Satire Today, a Song Where a Cry Is Mingled

Poem by Victor Hugo Period 19th centuryPrint

Satire today, a song where a cry is mingled,
Iron mouth from which an tender sob escapes,
Is no longer what it was long ago in our childhood,
When we were led, schoolboys without defense,
To the Sorbonne, a surly place and den of ill repute,
And when, before us all who listened very little,
Unwinding his lesson and spinning his distaff,
Little Andrieux, with his frog-like face,
Bit Shakespeare, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello,
With his false teeth taken from old Boileau.

Life in this restless century has become
Step by step grave and bleak, and naked truth
Has called thought to its aid ever since
It was walled up with falsehood in its well.
After Jean-Jacques, after Danton, fate brings back
The heavy tread of night upon the sad human soul;
Right and Duty lie there fallen, the wound in their side;
The cowardly sun laughs at the black hissing dragon;
Man throws honor, that old compass, into the sea;
The vanquished consoles himself by licking the victor;
All history is contained in this word: succeed;
Success is sultan and murder is vizier;
Alas, the old dreadful drunkenness of shame
Reappears in the eyes and rises again on brows,
Clinks glasses with tyrants, and the exhausted people
Drinks again this dark wine of which it has already drunk.
That is why satire is severe. It ignores
That grandeur of kings which made Boileau resound,
And remembers them only to slap them.
The scaffold that must be dismantled piece by piece,
The infamous law of blood that resists erasures,
That keeps the block while letting go the tortures,
And whose every nail must be cut; the child
Whom ignorance holds in its stifling fist
And who must, free bird, open its wings in the dawn;
To raise in turn these dark sentinels,
Evil, prejudice, error, that Roman monster,
Who guard the dungeon where the human mind sleeps;
War and its vultures, plague with its flies,
To drive away; the gags that must be removed from mouths;
Speech to be given to all sorrows;
The hatching of a new day upon flowering man;
Such is the goal, such is the duty, which complicates
Its anger, and makes it of public utility.

To teach virtue, equity,
Reason to all, it is enough that Reality,
Pure and serene, rise on the horizon and make
The horror of nights vanish before its face.
Shame, glory, grandeur, vices, beauties, faults,
Plain and mountains, are mingled as long as it is night; the false
Pretends to be honest in the dubious darkness.
What is the ray? A touchstone.
The light tests everything here below.
The just man on earth is enlightened by the true;
The just man is the summit and the true is the dawn.

So Light, Reason, Truth, and even more,
Goodness in wrath and supreme Pity,
The wicked pardoned, but evil punished,
That is what today, as in the old days of Rome,
Implacable and tender satire owes to man.
Marquis or physicians, a caste, a trade,
That is no longer its field; it needs the whole man.
It pursues the infamous and not the ridiculous.

A little Augias wants a little Hercules,
And good sly Despréaux did what he could.
It no longer has to do with the old Lilliput.

It flies, through shadow and catastrophes,
Great and pale, amid a hurricane of stanzas;
It cries to its frightful pack: — Let us run!
When a vile upstart, walking on all foreheads,
Crushes a people with feet once without boots.
It gives to its winged dogs all the despots,
All the monsters, giants and dwarfs, to devour.
It appears to the czars to drive them to despair.
One hears in its verse the bones of the tiger crack.
Just as the bird migrates toward spring,
It always goes toward honor.
The angel of Josaphat, the specter of Elsinore
Are its friends, and, wise, it seems mad,
So much its deep clamor fills the immense sky.
It needs, to growl and soar widely,
The whole people beneath it, harsh, vast, foaming;
Only on the sea is the wind at ease.

When Columbus departs, it stands on the cliff;
It loves you, O Barbès! And follows with a long vivat
Fulton, Garibaldi, Byron, John Brown and Watt,
And you Socrates, and you Jesus, and you Voltaire!
It makes, when a glorious dead man is under the earth,
A green laurel spring from his sleeping tomb;
It does not allow him to rot otherwise.
It kneels to dress the wounds of venerable vanquished,
Blesses the cursed, kisses the brow of the wretched,
Struggles, and, without deigning even an instant to think of it,
Feels itself judged behind its back by lackeys;
For, under vile and treacherous reigns, it is a crime
Not to laugh at the hour when the victim rales
And to love captives through their bars;
And whoever weeps for the dead offends the executioners.

Is it sad? No, for it is formidable.
Since beside the tombs the victors are at table,
Since one is satisfied in opprobrium, and one has
The shamelessness to be cowardly with a hosanna,
Since they sing and dance while devouring their prey,
It comes to the feast too. Into these joys,
Into these enormous contentments, into these games
Stormy with triumph and intoxication,
Into these banquets mingling Paphos, Clamart and Cnidus,
It brings, sinister, a laugh of a Fury.

But its immense effort is life. It wants
To drive out death, banish night, break the knot,
Even if it must roughen the popular titan.
As it has more love, it has more wrath.
What! Abdication would be a pillow!
Human conscience is slow to awaken;
Honor lets its fire pale, fall, sink
Under the gloomy thickening of ash.
So the singing Nemesis that leaps
And strikes, and before whom Tiberius is silenced,
The goddess of great Juvenal, the harsh muse,
Hebe by beauty, Medusa by terror,
Who sowed in the night what Dante found there,
And whom Job thought he saw speaking to Jehovah,
Feels in itself even more magnanimous fury
To awaken forgetfulness than to punish crime.
It approaches the people and, watching for the murmur,
Leans its bitter iambus over the immense sleeper;
The stanza then shudders in its tragic zeal,
And reddens trying to draw the spark
From all this bleak and fatal languor,
And the irritated verse becomes a glimmer.
Thus reddens in the shadow a fierce face
That comes to blow on a brand with full mouth.

April 26, 1870.

Victor Hugo

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-satire-today-song-where-a-cry-is-mingled-victor-hugo/