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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare
BY
VICTOR HUGO
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO
n
Eranslatrti
BY MELVILLE B. ANDERSON,
,291965
995740
TO
ENGLAND
£ Brtjiratc tfjig iSook
THE GLORIFICATION OF HER POET
I TELL ENGLAND THE TRUTH
BUT AS A LAND ILLUSTRIOUS AND FREE 1 ADMIRE HER
AND At AN ASYLUM I LOVE HER
VICTOR HUGO
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
THE true title of this work should be, 4 Concerning
Shakespeare '. The Author's original incentive was
the desire to * introduce ', as they say in England, the
new translation of Shakespeare to the public. The
tie that binds him so closely to the translator need not
deprive him of the privilege of commending the trans
lation l. From another side, however, and still more
closely, his conscience was engaged by the subject
itself. In contemplating Shakespeare, all the ques
tions relating to art have arisen in the Author's mind.
To deal with these questions is to set forth the mission
of art ; to deal with these questions is to set forth the
duty of human thought toward man. Such an oppor
tunity for speaking some true words imposes an obliga
tion that is not to be shirked, especially in a time
like ours. This the Author has understood. He has
not hesitated to take every avenue of approach to these
complex questions of art and of civilization, varying
the horizon as the perspective shifted, and accepting
every hint supplied by the urgency of the task. From
such an enlarged conception of the subject this book
has sprung.
1 Made by the poet's son, Francois Victor Hugo. TR-
vii
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
THE work herewith presented to the public belongs to
the literature of power rather than to the literature
of knowledge. Beguiling his exile, remote from great
libraries and from books of reference, by this sweeping
review of all that he regarded as worthiest and noblest
in the whole range of humane letters, Victor Hugo is
sometimes pardonably inaccurate in details. The
Translator has deemed it his duty to reproduce faith
fully the text, and has taken the liberty to correct in
footnotes (signed TB.) the errors that seemed to him
most noticeable, especially those touching the life and
works of Shakespeare. That he has corrected all which
may appear important to others, he cannot venture
to hope. Fortunately, this great work does not depend
for its value upon the accuracy of its statements of
fact, nor even, chiefly, upon the light it throws upon
the life and genius of Shakespeare. It is mainly to be
prized as a masterly statement of the Author's ideas
concerning the proper relation of literature to human
life, — a statement illuminated by wonderful flashes
of poetry and eloquence, and illustrated by strong
ix
x TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
characterizations of many famous books and men.
This is not to say, however, that the present work
will not serve, better than most others, as an intro
duction to Shakespeare, to vEschylus, and perhaps to
some other of the immortals whom it so glowingly
celebrates.
The Translator is responsible for the table of contents,
and for the index, which makes no pretence of being
exhaustive.
M. B. A.
CONTENTS
PART FIRST
BOOK I
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE
CHAPTER. I
PAGE
Description of Marine Terrace, Isle of Jersey — The
Kxiles 1
CHAPTER II
Shakespeare and the Ocean 4
CHAPTER III
Shakespeare's Birthplace — Orthography of Name —
Youthful Escapades and Marriage — London under
Elizabeth — The Actors, the Theatres, the Audience
— Moliere's Theatre and Louis XIV's Patronage —
Shakespeare's Person — The Taverns — Chronology
of Shakespeare's Plays — Shakespeare Manager
and Money-lender — New Place ; Mrs. Davenant —
The last Years 6
CHAPTER IV
Shakespeare's Life embittered — Contemporary Notice
— The Puritans close the Play-houses — Shake-
speare's Fame after the Restoration — Dryden,
Shaftesbury, Nahum Tate — Shakespeare's
'eclipse' 21
CHAPTER V
Recasts of Plays— Voltaire, Garrick, Malone . . 2fi
BOOK II
MEN OF GENIUS
CHAPTER I
Art, Nature, God — Science and the Supernatural —
The Poet's Inspiration 27
xi
xii CONTENTS
CHAPTER II
PAGE
The Poet's Ascent to the Ideal — Homer characterized
— Job characterized — ^Eschylus characterized —
Isaiah characterized-Ezekiel characterized— Lucre
tius characterized — Juvenal characterized — Taci
tus characterized : Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius,
Nero — Saint John characterized — Saint Paul char
acterized — Dante characterized — Rabelais charac
terized — Cervantes characterized — Shakespeare
characterized 30
CHAPTER III
The Dynasty of Genius — The Wreck of ^Eschylus . . 64
CHAPTER IV
The Great, Anonymous, Collective Works of Orient and
Occident — The German Genius : Beethoven —
' Good Taste ' an Incubus upon Genius ... 65
CHAPTER V
Good Taste — Nature of Genius 71
BOOK III
ART AND SCIENCE
CHAPTER I
Poetry made imperishable by Printing — The Book the
Instrument of Civilization 74
CHAPTER II
Number the Basis of Poetry and Science ... 77
CHAPTER III
Poetry, being absolute in Nature, incapable of Progress 78
CHAPTER IV
The Relative and Progressive Nature of Science — The
Improvement of the Telescope — Examples of Out
grown Scientific Notions — The Errors of Pytha
goras — The Errors of Chrysippus — Science transi
tory, Art abiding — The Eternal Power of Art illus
trated by the effect of Lucretius upon Hugo . 81
CHAPTER V
The Decline of Poetry impossible . . . . . 91
CONTENTS xiu
BOOK IV
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER I
PAOE
Formidable character of ^Eschylua — Vastness and Com
prehensiveness of the Drama — Tragic Terror of
^Eschylus 95
CHAPTER II
Description of the Greek Theatre — Description of the
Representation of a Greek Play .... 98
CHAPTER III
The Renown of ^Eschylus after his Death . . . 102
CHAPTER IV
Ptolemy Evergetes and the Alexandrian Library —
/Eschylus stolen from Athens and transferred to
Alexandria — The Alexandrian Library burned by
Omar 105
CHAPTER V
Attempts to justify Omar — Shakespeare nearly meets
the fate of ^Eschylus 109
CHAPTER VI
Lost — The Number of Works irrevocably
destroyed Ill
CHAPTER VII
The Affinity of ^Eschylus with Asia — His Geography —
His Priesthood of Nature — His Bold Familiarity
arity 113
CHAPTER VIII
The Relation of Aristophanes to ^Eschylus — The Oppo
sition of Socrates to their Religious Enthusiasm —
The Broad Farce of .-Eschylus — The Alarming
Mirth of Art — The Two Ears of Poetry . . .
CHAPTER IX
Greece the great Civilizer — The Drama in her Colonies
— jEschylus the Poet of the Greek Fatherland .
xiv CONTENTS
CHAPTER X
PAGE
Explanation of the Loss of Books in Antiquity — Guten
berg has made the Book immortal — The Ruins of
Greek and Roman Books — Sources of our Know
ledge of ^Eschylus — Similiarity of ^schylus to
Shakespeare 128
BOOK V
SOULS
CHAPTER I
The Genesis of the Soul— No Tangible Law— The Coin
cidences of Genius— The Sacred Horror of the
Great Mystery— The Reality of the Soul— The
Reality of Great Souls — Their Lofty Functions —
The Origin and the Mission of Genius . . . . 133
CHAPTER II
God the Exhaustless Source of Genius . . . . 143
PART SECOND
BOOK I
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS
CHAPTER I
The Censurers of Shakespeare : Forbes, Greene, Rymer,
Dryden, Ben Jonson, Warburton, Foote, Pope,
Voltaire, Dr Johnson, Frederick the Great, Cole
ridge, Knight, Hunter, Delaridine . . . . 147
CHAPTER II
Shakespeare's Reality — The Inexorable Law of his
Genius — His Sovereign Horror and his Charm —
His Philosophy — His Imaginative Arabesque —
His Psychology — His History — His Universality . 152
CHAPTER III
Shakespeare's Antithesis a Double Refraction of Nature 1 58
CONTENTS xv
PAUiC
CHAPTER IV
The Orthodox and Academical School condemns the
Luxuriance of Great Poets — No Flirtation with
the Muses — Genius bound over to keep the Peace 15«J
CHAPTER V
Shakespeare a Trial to the ' Sober ' Critics ; his Fer
tility and Virility — Shakespeare intoxicated with
Nature 164
BOOK II
SHAKESPEARE >S WORK : THE CULMI
NATING POINTS
CHAPTER I
The Great Poets Creators of Human Types — Their
Kinship with God— The Infamy of their Censors 170
CHAPTER II
The Nature of the Living Types produced by the Poets
— How they differ from Historic Persons . . 173
CHAPTER III
The Man of ^Eschylus, Prometheus ; the Man of Shake
speare, Hamlet 176
CHAPTER IV
Prometheus on Caucasus — Hamlet . * ... 178
CHAPTER V
The Feigned Madness of Hamlet— The Character of
Hamlet 181
CHAPTER VI
Macbeth— Othello— Lear : Time of the Action ; Nature
of the Subject ; Character of Lear : Lear and Cor
delia ISC.
xvi CONTENTS
BOOK III
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER
PAGE
CHAPTER I
A Chapter of Calumnies 194
CHAPTER II
The Pedants and the Police 197
CHAPTER III
Calumniation of Voltaire and Rousseau — Their Burial in
the Pantheon — Their Bones thrown into a Hole 199
CHAPTER IV
Pedantry solicitous about Genius 203
CHAPTER V
The Academical View of Genius — The Comfortable
Middle-Class View 204
CHAPTER VI
The Sun offensive to Weak Eyes — Genius portentous —
Its Humanity, Sympathy, Love, Beauty . . . 208
BOOK IV
CRITICISM
CHAPTER I
The Double Plots of Shakespeare's Plays a Reflection
of all the Art of the Renascence . . . . 213
CHAPTER II
Genius to be accepted as Nature is accepted . . 216
CHAPTER III
Pegasus a Gift-Horse — Prometheus the Progenitor of
Mab and Titania 217
CHAPTER IV
The Romantic School has imitated neither Shakespeare
nor ^Eschylus 219
CONTENTS xvii
PAGE
CHAPTER V
The Poet original, personal, inimitable .... 221
CHAPTER VI
DeHnition of the Official French School of Letters —
How the Poet panders to the Mob — The Mob des
cribed — The High Mission of the Poet to make
himself a Sacrifice for many 223
BOOK V
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES
CHAPTER I
Destruction and Construction 229
CHAPTER II
Literature secretes Civilization — The True Socialism 229
CHAPTER III
The Nadir of Democracy 232
CHAPTER IV
Animalism not the Goal of Man 234
CHAPTER V
Literature not for the Lettered only 235
CHAPTER VI
The Irony of Macchiavelli and of Voltaire ... 237
CHAPTER VII
The Poet a Teacher — The Mob at the Theatre— The
Mob open to the Ideal 238
CHAPTER VIII
How to restore the Ideal to the Human Mind . 241
xviii CONTENTS
BOOK VI
THE BEAUTIFUL THE SERVANT OF
THE TRUE
CHAPTER I
PAGE
Utility of the Test of Art — Utility of ^Eschylus and of
the Bible— The Poet a Helper 243
CHAPTER II
No Loss of Beauty from Goodness — ' Art for Art's
sake ' — Utility of Primitive Poetry — Greatness
of Juvenal 249
CHAPTER III
The Power of Poetry in Barbarous Times . . . 252
CHAPTER IV
The Obligation of the Poet to Political Vigilance . . 254
CHAPTER V
Bayle and Goethe — The Poet's Passion for the Right-
Louis XIV and Racine — The Official and Academi
cal Conception of the Poet's Function — The Poet a
Nourisher, a Comforter, a Liberator . . . 257
PART THIRD
CONCLUSION
BOOK I
AFTER DEATH : SHAKESPEARE :
ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
Six Feet of Earth the End of All for the Soldier, the
Beginning of All for the Poet 265
CHAPTER II
Shakespeare the Chief Glory of England — England,
Sparta, Carthage — England's Statues — Her Snob
bishness . 270
CONTENTS
PH \PTER IIT
are and Elizabeth — Shakespeare and the Bible
.^s rif England to Shakespeare — Knpli-Oi
I'rudishnes* — Philistine Criticism — Shakespeare
and Mr. Calcraft, the Hangman 275
CHAPTER IV
Ingland in Debt to Shakespeare — France to Joan of
Arc— Voltaire the Re viler of both .... 281
CHAPTER V
Shakespeare's True Monument — A Monument indiffer
ent to Shakespeare, important to England . 283
CHAPTER VI
The Centennial Anniversaries of Shakespeare . . 286
BOOK II
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
The Nineteenth Century born of the French Revolu
tion — Romanticism — ' Literary '93 ' — The
Eruption of Truth in the Soul — The Need of
Prompt Action on the part of Thinkers — Dis
couragement — The Practical Functions of Thinkers 289
BOOK III
TRUE HISTORY: EVERY ONE PUT IN
HIS PLAGE
CHAPTER I
The Ape of the Warrior gone — Finance hostile to Heroes
—Cost of the Napoleonic Wars 300
CHAPTER II
Imbecility the Warrior's Excuse — Things Tyrants,
and Tyrants Things — Horrible Examples of Tyran
nic Cruelty— The Wolf the Fruit of the Forest —
The Thinker the Founder of Civilization . . 304
xx CONTENTS
CHAPTER III
History must be rewritten — Examples of its Triviality
and Sycophancy — Cantemir arid Karamsin —
Loyal History : More Examples — History igno
rant of the Essential Facts of Civilization : Exam
ples 308
CHAPTER IV
True History described and prophesied — Truth coming
to Light — The Dynasty of Genius not oppressive 318
CHAPTER V
The New Aspect of Things — The Potentates put to
Flight by the Dreamers 323
Index 327
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
PART FIRST
BOOK I
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE
CHAPTER I
A DOZEN years ago, on an island near the coast of
France, a house, at every season of forbidding aspect,
was growing especially gloomy by reason of the ap
proach of winter. The west wind, which had full
sweep there, was piling thick upon this dwelling those
enveloping fogs November interposes between sun
and earth. In autumn, night falls early ; the narrow
windows made the days still briefer within, and deep
ened the sombre twilight of the house.
This house was flat-roofed, rectilinear, correct,
square, and covered with a fresh coat of whitewash ;
it was Methodism in brick and stone. Nothing is so
glacial as this English whiteness ; it seems to offer
you a kind of polar hospitality. One thinks with
longing of the old peasant huts of France, wooden
and black, yet cheerful with clustering vines.
Adjoining the house was a quarter- acre of sloping
garden-ground, walled in, broken by granite steps and
breast-walls, — a bare, treeless garden, with more stones
than leaves. This little uncultivated patch abounded
in tufts of marigolds, which bloom in autumn, and which
the poor people of the country eat cooked with the
conger-eel. The neighbouring sea-shore was concealed
from this garden by a rise of ground, upon which there
was a field of grass with some nettles and a big hemlock.
From the house was seen on the horizon at the right,
in a little wood upon a hill, a tower said to be haunted ;
at the left was seen the dike. The dike was a row of
2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
great piles set upright in the sand against a wall ; these
dry, gaunt, knotty logs resembled an array of leg-bones
and knee-caps afflicted with anchylosis. Reverie,
which likes to accept fancies as material for enigmas,
might inquire to what race of men these three-fathom
tibias had belonged.
The south front of the house faced the garden, the
north front a deserted road. A corridor as an entry
on the ground floor, a kitchen, a greenhouse, and a
court-yard, then a little drawing-room looking out upon
the lonely road, and a pretty large, dimly lighted study ;
on the second and third floors, neat, cold, freshly
painted chambers, barely furnished, with white shrouds
for window -hangings. Such was this dwelling, where
the roar of the sea was always heard.
This house, a heavy, white, rectangular cube, chosen
by its inmates upon a chance indication (possibly the
indications of chance are not always without design),
had the form of a tomb. Its inmates were a group — a
family rather — of proscribed persons. The eldest was
one of those men who at certain moments are found to
be in the way in their country. He came from an
assembly ; the others, who were young, came from
prison. To have written, furnishes a justification for
bolts : whither should reflection lead, if not to the
dungeon ?
The prison had set them at large into banishment.
The old man, the father, was accompanied by his
whole family, except his eldest daughter, who could
not follow him. His son-in-law was with her. Often
were they leaning round a table, or seated on a bench,
silent, grave, all of them secretly thinking of those two
absent ones.
Why had these people installed themselves in a
house so unattractive ? By reason of haste, and
from a desire to be as soon as possible anywhere but
at the inn. Doubtless, also, because it was the first
house to let that they had met with, and because
exiles are not lucky.
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 3
This house — which it is time to rehabilitate a little
and console ; for who knows whether, in its loneliness,
it is not sad at what we have just said about it ? A
house has a soul — this house was called Marine Terrace.
The arrival was mournful ; but, after all, we would
not deny that the stay in it was agreeable, and Marine
Terrace has left to those who then dwelt there none
but affectionate and dear remembrances. And what
we say of Marine Terrace, we say also of the Island of
Jersey. Places of suffering and trial come to have
a kind of bitter sweetness, which later on causes them
to be regretted ; they have a stern hospitality which
appeals to the conscience.
There had been, before them, other exiles in that
island. This is not the time to speak of them. We
mention only that the most ancient of whom tradi
tion, or perhaps a legend, has preserved the memory
was a Roman, Vipsanius Minator, who employed his
exile in extending, in the interest of his country's
supremacy, the Roman wall of which you may still
see some parts, like bits of hillock, near a bay named,
I think, St Catherine's bay. This Vipsanius Minator
was a consular dignitary, an old Roman so infatuated
with Rome that he stood in the way of the Empire.
Tiberius exiled him to this Cimmerian island, Ccusa-
rea l ; according to others, to one of the Orkneys.
Tiberius did more ; not content with exile, he decreed
oblivion. It was forbidden to the orators of the
Senate and the Forum to pronounce the name of
Vipsanius Minator. The orators of the Forum and
the Senate, and history, have obeyed, — a result regard
ing which Tiberius, for that matter, entertained no-
doubt. That arrogance in commanding, which pro
ceeded so far as to give orders to men's thoughts,
characterized certain ancient governments newly
arrived at one of those firm situations where the greatest
sum of crime produces the greatest sum of security.
1 The ancient name of the Island of Jersey, the place of
Hugo's exile. TB.
4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Let us return to Marine Terrace.
One morning, near the end of November, two of
the inhabitants of the place, the father and the young-
eet of the sons, were seated in the lower parlour. They
were silent, like shipwrecked persons who meditate.
Without, it rained, the wind blew, the house was
as if deafened by the outer roaring. Both went on
thinking, absorbed, perhaps, by thoughts of this
coincidence between the beginning of winter and the
beginning of exile.
Suddenly the son raised his voice and asked the
father,
' What think you of this exile ? '
' That it will be long.'
' How do you intend to employ it ? '
The father answered, ' I shall gaze at the ocean.'
There was a silence. The father was the first to
' And you ? '
* I ', said the son, ' I shall translate Shakespeare.'
CHAPTER II
THERE are, indeed, men whose souls are like the sea.
Those billows, that ebb and flood, that inexorable
going and coming, that noiee of all the winds, that
blackness and that translucency, that vegetation
peculiar to the deep, that democracy of clouds in full
hurricane, those eagles flecked with foam, those
wonderful star-risings reflected in mysterious agitation
by millions of luminous wave- tops, — confused heads
of the multitudinous sea, — the errant lightnings which
seem to watch, those prodigious sobbings, those half-
seen monsters, those nights of darkness broken by
howlings, those furies, those frenzies, those torments,
those rocks, those shipwrecks, those fleets crushing
each other, mingling their human thunders with the
divine thunders and staining the sea with blood ;
then that charm, that mildness, those festivals, those
gay white sails, those fishing-boats, those songs amid
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 5
the uproar, those shining ports, those mists rising
from the shore, those cities at the horizon's edge, that
deep blue of sky and water, that useful asperity, that
bitter savour which keeps the world wholesome, that
harsh salt without which all would putrefy ; those
wraths and those appeasements, that all in one, the
unforeseen amid the changeless, the vast marvel of
inexhaustibly varied monotony, that smoothness
after an upheaval, those hells and those heavens of
the unfathomed, infinite, over-moving deep, — all
this may exist in a mind, and then that mind is called
genius, and you have ^Eschylus, you have Isaiah,
you have Juvenal, you have Dante, you have Michael
Angelo, you have Shakespeare ; and it is all one
whether you look at these souls or at the sea *.
CHAPTER III
1. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born at Stratford-on-
Avon, in a house under the tiles of which was concealed
a confession of the Catholic faith beginning with these
words, ' I, John Shakespeare'. John was the father
of William. The house, situated in Henley Street,
was humble ; the chamber in which Shakespeare came
into the world, wretched : the walls were whitewashed,
the black rafters laid crosswise ; at the farther end
was a tolerably large window with two small panes,
where you may read to-day, among other names,
that of Walter Scott. This poor dwelling sheltered
a decayed family. The father of William Shakespeare
had been an alderman ; his grandfather had been
bailiff. Shakespeare signifies ' shake-spear * ; the
family had for a coat-of-arms an arm holding a spear, —
allusive arms, confirmed, they say, by Queen Elizabeth
in 1595, and visible, at the time we write, on Shake-
1 The reader is invited to compare this passage with the
eloquent interpretation of it at the beginning of Swinburne's*
Study of Shakespeare. TB.
<S WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
speare's tomb in the church of Stratford-on-Avon.1
There is little agreement about the orthography of
the word Shake-spear as a family name ; it is written
variously, — Shakspere, Shakespere, Shakespeare,
Shakspeare : in the eighteenth century it was habitu
ally written Shakespear. The present translator 2
has adopted the spelling Shakespeare as the only true
one, and gives for it unanswerable reasons. The
only objection 3 that can be made is that Shakspeare
is more easily pronounced than Shakespeare ; that
cutting off the e mute is perhaps useful ; and that
in the interest of the names themselves and to facilitate
their wider currency, posterity has, as regards proper
names, a certain euphonic right. It is evident, for
example, that in French poetry the orthography
Sliakspeare is necessary ; however, convinced by
the translator, we write, in prose, Shakespeare.
2. The Shakespeare family had some original draw
back, probably its Catholicism, which caused its
downfall. A little after the birth of William, Alder
man Shakespeare was no more than ' butcher John'.
1 An application for a grant of coat-armour to his father
was made in 1596, and another in 1599 ; but the matter
seems to have gone no further than the drafting of designs
by the heralds. The poet's relatives, however, at a later date
assumed his right to the coat suggested for his father in.
1596. The obvious pun upon the name was not overlooked
either by eulogists or by defamers. For example, an
ancient epigram reads,
' Thou hast so used thy Pen (or shook thy Speare)
That Poets startle, nor thy wit come neare.' TB.
2 That is, the translator of Shakespeare's works.
3 This ' objection ' is of course such to a Frenchman
only. Indeed this whole orthographical excursus, unintelli
gible as it must be to the English reader, is retained only
upon the general principle of fidelity. The translator
referred to is Franyois Victor Hugo (fee Preface). It may
be added that out of the scores of different spellings of the
name, the New Shakspere Society has adopted the ortho
graphy Shakspere, upon the ground that it was so spelled
by a very eminent authority, — the bearer of the name
himself. TR.
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 7
William Shakespeare made his debut in a slaughter
house. At the age of fifteen he entered his father's
shambles, bared his arm. and killed sheep and calves,
' in a high style ', says Aubrey. At eighteen he
married. Between the days of the slaughter-house
and the marriage he composed a quatrain. This
quatrain, directed against the neighbouring villages,
is his maiden effort in poetry. He there says that
Hillborough is illustrious for its ghosts, and Bidford
for its drunkards. He made this quatrain (being
tipsy himself) in the open air, under an apple-tree
still celebrated in the country in consequence of this
midsummer-night's dream. In this night and in this
dream, where there were lads and lasses, in this drunken
fit and under this apple-tree, he discovered that
Anne Hathaway was a pretty girl1. The wedding
followed. He espoused this Anne Hathaway, older
than himself by eight years, had a daughter by her,
then twins, boy and girl, and left her ; and this wife
disappears from Shakespeare's life, to reappear only
in his will, where he leaves her his second-best bed>
'having probably', says a biographer, 'employed
the best one with others.' Shakespeare, like La
Fontaine, did but sip at married life. His wife being
put aside, he was a schoolmaster, then clerk to an
attorney, then a poacher. This poaching was made
use of later to justify the statement that Shakespeare
had been a thief. One day he was caught poaching
in Sir Thomas Lucy's park. They threw him into
prison ; they began proceedings. These being spite
fully followed up, he saved himself by flight to London.
i For the story, which Victor Hugo haa, after his fashion,
very much improved upon, see HalUwell-Phillipps's Outlines
of the Life of Shakespeare 3d ed., pp. 205-0, and the accom
panying 'illustrative notes', pp. 354-9. The quatrain
referred to runs as follows :
' Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton,
Dadgeing Exhall, Papist Wicksford,
Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford.'
Tiu
8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In order to gain a livelihood, he began by holding
horses at the doors of theatres. Plautus had turned
a millstone. This business of holding horses at the
doors still existed at London in the last century, and
it brought together a kind of small band or corps that
they called ' Shakespeare's boys '.
3. You may call London the black Babylon —
gloomy by day, magnificent by night. To see London
is a sensation ; it is uproar under smoke— mysterious
analogy : uproar is the smoke of noise. Paris is the
capital of one side of humanity ; London is the capital
of the opposite side. Splendid and melancholy
town ! There activity is tumult, and the people
swarm like ants. One is free there, and yet confined.
London is an orderly chaos. The London of the
sixteenth century did not resemble the London of
our day ; but it was already an immense town. Cheap-
side was the main street ; St. Paul's, now a dome,
was then a spire. The plague was nearly as much
at home in London as in Constantinople. There
was not, in fact, much difference between Henry VIII
and a sultan. Fires (as in Constantinople, again)
were frequent in London, on account of the populous
parts of the town being built entirely of wood. In
the streets there was but one carriage, — the carriage
of her Majesty ; not a cross-road where they did not
cudgel some pickpocket with the flail l, which is still
retained at Groningen for thrashing wheat. Manners
were rough, almost savage ; a fine lady rose at six,
and went to bed at nine. Lady Geraldine Kildare,
to whom Lord Surrey inscribed verses, breakfasted
off a pound of bacon and a pot of beer. Queens — the
wives of Henry VIII — knitted mittens, and did not
even object to their being of coarse red wool. In
this London the Duchess of Suffolk took care of her
hen-house, and, with her dress tucked up to her knees,
threw corn to the ducks hi the court below. To dine
1 A purely conjectural translation, Victor Hugo's word
being ' drotschbloch.' Ta.
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE »
at midday was to dine late. It was the delight of
the upper classes to go and play at ' hot cockles ' at
my Lord Leicester's. Anne Boleyn played there ;
she knelt down, with eyes bandaged, for this game,
without knowing that she was rehearsing for a play
of a different kind upon the scaffold. This same
Anne Boleyn, destined for the throne, whence she
was to go still farther, was perfectly dazzled when
her mother brought her three linen chemises, at six
pence the ell, and promised her, for the Duke of Nor
folk's ball, a pair of new shues worth five shillings.
4. Under Elizabeth, in spita of the wrath of the
Puritians there were in London eight companies of
actors, — those of Newington Butts, Earl Pembroke's
company, Lord Strange's retainers, the Lord Cham
berlain's troop, the Lord High Admiral's troop, the
company of Blackfriars, the children of St. Paul's,
and, in the first rank, the Bear-baiters. Lord South
ampton went to the play every evening. Nearly
all the theatres were situated on the banks of the
Thames, — a fact which increased the number of water
men. The playrooms were of two kinds : some
merely open tavern-yards, a platform set up against
a wall, no ceiling, rows of benches placed on the ground ,
for boxes the windows of the tavern. The perform
ance took place in the broad daylight and in the
open air. The principal of these theatres was the
Globe. The others, which were mostly closed play
rooms, lighted with lamps, were used at night, the
most frequented being Blackfriars. The best actor
of Lord Pembroke's troop was named Henslowe ;
the best actor at Blackfriars was Burbage. The
Globe was situated on the bank-side. This is known
by a document at Stationers' Hall, dated the 26th
of November, 1607 : ' His Majesty's servants playing
usually at the Globe, on the Bank Side.' The scenery
was simple. Two swords laid crosswise — sometimes
two laths — signified a battle. A shirt over the coat
signified a knight ; a broom-handle draped with the
10 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
petticoat of the peers' hostess signified a palfrey
caparisoned. A rich theatre, which made its inventory
in 1598, possessed ' the limbs of Moors, a dragon, a
big horse with his legs, a cage, a rock, four Turks'
heads and that of old Mahomet, a wheel for the siege
of London, and a hell's mouth.' Another had ' a
sun, a target, the three plumes of the Prince of Wales,
with the device Ich Dien, besides six devils, and the
Pope on his mule.' An actor besmeared with plaster
and motionless1, signified a wall ; if he spread his
fingers, it meant that the wall had crevices. A man
laden with a faggot, followed by a dog, and carrying
a lantern, meant the moon ; his lantern represented
the moonshine. People have laughed at this mise
en scene of moonlight, made famous by the Mid
summer Night's Dream, without imagining that there
is in it a gloomy suggestion from Dante. (See The
Inferno, canto xx.) The dressing-room of these
theatres, where the actors robed themselves pell-mell,
was a corner separated from the stage by a rag of
some kind stretched on a cord. The dressing-room
at Blackfriars was shut off by an ancient piece of
tapestry which had belonged to one of the guilds, and
represented an ironmonger's shop. Through the holes
in this curtain, hanging in tatters, the public saw
the actors rouge their cheeks with brick-dust, or make
up their moustaches with a cork burned at a candle-
end. From time to time, through an occasional
opening of the curtain, you might see a face begrimed
as a Moor, peeping to see if the time for going on the
stage had arrived, or the glabrous chin of an actor
who was to play the part of a woman. * Glabri
histriones ' said Plautus. These theatres were fre
quented by noblemen, scholars, soldiers, and sailors.
There was acted Lord Buckhurst's tragedy, entitled
Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex ; Lyly's Mother Bombie,
in which the cheep-cheep of sparrows was heard ;
The Libertine, an imitation of the Convivado de Piedra,
which was making the tour of Europe ; Felix and
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 11
Philomena, a fashionable comedy performed for the
first time at Greenwich before ' Queen Bess ' ; Promos
and Cassandra, a comedy dedicated by the author,
George Whetstone, to William Fleetwood, recorder
of London ; Tamerlane and the Jew of Malta, by
Christopher Marlowe ; farces and pieces by Robert
Greene, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas
Kyd ; and lastly, mediaeval comedies. For just as
France has her VAvocat Pathelin, so (England has her
Gammer Gurton's Needle. While the actors gesticu
lated and ranted, the noblemen and officers — with
their plumes and bands of gold lace, standing or
squatting on the stage, turning their backs, haughty
and at their ease in the midst of the constrained actors
— laughed, shouted, played at cards, threw them
at each other's heads, or played at * post and pair ' ;
and below, in the darkness, on the pavement, among
pots of beer and pipes, the ' stinkards ', or groundlings,
were dimly visible. It was by way of that very theatre
that Shakespeare entered upon the dramatic career.
From being a tender of horses, he became a shepherd
of men.
5. Such was the theatre in London about the year
1580, under * the great Queen'. It was not much
less wretched, a century later, at Paris, under ' the
great King ' ; and Moliere, at his debut, had, like
Shakespeare, to make shift with rather miserable
playhouses. There is in the archives of the ' Comedie
FranQaise ' an unpublished manuscript of four hundred
pages, bound in parchment and tied with a band of
white leather. It is the diary of Lagrange, a comrade
of Moliere. Lagrange thus describes the theatre
where Moliere's company played by order of Mr.
Rataban, superintendent of the King's buildings :
4 Three rafters, the frames rotten and shored up, and
half the room roofless and in ruin '. In another place,
under date of Sunday, the 15th of March, 1671, he
says : * The company have resolved to make a large
ceiling over the whole hall, which, up to the said date
12 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(15th) has not been covered, save by a large blue cloth
suspended by cords '. As for the lighting and heating
of this hall, particularly on the occasion when such
extraordinary sums were spent upon the performance
of Psyche, which was by Moliere and Corneille, we
read : * Candles, thirty francs ; janitor for wood,
three francs'. This was the style of playhouse which
' the great King ' placed at the disposal of Moliere.
These bounties to literature did not impoverish Louis
XIV so much as to deprive him of the pleasure of
giving, at one time, two hundred thousand livres to
Lavardin, and the same to D'Epernon ; two hundred
thousand livres, besides the regiment of Prance, to
the Count de Medavid ; four hundred thousand livres
to the Bishop of Noyon, because this Bishop was a
Clermont-Tonnerre, a family that had two patents
of Count and Peer of France, one for Clermont and
one for Tonnerre ; five hundred thousand livres to
the Duke of Vivonne, seven hundred thousand livres
to the Duke of Quintin-Lorges, and eight hundred
thousand livres to Monseigneur Clement of Bavaria,
Prince-Bishop of Liege. Let us add that he gave a
thousand livres pension to Moliere. We find in
Lagrange's journal, in the month of April, 1663, this
remark : ' About the same time M. de Moliere received,
as a great wit, a pension from the King, and has been
placed on the civil list for the sum of a thousand livres '.
Later, when Moliere was dead, and interred at St.
Joseph, * chapel of ease to the parish of St. Eustache ',
the King pushed his patronage so far as to permit
his tomb to be ' raised a foot out of the ground'.
6. Shakespeare, as we see, remained a long time
on the threshold of theatrical life, — outside, rather,
and in the street At length he entered. He passed
the door and got behind the scenes. He succeeded
in becoming call-boy, vulgarly, a ' barker'. About
1586 Shakespeare was ' barking ' with Greene at
Blackfriars. In 1587 he gained a step. In the piece
called The Giant Agrapardo, King of Nubia, worse
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 13
than his late brother, Angulafer, Shakespeare was
intrusted with the task of carrying the turban to the
giant. Then from supernumerary he became actor, —
thanks to Burbage, to whom, long after, by an inter
lineation in his will, he left thirty-six shillings to buy
a gold ring. He was the friend of Condell and Hem-
ynge, — his comrades while alive, his publishers after
his death. He was handsome : he had a high forehead,
his beard was brown, his manner was gentle, his mouth
pleasant, his eye profound. He took delight in reading
Montaigne, translated by Florio. He frequented
•the Apollo Tavern, where he would see and keep com
pany with two frequenters of his theatre, — Decker,
author of The Gull's Horn book, in which a chapter
is specially devoted to * the way a man of fashion ought
to behave at the play ', and Dr Simon Forman, who
has left a manuscript journal containing reports of
the first performance of The Merchant of Venice and
The Winter's Tale1. He used to meet Sir Walter
Raleigh at the Mermaid Club. Somewhere about
that time Mathurin Regnier met Philippe de R6thune
at La Pomme de Pin. The great lords and fine gentle
men of the day were rather prone to lend their names
in order to start new taverns. At Paris the Vicomte
de Montauban, who was a Oe'qui, had founded Le
tripot des onze mille Diables. At Madrid the Duke
of Medina Sidonia, the unfortunate admiral of the
Invincible Armada, had founded the Puiio-en-rostro,
and in London Sir Walter Raleigh had founded the
Mermaid. There drunkenness and wit kept company.
7. In 1589, while James VI of Scotland, looking
to the throne of England, was paying his respects to
Elizabeth, who, two years before, on the 8th of Feb
ruary, 1587, had beheaded Mary Stuart, mother of
1 Inexact ; nothing is known of the first representation
of The Merchant of Venice. Dr Forman records representa
tions of but three plays, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The
Winter'* Tale ; and it does not appear that these were
first representations. Ta.
14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
this James, Shakespeare composed his first drama,
Pericles [1608] l. In 1591, while the Catholic King
was dreaming, after a scheme of the Marquis d'Astorga,
of a second Armada, more lucky than the first, inas
much as it was never launched, he composed
Henry VI. In 1593, when the Jesuits obtained from
the Pope express permission to paint * the pains and
torments of hell ' on the walls of * the chamber of
meditation ' of Clermont College, where they often
shut up a poor youth who, the year after, became
famous under the name of Jean Chatel, he composed
The Taming of the Shrew [1594-97 ? ]. In 1594, when,
looking daggers at each other, and ready for battle,
the King of Spain, the Queen of England, and even
the King of France, all three were saying * my good
city of Paris ', he continued and completed Henry VI
[1591-92]. In 1595, while Clement VIII at Rome
was solemnly striking Henry IV with his crosier over
the backs of Cardinals du Perron and d'Ossat, he
wrote Timon of Athens [1607-8). In 1596, the year
when Elizabeth published an edict against the long
points of bucklers, and when Philip II drove from his
presence a woman who had laughed while blowing
her nose, he composed Macbeth [1606]. In 1597, when
this same Philip II said to the Duke of Alva ' You
deserve the axe ', not because the Duke of Alva had
put the Low Countries to fire and sword, but because
he had entered the King's presence without being
announced 2, he composed Cymbdine [1609] and
1 As the chronology of the plays here given is very differ
ent from that accepted at present, the translator has inserted
in brackets, after the name of each play, the dates found
in Dowden's Shakspere Primer. To that excellent little
book the uninitiated reader is referred for a general correc
tion of Hugo's biography of Shakespeare, which is to some
extent legendary or fabulous. TR.
2 The Duke of Alva who put the Netherlands to fire and
sword died in 1582. His memory may therefore be relieved
of the stain of having entered the King's presence unan
nounced in 1597. TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 15
Richard III [1593]. In 1598, when the Earl of Essex
ravaged Ireland, wearing on his hat the glove of the
Virgin Queen Elizabeth, he composed The Two Gen
tlemen of Verona [1592-93], King John [1595], Love's
Labour Lost [1590], The Comedy of Errors [1591],
All's Well that Ends Well [1601-2], A Midsummer
Sight's Dream [1593-94], and The Merchant of Venice
[1596]. In 1599, when the Privy Council, at her
Majesty's request, deliberated on the proposal to put
Dr Hayward to the rack for having stolen some of
the ideas of Tacitus, he composed Romeo and Juliet
[two dates : 1591, 1596-97 ? ]. In 1600, while the
Emperor Rudolph was waging war against his rebel
brother, and sentencing his son, murderer of a woman,
to be bled to death, he composed As You Like It
[1599], Henry IV [1597-98], Henry V [1599], and
Much Ado About Nothing [1598]. In 1601, when
Bacon published the eulogy on the execution of the?
Earl of Essex *, just as Leibnitz, eighty years after
wards, was to find out good reasons for the murder
of Monaldeschi (with this difference, however, that
Monaldeschi was nothing to Leibnitz, and that Essex
had been the benefactor of Bacon), he composed
Twelfth Night ; or, What you Will [1600-1]. In 1602,
while, in obedience to the Pope, the King of France,
styled by Cardinal-nephew Aldobrandini 'The Fox
of Beam ', was counting his beads every day, reciting
the litanies on Wednesday, and the rosary of the Virgin
Mary on Saturday ; while fifteen cardinals, assisted
by the heads of the Orders, were opening the discussion
on Molinism at Rome ; and while the Holy See, at
the request of the Crown of Spain, was * saving Chris
tianity and the world ' by the institution of the congre
gation de Auxiliis, — he composed Othello [1604].
1 The author here confuses two works, — the Declaration
of the Practices and Treasons of Essex (1601), in which
Bacon's part was little more than that of amanuensis to
the Government, and his Apology in Certain Imputation*
concerning the Late Earl of Essex (1604). Tn.
56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
In 1603, when the death of Elizabeth made Henry
IV say ' she was a virgin just as I am a Catholic ',
he composed Hamlet [1602]. In 1604, while Philip III
was losing his last footing in the Low Countries, he
wrote Julius Cossar [1601] and Measure for Measure
[1603]. In 1604, at the time when James I of England,
the former James VI of Scotland, wrote against Bellar-
min the Tortura Torti, and, faithless to Carr, began
to smile upon Villiers, who was afterwards to honour
him with the title of ' Your Piggishness ', he composed
Coriolanus [1608]. In 1607, when the University
of York received the little Prince of Wales as doctor,
according to the account of Father St. Romuald,
' with all the ceremonies and the usual fur gowns ',
he wrote King Lear [1605-6]. In 1609, while the
magistracy of France, placing the scaffold at the
disposition of the King, gave upon trust a carte blanche
for the sentence of the Prince of Conde * to such punish
ment as it might please his Majesty to order ', Shakes
peare composed Troilus and Cressida [1603 ? revised
1607 ?]. In 1610, when Ravaillac assassinated Henry
IV by the dagger, and the French Parliament assassi
nated Ravaillac by the process of quartering his body,
Shakespeare composed Antony and Cleopatra [1607].
In 1611, while the Moors, driven out by Philip III,
were crawling out of Spain in the pangs of death, he
wrote The Winter's Tale [1610-11], Henry VIII
[1612-13], and The 'Tempest [1610].
8. He used to write on loose scraps of paper, — like
nearly all poets, for that matter. Malherbe and
Boileau are almost the only ones who have written
on sheets folded and stitched. Racan said to Mile
de Gournay, ' I have this morning seen M. de Malherbe
sewing with coarse grey thread a fascicle of white
paper, on which will soon appear some sonnets.'
Each of Shakespeare's dramas, composed according
to the wants of his company, was in all probability
learned and rehearsed in haste by the actors from
the original itself, as they had not time to copy it;
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 17
hence in his case, as in Moliere's, the dismemberment
and loss of manuscripts. There were few or no entry
books in those almost itinerant theatres ; no coinci
dence in time between representation and publication
of the plays ; sometimes not even a printed copy,
the stage remaining the eole medium of publication.
When the pieces by chance are printed, they bear
titles which bewilder us. The second part of Henry
VI is entitled The First Part of the Contention between
York and Lancaster. The third part is called The
True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York*. All this
enables us to understand why so much obscurity
rests on the dates when Shakespeaife composed his
dramas, and why it is difficult to fix them with
precision. The dates which we have just given —
here brought together for the first time — are pretty
nearly certain ; notwithstanding some doubt still
exists as to the years when were written, or even
played, Timon of Athens, Cymbeline, Julius Ccesar,
Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Macbeth. Here
and there we meet with barren years ; others there
are of which the fertility seems excessive. It is, for
instance, on a simple note by Meres, the author of
The Wit's Treasury, that we are compelled to attribute
to the year 1598 the creation of six pieces, — The Two
Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, King
John, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of
Venice, and AW 8 Well that Ends Well, which Meres
calls Love's Labour's Won 2. The date of Henry VI
is fixed, for the First Part at least, by an allusion
which Nash makes to this play in Pierce Penniless.
The year 1604 is given as that of Measure for Measure,
inasmuch as this piece was played on St Stephen's
1 The plays thus entitled are older ones, of which Henry
VI, Parts II and III, are recasts. TB.
2 Francis Meres published in 1598 his Palladia Tamitt :
Wit's Treasury, in which he enumerates not six but twelve
of Shakespeare's plays. This mention of course merely
proves the existence of the plays in 1 598 ; he does not
state that any of them were produced that year. TB.
o
18 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Day of that year, — a circumstance of which Hemynge
makes a special note ; and the year 1611 for Henry
VIII, inasmuch as Henri/ VIII was played at the
time of the burning of the Globe Theatre l. Various
circumstances — a disagreement with his company,
a whim of the Lord Chamberlain — sometimes com
pelled Shakespeare to change from one theatre to
another. The Taming of the Shrew was played for
the first time in 1593, at Henslowe's theatre 2 ; Twelfth
Night in 1601, at Middle Temple Hall ; Othello in 1602,
at Harefield Castle 3. King Lear was played at
Whitehall during Christmas (1607) before James I 4.
Burbage created the part of Lear. Lord Southampton,
recently set free from the Tower of London, was
present at this performance. This Lord Southampton
was an old frequenter of Blackfriars, and Shakespeare,
in 1589 5, had dedicated the poem of Venus and Adonis
to him. Adonis was the fashion at that time ; twenty-
five years after Shakespeare, the Chevalier Marini
wrote a poem on Adonis which he dedicated to Louis
XIII.
9. In 1597 Shakespeare lost his son, of whom the
only trace on earth is one line in the death-register
of the parish of Stratford-on-Avon : * 1597. August
17. Hamnet. Filius William Shakespeare. * On the
<3th of September, 1601, the poet's father, John Shake
speare, died. He was now the head of his company
of actors. James I had given him in 1607 the manage
ment of Blackfriars, and afterward the privilege of
the Globe. In 1613 the Princess Elizabeth, daughter
of James, and the Elector Palatine, King of Bohemia,
whose statue may be seen in the ivy at the angle of
1 This * most celebrated theatre the world has ever seen*
was destroyed by fire on Tuesday, June 29, 1613. TB.
2 This must have been the older play, The Taming of a
Shrew, published in 1594. TK.
3 Halli well-Phillips (Outlines, p. 180) says that Othello is
first heard of in 1604. TB.
* The true date is Dec. 26, 1606. TB.
& Venus and Adonis was published in 1593. TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 19
a great tower at Heidelberg, came to the Globe to
see The Tempest performed. These royal attendances
did not save him from the censure of the Lord Cham
berlain. A certain interdict weighed upon his pieces,
the representation of which was tolerated, and the
printing now and then forbidden. In the second
volume of the register at Stationers' Hall you may
read to-day, on the margin of the title of three pieces,
As You Like It, Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing,
the words * 4 Augi. to be staled. ' The motives for
these interdictions escape us. Shakespeare was able,
for instance, without arousing protest, to place upon
the stage his former poaching adventure, and make
of Sir Thomas Lucy a witling (Justice Shallow) ;
to show the public Falstaff killing the buck and bela
bouring Shallow's people ; and to push the likeness
BO far as to give to Shallow the arms of Sir Thomas
Lucy, — an Aristophanic piece of audacity by a man
who did not know Aristophanes. Falstaff, in Shake
speare's manuscripts, was written * Falstaffe. ' In
the meantime he had amassed some wealth, as did
Moliere later. Towards the end of the century he
was rich enough for a certain Richard Quiney to ask,
on the 8th of October *, 1598, his assistance in a letter
which bears the superscription, * To my loveing good
ffrend and countreyman Mr. Wm. Shackespere delr
thees.' He refused the assistance, as it appears, and
returned the letter, which was found afterwards among
Fletcher's papers, and on the back of which this same
Richard Quiney had written Histrio ! Mima 2 ! Shake
speare loved Stratford-on-Avon, where he was born,
where his father had died, where his son was buried.
1 Tho author has the date wrong. It should be the
25th of October. The letter is signed * Rye. Quyne ',
which Hugo prints thus : ' Ryc-Quiney.' TB.
2 Halliwell-Phillipps, who gives at p. 144 of the Outlines
a fac-simile of this, the only letter directly addressed to
Shakospeare known to exist, is silent about this part of the
anecdote. The letter was found in the Corporation archives
at Stratford. Til.
20 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He there bought or built a house, which he christened
* New Place '. We say, ' bought or built a house ' ;
for he bought it according to Whiterill, and he built
it according to Forbes, and on this point Forbes dis
putes with Whiterill *. These cavils of the learned
about trifles are not worth being searched into, particu
larly when we see Father Hardouin, for instance,
completely upset a whole passage of Pliny by replacing
nos pridem by non pridem.
10. Shakespeare went from time to time to pass
some days at New Place. Half-way upon the short
journey he encountered Oxford, and at Oxford the
Crown Inn, and at the inn the hostess, a beautiful,
intelligent creature, wife of the worthy innkeeper,
Davenant. In 1606 Mrs. Davenant was brought to
bed of a son, whom they named William ; and in 1644
Sir William Davenant, created knight by Charles I,
wrote to Rochester : ' Know this, which does honour
to my mother, — I am the son of Shakespeare ' ; thus
allying himself to Shakespeare in the same way that
in our days M. Lucas -Montigny has claimed relation
ship with Mirabeau. Shakespeare had married his
two daughters, — Susanna to a doctor, Judith to a
merchant. Susanna was clever, but Judith knew
not how to read or write, and signed her name with a
cross. In 1613 it happened that Shakespeare, having
come to Stratford-cn-Avon, had no further desire to
return to London. Perhaps he was in difficulties.
He had just been compelled to mortgage his house.
The contract deed of this mortgage, dated the llth
of March, 1613, and indorsed with Shakespeare's
signature, was in the last century in the hands of an
attorney, who gave it to Garrick, who lost it. Garrick
lost likewise (it is Mile Violetti, his wife, who tells the
1 Shakespeare bought the Great House, or New Place, in
the spring of 1597. For interesting particulars, see Halli-
ivell-Phillipps's Outlines, pp. 116 ff., and R. G. White's
Life and Genius of Shakespeare, p. 121. An exhaustive
account of it is given in the appendix to the Outlines, pp.
447-79. TK.
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 21
story) Forbes'a manuscript, with his letters in Latin.
From 1613 Shakespeare remained at his house at
New Place, occupied with his garden, forgetting his
plays, wholly devoted to his flowers. He planted in
this garden of New Place the first mulberry-tree that
was grown at Stratford,— just as Queen Elizabeth
wore, in 1561, the first silk stockings seen in England.
On the 25th of March, 1616, feeling ill, he made his
will. His will, dictated by him, is written on three
pages ; he signed each of them with a trembling hand.
On the first page he signed only his Christian name,
' William ' ; on the second, * Willm. Shaspr ' ; on
the third, 'William Shasp ' 1. On the 23d of April
he died. He had that day reached the exact age
of fifty-two years, having been born on the 23d of
April, 1564. On that same day, 23d April, 1616,
died Cervantes, a genius of like stature. When
Shakespeare died, Milton was eight years, and Cor-
neille ten years of age ; Charles I and Cromwell were
two youths, the one of sixteen, the other of seventeen
years.
CHAPTER IV
SHAKESPEARE'S life was greatly embittered. He
lived perpetually slighted. Posterity may read this
to-day in his familiar verses :
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.
And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand :
Pity me then. . . .
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysel. Sonnet 111.
* This statement of the form of the poet's signatures
to his will is incorrect. The surname is signed in full in
each case. All Shakespeare's authentic signatures are
conveniently exhibited in fac-simile at the end of Charles
Knight's Biograghy of Shekspere. In at least five of the
^natures the spelling is apparently Shakapere : in the
other (the last upon the will) it is obscure. The common
spelling, Shakespeare, is based upon ' the mode in which
it was usually printed during the poet's life. ' TR.
22 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Your love and pity doth th' impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow.
Sonnet 112.
Nor thou with public' kindness honour me,
. Unless thou take that honour from thy name.
Sonnet 36.
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies .
Sonnet 121.
Shakespeare had permanently near him one envious
person, Ben Jonson, an indifferent comic poet, whose
first steps he had aided 1. Shakespeare was thirty-
nine when Elizabeth died. This Queen had not paid
much attention to him ; she managed to reign forty-
four years without recognizing Shakespeare. None
the less is she historically styled ' protectress of arts
and letters ', etc. The historians of the old school
gave these certificates to all princes, whether they
knew how to read or not.
Shakespeare, persecuted as, at a later date, was
Moliere, sought, like Moliere, to lean on the master.
Shakespeare and Moliere would in our days have had
a loftier spirit. The master was Elizabeth, ' King
Elizabeth ', as the English say. Shakespeare glorified
Elizabeth: he called her 'the Virgin Star', 'Star
of the West ', and ' Diana ', — a name divine which
pleased the Queen ; but in vain. The Queen took
no notice of it, — less sensitive to the praises in which
Shakespeare called her ' Diana ' than to the insults
of Scipio Gentilis, who, taking the pretensions of
Elizabeth on the bad side, called her ' Hecate ', and
applied to her the ancient triple curse, Mormo ! Bombo /
Gorgo ! As for James I, whom Henry IV called
* Master James ', he gave, as we have seen, the privilege
of the Globe to Shakespeare, but he willingly forbade
1 Only the last clause of the sentence is accurate. For
the nature of the important service rendered by Shakespeare
to Ben Jonson, see Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines, pp. 148-50.
That Ben Jonson was envious of Shakespeare is doubtless
as untrue as that he was an ' indifferent poet.' ' I loved
the man ' he said after Shakespeare's death ' and do honour
his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.' TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 23
the publication of his pieces. Some contemporaries,
Dr Simon Forman among others, so far took notice
of Shakespeare as to make a note of the occupation
of an evening passed at the performance of The Mer
chant of Venice l 1 That was all he knew of glory 2.
Shakespeare, once dead, entered into oblivion.
From 1640 to 1660 the Puritans abolished art and
shut up the play-houses. The whole theatre was
shrouded as in a winding-sheet. With Charles II the
drama revived, without Shakespeare. The false
taste of Louis XIV had invaded England. Charles II
belonged rather to Versailles than London. He had
as mistress a French girl, the Duchess of Portsmouth,
and as an intimate friend the privy purse of the King
of France. Clifford, his favourite, who never entered
the Parliament-house without spitting, said : ' It
is better for my master to be viceroy under a great
monarch like Louis XIV than to be the slave of five
hundred insolent English subjects.' These were
no longer the days of the Commonwealth, — the time
when Cromwell took the title of ' Protector of England
and France ', and forced this same Louis XIV to
accept the title of * King of the French '.
Under this restoration of the Stuarts, Shakespeare's
eclipse became complete. He was so thoroughly dead
that Davenant, his putative son, recomposed his
pieces. There was no longer any Macbeth but the
Macbeth of Davenant. Dryden speaks of Shakespeare
on one occasion in order to say that he is 'out of
» See note p. 13.
2 Apart from the commendatory verses prefixed to the
folio of 1623, Halliwell-Phillipps (Outlines, pp. 569-82) citea
no less than eighteen contemporary references by name
to the great dramatist, substantially all of them eulogistic.
It would be strange indeed if that pre-eminently dramatic
age should have left the discovery of Shakespeare's genius
as a playwright to be made in an age of dramatic decay.
Considering that no one took pains to preserve testimony
of any kind with reference to Shakespeare, the evidence of
his great popularity — not to say pre-eminence — in his own
ti me is in truth remarkably abundant. TH.
24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
date '. Lord Shaftesbury calls him ' a wit out of
fashion ' l. Dryden and Shaftesbury were two oracles.
Dryden, a converted Catholic, had .two sons, ushers
in the chamber of Clement XI ; he made tragedies
worthy of being put into Latin verse, as Atterbury's
hexameters prove, and he was the servant of that
James II who, before he became king on his own
account, had asked of his brother, Charles II ' Why
don't you hang Milton ? ' The Earl of Shaftesbury,
a friend of Locke, was the man who wrote an Essay
on Sprightliness in Important Conversations, and who,
by the manner in which Chancellor Hyde helped his
daughter to the wing of a chicken, divined that she
was secretly married to the Duke of York.
These two men having condemned Shakespeare,
the oracle had spoken. England, a country more
obedient to conventional opinion than is generally
believed, forgot Shakespeare. Some purchaser pulled
down his house, New Place. A Rev. Dr Cartrell cut
down and burned his mulberry-tree. At the beginning
of the eighteenth century the eclipse 2 was total.
In 1707, a certain Nahum Tate published a King
Lear, informing his readers ' that he had borrowed
1 Dryden spoke of Shakespeare often, sometimes critically,
but always with the highest respect. It was he who wrote
in the prologue to The Tempest :
But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be ;
Within that circle none durst walk but he.
And in the dedication to The Eival Ladies, he refers to Shake
speare as one ' who, with some errors not to be avoided in
that age, had undoubtedly a larger soul of poesy than ever
any of our nation.' TR.
