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TO THE STATUARY DAVID
I
David! like a great king who shares out to princes
The paternal states province by province,
God gives each artist a different empire;
To the poet the breath scattered through the universe,
Life and thought and the thundering lightnings,
And the splendid swarm of quivering stanzas
Flying from man to angel and from monster to flower;
Form to the statuary; color to the painter;
To the gentle musician, limpid and somber dreamer,
The dark world of sounds that murmurs in the shadow.
Form to the statuary! — Yes, but, you know it well,
Form, O great sculptor, is everything and nothing.
It is nothing without spirit, it is everything with the idea!
It is necessary that, beneath the sky, flooded with sun,
Standing under the torches of a great gilded temple,
Or alone with the night in a sacred cave,
In the depths of sleeping woods as at the threshold of a theater,
The figure of stone, or of copper, or of alabaster,
Bear divinely on its calm and proud brow
Beauty, that ray, glory, that lightning flash!
It is necessary that an ardent breath swell its nostril,
That powerful strength fill its breast,
That grace, laughing, have rounded its fingers,
That its mute mouth nevertheless have a voice!
It is necessary that it be grave and for hands icy,
But for eyes alive, and, before thought,
Before the pure gaze of the soul and the blue sky,
Naked with majesty like Adam before God!
It is necessary that, chaste Venus, it emerge from the wave,
Sowing afar life and love over the world,
And making around itself, in its superb flight,
Everywhere where scatters and falls in drops of gold,
The water of its long hair, humid and sacred veil,
From every grass a flower, from every eye a star!
It is necessary, if Christian art animates the sculptor,
That with the same charm it have more height;
That, Winged soul, it laugh and mock Satan;
That, Martyr, it sing beside the wheel;
Or that, divine Virgin, star of the bitter gulf,
Its gaze be so gentle that it calms the sea!
II
That is what you know, O noble statuary!
You who into deep art, as into a sanctuary,
Entered still very young never to leave it!
Spirit, who, placing yourself on the purest summits
To create your great work, where are so many harmonies,
Near the flame on the brow of all proud geniuses!
That is what you know, you who feel, you who see!
Severe and gentle master whom enlighten at once,
Like a double ray that casts a strange light,
The young Raphael and the old Michelangelo!
And you also know well what inspiring breath
Sometimes, like a somber wind, carries away the sculptor,
Soul steeped in Isaiah and Phidias,
From the narrow and lofty ode to the immense epic!
III
The great men, heroes or thinkers, — demigods! —
In turn over the people have passed radiant,
Some armed with a sword and others with a book,
These pointing with a finger the road that must be followed,
Those forcing the cause to emerge from the effect;
The artist having a dream and the scientist a fact;
One found the magnet, the press, the compass,
Another a world where one goes, another a verse that consoles;
This king, just and profound, to help him on the way,
Took liberty frankly by the hand;
These tribunes forged brakes for republics;
This priest, founder of angelic hospices,
Under his roof, warmed by a breath of God,
Took in the motherless child and the fireless old man,
This mage, whose spirit reflects the stars,
From Isis lifted one after another all the veils;
This judge, abolishing the infamous tumbrel,
Struck out the code at the place of the executioner;
Seeding despite the insane clamors,
With schools the hamlets and with thoughts the hearts,
To make us better this true sage came;
In grave moments this other contained,
Under his powerful hands imposed on the crowd,
The people, great maker of broken crowns;
Others passed over a tottering bridge,
Over the mine that a fort concealed in its flank,
Over the breach through which a wall collapses,
A horrible hurricane of flame and grapeshot;
In a century of hatred, impious and mocking age,
Those, holy poets, made heard in chorus,
To the dark nations that discord drives,
The august and gentle voice of fields and forests
For the universal hymn extinguishes passions;
For it is especially in the days of revolutions,
Gloomy and burning desert where man ventures,
That art drinks its fill at your source, O nature!
All these men, pure hearts, spirits of truth,
Brows in which all humanity was summed up,
Dreamers or radiant ones, stand in history,
And all have their martyrdom beside their victory.
Virtue is an austere and triumphant book
In which every father must make his child spell out;
Each illustrious man, having some divine imprint,
Of this great alphabet is a holy letter.
Beneath their feet are grouped their sacred symbols,
Stars, lyres, compasses, disproportionate lions,
Eagles with eyes of flame, with vast wingspans.
— The dazzled sculptor contemplates these figures! —
He dreams of the homeland, of solemn tombs,
Of cities to fill with eternal examples;
And behold, already, magnificent vision!
