Hugo, Victor, 1802-1885 -- Criticism and interpretation
In _Le Cimetière d'Eylau_, a poem to which we have now in the third
series of the book a most noble and exquisite pendant (_Paroles de mon
Oncle_), all the Homeric side of a poet born of warlike blood comes out
into proud and bright relief. There is no better fighting in the Iliad;
it has the martial precision and practical fellow-feeling which animate
in his battle-pieces the lagging verse of Walter Scott; and it has, of
course, that omnipresent breath and light and fire of perfect poetry
which a Scott or a Byron is never quite permitted to attain. Beside or
even above these two poems, that other which commemorates the devotion
of a Vendean peasant chief will be set in the hearts of all readers
competent to appreciate either heroic action or heroic song.
The love of all high things which finds one form of expression in
warlike sympathy with warriors who can live and die for something higher
than personal credit or success takes another and as natural a shape in
the poems which are inspired by love and worship of nature and her
witness for liberty and purity and truth in the epic evangel of august
and indomitable mountains. The sublimest cry of moral passion ever
inspired by communion in spirit with these is uttered in the great poem
on the Swiss mercenaries of the seventeenth century, which even among
its fellows stands out eminent and radiant as an Alp at sunrise.
Mountain and cataract, the stars and the snows, never yet in any
language found such a singer and interpreter as this. Two or three
verses, two or three words, suffice for him to bring before us, in fresh
and actual presence, the very breath of the hills or the sea, the very
lights and sounds and spaces of clouded or sunlit air. Juvenal is not so
strong in righteousness, nor Pindar so sublime in illustration, as the
poet who borrowed from nature her highest symbols to illustrate the
glory and the duty of righteous wrath and insuppressible insurrection
against wrong-doing, when he wrote _Le Régiment du baron Madruce._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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