2 Victor Hugo's smoked glass very much darkens the
* eclipse ' of Shakespeare at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. Gerard Langbaine, in his Account of the English
Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), says : ' I esteem his plays
beyond any that have ever been published in our language.
Again : ' I should think I were guilty of an injury beyond
pardon to his memory, should I so far disparage it as to bring
his wit in competition with any in our age.' That Langbaine
was not alone in thinking thus, there is plenty of evidence.
See foot-note, p. 23. TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE 25
the idea of it from a play which he had read by chance,
the work of some nameless author '. This ' nameless
author ' was Shakespeare *.
CHAPTER V
IN 1728 Voltaire imported from England to France
the name of Will Shakespeare ; only, instead of Will,
he pronounced it Oittes.
Jeering began in France, and oblivion continued
in England. What the Irishman Nahum Tate had
done for King Lear, others did for other pieces. AWs
Well that Ends Well had successively two ' arrangers ',
Pilon for the Haymarket, and Kemble for Drury
Lane. Shakespeare existed no longer, and counted
no longer. Much Ado About Nothing served likewise
as a rough draft twice, — for Davenant in 1673 ; for
James Miller in 1737. Cymbeline was recast four
times, — under James II at the Theatre Royal, by
Thomas Dursey ; in 1695 by Charles Marsh ; in 1759
by W. Hawkins ; in 1761 by Garrick. Coriolanus
was recast four times, — in 1682, for the Theatre Royal,
by Tate ; in 1720, for Drury Lane, by John Dennis ;
i The statement that Tate styled the original Lear the
work of ' some nameless author ' is piquant, but untrue.
His Dedication names Shakespeare repeatedly, and ' in a
tone of reverence.' He speaks of his own work as a ' revival '
of Shakespeare's, and his Epilogue concludes with,
This Play's Reviver humbly do's admit
Your abs'lute Pow'r to damn his part of it :
But still so many Master-Touches shine
Of that vast Hand that first laid this Design
That in great Shakeapear'a right, He's bold to say,
If you like nothing you have seen this Day,
The Play your Judgment damns, not you the Play.
It may be added that Victor Hugo advances by about
a quarter of a century the date of Tate's ' revival ' of Lear,
which had been before the public seven or eight years when
Langbaine wrote the remarks quoted in the preceding note.
The reader may be willing to be reminded that this ' certain'
Nahum Tate succeeded Shad well (Dry den's successor) as
poet laureate of England. TK.
23 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
in 1755, for Covent Garden, by Thomas Sheridan ;
in 1801, for Drury Lane, by Kemble. Timon of
Athens was recast four times,— at the Duke's Theatre,
in 1678, by Shadwell ; in 1768, at the theatre of Rich
mond Green, by James Love ; in 1771, at Drury Lane,
by Cumberland ; in 1786, at Covent Garden, by Hull.
In the eighteenth century the persistent raillery
of Voltaire finally produced in England a certain
revival of interest. Garrick, while correcting Shake
speare, played him, and acknowledged that it was
Shakespeare that he played. They reprinted him
at Glasgow. An imbecile, Malone, made commenta
ries on his plays, and, as a logical sequence, white
washed his tomb. There was on this tomb a little
bust, of a doubtful resemblance, and indifferent as
a work of art, but venerable from the fact that it
was contemporaneous with Shakespeare. It is after
this bust that all the portraits of Shakespeare have
been made that we now see. The bust was white
washed. Malone, critic and whitewasher of Shake
speare, spread a coat of plaster over his face, and of
etupid nonsense over his work.
BOOK II
MEN OF GENIUS
CHAPTER I
HIGH Art, using this word in its absolute sense, is
the region of Equals.
Before going farther, let us fix the value of this
expression, ' Art ', which often occurs in this book.
We speak of Art as we speak of Nature. Here
are two terms of almost indeterminate meaning ;
to pronounce the one or the other of these words
— Nature, Art — is to make a conjuration, to call
forth the ideal from the deeps, to draw aside one
of the two great curtains of the divine creation. God
manifests himself to us in the first degree through
the life of the universe, and in the second through the
thought of man. The second manifestation is not less
holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the
second is named Art. Hence this reality : the poet
is a priest.
There is here below a pontiff, — it is genius. Sacerdos
Magnus.
Art is the second branch of Nature.
Art is as natural as Nature.
Ry the word GOD — let us fix the sense of this word
also — we mean the Living Infinite.
The latent Ego of the visible Infinite, that is God.
God is the invisible made evident.
The world concentrated, is God. God expanded,
is the world.
We, who are speaking, believe in nothing out of
God.
That being said, let us proceed. God creates Art
by man, having for a tool the human intellect. The
27
28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
great Workman has made this tool for himself ; he
has no other.
Forbes, in the curious little work perused by War-
burton and lost by Garrick, affirms that Shakespeare
devoted himself to the practice of magic, that magic
was in his family, and that what little good there
was in his pieces was dictated to him by a familir
spirit.
Let us say concerning this — for we must not draw
back from any question that may arise — that it has
been a strange error of all ages to desire to give the
human intellect assistance from without. Antrum
adjuvat vatem. The work appearing superhuman,
people wish to exhibit the intervention of the extra-
human : in antiquity, the tripod ; in our days, the
table. The table is nothing but the tripod come
again. To accept in a literal sense the demon that
Socrates talks of, the bush of Moses, the nymph of
Numa, the spirit of Plotinus, and Mahomet's dove,
is to be the victim of a metaphor.
On the other hand, the table, turning or talking,
has been very much laughed at. To speak plainly,
this raillery is out of place. To replace inquiry by
mockery is convenient, but not very scientific. For
our part, we think that the strict duty of Science
is to test all phenomena. Science is ignorant, and
has no right to laugh : a savant who laughs at the
possible, is very near being an idiot. The unexpected
ought always to be expected by Science. Her duty
is to stop it in its course and search it, rejecting the
chimerical, establishing the real. Science has but
the right to put a visa on facts ; she should verify
and distinguish. All human knowledge is but picking
and culling. The circumstance that the false is mingled
with the true, furnishes no excuse for rejecting the
whole mass. When was the tare an excuse for re
fusing the corn ? Hoe out the weed error, but reap the
fact, and place it beside others. Science is the sheaf
of facts.
MEN OF GENIUS 29
The mission of Science is to study and sound every
thing. All of us, according to our degree, are the
creditors of investigation ; we are its debtors also.
It is due to us, and we owe it to others. To evade a
phenomenon, to refuse to pay it that attention to
which it has a right, to bow it out, to show it the
door, to turn our back on it laughing, is to make truth
a bankrupt, and to leave the signature of Science
to be protested. The phenomenon of the tripod of
old, and of the table of to-day, is entitled, like any
thing else, to investigation. Psychic science will
gain by it, without doubt. Let us add, that to abandon
phenomena to credulity, is to commit treason against
human reason.
Homer affirms that the tripods of Delphi walked
of their own accord ; and he explains the fact (book
xviii of the Iliad) by saying that Vulcan forged invisible
wheels for them. The explanation does not much
simplify the phenomenon. Plato relates that the
statues of Dapdalus gesticulated in the darkness, had
wills of their own, and resisted their master, and that
he was obliged to tie them up, so that they might
not walk off. Strange dogs at the end of a chain !
Flechier mentions, at page 52 of his History of Theo-
dosius, — referring to the great conspiracy of the
magicians of the fourth century against the Emperor, —
a tipping table, of which we shall perhaps speak else
where, in order to say what Flechier did not say, and
seemed not to know. This table was covered with a
round plating of several metals, ex diversis metallicis
materiis fabrefacta, like the copper and zinc plates
employed at present in biological investigation. So
it appears that this phenomenon, always rejected and
always reappearing, is not an affair of yesterday.
Besides, whatever credulity has said or thought
about it, this phenomenon of the tripods and tables
is without any connection with the inspiration of
the poets, — an inspiration entirely direct. This is
the point at which we have been aiming. The sibyl
30 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
has a tripod, the poet none ; the poet is himself a
tripod, the tripod of divinity itself. God has not
made this marvellous distillery of thought, — the brain
of man, — in order to make no use of it. The man of
genius has need of no apparatus but his brain ; through
it his every thought must pass. Thought ascends,
and buds from the brain, as the fruit from the root.
Thought is the resultant of man ; the root plunges
into the earth, the brain into God, — that is to say,
into the Infinite.
Those who imagine (there are such, witness Forbes)
that a poem like Le, Medecin de son Honneur or King
Lear can be dictated by a tripod or a table, err in a
strange fashion ; these works are the works of man.
God has no need to make a piece of wood aid Shake
speare or Calderon.
Then let us set aside the tripod. Poetry is the
poet's own. Let us be respectful before the pos
sible, of which no one knows the limit. Let us be
attentive and serious before the extra-human, out
of which we come, and which awaits us ; but let us
not degrade the great workers of the world by hypo
theses of a mysterious assistance which is not necessary ;
let us leave to the brain that which belongs to it, and
agree that the productions of genius are a superhuman
offspring of man.
CHAPTER II
SUPREME Art is the region of Equals. There is no
primacy among masterpieces.
Like water, which heated to a hundred degrees
will bear no increase of temperature, human thought
attains in certain men its maximum intensity, ^schy-
lus, Job, Phidias, Isaiah, Saint Paul, Juvenal, Dante,
Michael Angelo, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare,
Rembrandt, Beethoven, with some others, rise to the
hundredth degree of genius.
MEX OF GENIUS 31
The human mind has a summit, — the ideal ; to
this summit God descends, man rises.
In each age three or four men of genius undertake
the ascent. From below the world's eyes follow them.
These men go up the mountain, enter into the clouds,
disappear, reappear. People watch them, mark them.
They skirt precipices ; a false step would not displease
certain of the lookers-on. They daringly pursue
their road. See them aloft, already afar ; they are
no longer anything but black specks. ' How small
they are ' ! says the crowd. They are giants. On
they go. The road is rugged, the scarped cliff resists
them. At each step a wall, at each step a pitfall.
As they rise, the cold increases. They must make
their ladder, cut the ice, and walk on it, converting
obstacles into a stairway. Every storm is raging.
Nevertheless, these madmen make their way. The
air becomes difficult to breathe, the abyss widens
around them. Some fall : they have done well.
Others stop, and retrace their steps ; there is sad
weariness. Some intrepid ones continue ; the elect
persevere. The dreadful declivity crumbles beneath
them and seeks to sweep them away ; glory is
treacherous. Eagles eye them ; lightnings blunt
their bolts upon them ; the hurricane is furious. No
matter, they persist, they press upward. He who
reaches the summit is thy equal, 0 Homer !
Repeat the names we have mentioned, and those
which we might have added. To choose between
these men is impossible. There is no method for
striking the balance between Rembrandt and Michael
Angelo.
Confining ourselves solely to the authors and poets,
let us examine them one after the other. Which is the
greatest ? Every one.
1. One, Homer, is the huge poet-child. The world
is born, Homer sings : he is the bird of this da\vn.
Homer has the holy candour of morning. The shadow
is almost unknown to him. Chaos, heaven, earth,
32 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Geo and Ceto, Jove god of gods, Agamemnon king of
kings, peoples, flocks from the beginning, temples,
towns, battles, harvests, the ocean ; Diomedes fight
ing, Ulysses wandering ; the meanderings of a ship
seeking its home ; the Cyclops, the Pygmies ; a map
of the world with a crown of gods upon Olympus, and
here and there a glimpse of Erebus through furnace-
mouths ; priests, virgins, mothers, little children
frightened by the plumes, the unforgetting dog, great
words which fall from grey-beards, loving friendships,
the passions and the hydras, Vulcan for the laugh of
the gods, Thersites for the laugh of men ; the two
aspects of married life summed up for the benefit of
the centuries in Helen and in Penelope ; the Styx,
Destiny, the heel of Achilles, without which Destiny
would be vanquished by the Styx ; monsters, heroes,
men, a thousand perspectives glimpsing in the haze of
the antique world, — this is Homer. Troy coveted,
Ithaca longed for. Homer is war and travel, — the two
first methods for the meeting of mankind. The camp
attacks the fortress, the ship attacks the unknown
by penetrating it ; around war every passion ; around
travel every kind of adventure ; two gigantic groups :
the first, bloody, is called the Iliad, the second, lumin
ous, is called the Odyssey. Homer makes men preter-
naturally big ; they hurl at each other masses of rock
which twelve yoke of oxen could not move ; the gods
hardly care to have to deal with them. Minerva
takes Achilles by the hair ; he turns around in anger :
* What wouldst thou with me, goddess ? ' There
is, however, no monotony in these puissant figures.
These giants are graduated. After each hero, Homer
breaks the mould. Ajax son of Oi'leus is less high in
stature than Ajax son of Telamon. Homer is one of
the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art, —
the finest of all, perhaps, — truly to depict humanity
by the enlargement of man : that is, to generate the
real in the ideal. Fable and history, hypothesis and
tradition, the chimera and knowledge, make up Homer.
MEN OF GENIUS 33
He is fathomless, and he is cheerful. All the depth
of ancient days moves, radiant and luminous, in the
vast azure of his mind. Lycurgus, that peevish sage,
half a Solon and half a Draco, was conquered by
Homer. He turned out of the way, while travelling, to
go and read, at the house of Cleophilus, Homer's poems,
placed there in remembrance of the hospitality that
Homer, it is said, had formerly received in that house.
Homer, to the Greeks, was a god ; he had priests, the
Homerides. Alcibiades gave a rhetorician a cuff
for boasting that he had never read Homer. The
divinity of Homer has survived Paganism. Michael
Angelo said, ' When I read Homer, I look at myself
to see if I am not twenty feet in height.' Tradition
will have ft that the first verse of the Iliad is a verse
of Orpheus ; and this tradition, doubling Homer by
Orpheus, increased in Greece the religion of Homer.
The shield of Achilles, book xviii of the Iliad, was
explained in the temples by Danco, daughter of
Pythagoras. Homer, like the sun, has planets. Virgil
who writes the jEncid, Lucan who writes the Pharsa-
lia, Tasso who writes the Jerusalem, Ariosto with his
Roland, Milton with Paradise Lost, Camoens with
the Lusiad, Klopstock with the Messiah, Voltaire
with the Henriade, all gravitate about Homer, and,
sending back to their own moons his light reflected
at different angles, move at unequal distances within
his boundless orbit. Such is Homer ; such is the
beginning of the epic.
2. Another, Job, begins the drama. This embryo
is a colossus. Job begins the drama, now fcr'y
centuries ago, by placing Jehovah and Satan in
presence of each other ; the evil defies the good, and
behold ! the action is begun. The scene is laid upon
the earth, and man is the field of battle ; the plagues
are the actors. One of the wildest grandeurs of this
poem is, that in it the sun is baleful. The sun is in
Job as in Homer ; but it is no longer th3 dawn, it is
high noon. The mournful oppression of the brazen
34 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ray, falling perpendicularly on the desert, pervades
the poem, which is heated to a white heat. Job
sweats on his dunghill. The shadow of Job is small
and black, and hidden under him, as the snake under
the rock. Tropical flies buzz on his sores. Job has
above his head the frightful Arabian sun — a breeder
of monsters, an intensifier of plagues, which changes
the cat into the tiger, the lizard into the crocodile,
the pig into the rhinoceros, the snake into the boa,
the nettle into the cactus, the wind into the simoom,
the miasma into the pestilence. Job is anterior to
Moses. Afar in the ages, by the side of Abraham
the Hebrew patriarch, there is Job the Arabian patri
arch. Before being tried, he had been happy : * this
man was the greatest of all men of the East ', says his
poem. This was the labourer-king : he exercised the
immense priesthood of solitude : he sacrificed and
sanctified. Toward evening he gave the earth the
blessing, the berachah. He was learned ; he was
acquainted with rhythm ; his poem, of which the
Arabian text is lost, was written in verse : this, at
least, is certain from verse 3 of chapter iii to the end.
He was good ; he did not meet a poor child without
throwing him the small coin kesitha ; he was the foot
of the lame, and the eye of the blind '. It is from this
that he has fallen, he becomes gigantic. The whole
poem of Job is the development of this idea, — the
greatness that may be found at the bottom of the
pit. Job is more majestic when unfortunate than
when prosperous ; his leprosy is a robe of purple.
His misery terrifies those who are there ; they speak
not to him until after a silence of seven days and
seven nights. His lamentation is marked by a certain
tranquil and gloomy magianism. While crushing
the vermin on his ulcers, he apostrophizes the stars.
He addresses Orion, the Hyades, — which he names
the Pleiades, — and ' the chambers of the south '. He
gays, ' God setteth an end to darkness '. He calls
the diamonds which are hidden, ' the stones of dark-
MEN OF GENIUS 35
ness '. He mingles with his own distress the misfor
tune of others, and has tragic words that freeze, —
' the widow is empty '. * He smiles also and is then
still more terrible. He has around him Eliphaz,
Bilclad, Zophar, three implacable types of the friendly
busybody, of whom he says, * You play on me as on a
tambourine '. His language, submissive toward God,
is bitter toward kings : * kings and counsellors of the
earth, which built desolate places for themselves ', —
leaving our wit to find out whether he speaks of their
tomb or of their kingdom. Tacitus says, sotitudinem
faciunt. As to Jehovah, Job adores him ; and under
the furious scourging of the plagues, all his resistance
is confined to asking of God : ' How long wilt thou
not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow
down my spittle ? * That dates from four thousand
years ago. At the same hour, perhaps, when the
enigmatical astronomer of Denderah carves in the
granite his mysterious zodiac, Job engraves his on
human thought ; and his zodiac is not made of stars,
but of miseries. This zodiac turns yet above our heads.
We have of Job only the Hebrew version, attributed to
Moses. The thought of such a poet, followed by such
a translator, is impressive : the man of the dunghill
translated by the man of Sinai ! Job is in reality a
priest and a seer. Job extracts from his drama a
dogma ; he suffers, and draws an inference. Now,
to suffer and draw an inference is to teach ; sorrow
leads logically to God. Job teaches ; having touched
the summit of the drama, he stirs the depths cf philo
sophy. He first shows that sublime madness of wisdom
which, two thousand years later, in resignation making
itself a sacrifice, will be the foolishness of the cross —
stiUtidam crucis. The dunghill of Job, transfigured,
will become the Calvary of Jesus.
3. Another, ^Eschylus, enlightened by the uncon-
i Is this an error ? Job xxii 9 reads, ' Thou hast sent
widows away empty '. And where is the next quotation
found ? TB.
36 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
scions divination of genius, without suspecting that
he has behind him, in the East, the resignation of Job,
completes it, unwittingly, by the revolt of Prometheus ;
so that the lesson may be complete, and that the human
race, to whom Job has taught but duty, shall feel in
Prometheus the dawn of right. There is something
ghastly in ^Eschylus from one end to the other ; there
is a vague outline of an extraordinary Medusa behind
the figures in the foreground. ^Eschylus is splendid
and formidable ; as though you saw a frowning brow
above the sun. He has two Cains, Eteocles and
Polynices ; Genesis has but one. His troop of Oceani-
des comes and goes under a dark sky, like a flock of
driven birds. ^Eschylus has none of the recognized
proportions. He is shaggy, abrupt, excessive, unsus
ceptible of softened contour, almost savage, with
a grace all his own like that of the flowers of wild
nooks, less haunted by the nymphs than by the furies,
siding with the Titans, among the goddesses choosing
the austere and greeting the Gorgons with a sinister
smile, like Othryx and Briareus a son of the soil, and
ready to scale the skies anew against the upstart
Jupiter. ^Eschylus is ancient mystery made man ;
something like a Pagan prophet. His work, if we
had it all, would be a kind of Greek Bible. Poet hun
dred-handed, having an Orestes more fatal than Ulysses
and a Thebes grander than Troy, hard as rock, tumul
tuous like the foam, full of steeps, torrents, and preci
pices, and such a giant that at times one might take
him for a mountain. Coming later than the Iliad,
he has the air of an elder brother of Homer.
4. Another, Isaiah, seems placed above humanity,
and resembles a rumbling of continual thunder. He
is the great reproacher. His style, a kind of nocturnal
cloud, is lighted up with images which suddenly em
purple all the depths of his obscure thought, and make
us exclaim, ' It lightens ! ' Isaiah engages in battle,
hand to hand, with the evil which, in civilization,
makes its appearance before the good. He cries
MEN OF GENIUS 37
* Silence ! ' at the noise of chariots, of festivals, of
triumphs. The foam of his prophecy fails even on
Nature ; he gives Babylon over to the moles and bats,
Nineveh to the briers, Tyre to ashes, Jerusalem to
night ; he fixes a date for oppressors, warns the powers
of their approaching end, assigns a day against idols,
against high citadels, against the fleets of Tarsus,
against all the cedars of Lebanon, and against all the
oaks of Bashan. He stands upon the threshold of
civilization, and he refuses to enter. He is a kind
of mouthpiece of the desert speaking to the multitudes,
and demanding, in the name of the sands, the brambles,
and the winds, the sites of the cities. And this upon
the score of justice : because the tyrant and the slave,
that is to say, pride and shame, exist wherever there
are walled enclosures ; because evil is there incarnate
in man ; because in solitude there is but the beast,
while in the city there is the monster. Those things
with which Isaiah reproached his time, — idolatry,
debauchery, war, prostitution, ignorance, — still exist.
Isaiah is the undying contemporary of the vices that
make themselves servants, and of the crimes that
make themselves kings.
» o. Another, Ezekiel, is the wild soothsayer: a
genius of the cavern, whose thought is best expressed
by a beast-like growling. But listen. This savage
makes a prophecy to the world, — the prophecy of
progress. Nothing more astonishing. Ah ! Isaiah
overthrows ? Very well ! Ezekiel will reconstruct.
Isaiah refuses civilization ; Ezekiel accepts, but
transforms it. Nature and humanity blend together
in that softened howl which Ezekiel utters. The
conception of duty is in Job ; in ^Eschylus, the con
ception of right. Ezekiel introduces the resultant
third conception, — the human race ameliorated, the
future more and more emancipated. It is man's
consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead
of a sunset. Time present works for time to come ;
work, then, and hope ! Such is Ezekiel's cry. Ezekiel
38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
is in Chaldaea, and from Chaldaea he sees distinctly
Judsea, just as from oppression one may see liberty.
He declares peace as others declare war. He prophesies
harmony, goodness, gentleness, union, the blending
of races, love. Notwithstanding, he is terrible. He
is the fierce benefactor, the universal, beneficent
grumbler at the human race. He scolds, he almost
gnashes his teeth, and people fear and hate him. The
men about are thorns to him. 'I live among the
briers ', he says. He condemns himself to be a symbol,
and makes of his person, become hideous, a sign of
human misery and popular degradation. He is a
kind of voluntary Job. In his town, in his house, he
causes himself to be bound with cords, and remains
mute : behold the slave ! In the public place he
eats filth : behold the courtier ! This causes Voltaire's
laughter to burst forth, and our sobs. Ah, Ezekiel,
so far does thy devotion go ! Thou renderest shame
visible by horror ; thou compellest ignominy to avert
the head when recognizing herself in ordure ; thou
showest that to accept a man as master is to eat filth ;
thou causest a shudder to the sycophants who follow
the prince, by putting into thy stomach what they
put into their souls ; thou preachest deliverance by
vomiting. Accept our veneration ! This man, this
being, this figure, this swine-prophet, is sublime. And
the transfiguration that he announces, he proves.
How ? By transfiguring himself. From this horrible
and defiled mouth there issues splendid poetry. Never
has grander language been spoken, never more extra
ordinary. * I saw visions of God. A whirlwind came
out of the North, and a great cloud, and a fire infolding
itself. I saw a chariot, and a likeness of four living
creatures. Above the living creatures and the chariot
was a space like a terrible crystal. The wheels of the
chariot were made of eyes, and so high that they were
dreadful. The noise of the wings of the four angels
was as the voice of the Almighty, and when they stood
they let down their wings. And I saw a likeness which
MEN OF GENIUS 39
was as fire, and which put forth a hand. And a voice
said, " The kings and the judges have in their souls
gods of dung. I will take the stony heart out of their
flesh, and I will give them an heart of flesh "... I
came to them that dwelt by the river of Chebar, and I
remained there astonished among them seven days'.
And again : * There was a plain and dry bones, and I
said, " Bones, rise up " ; and when I beheld, lo ! the
sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin
covered them above ; but there was no breath in
them. And I cried, " Come from the four winds, 0
breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may
live ! " The spirit came. The breath came into them,
and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an ex
ceeding great army. Then the voice said, " Ye shall
be one nation, ye shall have no king or judge but me ;
and I will be the God who has one people, and ye shall
be the people who have one God ".' Is not every
thing there ? Search for a higher formula, you will
not find it : a free man under a sovereign God. This
visionary eater of filth is a resuscitator. Ezekiel has
offal on his lips, and the sun in his eyes. Among the
Jews the reading of Ezekiel was dreaded, and was
not permitted before the age of thirty years. The
rabbis, disturbed, put a seal upon this poet. People
could not call him an impostor : his prophetic fury
was incontestable ; he had evidently seen what he
related : thence his authority. His very enigmas
made him an oracle. They could not tell who were
meant by those women sitting toward the North
weeping for Tammuz * ; impossible to divine what
was the hashmal, this metal which he pictured as in
1 Ezekiel viii 14. This ' enigma ' was not such to Milton,
who sings of Zion's daughters,
Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch
Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led,
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries
Of alienated Judah.
Paradise Lost, i 446 seq.
40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
fusion in the furnace of the dream *. But nothing
was more clear than his vision of Progress. Ezekiel
saw the quadruple man, — man, ox, lion, and eagle ;
that is to say, the master of thought, the master of
the field, the master of the desert, the master of the
air. Nothing is forgotten ; it is the entire future,
from Aristotle to Christopher Columbus, from Trip-
tolemus to Montgolfier. Later on, the Gospel also
will become quadruple in the four evangelists, making
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John subservient to man,
the ox, the lion, and the eagle, and, remarkable fact,
to symbolize progress it will take the four faces of
Ezekiel. Furthermore, Ezekiel, like Christ, calls
himself the * Son of Man'. Jesus often in his parables
invokes and cites Ezekiel ; and this kind of first
Messiah makes precedents for the second. There
are in Ezekiel three constructions, — man, in whom
he places progress ; the temple, where he puts a light
that he calls ' glory ' ; the city, where he places God.
He cries to the temple, ' No priests here, neither they,
nor their kings, nor the carcases of their kings ' (xliii
7) 2. One cannot help thinking that this Ezekiel, a
species of Biblical demagogue, would help '93 in the
terrible sweeping of St Denis. As for the city built
by him, he mutters above it this mysterious name,
Jehovah Schammah, which signifies ' the Eternal is
there.' Then, standing silent in the darkness, he
shows men, on the far horizon, an ever-widening space
of azure sky.
6. Another, Lucretius, is that vast, obscure thing,
All. Jupiter is in Homer ; Jehovah is in Job ; in
Lucretius, Pan appears. Such is Pan's greatness,
that he has under him Destiny, which is above Jupiter.
Lucretius has travelled and he has mused, and musing
1 The mysterious word hashmal is rendered by ' amber '
in our common version (Ezekiel i 4). Tn.
2 The curious reader will discover that the citations
from Ezekiel are either paraphrased or garbled, or both.
Pedantic exactitude is not one of Hugo's faults. TB.
MEN OF GENIUS 41
is another form of travel. He has been at Athens ;
he has been in the haunts of philosophers ; he has
studied Greece and divined India. Democritus has
set him to thinking about the molecule, and Anaxi-
mander about space. His dreams have become
doctrine. Nothing is known of the incidents of his
life. Like Pythagoras, he has frequented the two
mysterious schools of the Euphrates, Neharda and
Pombeditha, and he may have met there the Jewish
doctors. He has deciphered the papyri of Sepphoris,
which in his time was not yet transformed into Dio-
csesarea ; he has lived with the pearl-fishers of the
Isle of Tylos. We find in the Apocrypha traces of a
strange ancient itinerary, recommended, according
to some, to philosophers by Empedocles, the magician
of Agrigentum, and, according to others, to the rabbis
by the high-priest Eleazer, who corresponded with
Ptolemy Philadelphus. This itinerary would have
served at a later time as a model for the journeyings
of the Apostles. The traveller who followed this
itinerary traversed the five satrapies of the country
of the Philistines ; visited the people who charm
serpents and suck poisonous sores, — the Psylli ;
drank of the torrent Bosor, which marks the frontier
of Arabia Deserta ; then touched and handled the
bronze collar of Andromeda, still sealed to the rock
of Joppa ; Baalbec in Coele-Syria ; Apamea on the
Orontes, where Nicanor fed his elephants ; the harbour
of Ezion-geber, where rode the vessels of Ophir, laden
with gold ; Segher, which produced white incense,
preferred to that of Hadramauth ; the two Syrtes ;
Smaragdus, the mountain of emerald ; the Nasamones,
who pillaged the shipwrecked ; the black nation,
Agyzimba ; Adribe, the city of crocodiles ; Cynopolis,
the city of dogs ; the wonderful cities of Comagena,
Claudia, and Barsalium ; perhaps even Tadmor, the
city of Solomon ; such were the stages of this almost
fabulous pilgrimage of the thinkers. Did Lucretius
make this pilgrimage ? One cannot tell. His nu-
42 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
mcrous travels are beyond doubt. He has seen so
many men that at the last to his eye they all seem
indistinguishably blended, and have become to him
a spectral multitude. He is arrived at that excess
of simplification of the universe which almost causes
it to disappear. He has sounded until he feels the
plummet float. He has questioned the vague spectres
of Byblos ; he has conversed with the tree-trunk cut
from Cithseron, which represents Juno Thespia. Per
haps he has spoken in the reeds to Cannes, the man-
fish of Chaldaea, who had two heads, — at the top, the
head of a man, below, the head of a hydra, — and who,
drinking up chaos by his lower gulkt, revomited it
on the earth through his upper mouth in the form
of dreadful knowledge. Isaiah stands next to the
archangels, Lucretius to the spectres. Lucretius
twists the ancient veil of Isis, steeped in the waters,
of darkness, and wrings from it sometimes in torrents
sometimes drop by drop, a sombre poesy. The bound
less is in Lucretius. At times there passes a powerful
spondaic verse, almost monstrous, and full of shadow :
Circum se froliis ac frondibus involventes.
Here and there a vast image of pairing is dimly out
lined in the forest :
Tune Venus in sylvis jungebat corpora amantum
and the forest is Nature. These verses are impos
sible with Virgil. Lucretius turns his back on hu
manity, and fixes his gaze upon the enigma. His
searching spirit is placed between that reality, the
atom, and that impossibility, the vacuum : by turns
attracted by these two precipices, he is religious when
he contemplates the atom, sceptical when he per
ceives the void ; thence his two aspects, equally pro
found, of denial and of affirmation. One day this
traveller commits suicide. This is his last departure.
He puts himself en route for Death. He wishes to
see for himself. He has embarked successively upon
MEN OF GENIUS 43
every sort of vessel, — on the galley of Trevirium
for Sanastrea in Macedonia ; on the trireme of Carystos
for Metapontum J in Greece ; on the Cyllcnian ekiff
for the Island of Samothrace ; on the sandale of
Samothrace for Naxos, the home of Bacchus ; on
the ceroscaph of Naxos for Spia ; on the Syrian pin
nace for Egypt ; and on the ship of the Red Sea for
India. It remains for him to make one voyage : he
is curious about the dark country ; he takes passage
on the coffin, and slipping the hawser himself, he
pushes off into the shadow the obscure barque that
is tossed by an unknown sea.
7. Another, Juvenal, has everything in which
Lucretius fails, — passion, emotion, fever, tragic flame,
passion for honesty, the avenging sneer, personality,
humanity. He dwells at a certain given point in
creation, and he contents himself with it, finding
there what may nourish and swell his heart with justice
and anger. Lucretius is the universe, Juvenal the
locality. And what a locality ! Rome. Between
the two they are the double voice which speaks to
world and town — urbi et orbi. As Juvenal hovers
above the Roman Empire, one hears the terrific
flappings of the lammergeyer's wings above a nest
of reptiles. He pounces upon this swarm and takes
them, one after the other, in his terrible beak, — from
the adder who is emperor and calls himself Nero, to
the earthworm who is a bad poet and calls himself
Codrus. Isaiah and Juvenal has each his harlot ;
but there is one thing more ominous than the shadow
of Babel, — it is the creaking of the bed of the Caesars ;
and Babylon is less formidable than Messalina. Juvenal
is the ancient free spirit of the dead republics ; in
him there is a Rome of that metal in which Athens
and Sparta were cast. Thence in his poetry something
of Aristophanes and something of Lycurgus. Beware
of him ; he is severe ! Not a cord is wanting to his
1 Metapontum was a Greek colony in Lucania. Sanastrea
the translator is unable to find. TR.
44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
lyre, nor to the lash he uses. He is lofty, rigid, austere,
glowing, violent, grave, inexhaustible in imagery,
harshly gracious, too, when he chooses. His cynicism
is the indignation of modesty. His grace, thoroughly
independent and a true figure of liberty, has claws ;
it appears all at once, enlivening by certain supple
and spirited undulations the angular majesty of his
hexameter. It is as if you saw the Cat of Corinth
prowling upon the pediment of the Parthenon. There
is something of the epic on this satire ; Juvenal holds
in his hand the golden sceptre with which Ulysses
beats Thersites. * Bombast, declamation, exaggera
tion, hyperbole ', cry the slaughtered deformities ;
and these cries, stupidly repeated by rhetoricians,
are a sound of glory. ' To commit these things or
to relate them, the crime is equal ', say Tillemont,
Marc Muret, Garasse, etc. — fools, who, like Muret,
are sometimes knaves. Juvenal's invective has been
blazing for two thousand years, — a fearful flame of
poetry, which burns Rome in the presence of the
centuries. The fire still flashes upon that radiant
hearth, and, far from diminishing with time, increases
under its mournful cloud of smoke. From it proceed
rays in behalf of liberty, probity, heroism ; and it
may be said that Juvenal sends even into our civiliza
tion spirits born of his light. What is Regnier ? what
D'Aubigne ? what Corneille ? Scintillations from
Juvenal.
8. Another, Tacitus, is the historian. Liberty
is incarnate in him, as in Juvenal, and ascends, dead,
to the seat of judgment, having for a toga her wind
ing-sheet, and summons tyrants to her bar. Juvenal,
we have just said, is the soul of a nation embodied in
a man ; the same is also true of Tacitus. By the
side of the poet who condemns, stands the historian
who punishes. Tacitus, seated on the curule chair
of genius, summons and seizes in flagrante ddicto
those criminals, the Caesars. The Roman Empire
is a long crime. This crime is begun by four demons,
MEN OF GENIUS 45
Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. Tiberius, the
imperial spy ; the eye which watches the world ;
the first dictator who dared to pervert to his personal
service the law of majesty made for the Roman people ;
knowing Greek, intellectual, sagacious, sarcastic,
eloquent, terrible ; loved by informers ; the murderer
of citizens, of knights, of the senate, of his wife, of
his family ; having rather the air of stabbing nations
than of massacring them ; humble before the Bar
barians ; a traitor with Archelaus, a coward with
Artabanus; having two thrones, — Rome for his ferocity,
Capreae for his baseness ; an inventor of vices and of
names for these vices ; an old man with a seraglio of
young girls ; gaunt, bald, crooked, bandy-leg£ ed,
fetid, eaten up with leprosy, covered with suppura
tions, masked with plasters, crowned with laurels ;
having ulcers like Job, and the sceptre besides ; sur
rounded by an oppressive silence ; seeking a successor,
scenting out Caligula, and finding him good : a viper
choosing a tiger. Caligula, the man who has known
fear, the slave become master, trembling under Tiberius,
terrible after Tiberius, vomiting his fright of yesterday
in atrocity. This mad fool has not his equal. An
executioner makes a mistake, and kills, instead of
the condemned one, an innocent man ; Caligula
smiles and eays, ' The condemned had not more
deserved it.' He has a woman eaten alive by dogs,
to enjoy the sight. He lies publicly upon his three
sisters, all stark naked. One of them dies, — Drusilla ;
he says, ' Behead those who do not bewail her, for
she is my sister ; and crucify those who bewail her,
for she is a goddess.' He makes his horse a pontiff,
as, later on, Nero will make his monkey a god. He
offers to the universe the wretched spectacle of the
annihilation of intellect by supreme power. A prosti
tute, a sharper, a robber, breaking the busts of Homer
and Virgil, his head dressed as Apollo with rays, and
his feet shod with wings like Mercury, frenetically
master of the world, desiring incest with his mother,
40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
wishing a plague to his empire, famine to his people,
rout to his army, his own resemblance to the gods,
and one sole head to the human race, that he might
cut it off, — such is Caius Caligula. He forces the
son to assist at the torment of the father, and the
husband at the violation of the wife, and to laugh.
Claudius is a mere sketch of a ruler, a piece of a man
made a tyrant, a crowned noodle. He hides him
self ; they discover him, they drag him from his
hole, and they throw him, terrified, upon the throne.
Emperor, he still trembles, having the crown, but not
sure that he has his head. He feels for his head at
times, as if he searched for it. Then he gets moro
confident, and decrees three new letters to be added
to the alphabet. He is a learned man, this idiot.
They strangle a senator ; he says, ' I did not order
it ; but since it is done, it is well '. His wife prosti
tutes herself before him. He looks at her, and says,
' Who is this woman ? ' He scarcely exists ; he is
a shadow : but this shadow crushes the world. At
length the hour for his departure arrives : his wife
poisons him ; his doctor finishes him. He says, ' I
am saved ', and dies. After his death they come to
see his corpse ; during his life they had seen his ghost.
Nero is the most formidable figure of ennui that has
ever appeared among men. The yawning monster
that the ancients called Livor and the moderns call
Spleen, gives us this riddle to guess, — Nero. Nero
seeks simply a distraction. Poet, comedian, singer,
coachman, exhausting ferocity to find voluptuousness,
trying a change of sex, the husband of the eunuch
Sporus and bride of the slave Pythagoras, and promen
ading the streets of Rome between his husband and
his wife. He has two pleasures, — one, to see the
people clutching, gold-pieces, diamonds, and pearls ;
and the other, to see the lions clutch the people. An
incendiary for curiosity's sake, and a matricide for
want of employment. It is to these four that Tacitus
dedicates his first gibbets. Their reigns he hangs
MEN OF GENIUS 47
about their necks like a collar. His book of ' Caligula '
is lost. Nothing is easier to comprehend than the
loss and obliteration of bocks of this sort. To read
tlu- in was a crime. A man having been caught reading
the history of Caligula by Suetonius, Commodus had
him thrown to the wild beasts. ' Feris objici jus-
sit ', says Lampridius. The horror of those days
is awful. Manners, below and above stairs, are
ferocious. You may judge of the cruelty of the
Romans by the atrocity of the Gauls. An insurrec
tion breaks out in Gaul. The peasants place the
Roman ladies, naked and still alive, on harrows, whose
points enter here and there into the body ; then they
cut off their breasts and sew them in their mouths,
that they may have the appearance of eating them.
Vix vindicta est, ' this is scarcely retaliation ', says
the Roman general Turpilianus. These Roman
ladies had the practice, while chatting with their
lovers, of sticking gold pins in the breasts of the
Persian or Gallic slaves who dressed their hair. Such
is the human spectacle at which Tacitus is present ;
the sight of it renders him terrible. He states the
facts, and leaves you to draw your own conclusions.
It is only in Rome that a Potiphar mother of Joseph
is to be met '. When Agrippina, reduced to her
last resource, seeing her grave in the eyes of her son,
offers him her bed, when her lips seek those of Nero,
Tacitus is there, following her with his eyes : * Lasciva
oscula et praenuntias ttagitii blanditias ' ; and he
denounces to the world this effort of a monstrous
and trembling mother to make matricide miscarry by
means of incest. Whatever Justus Lipsius, who
bequeathed his pen to the Holy Virgin, may have
said about it, Domitian exiled Tacitus, and he did
well. Men like Tacitus are unwholesome for authority.
Tacitus applies his style to the shoulder of an emperor,
and the brand remains. Tacitus always makes his
1 The original reads : ' La Putiphar mOire du Joseph
c'est ce qu'ou no recontre quo dans Rome.' Ta.
48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
thrust at the required spot, and leaves a deep scar.
Juvenal, all-powerful poet, deals about him, scatters,
makes a show, falls and rebounds, strikes right and
left a hundred blows at a time, on laws, manners,
corrupt magistrates, on bad verses, on libertines and
the idle, on Ccesar, on the people, everywhere ; he
is lavish, like hail ; his stroke* scatter, like those of
the scourge. Tacitus has the incisiveness of red-hot
iron.
9. Another, John, is the virginal old man. All
the ardent juices of man seem subtilized within him,
filling his brain with visionary wraiths. One does
not escape love. Love, *unappeased and discon
tented, changes itself at the end of life into an outflow
of gloomy fancies. The woman wants man ; other
wise man, instead of human poetry, will have a phantom
poetry. Some beings, however, resist the universal
generative tendency, and then they are in that peculiar
state in which men are subject to monstrous inspira
tions. The Apocalypse is the almost insane master
piece of this dreadful chastity. John, while young,
was gentle and shy. Having loved Jesus, he could
love nothing else. There is a profound resemblance
between the Song of Songs and the Apocalypse ;
they are both explosions of pent-up virginity. The
heart, mighty volcano, bursts into eruption ; there
proceeds from it this dove, the Song of Songs, or
this dragon, the Apocalypse. These two poems are
the two poles of ecstasy, — voluptuousness and horror ;
the two extreme limits of the soul are attained. In
the first poem ecstasy exhausts love, in the second,
terror ; and this ecstasy inspires in mankind, hence
forth for ever disquieted, the dread of the eternal
precipice. Another resemblance, not less worthy of
attention, there is between John and Daniel. The
nearly invisible thread of affinity is carefully followed
by the eye of those who see in the prophetic spirit a
human and normal phenomenon, and who, far from
disdaining the question of miracles, generalize it,
MEN OF GENIUS 49
and calmly connect it with permanent laws. Religions
lose, and science gains by the process. It has not
been sufficiently remarked that the seventh chapter
of Daniel contains the germ of the Apocalypse. Em
pires are there represented as beasts. Legend has
therefore associated the two poets, making the one
pass through the lions' den, and the other through
the caldron of boiling oil. Independently of the
legend, the life of John is noble, an exemplary life,
subject to marvellous expansions, passing from Gol
gotha to Patmos, and from the execution of the Messiah
to the exile of the prophet. John, after having been
present at the sufferings of Christ, ends by suffering
on his own account. The suffering seen makes him
an apostle, the suffering endured makes him a
sage ; from the growth of the trial results the growth
of the spirit. Bishop, he writes the Gospel ; pro
scribed, he composes the Apocalypse, a tragic work,
written under the dictation of an eagle, the poet
having above his head we know not what mournful
flapping of wings. The whole Bible is between two
dreamers, Moses and John. This poem of poems
emerges from chaos in Genesis, and pnsses out of
view amid the thunders of the Apocalypse. John
was one of the great wanderers of the tongue of fire.
During the Last Supper his head was on the breast
of Jesus, and he could say, * Mine ear has heard the
beating of God's heart '. He went about to relate
it to men. He spoke a barbarous Greek, mingled
with Hebrew expressions and Syrian words, — a lan
guage of a wild, harsh charm. He went to Ephesus,
he went to Media, he went among the Parthians. He
dared to enter Ctesiphon, a town of the Parthians,
built as a counterpoise to Babylon. He faced the
living idol, Cobaris, king, god, and man, for ever
immovable on his pierced block of nephritic jade,
which serves him as throne and latrine. He evan
gelized Persia, which the Scriptures call Paras. When
he appeared at the Council of Jerusalem, he was
50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
regarded as a pillar of the Church. He looked with
stupefaction at Cerinthus and Ebion, who said that
Jesus was but a man. When they questioned him
upon the mystery, he answered, ' Love one another '.
He died at the age of ninety-four years, under Trajan.
According to tradition, he is not dead ; he is spared,
and John is ever living at Patmos, as Barbarossa at
Kaiserslautern *. Caverns there are in which these
mysterious mortals are waiting. John as an historian
has his equals, — Matthew, Luke, Mark ; as a visionary
he is alone. There is no dream that approaches his,
such a reach it has into the infinite. His metaphors
issue from eternity, perturbed ; his poetry has a
profound smile of madness. A light reflected from
the Most High is in the eye of this man ; it is the
sublime in full aberration. Men do not understand
it — scorn it, and laugh. * My dear Thiriot ', says
Voltaire ' the Apocalypse is a piece of ordure '. Re
ligions, being in want of this book, have taken to
worshipping it ; but it had to be placed upon the
altar in order to save it from the ditch. What does
it matter ? John is a spirit. It is in John of Patmos,
1 above all others, that the communication between
certain men of genius and the abyss is apparent. In
all other poets we guess this communication ; in
John we see it, at moments we touch it, and seem
to lay a shuddering hand upon that sombre portal.
It is the door that leads toward God. In reading the
poem of Patmos, some one seems to push you from
behind ; the dread entrance, vaguely outlined, arouses
mingled terror and longing. Were this all of John, he
would still be colossal.
10. Another, Paul, a saint for the Church, a great
man for humanity, represents that miracle, at once
divine and human, conversion. It is he to whom the
future has appeared. It leaves him haggard ; and
nothing can be more superb than this face, for ever
i On Kyffhauser, the German legends say. Ta.
MEX OF GENIUS 51
wondering, of the man conquered by the light. Paul,
born a Pharisee, had been a weaver of camel's-hair
for tents, and servant of one of the judges of Jesus
Christ, Gamaliel ; then the Scribes, perceiving his
fierce spirit, had educated him. He was a man of
the past, he had guarded the clothes of the stone-
throwers ; he aspired, having studied with the priests,
to become an executioner ; he was on the road for
this. All at once a wave of light emanates from the
darkness and throws him down from his horse ; and
henceforth there will be in the history of the human
race that wonderful thing, — the road to Damascus.
That day of the metamorphosis of Saint Paul is a
great day, — keep the date ; it corresponds to the
25th of January in our Gregorian calendar. The
road to Damascus is essential to the march of Pro
gress. To fall into the truth and to rise a just man,
— a transfiguring fall, — that is sublime. It is the history
of Saint Paul ; from his day it will be the history of
humanity. The flash of light is something beyond
the flash of lightning. Progress will be carried forward
by a series of dazzling visions. As for Saint Paul,
who has been thrown down by the force of new con
viction, this harsh stroke from on high reveals to him
his genius. Once more upon his feet, he goes forward ;
he will not pause again. * Forward ! ' is his cry.
He is a cosmopolite. He loves the outsiders, whom
Paganism calls Barbarians, and Christianity calls
Gentiles ; he devotes himself to them. He is the
apostle of the outer world. He writes to the nations
epistles in behalf of God. Listen to him speaking
to the Galatians : * O foolish Galatians ! how can ye
go back to the yokes to which ye were tied ? There
are no longer either Jews, or Greeks, or slaves. Do
not perform your grand ceremonies ordained by your
laws. I declare unto you that all that is nothing.
Love one another. It is all-important that man
become a new creature. Ye are called to liberty '.
On Mars Hill at Athens there were steps hewn in rock,
62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
•which may be seen to this day. Upon these steps
sat the great judges before whom Orestes had appeared.
There Socrates had been judged. Paul went there ;
and there, at night (the Areopagus sat only at night),
he said to those austere men, ' I come to declare unto
you the unknown God '. The epistles of Paul to the
Gentiles are simple and profound, with the subtlety
so marked in its influence over savages. There are
in these messages gleams of hallucination ; Paul
speaks of the celestial beings as if he distinctly saw
them. Divided, like John, between life and eternity,
it seems as though he had a part of his thought on
the earth, and a part in the Unknown ; and it would
seem, at moments, that one of his verses answers to
another from beyond the dark wall of the tomb. This
half-possession of death gives him a personal certainty
often wholly apart from dogma, and stamps his indi
vidual convictions with an emphasis which makes
him almost heretical. His humility, resting upon
the mystery, is lofty. Peter says : ' The words of
Paul may be taken in a bad sense '. Hilarius Dia-
conus and the Luciferians ascribe their schism to the
epistles of Paul. Paul is at heart so anti-monarchical
that King James I, very much encouraged by the
orthodox University of Oxford, caused the Epistle
to the Romans to be burned by the hand of the com
mon hangman. It is true it was accompanied with
a commentary by David Pareus. Many of Paul's
works are rejected by the Church : they are the finest ;
and among them his Epistle to the Laodiceans, arid
above all his Apocalypse, cancelled by the Council
of Rome under Gelasius. It would be curious to
compare it with the Apocalypse of John. Over the
opening that Paul had made to heaven the Church
wrote, ' No thoroughfare ! ' He is a saint none the
less ; that is his official consolation. Paul has the
restlessness of the thinker ; text and formulary are
little for him ; the letter does not suffice : the letter
is mere body. Like all men of progress, he speaks
MEN OF GENIUS 53
with reserve of the written law ; he prefers grace to
the law, just as we prefer to it justice. What is grace ?
It is the inspiration from on high ; it is the breath,
flat ubi vult ; it is liberty. Grace is the spirit of the
law. This discovery of the spirit of the law belongs
to Saint Paul ; and what he calls * grace ' from a
heavenly point of view, we, from an earthly point of
view, call ' right '. Such is Paul. The enlargement
of a mind by the in-breaking of light, the beauty of
the seizure of a soul by the truth, shine forth in his
person. Herein, we insist, lies the virtue of the
journey to Damascus. Whoever, henceforward, shall
desire such growth as this, must follow the pointing
finger of Saint Paul. All those to whom justice shall
reveal itself, every blindness desirous of the day, all
the cataracts looking to be healed, all searchers after
conviction, all the great adventurers after virtue, all
servants of the good in quest of the true, must follow
this road. The light that they find there shall change
nature, for the light is always relative to darkness ;
it shall increase in intensity ; after having been reve
lation, it shall be rationalism : but it shall ever be
the light. Voltaire, like Saint Paul, is on the road to
Damascus. The road to Damascus shall be forever
the route of great minds. It shall also be the route
of nations. For nations, those vast individualisms,
have, like each of us, their crisis and their hour ;
Paul, after his august fall, arose again, armed against
ancient errors with the flashing blade of Christianity ;
and two thousand years after, France also, struck to
earth by the light, arouses herself, holding in hand
the flaming sword of Revolution.
11. Another, Dante, has constructed within his
own mind the bottomless pit. He has made the epic
of the spectres. He rends the earth ; in the terrible
hole he has made, he puts Satan. Then ho pushes
the world through Purgatory up to Heaven. Where
all else ends, Dante begins. Dante is beyond man ;
beyond, not without, — a singular proposition, which,
54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
however, has nothing contradictory in it, the soul
being a prolongation of man into the indefinite. Dante
twists all light and all shadow into a monstrous spiral ;
it descends, then it ascends. Unexampled architec
ture ! At the threshold is the sacred mist ; across
the entrance is stretched the corpse of Hope ; all that
you perceive beyond is night. Somewhere in the
darkness is heard the sobbing of the infinite anguish.
You lean over this gulf-poem — is it a crater ? You
hear detonations ; the verse shoots out, narrow and
livid, as from the sulphurous fissures of a volcanic
region ; what seems vapour takes on a spectral form,
— the ghastly shape speaks ; and then you know that
the volcano you have glimpsed, is Hell. This is no
longer the human environment ; you are in the un
known abyss. In this poem the imponderable submits
to the laws of the ponderable with which it is mingled,
as, in the sudden crash of a building on fire, the smoke,
carried down by the ruins, falls and rolls with them,
and seems caught under the timber and the stones.
Hence strange effects ; ideas seem to suffer and to be
punished in men. The idea, sufficiently human to
suffer expiation, is the phantom, a form of the shadow,
impalpable, but not invisible, an appearance in which
there remains sufficient reality in order that chastise
ment may have a hold upon it ; sin in the abstract
state, but preserving the human countenance. It
is not only the wicked who grieves in this apocalypse,
it is evil itself ; there all possible bad actions are in
despair. This spiritualization of penalty gives to
the poem a powerful moral bearing. The depth of
Hell once sounded, Dante pierces it, and reascends
upon the other side of the infinite. In rising, he
becomes idealized, and thought drops the body as a
robe. From Virgil he passes to Beatrice : his guide
to Hell is the poet ; his guide to Heaven is poetry.
The epic swells into grander proportions as it con
tinues ; but man no longer comprehends it. Purga
tory and Paradise are not less extraordinary than
MEN OF GENIUS 55
Gehenna ; but as we ascend we lose our interest. We
•were somewhat at home in Hell, but are no longer
BO in Heaven. We cannot recognize our fellows in
the angels : perhaps the human eye is not made for
such excess of light ; and when the poem becomes
happy, it becomes tedious. Such is ever the story
of the happy. It is well to marry the lovers or to impa-
radise the souls ; but seek the drama elsewhere than
there. After all, what matters it to Dante if you no
longer follow him ? He goes on without you. He
stalks alone, this lion. His work is a miracle. What
a philosopher is this visionary ! what a sage is this
madman ! Dante lays down the law for Mon
tesquieu ; the penal divisions of L' Esprit des Lois are
copied from the classifications in the Hell of the Divina
Commedia. What Juvenal does for the Rome of the
Caesars, Dante does for the Rome of the Popes ; but
Dante is a more terrible judge than Juvenal. Juvenal
whips with cutting thongs ; Dante scourges with flames.
Juvenal condemns ; Dante damns. Woe to the living
man on whom this traveller fixes the inscrutable
glare of his eyes !
12. Another, Rabelais, is the son of Gaul. And
who says Gaul, says also Greece, for the Attic salt
and the Gallic jest have at bottom the same flavour ;
and if anything, buildings apart, resembles the Piraeus,
it is La Rapee J. Here is a greater than Aristophanes,
for Aristophanes is bad. Rabelais is good, Rabelais
would have defended Socrates. In the order of lofty
genius, Rabelais chronologically follows Dante ; after
the stern face, the sneering visage. Rabelais is the
formidable mask of ancient comedy detached from
the Greek proscenium, from bronze made flesh, hence
forth a human living face, remaining enormous, and
coming among us to laugh at us and with us. Dante
and Rabelais spring from the school of the Franciscan
friars, as, later, Voltaire springs from the Jesuits ;
1 La Rapee Bercy is an eastern suburb of Paris, on the
Seine. It gives its name to a station on the belt railroad. TB.
56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Dante the incarnate sorrow, Rabelais parody, Voltaire
irony, — these issue from the Church against the
Church. Every genius has his invention or his dis
covery ; Rabelais has made his, — the belly. The
serpent is in man, it is the intestine. It tempts,
betrays, and punishes. Man, single being as a spirit,
and complex as man, has within himself for his earthly
mission three centres, — the brain, the heart, the
belly ; each of these centres is august by one great
function which is peculiar to it : the brain has thought,
the heart has love, the belly has paternity and maternity.
The belly may be tragic. ' Feri ventrem ', says
Agrippina. Catherine Sforza, threatened with the
death of her children, who were hostages, exhibits
herself naked to the navel on the battlements of the
citadel of Rimini, and says to the enemy, * With this
I can bring forth others '. In one of the epic convul
sions of Paris, a woman of the people, standing on a
barricade, raised her petticoat, showed the soldiery
her naked belly, and cried, * Kill your mothers ! '
The soldiers riddled that belly with bullets. The
belly has its heroism ; but it is from it that flow, in
life, corruption, — in art, comedy. The breast, where
the heart rests, has for its summit the head ; the belly
has the phallus. The belly, being the centre of matter,
is our gratification and our danger ; it contains appetite
satiety, and putrefaction. The devotion, the tender
ness, which seize us there, are liable to death ; egoism
replaces them. Easily do the affections become
lusts. That the hymn can be used in the service of
Bacchus, the strophe deformed into a tippler's catch,
is sad. This is the work of the beast which is in man.