Softly lit by a peaceful reflection,
Growing out of the soil from moment to moment,
Vague bas-reliefs confusedly laden,
In the depths of his mind, which thought encumbers,
The enormous pediments appear in the shadow!
IV
Is it not so? it is thus that in your brain, without noise,
The edifice is sketched and the work is built?
That is what happens in your great moved soul
When a whole dark pantheon stirs within it?
It is thus, is it not, O master! that unites
Man to architecture and the idea to granite?
Oh! how in those moments your function is lofty!
At the threshold of your pediment you receive as a guest
These more than human men. On a block of Paros
You sit face to face with all these heroes
And there, before your eyes that never fail,
These shadows, which will be bronze and marble, quiver.
The future is yours, that goal of all their vows,
And you can give it, O master, to whom you wish!
You, spreading over all your complete equity,
Priest as much as sculptor, judge as much as poet,
Welcoming this one, rejecting that one,
Praising Napoleon, scolding Attila,
Sometimes magnifying one by contact with the other,
Displacing the warrior to better place the apostle,
You make gods! — you say, lowering your height,
To the poor old soldier, to the humble old pastor:
— Enter! I know you. Your crowns are ready.
And you say to kings: — I do not know who you are.
V
For it is not enough to have been kings,
To have borne the scepter, and the globe, and the cross,
For the proud poet and the lofty statuary
To star your funeral pall in its night,
And open to you the paths of high pantheons!
It is you yourselves, O kings, who with your own hands
Build upon your names either glory or shame!
What we have done sooner or later tells of us.
One can conquer the world, have a people, act
On a century, heal its wound or widen it, —
When your missions are at last fulfilled,
Of the things here below you will have accomplished
A voice will emerge, voice of hatred or love,
Somber like the sound of the bolt in the tower,
Or gentle like a song in the nest of doves,
That will make the stone of your tombs stir.
That voice, the future, grave and fatal witness,
Is in advance leaning, listening to it from afar.
And there, no caress and no flattery,
No mouth shaped and fed for lying,
No paid hosanna, no complaisant echo
Changing the bitter complaint into a grateful cry.
No, hideous vices, betrayals, crimes,
Like devotions and sublime virtues,
Bear an upright and sovereign testimony.
The actions one does have lips of brass.
VI
May over your workshop, master, a ray remain!
There, in silence, art, study forgetting the hour,
In the shadow the attempts that you repudiated,
On one side Jean Goujon, on the other Phidias,
Stones, half clothed with thought,
A mute tumult of motionless statues,
The busts meditating in the darkened corners,
I know not what peace that falls from the ceilings,
Everything is great, everything is beautiful, everything charms and everything dominates.
You whom inwardly divine art illuminates,
You watch pass, grave and without saying a word,
In your tranquil soul where the day comes from on high,
All the noble aspects of the human figure.
As in a church with slow steps walks
A great pensive people to whom a god smiles,
These serene phantoms walk in your mind.
They wander through your poetic dreams
Made of shadows and gleams and vague porticoes,
Sometimes vermilion palace, sometimes sleeping tomb,
Secret architecture, immense piling up
Which, casting joyful and plaintive murmurs,
Fills the perspectives of your great thought,
For ancient Babel is not dead, and lives again
Under the brows of dreamers. In your head, O David!
The spiral twists, the pillar projects;
And in the darkness of your brain grows
The deep forest, which one sees nowhere else,
Of tufted capitals full of birds and flowers!
VII
Now, — you who go off the traced roads,
O kneader of bronze, O molder of thoughts,
Consider how small men are,
And keep yourself superb above parties!
Keep the dignity of your sublime chisel.
Do not let your marble be touched by the file
Of dark passions that gnaw so many minds.
Michelangelo had Rome and David has Paris.
Give then to your city, friend, this great example
That, if vile merchants do not enter the temple,
The furies of tribunes and their abhorred dream
Do not enter the heart of the sacred artist.
Refuse to courts your art, give to peoples your vigils,
It is good, O my sculptor! but far from your ears
Chase those who go flattering at the crossroads.
You, in your workshop, must always dream,
And, crushing the viper of every human vice,
Yourself by degrees dazzle yourself with your work!
What those men do in the shadow or undo
Is not worth your gaze lifted toward the ceiling
Seeking pure beauty and the great and the just.
Their mission is low and yours is august.
And who then would dare mingle for a single moment
With the same visions, the same blindness,
The same hateful, insane or ferocious vows,
Them, slaves of dwarfs, you, father of colossi!
April 1840.
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-to-the-statuary-david-victor-hugo/