_Changement d'Horizon_[2]; Judaism, his view of which must be sought
rather in _Dieu_ than in the _Legende_, cold and harsh, could influence
man only by keeping him within the strait-waistcoat of a narrow law; the
life of the founder of Christianity was only a momentary gleam of light
in the darkness; the Middle Age was a confused turmoil of rude heroism
and cunning savagery; the Renaissance a relapse into heathenism and
the worship of nature. Yet with the modern ages comes a rift in the
blackness; the poets reveal a new spirit; their songs are the songs of
peace and not of war:

Le poete a la mort dit: Meurs, guerre, ombre, Envie!--
Et chasse doucement les hommes vers la vie;
Et l'on voit de ses vers, goutte a goutte, des pleurs
Tomber sur les enfants, les femmes et les fleurs;
Et des astres jaillir de ses strophes volantes;
Et son chant fait pousser des bourgeons verts aux plantes;
Et ses reves sont faits d'aurore, et dans l'amour,
Sa bouche chante et rit, toute pleine de jour.
(_Changement d'Horizon_.)

[Footnote 2: For a fuller development of this view see _La Fin de Satan:
Le Gibet_, I, i.]

Gentleness and humanity are the characteristic virtues of the later age.
It is a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that such pieces as _Le
Crapaud_, _Apres la Bataille_, and _Les Pauvres Gens_ have no connexion
with any epoch. In Hugo's view, that tenderness for the weak and the
defenceless which is their keynote was the peculiar mark of the age in
which he lived, and a foretaste of the glory that was to come. For the
great purpose which his reading of human history reveals to him is
the increase of the love of man to man, the widening of the bounds of
liberty, the growth of brotherly feeling. Suffering and oppression
behind, freedom and joy in front, so does Hugo's imagination picture
world-history, and his love of violent antitheses made him paint the
past in the darkest colours in order that his vision of the future might
shine with the greater radiance. Troubled as he was, no doubt, by the
sombre events of 1850-1, and by the slow progress that the principles
of peace seemed to be making in the world, yet the inspiration of that
vision was never lost, and in the apocalyptic vision of the poem _Plein
Ciel_ he gave superb lyrical expression to the thought that man will
find his heaven, not above the clouds, but in a regenerated earth,
penetrated with the spirit of light and love.

This underlying conception was expressed again in the poem entitled _La
Vision d'ou est sorti ce livre_, which was written at Guernsey in 1857,
but published only in 1877. In this vision the history of man appears to
the poet in the form of a gigantic wall, on which are seen the crimes
and sufferings of all the ages. Two spirits pass by, the spirit of Fate
(_Fatalite_), which is the enemy of man, and the spirit of God (Dieu),
which is the friend of man. This wall is shivered into fragments, by
which the seer understands the destruction of pain and evil, and the
closing of the long volume of human history. That volume, the end of
which the dreamer foresees, the poet proposes to write:

Ce livre, c'est le reste effrayant de Babel;
C'est la lugubre Tour des Choses, l'edifice
Du bien, du mal, des pleurs, des deuils, des sacrifices,
Fier jadis, dominant les lointains horizons,
Aujourd'hui n'ayant plus que de hideux troncons
Epars, couches, perdus dans l'obscure vallee;
C'est l'epopee humaine, apre, immense--ecroulee.

The poet's view of the problem of evil and the destiny of humanity
becomes clearer if the _Legende_ is read in connexion with the two poems
mentioned in the Preface to the volume of 1859, as designed to form
with it an immense trilogy: _Dieu_ and _La Fin de Satan_. Neither was
published till after the poet's death, and the latter was left in an
unfinished condition. But they were both planned in the days when,
isolated on his rock and severed from active life, the poet meditated on
the deep questions of life and death. They were meant to be, the one the
prelude, and the other the sequel of his poem of humanity. The leading
thought of _Dieu_ is the falseness of all the positive systems of
religion which have burdened or inspired humanity, and the truth that

'Dieu n'a qu'un front: Lumiere; et n'a qu'un nom: Amour,'

though it is only death which will fully reveal that light.

