BOOKS.

VICTOR HUGO'S NEW POEM.* THE mere publication of M. Victor Hugo's new work is a note- worthy fact in literary history. Many centuries hence, the Athenmus or Isaac Disraeli of nations yet unborn to civilisation will relate among the singularities of literature how at the age of

• Victor Hugo : La Ligende des Sticks. Nouvelle Serie. 2 vole- 8w. Paris : Calmann Ldvy. 1877.

seventy-five a French poet of the nineteenth century published two new volumes of poems, and announced by their titles the forth- coming publication within a twelvemonth of two more poetical works and one historical, besides promising the early completion of the series of which the work in question formed the second part, "unless the author should come to an end before his book."

The fact is, Victor Hugo's fecundity is as colossal as his genius. That he is, in our days, a literary colossus, whether looked at as a poet or a novelist, none who has read either the present poems or his last novel, Quatre- Vingt-Treize, can doubt. One can fancy him walking off with all the poets and novelists of contemporary Europe and America stowed away somewhere about his Brobding- nagian person, without so much as feeling the weight of them, —Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Lowell, and George Eliot sitting on his shoulders ; Mr. Browning balancing himself on the head of a shirt- pin ; Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Hughes curled up asleep under his coat-collar ; Mr. Black clambering up one arm ; Mrs. Stowe, Mrs. Oliphant, Dr. Holmes, and Mr. Palgrave looking out of his waistcoat-pockets, in the depths of one of which Mr. Robert Buchanan shrieks lost ; Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Morris, and Mr. Dante Rossetti astride on successive buttons ; Walt Whitman hanging on by a grey hair behind ; Mr. Trollope and Lord Beaconsfield, M. Flaubert, M. Dumas, and Herr Auerbach thrust with a "mixed multitude" into his coat-pocket, and engaged in exploring the intricacies of his pocket-handkerchief ; whilst M. Emile Zola has slipped into his boot, and is studying the con- ditions of life under the giant's instep, and endeavouring to depict them in the strictest plebeian language. Take away all that Victor Hugo has written, and one may safely say that if the most tedious piece in the present volumes—" l'Epopde du Ver," for instance, which no human being could read straight through at a sitting— were to appear for the first time, there would be a universal sense that a new literary power had arisen in the world. But colossal as he is, his faults are colossal too—colossal garrulity, colossal tedious- ness, colossal bad taste, colossal coarseness, colossal irreverence, colossal impudence—for what other name can be given to such insults to the good-faith of his follow-men as the personification of the " wapentake " in L'Houtme qui Rit ; or the tricks played with Scripture in the present volumes, when he speaks of the fiery chariot of " Amos " (" le char de feu d'Amos ") ; or of what " Shem " says to Rachel (" quand Sem dit is Rachel ") ? Unlike many Frenchmen, M. Victor Hugo has read the Bible, and even if we suppose that a momentary forgetfulness introduced the wrong names at first into the verse, it is impossible to be- lieve that anything but his huge indifference to veracity

has kept them there. Yet except that his faults have, to some extent, grown upon him, and that certain epithetic catch-words, such as " sinistre," "sombre," "formidable," begin to be too apparent, it is impossible to say that these volumes indicate the slightest falling-off of power. That they are among his best works one could not say, and yet the staple of the volumes is fully equal to anything he has written for the last twenty years, whilst there are at least three pieces which are dis- tinct additions in kind to the list of his master-pieces.

It must, indeed, be admitted that the present work has no very clear raison d'être. The first series of the Legend of the Ages, beginning with creation and ending with the future triumphs of aeronautics, seemed to form a complete cycle in itself. This second series can but cover, more or less, the same ground, and the fine opening piece, the "Vision whence this book has sprung," describing the " wall of the ages "—" living flesh, with rough granite, immobility made of unrest, an edifice having the noise of a multitude, black holes starred with fierce eyes, evolu- tions of monstrous groups," &c.,—one of those splendid enumera- tive descriptions which are one of the tricks of M. Victor Hugo's manner, and which Mr. Swinburne sometimes copies successfully— might well have served as a proem to both series. But this is after all only a cavil upon the title, and as long as the giant's right hand has not forgot its cunning, no one has any right to complain that six hundred pages, containing more than half of first-rate verse, should be given to the world under one name rather than under another.