The belly is essentially this beast ; degradation seems
to be its law. The ladder of sensual poetry has for
its topmost round the Song of Songs, and for its lowest
the jingling ballad. The belly god is Silenus ; the
belly emperor is Vitellius ; the belly animal is the
pig. One of those horrid Ptolemies was called the
Belly (Physcon). The belly is to humanity a formid-
MEN OF GENIUS 57
able weight ; it breaks at every moment the equili
brium between the soul and the body. It fills history ;
it is responsible for nearly all crimes ; it is the matrix
of all vices. It is the belly that by voluptuousness
makes the sultan, and by drunkenness the czar ;
this it is that shows Tarquin to the bed of Lucrece ;
this it is that makes the Senate which had awaited
Brennus and dazzled Jugurtha, end by deliberating
on the sauce of a turbot. It is the belly which counsels
the ruined libertine, Caesar, the passage of the Rubicon.
To pass the Rubicon, how well that pays your debts !
To pass the Rubicon, how readily that throws women
into your arms ! What good dinners afterward !
And the Roman soldiers enter Rome with the cry,
* Urbani, claudite uxores ; moechum calvum addu-
cimus '. The appetite debauches the intellect. Vo
luptuousness replaces will. At starting, as is always
the case, there is some nobleness : this is the stage
of the revel. There is a distinction between being
fuddled and being dead drunk. Then the revel
degenerates into guzzling. Where there was a Solo
mon there is Ramponneau. Man becomes a barrel ;
thought is drowned in an inner deluge of cloudy notions ;
conscience, submerged, cannot warn the drunken
soul. Brutalization is consummated ; it is not even
any longer cynical, it is empty and sottish. Diogenes
disappears ; there remains but the tub. Beginning
with Alcibiades, we end with Trimalchio, and the
thing is complete ; nothing is left, neither dignity,
nor shame, nor honour, nor virtue, nor wit, — crude
animal gratification, thorough impurity. Thought
is dissolved in satiety ; carnal gorging absorbs every
thing ; nothing survives of the grand sovereign crea
ture inhabited by the soul ; the belly (pass the expres
sion) eats the man. Such is the final state of all
societies where the ideal is eclipsed. This passes
for prosperity, and gets the name of growth. Some
times even philosophers heedlessly further this degra
dation by inserting in their doctrines the materialism
58 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
which is in men's consciences. This sinking of man
to the level of the human beast is a great calamity.
Its first-fruit is the turpitude visible at the summit
of all professions : the venal judge, the simoniacal
priest, the hireling soldier ; laws, manners, and beliefs
are a dung-heap, — totus homo fit excrementum.
In the sixteenth century, all the institutions of
the past are in that state. Eabelais gets hold of
the situation ; he verifies it ; he authenticates that
belly which is the world. Civilization is, then, but
a mass, science is matter, religion is blessed with hams,
feudality digests, royalty is obese. What is Henry
VIII ? A paunch. Rome is a squab-pampered old
dame : is it health ? is it sickness ? It is perhaps
obesity, perhaps dropsy. Rabelais, doctor and priest,
feels the pulse of the Papacy ; he shakes his head,
and bursts out laughing. Is it because he has found
life ? No, it is because he has felt death ; the Papacy
is, in reality, breathing its last. While Luther reforms,
Rabelais jests. Which best attains his end ? Rabelais
ridicules the monk, the bishop, the Pope ; laughter
and death-rattle together ; fool's bell sounding the
tocsin ! But Ipok ! I thought it was a feast — it is
a death-agony ; one may be deceived in the nature
of the hiccough. Let us laugh all the same : death
is at the table ; the last drop toasts the last sigh.
A death-agony in the merry mood, — it is superb !
The large intestine is king ; all that old world feasts
and bursts ; and Rabelais enthrones a dynasty of
bellies, — Grangousier, Pantagruel, and Gargantua.
Rabelais is the ^Eschylus of victuals ; and this is grand
when we think that eating is devouring. There is
something of the gulf in the glutton. Eat, then, my
masters, and drink, and come to the finale. To live,
is a song, of which death is the refrain. Beneath
the depraved human race others may dig dreadful
dungeons ; but in the direction of the subterranean,
Rabelais takes you no farther than the wine-cellar.
This universe, which Dante put into Hell, Rabelais
MEN OF GENIUS 69
confines in a wine-cask ; his book is nothing else.
The seven circles of Alighieri bound and encompass
this extraordinary tun. Look within the monstrous
cask, and there you see them again. In Rabelais they
are entitled Idleness, Pride, Envy, Avarice, Wrath,
Lechery, Gluttony ; and it is thus that you suddenly
meet again the formidable jester. Where ? In
church. The seven deadly sins form the text of this
parson's sermon. Rabelais is a priest. Castigation,
properly understood, begins at home, it is therefore
at the clergy that he strikes first. That is what it is
to be at home ! The Papacy dies of indigestion.
Rabelais plays the Papacy a trick, — the trick of a
Titan. The Pantagruelian merriment is not less
grandiose than the mirth of a Jupiter. Cheek by jowl :
the monarchical and priestly jowl eats ; the Rabelaisian
cheek laughs. Whoever has read Rabelais has for ever
before his eyes this stern confrontment : the mask
of comedy fixing its stare upon the mask of theocracy.
13. Another, Cervantes, is also a form of epic
mockery ; for as the writer of these lines said in 1827 J,
there are between the Middle Ages and modern times,
after the feudal barbarism, and placed there as it were
to make an end of it, two comic Homers, — Rabelais
and Cervantes. To epitomize the horrible in a jest
is not the least terrible manner of doing it. This is
what Rabelais did ; it is what Cervantes did : but
the raillery of Cervantes has nothing of the broad
Rabelaisian grin. It is the fine humour of the noble
after the joviality of the parson. Gentlemen, I am
the Seignior Don Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra,
poet-soldier, and, as a proof, one-armed. No coarse
jesting in Cervantes ; scarcely a flavour of elegant
cynicism. The satirist is fine, acute, polished, delicate,
almost gallant, and would even run the risk sometimes
of diminishing his power, with all his affected ways,
if he had not the deep poetic spirit of the Renascence.
That saves his charming grace from becoming prettiness.
1 Preface to Cromwell.
60 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Like Jean Gotijon, like Jean Cousin, like Germain
Pilon, like Primatice, Cervantes is not devoid of
illusion. Thence come all the unexpected marvels
of his imagination. Add to that a wonderful intuition
of the inmost processes of the mind and a multiform
philosophy which seems to possess a new and complete
chart of the human heart. Cervantes sees the inner
man. His philosophy blends with the comic and
romantic instinct. Hence the unexpected, breaking
out at every moment in his characters, in his action,
in his style ; the unforeseen, magnificent adventure.
Personages remaining true to themselves, but facts
and ideas whirling around them, with a perpetual
renewing of the original idea and a steady current
of that wind which brings the lightning-flash : such
is the law of great works. Cervantes is militant ;
he has a thesis, he makes a social book. Such poets
are the champions of the intelligence. Where have
they learned fighting ? On the battle-field itself.
Juvenal was a military tribune ; Cervantes comes
home from Lepanto, as Dante from Campalbino, as
yEschylus from Salamis. Afterward, they pass to
a new trial : JSschylus goes into exile, Juvenal into
exile, Dante into exile, Cervantes into prison. This
is just, since they have done you a service. Cervantes,
as poet, has the three sovereign gifts, — creation, which
produces types and clothes ideas with flesh and bone ;
invention, which hurls passions against events, kindles
in man a flame that outshines the star of destiny, and
brings forth the drama ; imagination, sun of the brain,
which throws light everywhere, giving to its figures
the high-relief of life. Observation, which comes by
acquisition, and is, therefore, not so much a gift as
an accomplishment, is included in creation ; were
the miser not observed, Harpagon would not be
created. In Cervantes, a new-comer, glimpsed in
Rabelais, puts in a decided appearance. You have
caught sight of him in Panurge, you see him plainly
in Sancho Panza. He comes like the Silenus of
MEN OF GENIUS 61
Plautus, and he may also say, ' I am the god mounted
on an ass.' Wisdom in the beginning, reason by and
by : such is the strange history of the human mind.
What more replete with wisdom than all the religions ?
What less reasonable ? Morals true, dogmas false.
Wisdom exists in Homer and in Job ; reason, such
as it must needs be to overcome prejudices, that is
to say, complete and armed cap-a-pie, will come in
only with Voltaire. Common-sense is not wisdom,
neither is it reason ; it is a little of one and a little
of the other, with a dash of egoism. Cervantes makes
it bestride ignorance, and, at the same time, com
pleting his profound satire, he mounts heroism upon
fatigue. Thus he shows one after the other, one
with the other, the two profiles of man, and parodies
them, without more pity for the sublime than for the
grotesque ; the hippogriff becomes Rosinante. Behind
the equestrian personage, Cervantes creates and sets
in motion the asinine personage. Enthusiasm takes
the field, Irony locks step with it. The wonderful
feats of Don Quixote, his riding and spurring, his big
lance steady in the rest, are judged by the ass,— a
connoisseur in windmills. The invention of Cervantes
is so masterly that there is, between the human type
and the quadruped complement, statuary adhesion ;
the babbler, like the adventurer, is part of the beast
that is proper to him, and you can no more dismount
Sancho Panza than Don Quixote. The Ideal is in
Cervantes as in Dante ; but it is called the Impossible,
and is scoffed at. Beatrice is become Dulcinea. To
rail at the ideal would be the failing of Cervantes ;
but this failing is only apparent. Look well, the smile
has a tear ; in reality, Cervantes sides with Don
Quixote, as Moliere sides with Alceste. One must
learn how to read, especially in the books of the six
teenth century ; there is in almost all, on account of
the threats hanging over freedom of thought, a secret
that must be unlocked, and whose key is often lost.
Rabelais has his reserves, Cervantes has an aside.
62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Machiavolli wears a mask, — more than one, perhaps.
At all events, the advent of common-sense is the great
fact in Cervantes. Common-sense is not a virtue ;
it is the eye of self-interest. It would have encouraged
Themistocles and dissuaded Aristides ; Leonidas has
no common-sense, Regulus has no common-sense : but
in face of selfish and ferocious monarchies dragging
their unhappy peoples into their own private wars,
decimating families, making mothers desolate, and
driving men to kill each other with all those fine
words, — military honour warlike glory, obedience
to orders, etc., etc — this Common-Sense is an admir
able personage, arising suddenly, and crying out to
the human race, ' Take care of your skin ! *
14. Another, Shakespeare : what is he ? You
might almost answer, He is the earth. Lucretius
is the sphere, Shakespeare is the globe. There is
more and less in the globe than in the sphere. In
the sphere there is the All ; on the globe there is man.
Here the outer, there the inner mystery. Lucretius
is being, Shakespeare is existence. Hence the shadow
that is in Lucretius ; hence the teeming life in Shake
speare. Space — * the blue ', as the Germans say —
is certainly not denied to Shakespeare. The earth
sees and traverses the heavens ; the earth knows them
under their two aspects, — darkness and azure, doubt
and hope. Life comes and goes in death. All life
is a secret, a sort of enigmatical parenthesis between
birth and the death-throe, between the opening and
the closing eye. The possession of this secret renders
Shakespeare restless. Lucretius is ; Shakespeare
lives. In Shakespeare the birds sing, the bushes are
clothed with green, hearts love, souls suffer, the cloud
wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes,
forests and multitudes speak, the vast eternal dream
hovers over all. Sap and blood, all forms of the mul
tiple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity,
the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions,
diamonds and pearls, dung-hills and charnel-houses,
MEN OF GENIUS 03
tli" obb and flow of beings, the steps of comers and
goers, all, all are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare ;
and, this genius being the earth, the dead emerge from
it. Certain sinister sides of Shakespeare are haunted
by spectres. Shakespeare is a brother of Dante :
the one completes the other. Dante incarnates all
supernaturalism, Shakespeare all Nature ; and as
these two regions, Nature and the supernatural,
which appear to us so different, are really the same
unity, Dante and Shakespeare, however dissimilar, have
conterminous boundaries and domains in common :
there is something of the human in Alighieri, something
of the spectre in Shakespeare. The skull passes from
the hands of Dante into the hands of Shakespeare.
Ugolino gnaws it, Hamlet questions it ; and it exhibit*
perhaps even a deeper meaning and a loftier teaching
in the second than in the first. Shakespeare shakes it
and makes stars fall from it. The isle of Prospero,
the forest of Ardennes, the heath of Harmuir, the
platform of Elsinore, are illuminated, no less than the
seven circles of Dante's spiral, by the sombre, reflected
light of hypothesis. Doubt, half chimera and half
truth, is outlined there as well as here. Shakespeare,
as well as Dante, gives us glimpses of the dim horizon
of conjecture. In the one as in the other there is the
possible, that window of the dream opening upon
reality. As for the real, we insist, Shakespeare over
flows with it ; everywhere the quick flesh. Shake
speare has emotion, instinct, the true voice, the right
tone, the whole human multitude with its clamour: Hia
poetry is himself, and at the same time it is you. Lake
Homer, Shakespeare is elemental. Men of genius,
renewers, — that is the name for them, — arise at all the
decisive crises of humanity ; they epitomize epochs,
and complete revolutions. In civilization, Homer
indicates the end of Asia and the beginning of Europe ;
Shakespeare the end of the Middle Ages. Rabelais
and Cervantes also mark the close of the Middle Ages ;
but, being essentially satirists, they give but a partial
64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
view. Shakespeare's mind is a total ; like Homer,
Shakespeare is a cyclic man. These two intelligences,
Homer and Shakespeare, close the two gates of Bar
barism, — the ancient gate, and the Gothic. That
was their mission — they have fulfilled it ; that was
their task— they have accomplished it. The third
great human crisis is the French Revolution ; the
third huge gate of barbarism, the monarchical gate,
is closing at this moment. The nineteenth century
hears it rolling on its hinges. Thence for poetry,
for the drama, and for art, arises the present era, equally
independent of Shakespeare and of Homer.
CHAPTER III
HOMER, Job, JSschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius,
Juvenal, Saint John, Saint Paul, Tacitus, Dante,
Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, — that is the avenue
cf the immovable giants of the human mind.
Men of genius form a dynasty : indeed, there is
no other. They wear all the crowns, even that of
thorns. Each of them represents the sum-total of
absolute truth realizable to man.
We repeat it : to choose between these men, to
prefer one to the other, to point with the finger to
the first among these first, is impossible. All are the
Mind. Perhaps, by the strictest measurements, —
and yet every objection would be legitimate, — one
might mark out as the highest among these summits,
Homer, ^Eschylus, Job, Isaiah, Dante, and Shakespeare.
It is understood that we speak here only from the
artistic standpoint ; to be still more specific, from the
standpoint of literary art.
Two men in this group, ^Eschylus and Shakespeare,
represent especially the drama.
/Eschylus, a kind of genius out of his time, worthy
to mark either a beginning or an end in humanity,
appears not to be placed in his right turn in the series,
and, as we have said, seems an elder brother of Homer.
MEN OF GENIUS 05
If we remember that ^Eschylus is nearly submerged
by the darkness rising over human memory ; if we
remember that ninety of his plays have disappeared,
that of that sublime hundred there remain no more than
seven dramas, which are also seven odes, — we are
astounded by what we see of this genius, and almost
terrified by what we do not see.
What, then, was ^Eschylus ? What proportions
and what forms had he in all this shadow ? ^Eschylus
is up to his shoulders in the ashes of ages ; his head
alone rises above that burial, and, like the colossus
of the desert, with his head alone he is as tall as all
the neighbouring gods, upright upon their pedestals.
Man passes before the insubmergible wreck. Enough
remains for an immense glory. What oblivion has
swallowed, adds an unknown element to his grandeur.
Buried and eternal, his brow projecting from the
sepulchre, ^Eschylus looks forth upon the generations
of men.
CHAPTER IV
To the eyes of the thinker, these men of genius occupy
thrones in the ideal kingdom. To the individual
works that these men have left us must be added
various vast collective works, — the Vedas, the Rama-
yana, the Mahabharata, the Edda, the Nibelungen,
the Heldenbuch, the Romancero.
Some of these works are revealed and sacred. They
bear the marks of unknown collaboration. The
poems of India, in particular, have the ominous fulness
of the possible, as imagined by insanity or related
in the vision. These works seem to have been com
posed in common with beings to whom our world is no
longer accustomed. Legendary horror covers these
epics. * These books were not composed by man
alone ', says the inscription of Ash-Nagar. Djinns
have alighted upon them, polypteral magi have mused
over them ; the texts have been interlined by invisible
F
66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
hands, the demi-gods have been aided by demi-demons
the elephant, which India calls the Sage, has been
consulted. Thence comes a majesty almost horrible.
The great enigmas are in these poems : they are full
of mysterious Asia. Their prominent parts have the
supernatural and hideous outline of chaos. They
form a mass above the horizon, like the Himalayas.
The distance of the manners, beliefs, ideas, actions,
persons, is extraordinary. One reads these poems
with that wondering droop of the head induced by
the profound distance between the book and the reader.
This Holy Writ of Asia has evidently been still more
difficult to reduce and to co-ordinate than our own.
It is in every part refractory to unity. In vain have
the Brahmins, like our priests, erased and interpolated :
Zoroaster is there ; Ized Serosch is there. The Eschem
of the Mazdsean traditions is discernible under the
name of Siva ; Manicheism is apparent between
Brahma and Booddha. All kinds of traces blend, cross
and re-cross each other in these poems. One per
ceives in them the mysterious footprints of a race of
intelligences who have worked at them in the darkness
of the centuries. Here is the enormous toe of the giant ;
there, the claw of the chimera. These poems are the
pyramid of a vanished colony of ants.
The Nibelungen, another pyramid of another
multitudinous race, has the same greatness. What
the divinities did in Asia, the elves have done here.
These powerful epic legends, the testaments of ages,
tattooings stamped by races on history, have no other
unity than the unity of the people itself. The collective
and the successive, combining together, are one.
Turba fit mens. These recitals are clouds, laced by
wonderful flashes of light. As to the Romancero,
which creates the Cid after Achilles, and the chivalric
after the heroic, it is the Iliad of several lost Homers.
Count Julian, King Roderigo, Cava, Bernardo del
Carpio, the bastard Mudarra, Nuno Salido, the Seven
Infantes of Lara, the Constable Alvar de Luna, — no
MEN OF GENIUS 67
Oriental or Hellenic type surpasses these figures.
The horse of Campeador is equal to the dog of Ulysses,
Between Priam and Lear you must place Don Arias,
the old man of Zamora's tower, sacrificing his seven
sons to his duty, and tearing them from his heart
one by one. There is grandeur in that. In pres
ence of these sublimities the reader suffers a sort of
sun-stroke.
These works are anonymous ; and, owing to the
great reason of the Jiomo sum, while admiring them,
while assigning them a place at the summit of art,
we prefer the acknowledged works. With equal beauty,
the Ramayana touches us less than Shakespeare.
The ego of a man is more vast and profound even than
the ego of a people.
However, these composite myriologues, the great
testaments of India particularly, expanses of poetry
rather than poems, an expression, at once sidereal
and bestial, of vanished races, derive from their very
deformity an indescribable supernatural air. The
multiple ego expressed by those myriologues makes
them the polypi of poetry, vague and wonderful
monstrosities. The strange seams of the antediluvian
rough outline are visible there, as in the ichthyosaurus
or the pterodactyl. One of these black, many-headed
masterpieces throws upon the horizon of art the sil
houette of a hydra.
The Greek genius is not deceived by them, and
abhors them ; Apollo would attack them. Beyond
and above all these collective and anonymous pro
ductions (the Romancero excepted), there are men
to represent the peoples. These men we have just
named. They give to nations and periods the human
countenance. They are, in art, the incarnations of
Greece, of Arabia, of Judaea, of Pagan Rome, of Chris
tian Italy, of Spain, of France, of England. As for
Germany, — the matrix, like Asia, of races, hordes, and
nations, — she is represented in art by a sublime man,
equal, although in a different category, to all those
68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
that we have characterized above. That man is
Beethoven. Beethoven is the German soul.
What a shadow is this Germany ! She is the India
of the West. She contains everything ; there is no
formation more colossal. In the sacred mist where
the German spirit moves, Isidore of Seville places
theology ; Albertus the Great, scholasticism ; Hra-
banus Maurus, linguistics ; Trithemius, astrology ;
Ottni, chivalry ; Reuchlin, vast curiosity ; Tutilo,
universality ; Stadianus, method ; Luther, inquiry ;
Albrecht Diirer, art ; Leibnitz, science ; Puffendorf,
law ; Kant, philosophy ; Fichte, metaphysics ; Wink-
elmann, archaeology ; Herder, aesthetics ; the Vossii,
— of whom one, Gerard John, was of the Palatinate, —
erudition ; Euler, the spirit of integration ; Humboldt,
the spirit of discovery ; Niebuhr, history ; Gottfried
of Strasburg, fable ; Hoffmann, dreams ; Hegel,
doubt ; Ancillon, obedience ; Werner, fatalism ;
Schiller, enthusiasm; Goethe, indifference; Arminius,
liberty.
Kepler lights this shadow with the stars.
Gerard Groot, the founder of the Fratres Com-
munis Vitas, makes in Germany a first attempt at
fraternity, in the fourteenth century. Whatever
may have been her infatuation for the indifference of
Goethe, do not deem her impersonal ; she is a nation,
and one of the most generous : for her, Riickert,
the military poet, forges the Geharnischte Sonnelte
(' Sonnets in Coat of Mail '), and she shudders when
Korner hurls at her the Song of the Sword. She is
the German fatherland, the great beloved land, Ten-
tonia mater. Galgacus was to the Germans what
Caractacus was to the Britons.
Within herself and at home, Germany has every
thing. She shares Charlemagne with France, and
Shakespeare with England ; for the Saxon element
is mingled with the British element. She has an
Olympus, the Valhalla. She must needs have her
own style of writing. Ulfilas, bishop of Mcesia, invents
MEN OF GENIUS 69
it for her, and the Gothic caligraphy will henceforth
form a pendant to the Arabic. The capital letter of
a missal rivals the fantastical signature of a caliph.
Like China, Germany has invented printing. Her
Burgraves (this remark has been already made l)
are to us what the Titans are to ^Eschylus. To the
temple of Tanfana, destroyed by Germanicus, she
caused the cathedral of Cologne to succeed. She is
the ancestress of our history, the granddam of our
legends. From all parts, — from the Rhine and from
the Danube, from the Rauhe Alp, from the ancient
Sylva Gabresa, from Upper Lorraine and from Lower
Lorraine, through the Wigalois and through the
Wigamur, through Henry the Fowler, through Samo
King of the Vends, through Rothe the chronicler of
Thuringia, through Zwinger the chronicler of Alsace,
through Gansbein the chronicler of Limburg, through
all those ancient popular songsters, Hans Folz, Jean
Viol, Muscatblut, through those rhapsodists the Minne
singers, — from all sources the tale, that form of dream,
reaches her and enters into her genius. At the same
time languages flow from her. From her fissures gush,
to the North, the Danish and Swedish ; to the West,
the Dutch and Flemish. The German passes the
Channel and becomes the English. In the intellectual
order, the German genius has other frontiers than
Germany. A given people may resist Germany and
yield to Germanism. The German spirit assimi
lates to itself the Greeks by Miiller, the Servians
by Gerhard, the Russians by Goetre, the Magyars
by Mailath. When Kepler, in the presence of
Rudolph II, was preparing the Rudolphine Tables,
it was with the aid of Tycho Brahe 2. German affi
nities extend far. Without any alteration in the
local and national autonomies, it is with the great
i Preface to the Burgraves 1843.
a The Rudolphine Tables, published in 1627, appear to
have been prepared long after the death of Tycho, which
occurred in 1(501. TK.
70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Germanic centre that the Scandinavian spirit in Oehlen-
schlager and the Batavian spirit in Vondel are con
nected. Poland unites herself to it, with all her
glory, from Copernicus to Kosciusko, from Sobieski to
Mickiewicz. Germany is the wellspring of nations.
They pass out of her like rivers ; she receives them
as a sea.
The vast murmur of the Hercynian forest seems to
be heard throughout Europe. The German nature,
profound and subtle, distinct from the European nature
but in harmony with it, volatilizes and floats above
the nations. The German mind is misty, luminous,
dispersed ; it is a kind of immense beclouded soul,
with stars. Perhaps the highest expression of Ger
many can be given only by music. Music, by its very
want of precision, which in this case is a quality, goes
wherever the German soul goes.
If the German spirit had as much density as expan
sion, — that is to say, as much will as power, — she
could, at a given moment, lift up and save the human
race. Such as she is, she is sublime.
In poetry she has not said her last word. At this
hour the indications are excellent. Since the jubilee
of the noble Schiller, particularly, there has been an
awakening, and a generous awakening. The great
definitive poet of Germany will be necessarily a poet
of humanity, of enthusiasm, of liberty. Perchance —
and some signs give token of it — we may soon see him
arise from the young group of contemporary German
writers.
Music (we beg indulgence for the figure) is the
vapour of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to
thought, what fluid is to liquid, what the ocean of
clouds is to the ocean of waves. If another analogy
is desired, it is the indefinite of this infinite. The
same insufflation impels, sweeps away, transports,
and overwhelms it, fills it with agitation and gleams
and unutterable sounds, saturates it with electricity,
and causes it to give forth sudden discharges of thunder.
MEN OF GENIUS 71
Music is the Word of Germany. The German
people, so much curbed as a nation, so emancipated
as thinkers, sing with a sombre delight. To sing,
seems a deliverance from bondage. Music expresses
that which cannot be said, and which cannot be sup
pressed. Therefore is Germany all music, in antici
pation of the time when she shall be all freedom.
Luther's choral is a kind of Marseillaise. Everywhere
are singing-clubs and choral circles. In the fields of
Swabian Esslingen, on the banks of the Neckar, comes
every year the Festival of Song. The ' Liedermusik ',
of which Schubert's Elf-King is the masterpiece,
makes a part of German life. Song is for Germany
a breathing : it is by singing that she respires and
conspires. The music -note being the syllable of a
kind of undefined universal language, Germany's
grand communication with the human race is made
through harmony, — an admirable prelude to unity.
It is by the clouds that the rains which fertilize the
earth ascend from the sea ; it is by music that ideas
emanate from Germany to take possession of the
minds of men. Therefore we may say that Ger
many's greatest poets are her musicians, of which
wonderful family Beethoven is the head.
Homer is the great Pelasgian ; ^Eschylus, the great
Hellene ; Isaiah, the great Hebrew ; Juvenal, the great
Roman ; Dante, the great Italian ; Shakespeare,
the great Englishman ; Beethoven, the great German.
CHAPTER V
THE dethroned 'Good Taste ',— that other 'right
divine ' which for so long a time weighed upon Art,
and which had succeeded hi suppressing the beautiful
for the benefit of the pretty, — the ancient criticism,
not altogether dead, like the ancient monarchy, find
from their point of view the same fault, exaggeration,
in those sovereign men of genius whom we have
72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
enumerated 1. These men of genius are extravagant.
This arises from the infinite element within them;
they are, in fact, not circumscribed. They contain
something unknown. Every reproach that is addressed
to them might be addressed to the Sphinx. People
reproach Homer for the carnage which fills his den,
the Iliad ; ^Eschylus, for his monstrousness ; Job,
Isaiah, Ezekiel, Saint Paul, for double meanings ;
Rabelais, for obscene nudity and venomous ambiguity ;
Cervantes, for insidious laughter ; Shakespeare, for
his subtlety ; Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, for obscur
ity ; John of Patmos and Dante Alighieri, for dark-
There are other minds, very great, but less great,
who can be reproached with none of these faults.
Hesiod, vEsop, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Thu-
cydides, Anacreon, Theocritus, Titus Livius, Sallust,
Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, Tasso,
Ariosto, La Fontaine, Beaumarchais, Voltaire, have
neither exaggeration nor darkness, nor obscurity nor
monstrousness. What, then, do they lack ? Some
thing the others have ; that something is the Un
known, the Infinite.
If Corneille had that ' something ', he would be
the equal of ^Eschylus. If Milton had that ' some
thing ', he would be the equal of Homer. If Moliere
had that ' something ', he would be the equal of
Shakespeare.
It is the misfortune of Corneille that he mutilated
and contracted the old native tragedy in obedience
to fixed rules. It is the misfortune of Milton that,
through Puritan melancholy, he excluded from his
1 To those unacquainted with the history of French
literature during the thirties and forties of this century,
this sentence may require explanation. Good taste (le bon
gout) and the ancient criticism were the legitimate literary
monarchs, against whose regime Victor Hugo's career was
a continuous insurrection. If ' Bon Gout ' is an ex-king,
Victor Hugo is his Cromwell or his Brutus. TB.
MEN OF GENIUS 73
work Nature, the great Pan. It is Moliere's failing
that, in dread of Boileau, he quickly extinguishes the
luminous style of the JZtourdi, that, for fear of the
priests, she writes too few scenes like that of the poor
man in Don Juan 1.
To give no occasion for attack, is a negative per-
fection. It is fine to be open to attack.
Indeed, penetrate the meaning of those words,
placed as masks upon the mysterious qualities of
genius, and under obscurity, subtlety, and darkness,
you find depth ; under exaggeration, imagination ;
under monstrousness, grandeur.
Therefore in the upper region of poetry and thought
there are Homer, Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius,
Juvenal, Tacitus, John of Patmos, Paul of Damascus,
Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare.
These supreme men of genius do not form a closed
series. The author of ALL adds to it a name when
the needs of progress require it.
*• The scene referred to is the second of the third act. TR.
BOOK ill
ART AND SCIENCE
CHAPTER I
MANY people in our day, especially stockbrokers,
and often attorneys, say and repeat, ' Poetry is passing
away '. It is almost as if they said : ' There are
no more roses ; spring has breathed its last ; the sun
has lost the habit of rising; you may roam all the
fields of earth, and not find a butterfly ; there is no
more moonlight, and the nightingale sings no more ;
the lion's roar is no longer heard ; the eagle no longer
soars ; the Alps and the Pyrenees have passed away ;
there are no more lovely girls and handsome young
men ; no one ever muses now over a grave ; the
mother no longer loves her child ; heaven is quenched ;
the human heart is dead '.
Were it permitted us to mingle the fortuitous with
the eternal, it would be rather the contrary which
would prove true. Never have the faculties of the
human mind, deepened and enriched by the mysteri
ous ploughing of revolution, been profounder and
loftier.
And wait a little ; give time for the realization
of that element of social well-being now impending,
— gratuitous and compulsory education. How long
will it take ? A quarter of a century. Imagine the
incalculable sum of intellectual development implied
in this single expression : 4 Every one can read '.
The multiplication of readers is the multiplication of
loaves. On the day when Christ created that symbol,
he caught a glimpse of printing. His miracle is this
marvel. Here is a book : with it I will feed five
74
ART AND SCIENCE 75
thousand souls, a hundred thousand souls, a million
souls — all humanity. In the action of Christ bringing
forth the loaves, there is Gutenberg bringing forth
books. One sower heralds the other.
What has the human race been since the beginning
of time ? A reader. For a long time he has spelled ;
he spells yet : soon he will read.
This child, six thousand years old, has been at
school from the first. Where ? In Nature. At
the beginning, having no other book, he spelled the
universe. He has had his primary instruction from
the clouds, from the firmament, from meteors, flowers,
animals, forests, seasons, phenomena. The Ionian
fisherman studies the wave ; the Chaldaean shepherd
spells the star. Then came the first books, — a sublime
advance. The book is vaster yet than that grand
scene, the world ; for to the fact it adds the idea.
If anything is greater than God seen in the sun, it is
God seen in Homer.
The universe without the book, is science becoming
rudely outlined ; the universe with the book, is the
ideal making its appearance. Thence an immediate
modification in human affairs ; where there had been
only force, power is revealed. The application of the
ideal to actual facts produces civilization. Poetry
written and sung begins its work, — a gloriously effec
tive deduction from the poetry only seen. It is
startling to perceive that where science was dreaming,
poetry acts. With a touch of the lyre, the thinker
dispels ferocity.
We shall return, later on, to this power of the book ;
we do not insist on it at present : it is clear as light.
Many writers then, few readers : such has the world
been up to this day. But a change is at hand. Com
pulsory education is a recruitment of souls for the
light. Henceforth all human advancement will be
accomplished by swelling the legions of those who read.
The diameter of the moral and ideal good corresponds
always to the calibre of men's minds. In proportion
70 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to the worth of the brain is the worth of the heart.
The book is the tool of this transformation. What
humanity requires, is to be fed with light ; such
nourishment is found in reading. Thence the import
ance of the school, everywhere adequate to civilization.
The human race is at last on the point of spreading
the book wide open. The immense human Bible,
composed of all the prophets, of all the poets, of all
the philosophers, is about to shine and blaze under
the focus of that enormous luminous lens, — compulsory
education.
Humanity reading is humanity knowing.
What nonsense, then, it is to cry, ' Poetry is passing
away ' ! We might say, on the contrary, poetry
is coming. For who says poetry, says philosophy
and light. Now, the reign of the book is beginning ;
the school is its purveyor. Exalt the reader, you
exalt the book. Not, certainly, in intrinsic value, —
this remains what it was ; but in efficient power :
it influences where it had no influence ; men's souls
become its subjects to good ends. It was only beauti
ful ; it becomes useful.
Who would venture to deny this ? The circle of
readers enlarging, the circle of books read will in
crease. Now, the desire to read being a train of
powder, once lighted it will not stop : and this, com
bined with the simplification of hand-labour by machin
ery, and with the increased leisure of man, the body
less fatigued leaving the mind freer, vast appetites
for thought will spring up hi all brains ; the insatiable
thirst for knowledge and meditation will become more
and more the human preoccupation ; low places will
be deserted for high places, — an ascent natural to
every growing intelligence ; people will quit Faublas
to read The Oresteia ; there they will taste the noble,
and, once tasting it, they will never be satiated ; men
will make the beautiful their food, because the refine
ment of minds augments in proportion to their force ;
and a day will come when, the fulness of civilization
ART AND SCIENCE 77
making itself manifest, those mountain-tops, Lucretius,
Dante, Shakespeare, for ages almost deserted, and
visited only by the select few, will be crowded with
intelligences seeking their food upon the heights.
CHAPTER II
THERE can be but one law ; the unity of law results
from the unity of essence : Nature and Art are the
two slopes of the same fact. And in principle, saving
the restriction which we shall indicate very shortly,
the law of one is the law of the other. The angle of
reflection equals the angle of incidence. All being
equity in the moral order, and equilibrium in the
material order, all is equation in the intellectual order.
The binomial, that marvel adjustable to everything,
is included in poetry no less than in algebra. Nature
plus humanity, raised to the second power, give Art.
Such is the intellectual binomial. Now, replace this
A +B by the number proper to each great artist and
each great poet, and you will have, in its multiple
physiognomy and hi its strict total, each of the crea
tions of the human mind. What more beautiful than
the variety of masterpieces resulting from the unity
of law ? Poetry, like Science, has an abstract root.
Science produces from that root masterpieces of metal;
wood, fire, or air, — machine, ship, locomotive, aerostat ;
Poetry causes to grow from it the masterpiece of flesh
and blood, Iliad, Song of Songs, Romancero, Divine
Comedy, Macbeth. Nothing so starts and prolongs
the thrill felt by the thinker as those mysterious
exfoliations of abstraction into reality in the double
region (the one positive, the other infinite) of human
thought, — a region double, and nevertheless one :
the infinite is an exactitude. The profound word
* number ' is at the base of 'man's thought ; it is, to
our intelligence, elemental ; it signifies harmony as
well as mathematics. Number reveals itself to Art
78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
by rhythm, which is the beating of the heart of the
Infinite. In rhythm, the law of order, God is felt.
A verse is numerous, like a crowd ; its feet march
with the cadenced step of a legion. Without number,
no science ; without number, no poetry. The strophe,
the epic, the drama, the riotous palpitation of man,
the bursting forth of love, the irradiation of the imagin
ation, the lightning-cloud of passion, all are lorded over
by this mysterious word ' number ', even as are
geometry and arithmetic. Ajax, Hector, Hecuba,
the seven chiefs before Thebes, CEdipus, Ugolino,
Messalina, Lear and Priam, Romeo, Desdemona,
Richard III, Pantagruel, the Cid, Alceste, all belong
to it, as well as conic sections and the differential
and integral calculus. It starts from ' two and two
make four ', and ascends to the region where the
lightning sits.
Yet between Art and Science let us note a radical
difference. Science is perfectible ; Art, not.
Why ?
CHAPTER III
AMONG human things, and inasmuch as it is a human
thing, Art is a strange exception.
The beauty of everything here below lies in the
power of reaching perfection. Everything is endowed
with this property. To increase, to augment, to
win strength, to make some gain, some advance, to
be worth more to-day than yesterday : this is at once
glory and life. The beauty of Art lies in not being
susceptible of improvement.
Let us insist on these essential ideas, already touched
upon in some preceding pages.
A masterpiece exists once for all. The first poet
who arrives, arrives at the summit. You shall ascend
after him, as high, not higher. Ah ! your name is
Dante ? Very well ; but he who sits yonder is named
Homer !
ART AND SCIENCE 79
Progress, its goal incessantly changing, its stages
constantly renewed, has a shifting horizon. Not
so the ideal.
Now, progress is the motive-power of Science ;
the ideal is the generator of Art.
Thus is explained why perfection is the character
istic of Science, and not of Art.
A savant may outshine a savant ; a poet never
throws a poet into the shade.
Art progresses after its own fashion, it shifts its
ground, like Science ; but its successive creations,
containing the unchangeable, abide ; while the admir
able guesses of Science, which are and can be nothing
but combinations of the contingent, obliterate each
other.
Science is relative ; Art definitive. The master
piece of to-day will be the masterpiece of to-morrow.
Does Shakespeare change anything in Sophocles ?
Does Moliere take anything from Plautus ? Even
when he borrows Amphitryon, he does not take it
from him. Does Figaro blot out Sancho Panza ?
Does Cordelia suppress Antigone ? No. Poets do
not climb over each other. The one is not the
stepping stone of the other. The poet rises alone
without any other lever than himself. He does not
tread his equal under foot. The new comers re
spect their elders. They succeed, they do not re
place each other. The beautiful does not drive out
the beautiful. Neither wolves nor masterpieces
devour each other.
Saint-Simon says (I quote from memory) : ' There
was through the whole winter but one cry of admir
ation for M. de Cambray's book ; when suddenly
appeared M. de Meaux's book, which devoured it.'
If Fenelon's book had been Saint-Simon's, the book
of Bossuet would not have devoured it.
Shakespeare is not above Dante, Moliere is not
above Aristophanes, Calderon is not above Euripides ;
the Divine Comedy is not above Genesis, the Romancero
80 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
is not above the Odyssey ; Sirius is not above Arc turns.
Sublimity is equality.
The human mind is the infinite possible. The
master-works, immense worlds, are generated within
it unceasingly, and abide there forever. No crowding
of one against the other ; no recoil. The occlusions,
when there are any, are but apparent, and quickly
cease. The expanse of the boundless admits all
creations.
Art, taken as art, and in itself, goes neither forward
nor backward. The transformations of poetry are
but the undulations of the beautiful, useful to human
movement. Human movement is another side of
the question, a side that we certainly do not overlook,
and that we shall examine further on. Art is not
susceptible of intrinsic progress. From Phidias to
Rembrandt, there is movement, but not progress.
The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel take absolutely
nothing from the metopes of the Parthenon. Retrace
your steps as far as you like, — from the palace of
Versailles to Heidelberg Castle, from Heidelberg
Castle to Notre Dame of Paris, from Notre Dame
of Paris to the Alhambra, from the Alhambra to St.
Sophia, from St. Sophia to the Colosseum, from the
Colosseum to the Propylaea, from the Propylaea to
the Pyramids ; you may go backward in centuries,
you do not go backward in art. The Pyramids and
the Iliad remain in the foreground.
Masterpieces have a level, the same for all, the
absolute.
The absolute once reached, all is said. That cannot
be excelled. The eye can bear but a certain quantity
of dazzling light.
Thence comes the assurance of poets. They lean
upon the future with a lofty grace. ' Exegi monu-
mentum ', says Horace ; and on that occasion he
derides bronze. ' Plandite cives ', says Plautus.
Corneille, at sixty-five years, wins the love (a tradition
in the Escoubleau family) of the very young Marquise
ART AND SCIENCE 81
dc Contades, by promising to send her name down
to posterity :
Lady, to that future raco
In whose day I'll have some credit,
You'll be known as fair of face
But because my verse has said it l.
In the poet and in the artist there is something
of the infinite. It is this ingredient, the infinite,
which gives to this kind of genius an irreducible
grandeur.
This infinite element in art is independent of pro
gress. It may have, and it certainly has, duties to
fulfil toward progress ; but it is not dependent upon
it. It is dependent upon none of the more perfect
processes of the future, upon no transformation of
language, upon no death or birth of idioms. It has
within itself the incommensurable and the innumer
able ; it can be subdued by no rivalry ; it is as pure,
as complete, as sidereal, as divine, in the heart of
barbarism as in the heart of civilization. It is the
beautiful, having the infinite variety of genius,
but always equal to itself, always supreme. Such
is the law, scarcely known, of Art.
CHAPTER IV
SCIENCE is different. The relative, which governs
it, leaves its impression ; and these successive stamps
of the relative, more and more resembling the real,
constitute the changing certainty of man.-
In Science, certain things have been masterpieces
which are so no more. The hydraulic machine of
Marly was a masterpiece.
Science seeks perpetual motion. She has found
it : it is Science herself.
1 Chez cette race nouvelle,
Ou j'aurai quelque credit,
Vous ne passerez pour belle
Qu'autant que je 1'aurai dit.
82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Science is continually changing in the benefit she
confers.
In Science, all tends to stir, to change, to form
fresh surfaces. All denies, destroys, creates, replaces
all. What was ground yesterday is put into the
hopper again to-day. The colossal machine, Science,
never rests. It is never satisfied ; it is insatiable
for improvement, of which the absolute knows nothing.
Vaccination is called in question, the lightning-rod is
called in question. Jenner may have erred, Franklin
may have been mistaken ; let us search again. This
agitation is noble. Science is restless around man ;
she has her own reasons. Science plays in progress
the part of utility. Let us reverence this superb
handmaiden.
Science makes discoveries ; Art composes works.
Science is an acquirement of man ; Science is a ladder :
one savant mounts above his fellow. Poetry is a
soaring flight.
Do you want examples ? They abound. Here
is one, the first which comes to mind.
Jacob Metzu (scientifically Metius) discovers the
telescope by chance, as Newton discovered gravita
tion, and Christopher Columbus, America. Let us
open a parenthesis : there is no chance in the creation
of The Oresteia or of Paradise Lost. A masterpiece
is the offspring of will. After Metzu comes Galileo,
who improves the discovery of Metzu ; then Kepler,
who improves on the improvement of Galileo ; then
Descartes, who, although going somewhat astray in
taking a concave glass for eyepiece instead of a convex
one, makes fruitful the improvement of Kepler ; then
the Capuchin Reita, who rectifies the reversing of
objects ; then Huyghens, who makes a great step by
placing the two convex glasses at the focus of the ob
jective ; and in less than fifty years, from 1610 to
1659, during the short interval which separates the
Nuncius Sidereus of Galileo from the Oculus Elice
et Enoch of Father Reita, behold the original inventor,
ART AND SCIENCE 83
Mctzu, obliterated. And it is constantly the same in
science.
Vegetius was count of Constantinople ; but that
did not prevent his tactics being forgotten, — for
gotten like the strategy of Polybius, ^forgotten like
the strategy of Folard. The pig's-head of the phalanx
and the pointed order of the legion reappeared for
a moment, two hundred years ago, in the wedge of
Gustavus Adolphus ; but in our days, when there are
no more pikemen, as in the fourth century, nor lans
quenets, as in the seventeenth, the ponderous triangular
attack, which was formerly the basis of all tactics,
is replaced by a swarm of zouaves charging with the
bayonet. Some day, sooner perhaps than people
think, the bayonet charge will itself be superseded by
peace, — at first European, by-and-by universal ;
and then the whole military science will vanish away.
For that science, improvement lies in disappearance.
Science goes on unceasingly erasing itself, — fruitful
erasures ! Who knows now what is the * Homceo-
meria ' of Anaximenes, which perhaps belongs really
to Anaxagoras ? Cosmography is notably amended
since the time when this same Anaxagoras told Pericles
that the sun was almost as large as the Peloponnesus.
Many planets, and satellites of planets, have been
discovered since the four stars of Medicis. Entomo
logy has made some advance since the time when it was
asserted that the scarabee was something of a god
and a cousin to the sun — first, on account of the thirty
toes on its feet, which correspond to the thirty days
of the solar month, secondly, because the scarabee is
without a female, like the sun — and the time when
Saint Clement of Alexandria, outbidding Plutarch,
made the remark that the scarabee, like the sun, passes
six months on the earth, and six months under it.
Would you verify this ? Refer to the Stromata,
paragraph iv. Scholasticism itself, chimerical as it
is, gives up the * Holy Meadow ' of Moschus, laughs
at the ' Holy Ladder ' of John Climacus, and is ashamed
84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of the century in which Saint Bernard, adding fuel
to the pyre which the Viscounts of Campania wished
to put out, called Arnaldo de Brescia * a man with the
dove's head and the scorpion's tail '. The * Cardinal
Virtues ' are no longer the law hi anthropology. The
* Steyardes * of the great Arnauld are decayed. How
ever uncertain is meteorology, it is far from discussing
now, as it did in the second century, whether a rain
which saves an army from dying of thirst is due to
the Christian prayers of the Melitine legion or to the
pagan intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. The astrologer
Marcian Posthumus was for Jupiter ; Tertullian was
for the Melitine legion : no one was for the cloud and
the wind. Locomotion, if we go from the antique
chariot of Laius to the railway, passing by the patache,
the track-boat, the turgotine, the diligence, and the
mail-coach, has indeed made some progress. The
time has gone by for the famous journey from Dijon
to Paris, lasting a month ; and we could not under
stand to-day the amazement of Henry IV, asking of
Joseph Scaliger : ' Is it true, Monsieur 1'Escale, that
you have been from Paris to Dijon without relieving
your bowels ? ' Micrography is now far beyond Leuwen-
hoeck, who was himself far beyond Swammerdam.
Look at the point at which spermatology and ovology
have already arrived, and recall Mariana reproaching
Arnaud de Villeneuve (who discovered alcohol and
the oil of turpentine) with the strange crime of having
attempted human generation in a pumpkin. Grand-
Jean de Fouchy, the not over-credulous life-secre
tary of the Academy of Sciences a hundred years
ago, would have shaken his head if any one had told
him that from the solar spectrum one would pass to
the igneous spectrum, then to the stellar spectrum,
and that by aid of the spectrum of flames and of the
spectrum of stars would be discovered an entirely new
method of grouping the heavenly bodies and what
might be called the chemical constellations. Orftyreus,
who destroyed his machine rather than allow the
ART AND SCIENCE 85
Landgrave of Hesse to see inside it, — Orffyreus,
so admired by S'Gravesande, the author of the Alathe-
seos Universalis Elementa, — would be laughed at by our
mechanicians. A country horse-doctor would not
inflict on horses the remedy with which Galen treated
the indigestions of Marcus Aurelius. What is the
opinion of the eminent specialists of our times, Des-
marres at the head of them, respecting the learned
discoveries of the seventeenth century by the Bishop
of Titiopolis concerning the nasal chambers ? The
mummies have got on ; M. Gannal makes them
differently, if not better, than the Taricheutes, the
Paraschistes, and the Cholchytes made them in the
days of Herodotus, — the first by washing the body,
the second by opening it, and the third by embalming.
Five hundred years before Jesus Christ, it was per
fectly scientific, when a king of Mesopotamia had a
daughter possessed of the devil, to send to Thebes
for a god to cure her. It is not exactly our way of
treating epilepsy. In the same way we have given up
expecting the kings of France to cure scrofula.
In 371, under Valens, son of Gratian the rope-
maker, the judges summoned to the bar a table accused
of sorcery. This table had an accomplice named
Hilarius. Hilarius confessed the crime. Ammianus
Marcellinus has preserved for us his confession, re
ceived by Zosimus, count and fiscal advocate. * Con-
struximus, magnifici judices, ad cortinse similitudinem
Delphicse infaustam hanc mensulam quam videtis ;
movimus tandem '. Hilarius was beheaded. Who
was his accuser ? A learned geometrician and magician,
the same who advised Valens to decapitate all those
whose names began with Theod. To-day you may
call yourself Theodore, and even make a table tip,
without the fear of a geometrician causing your head
to be cut off.
One would very much astonish Solon the son of
Execestidos, Zeno the Stoic, Antipater, Eudoxus,
Lysis of Tarentuin, Cebes, Menedemus, Plato, Epi-
86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
curus, Aristotle, and Epimenides, if one were to say
to Solon that it is not the moon which regulates the
year ; to Zeno, that it is not proved that the soul is
divided into eight parts ; to Antipater, that the heaven
is not formed of five circles ; to Eudoxus, that it is
not certain that, between the Egyptians embalming
the dead, the Romans burning them, and the Pseonians
throwing them into ponds, the Pasonians are those
who are right ; to Lysis of Tarentum, that it is not
correct that the sight is a hot vapour ; to Cebes, that
it is false that the principle of the elements is the
oblong triangle and the isosceles triangle ; to Menede-
mus, that it is not true that, in order to know the
secret bad intentions of men, it suffices to stick on
one's head an Arcadian hat decorated with the twelve
signs of the zodiac ; to Plato, that sea-water does
not cure all diseases ; to Epicurus, that matter is
infinitely divisible ; to Aristotle, that the fifth element
has not an orbicular movement, for the reason that
there is no fifth element ; to Epimenides, that the
plague cannot be infallibly got rid of by letting black
and white sheep go at random, and sacrificing to
unknown gods in the places where the sheep happen
to stop.
If you should try to hint to Pythagoras how impro
bable it is that he should have been wounded at the
siege of Troy — he, Pythagoras — by Menelaus, two
hundred and seven years before his birth, he would
reply that the fact is incontestable, and that it is
proved by the fact that he perfectly recognizes, as
having already seen it, the shield of Menelaus suspended
under the statue of Apollo at Branchidse, although
entirely rotted away, except the ivory face ; that
at the siege of Troy his own name was Euphorbus,
and that before being Euphorbus he was ^Ethalidos,
son of Mercury, and that after having been Euphorbus
he was Hermotimus, then Pyrrhus, fisherman at
Delos, then Pythagoras ; that it is all evident and
clear, — as clear as that he was present the same day
ART AND SCIENCE 87
and the same minute at Metapontum and at Crotona,
aa evident as that by writing with blood on a mirror
eiposed to the moon one may see in the moon what
or.e wrote on the mirror ; and lastly, that he is Pytha
goras, living at Metapontum, in the Street of the
Muses, the inventor of the multiplication-table and
of the square of the hypothenuse, the greatest of
mathematicians, the father of exact science ; and
that as for you, you are an imbecile.
Chrysippus of Tarsus, who lived about the hundred
ard thirtieth olympiad, forms an era in science. This
philosopher (the same who died — actually died —
of laughter caused by seeing a donkey eat figs out of a
alver basin) had studied everything, gone to the
bottom of everything, and had written seven hundred
ind five volumes, of which three hundred and eleven
were of dialectics, without having dedicated a single
one to a king, — a fact which astounds Diogenes
Laertius. He condensed in his brain all human
knowledge. His contemporaries named him ' Light '.
Chrysippus signifying * golden horse ', they said that
he had got detached from the chariot of the sun. He
had taken for device * TO ME '. He knew innumerable
things ; among others, these, — the earth is flat ; the
universe is round and limited ; the best food for man
is human flesh ; the community of wives is the basis
of social order ; the father ought to espouse his
daughter ; there is a word which kills the serpent, a
word which tames the bear, a word which arrests the
flight of eagles, and a word which drives the cattle
from the bean -field ; by pronouncing from hour to
hour the three names of the Egyptian Trinity, Amon-
Mouth-Khons, Andron of Argos contrived to cross
the deserts of Libya without drinking ; coffins ought
not to be made of cypress wood, the sceptre of Jupiter
being made of that wood ; Themistoclea, priestess of
Delphi, had given birth to children, yet remained
a virgin ; the just alone having authority to swear,
Jupiter very properly receives the name of ' The
88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Swearer ' ; the phoenix of Arabia and the moths
live in the fire ; the earth is carried by the air as by a
car ; the sun drinks from the ocean, and the moon
from the rivers. For these reasons the Athenians
raised a statue to him on the Ceramicus, with tm's
inscription : ' To Chrysippus, who knew everything '.
At very nearly the same time Sophocles wiote
(Edipus Rex.
And Aristotle believed in the story about Andron
of Argos, and Plato in the social principle of the
community of wives, and Gorgisippus in the earth's
being flat, and Epicurus admitted as a fact that the
earth was supported by the air, and Hermodamantes
that magic words mastered the ox and the eagle and
the bear and the serpent, and Echecrates believei
in the immaculate maternity of Themistoclea, and
Pythagoras in Jupiter's sceptre made of cypress wood,
and Posidonius in the ocean affording drink to the
sun and the rivers quenching the thirst of the moon,
and Pyrrho in the moths living in fire.
Except in this one particular, Pyrrho was a sceptic.
He made up for his belief in that by doubting every
thing else.
Such is the long groping course of Science. Cuvier
was mistaken yesterday, Lagrange the day before
yesterday; Leibnitz before Lagrange, Gassendi
before Leibnitz, Cardan before Gassendi, Cornelius
Agrippa before Cardan, Averroes before Agrippa,
Plotinus before Averroes, Artemidorus Daldian before
Plotinus, Posidonius before Artemidorus, Democritus
before Posidonius, Empedocles before Democritus,
Carneades before Empedocles, Plato before Carneades,
Pherecydes before Plato, Pittacus before Pherecydes,
Thales before Pittacus ; and before Thales, Zoroaster,
and before Zoroaster, Sanchoniathon, and before
Sanchoniathon, Hermes : Hermes, which signifies
science, as Orpheus signifies art. O wonderful marvel,
this mount swarming with dreams which engender
the real ! O sacred errors, slow, blind, and sainted
mothers of truth !
-ART AND SCIENCE 89
Some savants, such as Kepler, Euler, Geoffrey
St Hilaire, Arago, have brought into science nothing
but light ; they are rare.
At times Science is an obstacle to Science ; the
savants give way to scruples, and cavil at study.
Pliny is scandalized at Hipparchus ; Hipparchus,
with the aid of an imperfect astrolabe, tries to count
the stars and to name them, — * A deed evil in the
sight of God ', says Pliny (Ausus rem Deo improbam).
To count the stars is to commit a sin toward God.
This accusation, started by Pliny against Hipparchus,
is continued by the Inquisition against Campanella.
