la légende des siecles

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 Légende, 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 poète à la mort dit: Meurs, guerre, ombre, Envie!—
Et chasse doucement les hommes vers la vie;
Et l'on voit de ses vers, goutte à 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 rêves sont faits d'aurore, et dans l'amour,
Sa bouche chante et rit, toute pleine de jour.
(Changement d'Horizon.)
Footnote 2: (return) 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, Après 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