Nor is it enough to say that the present work exhibits no falling-off of power. In some respects there is an inc rease. If the graceful colouring of Victor Hugo's adjectives has passed away, the sinewy might with which he wields his verbs and nouns has increased. There can be no more wholesome study for many of our contemporary English poets, who, as Mr. Ruskin once proclaimed that ornament was architecture, fancy that poetry consists in daubing their verse with an accumulation of adjectives, than the style of the old literary athlete, all bone and muscle, in which whole pages may be found with barely a single adjective, and yet which are unmistakable poetry. At the same time, one can never forget—even he himself cannot make us forget—that he writes in the one European language which is best adapted to prose, most unfitted to poetry, and that much of his verse is cast in one of the moulds which cramp poetry the most, the rhymed Alexandrine couplet. No doubt much of M. Victor Hugo's best verse—as of good French verse generally—is not real poetry, but versified declamation of the finest sort.

Of many of the pieces in this work, such as "Le Titan," "Les Trois Cents," "Aide Offerte is Majorien," "Le Romancer° the Cid," "Welf, Castellon d'Osbor," Gaiffer-rerge, Due d'Aqui- taine," " Masferrer," &c., it is enough to say that they are as good as many of their kind from the same pen. But it has been stated above that three pieces in the volume are real masterpieces, and it is remarkable that each is wholly different in style from the others_ "Le Cimetiere d'Eylau " is a perfect model of brief dramatic nar- rative. It tells how the writer's uncle, then a captain, received orders at the battle of Eylau to hold a churchyard with his company of 120 men, and get killed there. They fought all day in the snow, under the mist and the smoke, seeing nothing. At last, when night has fallen, and the drummer-boy can no more beat his drum for hunger, and the captain, his right arm broken by a ball, is almost fainting from loss of blood, and can no longer draw out his watch to see whether six o'clock has come, the hour when he is allowed to draw off :—

" Soudain le feu cessa, la nuit sembla moil's noire, Et l'on criait, ' Victoire!' et je criai, Victoire !' J'apercus des darts qui s'approchaient de nous. Sanglant, sur une main et sur les deux genoux, Je me trainai. Jo die, ' Voyons oa none on sommes.' J'ajoutai, Debout, tons Et je comptai mos hommes.

'Present,' dit le sergent. Present,' dit le gamin.

Jo vie mon colonel venir, l'epee en main.

*Par qui done, la bataille a-t-elle elk gagnee ?'-

'Par vow,' dit-il. La neige etait de sang baignee.

II reprit, 'C'est hien vous, Hugo? c'est votre Toil ?'— '0ui.'—' Combien de vi vents etes-vous ici?'—' Trois.' "

"La Colere du Bronze" is a satire, the like of which has never been written since the days of Juvenal, unless it be by M. Victor Hugo himself. Bronze, enraged at having to mould the forms of so many humbugs and scoundrels of the Second Empire, finds a voice to reproach mankind, who compel it to lie. There is occasional prolixity and repetition, but the splendour of the satire is unsurpassable, and one feels sure that a thousand years hence the names of its victims will only be known through the im- mortal ignominy to which it has pilloried them. It is difficult to quote where each line almost is a sculpture, but the following passage may give an idea of it :—

"Jo sais bien qu'on dire: Passe; meptlsez-les.

Ce sent des gredins. Soit. Mais ce sent des statues.

Male ces indignites sent de splendour vetues.