Science is the asymptote of truth ; it approaches
unceasingly, and never touches. Nevertheless, it
has every kind of greatness. It has will, precision,
enthusiasm, profound attention, penetration, shrewd
ness, strength, patience in concatenation, permanent
watchfulness of phenomena, the ardour of progress,
and even fits of bravery. Witness La Perouse ;
witness Pilastre des Hosiers ; witness Sir John Frank
lin ; witness Jacquemont ; witness Livingstone ;
witness Mazet ; witness, at this very hour, Nadar.
But Science is series. It proceeds by proofs super
posed one above the other, whose obscure stratification
rises slowly to the level of Truth.
Art has nothing like it. Art is not successive.
All Art is ensemble.
Let us sum up these few pages.
Hippocrates is outrun, Archimedes is outrun,
Aratus is outrun, Avicennus is outrun, Paracelsus
is outrun, Nicholas Flamel is outrun, Ambroise Pare
is outrun, Vesalius is outrun, Copernicus is outrun,
Galileo is outrun, Newtoti is outrun, Clairaut is outrun,
Lavoisier is outrun, Montgolfier is outrun, Laplace is
outrun. Pindar is not, Phidias is not.
Pascal the savant is outrun ; Pascal the writer is not.
We no longer teach the astronomy of Ptolemy,
the geography of Strabo, the climatology of Cleo-
stratus, the zoology of Pliny, the algebra of Dio-
90 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
phantus, the medicine of Tribunus, the surgery of
Ronsil, the dialectics of Sphcerus, the myology of
Steno, the uranology of Tatius, the stenography of
Trithemius, the pisciculture of Sebastien de Medicis,
the arithmetic of Stifels, the geometry of Tartaglia,
the chronology of Scaliger, the meteorology of Stoffler,
the anatomy of Gassendi, the pathology of Fernel,
the jurisprudence of Robert Barmne, the agronomy
of Quesnay, the hydrography of Bouguer, the naviga
tion of Bourde de Villehuet, the ballistics of Gribeauval,
the veterinary practice of Garsault, the architectonics
of Desgodets, the botany of Tournefort, the scholas
ticism of Abelard, the politics of Plato, the mechanics
of Aristotle, the physics of Descartes, the theology of
Stillingfleet We taught yesterday, we teach to-day,
we shall teach to-morrow, we shall teach forever, the
' Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles '.
Poetry lives a potential life. The sciences may
extend its sphere, not increase its power. Homer
had but four winds for his tempests ; Virgil who has
twelve, Dante who has twenty-four, Milton who
has thirty-two, do not make their storms grander.
And it is probable that the tempests of Orpheus
wwre as beautiful as those of Homer, although Orpheus
had, to raise the waves, but two winds, the ' Phceni-
cias ' and the ' Aparctias ' ; that is to say, the south
wind and the north wind, — often confounded, by
the way, with the * Argestes ', the west wind of summer,
and the * Libs ', the west wind of winter.
Religions die away, and in dying bequeath a great
artist to other religions coming after them. Serpio
makes for the Venus Aversative of Athens a vase
which the Holy Virgin accepts* from Venus, and which
serves to-day as a baptismal urn at Notre Dame of
Gaeta.
O eternity of Art !
A man, a corpse, a shade from the depth of the
past, stretching a hand across the centuries, lays
hold of you.
ART AND SCIENCE 91
I remember one day of my youth, at Romorantin,
in a hut we had there, with its vine-trellis through
which the air and light sifted in, that I espied a book
upon a shelf, the only book there was in the house, —
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. My professors of
rhetoric had spoken very ill of it, — a circumstance
which recommended it to me. I opened the book.
It must have been at that moment about noonday.
I happened on these powerful and serene verses l :
* Religion does not consist in turning unceasingly
toward the veiled stone, nor in approaching all the
altars, nor in throwing one's self prostrate on the
ground, nor in raising the hands before the habitations
of gods, nor in deluging the temples with the blood of
beasts, nor in heaping vows upon vows ; but in behold
ing all with a peaceful soul.' I stopped in thought ;
then I began to read again. Some moments after
ward I could see nothing, hear nothing ; I was im
mersed in the poet. At the dinner-hour, I made a
sign that I was not hungry ; and at sunset, when
the flocks were returning to their folds, I was still in
the same place, reading the wonderful book ; and by
my side, my white-haired father, indulgent to my
prolonged reading, was seated on the door-sill of the
low room where his sword hung on a nail, and was
gently calling the sheep, which came one after another
to eat a little salt in the hollow of his hand.
CHAPTER V
POETRY cannot grow less. Why ? Because it can
not grow greater.
Those words, so often used, even by the lettered,
1 Nee pietas ulla est, velatum sjppe videri
Vertier ad lapidem, atque omnes accodere ad aras,
Nee procumbere humi prostratum, et pandere palmas
Ante deum delubra, neque aras sanguine multo
Spargere quadrupedum, nee votis nectere vota ;
Sed mage placata posse omnia mente tueri.
92 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
' decadence % ' renascence ', show to what an extent
the essence of Art is unknown. Superficial intellects,
easily becoming pedantic, take for renascence or deca
dence some effects of juxtaposition, some optical
mirage, some event in the history of a language, some
ebb and flow of ideas, all the vast movement of crea
tion and thought, the result of which is universal
Art. This movement is the very work of the Infinite
passing through the human brain.
Phenomena are seen only from the culminating
point, and poetry thus viewed is immanent. There
is neither rise nor decline in Art, Human genius
is always at its full ; all the rain of heaven adds not
a drop of water to the ocean. A tide is an illusion ;
water ebbs on one shore, only to rise on another.
Oscillations are taken for diminutions. To say ' there
will be no more poets ', is to say ' there will never be
flood- tide again '.
Poetry is elemental. It is irreducible, incorrup
tible, and refractory to manipulation. Like the sea,
it says on each occasion all it has to say ; then it
begins anew with a tranquil majesty, and with the
inexhaustible variety which belongs only to unity.
This diversity in what seems monotonous is the marvel
of immensity.
Wave upon wave, billow after billow, foam behind
foam, movement, and again movement. The Iliad
is moving away, the Romancero comes ; the Bible
sinks, the Koran surges up ; after the aquilon Pindar
comes the hurricane Dante. Does everlasting poetry
repeat itself ? No. It is the same, and it is
different ; the same breath, a different sound.
Do you take the Cid for a plagiarist of Ajax ? Do
you take Charlemagne for a copyer of Agamemnon ?
' There is nothing new under the sun '. ' Your novelty
is the repetition of the old ', etc. Oh, the strange
process of criticism ! Then Art is but a series of
counterfeits ! Thersites has a thief,— Falstaff. Orestes
has an ape, — Hamlet. The Hippogriff is the jay of
ART AND SCIENCE 93
Pegasus. All those poets ! A crew of cheats ! They
pillage each other, and there's an end. Inspiration
is involved with swindling. Cervantes plunders
Apuleius, Alceste cheats Timon of Athens. The
Smynthian Wood is the Forest of Bondy. Out of
whose pocket was Shakespeare seen to draw his hand ?
Out of the pocket of ^Eschylus.
No ! neither decadence, nor renascence, nor plagi
arism, nor repetition, nor imitation. Identity of
heart, difference of spirit ; that is all. Each great
artist, as we have already said, stamps Art anew in
his own image. Hamlet is Orestes in the image of
Shakespeare ; Figaro is Scapin in the image of Beau-
marchais ; Grangousier is Silenus in the image of
Rabelais.
With the new poet everything begins anew, and
at the same time nothing is interrupted. Each new
genius is an abyss. Nevertheless, tradition exists.
Tradition from abyss to abyss, such is — in Art, as in
the firmament — the mystery ; and men of genius
communicate by their effluence, like the stars. What
have they in common ? Nothing. Everything.
From the pit that is called Ezekiel to the preci
pice that is called Juvenal, there is no interruption
of continuity for the thinker. Lean over this ana
thema, or over that satire, and the same vertigo is
whirling around both. The Apocalypse is reflected
from the Polar Sea of Ice, and you have that aurora
borealis, the Nibelungen. The Edda replies to the
Vedas.
Hence this, — our starting -point, to which we return,
— Art is not perfectible.
No possible decline for poetry, nor any possible
improvement. We lose our time when we say :
Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade. Art is subject
neither to diminution nor to enlargement. Art has
its seasons, its clouds, its eclipses,— even its stains,
which are perhaps splendours ; its interpositions
of sudden opacity, for which it is not responsible :
94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
but in the end it brings light into the human soul
always with the same intensity. It remains the same
furnace, emitting the same auroral glow. Homer
does not grow cold.
Let us insist, moreover, upon this, inasmuch as
the rivalry of intelligences is the life of the beautiful :
O poets ! the first rank is ever free. Let us remove
everything which may disconcert daring minds and
break their wings. Art is a species of valour. To
deny that men of genius yet to come may be the peers
of men of genius of the past, would be to deny the
ever- working power of God.
Yes, and often do we return, and shall return again,
to this needed encouragement. Stimulation is almost
creation. Yes, those men of genius who cannot be
surpassed may be equalled.
How ?
By being different.
BOOK IV
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER I
THE ancient Shakespeare is ^Eschylus. Let us return
to ^Eschylus. He is the grandsire of the stage. This
book would be incomplete if ^Eschylus had not his
separate place in it.
A man whom we do not know how to class in his
own century, so little does he belong to it, being at the
same time so much behind it and so much in advance
of it, the Marquis de Mirabeau, — that ugly customer
as a philanthropist, but a very rare thinker after all, —
had a book-case, at the two corners of which he had
caused a dog and a she-goat to be carved, in remem
brance of Socrates, who swore by the dog, and of
Zeno, who swore by the goat. His library presented
this peculiarity : on one side there were Hesiod,
Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides,
Pindar, Theocritus, Anacreon, Theophrastus, Demos
thenes, Plutarch, Cicero, Titus Livius, Seneca, Persius,
Lucan, Terence, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus,
Virgil ; and underneath could be read, engraved
in letters of gold : * AMO '. On the other side stood
^Eschylus alone, and underneath this word : ' TIMBO *.
^Eschylus in reality is formidable. He cannot be
approached without trembling. He has magnitude
and mystery. Barbarous, extravagant, emphatic,
antithetical, bombastic, absurd, — such is the judg
ment passed on him by the official rhetoric of the
present day. This rhetoric will be changed. /Esehylus
is one of those men whom superficial criticism scoffs
90 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
at or disdains, but whom the true critic approaches
with a sort of sacred fear. The fear of genius is the
beginning of taste.
In the true critic there is always a poet, be it but
in the latent state.
Whoever does not understand ^Eschylus is irre
mediably commonplace. ^Eschylus is the touch
stone of the intelligence.
The drama is a strange form of art. Its diameter
measures from The Seven against Thebes to The Philo
sopher Without Knowing it, and from Brid'oison to
QEdipus. Thyestes forms part of it ; Turcaret also.
If you wish to define it, put into your definition Electra
and Marton.
The drama is disconcerting ; it baffles the weak.
This comes from its ubiquity. The drama has every
horizon ; you may then imagine its capacity. The
drama has been capable of absorbing the epic ; and
the result is that marvellous literary novelty, which
is at the same time a social power, — the romance.
The romance is bronze, an amalgamation of the
epic, lyric, and dramatic. Don Quixote is iliad, ode,
and comedy.
Such is the expansion of which the drama is capable.
The drama is the vastest reservoir of art, spacious
enough for both God and Satan : witness Job.
From the standard of absolute art, the characteristic
of the epic poem is grandeur ; the characteristic of
the drama, vastness. The vast differs from the great
in this : that it excludes, if it chooses, dimension ;
that ' it is beyond measure ', as the common saying is ;
and that it can, without losing beauty, lose proportion.
It is harmonious like the Milky Way. It is by vastness
that the drama begins, four thousand years ago, in
Job, whom we have just recalled, and, two thousand
five hundred years ago, in ^Eschylus ; it is by vastness
that it continues in Shakespeare. What person
ages does ^Eschylus take ? Volcanoes : one of his
lost tragedies is called Mtna ; then the mountains :
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 97
Caucasus with Prometheus ; then the sea : the Ocean
on its dragon, and the waves, the Oceanides ; then
the vast Orient : The Persians ; then the bottomless
darkness : The Eumenides. ^Eschylus proves the
man by the giant. In Shakespeare the drama ap
proaches nearer to humanity, but remains colossal.
Macbeth seems a polar Atrides. You see that the
drama reveals Nature, then reveals the soul ; and
there is no limit to this horizon. The drama is life,
and life is everything. The epic poem can be only
great ; the drama is constrained to be vast.
This vastness pervades ^Eschylus and Shakespeare
throughout.
The vast, in ^Eschylus, is a will. It is also a tem
perament. ^Eschylus invents the buskin, which
makes the man taller, and the mask, which increases
the voice. His metaphors are enormous. He calls
Xerxes * the man with the dragon eyes '. The sea,
which is a plain for so many poets, is for ^Eschylus
* a forest ' (dXros). These magnifying figures, peculiar
to the highest poets, and to them only, have the basal
truth which springs from imaginative musing. ^Eschy-
lus excites you to the very brink of convulsion. His
tragical effects are like blows struck at the spectators.
When the furies of ^Eschylus make their appearance,
pregnant women miscarry. Pollux, the lexicographer,
affirms that at the sight of those serpent faces and
of those nickering torches, children were seized with
fits of epilepsy, of which they died. That is evidently
* going beyond the mark.' Even in the grace of
^sch3'lus, that strange and sovereign grace of which
we have spoken, there is something Cyclopean. It
is Polyphemus smiling. At times the smile is formid
able, and seems to hide an obscure rage. Put, by
way of example, these two poets, Homer and ^Eschylus,
in the presence of Helen. Homer is at once conquered,
and admires ; his admiration is forgiveness. ^Eschylus
is moved, but remains grave. He calls Helen * fatal
flower ' ; then he adds, ' soul as calm as the tranquil
98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
sea '. One day Shakespeare will say, * false as the
wave
» i
CHAPTER II
THE theatre is a crucible of civilization. It is a place
of human communion. All its phases need to be
studied. It is in the theatre that the public soul is
formed.
We have just seen what the theatre was in the time
of Shakespeare and Moliere ; shall we see what it was
in the time of ^Eschylus ?
Let us go to see this play.
It is no longer the cart of Thespis ; it is no longer
the scaffold of Susarion ; it is no longer the wooden
circus of Chcerilus. Athens, forecasting the coming
of jEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, has built
theatres of stone. No roof, the sky for a ceiling,
the day for lighting, a long platform of stone pierced
with doors and staircases and secured to a wall, the
actors and the chorus going and coming upon this
platform, which is the logeum, and performing the
play ; in the centre, where in our day is the prompter's
box, a small altar to Bacchus, the thymele ; in front
of the platform a vast hemicycle of stone steps, on
which five or six thousand men are sitting pell-mell :
such is the laboratory. There it is that the swarming
crowd of the Piraeus come to turn Athenians ; there
it is that the multitude becomes the public, in antici
pation of the day when the public shall become the
people. The multitude is in fact there, — the whole
multitude, including the women, the children, and
the slaves, and Plato, who knits his brows.
If it is a fete-day, if we are at the Panathensea,
at the Lencea, or at the great Dionysia, the magistrates
form part of the audience ; the proedri, the epistati,
and the prytanes sit in their place of honour. If the
trilogy is to be a tetralogy ; if the representation is
i Othello, V ii 1. 134 : ' She was false as water '. TB.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 99
to conclude by a piece with satyrs ; if the fauns, the
segipans, the maenades, the goat-footed, and the
evantes are to come at the end to perform their pranks;
if among the comedians (who are almost priests, and
are called ' Bacchus's men ') is to appear the favourite
actor who excels in the two modes of declamation, in
paralogy as well as paracatology ; if the poet is suffi
ciently liked by his rivals so that the public may expect
to see some celebrated men, Eupolis, Cratinus, or even
Aristophanes, figure in the chorus (' Eupolis atque
Cratinus Aristophanesque poetse ', as Horace will one
day say) ; if a play with women is performed, even
the old Alcestis of Thespis, — the whole place is full,
there is a crowd. The crowd is already to ^Eschylus
what, later on, as the prologue of The Bacchidea re
marks, it will be to Plautus, — * a swarm of men on
seats, coughing, spitting, sneezing, making grimaces
and noises with the mouth (ore concrepario), touching
foreheads, and talking of their affairs ' : what a crowd
is to-day.
Students scrawl with charcoal on the wall — now
in token of admiration, now in irony — some well-
known verses ; for instance, the singular iambic of
Phrynichus in a single word
Archaiomelesidonophrunicherata *
of which the famous Alexandrine, in two words, of
one of our tragic poets of the sixteenth century, was
but a poor imitation
M^tamorphoserait Nabuchodonosor 2
There are not only the students to make a row,
there are the old men. Trust to the old men of the
Wasps of Aristophanes for a noise. Two schools
are represented,— on one side Thespis, Susarion,
Pratinas of Phlius, Epigenes of Sicyon, Theomis,
Auleas, Chcerilus, Phrynichus, Minos himself ; on
a ' He would transmogrify Nebuchadnezzar.' TR.
100 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the other, young ^Eschylus. ^Eschylus is twenty-
eight years old. He gives his trilogy of the ' Prome-
thei ', — Prometheus the Fire-bearer, Prometheus Bound,
Prometheus Delivered ; followed by some piece with
satyrs, — The Argians, perhaps, of which Macrobius
has preserved a fragment for us. The ancient quarrel
between youth and old age breaks out, — gray beards
against black hair. They discuss, they dispute : the
old men are for the old school ; the young are for
jEschylus. The young defend ^Eschylus against
Thespis, as they will defend Corneille agakist Gamier.
The old men are indignant. Listen to the Nestors
grumbling. What is tragedy ? It is the song of the
he -goat. Where is the he -goat in this Prometheus
Bound ? Art is in its decline. And they repeat the
celebrated objection : Quid pro Baccho ? (What is
there for Bacchus ?) Those of severest taste, the
purists, do not even accept Thespis, and remind each
other that Solon had raised his stick against Thespis,
calling him * liar ', for the sole reason that he had
detached and isolated in a play an episode in the life
of Bacchus, — the story of Pentheus. They hate this
innovator, ^Eschylus. They blame all these inven
tions,, the end of which is to bring about a closer con
nection between the drama and Nature, — the use of
the anapaest for the chorus, of the iambus for the dia
logue, and of the trochee for passion, — in the same
way that, later on, Shakespeare was blamed for passing
from poetry to prose, and the theatre of the nineteenth
century for what was termed ' broken verse.' These
are indeed unendurable novelties. And then, the
flute plays too high, and the tetrachord plays too
low ; and where is now the ancient sacred division
of tragedies into monodies, stasimes, and exodes ?
Thespis put on the stage but one speaking actor ;
here is ^Eschylus putting two. Soon we shall have
three. (Sophocles, indeed, was to come.) Where
will they stop ? These are impieties. And how
does this ^Eschylus dare to call Jupiter * the prytanis
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 101
of the Immortals ' ? Jupiter was a god, and he is
no longer anything but a magistrate. What are we
coming to ? The thymele, the ancient altar of sacri
fice, is now a seat for the corypheus ! The chorus
ought to limit itself to executing the strophe, — that
is to say, the turn to the right ; then the antistrophe, —
that is to say, the turn to the left ; then the epode, —
that is to say, repose. But what means the entrance
of the chorus in a winged chariot ? What is the gad
fly that pursues lo ? Why does the Ocean come
mounted on a dragon ? This is show, not poetry.
Where is the antique simplicity ? This spectacle
is puerile. Your ^Eschylus is but a painter, a deco
rator, a maker of brawls, a charlatan, a machinist.
All for the eyes, nothing for the mind. To the fire
with all these pieces, and let us content ourselves with
a recitation of the ancient pseans of Tynnichus !
Moreover, it is Chcerilus who, by his tetralogy of the
Curetes, started the evil. What are the Curetes, if
you please ? Gods forging metal. Well, then, he
had simply to show their five families at work upon
the stage, the Dactyli finding the metal, the Cabiri
inventing the forge, the Corybantes forging the sword
and the ploughshare, the Curetes making the shield,
and the Telchines chasing the jewelry. It was suffici
ently interesting in that form ; but by allowing poets
to blend in it the adventure of Plexippus and Toxeus,
all is ruined. How can you expect society to resist
such excess ? It is abominable. ^Eschylus ought
to be summoned before the court, and sentenced to
drink hemlock, like that old wretch Socrates. You
will see that after all he will only be exiled. Every
thing is degenerating.
And the young men burst into laughter. They
criticize as well, but in another fashion. What an
old brute is that Solon ! It is he who has instituted
the eponymous archonship. What do they want
with an archon giving his name to the year ? Hoot
the eponymous archon who has lately caused a poet
102 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to be elected and crowned by ten generals, instead
of by ten men of the people. It is true that one of
the generals was Cimon, — an extenuating circumstance
in the eyes of some, for Cimon has beaten the Phoeni
cians ; aggravating in the eyes of others, for it is this
very Cimon who, in order to get out of prison for debt,
sold his sister Elphinia, and his wife into the bargain, ,
to Callias. If vEschylus is a reckless person and
deserves to be cited before the Areopagus, has not
Phrynichus also been judged and condemned for having
shown on the stage, in The Taking of Miletus, the
Greeks beaten by the Persians ? When will poets
be allowed to suit their own fancy ? Hurrah for the.
liberty of Pericles, and down with the censure of Solon !
And then what is this law that has just been promul
gated, by which the chorus is reduced from fifty to
fifteen ? And how are they to play The Danaldes ? '
and won't there be chuckling at the line of ^Eschylus, —
' Egyptus, the father of fifty sons ' ? The fifty will
be fifteen. These magistrates are idiots. Quarrel,
uproar all around. One prefers Phrynichus, another
prefers ^Eschylus, another prefers wine with honey
and benzoin. The speaking-trumpets of the actors
compete as well as they can with this deafening noise,
through which is heard from time to time the shrill
cry of the public vendors of phallus and of the water-
bearers. Such is the Athenian uproar. During all
this time the play is going on. It is the work of a
living man. There is good cause for the commotion.
Later on, after the death of jEschylus, or after he has
been exiled, there will be silence. It is right to be silent
before a god. * ^Equum est ' — it is Plautua who
speaks — * vos deo facere silentum.'
CHAPTER III
A GENIUS is an accused man. As long as ^schylus
lived, his life was a strife. His genius was contested,
then he was persecuted : a natural progression.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 103
According to Athenian practice, his private life was
unveiled ; he was traduced, slandered. A woman
whom he had loved, Planesia, sister of Chrysilla,
mistress of Pericles, has dishonoured herself in the
eyes of posterity by the outrages that she publicly
inflicted on ^Eschylus. Unnatural amours were
imputed to him ; for him, as for Shakespeare, a Lord
Southampton was found. His popularity was broken
down. Then everything was charged to him as a
crime, even his kindness to young poets who respect
fully offered to him their first laurels. It is curious
to see this reproach constantly reappearing. Pezay
and St. Lambert repeat it in the eighteenth century :
* Why, Voltaire, in all thy notes to the authors who
address thee with complimentary verses, dost thou
reply with excessive praises ? ' l
^Eschylus, while alive, was a kind of public target
for all haters. Young, the ancient poets, Thespis
and Phrynichus, were preferred to him ; old, the new
ones, Sophocles and Euripides, were placed above
him. At last he was brought before the Areopagus,
and — according to Suidas, because the theatre had
fallen in during the performance of one of his pieces ;
according to ^Elian, because he had blasphemed, or,
what is the same thing, had revealed the mysteries
of Eleusis — he was exiled. He died in exile.
Then Lycurgus the orator cried : * We must raise
to ^Eschylus a statue of bronze.'
Athens, which had expelled the man, raised the
statue.
Thus Shakespeare, through death, entered into
oblivion ; ^Eschylus into glory.
This glory, which was to have in the course of ages
its phases, its eclipses, its vanishings, and its returns,
was then dazzling. Greece remembered Salamis,
1 Pourquoi, Voltaire, a ces auteurs
Qui t adressent des vers fialteurs,
R£pondre, en toutes tos missives,
Par des louangos exceasives ?
104 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
where ^Eschylus had fought. The Areopagus itself
was ashamed. It felt that it had been ungrateful
toward the man who, in The Oresteia, had paid to
that tribunal the supreme honour of summoning before
it Minerva and Apollo. ^Eschylus became sacred.
All the phratries had his bust, wreathed at first with
fillets, afterward crowned with laurels. Aristophanes
made him say, in The Frogs, ' I am dead, but my
poetry liveth.' In the great Eleusinian days, the
herald of the Areopagus blew the Tyrrhenian trumpet
in honour of ^Eschylus. An official copy of his ninety-
seven dramas was made at the expense of the Republic,
and placed under the special care of the recorder of
Athens. The actors who played his pieces were obliged
to go and collate their parts with this perfect and
unique copy. ^Eschylus was made a second Homer.
^Eschylus had, like Homer, his rhapsodists, who sang
his verses at the festivals, holding in their hands a
branch of myrtle.
He had been right, the great and insulted man,
to write on his poems this proud and mournful dedi
cation :
To TIME.
There was no more said about his blasphemy : it
was enough that this blasphemy had caused him to
die in exile ; it was as though it had never been.
Besides, one does not know where to find the blasphemy.
Palingenius seeks it in an Aster ope, which, in our
opinion, existed only in imagination. Musgrave
seeks it in The Eumenides. Musgrave probably was
right ; for The Eumenides being a very religious piece,
the priests must have chosen it for the purpose of
accusing him of impiety.
Let us note an odd coincidence. The two sons of
^Eschylus, Euphorion and Bion, are said to have recast
The Oresteia, exactly as, two thousand three hundred
years later, Davenant, Shakespeare's illegitimate son,
recast Macbeth. But in the face of the universal
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 105
respect for ^Eschylus after his death, such impudent
tamperings were impossible ; and what is true of
Davenant is evidently untrue of Bion and Euphorion.
The renown of ^schylus filled the world of those
days. Egypt, feeling with reason that he was a giant
and somewhat Egyptian, bestowed on him the name
of * Pimander ', signifying ' Superior Intelligence '.
In Sicily, whither he had been banished, and where
they sacrificed he-goats before his tomb at Gela, he
was almost an Olympian. Afterward he was almost
a prophet for the Christians, owing to the prediction
of Prometheus, which they thought to apply to Jesus.
Strangely enough, it is this very glory which has
wrecked his work.
We speak here of the material wreck ; for, as we
have said, the mighty name of ^Eschylus survives.
The disappearance of these poems is indeed a drama,
and an extraordinary drama. A king has stupidly
plundered the human mind.
Let us tell the story of this larceny.
CHAPTER IV
HERE are the facts, — the legend, at least ; for at such
a distance, and in such a twilight, history is legendary.
There was a king of Egypt named Ptolemy Ever-
getes, brother-in-law to Antiochus the god.
Let us mention, by the way, that all these people
were gods, — gods Soters, gods Evergetes, gods Epi-
phanes, gods Philometors, gods Philadelphi, gods
Philopators. Translation : Gods saviours, gods bene
ficent, gods illustrious, gods loving their mother, gods
loving their brothers, gods loving their father. Cleo
patra was goddess Soter. The priests and priestesses
of Ptolemy Soter were at Ptolemais. Ptolemy VI
was called * God-love-Mother * (Philometor), because
he hated his mother Cleopati a ; Ptolemy IV was
* God-love-Father ' (Philopalor), because he had
poisoned his father ; Ptolemy II was * God-love.
106 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Brothers ' (Philadelphus), because he had killed his
two brothers.
Let us return to Ptolemy Evergetes.
He was the son of the Philadelphus who gave golden
crowns to the Roman ambassadors, the same to whom
the pseudo-Aristeus wrongly attributes the version
of the Septuagint. This Philadelphus had much
increased the library of Alexandria, which during
his lifetime counted two hundred thousand volumes,
and which in the sixth century attained, it is said,
the incredible number of seven hundred thousand
manuscripts.
This stock of human knowledge, formed under the
eyes of Euclid and by the efforts of Callimachus,
Diodorus Cronus, Theodoras the Atheist, Philetas,
Apollonius, Aratus, the Egyptian priest Manetho,
Lycophron, and Theocritus, had for its first librarian,
according to some Zenodotus of Ephesus, according
to others Demetrius of Phalerum, to whom the Athe
nians had raised two hundred and sixty statues, which
they took one year to construct, and one day to destroy.
Now, this library had no copy of ^Eschylus. One
day the Greek Demetrius said to Evergetes, * Pharaoh
has not JLschylus ', — exactly as, at a later time,
Leidrade, archbishop of Lyons and librarian of Charle
magne, said to Charlemagne, ' The Emperor has not
Scceva Memor'.
Ptolemy Evergetes, wishing to complete the work
of Philadelphus his father, resolved to give ./Eschylus
to the Alexandrian library. He declared that he
would cause a copy to be made. He sent an embassy
to borrow from the Athenians the unique and sacred
copy, under the care of the recorder of the Republic.
Athens, not over-prone to lend, hesitated, and de
manded a security. The King of Egypt offered
fifteen silver talents. Now, those who wish to compre
hend the value of fifteen talents, have but to know
that it was three fourths of the annual tribute of ran
som paid by JudaBa to Egypt, which was twenty
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 107
talents, and weighed so heavily on the Jewish people
that the high-priest Onias II, founder of the Onian
Temple, decided to refuse this tribute at the risk of a,
war. Athens accepted the security. The fifteen
talents were deposited. The complete copy of ^Eschy-
lus was delivered to the King of Egypt. The King
gave up the fifteen talents, and kept the book.
Athens, indignant, had some thought of declaring
war against Egypt. To reconquer ^Eschylus would
be as good as reconquering Helen. To repeat the
Trojan war, but this time to recover Homer, seemed
a fine thing. Yet time was taken for consideration.
Ptolemy was powerful. He had forcibly taken back
from Asia the two thousand five hundred Egyptian
gods formerly carried there by Cambyses because
they were in gold and silver. He had, besides, con
quered Cilicia and Syria and all the country from the
Euphrates to the Tigris. With Athens it was no
longer the day when she had improvised a fleet of
two hundred ships against Artaxerxes. She left
^Eschylus a prisoner in Egypt.
A prisoner-god. This time the word * god ' is in
its right place. They paid ^Eschylus unheard-of
honours. The King refused, it is said, to allow the
works to be transcribed, stupidly bent on possessing
a unique copy.
Particular care was taken of this manuscript when
the library of Alexandria, augmented by the library
of Pergamus, which Antony gave to Cleopatra, was
transferred to the temple of Jupiter Serapis. There
it was that Saint Jerome came to read, in the Athenian
text, the famous passage in the Prometheus prophesying
Christ : ' Go and tell Jupiter that nothing shall make
me name the one who is to dethrone him.'
Other doctors of the Church made, from the same
copy, the same verification. For in all times orthodox
asseverations have been combined with what have
been called the testimonies of polytheism, and great
pains have been taken to make pagans say Christian
108 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
things. * Teste David cum Sibylla.' People came
to the Alexandrian library, as on a pilgrimage, to
examine the Prometheus, constant visits which perhaps
deceived the Emperor Hadrian, making him write
to the Consul Serviamis : ' Those who worship Serapis
are Christians ; those who profess to be bishops of
Christ are at the same time devotees of Serapis.'
Under the Roman dominion, the library of Alex
andria belonged to the Emperor. Egypt was Caesar's
property. ' Augustus ', says Tacitus, * seposuit Egypt-
urn.' It was not every one who could travel there.
Egypt was closed. The Roman knights, and even the
senators, could not easily obtain admittance.
It was during this period that the complete copy of
jEschylus was exposed to the perusal of Timocharis,
Aristarchus, Athenaeus, Stobaeus, Diodorus of Sicily,
Macrobius, Plotinus, Jamblichus, Sopater, Clement
of Alexandria, Nepotian of Africa, Valerius Maximus,
Justin the Martyr, and even of ^Elian, although ^Elian
left Italy but seldom.
In the seventh century a man entered Alexandria.
He was mounted on a camel and seated between two
sacks, one full of figs, the other full of corn. These
two sacks were, with a wooden platter, all that he
possessed. This man never seated himself except on
the ground. He drank nothing but water, and ate
nothing but bread. He had conquered half Asia and
Africa, taken or burned thirty-six thousand towns,
villages, fortresses, and castles, destroyed four thou
sand pagan or Christian temples, built fourteen hun
dred mosques, conquered Izdeger, King of Persia,
and Heraclius, Emperor of the East ; and he called
himself Omar. He burned the library of Alexandria.
Omar is for that reason celebrated ; Louis, called
the Great, has not the same celebrity, — an injustice,
for he burned the Rupertine library at Heidelberg.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 109
CHAPTER V
Now, is not this incident a complete drama ? It
might be entitled, ' ^Eschylus Lost '. Exposition,
plot, and denouement. After Evergetes, Omar. The
action begins with a robber, and ends with an incendi
ary.
Evergetes— this is his excuse— robbed from the
motive of love. The admiration of a fool has its
attendant inconveniences.
As for Omar, he is the fanatic. By the way, we
must mention that strange historical rehabilitations
have been attempted in our time. We do not speak
of Nero, who is the fashion ; but an attempt has been
made to exonerate Omar, as well as to bring a verdict
of " not guilty " for Pius V. Saint Pius V personifies-
the Inquisition ; to canonize him was enough : why
declare him innocent ? We do not lend ourselves
to these attempts at appeal in trials which have re
ceived final judgment. We have no taste for rendering
such little services to fanaticism, whether it be caliph
or pope, whether it burn books or men. Omar has
had many advocates. A certain class of historians
and biographical critics are easily moved to tears
over the sabre : a victim of slander, this poor sabre !
Imagine, then, the tenderness that is felt for a scimi
tar, — the scimitar being the ideal sabre. It is better
than brute, it is Turk. Omar, then, has been cleared
as far as possible. A first fire in the Bruchion district,
where the Alexandrian library stood, was used as an
argument to prove how easily such accidents happen.
That fire was the fault of Julius Cassar, — another
sabre ! Then a second argument was found in a second
conflagration, only partial, of the Serapeum, in order to
accuse the Christians, the demagogues of those days.
If the fire at the Serapeum had destroyed the Alex
andrian library in the fourth century, Hypatia would
not have been able, in the fifth century, to give in
that same library those lessons in philosophy which
110 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
caused her to be murdered with broken pieces of
•earthen pots. Touching Omar, we are willing to
believe the Arabs. Abdallatif saw at Alexandria,
.about 1220, ' a shaft of the pillars supporting a cupola 51,
And said, * There stood the library that Amroo-Ibn-
Al-Aas burned by permission of Omar'. Aboolfaraj,
in 1260, relates in precise terms in his Dynastic Histonj
that by order of Omar they took the books from the
library, and with them heated the baths of Alexandria
for six months. According to Gibbon, there were
were at Alexandria four thousand baths. Ibn-Khal-
doon, in his Historical Prolegomena, relates another
wanton destruction, — the annihilation of the library
of the Medes by Saad, Omar's lieutenant. Now,
Omar having caused the burning of the Median library
in Persia by Saad, was logical in causing the destruc
tion of the Egyptian -Greek library in Egypt by Amroo.
His lieutenants have preserved his orders for us :
' If these books contain falsehoods, to the fire with
them ! If they contain truths, these truths are in
the Koran : to the fire with them ! ' In place of the
Koran, put the Bible, Veda, Edda, Zend-Avesta,
Toldos-Jeschut, Talmud, Gospel, and you have the
imperturbable and universal formula of all fanaticisms.
This being said, we do not see any reason to reverse
the verdict of history ; we award to the Caliph the
smoke of the seven hundred thousand volumes of
Alexandria, ^Eschylus included, and we maintain
Omar in possession of his conflagration.
Evergetes, through his wish for exclusive posses
sion, treating a library as a seraglio, has robbed us of
^schylus. Imbecile contempt may have the same
results as imbecile adoration. Shakespeare came very
near meeting the fate of ^Eschylus. He also has had
Ms conflagration. Shakespeare was so little printed,
printing existing so little for him, thanks to the stupid
indifference of his immediate posterity, that in 1666
1 The original reads : ' la colonne des piliers supportant
>une coupole.' TB.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 111
there was still but one edition of the poet of Stratford-
on-Avon (Hemynge and Condell's edition), three
hundred copies of which were printed. Shakespeare,
with this obscure and pitiful edition awaiting the public
in vain, was a sort of poor but proud relative of the
glorious poets. These three hundred copies were
nearly all stored up in London when the Fire of 1666
broke out. It burned London, and nearly burned
Shakespeare. The whole edition of Hemynge and
Condell disappeared, with the exception of the forty-
eight copies which had been sold in fifty years. Those
forty-eight purchasers saved from death the words
of Shakespeare *.
CHAPTER VI
THE disappearance of ^Eschylus ! Extend this catas
trophe hypothetically to a few more names, and it
seems as though one perceived a vacuum forming
in the human mind.
The work of JEschylus was, by its extent, the great
est, certainly, of all antiquity. By the seven plays
which remain to us, we may judge what that universe
was.
Let us point out what * JSschylus Lost ' imports :
Fourteen trilogies, — * The Promethei ', of which
Prometheus Bound formed a part ; The Seven Chiefs
against Thebes, of which there remains one piece ;
The Danaldes, which included The Suppliants, written
1 In addition to Hemynge and Condell's edition (known
as the ' First Folio, or Folio of 1623 '), there had been, before
the year of the Great Fire, two editions, — the ' Second
Folio', 1632, and the 'Third Folio', 1663-64. Besides
these during the poet's lifetime, and throughout a large
part of the aeventeenth century, single plays of Shakespeare
.red in quarto form. See Dowden s Primer, pp. 30-31.
In the last chapter of this useful little book some facts are
jzivcii which show that Shakespeare wan by no means so
unknown and unpopular throughout the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries as Victor Hugo would persuade us
that he was. TR.
112 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
in Sicily, and in which the ' Sicilianism ' of ^Eschylus is
traceable ; Laius, which included (Edipus ; Athamas,
which ended with The Isthmiastes ; Perseus, the
node of which was The Phorcydes ; JEtna, which had
as prologue The Mnean Women; Iphigenia, the
denouement of which was the tragedy of The Priestesses ;
The Ethiopid, the titles of which are nowhere to be
found ; Peniheus, in which were The Hydrophori
(Water-carriers) ; Teucer, which opened with The
Judgment of Arms ; Niobe, which began with The
Nurses and ended with The Men of the Train ; a
trilogy in honour of Achilles, The Tragic Iliad, com
posed of The Myrmidons, The Nereids, and The Phry
gians ; one in honour of Bacchus, The Lycurgia,
composed of The Edons, The Bassarides, and The
Young Men.
These fourteen trilogies alone give a total of fifty-six
plays, if we consider that nearly all were tetralogies ;
that is to say, quadruple dramas, and ended with a
satyric after-piece. Thus The Oresteia had as a
satyric after-piece, Proteus ; and The Seven Chiefs
against Thebes had The Sphinx.
Add to these fifty-six pieces a probable trilogy of
The Laldacides ; add the tragedies of The Egyptians,
The Ransom of Hector, Memnon, undoubtedly connected
with such trilogies ; add all the satyric plays, Sisyphus
the Deserter, The Heralds, The Lion, The Argians,
Amymone, Circe, Cercyon, Glaucus the Mariner, —
comedies in which was found the mirth of that wild
genius.
That is what we have lost.
Evergetes and Omar have robbed us of all this.
It is difficult to fix precisely the total number of
pieces written by ^Eschylus. The statements vary.
The anonymous biographer speaks of seventy-five,
Suidas of ninety, Jean Deslyons of ninety-seven,
Meursius of a hundred. Meursius enumerates more
than a hundred titles ; but some probably do double
service.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE US
Jean Deslyons, doctor of the Sorbonne, lecturer
on divinity at Senlis, author of the Diacours ecclesi-
ostique centre le poganisme du Roi boit1, published in
the seventeenth century a work against laying coffins
one above another in cemeteries, in which he took for
his authority the twenty-fifth canon of the Council of
Auxerre : * Non licet mortuum super mortuum mitti '.
Deslyons, in a note added to that work, which is now
very rare, and of which we believe Charles Nodier
possessed a copy, — quotes a passage from the great
antiquarian numismatist of Venloo, Hubert Goltzius,
in which, in reference to embalming, Goltzius mentions
The Egyptians of ^Eschylus, and The Apotheosis of
Orpheus, — a title omitted in the enumeration given
by Meursius. Goltzius adds that The Apotheosis
of Orpheus was recited at the mysteries of the Lyco-
mides 2.
This title, The Apotheosis of Orpheus, sets one to-
thinking. ^Eschylus speaking of Orpheus, the Titan
measuring the hundred-handed, the god intrepreting
the god, — what could be nobler, and how one would
long to read that work ! Dante speaking of Virgil
and calling him his master, does not fill up this gap,
because Virgil, a noble poet, but without invention,
is less than Dante ; it is between equals, from genius
to genius, from sovereign to sovereign, that such hom
age is splendid. ^Eschylus raises to Orpheus a temple
of which he might occupy the altar himself : this is
grand !
CHAPTER VII
JSsciiYLUs is disproportionate. There is in him
something of India. The wild majesty of his stature
recalls those vast poems of the Ganges which stride
through Art with the steps of a mammoth, and which
have, among the Iliads and the Odysseys, the appear-
1 ' Ecclesiastical Discourse against the Paganism of the
King drinks.' (?)
2 *S'tc in original.
I
114 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ance of hippopotami among lions. ^Eschylus, a
thorough Greek, is yet something more than a Greek ;
he has the Oriental incommensurableness.
Salmasius declares that he is full of Hebraisms
and Syrianisms : ' Hebrai'smis et Syrianismis '. ^Eschy-
lus makes the Winds bear Jupiter's throne, as the
Bible makes the Cherubim bear Jehovah's throne,
as the Rig- Veda makes the Marouts bear the throne
of Indra. The Winds, the Cherubim, and the Marouts
are the same beings, the Breathings. For the rest,
Salmasius is right. Plays upon words so frequent in
the Phoenician language, abound in ^Eschylus. He plays,
for instance, in reference to Jupiter and Europa, on
the Phoenician word ilpha, which has Hie double
meaning of ' ship ' and ' bull '. He loves that language
of Tyre and Sidon, and at times he borrows from it
the strange gleams of his style ; the metaphor,
' Xerxes with the dragon eyes ', seems an inspiration
from the Ninevite dialect, in which the word draka
meant at the same time ' dragon ' and ' clear-sighted '.
He has Phoenician heresies : his heifer, lo, is rather
the cow, Isis ; he believes, like the priests of Sidon,
that the temple of Delphi was built by Apollo with
a paste made of wax and bees' -wings. In his exile in
Sicily he goes often to drink religiously at the fountain
of Arethusa ; and never do the shepherds who watch
him hear him mention Arethusa otherwise than by
this mysterious name, Alphaga, — an Assyrian word
signifying ' spring surrounded with willows '.
./Eschylus is, in the whole Hellenic literature, the
sole example of the Athenian mind with a mixture
of Egypt and Asia. These depths were repugnant to
the Greek intelligence. Coniith, Epidaurus, (Edepsus,
Gythium, Chaeroneia, which was to be the birthplace
of Plutarch, Thebes, where Pindar's house was, Man-
tineia, where the glory of Epaminondas shone, — all
these golden towns repudiated the Unknown, a glimpse
of which was seen like a cloud behind the Caucasus.
It seemed as though the sun was Greek. The sun,
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 115
used to the Parthenon, was not made to em/er the
diluvian forests of Grand Tartary, under the thick mould
of gigantic endogens, under the lofty ferns of five hun
dred cubits, where swarmed all the first dreadful
models of Nature, and under whose shadows existed
unknown, shapeless cities, such as that fabled Anarod-
gurro, the existence of which was denied until it sent
an embassy to Claudius. Gagasruira, Sambulaca,
Maliarpha, Barygaza, Caveripatnam, Sochoth-Benoth,
Tiglath-Pileser, Tana-Serim, all these almost hideous
names affrighted Greece when they came to be
reported by the adventurers on their return, first by
those with Jason, then by those of Alexander. ^Eschylus
had no such horror. He loved the Caucasus. It was there
he had made the acquaintance of Prometheus. One
almost feels in reading ^Eschylus that he had haunted
the vast primitive thickets now become coal-measures,
and that he had taken huge strides over the roots,
snake-like and half-living, of the ancient vegetable
monsters. ^Eschylus is a kind of behemoth among
the great intelligences.
Let us say, however, that the affinity of Greece
with the East — an affinity hated by the Greeks —
was real. The letters of the Greek alphabet are
nothing but the letters of the Phoenician alphabet
reversed. ^Eschylus was all the more Greek from the
fact of his being something of a Phoenician.
This powerful mind, at times apparently shapeless,
on account of its very greatness, has the Titanic
gaiety and affability. He indulges in quibbles on the
names of Prometheus, Polynices, Helen, Apollo,
Ilion, on the cock and the sun, — imitating, in this
respect, Homer, who made about the olive that famous
pun which caused Diogenes to throw away his plate
of olives and eat a tart.
The father of ^Eschylus, Euphorion, was a disciple
of Pythagoras. The soul of Pythagoras; that philos
opher half magian and half Brahmin, seemed to have
entered through Euphorion into ^Eschylus. We have
116 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
already said that in the dark and mysterious quarrel
between the celestial and the terrestrial gods, the
intestine war of paganism, ^Eschylus was terrestrial.
He belonged to the faction of the gods of earth. The
Cyclops having worked for Jupiter, he rejected them,
as we should reject a corporation of workmen who had
betrayed us, and he preferred to them the Cabiri.
He adored Ceres. ' O thou, Ceres, nurse of my soul ! '
and Ceres is Demeter, — that is, Ge-meter, the mother-
earth. Hence his veneration for Asia. It seemed
then as though the Earth was rather in Asia than
elsewhere. Asia is in reality, compared with Europe,
a kind of block almost without capes and gulfs, and
little penetrated by the sea. The Minerva of ^Eschy-
lus says * Asia the Great '. ' The sacred soil of Asia ',
says the chorus of the Oceanides. In his epitaph,
graven on his tomb at Gela, and written by himself,
^Eschylus attests 'the long-haired Mede'1. He
makes the chorus celebrate * Susicanes and Pegastagon,
born in Egypt, and the chief of Memphis the sacred
city '. Like the Phoenicians, he gives the name ' Oncea '
to Minerva. In The Mtna, he celebrates the Sicilian
Dioscuri, the Palici, those twin gods whose worship,
connected with the local worship of Vulcan, had
reached Asia through Sarepta and Tyre. He calls
them ' the venerable Palici '. Three of his trilogies
are entitled The Persians, The Ethiopid, The Egypt
ians. In the geography of ^Eschylus, Egypt, as well
as Arabia, was in Asia. Prometheus says, ' the flower
of Arabia, the hero of Caucasus '. ^Eschylus was
in geography a notable specialist. He had a Gorgonian
city, Cysthenes, which he placed in Asia, as well as
a River Pluto, rolling sands of gold, and defended by
1 The epitaph is translated by John Stuart Blackie as
follows : —
Here ^schylus lies, from his Athenian home
Remote, 'neath Gela's wheat-producing loam ;
How brave in battle was Euphorion's son,
The long-haired Mede can tell who fell at Marathon. TB.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 117
men with a single eye, — the Arimaspians. The pirates
to whom he makes allusion somewhere are, according
to all appearance, the pirates of Angria *, who in
habited the rock Vizindruk. He could see distinctly
beyond the Pas-du-Nil, in the mountains of Byblos,
the source of the Nile, still unknown to-day. He knew
the precise spot where Prometheus had stolen the
fire, and he designated without hesitation Mount
Mosychlus, in the neighbourhood of Lemnos.
When this geography ceases to be fanciful, it is
exact as an itinerary. It becomes true, and remains
incommensurable. There is nothing more real than
that splendid transmission, in one night, of the news
of the capture of Troy, by bonfires lighted one after
the other, and answering from mountain to mountain,
— from Mount Ida to the promontory of Hermes, from
the promontory of Hermes to Mount Athos, from
Mount Athos to Mount Macispe, from Macispe to
Messapius, from Mount Messapius over the River
Asopus to Mount Cytheron, from Mount Cytheron
over the morass of Gorgopis to Mount Egiplanctus,
from Mount Egiplanctus to Cape Saronica (later
Spireum), from Cape Saronica to Mount Arachne,
from Mount Arachne to Argos. You may follow on
the map that train of fire announcing Agamemnon
to Clytemnestra.
This bewildering geography is mingled with an
extraordinary tragedy, in which you hear dialogues
more than human : Prometheus ' Alas ! * Mercury
* This is a word that Jupiter speaks not.' And again,
where the Ocean plays the part of a Geronte : ' To
appear mad ' says the Ocean to Prometheus * is
the secret of the sage ' — a saying as deep as the sea.
Who knows the mental reservations of the tempest ?
And the Power exclaims : * There is but one free god
— Jupiter.'
^Eschylus has his own geography ; he has also his
fauna.
1 The original reads : ' les pirates angrias.' TB.
118 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
This fauna, which strikes us as fabulous, is enig
matical rather than chimerical. The author of these
lines has discovered and identified, in a glass case of
the Japanese Museum at the Hague, the impossible
serpent of The Oresteia, having two heads at its two
extremities. There are, it may be added, in the same
case several specimens of a monstrosity which would
seem to be of another world, and is, at all events,
strange and unexplained, — as, for our part, we are
little disposed to admit the odd hypothesis of Japan
ese manufacturers of monsters.
^Eschylus at times sees Nature with simplifications
stamped with a mysterious disdain. Here the Pythagor
ean disappears, and the magian shows himself. All
beasts are the beast. ^Eschylus seems to see in the
animal kingdom only a dog. The griffin is a ' dumb
dog ' ; the eagle is a ' winged dog ', — * the winged
dog of Jupiter ', says Prometheus.
We have just used the word ' magian '. In fact,
this poet, like Job, performs at times the functions
of a priest. One would say that he exercises over
Nature, over human creatures, and even over gods,
a kind of magianism. He upbraids animals for their
voracity. A vulture which seizes a doe-hare with
young, in spite of its running, and feeds on it, ' eats
a whole race stopped in its flight '. He addresses the
dust and the smoke : the first he calls * thirsty sister
of mire ' ; the other, * black sister of fire '. He insults
the dreaded bay of Salmydessus, 'stepmother of
ships.' He reduces to dwarfish proportions the
Greeks who took Troy by treachery : he exhibits them
whelped by a machine of war ; he calls them ' these
foal of a horse '. As for the gods, he goes so far as
to incorporate Apollo with Jupiter. He finely calls
Apollo * the conscience of Jupiter '.
His bold familiarity is absolute, — a mark of sove
reignty. He makes the sacrificer take Iphigenia
* as a she-goat .' A queen who is a faithful spouse
is for him ' the good house-bitch '. As for Orestes,
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 119
he has seen him when a babe, and he speaks of him
as ' wetting his swaddling-clothes ' (humectatio ex
urina). He goes even beyond this Latin. The
expression, which we do not repeat here, is to be found
in The Litigants 1. If you are bent upon reading the
word which we hesitate to write, apply to Racine.
The whole is vast and mournful. The profound
despair of fate is in ^Eschylus. He portrays in terrible
lines ' the impotence which chains down, as in a dream,
the blind living creatures '. His tragedy is nothing
but the old Orphic dithyramb suddenly bursting into
tears and lamentations over man.
CHAPTER VIII
ARISTOPHANES loved ^Eschylus by that law of affinity
which causes Marivaux to love Racine.
Tragedy and comedy are made to understand one
another.
The same distracted and all-powerful breath fills
^Ischylus and Aristophanes. They are the two
inspired wearers of the antique mask.
Aristophanes, who is not yet finally judged, adhered
to the Mysteries, to Cecropian poetry, to Eleusis, to
Dodona, to the Asiatic twilight, to the profound
pensive dream. This dream, whence sprang the art
of ^Egina, was at the threshold of the Ionian philosophy
in Thales as well as at the threshold of the Italic
philosophy in Pythagoras. It was the sphinx guarding
the entrance.
This sphinx was a muse, — the great pontifical
and wanton muse of universal procreation ; and Aris
tophanes loved it. This sphinx breathed tragedy
into ^Eschylus, and comedy into Aristophanes. It
contained something of Cybele. The antique sacred
immodesty is found in Aristophanes. At times he
shows Bacchus foaming at the lips. He comes from
1 Les Plaideurs, act iii scene iii.
120 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the Dionysia, or from the Ascolia *, or from the great
trieterical Orgy, and he strikes one as a raving maniac
of the Mysteries. His staggering verse recalls the
Bacchant hopping giddily upon air-bladders. Aris
tophanes has the sacerdotal obscenity. He is for
nudity against love. He denounces the Phccdras
.and the Sthenobseas, and he creates * Lysistrata '.
Let no one fail to note that this was religion, and
that a cynic was an austere mind. The Gymnosophists
formed the point of intersection between lewdness
and thought. The he-goat, with its philosopher's
beard, belonged to that sect. That dark, ecstatic,
and bestial Oriental spirit lives still in the santon, the
dervish, and the fakir. Aristophanes, like Diogenes,
belonged to that family. ^Eschylus was related to it
by his Oriental temperament, but he retained the
tragic chastity.
This mysterious naturalism was the antique Genius
of Greece. It was called poetry and philosophy.
It had under it the group of the seven sages, one of
whom, Periander, was a tyrant. Now, a certain
vulgar spirit of moderation appeared with Socrates ;
it was sagacity clarifying wisdom. Thales and Pytha
goras reduced to immediate truth : such was the
operation, — a sort of filtration, which, purifying and
weakening, allowed the ancient divine doctrine to
percolate, drop by drop, and become human. These
simplifications disgust fanaticism ; dogmas object
to a process of sifting. To ameliorate a religion is to
lay violent hands on it. Progress, offering its services
to Faith, offends it. Faith is an ignorance which
professes to know, and which in certain cases does,
perhaps, know more than Science. In the face of
the lofty affirmations of believers, Socrates had an
uncomfortable, sly half-smile. There is in Socrates
something of Voltaire. Socrates denounces all the
Eleusinian philosophy as unintelligible and incon-
1 ' Aschosie ' in the original. The translator supposes the
' Ascoliasmus ' or ' Ascolia ' to be intended. TB.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 121
ceivable ; and he said to Euripides, that to under
stand Heraclitus and the old philosophers, ' one
would have to be a swimmer of Delos ', — that is, a
swimmer capable of landing on an island which recedes
before him. That was impiety and sacrilege toward
the ancient Hellenic naturalism. One need seek no
other cause for the antipathy of Aristophanes for
Socrates.
This antipathy was hideous : the poet has the
bearing of a persecutor ; he lends assistance to the
oppressors against the oppressed, and his comedy is
guilty of crimes. Aristophanes — fearful punishment !
— has remained in the eyes of posterity in the predica
ment of an evil genius. But there is for him one
extenuating circumstance, — he was an ardent admirer
of the poet of Prometheus, and to admire him was
to defend him. Aristophanes did what he could to
prevent his banishment ; and if anything can diminish
one's indignation in reading The Clouds, with its rabid
satire of Socrates, it is to see in the background the
hand of Aristophanes detaining by the mantle the
departing ^Eschylus. ^Eschylus has likewise a comedy,
— a sister of the broad farce of Aristophanes. We
have spoken of his mirth ; it goes very far in The,
Argians. It equals Aristophanes, and outstrips the
Shrove Tuesday of our Carnival. Listen : ' He
throws at my head a chamber utensil. The full vase
falls on my head, and is broken, odoriferous, but not
precisely like an urn of perfume.' Who says that ?