The theme of _La Fin de Satan_ is the final reconciliation of good and
evil. As Satan falls from heaven, a feather drops from his wing, and
from that feather the Almighty creates the angel Liberty, who is thus
the child equally of the spirit of Good and the spirit of Evil; that
angel finally brings about the pardon of Satan, when the demon finds
that it is impossible for him to live without the presence of the
Almighty. Man is endowed with liberty, this child of good and ill, and
his spirit hovers therefore ever between the exalted and the mean. So
humanity appears to the seer in _Dieu_:

Et je vis apparaitre une etrange figure;
Un etre tout seme de bouches, d'ailes, d'yeux,
Vivant, presque lugubre et presque radieux;
Vaste, il volait; plusieurs des ailes etaient chauves.
En s'agitant, les cils de ses prunelles fauves
Jetaient plus de rumeur qu'une troupe d'oiseaux,
Et ses plumes faisaient un bruit de grandes eaux.
Cauchemar de la chair ou vision d'apotre,
Selon qu'il se montrait d'une face ou de l'autre,
Il semblait une bete ou semblait un esprit.
Il paraissait, dans l'air ou mon vol le surprit,
Faire de la lumiere, et faire des tenebres.

To Hugo, therefore, evil is not an equal force with good, nor is it
eternal. It was created in time, it will end in time. It is a mistake to
suppose that he accepted any kind of Manichaeism as his solution of the
problem of the universe. In reality his thought is much more permeated
with Christian feeling than with Manichaeism. Though he rejected
dogmatic Catholicism, and indeed assailed it with Voltairian mockery,
yet his vision of the Eternal as the embodiment of that mercy and
goodness which is greater than justice is in its essence a Christian
conception. Inspired, in part at least, by Christian thought seems also
to be his conception of the eventual reconciliation of good and evil,
and that belief in the restoration of all things which finds expression
in the concluding lines of _L'Ane_:

Dieu ne veut pas que rien, meme l'obscurite,
Meme l'Erreur qui semble ou funeste ou futile,
Que rien puisse, en criant: Quoi, j'etais inutile!
Dans le gouffre a jamais retomber eperdu;
Et le lien sacre du service rendu,
A travers l'ombre affreuse et la celeste sphere,
Joint l'echelon de nuit aux marches de lumiere.

Hope is indeed the keynote of Hugo's poetry. In the darkest days
of 1871, when France was tearing out her own vitals and Paris was
destroying itself, he could write thus:

Les recits montrent l'un apres l'autre leurs tetes,
Car les evenements ont leur cap des Tempetes,
Derriere est la clarte. Ces flux et ces reflux,
Ces recommencements, ces combats sont voulus,
Au-dessus de la haine immense, quelqu'un aime.
Ayons foi. Ce n'est pas sans quelque but supreme
Que sans cesse, en ce gouffre ou revent les sondeurs,
Un prodigieux vent soufflant des profondeurs,
A travers l'apre nuit, pousse, emporte et ramene
Sur tout l'ecueil divin toute la mer humaine.
(_L'Annee Terrible._)

See too the beautiful lines written when to public disaster was added
private grief for the loss of his son Charles, especially the passage,
too long to quote here, in _L'Enterrement_, beginning 'Quand le jeune
lutteur....'

If, passing from the underlying conception to the actual material of the
_Legende_, we ask to what extent the poems can be regarded as history,
the answer must be that they are not history at all in the ordinary
sense of the word. In his _Preface_ Hugo remarks: 'C'est l'aspect
legendaire qui prevaut dans ces deux volumes.' As a matter of fact,
there is not a single poem in any of the series which is a narrative
based upon actual fact. Of the pieces in the present volume, _Le Mariage
de Roland, Aymerillot_, and _Bivar_ are founded on legends. _Eviradnus_
and _La Confiance du Marquis Fabrice_ are inventions, and the others are
mostly embroideries woven upon ancient themes rather than historical or
even legendary pictures. These latter, of which _La Conscience_ is the
best instance in this volume, suggest De Vigny's conception: 'Une pensee
philosophique, mise en scene sous une forme epique ou dramatique.' Of
accuracy in detail and local colour, Hugo was utterly careless. He
possessed a capacious, but not an exact, memory, and, provided the
general impression produced by a description was the true one, he did
not stop to inquire whether every detail was correct. Nor did he always
enjoy an extensive knowledge of the epoch which he delineated. But he
possessed to the full the poet's faculty of building the whole form and
feature of a past age out of a few stray fragments of information. The
historical colour of _Ruy Blas_ is said to be based on two French books,
carelessly consulted, yet of _Ruy Blas_ M. Paul de Saint-Victor, after
making a close study of the period, wrote: 'Ce fragment de siecle que
je venais d'exhumer de tant de recherches, je le retrouvais, vivant et
mouvant, dans l'harmonie d'un drame admirable. Le souffle d'un grand
poete ressuscitait subitement l'ossuaire des faits et des choses que
j'avais peniblement rajuste.'[3]

[Footnote 3: Quoted in Eugene Rigal's _Victor Hugo, poete epique_.]

