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Updated: May 1, 2025
Twenty thousand long Alexandrines are filled with admirable descriptions of scenery, natural productions, and historical events, but how many of us in these days have time to read and inwardly digest twenty thousand Alexandrine verses? I fear that the specialist is apt to hold his intelligent reader or hearer too cheap.
'Ha! he said, 'Alexandrines, the tragic metre. I shall cherish this, your Highness, like a relic; no more suitable offering, although I say it, could be made. "DIEUX DE L'IMMENSE PLAINE ET DES VASTES FORETS." Very good, he said, 'very good indeed! "ET DU GEOLIER LUI-MEME APPRENDRE DES LECONS." Most handsome, begad!
Bailey have dubbed his alexandrines 'monotonous'! But to his lovers, to those who have found their way into the secret places of his art, his lines are impregnated with a peculiar beauty, and the last perfection of style. Over them, the most insignificant of his verses can throw a deep enchantment, like the faintest wavings of a magician's wand.
Besides fragments often in very dainty verse he wrote several comedies, one of which, Der Bethlehemitische Kindermord, in rhymed Alexandrines, was often performed; it was published and received the warmest praise from Goethe.
I have learnt from the Alexandrines how the earth, at first soft and without form, hardened in proportion as Nereus withdrew himself from it to dig his humid dwellings; I have learned how things were formed insensibly; in what manner the rains, falling from the burdened clouds, nourished the silent forests, and by what progress a few animals at last began to wander over the nameless mountains.
The early efforts of Virgil were chiefly lyric and elegiac pieces after the manner of Catullus, whom he studied with the greatest care, and two short poems in hexameters, both taken from the Alexandrines, called Culex and Moretum, of which the latter alone is certainly, the formerly possibly, genuine.
There were the orange wenches to quiz plaguey sharp of tongue the hussies are, too and there were the vizards of the pit, whose little black masks did invite inquiry, and there were the beauties of the town and the toasts of the Court, all fair mark for our quizzing-glasses. Play, indeed! S'bud, we had something better to do than to listen to alexandrines or weigh the merits of hexameters!
"Ha!" he said, "Alexandrines, the tragic metre. I shall cherish this, your Highness, like a relic; no more suitable offering, although I say it, could be made. 'Dieux de l'immense plaine et des vastes forêts. Very good," he said, "very good indeed! 'Et du geôlier lui-même apprendre des leçons. Most handsome, begad!"
It is for him to sit up all night with the spectral heroes of Byron; it is for him to exchange innumerable alexandrines with the faded heroines of Voltaire. The great potentate of the eighteenth century has suffered cruelly indeed at the hands of posterity. Everyone, it is true, has heard of him; but who has read him? It is by his name that ye shall know him, and not by his works.
To write ten acts in Alexandrines, with feminine rhymes alternating with masculine, was still, to be sure, an appalling task; but Hugo was a facile and prolific poet, and could write very quickly after he had determined exactly what it was he had to write.
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