^Eschylus. And in his turn Shakespeare will come
and exclaim through Falstaff's lips : * Empty the
jorden '. What can you say ? You have to deal with
savages.
One of these savages is Moliere ; witness, from
one end to the other, Le Malade Imaginaire. Racine
also is, to some extent, one of them ; see Lea Plaidevrs,
already mentioned.
The Abbe Camus was a witty bishop, — a rare thing
at all times ; and, what is more, he was a good mun.
122 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He would have deserved this reproach of another
bishop, our contemporary, of being * good to the
point of silliness '. Perhaps he was good because he
was clever. He gave to the poor all the revenue of his
bishopric of Belley. He objected to canonization.
It was he who said, ' There's no chase but with
old dogs, and no shrine but for old saints ' * ; and
although he did not like new-comers in sainthood,
he was the friend of Saint Frangois de Sales, by whose
advice he wrote romances. He relates in one of his
letters that FranQois de Sales had said to him, * The
Church enjoys a laugh '.
Art enjoys a laugh. Art, which is a temple, has
its laughter. Whence comes this hilarity ? All at
once, in the midst of the stern faces of serious master
pieces, there bursts forth a buffoon, — a masterpiece
he also. Sancho Panza jostles Agamemnon. All
the marvels of thought are there ; irony comes to
complicate and complete them. Enigma. Behold
Art, great Art, seized with a fit of gaiety. Its problem,
matter, amuses it. It was forming it, now it deforms
it. It was shaping it for beauty, now it delights in
extracting from it its ugliness. It seems to forget
its responsibility. It does not forget it, however ;
for suddenly, behind the grimace, there shines the
countenance of philosophy, — a smooth-browed philo
sophy, less sidereal more terrestrial, quite as mysterious
as the gloomy philosophy. The unknown man
and the unknown in things confront each other ; and
in the act of meeting, these two augurs, Fate and
Nature, fail to keep their faces straight. Poetry
burdened with anxieties, befools, — whom ? Itself.
A mirth, which is not serenity, gushes out from the
incomprehensible. An unknown, austere, and sinister
raillery flashes its lightning through the human dark-
The shadows piled around us play with our soul.
1 This saw involves a quaint pun between ckasse (chase)
and chdsse (shrine). TB.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 123
Formidable blossoming of the Unknown : the jest
issuing from the abyss.
This alarming mirth in Art is called, in antiquity,
Aristophanes ; and in modern times, Rabelais.
When Pratinas the Dorian had invented the play
with satyrs, — comedy making its appearance face to
face with tragedy, mirth by the side of mourning,
the two styles ready, perhaps, to unite, — it was a
matter of scandal. Agathon, the friend of Euripides,
went to Dodona to consult Loxias. Loxias is Apollo.
Loxias means * crooked ', and Apollo was called
* The Crooked ', because his oracles were always indirect
and full of meanders and coils. Agathon inquired
of Apollo whether comedy existed by right as well
as tragedy. Loxias answered : ' Poetry has two
ears '.
This answer, which Aristotle declares obscure, seems
to us very clear. It sums up the entire law of Art.
The poet finds himself, in fact, confronted by two
problems. The first open to the sunlight : the noisy,
tumultuous, stormy, clamorous problem, — problem
of the crowded thoroughfare, of all the paths open to
the multitudinous tread of human feet ; problem of
disputing tongues, of feuds, of the passions with their
* Wherefore ? ' problem of evil, which is the beginning
of sorrow, for to be evil is worse than to do it ; problem
of pain, dolor, tears, cries, groans. The other, the
mute problem of the shadow, the vast silence, of un
speakable and dread significance. And poetry has
two ears : the one listens to the living, the other to the
dead.
CHAPTER IX
THE power that Greece had to throw out light is
marvellous, even now that we have the example of
France. Greece did not colonize without civilizing, —
an example that more than one modern nation might
follow : to buy and sell is not all.
124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Tyre bought and sold ; Berytus bought and sold ;
Sidon bought and sold ; Sarepta bought and sold.
Where are these cities ? Athens taught ; and she is
to this hour one of the capitals of human thought.
The grass is growing on the six steps of the tribune
where spoke Demosthenes ; the Ceramicus is a ravine
half-choked with the marble dust which was once the
palace of Cecrops ; the Odeon of Herod Atticus, at
the foot of the Acropolis, is now but a ruin on which
falls, at certain hours, the imperfect shadow of the
Parthenon ; the temple of Theseus belongs to the
swallows ; the goats browse on the Pnyx. Still the
Greek spirit lives ; still Greece is queen ; still Greece
is goddess. A counting-house passes away : a school
remains.
It is curious to remind one's self to-day that twenty-
two centuries ago, small towns, isolated gfcd scattered
on the outskirts of the known world, possessed, all of
them, theatres. In the interest of civilization, Greece
began always by the construction of an academy, of
a portico, or of a logeum. Whoever could have seen,
at almost the same period, rising at a short distance
one from the other, in Umbria, the Gallic town of Sens
(now Sinigaglia), and, near Vesuvius, the Hellenic
city Parthenopea (at present Naples), would have
recognized Gaul by the big stone standing all red with
blood, and Greece by the theatre.
This civilization by Poetry and Art had such a
mighty force that sometimes it subdued even war.
The Sicilians, as Plutarch relates in speaking of Nicias,
gave liberty to the Greek prisoners who sang the
verses of Euripides.
Let us point out some very little known and very
singular facts.
The Messenian colony, Zancle, in Sicily ; the Corin
thian colony, Corcyra, distinct from the Corcyra
of the Absyrtides Islands ; the Cycladian colony,
Cyrene, in Libya ; the three Phocsean colonies, Helea
in Lucania, Palania in Corcisa, Marseilles in France, —
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 125
all had theatres. The gadfly having pursued lo all
along the Adriatic Gulf, the Ionian Sea reached as
far as the harbour of Venetus, and Tergeste (now
Trieste) had a theatre. A theatre at Salpe, in
Apulia ; a theatre at Squillacium, in Calabria ; a
theatre at Thernus, in Livadia ; a theatre at Lysi-
machia, founded by Lysimachus, Alexander's lieu
tenant ; a theatre at Scapta-Hyla, where Thucydides
had gold mines ; a theatre at Byzia, where Theseus
had lived ; a theatre in Chaonia, at Buthrotum, where
those equilibrists from Mount Chimaera performed
whom Apuleius admired on the Pcocile ; a theatre in
Pannonia, at Buda, where the Metanastes were, —
that is to say, * the Transplanted '. Many of these
remote colonies were much exposed. In the Isle
of Sardinia — which the Greeks named Ichnusa, on
account of its resemblance to the sole of the foot —
Calaris (now Cagliari) was in some sort under the
Punic claw ; Cibalis, in Mysia, had to fear the Triballi ;
Aspalathon, the Illyrians ; Tomis, the future resting-
place of Ovid, the Scordiscae ; Miletus, in Anotlia,
the Massagetre ; Denia, in Spain, the Cantabrians ;
Salmydessus, the Molossians ; Carsina, the Tauro-
Scythians ; Gelonus, the Arymphaeans of Sarmatia,
who lived on acorns ; Apollonia, the Hamaxobians
prowling in their chariots ; Abdera, the birthplace
of Democritus, the tattooed Thracians. All these
towns by the side of their citadel had a theatre. Why ?
Because the theatre keeps alive the flame of love for
the fatherland. Having the Barbarians at their gates,
it was imperative that they should remain Greeks.
The national spirit is the strongest of bulwarks.
The Greek drama was profoundly lyrical. It was
often less a tragedy than a dithyramb. It had upon
occasion strophes as powerful as swords. It rushed
helmeted upon the stage ; it was an ode armed for
battle. We know what a Marseillaise can do.
Many of these theatres were of granite, some of
brick. The theatre of Apollonia was of marble. The
126 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
theatre of Salmydessus, which could be moved to the
Doric place or to the Epiphanian place, was a vast
scaffolding rolling on cylinders, after the fashion of
those wooden towers which are thrust against the
stone towers of besieged towns.
And what poet did they prefer to play at these
theatres ? ^Eschylus.
^Eschylus was for Greece the autochthonal poet.
He was more than Greek, he was Pelasgian. He
was born at Eleusis ; and not only was he Eleusinian,
but Eleusiac * — that is to say, a believer. It is the
same shade as that between * English ' and ' Anglican '.
The Asiatic element, a sublime distortion of his genius,
increased the popular respect ; for people said that
the great Dionysius — that Bacchus common to Occi
dent and Orient — came in dreams to dictate to him
his tragedies. You find again here the ' familiar spirit '
of Shakespeare.
^Eschylus, Eupatrid and ^Eginetic, struck the
Greeks as more Greek than themselves. In those times
of mingled code and dogma, to be sacerdatol was a
lofty way of being national. Fifty-two of his tragedies
had been crowned. On leaving the theatre after the
performance of the plays of ^schylus, the men
would strike the shields hung at the doors of the
temples, crying, ' Fatherland, fatherland ! ' Let us
add that to be hieratic did not hinder him from being
demotic. ^Eschylus loved the people, and the people
adored him. There are two sides to greatness : majesty
is one, familiarity the other. ^Eschylus was familiar
with the turbulent and generous mob of Athens. He
often gave to that mob the noble part in his plays.
See in The Oresteia how tenderly the chorus, which
is the people, receives Cassandra ! The Queen mal
treats and frightens the slave whom the chorus tries
to reassure and soothe. ^Eschylus had introduced
1 Victor Hugo's word is ' eleusiaque.' Neither the
word nor the distinction is to be found in the ordinary
books of reference. TR.
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 127
the people in his grandest works, — in Pentheiw, by
the tragedy of The Wool-carders ; in Niobe, by the
tragedy of The Nurses ; in Athamas, by the tragedy
of The Net-drawers ; in Iphigenia, by the tragedy of
The Bed-makers. It was on the side of the people
that he turned the balance in the mysterious drama
The Weighing of Souls J. Therefore had he been chosen
to preserve the sacred fire.
In all the Greek colonies they played The Oresteia
and The Persians. ^Eschylus being present, the
fatherland was no longer absent. These almost
religious representations were ordered by the magis
trates. It was as if to the gigantic ^Eschylean theatre
the task had been entrusted of watching over the
infancy of the colonies. It threw around them the
Greek spirit, it protected them from the influence of
bad neighbours and from all temptations of being led
astray. It preserved them from contact with Barbar
ism, it maintained them within the Hellenic circle.
It was there as a warning. All those young offspring
of Greece were, so to speak, placed under the care of
^Eschylus.
In India they often give the children into the charge
of elephants. These mountains of goodness watch
over the little ones. The whole group of flaxen heads
sing, laugh, and play under the shade of the trees.
The dwelling is at some distance. The mother is not
with them, she is at home ; busy with her domestic
cares, she gives no heed to her children. Yet, merry
as they are, they are in danger. These beautiful
trees are treacherous ; they hide beneath their thickets
thorns, claws and teeth. There the cactus bristles, the
lynx roams, the viper crawls. The children must not
wander away ; beyond a certain limit they would be
lost. Nevertheless, they run about, call to each other,
pull and entice one another away, some of them just
beginning to stammer, and quite unsteady on their
i The Psychostasia.
128 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
feet. At times one of them ventures too far. Then
a formidable trunk is stretched out, seizes the little one,
and gently leads him home.
CHAPTER X
SOME copies, more or less complete, of ^schylus were
at one time in existence.
Besides the small copies in the colonies, which were
limited to a small number of pieces, it is certain that
partial copies of the original at Athens were made by
the Alexandrian critics and scholiasts, who have left
us some fragments ; among others, the comic fragment
of The Argians, the Bacchic fragment of The Edons,
the lines [cited by Stobseus, and even the probably
apocryphal verses given by Justin the Martyr.
These copies, buried, but perhaps not destroyed,
have buoyed up the persistent hope of searchers,
— notably of Le Clerc, who published in Holland,
in 1709, the discovered fragments of Menander. Pierre
Pelhestre of Rouen, the man who had read everything
(for which the worthy Archbishop Perefixe scolded him),
affirmed that the greater part of the poems of ^Ischylus
would be found in the libraries of the monastries of
Mount Athos, just as the five books of The Annals
of Tacitus had been discovered in the convent of Corwey
in Germany, and The Institutes of Quintilian in an
old tower of the abbey of St. Gall.
A tradition, not undisputed, would have it that
Evergetes II returned to Athens, not the original
draft of ^Eschylus, but a copy, leaving the fifteen
talents as compensation.
Independently of the story about Evergetes and
Omar which we have related, and which, while true
in substance, is perhaps legendary in more than one
particular, the loss of so many fine works of antiquity
is but too well explained by the small number of copies.
•Egypt, hi particular, transcribed everything on papyrus.
Papyrus, being very dear, became very rare. People
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 129
were reduced to the necessity of writing on pottery.
To break a vase was to destroy a book. About the
time when Jesus Christ was painted on the walls
at Rome with ass's hoofs and this inscription, ' The
God of the Christians, hoof of an ass ' (namely, in
the third century), to make ten manuscripts of Tacitus
yearly, — or, as we should say to-day, to strike off ten
copies of his works — a Caesar must needs call himself
Tacitus, and believe Tacitus to have been his uncle.
And yet Tacitus is nearly lost. Of the twenty -eight
years of his History of the Ccesars, extending from
the year 69 to the year 96, we have but one complete
year, 69, and a fragment of the year 70. Evergetes
prohibited the exportation of papyrus, which pro
hibition caused parchment to be invented. The
price of papyrus was so high that Firmius the Cyclops,
manufacturer of papyrus about the year 270, made
by his trade enough money to raise armies, wage war
against Aurelian, and declare himself emperor.
Gutenberg is a redeemer. These submersions
of the works of the mind, inevitable before the inven
tion of printing, are now impossible. Printing is
the discovery of the inexhaustible ; it is perpetual
motion found in social science. From time to time
a despot seeks to stop or to slacken it, and he is worn
away by the friction. Thought no more to be shackled,
progress no more to be impeded, the book imperish
able, — such is the result of printing. Before printing,
civilization was subject to losses of substance. The
indications essential to progress, derived from such
a philosopher or such a poet, were all at once missing.
A page was suddenly torn from the human book. To
disinherit humanity of all the great bequests of
genius, the stupidity of a copyist or the caprice of
a tyrant sufficed. No such danger exists in the present
day. Henceforth the undistrainable reigns. No one
could serve a writ upon thought and take up its body.
The manuscript was the body of the masterpiece ;
the manuscript was perishable, and carried off the
130 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
soul — the work. The work, made a printed sheet, is
delivered. It is now only a soul. Kill now this
immortal ! Thanks to Gutenberg, the copy is no
longer exhaustible. Every copy is a germ, and has
in itself its own possible regeneration in thousands of
editions ; the unit is pregnant with the innumerable.
This miracle has rescued universal intelligence. Guten
berg in the fifteenth century emerges from the awful
obscurity, bringing out of the darkness that ransomed
captive, the human mind. Gutenberg is for ever the
auxiliary of life ; he is the permanent fellow- workman
in the great task of civilization. Nothing is done
without him. He has marked the transition from
man enslaved to man free. Try to deprive civiliza
tion of him, and you have Egypt. The simple diminu
tion of the freedom of the press is enough to diminish
the stature of a people.
One of the great features in this deliverance of
man by printing is — let us insist on it — the indefinite
preservation of poets and philosophers. Gutenberg
is a second father of the creations of the mind. Before
him — yes, it was possible for a masterpiece to die.
A mournful thing to say : Greece and Rome have
left vast ruins of books. A whole facade of the human
mind half crumbled : such is antiquity. Here the
ruin of an epic, there a tragedy dismantled ; great
verses effaced, buried, and disfigured, pediments of
ideas almost entirely fallen, geniuses truncated like
columns, palaces of thought without ceiling and
door, bleached bones of poems, a death's-head which
was once a strophe, immortality in rubbish ! These
things inspire bodeful dreams. Oblivion, a black
spider, hangs its web between the drama of jEschylus
and the history of Tacitus.
Where is ^Eschylus ? In scraps everywhere.
JEschylus is scattered about in twenty texts. His
ruins must be sought in innumerable places. Athe-
nseus gives the dedication ' To Time ', Macrobius the
fragment of Mtna and the homage to the Palici,
THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE 131
Pausanias the epitaph ; the biographer is anonymous ;
Goltzius and Meursius give the titles of the lost pieces.
We know from Cicero, in the Disputationcs Tus-
culance, that ^Eschylus was a Pythagorean ; from
Herodotus that he fought bravely at Marathon ; from
Diodorus of Sicily that his brother Amynias behaved
valiantly at Plataea ; from Justin that his brother
Cynegyrus was heroic at Salamis. We know by the
didascalies that The Persians was represented under
the archon Meno, The Seven Chiefs against Thebes
under the archon Theagenides, and The Oresteia
under the archon Philocles ; we know from Aristotle
that ^Eschylus was the first to venture to make two
personages speak at once on the stage ; from Plato
that the slaves were present at his plays ; from Horace
that he invented the mask and the buskin ; from
Pollux that pregnant women miscarried at the appear
ance of his Furies ; from Philostratus that he abridged
the monodies ; from Suidas that his theatre fell in
under the weight of the crowd ; from JSlian that he
committed blasphemy ; from Plutarch that he was
exiled ; from Valerius Maximus that an eagle killed
him by letting a tortoise fall on his head ; from Quin-
tilian that Jus plays were recast ; from Fabricius
that his sons are accused of the crime of leze-paternity ;
from the Arundel marbles the date of his birth, the
date of his death, and his age, sixty-nine years.
Now, take away from the drama the Orient and
replace it by the North, take away Greece and put
in England, take away India and put Germany (that
other immense mother, Alemannia, All-men), take
away Pericles and put in Elizabeth, take away the
Parthenon and put in the Tower of London, take
away the plebs and put in the mob, take away fatality
and put in melancholy, take away the Gorgon and put
in the witch, take away the eagle and put in the cloud,
take away the sun and light the wind-swept heath
with a ghastly moonrise, — and you have Shakespeare.
Given the dynasty of men of genius, the originality
132 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of each being absolutely reserved, the poet of the
Carlovingian formation being the natural successor
of the poet of the Jupiterian formation, the Gothic
mist succeeding the antique mystery, — and Shake
speare is ^Eschylus II.
There remains the right of the French Revolution,
creator of the third world, to be represented in Art.
Art is an immense gaping chasm, ready to receive
all that is within possibility.
BOOK V
SOULS
CHAPTER I
THE production of souls is the secret of the unfathom
able depth. The innate, what a shadow ! What
is that concentration of the unknown which takes
place hi the darkness ; arid whence abruptly breaks
the light of genius ? What is the law of such advents,
O Love ? The human heart does its work, on earth,
and by that the great deep is moved. What is that
incomprehensible meeting of material sublimation
and moral sublimation in the atom, indivisible from
the point of view of life, incorruptible from the point
of view of death ? The atom, — what a marvel !
No dimension, no extent, nor height, nor breadth,
nor thickness, independent of every possible measure
ment ; and yet, everything in this nothing ! For
algebra a geometrical point, for philosophy a soul.
As a geometrical point, the basis of science ; as a
soul, the basis of faith. Such is the atom. Two
urns, the sexes, imbibe life from the infinite, and the
spilling of one into the other produces the being.
This is the norm for all, for the animal as well as for
man. But the man more than man, whence comes
he?
The supreme intelligence, which here below is
the great man, what is the power which evokes it,
incarnates it, and reduces it to a human state ? What
part do flesh and blood take in this miracle ? Why
do certain terrestrial sparks seek certain celestial
molecules ? Where do they plunge, those sparks ?
Whither do they go ? How do they proceed ? What
133
134 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
is this faculty of man to set fire to the unknown ?
This mine, the infinite, this product, a genius, — what
more formidable ? Whence does it issue ? Why,
at a given moment, this one, and not that one ! Here,
as everywhere, the incalculable law of affinities appears
but to escape our ken. One gets a glimpse, but seea
not. 0 forgeman of the gulf ! where art thou ?
Qualities the most diverse, the most complex, the
most opposed in appearance, enter into the composi
tion of souls. Contraries are not mutually exclusive ;
far from that, they complete each other. Such a
prophet contains a scholiast ; such a magian is a
philologian. Inspiration knows its own trade. Every
poet is a critic : witness the excellent piece of theatri
cal criticism that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of
Hamlet. A visionary mind may also be precise, like
Dante, who writes a book on rhetoric, and a grammar.
A precise mind may be also visionary, like Newton,
who comments on the Apocalypse ; like Leibnitz,
who demonstrates, nova inventa logica, the Holy
Trinity. Dante knows the distinctions between the
three sorts of words, parola piana, parola sdrucciola,
parola tronca : he knows that the piana gives a trochee,
the sdrucciola a dactyl, and the tronca an iamb. New
ton is perfectly sure that the Pope is the Antichrist.
Dante combines and calculates ; Newton dreams.
There is no tangible law in this obscurity. No
system is possible. The currents of adhesion and
of cohesion cross each other at random. At times
one imagines that one detects the phenomenon of
the transmission of the idea ; one seems- distinctly
to see a hand taking the torch from him who is depart
ing, and passing it on to him who arrives. 1642, for
example, is a strange year. Galileo dies, Newton is
born in that year. Very good, it is a clue ; but try
to tie it, it breaks at once. Here is a disappearance :
on the 23rd of April, 1616, on the same day, almost
at the same minute, Shakespeare and Cervantes die.
Why are these two flames extinguished at the same
SOULS 135
moment ? No apparent logic. A whirlwind in the
night.
Questions unanswered at every turn: why does
Commodus issue from Marcus Aurelius ?
These problems beset in the desert Jerome, that
man of the caves, that Isaiah of the New Testament.
He interrupted his preoccupation with eternity and
his attention to the trumpet of the archangel, in
order to meditate on the soul of some Pagan in whom
he felt interested ; he calculated the age of Persius,
connecting that research with some obscure chance
of possible salvation for that poet, dear to the Cenobite
on account of his austerity. And nothing is so sur
prising as to see this wild thinker, half naked on his
straw like Job, dispute on this question, apparently
so frivolous, of the birth of a man, with Rufinus and
Theophilus of Alexandria, — Rufinus observing to him
that he is mistaken in his calculations, and that Persius
having been born in December, under the consulship
of Publius and Marius Asinius Callus, these periods
do not correspond rigorously with the year II of the
two hundred and third olympiad and the year II of
the two hundred and tenth, the dates fixed by Jerome.
It is thus that the mystery invites contemplation.
These calculations, almost wild, of Jerome or others
like him, are made by more than one dreamer. Never
to find a stop, to pass from one spiral to another like
Archimedes, and from one zone to another like Alighieri,
to fall fluttering down the circular shaft, — this is the
eternal lot of the dreamer. He strikes against the
hard wall on which the pale ray glides. Sometimes
certainty comes to him as an obstacle, and some
times clearness as a fear. He keeps on his way. He
is the bird beneath the vault. It is frightful ; but
no matter, the dreamer goes on.
To muse is to think here and there, passim. What
means the birth of Euripides during the battle of
Salamis, where Sophocles, a youth, prays, and whero
^Eschylus, a mature man, fights ? What means the
136 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
birth of Alexander the night which saw the burning
of the temple of Ephesus ? What tie exists between
that temple and that man ? Is it the conquering
and radiant spirit of Europe, which, perishing in the
form of the masterwork, reappears in the form of
the hero ? For it must not be forgotten that Ctesiphon
is the Greek architect of the temple of Ephesus. We
mentioned just now the simultaneous disappearance
of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Here is another
case not less surprising. The day Diogenes dies
at Corinth, Alexander dies at Babylon. These two
cynics — the one of the tub, the other of the sword
—depart together ; and Diogenes, eager to bathe in
the radiance of the vast unknown, will again say to
Alexander, ' Stand out of my sunlight '.
What is the meaning of certain harmonies in the
myths represented by divine men ? What is that
analogy between Hercules and Jesus which struck
the Fathers of the Church, which shocked Sorel but
edified Duperron, and which makes Alcides a
kind of material mirror of Christ ? Was there not
a community of soul and an unconscious commu
nication between the Greek legislator and the Hebrew
legislator, who (neither of them knowing the other,
or even suspecting his existence) created at the same
moment, the first the Areopagus, the second the
Sanhedrim ? Strange resemblance between the jubilee
of Moses and the jubilee of Lycurgus ! What are
these double paternities, — paternity of the body,
paternity of the soul, like that of David for Solomon ?
Giddy heights, steeps, precipices.
He who looks too long into this sacred horror feels
immensity unsettling his brain. What does the
sounding-line give you when thrown into that mystery ?
What do you see ? Conjectures waver, doctrines
shudder, hypotheses float ; all human philosophy
shivers in the mournful blast rising from that chasm.
The expanse of the possible is in some sort under
your eyes. The dream that you have within your-
SOULS 137
self, you discover beyond yourself. All is indistinct.
Confused white shadows are moving. Are they
souls ? In the deeps of space there are passings
of vague archangels : will they one day be men ?
Grasping your head between your hands, you strive
to see and to know. You are at the window opening
into the unknown. On all sides the deep layers of
effects and causes, heaped one behind the other,
wrap you with mist. The man who meditates not,
lives in blindness ; the man who meditates, li ves in
darkness. The choice between darkness and darkness,
—that is all we have. In that darkness, which thus
far is nearly all our science, experience gropes, obser
vation lies in wait, supposition wanders about. If
you gaze into it very often, you become the vatcs.
Protracted religious meditation takes possession of
you.
Every man has within him his Patmos. He is
free to go, or not to go, out upon that frightful promon
tory of thought from which one perceives the shadow.
If he goes not, he remains in the common life, with
the common conscience, with the common virtue,
with the common faith, or with the common doubt ;
and it is well. For inward peace it is evidently the
best. If he goes out upon those heights, he is taken
captive. The profound waves of the marvellous
have appeared to him. No one views with impunity
that ocean. Henceforth he will be the thinker,
dilated, enlarged, but floating ; that is to say, the
dreamer. He will partake of the poet and of the
prophet. Henceforth a certain portion of him be
longs to the shadow. An element of the boundless
enters into his life, into his conscience, into his virtue,
into his philosophy. Having a different measure
from other men, he becomes extraordinary in their
eyes. He has duties which they have not. He lives
in a sort of diffused prayer, and, strange indeed, at
taches himself to an indeterminate certainty which
he calls God. He distinguishes in that twilight enough
138 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of the anterior life and enough of the ulterior life to
seize these two ends of the dark thread, and with
them to bind his soul to life. Who has drunk will
drink, who has dreamed will dream. He will not
give up that alluring abyss, that sounding of the
fathomless, that indifference for the world and for
this life, that entrance into the forbidden, that effort
to handle the impalpable and to see the invisible :
he returns to it, he leans and bends over it, he takes
one step forward, then two ; and thus it is that one
penetrates into the impenetrable, and thus it is that
one finds the boundless release of infinite meditation.
He who descends there is a Kant ; he who falls
there is a Swedenborg.
To preserve the freedom of the will in that expansion,
is to be great. But, however great one may be, the
problems cannot be solved. One may ply the fathom
less with questions : nothing more. As for the
answers, they are there, but veiled by the shadow.
The colossal lineaments of truth seem at times to
appear for a moment ; then they fade away, and are
lost in the absolute. Of all these questions, that
among them all which besets the intellect, that among
them all which weighs upon the heart, is the question
of the soul.
Does the soul exist ? — question the first. The
persistence of self is the longing of man. Without
the persistent self, all creation is for him but an immense
cui bono ? Listen, therefore, to the tremendous
affirmation which bursts forth from all consciences.
The whole sum of God that there is on the earth,
within all men, concentrates itself in a single cry to
affirm the soul. And then, question the second:
Are there great souls ?
It seems impossible to doubt it. Why not great
minds in humanity, as well as great trees in the forest,
as well as great peaks at the horizon ? We behold
great souls as we behold great mountains : hence
they exist. But here the interrogation presses, it
SOULS 139
becomes anxious : whence come they ? What are
they ? Who are they ? Are these atoms more divine
than others ? This atom, for instance, which shall
be endowed with irradiation here below, this one
which shall be Thales, this one ^Eschylus, this one
Plato, this one Ezekiel, this one Maccabneus, this
one Apollonius of Tyana, this one Tertullian, this
one Epictetus, this one Marcus Aurelius, this one
Nestorius, this one Pelagius, this one Gama, this one
Copernicus, this one John Huss, this one Descartes,
this one Vincent de Paul, this one Piranesi, this one
Washington, this one Beethoven, this one Garibaldi,
this one John Brown, — all these atoms, souls having
a sublime function among men, have they seen other
worlds, and do they bring to earth the essence of
those worlds ? The master-souls, the guiding intelli
gences, — who sends them ? who determines their
advent ? who is judge of the actual want of humanity ?
who chooses the souls ? who musters the atoms ?
who ordains the departures ? who premeditates the
arrivals ? Does the link-atom, the atom universal,
the atom binder of worlds, exist ? Is not that the
great soul ?
To complete one universe by the other;" to pour
upon the insufficiency of the one the excess of the
other ; to increase here liberty, there science, there
the ideal ; to communicate to inferiors patterns of
superior beauty ; to effect an exchange of effluences ;
to bring the central fire to the planet ; to harmonize
the various worlds of the same system ; to urge for
ward those which lag behind ; to mingle the crea
tions, — does not that mysterious function exist ?
Is it not unwittingly fulfilled by certain chosen
spirits who, during the moments of their earthly
pilgrimage, are in part unknown to themselves ?
Is it not the function of such or such an atom, a divine
motive power called soul, to bring a solar man to go
and come among terrestrial men ? Since the floral
atom exists, why should not the stellar atom exist ?
140 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
That solar man will be, in turn, the sarant, the seer,
the calculator, the thaumaturgus, the navigator,
the architect, the magian, the legislator, the philosopher,
the prophet, the hero, the poet. The life of humanity
will move onward through them. The transport
of civilization will be their task ; these spirit- teams
will draw the huge chariot. One being unyoked,
another will start again. Each turn of a century
will be a stage, and there will never be a break in
the connection. That which one mind begins, another
mind will finish, chaining phenomenon to phenomenon,
sometimes without suspecting links. To each revolu
tion in fact will correspond an adequate revolution
in idea, and reciprocally. The horizon will not be
allowed to extend to the right without stretching
as much to the left. Men the most diverse, the most
opposite even, will find unexpected points of contact,
and in these alliances the imperious logic of progress
will be made plain. Orpheus, Buddha, Confucius,
Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Moses, Manu, Mahomet, with
many more, will be links of the same chain. A Guten
berg discovering a method for the sowing of civiliza
tion and a means for the ubiquity of thought, will be
followed by a Christopher Columbus discovering a
new field. A Christopher Columbus discovering a
new world will be followed by a Luther discovering
a new liberty. After Luther, innovator in dogma,
will come Shakespeare, innovator in art. One genius
completes another.
But not in the same region. The astronomer
supplements the philosopher ; the legislator is the
executor of the poet's wishes ; the fighting liberator
lends his aid to the thinking liberator ; the poet
corroborates the statesman. Newton is the appendix
to Bacon ; Danton originates in Diderot ; Milton
confirms Cromwell ; Byron supports Bozzaris ; ^Eschy-
lus, before him, has assisted Miltiades. The work
is mysterious even for the men who perform it. Some
are conscious of it, others are not. At great distances,
SOULS 141
at intervals of centuries, the correlations manifest
themselves, wonderful ; the softening of human
manners begun by the religious revealer, will be
completed by the philosophical reasoner, so that
Voltaire continues Jesus. Their work harmonizes
and coincides. If this concordance depended upon
them, both would resist, perhaps : the one, the divine
man, indignant in his martyrdom ; the other, the
human man, humiliated in his irony. But the fact
remains. Some power that is very high ordains it
thus.
Yes, let us meditate upon these vast obscurities.
Reverie fixes its gaze upon the shadow until there
issues from it light.
Properly speaking, civilization is humanity develop
ing itself from within outward. Human intelligence
radiates, and, little by little, wins, subdues, and hu
manizes matter. Sublime domestication ! This
labour has phases, and each of these phases, marking
an age in progress, is opened or closed by one of those
beings called ' men of genius.' These missionary
spirits, these legates of God, do they not carry in them
a sort of partial solution of the question, so abstruse,
of free-will ? The apostolate, being an act of will,
is related on one side to liberty ; and on the other,
being a mission, is related by predestination to
fatality. The voluntary necessity. Such is the
Messiah; such is genius.
Now let us return — for all questions which pertain
to mystery form the circle from which one cannot
escape — let us return to our starting-point and to
our first question : What is a genius ? Is it not
perchance a cosmic soul, — a soul penetrated by a ray
from the unknown ? In what deeps are such souls
prepared ? What stages do they pass through ? What
medium do they traverse ? What is the germination
which precedes the hatching ? What is the antenatal1
mystery ? Where was this atom ? It seems to be
the point of intersection of all the forces. How come*
H2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
all the powers to converge and tie themselves into an
invisible unity in this sovereign intelligence ? Who
has brooded upon this eagle ? The incubation of
genius by the abysmal deep : what a riddle ! These
lofty souls, momentarily belonging to earth, have they
not seen something else ? Is it for that reason that
they come to us with so many intuitions ? Some
of them seem full of the dream of a previous world.
Is it thence that comes to them the terror that they
sometimes feel ? Is it this which inspires them with
perplexing words ? Is it this which fills them with
strange agitations ? Is it this which possesses them
until they seem to see and touch imaginary things
and beings? Moses had his burning bush; Socrates
his familiar demon ; Mahomet his dove ; Luther his
goblin playing with his pen, to whom he would say,
* Be still, there ! ' Pascal his open precipice, which
he hid with a screen.
Many of these majestic souls are evidently conscious
of a mission. They act at times as if they knew. They
seem to have a confused certainty. They have it.
They have it for the mysterious ensemble ; they have
it also for the detail. John Huss dying predicts
Luther. He exclaims : ' You burn the goose (Huss),
but the swan will come '. Who sends these souls ?
Who fills them with life ? What is the law of their
formation anterior and superior to life ? Who pro
vides them with force, patience, fruitfulness, will,
wrath ? From what urn of goodness have they
drawn their austerity ? In what regions of the light
nings have they gathered love ? Each of these great
new-born souls renews philosophy, or art, or science,
or poetry, and recreates these worlds in its own image.
They are as if impregnated with creative power. At
times there emanates from these souls a truth which
lights up the questions on which it falls : such a soul
is like a star from which light should gutter. From
what wonderful source, then, do they proceed, that
they are all different ? No one springs from the
SOULS 143
other, and yet they have this in common, — that they
all bring in the infinite. Incommensurable and
insoluble question ! That does not hinder worthy
pedants and knowing people from bridling up and
saying, as they point to the heights of civilization
where shines the starry group of men of genius :
* You shall see no more men like those. They cannot
be matched. There are no more of them. We
declare to you that the earth has exhausted its con
tingent of master-spirits. Now for decadence and
general closing up. We must make up our minds
to it. We shall have no more men of genius '. Ah !
you have seen the bottom of the unfathomable, you !
CHAPTER II
No, Thou art not worn out ! Thou hast not before
thee the bourn, the limit, the term, the frontier. Thou
hast nothing to bound Thee, as winter bounds summer,
as lassitude the birds, as the precipice the torrent,
as the cliff the ocean, as the tomb man. Thou art
without end. * Hitherto shalt thou come, but no
farther ', is spoken by Thee, and it is not spoken of
Thee. No, Thou windest not a diminishing skein
of brittle thread. No, Thou stoppest not short. No,
Thy quantity decreaseth not ; Thy breadth is not
becoming narrowness ; Thy faculty miscarrieth not.
No, it is not true that they begin to perceive in Thy
omnipotence that transparence which announces the
end, and to get a glimpse of something else beyond
Thee. Something beyond ! And what then ? — an
obstacle : obstacle to whom ? An obstacle to creation !
an obstacle to the immanent ! an obstacle to the
necessary ! What a dream !
Men say, ' This is as far as God advances. Ask
no more of Him. He starts from here and stops there.
In Honor, in Aristotle, in Newton, He has given you
all that He had. Leave Him at rest now ; His strength
is drained. God does not begin again. He could
144 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
do that once, He cannot do it twice. He has quite
spent Himself upon this man ; enough of God does
not remain to make a similar man '. At hearing
such things, wert Thou a man like them, Thou wouldst
smile in Thy dreadful deep ; but Thou art not in a
dreadful deep, and, being goodness, Thou hast no
smile. The smile is but a passing wrinkle, unknown
to the absolute.
Thou stricken by a chill ! Thou cease ! Thou
suffer impediment ! Thou to cry ' Halt ! ' Never.
Shouldst Thou be compelled to take breath after
having created a man ? No ; whoever that man
may be, Thou art God. If this pale throng of living
beings, in presence of the unknown, must feel wonder
and dismay at something, it is not at beholding the
generative principle dry up, and creative power grow
sterile ; it is, O God, at the eternal unleashing of
miracles. The hurricane of miracles blows perpetually.
Day and night the phenomena surge around us on all
sides, and (what is not least marvellous) without
disturbing the majestic tranquillity of the Creation.
This tumult is harmony.
The huge concentric waves of universal life are
shoreless. The starry sky that we study is but a
partial appearance. We grasp but a few meshes
of the vast network of existence. The complication
of the phenomenon, of which a glimpse can be caught
beyond our senses only by contemplation and ecstasy,
makes the mind giddy. The thinker who reaches
so far is to other men only a visionary. The necessary
interlacement of the perceptible with the non-per
ceptible strikes the philosopher with stupor. This
plenitude is required by Thy omnipotence, which
admits no gap. The interpenetration of universe
with universe makes part of Thy infinitude. Here
we extend the word * universe ' to an order of facts
that no astronomer can reach. In the Cosmos, invisi
ble to fleshly eye, but revealed to vision, sphere blends
with sphere without change of form, the creations
SOUIJ3 145
being of diverse density ; so that, to all appearance,
with our world is inexplicably merged another, invisible
to us as we to it.
And Thou, centre and base of things, Thou, the
* I Am ', exhausted ! Can the absolute serenities
be distressed, from time to time, by want of power
on the part of the Infinite ? Shall we believe that
an hour may come when Thou canst no longer
furnish the light of which humanity has need ; that,
mechanically unwearied, Thou mayst grow faint in
the intellectual and moral order, so that men may
say, ' God is extinct upon that side ' ? No ! No !
No ! O Father !
Phidias created does not hinder Thee from making
Michael Angelo. Michael Angelo formed, there still
remains to Thee the material for Rembrandt. A
Dante does not fatigue Thee. Thou art no more
exhausted by a Homer than by a star. Auroras by
the side of auroras, the indefinite renewal of meteors,
worlds above worlds, the portentous passage of those
flaming stars called comets, men of genius, Orpheus,
then Moses, then Isaiah, then ^Eschylus, then Lucre
tius, then Tacitus, then Juvenal, then Cervantes and
Rabelais, then Shakespeare, then Moliere, then Vol
taire, those who have been and those to come, — all
that does not weary Thee. Chaos of constellations !
there is room in Thy immensity.
PART SECOND
BOOK I
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS
CHAPTER I
* SHAKESPEARE ', says Forbes, ' had neither the tragic
talent nor the comic talent. His tragedy is artificial,
and his comedy is but instinctive.' Dr Johnson
confirms the verdict. * His tragedy is the product
of industry, and his comedy the product of instinct.'
After Forbes and Johnson have contested his claim
to dramatic talent, Greene contests his claim to origi
nality. Shakespeare is * a plagiarist ' ; Shakespeare
is ' a copyist ' ; Shakespeare * has invented nothing ' ;
he is * a crow adorned with the plumes of others * ;
he pilfers from ^Eschylus, Boccaccio, Bandello, Hollin-
shed, Belleforest, Benoist de St. Maur ; he pilfers
from Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, Robert of Wace,
Peter of Langtoft, Robert Manning, John de Mande-
ville, Sackville, Spenser; he pilfers from the Arcadia
of Sidney ; he pilfers from the anonymous work called
The True Chronicle of King Leir ; he pilfers from
! Rowley, in The Troublesome Reign of King John
'(1591), the character of the bastard Faulconridge.
Shakespeare plunders Robert Greene ; Shakespeare
plunders Dekker and Chettle. Hamlet is not his ;
'Othello is not his. As for Green, Shakespeare is for
him not only ' a bumbaster of blank verses ', a * Shake-
scene ', a Joliannes factotum (allusion to his former
position as call-boy and supernumerary) ; Shakespeare
is a wild beast. Crow no longer suffices ; Shakespeare
is promoted to a tiger. Here is the text: * Tyger's
147
148 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
heart wrapt in a player's hide ' (A Groats-worth of
Wit, 1592) i.
Thomas Rymer thus judges Othello : ' The moral
of this story is certainly very instructive ; it is a
warning to good housewives to look after their linen '.
Then the same Rymer condescends to give up joking,
and to take Shakespeare in earnest : ' What edifying
and useful impression can the audience receive from
such poetry ? To what can this poetry serve, unless
it is to mislead our good sense, to throw our thoughts
into disorder, to trouble our brain, to pervert our
instincts, to crack our imaginations, to corrupt our
taste, and to fill our heads with vanity, confusion,
clatter, and nonsense ? ' This was printed some four
score years after the death of Shakespeare, in 1693.
All the critics and all the connoisseurs were of one
opinion.
Here are some of the reproaches unanimously
addressed to Shakespeare : Conceits, word-play, puns.
Improbability, extravagance, absurdity. Obscenity.
Puerility. Bombast, emphasis, exaggeration. False
glitter, pathos. Far-fetched ideas, affected style.
Abuse of contrast and metaphor. Subtilty. Immo
rality. Writing for the mob. Pandering to the rabble.
1 It may be well to transcribe the familiar passage referred
to, noting that Hugo here distinguishes between Robert
Greene, the dramatist (whom he re -christens Thomas)
and an imaginary critic, ' Green.' In the Groats-worth of
Wit bought with a Million of Repentaunce, written by the
unhappy Greene upon his death -bed, he warns his fellow
playwrights of certain ' puppits that speak from our mouths
those anticks garnished in our colours '. ' Yes, trust them
not ; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our
feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide,
supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse
as the best of you ; and being an absolute Johannes Fac
totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a
countrie.' Greene's reference to the line of Henry VI
Part III, ' O tiger's heart, wrapped in a woman's hide ! '
is of extreme interest, says Halliwell-Phillipps, as including
the earliest record of words composed by the great drama
tist. Tn.
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 149
Delighting in the horrible. Want of grace. Want
of charm. Overreaching his aim. Having too much
wit. Having no wit. Overdoing his work.
* This Shakespeare is a rude and savage mind ',
says Lord Shaftesbury. Dryden adds, ' Shakespeare
is unintelligible '. Airs Lennox applies the ferule
to Shakespeare as follows : ' This poet alters historical
truth'. A German critic of 1680, Bentheim, feels
himself disarmed, because, says he, * Shakespeare is
a mind full of drollery '. Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's
protege, relates (ix, 175, Gifford's edition) : ' I recollect
that the players often mentioned it as an honour to
Shakespeare that, in his writing, whatsoever he
penned, he never blotted out a line : I answered.
" Would to God he had blotted out a thousand ! " '
This wish, moreover, was granted by the worthy
publishers of 1623, Blount and Jaggard. They struck
out of Hamlet alone, two hundred lines ; they cut out
two hundred and twenty lines of King Lear *. Garrick
played at Drury Lane only the King Lear of Nahum
Tate 2. Listen again to Rymer : ' Othello is a san
guinary farce without wit '. Dr Johnson adds :
* Julius Cczsar, a cold tragedy, and lacking the power
to move the public '. * I think ', says Warburton,
in a letter to the Dean of St Asaph, ' that Swift has
much more wit than Shakespeare, and that the
comic in Shakespeare, altogether low as it is, is very
inferior to the comic in Shad well '. As for the witches
in Macbeth, * nothing equals ', says that critic of the
seventeenth century, Forbes, repeated by a critic
1 This statement is very wild. Readers unversed in
literary history should consult Dowden,or Halliwell-Phillipps,
or Mrs. Caroline H.Dall's popularization of the latter, en titled,
What we really know about Shakespeare. TB.
* Furness says that Tate's version of Lear held the stage
for a hundred and sixty years, and in it all the greatest
actors won applause. Mac-ready (Reminiscences) says it ' was
the only acting copy from the date of its production until
the restoration of Shakespeare's tragedy at Covent Garden
in 1838 '. TB.
150 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of the nineteenth, ' the absurdity of such a spectacle '.
Samuel Foote, the author of The Young Hypocrite,
makes this declaration : ' The comic in Shakespeare
is too heavy, and does not make one laugh ; it is
buffoonery without wit '. Finally, Pope, in 1725,
finds a reason why Shakespeare wrote his dramas,
and exclaims, * One must eat ! '
After these words of Pope, one cannot understand
with what object Voltaire, aghast about Shakespeare,
writes : ' Shakespeare, whom the English take for
a Sophocles, nourished about the time of Lopez [Lope,
if you please, Voltaire] de Vega '. Voltaire adds :
* You are not ignorant that in Hamlet the diggers
prepare a grave, drinking, singing ballads, and cracking
over the heads of dead people jokes appropriate to
men of their profession '. And, concluding, he charac
terizes the whole scene by the term ' these fooleries '.
He characterizes Shakespeare's pieces as ' monstrous
farces called tragedies ', and completes the judgment
by declaring that Shakespeare * has ruined the English
theatre '.
Marmontel comes to see Voltaire at Ferney. Vol
taire is in bed, holding a book in his hand ; all at once
he rises up, throws the book away, stretches his thin
legs out of the bed, and cries to Marmontel : ' Your
Shakespeare is a Huron Indian '. ' He is not my
Shakespeare at all ', replies Marmontel.
Shakespeare was an occasion for Voltaire to show
his skill at the target. Voltaire missed it rarely.
Voltaire shot at Shakespeare as peasants shoot at a
goose. It was Voltaire who had opened in France
the fire against this Barbarian. He nicknamed him
the ' Saint Christopher of Tragic Poets '. He said
to Madame de Graffigny : ' Shakespeare for a jest '.
He said to Cardinal de Bernis, ' Compose pretty
verses ; deliver us, monsignor, from plagues, from
bigots, from the Academy of the King of Prussia,
from the Bull Unigenitus and its supporters, from
the convulsionists, and from that ninny Shakespeare.
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 151
Libera nos, Domine '. The attitude of Freron toward
Voltaire has in the eyes of posterity as an extenuating
circumstance the attitude of Voltaire toward Shake
speare. Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth cen
tury Voltaire gives the law. The moment that Vol
taire sneers at Shakespeare, Englishmen of wit, such
is my Lord Marshal, follow suit. Dr Johnson admits
the ignorance and vulgarity ' of Shakespeare. Fred-
crick II also puts in a word. He writes to Voltaire hi
xespect of Julius Caesar : * You have done well in
recasting, according to principles, the formless piece
of that Englishman '. Thus stood Shakespeare in
the last century. Voltaire insults him ; La Harpe
protects him : ' Shakespeare himself, coarse as he
was, was not without reading and knowledge'1.
In our days, the class of critics of whom we have
just seen some samples have not lost courage. Cole
ridge speaks of Measure for Measure : ' a painful
comedy ', he hints. * Revolting ', says Mr Knight.
* Disgusting ', responds Mr Hunter 2.
In 1804 the author of one of those idiotic Universal
Biographies, — in which they contrive to relate the
history of Calas without mentioning the name of
Voltaire, and to which governments, knowing what
they are about, grant readily their patronage and
subsidies, — a certain Delandine, feels himself called
upon to be a judge, and to pass sentence on Shakespeare ;
and after having said that * Shakespeare, which is
pronounced Chekspir ', had, in his youth, * stolen the
deer of a nobleman ', he adds : ' Nature had brought
together in the head of this poet the highest greatness
we can imagine, with the lowest coarseness, without
wit '. Lately we read the following words, written
1 La Harpe, Introduction to the Course in Literature.
a Victor Hugo could hardly have betrayed with more
charming simplicity his unique and delightful ignoance
of English literature than by thus confusing with Shake
speare's revilera such devout worshippers as Coleridge and
Knight. TB.
152 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
a short time ago by an eminent dolt who is still living :
' Second-rate authors and inferior poets, such as
Shakespeare ', etc.
CHAPTER II
THE poet is necessarily at once poet, historian, and
philosopher. Herodotus and Thales are included
in Homer. Shakespeare, likewise, is this triple mar.
He is besides, a painter, a painter upon a colossal
scale. The poet in reality does more than relate,
he exhibits. Poets have in them a reflector, obser
vation, and a condenser, emotion ; thence those grand
luminous spectres which issue from their brain, and
which go on shining for ever against the murky human
wall. These phantoms have life. To have an exis
tence as real as that of Achilles would be the ambition
of Alexander. Shakespeare has tragedy, comedy,
fairy scenes, hymn, farce, deep divine laughter, terror
and horror, — in one word, the drama. He touches
the two poles : he belongs to Olympus and to the
itinerant show. No possibility escapes him. When
he grasps you, you are subdued. Do not expect
pity from him. His cruelty is pathetic. He shows
you a mother, Constance, the mother of Arthur ;
and when he has brought you to such a point of tender
ness that your heart is as her heart, he kills the child.
He goes farther in horror even than history, — a difficult
feat : he does not content himself with killing Rutland
and driving York to despair ; he dips in the blood of
the son the handkerchief with which he wipes the
father's eyes. He causes Elegy to be choked by the
Drama, Desdemona by Othello. No respite to anguish :
genius is inexorable. It has its law, and follows it.
The mind also has its inclined planes, and these slopes
determine its direction. Shakespeare flows toward
the terrible. Shakespeare, ^Eschylus, Dante, are
great streams of human emotion pouring from
the depth of their cavern the urn of tears.
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 153
The poet is only limited by his aim ; he considers
nothing but the idea to be worked out ; he recognizes
no sovereignty, no necessity, save the idea : for since
Art emanates from the Absolute, in Art, as in the
Absolute, the end justifies the means. This is, it may
be said in passing, one of those deviations from the
ordinary terrestrial law which make the higher criti
cism muse and reflect, and which reveal to it the
mysterious side of Art. In Art, above all, is visible
the quid divinum. The poet moves in his work as
Providence in its own. He excites, dismays, strikes ;
then exalts or depresses, often in inverse ratio to
your expectation, ploughing into your very soul
through surprise. Now consider. Art, like the
Infinite, has a Because superior to all the Whys. Go
and ask of the Ocean, that great lyric poet, the where
fore of a tempest. What seems to you odious or
absurd has an inner reason for existing. Ask of Job
why he scrapes the pus from his ulcer with a potsherd,
and of Dante why he sews with a thread of iron the
eyelids of the ghosts in Purgatory, making the stitches
trickle with frightful tears l. Job upon his dungheap
continues to clean his sore with his potsherd, and Dante
goes on his way. It is the same with Shakespeare.
His sovereign horrors reign and force themselves
upon you. He mingles with them, when he chooses,
the charm, the august charm, of the strong, excelling
the feeble sweetness, the slender attraction, of Ovid
or of Tibullus, as the Venus of Milo excels the Venus
of Medici. The things of the unknown ; the meta
physical problems which recede beneath the diving
plummet ; the enigmas of the soul and of Nature,
which is also a soul ; the far-off intuitions of the even
tual included in destiny ; the amalgams of thought
i ' And as the sun does not reach the blind, so the spirits
of which I was just speaking have not the gift of light.
An iron wire pierces and fastens together their eyelids,
as it is done to the wild hawk in order to tame it.' Purga
tory, canto xiii.
154 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
and event, — can be translated into delicate traceries,
filling poetry with mysterious and exquisite types, the
more lovely that they are somewhat sorrowful, half
clinging to the invisible, and at the same time very
real, absorbed by the shadow behind them, and yet
endeavouring to give you pleasure. Profound grace
does exist.
Prettiness combined with greatness is possible ;
it is found in Homer, — Astyanax is a type of it ; but
the profound grace of which we speak is something
more than this epic delicacy. It is complicated with
a certain agitation, and hints the infinite. It is a
kind of irradiance of blended light and shade. Modern
genius alone has that smiling profundity which discloses
the abyss while veiling it with beauty.
Shakespeare possesses this grace, — the very con
trary of morbid grace, although resembling it, emanat
ing, as it also does, from the tomb. Sorrow, the
deep sorrow of the drama, which is but the human
social atmosphere transferred to Art, envelops this
grace and this horror.
At the centre of his work is Hamlet, — doubt ;
and at the two extremities, love, — Romeo and Othello,
the whole heart. There is light in the folds of Juliet's
shroud, but only blackness in the winding-sheet of
Ophelia disdained and of Desdemona suspected.
These two innocents, to whom love has broken faith,
cannot be consoled. Desdemona sings the song of the
willow, under which the water sweeps away Ophelia.
They are sisters without knowing each other, and
kindred souls, although each has her separate drama.
The willow trembles over them both. In the mysterious
song of the calumniated woman who is about to die,
floats the dishevelled shadow of the drowned Ophelia.
Shakespeare hi philosophy goes at times deeper
than Homer. Beyond Priam there is Lear ; to weep
at ingratitude is worse than to weep at death. Homer
meets envy and strikes it with the sceptre ; Shake
speare gives the sceptre to the envious, and out of
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 155
Thersites creates Richard III. Envy is exposed in
its nakedness all the more strongly for being clothed
in purple ; its reason for existing is then visibly alto
gether in itself : envy on the throne, — what more
striking ?
Deformity in the person of the tyrant is not enough
for this philosopher ; he must have it also in the shape
of the valet, and he creates Falstaff. The dynasty
of common sense, inauguarated in Panurge, continued
in Sancho Panza, goes wrong and miscarries in Falstaff.
The rock which this wisdom splits upon is, in reality,
baseness. Sancho Panza, in combination with the
ass, is one with ignorance ; Falstaff — glutton, poltroon,
savage, obscene, a human face and belly with the
lower parts of the brute — walks on the four hoofs of
turpitude ; Falstaff is the centaur man and pig.
Shakespeare is, above all, imagination. Now —
and this is a truth to which we have already alluded,
and which is well known to thinkers — imagination
is depth. No faculty of the mind penetrates and
plunges deeper than imagination ; it is the great diver.
Science, reaching the lowest depths, meets imagination.
In conic sections, in logarithms, in the differential
and integral calculus, in the calculations of sonorous
waves, in the application of algebra to geometry,
the imagination is the coefficient of calculation, and
mathematics becomes poetry. I have no faith in the
science of stupid men of learning.
The poet philosophizes because he imagines. That
is why Shakespeare has that sovereign management
of reality which enables him to have his way with it.
And his very whims are varieties of the true, — varieties
which deserve meditation. Does not destiny resemble
a constant whim ? Nothing more incoherent in
appearance, nothing less connected, nothing worse
as deduction. Why crown this monster, John ?
Why kill that child, Arthur ? Why have Joan of Arc
burned ? Why Monk triumphant ? Why Louis XV
happy ? Why Louis XVI punished ? Let the logic
156 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of God pass. It is from that logic that the fancy of
the poet is drawn. Comedy bursts forth in the midst
of tears ; the sob rises out of laughter ; figures mingle
and clash ; massive forms, as of beasts, pass clum
sily ; spectres — women, perhaps, perhaps smoke —
float about ; souls, dragon-flies of the shadow, flies of
the twilight, flutter among all those black reeds that
we call passions and events. At one pole Lady Mac
beth, at the other Titania : a colossal thought, and an
immense caprice.