Maio on croit tenement le bronze honnete, et sar Da bon choix des heros glen dresse dans l'azur, On est si convaincu quo lorsque, sous les arbres, Au milieu des enfants rieurs, parmi les marbres, Sur les degree dun temple ou stir l'arche d'un pont Le bronze montre an peuple un homme, il en repond ;

3Iais tons ces malfaiteurs, male tons ces miserables,

Devenna an peasant stnpide venerables, Out si profondement, do lours pieds de metal, Pris raeine an granit puissant du piedestal ; J'ai mis sur leur bassesse une si grande armure, Qu'en vain l'apre aquilon stir lours tetes murmurs; Ils Bout la, ferules, froids, rayonnants, tenebrous; L'heure, goutte du siècle, en vain tombe sur wax; Et vienne la tempete, et vienne la nue°, La foudre et son eclair, la trombe et sa bade.

Qu'importe! us sent d'airain, et l'airain jamais liens Rit des coups d'ongles noire de l'hiver pluvieux. Novembre a beau venir spree Juillet ; l'annee, Cette dent qui mord tout, les respecte, indignee! L'ondea en les rouillant, les conserve, leurs fronts Se dressent immortels, plus fiers sous plus d'affronts Sur eux s'abattent neige, averse, givre, orage, Et tout le tourbillon des bises, folio rage, Et la giele insultante et le soleil rougeur, Et sans qu'il leur en reste une ombre, une rougeur, Tons les soufflets du temps, us les out sur la joue ; De sorte quo le bronze dternise la bone."

The only hope that remains to Bronze is that some day his statues will be melted into pence, since,—

" Plutot qu'etre Troplong mieux vaut etre un centime, Et lorsqu'il fut Dupin aux yeux de tout Paris. L'airain lea debarbouille avec du vert de gris.

"Petit Paul," lastly, apart from one or two gratuitous pieces of coarseness, is one of the most touchingly told tales ever put into verse. It is that of a child whose mother died in giving him birth, whose father married again, and handed over the little one to his grandfather. The two are perfectly happy together for a twelve- vionth, and nothing can be more charming than the picture of their happiness, but when one is two years old, the other eighty, the grandfather dies. The child is taken to the funeral, and is ob- served to note attentively the entrance to the churchyard. Then he returns to his father's house ; but his stepmother has a boy of her own, in whom she is wrapped up ; her husband is greatly in love with her ; nothing that Paul can do gives pleasure.

He is driven out of sight, becomes silent, lonely. One evening they look for him everywhere in the house without finding him. It was winter, "and outside little footseps were vanishing in the snow." Some one in the night heard cries of, "Papa, papa!"

On the morrow morning they found him by the churchyard, - stretched before the entrance, holding still with one hand the railings of the gate, which he had tried to open :—

"II avait appeld dans rombre solitaire, ‘Long-temps ; puis etait tomb6 mort sur la terra,

A quelques pas du Timm grand-pere, son aroi. N'ayant pu reveiller, ii s'etait endormi."

M. Hugo is generally at his best when writing of children. None -who have read it will ever forget the exquisite "Massacre of St. Bartholomew," in his Quatre- Vinyl- Treize, when the two children shut up in the tower, in the midst of the worst horrors of civil war, find it such fun to tear a splendid manuscript to pieces. Nor can one help looking forward with every anticipation of delight to his next forthcoming volume, promised for May of this year,—" L'Art d'Ktre Grand-pere."

The purely artistic point of view from which M. Hugo's work has been looked at hitherto is probably the only one from which it is worth while to criticise it. Yet it is but just to mention that it proclaims, somewhat more distinctly than some of its predecessors from the same pen, a belief in God. It requires now-a-days, out- side of the narrow pale of Protestantism, some moral courage in one who is not an Ultramontane to avow such a belief, even in so bald a form as it comes out in these volumes. A great spiritual teacher, indeed, M. Victor Hugo is not, for all his lite- rary greatness. There is more food for man's spirit in the invo- cation which opens "In Memoriam" than in the whole range of his poetry and prose together. Hence it is that his greatness is only of the material type, and is more properly bigness only.

The colossus of contemporary literature is not, and never will be, a truly great man.