La Legende des Siecles Ce livre, c'est le reste effrayant de

La Legende des Siecles Ce livre, c'est le reste effrayant de Babel; C'est la lugubre Tour des Choses, l'édifice Du bien, du mal, des pleurs, des deuils, des sacrifices, Fier jadis, dominant les lointains horizons, Aujourd'hui n'ayant plus que de hideux tronçons Épars, couchés, perdus dans l'obscure vallée; C'est l'épopée humaine, âpre, immense--écroulée. The poet's view of the problem of evil and the destiny of humanity becomes clearer if the Légende 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: Lumière; 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 apparaître une étrange figure; Un être tout semé de bouches, d'ailes, d'yeux, Vivant, presque lugubre et presque radieux; Vaste, il volait; plusieurs des ailes étaient 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'apôtre, Selon qu'il se montrait d'une face ou de l'autre, Il semblait une bête ou semblait un esprit. Il paraissait, dans l'air où mon vol le surprit, Faire de la lumière, et faire des ténèbres. 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'Âne: Dieu ne veut pas que rien, même l'obscurité, Même l'Erreur qui semble ou funeste ou futile, INTRODUCTION 5 La Legende des Siecles Que rien puisse, en criant: Quoi, j'étais inutile! Dans le gouffre à jamais retomber éperdu; Et le lien sacré du service rendu, A travers l'ombre affreuse et la céleste sphère, Joint l'échelon de nuit aux marches de lumière. 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 récits montrent l'un après l'autre leurs têtes, Car les évènements ont leur cap des Tempêtes, Derrière est la clarté. 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 suprême Que sans cesse, en ce gouffre où rêvent les sondeurs, Un prodigieux vent soufflant des profondeurs, A travers l'âpre nuit, pousse, emporte et ramène Sur tout l'écueil divin toute la mer humaine. (L'Année 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 Légende, 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 Préface Hugo remarks: 'C'est l'aspect légendaire qui prévaut 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. Éviradnus 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 pensée philosophique, mise en scène sous une forme épique 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 siècle 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 poète ressuscitait subitement l'ossuaire des faits et des choses que j'avais péniblement rajusté.'[3] [Footnote 3: Quoted in Eugène Rigal's Victor Hugo, poète épique.] Moreover, inaccurate as Hugo often is, it is never the inaccuracy that falsifies. He has been severely criticized for having in Au Lion d'Androclès 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 INTRODUCTION 6