What are The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, The
Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor,
The Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale?
They are fancy, arabesque work. The arabesque
in Art is the same phenomenon as vegetation in Nature.
The arabesque sprouts, grows, knots, exfoliates,
multiplies, becomes green, blooms, and entwines itself
with every dream. The arabesque is incommensurable ;
it has a strange power of extension and enlargement ;
it fills horizons, and opens up others ; it intercepts
the luminous background by innumerable interlace
ments ; and if you mingle the human face with these
entangled branches, the whole thrills you and makes
you giddy. Behind the arabesque, and through its
openings, all philosophy can be seen ; vegetation lives ;
man becomes pantheistic ; an infinite combination takes
form in the infinite ; and before such work, in which
are blended the impossible and the true, the human soul
quivers with an emotion obscure, and yet supreme.
For all this, the edifice ought not to be overrun by
vegetation, nor the drama by arabesque.
One of the characteristics of genius is the singular
union of faculties the most distant. To design an
astragal like Ariosto, then to scrutinize the soul like
Pascal, — such are the poet's gifts. Man's inner tri
bunal belongs to Shakespeare, and he finds you constant
surprises there. He extracts from human conscious
ness whatever it contains of the unforeseen. Few
poets surpass him in this psychical research. Many
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 157
of the strangest peculiarities of the human mind are
indicated by him. He skilfully makes us feel the
simplicity of the metaphysical fact under the com
plication of the dramatic fact. That which the
human creature does not acknowledge to himself,
the obscure thing that he begins by fearing and ends
by desiring, — such is the point of junction and the
strange place of meeting for the heart of the virgin
and the heart of the murderer, for the soul of Juliet and
the soul of Macbeth ; the innocent girl fears and longs
for love, just as the wicked man for ambition. Peri
lous kisses given furtively to the phantom, now smiling
and anon austere.
To all this prodigality — analysis, synthesis, creation
in flesh and bone, reverie, fancy, science, metaphysics
— add history : here the history of historians, there
the history of the tale. This history contains specimens
of everything : of the traitor, from Macbeth, the assas
sin of his guest, up to Coriolanus, the assassin of his
country ; of the despot, from the tyrant brain, Csesar,
to the tyrant belly, Henry VIII ; of the carnivore,
from the lion down to the ursurer. One may say
to Shylock, ' Well bitten, Jew ! ' And in the back
ground of this wonderful drama, on the desert heath,
there appear in the twilight three black shapes promis
ing crowns to murderers, — silhouettes in which Hesiod,
through the vista of ages, perhaps recognizes the
Parca?. Inordinate force, exquisite charm, epic
ferocity, pity, creative faculty, gaiety (that lofty
gaiety unintelligible to narrow understandings), sar
casm (the cutting lash for the wicked), sidereal
grandeur, microscopic tenuity, a universe of poetry,
with its zenith and its nadir, the vast whole, the pro
found detail, — nothing is wanting in this mind. One
feels, on approaching the work of this man, a vast
wind blowing off the shores of a world. The irradiation
of genius on every side, — such is Shakespeare. ' Totus
in antithesi ', says Jonathan Forbes.
158 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER III
ONE of the characteristics which distinguish men of
genius from ordinary minds, is that they have a
double reflection, — just as the carbuncle, according
to Jerome Cardan, differs from crystal and glass in
having a double refraction.
Genius and carbuncle, double reflection, double
refraction : the same phenomenon in the moral and
in the physical order.
Does this diamond of diamonds, the carbuncle,
exist ? It is a question. Alchemy says yes ; chem
istry searches. As for genius, it does exist. It is
sufficient to read one verse of ^Eschylus or Juvenal
in order to find this carbuncle of the human brain.
This phenomenon of double reflection raises to
the highest power in men of genius what rhetoricans
call * antithesis ' ; that is to say, the sovereign faculty
of seeing the two sides of things.
I dislike Ovid, — that proscribed coward, that licker
of bloody hands, that fawning cur of exile, that far
away flatterer disdained by the tyrant, — and I hate
the literary elegance of which Ovid is full ; but I do
not confound that elegance with the powerful anti
thesis of Shakespeare.
Complete minds have everything. Shakespeare
contains Gongora, as Michael Arigelo contains Ber
nini ; and there are on that subject ready-made
sentences : ' Michael Angelo is a mannerist, Shake
speare is antithetical '. These are the formulas of
the school which express the petty view of the great
question of contrast in Art.
Totus in antithesi. Shakespeare is all in antithesis.
Certainly it is not very just to see the entire man,
and such a man, in one of his qualities. But, with this
reservation, let us observe that this saying, totus in
antithesi, which pretends to be a criticism, might be
simply a statement of fact. Shakespeare, in fact,
has deserved, like all truly great poets, this praise,—
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 150
that he is like creation. What is creation ? Good
and evil, joy and sorrow, man and woman, roar and
song, eagle and vulture, lightning and ray, bee and
drone, mountain and valley, love and hate, the medal
and its reverse, beauty and ugliness, star and swine,
high and low, Nature is the eternal bifrons. And
this antithesis, whence comes the antiphrasis, is found
in all the habits of man ; it is in fable, in history, in
philosophy, in language. Are you the Furies, they
call you Eumenides, the Charming ; do you kill your
'brother, you are called Philadelphus ; kill your father,
they will call you Philopater ; be a great general, they
will call you the little corporal. The antithesis of
; Shakespeare is the universal antithesis, present
always and everywhere ; it is the ubiquity of opposites,
— life and death, cold and heat, just and unjust, angel
and demon, heaven and earth, flower and lightning,
'melody and harmony, spirit and flesh, high and low,
ocean and envy, foam and slaver, hurricane and whistle,
'self and not-self, objective and subjective, marvel and
miracle, type and monster, soul and shadow. It is
from this sombre, flagrant quarrel, from this endless
ebb and flow, from this perpetual yes and no, from
'this irreconcilable opposition, from this vast, perma
nent antagonism, that Rembrandt obtains his clare-
obscure, and Piranesi his vertiginous effects.
Before removing this antithesis from Art, we should
begin by removing it from Nature.
CHAPTER IV
* HE is reserved and discreet. You may trust him ;
he will take no advantage. He has, above all, a
very rare quality, — he is sober '.
What is this — a recommendation for a domestic ?
No. It is an eulogy upon a writer. A certain school
called * serious ', has in our days hoisted this motto
for poetry : sobriety. It seems that the only question
should be to preserve literature from indigestion.
100 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Formerly the device was * fecundity and power ' ;
to-day it is ' barley-gruel '. You are in the resplen
dent garden of the Muses, where those divine blossoms
of the mind that the Greeks call ' tropes ' blow in riot
and luxuriance on every branch ; everywhere the
ideal image, everywhere the thought-flower, every
where fruits, metaphors, golden apples, perfumes,
colours, rays, strophes, wonders : touch nothing, be
discreet. It is by plucking nothing there that the
poet is known. Be of the temperance society. A
good critical book is a treatise on the dangers of drink
ing. Do you wish to compose the Iliad, put yourself
on diet. Ah ! thou mayest well open wide thine eyes,
old Rabelais !
Lyricism is heady ; the beautiful intoxicates, the
noble inebriates, the ideal causes giddiness. One
who makes it his starting, point no longer knows what
he is about. When you have walked among the stars,
you are capable of refusing an under prefecture ; you
are no longer in your right mind ; they might offer
you a seat in the senate of Domitian, and you would
refuse it ; you no longer render to Caesar what is due
to Caesar ; you have reached such a point of mental
alienation that you will not even salute the Lord
Incitatus, consul and horse. See what is the result
of your having jjjeen drinking in that shocking place,
the Empyrean ! You become proud, ambitious, dis
interested. Now be sober. It is forbidden to haunt
the tavern of the sublime
Liberty means libertinism. To restrain yourself
is well ; to emasculate yourself is better.
Pass your life in holding in.
Sobriety, decorum, respect for authority, irre
proachable toilet. No poetry unless it is fashionably
dressed. An uncombed savannah, a lion which does
not pare its nails, an unregulated torrent, the navel
of the sea which exposes itself to the sight, the cloud
which forgets itself so far as to show Aldebaran. —
Oh ! shocking. The wave foams on the rock, the
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS IG1
cataract vomits into the gulf, Juvenal spits on the
tyrant. Fie !
We like too little better than too much. No
exaggeration. Henceforth the rose-bush is to be
required to count its roses ; the meadow to be re
quested not to be so prodigal of daisies ; the spring
to be commanded to calm itself. The nests are rather
too prolific. Attention, groves ! not so many war
blers, if you please. The Milky Way will have the
goodness to number its stars ; there are a good many.
Take example from the big Cereus serpentaria
of the Jardin des Plantes, which blooms but once
in fifty years : that is a flower truly respectable.
A true critic of the sober school is that garden-
keeper who, to the question, 'Have you any night
ingales in your trees ? ' replied, * Ah ! don't mention
it ; during the whole month of May these ugly fowl
have been doing nothing but bawl '.
M. Suard gave to Marie Joseph Chenier this certifi
cate : ' His style has the great merit of not containing
comparisons '. In our days we have seen that singular
eulogy reproduced. This reminds us that a great
professor of the Restoration, indignant at the com
parisons and figures which abound in the prophets, put
a crusher on Isaiah, Daniel, and Jeremiah, with this
profound apophthegm : ' The whole Bible is in like '.
Another, a greater professor still, was the author of
this saying, still celebrated at the Ecole Normale :
1 1 toss Juvenal back upon the romantic dunghill '.
Of what crime was Juvenal guilty ? Of the same
crime as Isaiah ; namely, of being fend of expressing
the idea by image. Shall we return, little by little,
in the walks of learning, to metonymy as a term of
chemistry, and to the opinion of Pradon touching
metaphor ?
One would suppose, from the demands and clamours
of the doctrinaire school, that it had to furnish, at its
own expense, the whole supply of the metaphors and
figures that poets may use, and that it felt itself ruined
162 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
by spendthrifts like Pindar, Aristophanes, Ezekiel,
Plautus, and Cervantes. This school puts under lock
and key passions, sentiments, the human heart, reality,
the ideal, life. It looks with dismay upon men of
genius, hides from them everything, and says, ' How
greedy they are ! ' It has, accordingly, invented for
writers this superlative praise : ' He is temperate '.
On all these points, vestry-room criticism frater
nizes with doctrinaire criticism. The prude and the
devotee are cheek-by-jowl.
A curious bashful fashion tends to prevail. We
blush at the coarse manner in which grenadiers
meet death. Rhetoric has for heroes modest vine-
leaves termed ' periphrases'. It is assumed that the
bivouac speaks like the convent ; the talk of the
guard-room is a calumny. A veteran drops his eyes
at the recollection of Waterloo, and the Cross of the
Legion of Honour is given to these downcast eyes.
Certain sayings which are in history have no right
to be historical ; and it is well understood, for example,
that the gendarme who fired a pistol at Robespierre
at the Hotel de Ville rejoiced in the name ' The-guard-
dies-and-never-surrenders ' 1.
From the combined effort of the two schools of
criticism, guardians of public tranquillity, there results
a salutary reaction. This reaction has already pro
duced some specimens of poets, — steady, well-bred,
prudent, whose style always keeps good hours ; who
never indulge in an outing with those mad creatures,
Ideas ; who are never met at the corner of a wood,
solus cum sold, with Reverie, that gypsy girl ; who
are incapable of having relations either with Imagina
tion, dangerous vagabond, or with the bacchante
Inspiration, or with the grisette Fancy ; who have
never in their lives given a kiss to that beggarly chit,
i It is said that an indecent word of Carabronne (a com-
mander of the Old Guard at Waterloo), in answer to the
summons to surrender, was translated by some big-wig
historian into this bit of heroic claptrap. TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 163
the Muse ; who never sleep away from home, and who
are honoured with the esteem of their doorkeeper,
Nicholas Boileau. If Polyhymnia goes by with her
hair floating a little, what a scandal ! Quick ! they
call the hairdresser. M. de la Harpe comes hastily.
These two sister schools of criticism, that of the doctrin
aire and that of the sacristan, undertake to educate.
They bring up little writers. They keep a place to
wean them, — a boarding-school for juvenile reputa
tions.
Thence a discipline, a literature, and art. Fall into
line, — right dress ! Society must be saved in litera
ture as well as politics. Every one knows that poetry
is a frivolous, insignificant thing, childishly occupied
in seeking rhymes, barren, vain ; consequently nothing
is more formidable. It behoves us to tie up the
thinkers securely. To the kennel with him ! He is
dangerous ! What is a poet ? For honour, nothing ;
for persecution, everything.
This race of writers requires repression ; it is useful
to have recourse to the secular arm. The means vary.
From time to time a good banishment is expedient.
The list of exiled writers opens with ^Eschylus, and
does not close with Voltaire. Each century has its
link in the chain. But there must be at least a pretext
for exile, banishment, and proscription. Exile cannot
be applied in all cases. It is rather unhandy ; it is
important to have a lighter weapon for every-day
skirmishing. A State criticism, duly sworn and
accredited, can render service. To organize the
persecution of writers is not a bad thing. To entrap
the pen by the pen is ingenious. Why not have
literary policemen ?
Good taste is a precaution taken to keep the peace.
Sober writers are the counterpart of prudent electors.
Inspiration is suspected of love for liberty. Poetry is
rather outside of legality ; there is, therefore, an
official art, the offspring of official criticism.
A whole special rhetoric proceeds from these premises.
164 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Nature has in this particular art but a narrow entrance,
and goes in through the sidedoor. Nature is infected
with demagogism. The elements are suppressed,
as being in bad form and making too much uproar.
The equinoctial storm is guilty of trespass ; the squall
is a midnight row. The other day, at the School of
Fine Arts, a pupil painter having caused the wind to
lift up the folds of a mantle during a storm, a local
professor, shocked at this disordered apparel, said :
* Style does not admit of wind '.
Moreover, reaction does not despair. We get
on ; some progress is made. A ticket of confession
sometimes gets its bearer admitted into the Academy.
Jules Janin, Theophile Gautier, Paul de Saint-Victor,
Littre Renan, please to recite your credo.
But that does not suffice ; the evil is deep-rooted.
The ancient Catholic society and the ancient legiti
mate literature are threatened. Darkness is in peril.
To arms against the new generations ! To arms
against the modern spirit ! And down with De
mocracy, the daughter of Philosophy !
Cases of rabidness — that is to say, works of genius —
are to be feared. Hygienic prescriptions are renewed.
The public high-road is evidently badly watched.
It appears that there are some poets wandering about.
The prefect of police, a negligent man, allows some
spirits to rove. What is Authority thinking of ?
Let us take care. There is danger lest men's minds
may be bitten. Indeed, the rumour is confirmed
that Shakespeare has been met without a muzzle on.
This Shakespeare without a muzzle is the present
translation l.
CHAPTER V
IF ever a man was undeserving of the good character,
* he is sober ' 2, it is most certainly William Shake-
1 The Complete Works of Shakespeare, translated by
Francois Victor Hugo.
2 See the beginning of the preceding chapter. TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 1C5
speare. Shakespeare is one of the worst cases that
serious aesthetics ever had to regulate.
Shakespeare is fertility, force, exuberance, the
swelling breast, the foaming cup, the brimming trough,
sap in excess, lava in torrents, the universal rain of
life, everything by thousands, everything by millions,
no reticence, no ligature, no economy, the inordinate and
tranquil prodigality of the creator. To those who
fumble in the bottom of their pockets, the inexhaustible
seems insane. Will it stop soon ? Never. Shake
speare is the sower of dazzling wonders. At every
turn, an image ; at every turn, contrast ; at every
turn, light and darkness.
The poet, we have said, is Nature. Subtle, minute,
keen, microscopical like Nature, and yet vast. Not
discreet, not reserved, not parsimonious ; magnifi
cently simple. Let us explain this word * simple'.
Sobriety in poetry is poverty ; simplicity is grandeur.
To give to each thing the quantity of space which
fits it, neither more nor less ; this is simplicity.
Simplicity is justice. The whole law of tasteisin that.
Each thing put in its own place and spoken with its
own word. On the single condition that a certain
latent equilibrium is maintained and a certain mysteri
ous proportion is preserved, simplicity may be found
in the most stupendous complication, either in the style
or in the ensemble. These are the arcana of great art.
The higher criticism alone, which takes its starting-
point from enthusiasm, penetrates and comprehends
these profound laws. Opulence, profusion, dazzling
radiancy, may be simplicity. The sun is simple.
Such simplicity evidently does not resemble the
simplicity recommended by Le Batteux, the Abbe
d'Aubignac, and Father Bouhours.
Whatever may be the abundance, whatever may
be the entanglement, even were it perplexing, con
fused, and inextricable, all that is true is simple.
The only form of simplicity recognized by Art is the
simplicity that is profound.
166 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Simplicity, being true, is artless. Artlessness is
the countenance of truth. Shakespeare is simple
in the grand manner ; he is infatuated with it : but
petty simplicity is unknown to him.
The simplicity which is impotence, the simplicity
which is meagreness, the simplicity which is short-
winded, is a case for pathology. A hospital ticket
suits it better than a ride on the hippogriff.
I admit that the hump of Thersites is simple ;
but the pectoral muscles of Hercules are simple also.
I prefer this simplicity to the other.
The simplicity proper to poetry may be as bushy
as the oak. Does the oak happen to produce on you
the effect of a Byzantine and of a delicate being ?
Its innumerable antitheses, — gigantic trunk and small
leaves, rough bark and velvet mosses, absorption
of rays and lavishness of shade, crowns for heroes
and mast for swine, — are they marks of affectation,
corruption, subtlety, and bad taste ? Could the
oak be too witty ? could the oak belong to the
Hotel Rambouillet ? could the oak be a finical prude ?
could the oak be tainted with Gongorism ? could the
oak belong to an age of decadence ? Is it possible
that all simplicity, sancta simplicitas, is concentrated
in the cabbage ?
Refinement, excess of wit, affectation, Gongorism,
— all that has been hurled at Shakespeare's head.
They say that these are the faults of littleness, and
they hasten to reproach the giant with them.
But then this Shakespeare respects nothing ; he
goes straight on, putting out of breath those who
wish to follow him. He strides over proprieties, he
overthrows Aristotle, he spreads havoc among the
Jesuits, the Methodists, the Purists, and the Puritans ;
he puts Loyola to disorderly rout, and upsets Wesley ;
he is valiant, bold, enterprising, militant, direct.
His inkstand smokes like a crater. He is always
laborious, ready, spirited, disposed, pressing forward.
Pen in hand? his brow blazing, he goes on, driven by
SKAKESPEARE'S GENIUS 16?
the demon of genius. The stallion is over-demon
strative ; there are jack-mules passing by, to whom
this is displeasing. To be prolific is to be aggressive.
A poet like Isaiah, like Juvenal, like Shakespeare, is, in
truth, exorbitant. By all that is holy, some attention
ought to be paid to others ; one man has no right to
everything ! What ! virility always, inspiration every
where ; as many metaphors as the meadow, as many
antitheses as the oak, as many contrasts and depths
as the universe ; incessant generation, pubescence,
hymen, gestation ; a vast unity with exquisite and
robust detail, living communion, fecundation, plenitude,
production ! It is too much ; it infringes the rights
of neuters.
For nearly three centuries Shakespeare, this poet
all brimming with virility, has been looked upon by
sober critics with that discontented air which certain
bereaved spectators must have in the seraglio.
Shakespeare has no reserve, no restraint, no limit,
no blank. What is wanting in him is that he wants
nothing. He needs no savings-bank. He does not
keep Lent. He overflows like vegetation, like ger
mination, like light, like flame. Yet this does not
hinder him from thinking of you, spectator or reader,
from preaching to you, from giving you advice, from
being your friend, like the first good-natured La
Fontaine you meet, and from rendering you small
services. You can warm your hands at the con
flagration he kindles.
Othello, Romeo, lago, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard
III, Julius Caesar, Oberon, Puck, Ophelia, Desdemona,
Juliet, Titania, men, women, witches, fairies, souls, —
Shakespeare is the grand distributor ; take, take,
take, all of you ! Do you want more ? Here are
Ariel, Parolles, Macduff, Prospero, Viola, Miranda,
Caliban. More yet ? Here are Jessica, Cordelia,
Cressida, Portia, Brabantio, Polonius, Horatio, Mer-
cutio, Imogen, Pandarus of Troy, Bottom, Theseus.
Ecce Deus ! It is the poet, he offers himself ; who will
166 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Simplicity, being true, is artless. Artlessness is
the countenance of truth. Shakespeare is simple
in the grand manner ; he is infatuated with it : but
petty simplicity is unknown to him.
The simplicity which is impotence, the simplicity
which is meagreness, the simplicity which is short-
winded, is a case for pathology. A hospital ticket
suits it better than a ride on the hippogriff.
I admit that the hump of Thersites is simple ;
but the pectoral muscles of Hercules are simple also.
I prefer this simplicity to the other.
The simplicity proper to poetry may be as bushy
as the oak. Does the oak happen to produce on you
the effect of a Byzantine and of a delicate being ?
Its innumerable antitheses, — gigantic trunk and small
leaves, rough bark and velvet mosses, absorption
of rays and lavishness of shade, crowns for heroes
and mast for swine, — are they marks of affectation,
corruption, subtlety, and bad taste ? Could the
oak be too witty ? could the oak belong to the
Hotel Rambouillet ? could the oak be a finical prude ?
could the oak be tainted with Gongorism ? could the
oak belong to an age of decadence ? Is it possible
that all simplicity, sancta simplicitas, is concentrated
in the cabbage ?
Refinement, excess of wit, affectation, Gongorism,
— all that has been hurled at Shakespeare's head.
They say that these are the faults of littleness, and
they hasten to reproach the giant with them.
But then this Shakespeare respects nothing ; he
goes straight on, putting out of breath those who.
wish to follow him. He strides over proprieties, he
overthrows Aristotle, he spreads havoc among the
Jesuits, the Methodists, the Purists, and the Puritans ;
he puts Loyola to disorderly rout, and upsets Wesley ;
he is valiant, bold, enterprising, militant, direct.
His inkstand smokes like a crater. He is always
laborious, ready, spirited, disposed, pressing forward.
Pen in hand? his brow blazing, he goes on, driven by
SKAKESPE ARE'S GENIUS 1&7
the demon of genius. The stallion is over-demon
strative ; there are jack-mules passing by, to whom
this is displeasing. To be prolific is to be aggressive.
A poet like Isaiah, like Juvenal, like Shakespeare, is, in
truth, exorbitant. By all that is holy, some attention
ought to be paid to others ; one man has no right to
everything ! What ! virility always, inspiration every
where ; as many metaphors as the meadow, as many
antitheses as the oak, as many contrasts and depths
as the universe ; incessant generation, pubescence,
hymen, gestation ; a vast unity with exquisite and
robust detail, living communion, fecundation, plenitude,
production ! It is too much ; it infringes the rights
of neuters.
For nearly three centuries Shakespeare, this poet
all brimming with virility, has been looked upon by
sober critics with that discontented air which certain
bereaved spectators must have in the seraglio.
Shakespeare has no reserve, no restraint, no limit,
no blank. What is wanting in him is that he wants
nothing. He needs no savings-bank. He does not
keep Lent. He overflows like vegetation, like ger
mination, like light, like flame. Yet this does not
hinder him from thinking of you, spectator or reader,
from preaching to you, from giving you advice, from
being your friend, like the first good-natured La
Fontaine you meet, and from rendering you small
services. You can warm your hands at the con
flagration he kindles.
Othello, Romeo, lago, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard
III, Julius Caesar, Oberon, Puck, Ophelia, Desdemona,
Juliet, Titania, men, women, witches, fairies, souls, —
Shakespeare is the grand distributor; take, take,
take, all of you ! Do you want more ? Here are
Ariel, Parolles, Macduff, Prospero, Viola, Miranda,
Caliban. More yet ? Here are Jessica, Cordelia,
Cressida, Portia, Brabantio, Polonius, Horatio, Mer-
cutio, Imogen, Pandarus of Troy, Bottom, Theseus.
Ecce Deus ! It is the poet, he offers himself ; who will
BOOK II
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK : THE CULMINATING
POINTS
CHAPTER I
THE characteristic of men of genius of the first order
is to produce each a peculiar model of man. All
bestow on humanity its portrait, — some laughing,
some weeping, others pensive ; these last are the
greatest. Plautus laughs, and gives to man Am
phitryon ; Rabelais laughs, and gives to man Gargan-
tua ; Cervantes laughs, and gives to man Don Quixote ;
Beaumarchais laughs, and gives to man Figaro ;
Moliere weeps, and gives to man Alceste ; Shake
speare dreams, and gives to man Hamlet ; ^Eschylus
meditates, and gives to man Prometheus. The
others are great ; ^Eschylus and Shakespeare are
vast.
These portraits of humanity (left to humanity as
a last farewell by those passing spirits, the poets) are
rarely flattering, always exact, — likenesses of profound
resemblance. Vice, or folly, or virtue is extracted
from the soul and stamped upon the visage. The
tear congealed, becomes a pearl ; the smile petrified,
at last appears a menace ; wrinkles are the furrows
of wisdom ; certain frowns are tragic. This series
of models of man is a permanent lesson for the genera
tions : each century adds in some figures, sometimes
done in full light and strong relief, like Macette,
Celimene, Tartuffe, Turcaret, and Rameau's Nephew ;
sometimes simple profiles, like Gil Bias, Manon Lescaut,
Clarissa Harlowe, and Candide.
170
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 171
God creates by intuition ; man creates by inspir
ation, strengthened by observation. This second
creation, which is nothing else but divine action
carried out by man, is what is called * genius'.
The poet stepping into the place of destiny; an
invention ef men and events so strange, so true to
nature, and so masterly that certain religious sects
hold it in horror as an encroachment upon Provi
dence, and call the poet ' the liar ' ; the conscience
of man taken in the act and placed in surroundings
which it resists, governs, or transforms : such is the
drama. And there is in this something supreme.
This handling of the human soul seems a kind of
equality with God : equality, the mystery of which
is explained when we reflect that God is within man.
This equality is identity. Who is our conscience ?
He ; and He counsels right action. Who is our
intelligence ? He ; and He inspires the master
piece.
God may be there ; but this, as we have seen,
does not lessen the crabbedness of critics ; the greatest
minds are the ones most called in question. It even
sometimes happens that real intelligences attack
genius ; the inspired, strangely enough, do not recog
nize inspiration. Erasmus, Bayle, Scaliger, St Evre-
mond, Voltaire, many of the Fathers of the Church,
whole families of philosophers, the whole Alexandrian
School, Cicero, Horace, Lucian, Plutarch, Josephus,
Dion Chrysostom, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Philo-
stratus, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, Plato, Pythagoras,
have severely criticized Homer. In this enumeration
we omit Zoilus. Men who deny are not critics. Hatred
is not intelligence. To insult is not to discuss. Zoilus,
Maevius, Cecchi, Green, Avellaneda, William Lauder,
Vise, Freron, — no cleansing of these names is possible.
These men have wounded the human race in her
men of genius ; these wretched hands for ever retain
the colour of the mud that they have thrown.
Nor have these men even the miserable renown
172 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
that they seem to have amply earned, nor the whole
quantity of infamy that they had hoped for. It is
scarcely known that they have existed. They are
half forgotten, a greater humiliation than to be
wholly forgotten. With the exception of two or
three among them who have become by-words of
contempt, despicable owls nailed up for a warning,
all the wretched names are unknown. An obscure
notoriety follows their equivocal existence. Look
at that Clement who called himself the ' hypercritic ',
and whose profession it was to bite and denounce
Diderot ; he disappears, and is confounded, although
born at Geneva, with Clement of Dijon, confessor
to Mesdames ; with David Clement, author of the
Bibliotheque Curieuse ; with Clement of Baize, Bene
dictine of St. Maur ; and with Clement d'Ascain,
Capuchin, definitor and provincial of Beam. What
avails it him to have declared that the work of Diderot
is but ' obscure verbiage ', and to have died mad at
Charenton, to be afterward submerged in four or
five unknown Clements ? In vain did Famien Strada
rabidly attack Tacitus : he is scarcely distinguished
now from Famien Spada, called * the Wooden Sword ',
the jester of Sigismond Augustus. In vain did Cecchi
vilify Dante : we are not certain that his name was
not Cecco. In vain did Green fasten on Shakespeare :
he is now confounded with Greene J. Avellaneda,
the ' enemy ' of Cervantes, is perhaps Avellanedo.
Lauder, the slanderer of Milton, is perhaps Leuder.
The unknown De Vise, who ' smashed ' Moliere,
turns out to be a certain Donneau ; he had surnamed
himself De Vise through a taste for nobility. Those
men relied, in order to create for themselves a little
notoriety, on the greatness of those whom they out
raged. But no ; they have remained obscure. These
poor insulters did not get their wages ; they are
bankrupt of contempt. Let us pity them.
1 And rightly ; for he is indeed the same individual. See
note, p. 148. TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 173
CHAPTER II
LET us add that calumny's labour is lost. Then what
purpose can it serve ? Not even an evil one. Do
you know anything more useless than the injurious
which does not injure ?
Better still. This injury is beneficial. In good
time it is found that calumny, envy, and hatred,
thinking to work harm, have worked benefit. Their
insults bring fame ; their blackening adds lustre.
They succeed only in mingling with glory an outcry
which increases it.
Let us continue.
Thus each great poet tries on in his turn this immense
human mask. And such is the strength of the soul
which shines through the mysterious aperture of the
eyes, that this look changes the mask, and from terrible
makes it comic, then pensive, then grieved, then young
and smiling, then decrepit, then sensual and gluttonous,
then religious, then outrageous ; and it is Cain, Job,.
Atreus, Ajax, Priam, Hecuba, Niobe, Clytemnestra,.
Nausicaa, Pistoclerus, Grumio, Davus, Pasicompsa,
China ene, Don Arias, Don Diego, Mudarra, Richard
III, Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Juliet, Romeo, Lear,
Sancho Panza, Pantagruel, Panurge, Arnolphe, Dandin,.
Sganarelle, Agnes, Rosine, Victorine, Basile, Almaviva,
Cherubin, Manfred.
From the direct divine creation proceeds Adam,
the prototype. From the indirect divine creation
— that is to say, from the human creation — proceed
other Adams, the types.
A type does not reproduce any man in particular ;
it cannot be exactly superposed upon any individual ;
it sums up and concentrates under one human form
a whole family of characters and minds. A type
is no abridgment : it is a condensation. It is not
one, it is all. Alcibiades is but Alcibiades, Petronius;
is but Petronius, Bassompierre is but Bassompierre,.
Buckingham is but Buckingham, Fronsac is but Fron-
174 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
sac, Lauzun is but Lauzun ; but take Lauzun, Fronsac,
Buckingham, Bassompierre, Petronius, and Alcibiades,
and bray them in the mortar of the dream, and there
issues from it a phantom more real than them all, —
Don Juan. Take usurers individually, and no one
of them is that fierce merchant of Venice, crying :
* Go, Tubal, fee me an officer, bespeak him a fortnight
before ; I will have the heart of him if he forfeit '.
Take all the usurers together, from the crowd of them
is evolved a total, — Shylock. Sum up usury, you
have Shylock. The metaphor of the people, who
are never mistaken, confirms unawares the invention
of the poet ; and while Shakespeare makes Shylock,
the popular tongue creates the bloodsucker 1. Shylock
Is the embodiment of Jewishness ; he is also Judaism, —
that is to say, his whole nation, the high as well as
the low, faith as well as fraud ; and it is because he
sums up a whole race, such as oppression has made
it, that Shylock is great. The Jews are, however,
right in saying that none of them — not even the
mediaeval Jew — is Shylock. Men of pleasure may
with reason say that no one of them is Don Juan.
No leaf of the orange-tree when chewed gives the
flavour of the orange ; yet there is a deep affinity,
an identity of roots, a sap rising from the same source,
a sharing of the same subterranean shadow before
life. The fruit contains the mystery of the tree, and
the type contains the mystery of the man. Hence
the strange vitality of the type.
For — and this is the marvel — the type lives. Were
it but an abstraction, men would not recognize it, and
would allow this shadow to go its way. The tragedy
termed * classic ' makes phantoms ; the drama creates
living types. A lesson which is a man ; a myth with
a human face so plastic that it looks at you and that
its look is a mirror ; a parable which nudges you ; a
symbol which cries out ' Beware ! ' an idea which is
nerve, muscle, and flesh, — which has a heart to love,
i Happe-chair ; literally, ' grab-flesh '. TR.
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 175
bowels to suffer, eyes to weep, and teeth to devour
or to laugh ; a psychical conception with the relief
of actual fact, which, if it be pricked, bleeds red, —
such is the type. 0 power of all poetry ! These
types are beings. They breathe, they palpitate, their
steps are heard on the floor, they exist. They exist
with an existence more intense than that of any
creature thinking himself alive there in the street.
These phantoms are more substantial than man.
In their essence is that eternal element which belongs
to masterworks, which makes Trimalchio live, while
M. Romieu is dead.
Types are cases foreseen of God ; genius realizes
them. It seems that God prefers to teach man a
lesson through man, in order to inspire confidence.
The poet walks the street with living men ; he has
their ear. Hence the efficacy of types. Man is a
premise, the type the conclusion ; God creates the
phenomenon, genius gives it a name ; God creates
the miser only, genius forms Harpagon ; God creates
the traitor only, genius makes lago ; God creates
the coquette, genius makes Celimene ; God creates
the citizen only, genius makes Chrysale ; God creates
the king only, genius makes Grandgousier. Some
times, at a given moment, the type issues full-grown
from some unknown collaboration of the mass of the
people with a great natural actor, an involuntary and
powerful realizer ; the crowd is a midwife ; in an
epoch which bears at one extreme Talleyrand, and
at another Chodruc-Duclos, there springs up suddenly,
in a flash of lightning, under the mysterious incubation
of the theatre, that spectre Robert Macaire *.
Types go and come on a common level in Art and
in Nature ; they are the ideal realized. The good
and the evil of man are in these figures. From each
of them springs, in the eyes of the thinker, a humanity.
1 For an entertaining account of Chodruc-Ducloe, by
Dr Holmes, see The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1886, pp. 12,
176 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
As we have said before, as many types, as many
Adams. The man of Homer, Achilles, is an Adam :
from him comes the species of the slayers ; the man
of ^Eschylus, Prometheus, is an Adam : from him
comes the race of the wrestlers ; the man of Shake
speare, Hamlet, is an Adam : to him belongs the
family of the dreamers. Other Adams, created by
poets, incarnate, — this one, passion ; another, duty ;
another, reason ; another, conscience ; another, the
fall ; another, the ascension.
Prudence, drifting into trepidation, passes from
the old man Nestor to the old man Geronte. Love,
drifting into appetite, passes from Daphne to Love
lace. Beauty, entwined with the serpent, passes from
Eve to Melusina. The types begin in Genesis, and a
link of their chain passes through Restif de la Bretonne
and Vade. The lyric suits them, — Billingsgate does
not misbecome them. They speak a country dialect
by the mouth of Gros-Rene, and in Homer they say
to Minerva, who takes them by the hair : * What
wouldst thou with me, Goddess ? '
A surprising exception has been conceded to Dante.
The man of Dante is Dante. Dante has, so to speak,
recreated himself in his poem : he is his own type ;
his Adam is himself. For the action of his poem he
has sought out no one. He has taken Virgil only as
a supernumerary. Moreover, he made himself epic
at once, without even giving himself the trouble to
change his name. What he had to do was in fact
simple, — to descend into hell, and remount to heaven.
What use was it to trouble himself for so little ? He
knocks gravely at the door of the Infinite and says :
' Open ! I am Dante.'
CHAPTER III
THE man of ^Eschylus, Prometheus, and the man of
Shakespeare, Hamlet, are, as we have just said, —
two marvellous Adams.
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 177
Prometheus is action ; Hamlet is hesitation.
In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior ; in Hamlet
it is interior.
In Prometheus the four limbs of incarnate Will
are nailed down with brazen spikes, and cannot move :
besides, it has by its side two watchers, Force and
Power. In Hamlet the Will is still more enthralled :
it is bound by preliminary meditation, the endless
chain of the irresolute. Try to get out of yourself
if you can ! What a Gordian knot is our reverie !
Slavery from within, is slavery indeed. Scale me
the barricade of thought ! escape, if you can, from
the prison of love ! The only dungeon is that which
immures the conscience. Prometheus, in order to
be free, has but a bronze collar to break and a god to
conquer ; Hamlet must break and conquer himself.
Prometheus can rise upright, quit with lifting a moun
tain ; in order that Hamlet may stand erect, he must
lift his own thought. If Prometheus plucks the vul
ture from his breast, all is done ; Hamlet must rend
from his flank Hamlet. Prometheus and Hamlet
are two livers laid bare : from the one trickles blood,
from the other doubt.
We are hi the habit of comparing ^Eschylus and
Shakespeare by Orestes and Hamlet, these two
tragedies being the same drama. Never in fact was
there more identity of subject. The learned note
an analogy between them ; the impotent, who are
also the ignorant, the envious, who are also the imbe
cile, have the petty joy of thinking they detect a
plagiarism. There is here, for the rest, a possible
field for comparative erudition and for serious criti
cism. Hamlet walks behind Orestes, a parricide
through filial love. This easy comparison, rather
superficial than substantial, is less striking than
the mysterious confrontment of those two captives,
Prometheus and Hamlet.
Let it not be forgotten that the human mind, half
divine as it is, creates from time to time superhuman
M
178 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
works. Furthermore, these superhuman works of
man are more numerous than is believed, for they
make up the whole of art. Outside of poetry, where
wonders abound, there is, in music, Beethoven ; in
sculpture, Phidias ; in architecture, Piranesi ; in
painting, Rembrandt ; and in painting, architecture,
and sculpture, Michael Angelo. We pass over many,
and not the least.
Prometheus and Hamlet are among these more
than human works.
A kind of gigantic prepossession : the usual measure
exceeded ; greatness everywhere, — the dismay of
commonplace minds ; the true demonstrated, when
necessary, by the improbable ; destiny, society, law,
religion, brought to trial and judgment in the name
of the Unknown, the abyss of the mysterious equili
brium ; the event treated as a role to be played, and,
on occasion, hurled as a reproach against Fatality
or Providence ; Passion, terrible personage, going
and coming in man ; the audacity and sometimes
the insolence of reason ; the haughty forms of a style
at ease in all extremes, and at the same time a pro
found wisdom ; the gentleness of the giant, the good
nature of a softened monster ; an ineffable dawn
which cannot be accounted for and which lights up
everything : such are the signs of these supreme
works. In certain poems there is starlight.
This light is in ^Eschylus and in Shakespeare.
CHAPTER IV
NOTHING can be more fiercely wild than Prometheus
stretched on the Caucasus. It is gigantic tragedy.
The old punishment which our ancient laws of torture
called ' extension ', and which Cartouche escaped
because of a hernia, — this, Prometheus undergoes ;
only the rack is a mountain. What is his crime ?
The Right. To characterize right as crime, and
movement as rebellion, is the immemorial skill of
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 179
tyrants. Prometheus has done on Olympus what
Eve did in Eden, — he has taken a little knowledge.
Jupiter — identical, indeed, with Jehovah (lovi, lova) —
punishes this temerity of having desired to live. The
^Eginetic traditions, which localize Jupiter, deprive
him of the cosmic impersonality of the Jehovah of
Genesis. The Greek Jupiter — bad son of a bad
father, in rebellion against Saturn, who has himself
been a rebel against Coelus, — is an upstart. The
Titans are a sort of elder branch which has its legiti
mists, of whom ^Eschylus, the avenger of Prometheus,
was one. Prometheus is the right conquered. Jupiter
has, as is always the case, consummated the usurpation
of power by the punishment of right. Olympus claims
the aid of Caucasus. Prometheus is fastened there
by the brazen collar. There is the Titan, fallen,
prostrate, nailed down. Mercury, everybody's friend,
comes to give him such counsel as generally follows
the perpetration of coups d' etat. Mercury is the
cowardice of intelligence ; the embodiment of all
possible vice, but full of cleverness : Mercury, the
god Vice, serves Jupiter, the god Crime. These
flunkeys hi evil are marked to this day by the venera
tion of the thief for the assassin. There is something
of that law in the arrival of the diplomatist behind
the conqueror. The masterworks are immense in
this, — that they are eternally present at the deeds
of humanity. Prometheus on the Caucasus, is Poland
after 1772 ; France after 1815 ; the Revolution after
Brumaire. Mercury speaks ; Prometheus listens but
little. Offers of amnesty miscarry when it is the
victim alone who should have the right to grant pardon,
Prometheus, thrown to earth, scorns Mercury standing
proudly above him, and Jupiter standing above
Mercury, and Destiny standing above Jupiter. Pro
metheus jests at the vulture which gnaws at him ;
he disdainfully shrugs his shoulders as much as his
chain allows. What does he care for Jupiter, and
of what good is Mercury ? There is no hold upon
180 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
this haughty sufferer. The scorching thunderbolt
causes a smart, which is a constant appeal to pride.
Meanwhile tears flow around him, the earth despairs,
the cloud- women — the fifty Oceanides — come to
worship the Titan, forests cry aloud, wild beasts
groan, winds howl, waves sob, the elements moan,
the world suffers in Prometheus, — his brazen collar
chokes the universal life. An immense participation
in the torture of the demigod seems to be henceforth
the tragic delight of all Nature ; anxiety for the
future mingles with it : and what is to be done now ?
How are we to move ? What will become of us ?
And in the vast whole of created beings, things, men,
animals, plants, rocks, all turned toward the Caucasus,
is felt this unspeakable anguish : the liberator is
enchained.
Hamlet, less gigantic and more human, is not less
great.
Hamlet, that awful being complete in incom
pleteness ; all, in order to be nothing ! He is prince
and demagogue, sagacious and extravagant, profound
and frivolous, man and neuter. He has little faith
in the sceptre, rails at the throne, has a student for
his comrade, converses with any one passing by,
argues with the first comer, understands the people,
despises the mob, hates violence, distrusts success,
questions obscurity, and is on speaking terms with
mystery. He communicates to others maladies that
he has not himself ; his feigned madness inoculates
his mistress with real madness. He is familiar with
spectres and with actors. He jests, with the axe
of Orestes in his hand. He talks literature, recites
verses, composes a theatrical criticism, plays with
bones in a churchyard, dumfounds his mother, avenges
his father, and closes the dread drama of life and death
with a gigantic point of interrogation. He terrifies,
and then disconcerts. Never has anything more
overwhelming been dreamed. It is the parricide
saying, ' What do I know ? '
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 181
Parricide ? Let us pause upon that word. Is
Hamlet a parricide ? Yes, and no. He confines
himself to threatening his mother ; but the threat
is so fierce that the mother shudders. ' Thy word
is a dagger ! . . . What wilt thou do ? Thou wilt
not murder me ? Help ! help ! ho ! ' — and when
she dies, Hamlet, without grieving for her, strikes
Claudius with the tragic cry : * Follow my mother ! *
Hamlet is that sinister thing, the possible parricide '.
Instead of the North, which he has in his brain,
let him have, like Orestes, the South in his veins,
and he will kill his mother.
This drama is stern. In it truth doubts, sincerity
lies. Nothing can be vaster, nothing subtler. In
it man is the world, and the world is zero. Hamlet,
even in full life, is not sure of his existence. In this
tragedy — which is at the same time a philosophy —
everything floats, hesitates, shuffles, staggers, becomes
discomposed, scatters, and is dispersed. Thought
is a cloud, will is a vapour, resolution a twilight ; the
action blows every moment from a different direction :
the mariner's card governs man. A work which
disturbs and makes dizzy ; in which the bottom of
everything is laid bare ; where the pendulum of
thought oscillates only from the murdered king to
buried Yorick ; and where that which is most real
is kingliness impersonated in a ghost, and mirth
represented by a death's-head.
Hamlet is the supreme tragedy of the human dream.
CHAPTER V
ONE of the probable causes of the feigned madness
of Hamlet has not been, up to the present time, indi
cated by critics. It has been said, * Hamlet acts
the madman to hide his thought, like Brutus '. In
fact, it is easy for apparent imbecility to hatch a
1 The quotation from Hamlet is left in the exact form
that Hugo gave it. TB.
182 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
great project ; the supposed idiot can take aim de
liberately. But the case of Brutus is not that of Hamlet.
Hamlet acts the madman for his safety. Brutus
screens his project, Hamlet his person. Given the
manners of those tragic courts, from the moment
that, through the revelation of the ghost, Hamlet
is acquainted with the crime of Claudius, he is in
danger. The superior historian within the poet is
manifested, and one feels the deep insight of Shake
speare into the darkness of the ancient royalty. In
the Middle Ages and in the Eastern Empire, and
even at earlier periods, woe unto him who found
out a murder or a poisoning committed by a king I
Ovid, according to Voltaire's conjecture, was exiled
from Rome for having seen something shameful in
the house of Augustus. To know that the King was
an assassin was a state crime. When it pleased the
prince not to have had a witness, it was a matter of
life and death to know nothing ; it was bad policy
to have good eyes. A man suspected of suspicion
was lost. He had but one refuge, — madness ; to pass
for * an innocent ' : he was despised, and that was
all. You remember the advice that, in ^Eschylus,
the Ocean gives to Prometheus : * To seem mad is :
the secret of the sage '. When the Chamberlain
Hugolin found the iron spit with which Edric of
Mercia * had impaled Edmund II, * he hastened to
put on madness ', says the Saxon chronicle of 1016,
and saved himself in that way. Heraclides of Nisibis,
having discovered by chance that Rhinometer was
a fratricide, had himself declared insane by the doctors,
and succeeded in getting himself shut up for life in a
cloister. He thus lived peaceably, growing old, and
waiting for death with a vacant stare. Hamlet runs
the same risk, and has recourse to the same means.
1 Freeman says : ' The chronicles are silent as to the
manner of Eadmund's death.' Norman Conquest, i. 470.
The reality of the murder is very doubtful. The story of
Hugolin is not mentioned by Freeman. TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 183
He gets himself declared insane like Heraclides, and
puts on madness like Hugolin. This does not prevent
the uneasy Claudius from twice making an effort to
get rid of him,— in the middle of the drama by the
axe or the dagger, and toward the end by poison.
The same indication is again found in King Lear :
the Earl of Gloucester's son takes refuge also in appar
ent lunacy. Herein is a key to open and understand
Shakespeare's thought. To the eyes of the philosophy
of Art, the feigned madness of Edgar throws light
upon the feigned madness of Hamlet.
The Hamblet of Belleforest is a magician ; the
Hamlet of Shakespeare is a philosopher. We just
now spoke of the singular reality which characterizes
poetical creations. There is no more striking example
than this type, Hamlet. Hamlet is not in the least
an abstraction. He has been at the university ; he
has the Danish savageness softened by the Italian
politeness ; he is short, plump, somewhat lymphatic ;
he fences well, but is soon out of breath. He does
not care to drink too soon during the fencing-bout
with Laertes, probably for fear of sweating. After
having thus supplied his personage with real life,
the poet can launch him into the full ideal ; there is
ballast enough.
Other works of the human mind equal Hamlet ;
none surpasses it. There is in Hamlet all the majesty
of the mournful. A drama issuing from an open
sepulchre, — this is colossal. Hamlet is to our mind
Shakespeare's capital work.
No figure among those that poets have created
is more poignant and more disquieting. Doubt
counselled by a ghost, — such is Hamlet. Hamlet
has seen his dead father and has spoken to him.
Is he convinced ? No ; he shakes his head. What
shall he do ? He does not know. His hands clench,
then fall by his side. Within him are conjectures,
systems, monstrous apparitions, bloody recollections,
veneration for the ghost, hate, tenderness, anxiety
184: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to act and not to act, his father, his mother, con
flicting duties, — a profound storm. His mind is
occupied with ghastly hesitation. Shakespeare, won
derful plastic poet, makes the grandiose pallor of this
soul almost visible. Like the great spectre of Albrecht
Diirer, Hamlet might be named 'Melancholia'.
Above his head, too, there flits the disembowelled
bat ; at his feet are science, the sphere, the compass,
the hour-glass, love ; and behind him, at the horizon,
a great and terrible sun, which seems to make the
sky but darker.
Nevertheless, at least one half of Hamlet is anger,
transport, outrage, hurricane, sarcasm to Ophelia,
malediction on his mother, insult to himself. He
talks with the grave-diggers, almost laughs, then
clutches Laertes by the hair in the very grave of
Ophelia, and tramples furiously upon that coffin.
Sword- thrusts at Polonius, sword- thrusts at Laertes,
sword-thrusts at Claudius. At times his inaction
gapes open, and from the rent, thunderbolts flash
out.
He is tormented by that possible life, interwoven
of reality and dream, concerning which we are all
anxious. Somnambulism is diffused through all his
actions. One might almost consider his brain as a
formation : there is a layer of suffering, a layer of
thought, then a layer of dream. It is through this
layer of dream that he feels, comprehends, learns,
perceives, drinks, eats, frets, mocks, weeps, and
reasons. There is between life and him a transpar
ency, — the wall of dreams ; one sees beyond it, but
one cannot step over it. A kind of cloudy obstacle
everywhere surrounds Hamlet. Have you never,
while sleeping, had the nightmare of pursuit or flight,
and tried to hasten on, and felt the anchylosis of
your knees, the heaviness of your arms, the horrible
paralysis of your benumbed hands ? This night
mare Hamlet suffers while awake. Hamlet is not
upon the spot where his life is. He has ever the air
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 185
of a man who talks to you from the other side of a
stream. He calls to you at the same time that he
questions you. He is at a distance from the catas
trophe in which he moves, from the passer-by he
questions, from the thought he bears, from the action
he performs. He seems not to touch even what he
crushes. This is isolation carried to its highest power.
It is the loneliness of a mind, even more than the
unapproachableness of a prince. Indecision is, in
fact, a solitude ; you have not even your will to keep
you company. It is as if your own self had departed
and had left you there. The burden of Hamlet is
less rigid than that of Orestes ; it fits patter to his
form : Orestes bears fatality, Hamlet destiny.
And thus, apart from men, Hamlet still has within
him an undefined something which represents them
all. Agnosco fratrem. If at certain hours we felt
our own pulse, we should be conscious of his fever.
His strange reality is our own reality, after all. He
is the mournful man that we all are in certain situations.
Unhealthy as he is, Hamlet expresses a permanent
condition of man. He represents the discomfort of
the soul in a life unsuited to it. He represents the
shoe that pinches and stops our walking : this shoe
is the body. Shakespeare delivers him from it, and
rightly. Hamlet — prince if you like, but king never
— is incapable of governing a people, so wholly apart
from all does he exist. On the other hand, he does
better than to reign ; he is. Take from him his family,
his country, his ghost, the whole adventure at Elsinore,
and even in the form of an inactive type he remains
strangely terrible. This results from the amount of
humanity and the amount of mystery in him. Hamlet
is formidable, — which does not prevent his being
ironical. He has the two profiles of destiny.
Let us retract a word said above. The capital
work of Shakespeare is not Hamlet: the capital
work of Shakespeare is all Shakespeare. This is,
moreover, true of all minds of this order. They
186 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
are mass, block, majesty, bible ; and their unity is
what renders them impressive.
Have you never gazed upon a beclouded head
land running out be3^ond eye-shot into the deep sea ?
Each of its hills contributes to its make-up. No
one of its undulations is lost upon it. Its bold out
line is sharply marked upon the sky, and juts far
out amid the waves ; and there is not a useless rock.
Thanks to this cape, you can go amidst the boundless
waters, walk among the winds, see closely the eagles
soar and the monsters swim, let your humanity
wander in the eternal uproar, penetrate the impene
trable. The poet renders this service to your mind.
A genius is a headland into the infinite.
CHAPTER VI
WITH Hamlet, and upon the same level, must be
placed three noble dramas, — Macbeth, Othello, King
Lear.
Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear — these four figures
tower upon the lofty edifice of Shakespeare. We
have said what Hamlet is.
To say ' Macbeth is ambition ', is to say nothing.
Macbeth is hunger. What hunger ? The hunger
of the monster, always possible in man. Certain
souls have teeth. Do not arouse their hunger.
To bite at the apple is a fearful thing. The apple
is named ' Omnia ', says Filesac, that doctor of the
Sorbonne who confessed Ravaillac. Macbeth has a
wife whom the chronicle calls Gruoch. This Eve
tempts this Adam. Once Macbeth has taken the first
bite, he is lost. The first thing that Adam produces
with Eve is Cain ; the first thing that Macbeth accom
plishes with Gruoch is murder.
Covetousness easily becoming violence, violence
easily becoming crime, crime easily becoming mad
ness : this progression is in Macbeth. Covetousness,
Crime, Madness — these three night-hags have spoken
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 187
to him in the solitude, and have invited him to the
throne. The cat Gray-malkin has called him : Macbeth
will be cunning ; the toad Paddock has called him :
Macbeth will be horror. The unsexed being, Gruoch,
completes him. It is done ; Macbeth is no longer
a man. He is no longer anything but an unconscious
energy rushing wildly toward evil. Henceforth,
no notion of right ; appetite is everything. The
transitory right of royalty, the eternal right of hospi
tality — Macbeth murders both. He does more than
slay them : he ignores them. Before they fell bleeding
under his hand, they already lay dead within his
soul. Macbeth begins by this parricide, — the murder
of Duncan, his guest ; a crime so terrible that, as a
consequence, in the night when their master is stabbed,
the horses of Duncan become wild again. The first
step taken, the ground begins to crumble ; it is the
avalanche. Macbeth rolls headlong ; he is pre
cipitated ; he falls and rebounds from one crime to
another, ever deeper and deeper. He undergoes
the mournful gravitation of matter invading the
soul. He is a thing that destroys. He is a stone
of ruin, a Same of war, a beast of prey, a scourge.
He marches over all Scotland, king as he is, his bare
legged kernes and his heavily armed gallow-glasses
slaughtering, pillaging, massacring. He decimates
the thanes, he murders Banquo, he murders all the
Macduffs except the one that shall slay him, he murders
the nobility, he murders the people, he murders his
country, he murders * sleep'. At length the catas-
itrophe arrives, — the forest of Birnam moves against
him. Macbeth has infringed all, overstepped all,
destroyed all, violated all ; and this desperation
ends in arousing even Nature. Nature loses patience,
Nature enters into action against Macbeth, Nature
becomes soul against the man who has become brute
force.
This drama has epic proportions. Macbeth re
presents that frightful hungry creature who prowla
188 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
throughout history — in the forest called brigand,
and on the throne, conqueror. The ancestor of
Macbeth is Nimrod. These men of force, are they
for ever furious ? Let us be just ; no. They have
a goal, which being attained, they stop. Give to
Alexander, to Cyrus, to Sesostris, to Caesar — what ?
— the world ; they are appeased. Geoffrey St.
Hilaire said to me one day : ' When the lion has
eaten, he is at peace with Nature '. For Cambyses,
Sennacherib, Genghis Khan, and the like, to have
eaten is to possess the whole earth. They would calm
themselves down in the process of digesting the human
race.
Now what is Othello ? He is the night. An
immense fatal figure. Night is amorous of day.
Darkness loves the dawn. The African adores the
white woman. Othello has for his light and for
his frenzy, Desdemona. And then, how easy to him
is jealousy ! He is great, he is dignified, he is majestic,
he soars above all heads ; he has as an escort bravery,
battle, the braying of trumpets, the banners of war,
renown, glory ; he is radiant with twenty victories,
he is studded with stars, this Othello : but he is black.