Moreover, inaccurate as Hugo often is, it is never the inaccuracy that
falsifies. He has been severely criticized for having in _Au Lion
d'Androcles_ assigned to a single epoch events and personages which are
really separated by centuries. But all the facts are typical of the
spirit which dominated Imperial Rome, and combine therefore to form a
description which has poetic and imaginative, if not historical, truth.
And if, with greater licence, he has accumulated upon the head of a
single Mourad all the crimes of a long line of Sultans it is because in
drawing Mourad he is drawing the Turkish nation. Mourad is to him the
typical Turk, the embodiment of Oriental cruelty and lust. If again, to
pass to a larger subject, he has chosen legend rather than history as
the basis of many of his poems, it is not only because of his own innate
love of the marvellous and romantic, but because he cared for the truth
embodied in legend more than the truth embodied in chronicle. If he
mingled fiction with his history, it was because he conceived of the
fiction as being as true a representation of the facts of an era as
annals and records. It may be true that Hugo made imagination do duty
for study, but it is also true that an imagination, such as Hugo's, may
be as sure an instrument as study in reconstructing the past. He may
have mistaken the date of Crassus by several centuries, but readers of
Suetonius will hardly deny the faithfulness of his delineation of at
least one side of the civilization of ancient Rome; he may have invented
a Spanish princess, but his carefully stippled portrait of Philip II
is true to the life, even if it be Philip in his darkest moods. His
inaccuracies are in truth of small account. Who that reads _Le Cimetiere
d'Eylau_ cares whether there was a place of burial in the battlefield or
not? or what lover of _Booz endormi_ seeks to know how closely the flora
of Palestine has been studied? A more serious criticism than the charge
of inaccuracy is that of partial vision, and from this Hugo cannot be
entirely exculpated. He saw with his heart, and seeing with the heart
must always mean partial vision. For at the root of Hugo's nature lay an
immense pity, pity not merely for the suffering, but for what is base
or criminal, or what is ugly or degraded. It was this pity which is the
keynote of _Notre-Dame de Paris_ and _Les Miserables_; it is this pity
which inspired much of the _Legende des Siecles_.

The defence of the weak by the strong is one of his constant themes, as
witness _Eviradnus_, _Le Petit Roi de Galice_, _Les Pauvres Gens._ The
contrast of the weak and the strong is one of his favourite artistic
effects, as witness _Booz endormi_, _La Confiance du Marquis Falrice._
An act of pity redeemed Sultan Mourad, an act of pity made the poor ass
greater than all the philosophers. It was this absorbing pity for
the defenceless that made Hugo so merciless to the oppressor and so
incapable of seeing anything but the deepest black in the picture of
the tyrant. One-sided the poet may be, but it is the one-sidedness of a
generous nature; he may err, but his errors at least lean to the side of
virtue.

It would be impossible in the brief space of an introduction such as
this to discuss at any length the characteristics of Hugo as a literary
artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art
which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume. It is
scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet's extraordinary fecundity of
words and images. Occasionally, especially in his later works, this
degenerates into diffuseness, and he exhibits a tendency to repetition
and a fondness for long enumeration of names and details. On the other
hand, he constantly shows how well he understood the power of brevity
and compression. There is not a superfluous word nor a poetic image in
_La Conscience_, the severe and simple style of which is well suited
to the sternness of the subject. The story of _Apres la Bataille_ is
related with telling conciseness, while in the highly finished work of
_Booz endormi_ there are no redundant phrases. The many variations on
the same theme in _Aymerillot_ may be criticized as tedious, but there
underlies them the artistic purpose of intensifying the reader's sense
of the cowardice of the nobles by an accumulation of examples. A like
criticism and a like defence may be made of the long list of the crimes
of Sultan Mourad, though here perhaps the poet's torrent of facts goes
beyond the point at which the amassing of details is effective. On the
other hand, the swiftness of the narrative of the _Mariage de Roland_,
and the soldierly brevity of the _Cimetiere d'Eylau_, a piece not
included in this volume, are alike admirable, and show Hugo at his best
as a story-teller.

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