And thus how soon, when jealous, the hero becomes
the monster, the black becomes the negro ! How
speedily has night beckoned to death !
By the side of Othello, who is night, there is lago,
who is evil — evil, the other form of darkness. Night
is but the night of the world ; evil is the night of
the soul. How deeply black are perfidy and false
hood ! It is all one whether what courses through
the veins be ink or treason. Whoever has jostled
against imposture and perjury, knows it : one must
blindly grope one's way with knavery. Pour hypocrisy
upon the break of day, and you put out the sun ;
and this, thanks to false religions, is what happens
to God.
lago near Othello is the precipice near the landslip.
* This way ! ' he says in a low voice. The snare
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 189
advises blindness. The lover of darkness guides
the black. Deceit takes upon itself to give what
light may be required by night. Falsehood serves
as a blind man's dog to jealousy. Othello the negro
and lago the traitor pitted against whiteness and
candour ; what more formidable ? These ferocities
of darkness act in unison. These two incarnations
of the eclipse conspire, the one roaring, the other
sneering, for the tragic suffocation of light.
Sound this profound thing. Othello is the night,
and being night, and wishing to kill, what does he
take to slay with ? Poison ? the club ? the axe ?
the knife? No; the pillow. To kill is to lull to
sleep. Shakespeare himself perhaps did not take
this into account. The creator sometimes, almost
unknown to himself, yields to his type, so truly is
that type a power. And it is thus that Desdemona,
spouse of the man Night, dies, stifled by the pillow
upon which the first kiss was given, and which receives
the last sigh.
Lear is the occasion for Cordelia. Maternity of
the daughter toward the father. Profound subject !
A maternity venerable among all other maternities,
so admirably translated by the legend of that Roman
girl who in the depth of a prison nurses her old father.
The young breast near the white beard : there is no
holier sight ! Such a filial breast is Cordelia !
Once this figure dreamed of and found, Shake
speare created his drama. Where should he put
this consoling vision ? In an obscure age. Shake
speare has taken the year of the world SI 05, the
time when Joash was king of Judah, Aganippus
king of France, and Leir king of England. The
whole earth was at that time mysterious. Picture
to yourself that epoch. The temple of Jerusalem
is still quite new ; the gardens of Semiramis, con
structed nine hundred years before, are beginning
to crumble ; the first gold coin appears in ^Egina ;
the first balance is made by Phydon, tyrant of Argos ;
190 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the eclipse of the sun is calculated by the Chinese ;
three hundred and twelve j^ears have passed since
Orestes, accused by the Eumenides before the Areo
pagus, was acquitted ; Hesiod is just dead ; Homer,
if he still lives, is a hundred years old ; Lycurgus,
thoughtful traveller, re-enters Sparta ; and one may
perceive in the depth of the sombre cloud of the
Orient the chariot of fire which carries Elijah away :
it is at that period that Leir — Lear — lives, and reigns
over the dark islands. Jonas, Holofernes, Draco,
Solon, Thespis, Nebuchadnezzar, Anaximenes who
is to invent the signs of the zodiac/ Cyrus, Zorobabel,
Tarquin, Pythagoras, ^Eschylus, are not yet born ;
Coriolanus, Xerxes, Cincinnatus, Pericles, Socrates,
Brennus, Aristotle, Timoleon, Demosthenes, Alexander,
Epicurus, Hannibal, are ghosts awaiting their hour to
enter among men ; Judas Maccabseus, Viriatus,
Popilius, Jugurtha, Mithridates, Marius and Sylla,
Csesar and Pompey, Cleopatra and Antony, are far
away in the future ; and at the moment when Lear
is king of Britain and of Iceland, there must pass
away eight hundred and ninety-five years before
Virgil says, ' Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos ',
and nine hundred and fifty years before Seneca says
4 Ultima Thule'. The Picts and the Celts (the Scotch
and the English) are tattooed. A redskin of the
present day gives a vague idea of an Englishman
then *. It is this twilight that Shakespeare has
chosen, — a long, dreamy night in which the inventor
is free to put anything he likes : this King Lear,
and then a king of France, a duke of Burgundy, a
duke of Cornwall, a duke of Albany, an earl of
Kent, and an earl of Gloucester. What matters
your history to him who has humanity ? Besides,
he has with him the legend, which is also a
kind of science, and as true as history, perhaps,
although from another point of view. Shake -
1 Victor Hugo is responsible for the words ' English '
and ' Englishman ', instead of ' British ' and ' Briton.' TB.
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 191
gpeare agrees with Walter Mapes, archdeacon of
Oxford, — that is something ; he admits, from Brutus
to Cadwalla, the ninety-nine Celtic kings who have
preceded the Scandinavian Hengist and the Saxon
Horsa : and since he believes in Mulmutius, Cinigisil,
Ceolulf, Cassibelan, Cymbeline, Cynulphus, Arviragus.
Guiderius, Escuin, Cudred, Vortigern, Arthur, Uther
Pendragon, he has every right to believe in King Lear
and to create Cordelia. This site adopted, the place
for the scene marked out, the foundation laid deep,
he takes all in hand and builds his work, — unheard-of
edifice. He takes tyranny, of which at a later period
he will make weakness, — Lear ; he takes treason, —
Edmund ; he takes devotion, — Kent ; he takes
Ingratitude, which begins with a caress, and he gives
to this monster two heads, — Goneril, whom the legend
calls Govnerille, and Regan, whom the legend calls
Ragaii 1 ; he takes paternity ; he takes royalty ;
ho takes feudality ; he takes ambition ; he takes
madness, which he divides, and he places face to
face three madmen — the King's buffoon, madman by
trade ; Edgar of Gloucester, mad for prudence' sake ;
the King, mad through misery. It is at the summit
of this tragic pile that he sets the bending form of
Cordelia.
There are some formidable cathedral towers, —
as, for instance, the Giralda of Seville, — which seem
made all complete, with their spirals, their staircases,
their sculptures, their cellars, their ccecums, their
aerial cells, their sounding chambers, their bells,
their wailing, and their mass and their spire, and all
their vastness, in order to support at their summit
an angel spreading its golden wings. Such is the
drama, King Lear.
The father is the pretext for the daughter. That
admirable human creature, Lear, serves, as a support
1 In Holinshed's Chronicle, Shakespeare's source, the
names are, Gonorilla, Regan, and Cordeilla ; in Layamon's
' Brut ', Gornoille, Regan, and Cordoille or Gordoylle. TB.
192 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to this ineffable divine creation, Cordelia. All that
chaos of crimes, vices, manias, and miseries, finds its
justification in this shining vision of virtue. Shake
speare, bearing Cordelia in his brain, in creating this
tragedy was like a god who, having an Aurora to
establish, should make a world to put her in.
And what a figure is that father ! What a carjratid !
It is man stooping. He does nothing but shift his
burdens for others that are heavier. The more the
old man becomes enfeebled, the more his load augments.
He lives under an over-burden. He bears at first
power, then ingratitude, then isolation, then despair,
then hunger and thirst, then madness, then all Nature.
Clouds overcast him, forests heap their shadow upon
him, the hurricane swoops down upon the nape of his
neck, the tempest makes his mantle heavy as lead, the
rain weighs upon his shoulders, he walks bent and
haggard as if he had the two knees of Night upon
his back. Dismayed and yet colossal, he flings to the
winds and to the hail this epic cry : * Why do ye
hate me, tempests ? Why do ye persecute me ?
Ye are not my daughters '*. And then all is over ;
the light is extinguished ; Reason loses courage,
and leaves him ; Lear is in his dotage. This old
man, being childish, requires a mother. His daughter
appears, his only daughter, Cordelia. For the two
others, Regan and Goneril, are no longer his daughters,
— save so far as to entitle them to the name of parricides.
Cordelia approaches, — ' Sir, do you know me ? '
* You are a spirit, I know ', replies the old man, with
the sublime clairvoyance of frenzy. From this moment
the filial nursing begins. Cordelia applies herself
to nursing this old despairing soul, dying of inanition
in hatred. Cordelia nourishes Lear with love, and
1 Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters :
I tax not you, you elements, with unkmdness ;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription.
Act iii, scene ii.
SHAKESPEARE'S WORK 193
his courage revives : she nourishes him with respect,
and the smile returns ; she nourishes him with hope,
and confidence is restored ; she nourishes him with
wisdom, and reason awakens. Lear, convalescent,
rises again, and step by step returns again to life ;
the child becomes again an old man, the old man
becomes a man again. And behold him happy,
this wretched one ! It is upon this expansion of
happiness that the catastrophe is hurled down. Alas !
there are traitors, there are perjurers, there are mur
derers. Cordelia dies. Nothing more heart-rending
than this. The old man is stunned ; he no longer
understands anything; and, embracing her corpse,
he expires. He dies upon his daughter's breast.
He is saved from the supreme despair of remaining
behind her among the living, a poor shadow, to .feel
the place in his heart empty, and to seek for his soul,
carried away by that sweet being who is departed.
O God ! those whom Thou lovest Thou takest away.
To live after the flight of the angel; to be the
father orphaned of his child ; to be the eye that no
longer has light ; to be the deadened heart that knows
no more joy ; from time to time to stretch the hands
into obscurity and try to reclasp a being who was
there (where, then, can she be ?) ; to feel himself
forgotten in that departure ; to have lost all reason
for being here below ; to be henceforth a man who
goes to and fro before a sepulchre, not received, not
admitted, — this is indeed a gloomy destiny. Thou
hast done well, poet, to kill this old man l.
1 Perhaps the reader will pardon, in view of the remarkable
parallelism, a reference to Charles Lamb's Essay on the
Tragedies of Shakespeare, which Victor Hugo probably
never saw. ' A happy ending ! as if the living martyrdom
that Lear had gone through, — the flaying of his feelings
alive, — did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of lifo
the only decorous tiling for him.' Ta.
BOOK III
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER
CHAPTER I
That vulgar flatt'rer of the ignoble herd *
THIS line is by La Harpe, who aims it at Shakespeare.
Elsewhere La Harpe says : ' Shakespeare panders
to the mob.'
Voltaire, as a matter of course, reproaches Shake
speare with antithesis : that is well. And La Beau-
melle reproaches Voltaire with antithesis : that is
better.
Voltaire, when it is a personal matter with him,
pro domo sua, gets angry. * But ', he writes, * this
Langleviel, alias La Beaumelle, is an ass. I defy
you to find in any poet, in any book, a fine thing
which is not an image or an antithesis.'
Voltaire's criticism is double-edged. He wounds
and is wounded. This is how he characterizes the
Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs : ' Works without
order, full of low images and coarse expressions.'
A little while after he exclaims, furious,
The barb'rous Cr^billon's preferred to me ! 2
An idler of the (Eil-de-Bceuf, wearing the red heel
and the blue ribbon, a stripling and a marquis, — M.
de Crequi, — comes to Ferney, and writes with an
air of superiority : ' I have seen Voltaire, that old
dotard.'
That the unjust should receive a counterstroke
from injustice, is nothing more than right ; and
1 Ce courtisan grossier du profane vulgaire.
2 On m'ose preferer Cr6 billon le barbare !
194
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER 195
Voltaire gets what he deserves. But to throw stones
at men of genius is a general law, and all have to bear
it. To be insulted is, it seems, a coronation.
For Salmasius, ^Eschylus is nothing but farrago *.
Quintilian understands nothing of The Oresteia.
Sophocles mildly scorned ^Eschylus. * When he
does well, he does not know it ', said Sophocles. Ra
cine rejected everything, except two or three scenes
of The, Choephori, which, by a note in the margin of
his copy of ^schylus, he condescended to spare.
Fontenelle says in his Remarks : ' One does not know
what to make of the Prometheus of ^Eschylus. ^Eschy-
lus is a kind of madman'. The eighteenth century,
without exception, ridicules Diderot for admiring
The Eumenides.
' The whole of Dante is a hotch-potch ', says Chau-
don. * Michael Angelo wearies me ', says Joseph de
Maistre. * Not one of the eight comedies of Cervantes
is tolerable ', says La Harpe. 'It is a pity that
Moliere does not know how to write ', says Fenelon.
* Moliere is a base mountebank ', says Bossuet. * A
schoolboy would have avoided the mistakes of Milton ',
says the Abbe Trublet, — an authority as good as any
other. * Corneille exaggerates, Shakespeare raves ',
says Voltaire again, — Voltaire, who must ever be
resisted, and ever defended.
' Shakespeare ', says Ben Jonson, talked heavily
and without any wit '. How prove the contrary ?
What is written abides; talk passes away. Still,
so much stands denied to Shakespeare. That man
of genius had no wit : how that flatters the numberless
men of wit who have no genius !
Some time before Scudery called Corneille ' corneille
deplumee ' (unfeathered carrion-crow), Greene had
1 The passage in Salmaaius is curious, and worth tran
scribing : ' Unus ejus Agamemnon obscuritate suporat
quantum est librorum sacrorum cum suis hebraismis et
syrianiamis et tot a hellenistica supelloctile vel farragino.'
DC Re Hellenisticd, p. 38, ep. dedic.
196 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
called Shakespeare * a crow beautified with our fea
thers '. In 1752 Diderot was sent to the fortress of
Vincennes for having published the first volume of
the Encyclopaedia, and the great success of the year
was a print sold on the quays which represented a
Gray Friar flogging Diderot. Death is always an
extenuating circumstance for those guilty of genius ;
but although Weber is dead, he is ridiculed in Germany,
and for thirty-three years a masterpiece has been
disposed of by a pun. Euryanthe is called the * Ennu-
yante ' [tedious womanj.
D'Alembert hits at one blow Calderon and Shake
speare. He writes to Voltaire [letter cv] : ' I have
announced to the Academy your " Heraclius " of
Calderon. The Academy will read it with as much
pleasure as the harlequinade of Gilles Shakespeare.'
That everything should be perpetually re-examined,
that everything should be contested, even the incon
testable, — what does it matter ? The eclipse is a
good test of truth as well as of liberty. Genius, being
truth and liberty, has a claim to persecution. What
i does genius care for what is transient ? It has been,
and will be again. It is not toward the sun that the
eclipse casts a shadow.
Anything admits of being written. Paper is very
patient. Last year a grave review printed this :
' Homer is about to go out of fashion '.
The judgment passed on the philosopher, on the
artist, on the poet, is completed by the portrait of
the man.
Byron killed his tailor ; Moliere married his own
daughter ; Shakespeare ' loved ' Lord Southampton 1
At last, with their appetites whetted for vices,
The pit roared for the author, that compound of all. 1
This compendium of all the vices is Beaumarchais.
As for Byron, we mention this name a second tune ;
1 Et pour voir a la fin tous les vices ensemble,
Le parterre en tumulte a demande 1'auteur.
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER 197
he is worth the trouble. Read Glenarvon, and listen,
on the subject of Byron's abominations, to Lady
Bl , whom he had loved, and who, of course,
resented it.
Phidias was a procurer ; Socrates was an apostate
and a thief, ' a detacher of mantles ' ; Spinoza was a
renegade and a legacy-hunter ; Dante was a peculator ;
Michael Angelo was cudgelled by Julius II, and quietly
put up with it for the sake of five hundred crowns ;
D'Aubigne was a courtier sleeping in the king's closet,
ill-tempered when he was not paid, and to whom
Henry IV was too kind ; Diderot was a libertine ;
Voltaire a miser ; Milton was venal, — he received a
thousand pounds sterling for his Latin apology for
regicide : * Defensio pro se ' 1, etc. Who says these
things ? who relates these stories ? That good person,
your old fawning friend, 0 tyrants ; your old comrade,
O traitors ; your old auxiliary, O bigots ; your old
comforter, O imbeciles ! — Calumny.
CHAPTER II
LET us add one particular, — diatribe is, upon occasion,
a means of government.
Thus in the print of ' Diderot flogged ', the hand
of the police appeared, and the engraver of the Gray
Friar must have been of close kin to the turnkey of
Vincennes. Governments, more passionate than is
necessary, fail to keep aloof from the animosities
of the crowd below. The political persecution of
former days — it is of former days that we are speak
ing — willingly availed itself of a dash of literary perse
cution. Certainly, hatred hates without being paid
for it. Envy, to do its work does not need a minister
of state to encourage and pension it, and there is such
a thing as unofficial calumny. But a money-bag
does no harm. When Roy, the court-poet, rhymed
1 The work referred to is probably Milton's Defensio
Populi Angdicani, written by way of reply to Salmasius. TR.
198 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
against Voltaire, ' Tell me, daring stoic ', etc., the
position of treasurer of the excise office of Clermont,
and the cross of St. Michael, were not likely to damp
his enthusiasm for the court, and his spirit against
Voltaire. A gratuity is pleasant to receive after a
service rendered. The masters upstairs smile ; you
receive the agreeable order to insult some one you
detest ; you obey amply ; you are free to bite ad
libitum ; you take your fill : it is all profit ; you
hate, and you give satisfaction. Formerly, authority
had its scribes. It was a pack of hounds as good as
any other. Against the free rebellious spirit, the
despot would let loose the scribbler. To torture
was not sufficient ; teasing was resorted to likewise.
Trissotin would hold a confabulation with Vidocq,
and from their tete-a-tete a complex inspiration would
result. Pedantry, thus supported by the police, felt
itself an integral part of authority, and strengthened
its aesthetics with legal means. It grew haughty.
No arrogance is equal to that of the base pedant
raised to the dignity of bumbailiff. See, after the
struggle between the Arminians and the Gomarists,
with what a superb air Sparanus Buyter, his pockets
full of Maurice of Nassau's florins, denounces Joost
Vondel, and proves, Aristotle in hand, that the Pala-
medes of Vondel's tragedy is no other than Barne-
veldt ! useful rhetoric, by which Buyter obtains against
Vondel a fine of three hundred crowns, and for himself
a fat prebend at Dordrecht.
The author of the book, Literary Quarrels, the Abbe
Trail, canon of Monistrol, asks of La Beaumelle,
' Why do you insult M. de Voltaire so much ? ' 'It
is because it sells well ', replies La Beaumelle. And
Voltaire, informed of the question and of the reply,
concludes : ' Precisely so : the simpleton buys the
writing, and the minister buys the writer. It sells
well '.
Fran9oise d'Issembourg de Happoncourt, wife
of Francois Hugo, chamberlain of Lorraine, and
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER 199
celebrated under the name of Madame de Graffigny,
writes to M. Devaux, reader to King Stanislaus:
1 My dear Pampan, Atys being sent away (Read :
Voltaire being banished), the police cause to be pub
lished against him a swarm of small writings and
pamphlets, which are sold at a sou in the cafes and
theatres. That would displease the Marquise1,
if it did not please the King '.
Desfontaines, that other insulter of Voltaire, who
had rescued him from the mad-house of Bicetre,
said to the Abbe Prevost, who advised him to make
his peace with the philosopher : * If Algiers did not
make war, Algiers would die of hunger '.
This Desfontaines, also an abbe, died of dropsy ;
and his well-known tastes gained for him this epitaph :
1 Periit aqua qui meruit igne '.
Among the publications suppressed in the last
century by decree of parliament, is found a document
printed by Quinet and Besogne, and destroyed doubt
less because of the revelations which it contained,
and of which the title gave promise : The Aretiniad 2 ;
or, Price-list of Libellers and Abusive Men of Letters.
Madame de Stael, exiled to a distance of forty-five
leagues from Paris, stops exactly at the forty-five
leagues, at Beaumont-sur-Loire, and thence writes
to her friends. Here is a fragment of a letter addressed
to Madame Gay, mother of the illustrious Madame
de Girardin : ' Ah, dear madame, what a persecution
are these exiles ! ' (We suppress some lines.) ' You
write a book ; it is forbidden to speak of it. Your
name in the journals displeases. Permission is,
however, fully given to speak ill of it '.
CHAPTER III
SOMETIMES the diatribe is sprinkled with quicklime.
All these black pen-nibs end by digging dismal pits.
1 Madame de Pompadour.
2 From Pietro Aretino, the literary jackal of the sixteenth
century. TB.
200 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Among the writers abhorred for having been useful,
Voltaire and Rousseau stand in the first rank. Living,
they were lacerated ; dead, they were mangled. To
have a hack at these renowned ones was a splendid
deed, and set down as such in the bills of service of
literary catchpolls. To insult Voltaire even once,
was enough to give one the rank of pedant-laureate.
Men of power egged on the men of libel. A swarm
of mosquitoes settled upon these two illustrious men,
and the insects are still humming.
Voltaire is the more hated, being the greater.
Everything was good for an attack on him, every
thing was a pretext : the princesses of France, Newton,
Madame du Chatelet, the Princess of Prussia, Mauper-
tuis, Frederick, the Encyclopaedia, the Academy, even
Labarre, Sirven, and Galas. Never a truce. His
popularity suggested to Joseph de Maistre this line :
* Paris crowned him ; Sodom would have banished
him.' Arouet was translated into A rouer 1. At
the house of the Abbess of Nivelles, Princess of the
Holy Empire, half recluse and half worldling — having
recourse, it is said, in order to make her cheeks rosy,
to the method of the Abbess of Montbazon — charades
were played ; among others, this one : ' The first
syllable is his fortune ; the second should be his duty '.
The word was Vol-taire2 . A celebrated member of
the Academy of Sciences, Napoleon Bonaparte, seeing
in 1803, in the library of the Institute, this inscription
in the centre of a crown of laurels, ' To the Great
Voltaire ', scratched with his nail the last three letters,
leaving only * To the Great Volta ! '
Around Voltaire especially there is a sanitary
cordon of priests, the Abbe Desfontaines at the head,
the Abbe Nicolardot at the tail. Freron, although
a layman, is a critic after the priestly fashion, and
belongs to this band.
It was at the Bastile that Voltaire made his debut.
1 Deserving of being broken on the wheel. TB.
2 Vol, * theft ', taire, ' to be silent.' TB.
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER 201
Hi8 cell was next to the dungeon in which Bernard
Palissy had died. Young, he tasted the prison ; old,
he tasted exile. He was kept twenty-seven years
away from Paris.
Jean-Jacques, being wild and somewhat solitary,
was, in consequence of these traits, hunted about.
Paris issued a writ against his person ; Geneva ex
pelled him ; Neufchatel rejected him : Motiers-
Travers condemned him ; Bienne stoned him ; Berne
gave him the choice between prison and expulsion ;
London, hospitable London, scoffed at him.
Both died at about the same time *. Death caused
no interruption to the outrages. A man is dead ;
insult does not slacken pursuit for such a trifle. Hatred
can feast on a corpse. Libels continued, piously
rabid against such glory.
The Revolution came, and placed them in the
Pantheon.
At the beginning of this century, children were
often brought to see these two graves. They were
told, ' It is here ! ' That made a strong impression
on their minds. They carried for ever in their thought
that vision of two sepulchres side by side : the elliptical
arch of the vault, the antique form of the two monu
ments provisionally covered with wood painted like
marble ; these two names, ROUSSEAU, VOLTAIRE,
in the twilight ; and the hand bearing a torch which
was thrust out of the tomb of Jean-Jacques.
Louis XVIII returned. The restoration of the
Stuarts had torn Cromwell from his grave ; the restora
tion of the Bourbons could not do less for Voltaire.
One night, in May, 1814, about two o'clock in the
morning, a cab stopped near the city-gate of La Gare,
opposite Bercy, at a door in a board fence. This
fence surrounded a large vacant piece of ground,
reserved for the projected warehouses, and belonging
to the city of Paris. The cab had come from the
1 Voltaire died May 30, 1778; Rousseau, four days
later. TR.
202 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Pantheon, and the coachman had been ordered to
take the most deserted streets. The fence -gate was
opened. Some men alighted from the cab and entered
the inclosure. Two carried a sack between them.
They were conducted, so tradition asserts, by the
Marquis de Puymaurin, afterward deputy to the
Invisible Chamber *• and Director of the Mint, accom
panied by his brother, the Comte de Puymaurin.
Other men, some in cassocks, were awaiting them.
They proceeded toward a hole dug in the middle of
the field. This hole — according to one of the wit
nesses, who has since been a waiter at the Marronniers
inn at La Rapee — was round, and looked like a dry
well. At the bottom of the hole was quicklime. These
men said nothing, and had no lanterns. The wan
daybreak gave a ghastly light. The sack was opened.
It was full of bones. These were the intermingled
bones of Jean -Jacques and of Voltaire, which had
just been withdrawn from the Pantheon. The mouth
of the sack was brought close to the hole, and the
bones were thrown into that black pit. The two
skulls struck against each other ; a spark, not likely
to be seen by such men as those present, was doubtless
exchanged between the head that had made The
Philosophical Dictionary and the head that had made
The Social Contract, and reconciled them. When
that was done, when the sack had been shaken, when
Voltaire and Rousseau had been emptied into that
hole, a digger seized a spade, threw into the opening
the heap of earth at the side, and filled up the grave.
The others stamped with their feet on the ground,
so as to remove from it the appearance of having been
freshly disturbed ; one of the assistants took for his
trouble the sack — as the hangman takes the clothing
of his victim ; they left the inclosure, shut the gate,
got into the cab without saying a word, and hastily,
before the sun had risen, these men got away.
1 ' Chambre introuvable ', referring to the French Cham
ber of Deputies of 1815. TB.
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER 203
CHAPTER IV
SALMASIUS, that worse Scaliger, does not comprehend
./Eschylus, and rejects him. Who is to blame ?
Salmasius much ; JEschylus little.
The attentive man who reads great works feels
at times, in the midst of his reading, certain sudden
chills, followed by a kind of excess of heat — ' I no
longer understand ! . . . I understand ! ' — shivering
and burning, something which causes him to be a
little upset at the same time that he is very much
struck. Only minds of the first order, only men of
supreme genius, subject to absences in the infinite,
give to the reader this singular sensation, — stupor
for the most, ecstasy for a few. These few are the
children of light. As we have already observed,
these select few, gathering from century to century,
and continually gaining recruits, at last become
numerous, and make up the supreme company, the
definitive public of genius, and like it, sovereign.
It is with this public that, first or last, one must
deal.
Meanwhile there is another public ; there are other
appraisers, other judges, to whom we have just now
given a word. These are not content.
The men of genius, the great minds — this ^Eschylus,
this Isaiah, this Juvenal, this Dante, this Shakespeare
— are beings imperious, tumultuous, violent, passionate,
hard riders of winged steeds, ' overleaping all bounda
ries ', having their own goal, which itself * is beyond
the mark ', * exaggerated ', taking scandalous strides,
flying abruptly from one idea to another, and from
the North ^ole to the South Pole, crossing the heavens
in three steps, making little allowance for the scant
of breath, shaken by all the winds of space, and at
the same time full of some unaccountable equestrian
confidence amidst their bounds across the abyss,
intractable to the ' Aristarchs ', refractory to official
rhetoric, not amiable to asthmatic literati, unsubdued
204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to academic hygiene, preferring the foam of Pegasus
to ass's-milk.
The worthy pedants are kind enough to fear for
them. The ascent occasions a calculation of the
fall. Compassionate cripples lament for Shakespeare.
He is mad ; he mounts too high ! The mob of college
scouts (they are a mob) look on in wonder, and get
.angry. ^Eschylus and Dante make these connoisseurs
blink every moment. This JEschylus is lost ! This
Dante is near falling ! A god spreads his wings for
flight : the Philistines cry out to him, ' Mind your
self ! '
CHAPTER V
BESIDES, these men of genius are disconcerting.
There is no reckoning with them. Their lyric
{fury obeys them ; they interrupt it when they like.
They seem wild. Suddenly they stop. Their frenzy
becomes melancholy. They are seen among the
precipices, alighting on a peak and folding their wings ;
and then they give way to meditation. Their medita
tion is not less surprising than their transport. Just
now they were soaring, now they are sinking shafts.
But their audacity is ever the same.
They are pensive giants. Their Titanic reverie
needs the absolute and the unfathomable for its expan
sion. They meditate as the suns shine, conditioned
by the medium of the abyss around them.
Their roving to and fro in the ideal dizzies the ob
server. Nothing is too high for them, and nothing
too low. They pass from the pigmy to the Cyclops,
from Polyphemus to the Myrmidons, from Queen
Mab to Caliban, from a love-affair to a deluge, from
Saturn's rings to a child's doll. Sinite parvulos venire.
One of their eyes is a telescope, the other a microscope.
They investigate familiarly those two frightful inverse
depths — the infinitely great, and the infinitely little.
And one should not be angry with them ! and
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER 205
one should not reproach them for all this ! Indeed,
what would result if such excesses were to be tolerated ?
What ! No scruple in the choice of subjects, horrible
or sad ; and the thought, even if it be distressing
and formidable, always relentlessly followed up to its
extreme consequence ! These poets see only their
own aim ; and in everything they have an immoderate
way of doing things. What is Job ? A maggot
upon a sore. What is the Divina Commedia? A
series of torments. What is the Iliad ? A collection
of plagues and wounds. Not an artery cut which
is not complacently described. Go about for opinions
of Homer ; ask Scaliger, Terrasson, Lamotte, what
they think of him. The fourth of a canto to the
shield of Achilles — what want of proportion ! He
who does not know when to stop, never knew how
to write. These poets agitate, disturb, trouble, upset,
overwhelm, make everything shiver, break things
occasionally here and there ; they may do mischief, —
the thing is serious ! Thus speak the Athenaea, the
Sorbonnes, the sworn professors, the societies called
* learned ', Salmasius, successor of Scaliger at the
University of Leyden, and the Philistines after them —
all who represent in literature and art the great party
of order. What can be more natural ? The cough
quarrels with the hurricane.
Those who are poor in wit are joined by those who-
have too much wit. The sceptics join hands with
the simpletons. Men of genius, with few exceptions,
are proud and stern; that is in the very marrow of
their bones. They have in their company Juvenal,
Agrippa d'Aubigne, and Milton ; they are prone
to harshness ; they despise the panem et circenses ,-
they seldom grow sociable, and they growl. People
do well to rally them in a pleasant way.
Aha, Poet ! Aha, Milton ! Aha, Juvenal ! So>
you keep up resistance ! you perpetuate disinterested
ness ! you bring together those two firebrands, faith
and will, in order to draw flame from them ! So
206 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
there is something of the Vestal in you, old grumbler !
So you have an altar, — your country ! you have a
tripod, — the ideal ! you believe in the rights of man,
in emancipation, in the future, in progress, in the
beautiful, in the just, in what is great ! Take care ;
you are behindhand ! All this virtue is infatuation.
You emigrate with honour, — but you emigrate. This
heroism is no longer in good form. It no longer suits
the spirit of the time. There comes a moment when
the sacred fire is no longer fashionable. Poet, you
believe in right and truth ; you are behind your age.
Your very immortality makes you a thing of the past.
So much the worse, without doubt, for those grumb
ling geniuses accustomed to greatness, and scornful
of what is not great. They are slow of movement
when honour is at stake ; their back is struck with
anchylosis for anything like bowing and cringing ;
when success passes along, deserved or not. but saluted,
they have an iron bar stiffening their vertebral column.
That is their affair. So much the worse for those
antique Romans. They are ready to be relegated
to antiquarian museums. To bristle up at every
turn may have been all very well in former days ;
these unkempt manes are no longer worn ; lions went
out of fashion with the perukes. The French Revolu
tion is nearly seventy-five years old ; at that age
dotage comes. The people of the present time mean
to belong to their day, and even to their minute.
Certainly, we find no fault with this. Whatever is,
must be ; it is quite right that what exists should
exist ; the forms of public prosperity are diverse ;
one generation is not bound to imitate another. Cato
took example from Phocion ; Trimalchio, who is
sufficiently unlike either, embodies the idea of inde
pendence. You bad-tempered old fellows, you wish
us to emancipate ourselves ? Let it be so. We
disencumber ourselves of the imitation of Timoleon,
Thrasea, Artevelde, Thomas More, Hampden. This
is our way of emancipating ourselves. You wish
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER 207
for a revolt — there it is. You wish for an insurrection
— we rise up against our rights. We enfranchise our
selves from the solicitudes of freedom. Citizenship
is a heavy burden. Rights entangled with obligations
are shackles to one who desires mere enjoyment. It
is fatiguing to be guided by conscience and truth in
all the steps that we take. We mean to walk without
leading-strings and without principles. Duty is a
chain ; we break our shackles. What do you mean
by speaking to us of Franklin ? Franklin is a rather
too servile copy of Aristides. We carry our horror
of servility so far as to prefer Grimod de la Reyniere.
To eat and drink well is an aim in life. Each epoch
has its peculiar manner of being free. Feasting is
freedom. This way of reasoning is triumphant ;
to adhere to it is wise. There have been, it is true,
epochs when people thought otherwise. In those
times the things which were trodden on would some
times resent it, and would rebel ; but that was the
ancient fashion, ridiculous now ; and tiresome people
and croakers must just be allowed to go on affirming
that there was a better notion of right, justice, and
honour in the paving-stones of yore than in the men
of the present.
The rhetoricians, official and officious — we have
pointed out already their wonderful sagacity — take
strong precautions against men of genius. Men of
genius are but slightly academic ; what is more, they
do not abound in commonplaces. They are lyrists,
colourists, enthusiasts, enchanters, possessed, exalted,
* rabid ' — we have read the word — beings who, when
everybody is small, have a mania for creating great
characters ; in fact, they have every vice. A doctor
has recently discovered that genius is a variety of
madness. They are Michael Angelo chiselling giants,
Rembrandt painting with a palette all bedaubed with
the sun's rays ; they are Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare,
—excessive. They bring with them a style of art
wild, howling, flaming, dishevelled like the lion and
208 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the comet. Oh, shocking ! People are right in form
ing combinations against them. It is a fortunate
circumstance that the ' teetotallers ' of eloquence and
poetry exist. ' I admire pallor ', said a literary
Philistine one day — for there is a literary Philistine.
Rhetoricians, solicitous on account of the contagions
and fevers which are spread by genius, recommend
with a lofty wisdom which we have commended,
temperance, moderation, * common sense ', the art of
keeping within bounds ; writers expurgated, trimmed
pruned, regulated ; the worship of the qualities
that the malignant call negative, — continence, absti
nence, Joseph, Scipio, the water-drinkers. All this
is excellent ; only young students must be warned
that by following these sage precepts too closely they
run the risk of glorifying the chastity of the eunuch.
Perhaps I admire Bayard ; I admire Origen less.
CHAPTER VI
SUMMARY statement : Great minds are importunate ;
it is judicious to restrain them a little.
After all, let us admit it at last, and complete our
statement : there is some truth in the reproaches
that are hurled at them. This anger is natural.
The powerful, the grand, the luminous, are, from a
certain point of view, things calculated to offend.
To be surpassed is never agreeable ; to feel one's
own inferiority is to feel a pang. The beautiful exists
so truly by itself that it certainly has no need of pride ;
nevertheless, given human mediocrity, the beautiful
humiliates at the same time that it enchants : it seems
natural that beauty should be a vase for pride, a
brimming vase ; so that the pleasure beauty gives
is tainted with resentment, and the word ' superb '
comes finally to have two senses, one of which breeds
distrust of the other. This is the fault of the beautiful,
as we have already said. It wearies : a sketch by
Piranesi disconcerts you ; the hand-grasp of Hercules
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER '209
bruises you. Greatness is sometimes in the wrong.
It is ingenuous, but obstructive. The tempest thinks
to sprinkle you : it drowns you ; the star thinks to
give light : it dazzles, sometimes blinds. The Nile
fertilizes, but overflows. Excess does not comport
with comfort : the deeps of space form but an inhospi
table dwelling-place ; the infinite is scarcely tenant-
able. A cottage is badly situated on the cataract
of Niagara, or in the circus of Gavarnie ; it is awkward
to keep house with these fierce wonders : to frequent
them regularly without being overwhelmed, one must
be a cretin or a genius.
The dawn itself at times seems to us immoderate :
he who looks straight at it, suffers ; the eye at certain
moments thinks very ill of the sun. Let us not, then,
be surprised at the complaints made, at the incessant
protests, at the fits of passion and prudence, at the
poultices applied by a certain school of criticism, at
the chronic ophthalmy of academies and teaching
bodies, at the precautions suggested to the reader,
at all the curtains drawn and at all the shades set up
against genius. Genius is intolerant unaware*, because
it is genius. What familiarity is possible with ^Eschy-
lus, with Ezekiel, with Dante ?
The self is one's title to egoism. Now, the first
thing that those beings do, is to shock the self of every
man. Exorbitant in everything, in thoughts, in
images, in convictions, in emotions, in passion, in
faith, whatever may be the side of yourself to which
they address themselves, they disturb it. They
overshoot your intelligence ; they dazzle the inner
eye of imagination ; they question and search your
conscience ; they wrench your deepest sensibilities ;
they tear your heart-strings ; they sweep away your
soul.
The infinite that is in them passes from them, and
multiplies them, and transfigures them before your
eyes every moment, a fearful strain upon the vision !
With them, you never know where you are. At every
210 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
turn you encounter the unforeseen. You were looking
for men only : there come giants who cannot enter
your chamber. You expected only an idea : cast
down your eyes, for they are the ideal. You expected
only eagles : these beings have six wings, they are
seraphs. Are they then beyond Nature ? Are they
lacking in humanity ?
Certainly not ; and far from that, and quite the
reverse. We have already said, and we insist upon
it, Nature and humanity are in them more than in
any other beings. They are superhuman men, but
men. Homo sum. This word of a poet sums up all
poetry. Saint Paul strikes his breast, and says,
' Peccamus '. Job tells you who he is : 'I am the
son of a woman '. They are men. What troubles
you is that they are men more than you ; they are
too much men. Where you have but the part, they
have the whole ; they carry in their vast heart entire
humanity, and they are you more than yourself ;
you recognize yourself too much in their work —
hence your outcry. To that total of Nature, to that
complete humanity, to that clay which is all your
flesh, and which is at the same time the whole earth,
they add something ; and this marvellous reflection
of the light of unknown suns completes your terror.
They have vistas of revelation ; and suddenly, and
without crying ' Beware ! * at the moment when you
least expect it, they burst the cloud, and make in
the zenith a gap whence falls a ray lighting up the
terrestrial with the celestial. It is quite natural
that people should have no great fancy for their com
pany, and no taste for neighbourly intimacy with
them.
Whoever has not a soul well attempered by a vigo
rous education prefers to avoid them. For colossal
books there must be athletic readers. To open Jere
miah, Ezekiel, Job, Pindar, Lucretius, and this
Alighieri, and this Shakespeare, one must be robust.
Let it be owned that commonplace habits, a vulgar
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER 211
life, the dead calm of the conscience, ' good taste '
and * common sense ' — all petty and placid egoism —
are disturbed by the portents of the sublime.
Yet, when one plunges in and reads them, nothing
is more hospitable for the mind at certain hours than
these stern spirits. They suddenly assume a lofty
gentleness, as unexpected as the rest. They say to
you, ' Come in ! ' They receive you at home with
an archangelic fraternity. They are affectionate,
sad, melancholy, consoling. You are suddenly at
your ease. You feel yourself loved by them ; you
almost imagine yourself personally known to them.
Their sternness and their pride veil a profound sym
pathy ; if granite had a heart, how deep would its
goodness be ! Well, genius is granite with goodness.
Extreme power goes with great love. They join you
in your prayers. Such men know well that God exists.
Apply your ear to these giants, and you will hear
their hearts beat. Would you believe, love, weep,
beat your breast, fall upon your knees, raise your
hands to heaven with confidence and serenity ? Listen
to these poets : they will aid you to rise toward a
wholesome and fruitful sorrow ; they will make you
feel the heavenly use of emotion. Oh, goodness
of the strong ! Their emotion, which, if they will,
can be an earthquake, is at moments so cordial and
so gentle that it seems like the rocking of a cradle.
They have just quickened within you something which
they foster tenderly. There is maternity in genius.
Advance a step ; a new surprise awaits you : these
poets have a grace like that of Aurora herself.
High mountains have upon their slopes all climes,
and the great poets all styles. It is sufficient to
change the zone. Go up, it is the tempest ; descend,
the flowers are there. The inner fire accommodates
itself to the winter without ; the glacier makes an
admirable crater ; and the lava has no finer outlet
than through the snow. A sudden blaze of flame
is not strange on a polar summit. This contact of
212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the extremes is a law in Nature, in which the theatrical
strokes of the sublime are exhibited at every moment.
A mountain, a genius, both possess an austere majesty.
These masses evolve a sort of religious intimidation.
Dante is not less precipitous than Etna ; Shakespeare's
heights equal the steeps of Chimborazo. The summits
of the poets are not less cloud-piercing than mountain
peaks. There thunders roll ; while in the valleys,
in passes, in sheltered nooks, at the bottom of canons,
are rivulets, birds, nests, foliage, enchantments, extra
ordinary floras. Above the frightful arch of the
Aveyron, in the middle of the Mer de Glace, there is that
paradise, called 'The Garden' — have you seen it? What
a freak of Nature ! A hot sun, a shade tepid and
fresh, a vague exudation of perfumes on the grass-plots,
an indescribable month of May perpetually crouching
amid precipices. Nothing can be more tender and
more exquisite. Such are the poets ; such are the
Alps. These vast, dreadful heights are marvellous
growers of roses and violets. They avail themselves
of the dawn and of the dew better than all your mea
dows and all your hills, whose natural business it is.
The April of the plain is flat and vulgar compared
with their April, and they have, those immense old
mountains, in their wildest ravine, their own charming
spring-tide well known to the bees.
BOOK IV
CRITICISM
CHAPTER I
ALL Shakespeare's plays, with the exception of Mac
beth and Romeo and Juliet — thirty-four plays out of
thirty-six—offer to the observer one peculiarity which
seems to have escaped, up to this day, the most eminent
commentators and critics ; one which is unnoticed
by the Schlegels, and even by M. Villemain himself,
in his remarkable labours, and of which it is impossible
not to speak. It is the double action which traverses
the drama and reflects it on a small scale. Beside
the tempest in the Atlantic is the tempest in the
tea-cup. Thus, Hamlet makes beneath himself a
Hamlet; he kills Polonius, father of Laertes,— and
there stands Laertes over against him exactly as he
stands over against Claudius. There are two fathers
to avenge. There might be two ghosts. So, in
King Lear, side by side and simultaneously, Lear,
driven to despair by his daughters Goneril and Regan,
and consoled by his daughter Cordelia, is repeated
in Gloster, betrayed by his son Edmund and loved
by his son Edgar. The idea bifurcated, the idea
echoing itself, a lesser drama copying and elbowing
the principal drama, the action attended by its moon,
— a smaller action like it, — unity cut in two ; surely
the fact is a strange one. These double actions have
been strongly condemned by the few commentators
who have pointed them out. In this condemnation
we do not sympathize. Do we then approve and
accept as good these double actions ? By no means.
We recognize them, and that is all. The drama of
Shakespeare — as we said with all our force as far back
213
214 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
as 1827 1, in order to discourage all imitation — the
drama of Shakespeare is peculiar to Shakespeare ;
it is a drama inherent in this poet ; it is his own essence ;
it is himself. Thence his originalities, which are
absolutely personal ; thence his idiosyncrasies, which
exist without establishing a law.
These double actions are purely Shakespearean.
Neither ^Eschylus nor Moliere would admit them ;
and we should certainly agree with ^Eschylus and
Moliere.
These double actions are, moreover, the sign of
the sixteenth century. Each epoch has its own
mysterious stamp. The centuries have a signature
which they affix to masterpieces, and which it is
necessary to know how to decipher and recognize.
The signature of the sixteenth century is not that
of the eighteenth. The Renascence was a subtle time,
a time of reflection. The spirit of the sixteenth cen
tury was reflected in a mirror. Every idea of the
Renascence has a double compartment. Look at
the rood-lofts in the churches. The Renascence,
with an exquisite and fantastical art, always makes
the Old Testament an adumbration of the New.
The double action is there in everything. The symbol
explains the personage by repeating his gesture. If,
in a low-relief, Jehovah sacrifices his son, he has for
a neighbour, in the next low-relief, Abraham sacrificing
his son. Jonah passes three days in the whale, and
Jesus passes three days in the sepulchre ; and the
jaws of the monster swallowing Jonah answer to the
mouth of hell engulfing Jesus.
The carver of the rood-loft of Fecamp, so stupidly
demolished, goes so far as to give for a counterpart
to St Joseph— whom ? Amphitryon.
These singular parallels constitute one of the habits
of the profound and far-sought art of the sixteenth
century. Nothing can be more curious in that manner
than the use which was made of St Christopher. In
1 Preface to Cromwell.
CRITICISM 215
the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, in paint
ings and sculptures, St Christopher — the good giant
martyred by Decius in 250, recorded by the Bollandists
and accepted imperturbably by Baillet — is always
triple, an opportunity for the triptych. To begin
with, there is a first Christ- bearer, a first Chris tophorus ;
this is Christopher with the infant Jesus on his shoulders.
Next, the Virgin with child is a Christopher, since
she carries Christ. Lastly, the cross is a Christopher ;
it also carries Christ. This treble illustration of the
idea is immortalized by Rubens in the cathedral of
Antwerp. The twin idea, the triple idea — such is
the stamp of the sixteenth century.
Shakespeare, faithful to the spirit of his time, must
needs add Laertes avenging his father to Hamlet
avenging his father, and cause Hamlet to be pursued
by Laertes at the same time that Claudius is pursued
by Hamlet ; he must needs make the filial piety of
Edgar a comment on the filial piety of Cordelia, and
bring out in contrast, weighed down by the ingratitude
of unnatural children, two wretched fathers, each
bereaved of one of the two kinds of light — Lear mad,
and Gloster blind.
CHAPTER II
WHAT then ? No criticisms ? No strictures ? You
explain everything ? Yes. Genius is an entity
like Nature, and requires, like Nature, to be accepted
purely and simply. A mountain must be accepted
as such, or left alone. There are men who would
make a criticism on the Himalayas, pebble by pebble.
Mount Etna blazes and sputters, throws out its glare,
its wrath, its lava, and its ashes ; these men take
scales and weigh these ashes, pinch by pinch. Quot
librae in monte summo ? Meanwhile genius continues
its eruption. Everything in it has its reason for
existing. It is because it is. Its shadow is the under
side of its light. Its smoke comes from its flame. Its
216 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
precipice is the condition of its height. We love
this more, and that less ; but we remain silent wherever
we feel God. We are in the forest ; the crossed
grain of the tree is its secret. The sap knows what
it is doing ; the root understands its trade. We
take things as they are ; we are on good terms with
what is excellent, tender, or magnificent ; we acquiesce
in masterpieces ; we do not make use of one to find
fault with the other ; we do not insist that Phidias
should sculpture cathedrals, nor that Pinaigrier
should glaze temples. The temple is harmony, the
cathedral is mystery ; they are two different models
of the sublime ; we do not claim for the minster the
perfection of the Parthenon, nor for the Parthenon
the grandeur of the minster.
We are so far whimsical as to be satisfied if a thing
is beautiful. We do not reproach for its sting the
insect that gives us honey. We renounce our right
to criticise the feet of the peacock, the cry of the
swan, the plumage of the nightingale, the larva of the
butterfly, the thorn of the rose, the odour of the lion,
the hide of the elephant, the prattle of the cascade,
the pips of the orange, the immobility of the Milky
Way, the saltness of the ocean, the spots on the sun,
the nakedness of Noah.
The quandoque bonus dormitat is permitted to Horace.
We raise no objection. What is certain is that Homer
would not say this of Horace, he would not take the
trouble. But that eagle would find this chattering
humming-bird charming enough. I grant it is pleasant
to a man to feel himself superior, and to say, ' Homer
is puerile, Dante is childish '. The smile accompanying
such a remark is rather becoming. Why not crush
these poor geniuses a little ? To be the Abbe Trublet,
and to say, * Milton is a schoolboy ', is agreeable.
How witty is the man who finds that Shakespeare
has no wit ! That man is La Harpe, Delandine,
Auger; he is, was, or shall be, an Academician.
* All these great men are full of extravagance, bad
CRITICISM 217
taste, and childishness '. What a fine decision to
render ! These manners tickle their possessors voluptu
ously ; and, in reality, when they have said, * This
giant is small ', they can fancy that they are great.
Every man has his own way. As for myself, the
writer of these lines, I admire everything, like a fool.
That is why I have written this book.
To admire, — to be an enthusiast, — it has struck
me that it was well to give, in our century, this
example of folly.
CHAPTER III
LOOK, therefore, for no criticism. I admire ^Eschylus,
I admire Juvenal, I admire Dante in the mass, in the
lump, all. .1 do not cavil at those great benefactors.
What you characterize as a fault, I call accent. I
accept, and give thanks. The marvels of the human
mind being my inheritance, I claim no exemption
from the liabilities of the succession. Pegasus being
given to me, I do not look the gift-horse in the mouth.
A masterpiece offers me its hospitality : I approach
it hat in hand, and I admire the countenance of my
host. Gilles Shakespeare, — be it so. I admire Shake
speare, and I admire Gilles. Falstaff is proposed
to me, — I accept him, and I admire the * Empty
the jorden.' I admire the senseless cry, * A rat ! *
I admire the quips of Hamlet ; I admire the whole
sale murders of Macbeth : I admire the witches,
' that ridiculous spectacle ' ; I admire * the buttock
of the night ' ; I admire the eye plucked from Glouces
ter. I have no more intelligence than that comes to.
Having recently had the honour to be called * silly '
by several distinguished writers and critics, and even
by my illustrious friend M. de Lamartine *, I am
determined to justify the epithet.
1 'The whole biography, sometimes rather puerile even
rather silly, of Bishop Myriel.' LAMARTINE : Course in
Literature (Discourse Uxxiv, p. 385.
218 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
We close with a final observation of detail which
we have specially to make regarding Shakespeare.
Orestes, that fatal senior of Hamlet, is not, as we
have said, the sole link between ^Eschylus and Shake
speare ; we have noted a relation, less easily per
ceptible, between Prometheus and Hamlet. The
mysterious intimacy between the two poets appears,
with reference to this same Prometheus, still more
strangely striking in a particular which, up to this
time, has escaped the notice of observers and critics.
Prometheus is the grandsire of Mab.
Let us prove it.
Prometheus, like all personages who have become
legendary, like Solomon, like Caesar, like Mahomet,
like Charlemagne, like the Cid, like Joan of Arc, like
Napoleon, has a double continuation, the one in
history, the other in fable. Now, the continuation
of Prometheus in the fable is this :
Prometheus, creator of men, is also creator of
spirits. He is father of a dynasty of Divs, whose
filiation the old metrical romance have preserved:
Elf, that is to say, the Rapid, son of Prometheus ;
then Elfin, king of India ; then Elfinan, founder of
Cleopolis, town of the fairies ; then Elfilin, builder
of the golden wall ; then Elfinell, winner of the battle
of the demons ; then Elfant, who built Panthea all
in crystal ; then Elfar, who killed Bicephalus and
Tricephalus ; then Elfinor, the magian, a kind of
Salmoneus, who built over the sea a bridge of copper,
sounding like thunder, ' non imitabile fulmen sere
et cornipedum pulsu simularet equorum ' ; then
seven hundred princes ; then Elficleos the Sage ;
then Elferon the Beautiful; then Oberon ; then
Mab. Wonderful fable, which, with a profound
meaning, unites the sidereal and the microscopic,
the infinitely great and the infinitely small.
And it is thus that the animalcule of Shakespeare
is connected with the giant of ^Eschylus.
The fairy — drawn athwart men's noses as they lie
CRITICISM 219
asleep, in her chariot covered with the wings of grass
hoppers, by eight little atomies harnessed with moon
beams and whipped with a lash of film — the fairy
atom has for ancestor the huge Titan, robber of stars,
nailed on the Caucasus, having one hand on the
Caspian Gates, the other on the Gates of Ararat, one
heel on the source of the Phasis, the other on the
Validus-Murus, closing the passage between the
mountain and the sea, a colossus whose vast profile
of shadow was projected by the sun, according to ita
rising or setting, now over Europe as far as Corinth,
now over Asia as far as Bangalore.
Nevertheless, Mab — who is also called Tanaquil
— has all the wavering inconsistency of a dream.
Under the name of Tanaquil she is the wife of the
elder Tarquin, and she spins for young Servius Tulliua
the first tunic worn by a young Roman after leaving
off the praetexta ; Oberon, who turns out to be Numa,
is her uncle. In * Huon de Bordeaux * she is called
Gloriande, and has for a lover Julius Caesar, and
Oberon is her son ; in Spenser she is called Gloriana,
and Oberon is her father ; in Shakespeare she is
called Titania, and Oberon is her husband. This
name, Titania, connects Mab with the Titan, and
Shakespeare with ^Eschylus.
CHAPTER IV
AN eminent man of our day, a celebrated historian,
a powerful orator, an earlier translator of Shake
speare, is in our opinion mistaken when he regrets,
or appears to regret, the slight influence of Shake
speare upon the theatre of the nineteenth century.
We cannot share that regret. An influence of any
sort, even that of Shakespeare, could but mar the
originality of the literary movement of our epoch.
* The system of Shakespeare ', says this honourable*
and grave writer, with reference to that movement,
* may furnish, it seems to me, the plans after which
220 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
genius must henceforth work '. We have never been
of that opinion, and we said so, in anticipation, forty
years ago1. For us, Shakespeare is a genius, and
not a system. On this point we have already ex
plained our views, and we mean soon to explain them
at greater length ; but let us say now that what
Shakespeare has done, is done once for all. There
is no reverting to it. Admire or criticize, but do not
recast. It is finished.
A distinguished critic, recently deceased, M. Chaude-
saigues, lays stress on this reproach. ' Shakespeare ',
says he, * has been revived without being followed.
The romantic school has not imitated Shakespeare ;
that is its fault'. That is its merit. It is blamed
for this ; we praise it. The contemporary theatre,
such as it is, is itself. The contemporary theatre
has for device, ' Sum, non sequor '. It belongs to no
' system '. It has its own law, and it fulfils this
law ; it has its own life, and it lives this life.
The drama of Shakespeare expresses man at a
given moment. Man passes away ; this drama
remains, having as its eternal background life, the
heart, the world, and as its foreground the sixteenth
century. This drama can neither be continued nor
begun anew. Another age, another art.
The theatre of our day has no more followed Shake
speare than it has followed ^Eschylus ! And without
enumerating all the other reasons that we shall note
farther on, how perplexed would he be who wished
to imitate and copy, in making a choice between
these two poets ! ^Eschylus and Shakespeare seem
made to prove that contraries may be admirable.
The point of departure of the one is absolutely opposite
to the point of departure of the other. ^Eschylus
is concentration, Shakespeare is diffusion. One
deserves applause because he is condensed, and the
other because he is dispersed ; to JEschylus unity,
1 Preface to Cromwell.
CRITICISM 221
to Shakespeare ubiquity. Between them they divide
God. And as such intelligences are always complete,
one feels in the unit drama of ^Eschylus the free
agitation of passion, and in the diffusive drama of
Shakespeare the convergence of all the rays of life.
The one starts from unity and reaches the multiple ;
the other starts from the multiple and arrives at
unity.
The evidence of this is striking, especially when
we compare Hamlet with Orestes. Extraordinary
double page, obverse and reverse of the same idea,
which seems written expressly to prove how true
it is that two different geniuses, making the same
thing, will make two different things.
It is easy to see that the theatre of our day has,
rightly or wrongly, traced out its own way between
Greek unity and Shakespearean ubiquity.
CHAPTER V
LET us set aside, for the present, the question of
contemporary art, and take up again the general
question.
Imitation is always barren and bad.
As for Shakespeare — since Shakespeare is the
poet who claims our attention now — he is in the
highest degree a genius human and general ; but,
like every true genius, he is at the same time an idiosyn
cratic and a personal mind. Axiom : the poet starts
from his own inner self to come to us. It is that
which makes the poet inimitable.
Examine Shakespeare, fathom him, and see how
determined he is to be himself. Expect from him
no concession. He is certainly not selfish, but what
he does he does of deliberate choice. He commands
his art, within the limits, of course, of his proper
work. For neither the art of ^Eschylus, nor the art
of Aristophanes, nor the art of Plautus, nor the art
222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of Macchiavelli, nor the art of Calderon, nor the art
of Moliere, nor the art of Beauinarchais, nor any
of the forms of art, deriving life each of them from
the special life of a man of genius, would obey the
orders given by Shakespeare. Art thus understood
is vast equality and profound liberty ; the region
of equals is also the region of the free.
It is an element of Shakespeare's grandeur that
he cannot be taken as a model. In order to realize
his idiosyncrasy, open one of his plays — no matter
which — it is always, foremost and above all, Shake
speare.
What more personal than Troilus and Cressida ?
A comic Troy ! Here is Much Ado about Nothing —
a tragedy which ends with a burst of laughter. Here
is The Winter's Tale — a pastoral drama. Shake
speare is at home in his work. Would you see a
despotism ? — consider his imagination. What arbi
trary determination to dream ! What despotic re
solution in his dizzy flight ! What absoluteness in
his indecision and wavering ! The dream fills some
of his plays to such a degree that man changes his
nature, and becomes a cloud rather than a man.
Angelo in Measure for Measure is a misty tyrant.
He becomes disintegrated, and wears away. Leontes
in The Winter's Tale is an Othello who fades out.
In Cymbeline one thinks that lachimo will become
an lago ; but he dissolves. The dream is there —
everywhere. Watch Manilius, Posthumus, Hermione,
Perdita, passing by. In The Tempest the Duke of
Milan has ' a brave son ', who is like a dream within
a dream. Ferdinand alone speaks of him, and no
one but Ferdinand seems to have seen him. A brute
becomes reasonable : witness the constable Elbow
in Measure for Measure. An idiot comes suddenly
by his wits : witness Cloten in Cymbeline. A king
of Sicily is jealous of a king of Bohemia. Bohemia
has a sea-coast ; the shepherds piok up children
there. Theseus, a duke, espouses Hippolyta, the
CRITICISM 223
Amazon. Oberon comes in also. For here it is Shake
speare's will to dream ; elsewhere he thinks.
We say more : where he dreams, he still thinks ;
with a profundity different, but not inferior.
Let men of genius remain in peace in their originality.
There is something wild in these mysterious civilizers.
Even in their comedy, even in their buffoonery,
even in their laughter, even in their smile, there is
the unknown. In them is felt the sacred dread that
belongs to art, and the all-powerful terror of the
imaginary mingled with the real. Each of them
is in his cavern, alone. They hear each other from
afar, but never copy. We are not aware that the
hippopotamus imitates the roar of the elephant.
Lions do not ape each other.
Diderot does not recast Bayle ; Beaumarchais
does not copy Plautus, and has no need of Davus
to create Figaro ; Piranesi is not inspired by Daedalus ;
Isaiah does not begin again the work of Moses.
One day, at St Helena, M. de las Casas said, ' Sire,
had I been like you, master of Prussia, I should have
taken the sword of Frederick the Great from the
tomb at Potsdam, and I should have worn it '. ' Fool ',
replied Napoleon, ' I had my own '.
Shakespeare's work is absolute, sovereign, im
perious, eminently solitary, unneighbourly, sublime
in radiance, absurd in reflection and must remain
without a copy.
To imitate Shakespeare would be as insane as to
imitate Racine would be stupid.
CHAPTER VI
LET us agree, by the way, respecting a designation
much used on every hand, ' profanum vulgus ', a
word of a poet emphasized by pedants. This ' pro
fanum vulgus' seems to be everybody's missile.
Let us fix the meaning of this word. What is the
* vulgar herd ' ? The school says, * It is the people '.
And we, for our part, say, * It is the school '.
224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
But let us first define this expression, * the school '.
When we say * the school ', what must be understood ?
Let us explain. The school is the resultant of ped
antry ; the school is the literary excrescence of the
budget ; the school is intellectual mandarinship
governing in the various authorized and official teach
ings, either of the press or of the state, from the theatri
cal feuilleton of the prefecture to the biographies and
encyclopaedias duly examined and stamped and
hawked about, and made sometimes, by way of refine
ment, by republicans agreeable to the police ; the
school is the classic and scholastic orthodoxy, with its
unbroken girdle of walls. Homeric and Virgilian
antiquity traded upon by official and licensed literati,
a sort of China calling itself Greece ; the school is,
summed up in one concretion which forms part of
public order, all the knowledge of pedagogues, all
the history of historiographers, all the poetry of
laureates, all the philosophy of sophists, all the criticism
of pedants, all the ferules of the teaching friars, all
the religion of bigots, all the modesty of prudes, all
the metaphysics of partisans, all the justice of place
men, all the old age of dapper young men bereft of
their virility, all the flattery of courtiers, all the
diatribes of censer- bearers, all the independence of
flunkeys, all the certitudes of short sights and of
base souls. The school hates Shakespeare. It detects
him in the very act of mingling with the people,
going to and fro in public thoroughfares, ' trivial ',
having a word for every man, speaking the language
of the people, uttering the human cry like any other,
accepted by those whom he accepts, applauded by
hands black with tar, cheered by the hoarse throats
of all those who come from labour and from weariness.
The drama of Shakespeare is for the people ; the
school is indignant, and says, * Odi profanum vulgus'.
There is demagogy in this poetry roaming at large ;
the author of Hamlet * panders to the mob '.
Be it so. The poet ' panders to the mob '.
CRITICISM 226
If anything is groat, it ia that.
In the foreground everywhere, in full light, amidst
the flourish of trumpets, are the powerful men, followed
by the gilded men. The poet does not see them, oiv
if he does, he disdains them. He lifts his eyes and
looks at God ; then he drops his eyes and looks at
the people. There in the depths of shadow, well-
nigh invisible by reason of its submersion in darkness,
is that fatal crowd, that vast and mournful heap of
suffering, that venerable populace of the tattered
and of the ignorant — a chaos of souls. That crowd
of heads undulates obscurely like the waves of a
nocturnal sea. From time to time there pass over
that surface, like squalls over the water, catastrophe*
— a war, a pestilence, a royal favourite, a famine.
This causes a tremor of but brief duration, the deeps
of sorrow being calm, like the deeps of the sea. Despair
leaves in the soul a dreadful weight, as of lead. Th&
last word of the abyss is stupor. This is the night.
Such is, beneath the mournful glooms amid which all
is indistinct, the sombre sea of the poor.
These burdened ones are silent ; they know nothing,
they can do nothing, they think nothing : they simply
endure. Plectuntur Achivi. They are hungry and
cold. Their indelicate flesh appears through their
tatters. Who makes those tatters ? The purple.
The nakedness of virgins comes from the nudity of
odalisques. From the twisted rags of the daughters
of the people fall pearls for the Fontanges and the
Chateauroux. It is famine that gilds Versailles.
The whole of this living and dying shadow moves ;
these spectral forms are in the pangs of death ; the
mother's breast is dry, the father has no work, the
brain has no light. If there is a book in that desti
tution it resembles the pitcher, so insipid or corrupt i»
what it offers to the thirst of the mind. Mournful
households !
The group of the little ones is wan. This whole
mass expires and creeps, not having even the power
226 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
to love ; and perhaps unknown to them, while they
bow and submit, from all that vast unconsciousness
in which Right dwells, from the inarticulate murmur
of those wretched breaths mingled together proceeds
an indescribable, confused voice, a mysterious fog
of expression, succeeding, syllable by syllable in the
darkness, in uttering wonderful words : Future,
Humanity, Liberty, Equality, Progress. And the
poet listens, and he hears ; and he looks, and he sees ;
and he bends lower and lower, and he weeps ; and
then, growing with a strange growth, drawing from
all that darkness his own transfiguration, he stands
erect, terrible and tender, above all these wretched
ones — those of high place as well as those of low
— with naming eyes.
And with a loud voice he demands a reckoning.
And he says, Here is the effect ! And he says, Here
is the cause ! Light is the remedy. Erudimini.
He is like a great vase full of humanity shaken by
the hand within the cloud, from which should fall
to earth great drops — fire for the oppressors, dew
for the oppressed. Ah ! you deem that an evil ?
Well, we, for our part, approve it. It seems to us<
right that some one should speak when all are suffer
ing. The ignorant who enjoy and the ignorant who
suffer have equal need of instruction. The law of
fraternity is derived from the law of labour. The
practice of killing one another has had its day ; the
hour has come for loving one another. It is to promul
gate these truths that the poet is good. For that,
he must be of the people ; for that, he must be of the
populace : that is to say, the poet, as he leads in
progress, should not draw back before the elbow
ing of facts, however ugly the facts may be. The
actual distance between the real and the ideal cannot
otherwise be measured. Besides, to drag the ball and
chain a little completes a Vincent de Paul. To steel
themselves, therefore, to promiscuous contact with
trivial things, to the popular metaphor, to the great
CRITICISM 227
life in common with those exiles from joy who are
called the poor — such is the first duty of poets. It
is useful, it is necessary, that the breath of the people
should traverse these all-powerful souls. The people
have something to say to them. It is good that
there should be in Euripides a flavour of the herb-
dealers of Athens, and in Shakespeare of the sailors
of London.
Sacrifice to * the mob ', O poet ! Sacrifice to that
unfortunate, disinherited, vanquished, vagabond,
shoeless, famished, repudiated, despairing mob ;
sacrifice to it, if it must be and when it must
be, thy repose, thy fortune, thy joy, thy country,
'thy liberty, thy life. The mob is the human race
in misery. The mob is the mournful beginning of
the people. The mob is the great victim of dark
ness. Sacrifice to it ! Sacrifice thyself ! Let thy
self be hunted, let thyself be exiled like Voltaire to
Ferney, like D'Aubigne to Geneva, like Dante to
Verona, like Juvenal to Syene, like Tacitus to Me-
thymna. like ^Eschylus to Gela, like John to Patmos,
like Elijah to Horeb, like Thucydides to Thrace, like
Isaiah to Ezion-geber ! Sacrifice to the mob. Sacri
fice to it thy gold, and thy blood which is more than
thy gold, and thy thought which is more than thy blood,
and thy love which is more than thy thought ;
sacrifice to it everything except justice. Receive
its complaint ; listen to it touching its faults and
touching the faults of others ; hear its confession and
its accusation. Give it thy ear, thy hand, thy arm,
thy heart. Do everything for it, excepting ovil.
Alas ! it suffers so much, and it knows nothing. Cor
rect it, warn it, instruct it, guide it, train it. Put it
to the school of honesty. Make it spell truth, show
it the alphabet of reason, teach it to read virtue,
probity, generosity, mercy. Hold thy book wide
open. Be there, attentive, vigilant, kind, faithful,
humble. Light up the brain, inflame the mind,
extinguish selfishness ; and thyself give the ex-
228 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
ample. The poor are privation ; be thou abnega
tion. Teach ! irradiate ! they need thee ; thou art
their great thirst. To learn is the first step ; to
live is but the second. Be at their command :
dost thou hear ? Be ever there in the form of light !
For it is beautiful on this sombre earth, during this
dark life, brief passage to something beyond, — it is
beautiful that Force should have Right for a master,
that Progress should have Courage as a leader, that
Intelligence should have Honour as a sovereign, that
Conscience should have Duty as a despot, that Civiliza
tion should have Liberty as a queen, and that the
servant of Ignorance should be the Light.
BOOK V
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES
CHAPTER I
MEMORABLE things have been done during the last
eighty years. The pavement is cluttered with the
rubbish of a vast demolition.
What is done is but little compared with what
remains to be done.
To destroy is mere task-work ; the work of the
artist is to build. Progress demolishes with the
left hand ; it is with the right hand that it builds.
The left hand of Progress is called Force ; the
right hand is called Mind.
A great deal of useful destruction has, up to this
hour, been accomplished ; all the old cumbersome
civilization is, thanks to our fathers, cleared away.
It is well ; it is finished, it is thrown down, it is on
the ground. Up, now, O intelligences ! gird your
selves for work, for travail, for fatigue, for duty ; it
becomes necessary to construct.
Here are three questions,
To construct what ?
To construct where ?
To construct how ?
We reply,
To construct the people.
To construct it according to the laws of progress.
To construct it by means of light.
CHAPTER II
To work for the people— this is the great and urgent
need.
It is important, at the present time, to bear in
230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
mind that the human soul has still greater need of
the ideal than of the real.
It is by the real that we exist ; it is by the ideal
that we live. Would you realize the difference ?
Animals exist, man lives *.
To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at
the present ; it is to be able to see over the wall of
the future. To live, is to have in one's self a balance,
and to weigh in it good and evil. To live, is to have
justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity,
common-sense, right, and duty welded to the heart.
To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can
do and should do. Life is conscience. Cato would
not rise before Ptolemy. Cato really lived.
Literature secretes civilization, poetry secretes
the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants
of societies ; that is why poetry is a hunger of the
soul.
That is why poets are the first instructors of the
people.
That is why Shakespeare must be translated in
France.
That is why Moliere must be translated in England.
That is why comments must be made on them.
That is why there must be a vast public literary
domain.
That is why all the poets, all the philosophers,
all the thinkers, all the producers of nobility of soul
must be translated, commented on, published, printed,
reprinted, stereotyped, distributed, hawked about,
explained, recited, spread abroad, given to all, given
cheaply, given at cost price, given for nothing.
Poetry evolves heroism. M. Royer-Collard, that
original and ironical friend of routine, was, taken for
all in all, a wise and noble spirit. Some one we know
heard him say one day, * Spartacus is a poet.'
1 Perhaps it should be noted that, in the original, exis
tence is made the higher, more absolute mode of being ;
e.^r., ' kes animatp; vivent, 1'homme existe.' Ta.
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES 231
That dreadful and consoling Ezckiel, the tragic
revcaler of progress, has all kinds of singular passages
full of a profound meaning : * The voice said to me,
Fill thine hand with coals of fire from between the
cherubim, and scatter them over the city '. And
elsewhere : * The spirit having gone into them, whither
soever the spirit was to go they went ' . And again :
* Behold, a hand was sent unto me ; and lo, a roll of
a book was therein. The voice said unto me : Eat
this roll. Then did I eat it : and it was in my mouth
as honey for sweetness' *. To eat the book is a strange
and striking image, embodying the whole formula of
perfectibility, which is made up of knowledge above,
and of instruction below.
We have just said: * Literature secretes civiliza
tion '. Do you doubt it ? Open the first statistics
you come across.
Here is one fact which we find under our hand :
Toulon Penitentiary, 1862. Three thousand and
ten prisoners. Of these three thousand and ten
convicts, forty know a little more than to read and
write, two hundred and eighty-seven know how to
read and write, nine hundred and four read badly
and write badly, seventeen hundred and seventy-nine
can neither read nor write. In this wretched crowd,
all the merely mechanical trades are represented by
numbers decreasing as you rise toward the enlight
ened professions ; and you arrive at this final result,—
goldsmiths and jewellers in the prison, four ; ecclesi
astics, three ; attorneys, two ; actors, one ; musicians,
one ; men of letters, not one.
The transformation of the crowd into the people
—profound task ! It is to this labour that the men
called Socialists have devoted themselves during
the last forty years. The author of this book, how
ever insignificant he may be, is one of the oldest
in this labour. The Last Day of a Condemned Pris-
1 In this passage, as elsewhere, the quotations appear to
be made from memory. TE.
232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
oner dates from 1828, and Claude Gueux from 1834.
If he claims his place among these philosophers, it is
because it is a place of persecution. A certain hatred
of Socialism, very blind, but very general, has raged
for fifteen or sixteen years, and is still raging most
bitterly among the influential classes (classes, then,
are still in existence ?). Let it not be forgotten that
true Socialism has for its end the elevation of the
masses to the civic dignity, and that, therefore, its
principal care is for moral and intellectual cultivation.
The first hunger is ignorance; Socialism wishes,
then, above all, to instruct. That does not hinder
Socialism from being calumniated, and Socialists from
being denounced. To most of the infuriated tremblers
who have the public ear at the present moment, these
reformers are public enemies ; they are guilty of
everything that has gone wrong. * O Romans ! '
said Tertullian, * we are just, kind, thinking, lettered,
honest men. We meet to pray, and we love you because
you are our brethren. We are gentle and peaceable
like little children, and we wish for concord among
men. Nevertheless, O Romans, if the Tiber over
flows, or if the Nile does not, you cry, " To the lions
with the Christians ! " '
CHAPTER IU
THE democratic idea, the new bridge of civilization,
is just now undergoing the formidable trial of over
weight. Every other idea would certainly give way
under the load that it is made to bear. Democracy
proves its solidity by the absurdities that are heaped
upon it without shaking it. It must bear everything
that people choose to place upon it. At this moment
they are attempting to make it carry despotism.
* The people have no need of liberty' — such was the
password of a certain innocent but deluded school,
the head of which has been dead some years. That
poor honest dreamer sincerely believed that progress
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES 233
can continue without freedom. We have heard him
put forth, probably without intention, this aphorism :
' Freedom is good for the rich '. Such maxims have
the disadvantage of not being prejudicial to the
establishment of empires.
No, no, no ; nothing without freedom !
Servitude is the soul blinded. Can you picture
to yourself a man voluntarily blind ? This terrible
thing exists. There are willing slaves. A smile
in irons ! Can anything be more hideous ? He who
is not free is not a man ; he who is not free has no
sight, no knowledge, no discernment, no growth, no
comprehension, no will, no faith, no love ; he has
no wife and children, he has only a female with young :
he lives not. Ab luce principium. Freedom is the
apple of the eye ; freedom is the visual organ of pro
gress.
To attempt, because freedom has inconvenience
and even perils, to produce civilization without it,
would be like attempting to cultivate the ground
without the sun, which is also a not unexceptionable
star. One day, in the too beautiful summer of 1829,
a critic, now forgotten — and wrongly, for he was not
without some talent — M.P., feeling too warm, ex
claimed as he mended his pen : * I am going to write
down the sun.'
Certain social theories, very distinct from Socialism
as we understand it and desire it, have gone astray.
Let us discard all that resembles the convent, the
barrack, the cell, and the straight line. Paraguay
minus the Jesuits is Paraguay just the same. To
give a new shape to the evil is not a useful task. To
remodel the old slavery would be stupid. Let the
nations of Europe beware of a despotism made anew
from materials which to some extent they have them
selves supplied. Such a thing, cemented with a
special philosophy, might easily endure. We have
just mentioned the theorists, some of them otherwise
upright and sincere, who, through fear of a dispersion
234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of activities and energies, and of what they call ' an
archy ', have arrived at an almost Chinese acceptance
of absolute social centralization. They turn their
resignation into a doctrine. Provided man eats and
drinks, all is right. The happiness of the beast is
the solution. But this is a happiness which others
might call by a different name.
We dream for nations something besides a felicity
made up solely of obedience. The bastinado sums up
that sort of felicity for the Turkish fellah, the knout
for the Russian serf, and the cat-o' -nine-tails for the
English soldier. These Socialists outside of Socialism
derive from Joseph de Maistre and from Ancilion,
perhaps without suspecting it ; for these ingenious
theorists, the partisans of the ' deed accomplished ',
have — or fancy they have — democratic intentions,
and speak energetically of ' the principles of '80.'
Let these involuntary philosophers of a possible despot
ism reflect that to indoctrinate the masses against
freedom, to allow appetite and fatalism to get a hold
upon the minds of men, to saturate them with material
ism and expose them to the results — this would be
to understand progress in the fashion of that worthy
man who applauded a new gibbet and exclaimed,
* Excellent ! We have had till now only an old wooden
gallows ; but times have changed for the better,
and here we are with a good stone gibbet,
which will do for our children and our grandchildren ! *
CHAPTER IV
To enjoy a full stomach, a satisfied digestion, a satiated
belly, is doubtless something, for it is the enjoyment
of the brute. However, one may set one's ambition
higher.
Certainly, a good salary is a fine thing. To have
beneath one's feet the firm ground of good wages,
is pleasant. The wise man likes to want nothing.
To assure jjjs QWQ position is the characteristic of an
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES 235
intelligent man. An official chair, with ten thousand
sesterces a year, is a graceful and convenient seat ;
liberal emoluments give a fresh complexion and good
health ; one lives to an old age in pleasant well-paid
sinecures ; the high financial world, abounding in
profits, is a place agreeable to live in ; to be on a good
footing at court settles a family well and brings a
fortune. As for myself, I prefer to all these solid
comforts the old leaky vessel in which Bishop Quod-
vultdeus embarks with a smile.
There is something beyond satisfying one's appetite.
The goal of man is not the goal of the animal.
A moral lift is necessary. The life of nations, like
the life of individuals, has its moments of depression ;
these moments pass, certainly, but no trace of them
ought to remain. Man, at this day, tends to fall into
the stomach:, man must be replaced in the heart,
man must be replaced in the brain. The brain — this
is the bold sovereign that must be restored ! The
social question requires to-day, more than ever, to
be examined on the side of human dignity.
To show man the human goal ; to ameliorate intelli
gence first, the animal afterward ; to contemn the
flesh as long as the thought is despised, and to set
the example upon their own flesh — such is the actual,
immediate, urgent duty of writers.
This is what men of genius have done at all times.
You ask in what poets can be useful. Simply this —
in permeating civilization with light.
CHAPTER V
UP to this day there has been a literature for the
lettered. In France particularly, as we have already
said, literature tended to form a caste. To be a
poet was something like being a mandarin. Words
did not all belong by right to the language ; regis
tration was granted or refused by the dictionary. The
dictionary had a will of its own. Imagine the botanist
236 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
declaring to a vegetable that it does not exist, and
Nature timidly offering an insect to entomology which
refuses it as incorrect ! Imagine astronomy cavilling
at the stars ! We recollect having 'heard an academi
cian, now dead, say before the full Academy that
French had been spoken in France only in the seven
teenth century, and then for but twelve years, — we no
longer recollect which years. Let us abandon — for
it is time — this order of ideas ; democracy requires
it. The present enlargement of thought demands
something else. Let us forsake the college, the con
clave, the cell, trivial tastes, trivial art, the trivial
chapel.
Poetry is not a coterie. An effort is now being
made to galvanize things that are defunct. Let us
strive against this tendency. Let us insist on the
truths that are urgent. The masterpieces recom
mended by the manual for the bachelorship, com
pliments in verse and in prose, tragedies serving
merely as canopies over the head of some king, inspira
tion in full dress, decorated big-wigs laying down the
laws of poetry, the manuals of poetic art which forget
La Fontaine and for which Moliere is a ' perhaps ',
the Planats emasculating the Corneilles, prudish
tongues, thought shut in between the four walls of
Quintilian, Longinus, Boileau, and La Harpe : all
this — although the official public instruction is soaked
and saturated with it — all this is of the past. A certain
epoch called the great century — which was certainly,
for literature, a fine century — is after all, at bottom,
nothing but a literary monologue. Is it possible to
realize such a thing — a literature which is an aside?
A certain form of art seems to bear upon its pediment
the legend, * No admittance.' As for ourselves, we
understand poetry only with the door wide open. The
hour has struck for hoisting the * All for All '. What is
needed by civilization, henceforth a grown-up matron,
is a popular literature.
The year 1832 opened a debate, on the surface
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES 237
literary, at bottom social and human. Tho time has
come to conclude the debate. We conclude it in
favour of a literature having in view this goal : * The*
People.'
Thirty-one years ago the author of these pages
wrote, in the preface to Lucretia Borgia, a word often
repeated since : * The poet feels the burden of souls '.
Were it worth while, he would add here that, possible
error apart, this utterance of his conscience has beem
the rule of his life.
CHAPTER VI
MACCHIAVELLI cast upon the people a strange glance.
To heap the measure, to overflow the cup, to exagger
ate the horror of the prince's deed, to make the burden
more crushing in order to make the revolt more certain,
to cause idolatry to grow into execration, to push the
masses to extremities — such seems to be his policy.
His Yes signifies No. He charges despotism to the-
muzzle in order to explode it ; the tyrant becomes
in his hands a hideous projectile which will shatter
itself. Macchiavelli conspires. For whom? Against
whom ? Guess ! His apotheosis of kings is thus
the thing to make regicides. On the head of his;
Prince he places a diadem of crimes, a tiara of vices,
a halo of baseness, and he invites you to adore hia
monster with the air of a man expecting an avenger.
He glorifies evil with a sidelong glance toward the
shadow where Harmodius lurks. Macchiavelli, this
getter up of princely outrages, this servant of the-
Medici and of the Borgias, had in his youth been-
put to the rack for admiring Brutus and Cassius.
He had perhaps plotted with the Soderini for the-
deliverance of Florence. Does he remember this ?
Does he continue ? His advice is followed, like the-
lightning. by a low rumbling in the cloud, an alarming
reverberation. What did he mean to say ? Against
whom has he a design ? Is- the advice for or against
238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
him to whom he gives it ? One day at Florence, in
the garden of Cosmo Ruccelai, there being present
the Duke of Mantua and John de' Medici, who after
ward commanded the Black Bands of Tuscany, Varchi,
the enemy of Macchiavelli, heard the latter say to
the two princes, * Let the people read no book, not
even mine '. It is curious to compare with this
remark the advice given by Voltaire to the Due de
Choiseul — at once advice to the minister, and in
sinuation for the King : ' Let the noodles read our
nonsense ; there is no danger in reading, my lord.
What can a great monarch like the King of France
fear ? The people are but rabble, and the books
are but trash '. Let them read nothing — let them
read everything. These two pieces of contrary advice ,
coincide more than one would think. Voltaire with
hidden claws is purring at the feet of the King. Vol
taire and Macchiavelli are two formidable, indirect
revolutionists, dissimilar in everything, and yet really
identical by their profound hatred disguised as flattery
of their master. The one is sly, the other is sinister.
The princes of the sixteenth century had as theorist
-upon their infamies, and as enigmatical courtier,
Macchiavelli, a dark enthusiast. It is a dreadful
thing to be flattered by a sphinx ! Better to be
flattered, like Louis XV, by a cat.
Conclusion : Make the people read Macchiavelli,
•and make them read Voltaire.
Macchiavelli will inspire them with horror, and
Voltaire with contempt, for crowned guilt.
But the hearts should turn, above all, toward the
grand, pure poets, be they sweet like Virgil, or bitter
like Juvenal.
CHAPTER VII
THE progress of man through intellectual advance
ment : there is no safety but in that. Teach !
learn .! All the revolutions of the future are enclosed
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES 239
and engulfed in this phrase : Gratuitous and obliga
tory instruction.
This large scheme of intellectual instruction should
be crowned by the exposition of works of the first
order. The highest place to the men of genius !
Wherever there is a gathering of men, there ought
to be, in a special place, a public expositor of the
great thinkers.
By a great thinker we mean a beneficent thinker.
The perpetual presence of the beautiful in their
works makes the poets the highest of teachers.
No ono can foresee the quantity of light that will
be evolved by placing the people in communication
with men of genius. The combination of the heart
of the people with the heart of the poet will be the
voltaic pile of civilization.
Will the people understand this magnificent teach
ing ? Certainly. We know of nothing too high for the
people. The soul of the people is great. Have you
ever gone, of a holiday, to a theatre open gratuitously
to all ? What do you think of that audience. Do
you know of any other more spontaneous and intelli
gent ? Do you know, even in the forest, a vibration
more profound ? The court of Versailles admires
like a well-drilled regiment ; the people throw them
selves passionately into the beautiful. They pack
together, crowd, amalgamate, combine, and knead
themselves in the theatre, — a living paste, which
the poet is about to mould. The powerful thumb
of Moliere will presently make its mark on it; the
nail of Corneille will scratch this shapeless mass.
Whence does that mass come ? From the Courtille,
from the Porcherons, from the Cunette ; it is barefoot,
barearmed, ragged. Silence ; This is the raw
material of humanity 1.
The house is crowded ; the vast multitude looks,
listens, loves ; all consciences, deeply moved, throw
1 The places mentioned are banlicues, or low quarters of
Paris, full of driaking-dons. TB.
240 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
out their internal fire ; all eyes glisten ; the huge,
thousand-headed beast is there, the Mob of Burke,
the Plebs of Titus Livius, the Fex Urbis of Cicero.
It caresses the beautiful, smiling at it with the grace
of a woman. It is literary in the most refined sense
of the word ; nothing equals the delicacy of the
monster. The tumultuous crowd trembles, blushes,
palpitates ; its modesty is surprising : the crowd is a
virgin. No prudery, however ; this creature is no
fool. It is wanting in no kind of sympathy ; it has
in itself the whole keyboard, from passion to irony,
from sarcasm to the sob. Its pity is more than pity,
it is real mercy. God is felt in it. Suddenly the
sublime passes, and the sombre electricity of the
deep instantly arouses all that mass of hearts ; enthusi
asm works its transfiguration. And now, is the
enemy at the gates ? is the country in danger ? Give
the word to this populace, and it will re-enact Ther
mopylae. What has produced this transformation ?
Poetry.
The multitude — and in this lies their grandeur
— are profoundly open to the ideal. When they
come in contact with lofty art they are pleased, they
palpitate. Not a detail escapes them. The crowd
is one liquid and living expanse capable of vibration.
A mob is a sensitive-plant. Contact with the beautiful
stirs ecstatically the surface of multitudes, a sure sign
that the deeps are sounded. A rustling of leaves, a
mysterious passing breath — the crowd trembles
beneath the sacred insufflation of the deep.
And even when the man of the people is not of
the crowd, he is still a good auditor of great things.
His ingenuousness is honest, his curiosity healthy.
Ignorance is a longing. His near relation with Nature
renders him open to the holy emotion of the true.
He has secret absorbents for poetry which he himself
does not suspect. Every kind of instruction fs due
to the people. The more divine the light, the more
is it made for this simple soul. We would have in
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES 241
every village a chair from which Homer should be
explained to the peasants.
CHAPTER VIII
EXCESSIVE devotion to the material is the evil of
our epoch ; hence a certain sluggishness.
The great problem is to restore to the human mind
something of the ideal. Whence shall we draw tho
ideal ? Wherever it is to be found. The poets, the
philosophers, the thinkers are its urns. The ideal
is in ^Eschylus, in Isaiah, in Juvenal, in Alighieri, in
Shakespeare. Throw ^Eschylus, throw Isaiah, throw
Juvenal, throw Dante, throw Shakespeare into the
deep soul of the human race.
Pour Job, Solomon, Pindar, Ezekiel, Sophocles,
Euripides, Herodotus, Theocritus, Plautus, Lucre
tius, Virgil, Terecne, Horace, Catullus, Tacitus, Saint
Paul, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Petrarch, Pascal,
Milton, Descartes, Corneille, La Fontaine, Montes
quieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Sedaine,
Andre Ch^nier, Kant, Byron, Schiller — pour all these
souls into man.
Pour in all the wits from ^Esop up to Moliere,
all the intellects from Plato up to Newton, all the
encyclopaedists from Aristotle up to Voltaire.
By this means you will cure the present malady
and establish forever the health of the human mind.
You will cure the middle-class, and found the
people.
As already indicated, after the destruction which
has delivered the world, you will construct the home
for the permanent life of the race.
What an aim — to construct the people ! Princi
ples combined with science, all possible quantity of
the absolute introduced by degrees into the fact,
Utopia treated successively by every mode of reali
zation, — by political economy, by philosophy, by
physics, by chemistry, by dynamics, by logic, by
242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
art ; union gradually replacing antagonism, and unity
replacing union ; for religion God, for priest the father,
for prayer virtue, for field the whole earth, for language
the word, for law the right, for motive-power duty,
for hygiene labour, for economy universal peace, for
canvas the very life, for the goal progress, for authority
freedom, for people the man. Such is the simplifica
tion.
And at the summit the ideal.
The ideal ! — stable type of ever-moving progress.
To whom belong men of genius, if not to thee, O
people ? They do belong to thee ; they are thy sons
and thy fathers. Thou givest birth to them, and
they teach thee. They open in thy chaos vistas of
light. As children, they have drunk at thy breasts.
They have leaped in the universal matrix of humanity.
Each of thy phases, O people, is^an avatar. The deep
action of life — it is in thee that it must be sought.
Thou art the great mother. From thee issue the
mysterious company of the intelligences : to thee,
therefore, let them return.
To thee, O people, they are dedicated by their
author, God !
BOOK VI
THE BEAUTIFUL THE SERVANT OF THE
TRUE
CHAPTER I
AH, minds, be useful ! Be of some service. Do
not be fastidious when so much depends upon being
efficient and good. Art for art's sake may be very fine,
but art for progress is finer still. To dream of castles
in Spain is well ; to dream of Utopia is better. Ah !
you must think ? Then think of making man better.
You must have a vision ? Here is a vision for you
— the ideal. The prophet seeks solitude, but not
isolation. He unravels and untwists the threads of
humanity, tied and rolled in a skein within his soul ;
he does not break them. He goes into the desert
to think — of whom ? Of the multitudes. It is not to
the forests that he speaks, it is to the cities. It is
not a reed that he sees shaken with the wind, it is
man ; it is not against lions that he cries aloud,
it is against tyrants. Woe unto thee, Ahab ! woe
unto thee, Hoshea ! woe unto you, kings ! woe
unto you, Pharaohs ! is the cry of the great solitary.
Then he weeps.
Over what ? Over that eternal Babylonish cap
tivity suffered long ago by Israel ; suffered by Poland,
by Roumania, by Hungary, by Venice to-day. He
grows old, the good and gloomy thinker ; he watches,
he lies in wait, he listens, he looks, his ear inclined to
the silence, his eye straining into the night, his claw
half unsheathed toward the wicked. Go, then, and
talk of ' art for art's sake ' to this cenobite of the ideal.
243
244 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
He walks straight toward his goal, which is this : the
best. To this he is consecrated.
He is not his own ; he belongs to his apostleship.
To him is intrusted the great duty of impelling the
human race upon its forward march. Genius is not
made for genius, it is made for man. Genius on earth
is God giving himself. Whenever a masterpiece
appears, a distribution of God is taking place. The
masterpiece is a variety of the miracle. Thence, in
all religions and among all peoples, comes faith in
divine men. They deceive themselves who think
that we deny the divinity of the Christs.
At the point now reached by the social question,
all action should be in common. Isolated forces
frustrate one another ; the ideal and the real are
solidary. Art should aid science. These two wheels
of progress should turn together.
Generation of new talents, noble group of writers
and poets, legion of young men, O living future of
my country, your elders love and salute you ! Cour
age ! let us consecrate ourselves. Let us devote
ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just ; it is
well for us to do so.
Some pure lovers of art, moved by a solicitude
which is not without its dignity and its nobility,
discard the formula, * Art for Progress ', the Beau
tiful Useful, fearing lest the useful should deform
the beautiful. They tremble to see the drudge's
hand attached to the muse's arm. According to
them, the ideal may become perverted by too much
contact with reality. They are solicitous for the
sublime if it descends as far as to humanity. Ah !
they are in error.
The useful, far from circumscribing the sublime,
enlarges it. The application of the sublime to human
affairs produces unexpected masterpieces. The useful,
considered in itself and as an element combining with
the sublime, is of several kinds : there is the useful
which is tender, and there is the useful which is indig-
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 245
nant. Tender, it cheers the unfortunate and creates
the social epopee ; indignant, it flagellates the wicked
and creates the divine satire. Moses passes the rod
to Jesus ; and after having caused the water to gush
from the rock, that same august rod drives the vendors
from the Temple.
What ! could art decrease by being expanded ?
No ; a further service is an added beauty.
But people protest : To undertake the cure of
social evils, to amend the codes, to impeach law in
the court of right, to utter those hideous words,
* penitentiary ', * convict-keeper ', * galley-slave ', ' girl
of the street ' ; to inspect the police registers, to
contract the business of dispensaries, to study the
questions of wages and want of work, to taste the
black bread of the poor, to seek labour for the work
ing-woman, to confront fashionable idleness with
ragged sloth, to throw down the partition of ignor
ance, to open schools, to teach little children how to
read ; to attack shame, infamy, error, vice, crime,
want of conscience ; to preach the multiplication of
spelling-books, to proclaim the equality of the sun,
to improve the food of intellects and of hearts, to give
meat and drink, to demand solutions for problems
and shoes for naked feet — these things are not the
business of the azure. Art is the azure.
Yes, art is the azure ; but the azure from above,
whence falls the ray which swells the wheat, yellows
the maize, rounds the apple, gilds the orange, sweetens
the grape. Again I say, a further service is an added
beauty. At all events, where is the diminution ?
To ripen the beet- root, to water the potato, to increase
the yield of lucern, of clover, or of hay ; to be a fellow-
workman with the ploughman, the vine -dresser, and
the gardener, this does not deprive the heavens of
one star. Ah ! immensity does not despise utility,
and what does it lose by it ? Does the vast vital
fluid that we call magnetic or electric flash through
the cloud-masses with less splendour because it
246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
consents to perform the office of pilot to a bark, and
to keep constant to the north the little needle intrusted
to it, the gigantic guide ? Is Aurora less splendid,
clad less in purple and emerald ; suffers she any
diminution of majesty and of radiant grace, because,
foreseeing an insect's thirst, she carefully secretes
in the flower the dewdrop needed by the bee ?
Yet people insist that to compose social poetry,
human poetry, popular poetry ; to grumble against
the evil and laud the good, to be the spokesman of
public wrath, to insult despots, to make knaves
despair, to emancipate man before he is of age, to
push souls forward and darkness backward, to know
that there are thieves and tyrants, to clean penal
cells, to flush the sewer of public uncleanness — shall
Polyhymnia bare her arm to these sordid tasks ? Fie !
Why not ?
Homer was the geographer and historian of his
time, Moses the legislator of his, Juvenal the judge
of his, Dante the theologian of his, Shakespeare the
moralist of his, Voltaire the philosopher of his. No
region, in speculation or in fact, is shut to the mind.
Here a horizon, there wings ; freedom for all to soar.
For certain sublime beings, to soar is to serve.
In the desert, not a drop of water ; the wretched file
of pilgrims drag along, overcome with a horrible
thirst ; suddenly, in the horizon, above an undula
tion in the sands, a lammergeier is seen soaring, and
all the caravan cry out, ' There is a spring ! '
What thinks ^Eschylus of art for art's sake ? If
ever there was a poet, ^Eschylus is certainly he. Listen
to his reply. It is in the Frogs of Aristophanes, line
1039. ^Eschylus speaks : ' From the beginning
the illustrious poet has served men. Orpheus has
taught the horror of murder, Musaeus oracles and
medicine, Hesiod agriculture, and divine Homer
heroism. And I, after Homer, have sung Patroclus
and Teucer the lion-hearted, to the end that every
citizen may endeavour to imitate great men '.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 247
Just as the whole sea is salt, the whole Bible is
poetry. This poetry takes its own time for talking
politics. Open 1 Samuel, chapter viii. The Jewish
people demand a king. ... ' And the Lord said
unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people
in all that they say unto thee : for they have not
rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should
not reign over them.' ... * And Samuel told all
the words of the Lord* unto the people that asked
of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of
the king that shall reign over you : He will take your
sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots
and to be his horsemen ; and some shall run before
his chariots '. . . . * And he will take your daughters
to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.
And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and
your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them
to his servants '. . . . * And he will take your men-
servants, and your maid-servants, and your good
liest young men, and your asses, and put them to
his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep :
and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out
in that day because of your king which ye shall have
chosen you ; and the Lord will not hear you in that
day '. Samuel, we see, denies the right divine ;
Deuteronomy shakes the altar, — the false altar, let
us observe ; but is not the next altar, always the false
altar ? ' Ye shall demolish the altars of the false
gods. Ye shall seek God where he dwells'. It is
almost Pantheism. Because it takes part in human
affairs, because it is democratic here, iconoclastic
there, is this book less magnificent and less supreme ?
If poetry is not in the Bible, where is it ?
You say : The muse is made to sing, to love, to
believe, to pray. Yes, and no. Let us understand
each other. To sing whom ? The void ? To love
whom ? One's self ? To believe what ? The dogma?
To pray to what ? The idol ? No ; here is the
truth : to sing the ideal, to love humanity, to believe
in progress, to pray toward the infinite.
248 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Take care, ye who trace these circles about the
poet ; ye place him outside of humanity. That the
poet should be beyond humanity in one way — by
his wings, by his immense flight, by his possible
sudden disappearance in the fathomless — is well,
it must be so; but on condition of reappearance.
He may go, but he must return. Let him have
wings for the infinite, provided he has feet for the
earth, and that, after having been seen flying, he is
seen to walk. Having gone beyond humanity, let
him become man again. After he has been seen
as an archangel, let him be once more a brother.
Let the star which is in that eye shed a tear, and
let it be a human tear. Thus, human and super
human, he shall be the poet. But to be altogether
beyond man, is not to be. Show me thy foot, genius,
and let us see if, like myself, thou hast the dust of
earth upon thy heel. If thou hast never walked in
the dusty footpath which I tread, thou knowest not
me, nor I thee. Depart ! Thou who believest thy
self an angel art but a bird.
Help from the strong for the weak, help from the
great for the small, help from the free for the slaves,
help from the thinkers for the ignorant, help from
the solitary for the multitudes, such is the law, from
Isaiah to Voltaire. He who does not follow this law
may be a genius, but he is only a genius of luxury. By
not handling the things of the earth, he thinks to
purify himself ; but he annuls himself. He is the
refined, the delicate, he may be the exquisite genius ;
he is not the great genius. Any one, roughly useful,
but useful, has the right to ask, on seeing this good-
for-nothing genius, * Who is this idler ? ' The amphora
which refuses to go to the fountain deserves the hisses
of the water-pots.
Great is he who consecrates himself ! Even when
overcome, he remains serene, and his misfortune is
happiness. No, it is not a bad thing for the poet to
be brought face to face with duty. Duty has a stern
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 240
likeness to the ideal. The task of doing one's duty is
worth undertaking. No, the jostling with Cato is
not to t>e avoided. No, no, no ; truth, honesty, the
instruction of the masses, human liberty, manly
virtue, conscience, are not things to disdain. Indig
nation and compassion for the mournful slavery of
man are but two sides of the same faculty ; those
who are capable of wrath are capable of love. To
level the tyrant and the slave, what a magnificent
endeavour! Now, the whole of one side of actual
society is tyrant, and all the other side is slave. A
grim settlement is impending, and it will be accom
plished. All thinkers must work with that end in
view. They will gain greatness in that work. To
be the servant of God in the task of progress, and the
apostle of God to the people, such is the law which
regulates the growth of genius.
CHAPTER II
THERE are two poets — the poet of caprice, and the
poet of logic ; and there is a third poet, a composite
of the other two, correcting and completing the one
by the other, and summing up both in a higher entity,
so that the two forms are blended in one. This last
is the first. He has caprice, and he follows the divine
breath ; he has logic, and he follows duty. The
first writes the Song of Songs, the second writes
Leviticus, the third writes the Psalms and the Prophe
cies. The first is Horace, the second is Lucan, the
third is Juvenal ; the first is Pindar, the second is
Hesiod, the third is Homer.
No loss of beauty results from goodness. Is the
lion less beautiful than the tiger because he has the
faculty of compassionate emotion ? Is that mane
deprived of its majesty because the jaw opens to
drop the child into its mother's arms ? Does the
roaring vanish from that terrible mouth because it
has licked Androcles ? The unhelpful genius, no
250 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
matter how graceful, is really ugly. A prodigy with
out love is a monster. Let us love ! let us love !
To love has never hindered from pleasing. Where
have you seen one form of the good excluding the
other ? On the contrary, all that is good is allied.
Let me, however, be understood : it does not follow
that to have one quality implies necessarily the posses
sion of the other ; but it would be strange that one
quality added to another should produce diminution.
To be useful, is but to be useful ; to be beautiful, is
but to be beautiful ; to be both useful and beautiful,
is to be sublime. Such are Saint Paul in the first
century, Tacitus and Juvenal in the second, Dante in
the thirteenth, Shakespeare hi the sixteenth, Milton
and Moliere in the seventeenth.
We have just now recalled a saying that has become
famous, ' Art for art's sake '. Let us, once for all,
explain ourselves touching this expression. If an
assertion very general and very often repeated (in
good faith, we believe) can be credited, the shibboleth,
' Art for art's sake ', must have been written by the
author of this book. Written ? never. You may
read, from the first to the last line, all that we have
published ; you will not find these words. It is the
contrary that is written throughout our works, and,
we insist, in our entire life. As to the expression in
itself, what reality has it ? Here is the fact, which
several of our contemporaries remember as well as
we do. One day, thirty- five years ago, in a discussion
between critics and poets on Voltaire's tragedies,
the author of this book threw out this interruption :
* This tragedy is not a tragedy. It does not contain
living men ; it contains glib maxims. Rather, a
hundred times, " Art for art's sake ".' This remark,
turned — doubtless involuntarily — from its true sense
to serve the ends of the discussion, has since assumed,
to the great surprise of him who had uttered it, the
proportions of a formula. It is this phrase, limited
to Alzire and to the Orphan of China, and incontestable
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 251
in that restricted application, which has been turned
into a perfect declaration of principles, and an axiom
to inscribe on the banner of Art.
This point settled, let us go on.
Between two verses — the one by Pindar, deifying
a coachman or glorifying the brazen nails of a chariot
wheel ; the other by Archilochus, so powerful that,
after having read it, Jeffreys would leave off his career
of crime and would hang himself on the gallows pre
pared by him for honest people— between two such
verses of equal beauty, I prefer that of Archilochus.
In times anterior to history, when poetry is fabulous
and legendary, it has a Promethean grandeur. What
forms this grandeur ? Utility. Orpheus tames wild
animals ; Amphion builds cities ; the poet, tamer
and architect, Linus aiding Hercules, Musaeus assisting
Daedalus, poetry a civilizing power : such are the
origins. Tradition agrees with reason : in that, the
good sense of the nations is not deceived. The people
have always invented fables in the interest of truth.
Magnified by that hazy remoteness, everything is great.
Now, the beast- taming poet whom you admire in
Orpheus, you may recognize again in Juvenal.
We insist on Juvenal. Few poets have been more
insulted, more contested, more calumniated. Calumny
against Juvenal has been drawn at such long date
that it still lasts. It passes from one knave of the
pen to another. These grand haters of evil are
hated by all the flatterers of power and success.
The mob of servile sophists, of writers who
have the mark of the collar about their necks, of
bullying historiographers, of scholiasts kept and
fed, of court and school followers, stand in the way
of the punishers and avengers. They croak around
these eagles. Scant and grudging justice is ren
dered to dispensers of justice. They hinder the
masters, and rouse the indignation of the lackeys,
for there is such a thing as the indignation of baseness.
Moreover, the diminutives cannot do less than
252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
help each other, and Cscsarion must at least have
Tyrannion as a support. The pedant breaks ferules
for the satrap. For such jobs there are lettered
courtiers and official pedagogues. These poor, dear
vices, so open-handed, these excellent condescending
•crimes, his Highness Rufinus, his Majesty Claudius,
the august Madame Messalina who entertains so
sumptuously and grants pensions out of her privy
purse, and who abides and perpetuates her reign
•under the names of Theodora, Fredegonde, Agnes,
Margaret of Burgundy, Isabel of Bavaria, Catherine
de' Medici, Catherine of Russia, Caroline of Naples,
etc., etc. — all these great lords the crimes, all these
fine ladies the turpitudes, shall they have the sorrow
of witnessing the triumph of Juvenal ? No. War
with the scourge in the name of sceptres ! War with
the rod in the name of the cliques ! That is well !
Go on, courtiers, clients, eunuchs, and scribes. Go
on, publicans and pharisees. You will not hinder
the republic from thanking Juvenal, or the temple
from approving Jesus.
Isaiah, Juvenal, Dante, are virgins. Observe
their downcast eyes. There is chastity in the wrath
of the just against the unjust. The Imprecation can
be as holy as the Hosanna ; and indignation, honest
indignation, has the very purity of virtue. In point
of whiteness, the foam has no reason to envy the
snow.
CHAPTER III
ALL history proves the working partnership of art
and progress. Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres. Rhythm
is a power, a power that the Middle Ages recognize
and submit to not less than antiquity. The second
barbarism, feudal barbarism, also dreads the power
•of verse. The barons, not over-timid, are abashed
before the poet,— who is this man ? They fear lest
* a manly song be sung'. Behind this unknown
man is the spirit of civilization. The old donjons
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 253
full of carnage open thoir wild eyes and scan the dark
ness ; anxiety seizes them. Feudality trembles,
the den is disturbed. The dragons and the hydras are
ill at ease. Why ? Because an invisible god is there.
It is curious to find this power of poetry in countries
where barbarism is densest, particularly in England,
in that extreme feudal darkness, * penitus toto divisos
orbe Britannos.' If we believe the legend — a form
of history as true and as false as any other — it is
due to poetry that Colgrim, besieged by the Britons,
is relieved in York by his brother Bardulf the Saxon ;
that King Awlof penetrates into the camp of Athel-
etan ; that Werburgh, prince of Northumbria, is
delivered by the Welsh, whence, it is said, that Celtic
device of the Prince of Wales, Ich dien * ; that Alfred,
King of England, triumphs over Gitro, King of the
Danes, and that Richard the Lion-hearted escapes
from the prison of Losenstein. Ranulf, Earl of
Chester, attacked in his castle of Rothelan, is saved
by the intervention of the minstrels, the legend is
confirmed by the privileges still enjoyed under Elizabeth
by the minstrels, who were patronized by the Lords
of Dalton.
The poet had the right of reprimand and menace.
In 1316, at Whitsuntide, Edward II being at table in
the grand hall of Westminster with the peers of Eng
land, a female minstrel entered the hall on horseback,
rode all around, saluted Edward II, predicted in a
loud voice to the minion Spencer the gibbet and
castration by the hand of the executioner, and to the
King the horn by means of which a red-hot iron should
be buried in his intestines, placed on the table before
the King a letter, and departed, unchallenged and un
molested.
At the festivals, the minstrels passed before the
priests, and were more honourably treated. At
Abingdon, at the festival of the Holy Cross, each
1 Welsh eich dyn, ' behold your man.' See Stormonth'a
Dictionary, a. v. TB.
254 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of the twelve priests received fourpence, and each
of the twelve minstrels two shillings. At the
priory of Maxtoke, the custom was to give supper
to the minstrels in the Painted Chamber lighted by
eight huge wax candles.
As we advance toward the North, the rising fogs
seem to magnify the poet. In Scotland, his propor
tions are colossal. If anything surpasses the legend
of the rhapsodists, it is the legend of the scalds. At
the approach of Edward of England, the bards defend
Stirling as the three hundred had defended Sparta ;
.and they have their Thermopylae, equal to that of
Leonidas. Ossian, perfectly certain and real, has
had a plagiarist. That is nothing ; but this plagiarist
has done more than rob him, he has made him insipid.
To know Fingal only through Macpherson is as if one
knew Amadis only through Tressan. They show at
Staffa the poet's stone, Clachan an Bairdh, so named,
according to many antiquaries, long before the visit of
Walter Scott to the Hebrides. This Bard's Chair, a
great hollow rock furnishing a proper seat for a giant,
is at the entrance of the grotto. Around it are the
waves and the clouds. Behind Cie Clachan an Bairdh
is piled the superhuman geometry of the basaltic
prisms, the chaos of colonnades and waves, and all
the mystery of that dread edifice. The gallery of
Fingal runs next to the poet's chair, and there the
sea breaks before entering beneath that terrible ceiling.
At nightfall the fishermen of the Mackinnon clan think
they see in that chair a leaning figure. ' It is the
ghost ', they say ; and no one would venture even in
full daylight, to ascend to that awful seat ; for to the
idea of the stone is linked the idea of the tomb, and
none but the shadow-man may sit upon that granite
chair.
CHAPTER IV
THOUGHT is power.
All power is duty. Should this power enter into
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 255
repose in our age ? Should duty shut its eyes ? and
is the moment come for art to disarm ? Less than
ever. Thanks to 1789, the human caravan has reached
a high pleateau ; and, the horizon being vaster, art
has more to do. This is all. To every widening of
the horizon, an enlargement of conscience corresponds.
We have not reached the goal. Concord condensed
into felicity, civilization summed up in harmony, that
is yet far off. In the eighteenth century that dream
was so distant that it seemed guilty. The Abbe de
St. Pierre was expelled from the Academy for having
dreamed that dream, an expulsion which appears
rather severe at a period when pastorals carried the
day even with Fontenelle, and when St. Lambert
invented the idyl for the use of the nobility. The
Abbe de St. Pierre has left behind him a word and a
dream ; the word is his own, ' Beneficence ' ; his
dream is the dream of us all, ' Fraternity '. This
dream, which made Cardinal de Polignac foam, and
Voltaire smile, is now less hidden that it once was in
the midst of the improbable ; it is a little nearer :
but we have not attained it. The people, those
orphans seeking their mother, 4o not yet hold in their
hand the hem of the robe of peace.
There remains about us enough of slavery, of sophis
try, of war, and of death, to make it essential that
the spirit of civilization should relinquish none of its
resources. The idea of the right divine is not yet
entirely dissipated. The spirit which animated Fer
dinand VII in Spain, Ferdinand II in Naples, George
IV in England, Nicholas in Russia, is still in the air.
A spectral remnant still flits about. From that
fatal cloud inspirations descend upon wearers of
crowns bent in dark meditation.
• Civilization has not yet done with the granters of
constitutions, with the proprietors of nations, and
with the legitimate and hereditary madmen who
assert themselves kings by the grace of God, and think
that they have the right of manumission over the
250 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
human race. It is becoming important to raise some
obstacle, to show bad will to the past, and to bring
some check to bear on these men, on these dogmas,
on these chimeras which stand in the way. Intelli
gence, thought, science, austere art, philosophy, ought
to watch and beware of misunderstandings. False
rights contrive very easily to put actual armies in the
field. There are murdered Polands at the horizon.
* All my anxiety ', said a contemporary poet, recently
deceased, * is the smoke of my cigar '. My anxiety
is also a smoke — the smoke of the cities which are
burning yonder. Let us, therefore, bring the tyrants
to grief, if we can.
Let us again, in the loudest possible voice, repoat
the lesson of the just and the unjust, of right and
usurpation, of sworn truth and perjury, of good and
evil, of fas et nefas ; let us display all our old antitheses,
as they say. Let us contrast what ought to be with
what actually is. Let us dispel all confusion touching
these things. Bring light, ye that have it ! Let us
oppose dogma to dogma, principle to principle, energy
to obstinacy, truth to imposture, dream to dream, —
the dream of the future to the dream of the past, —
liberty to despotism. We shall be able to stretch
ourselves at full length and smoke out the cigar of
fanciful poetry, and laugh over Boccaccio's Decameron,
with the soft blue sky over our heads, on the day when
the sovereignty of a king shall be exactly of the same
dimensions as the liberty of a man. Until then,
little sleep ; I am distrustful.
Place sentinels everywhere. Do not expect from
despots a large share of liberty. Let all the Polands I
effect their own deliverance. Unlock the future!
with your own hand. Do not hope that your chain I
will forge itself into the key of freedom. Up, children i
of the fatherland ! O mowers of the steppes, arise ! j
Trust to the good intentions of orthodox czars just
enough to take up arms. Hypocrisies and apologies,!
being traps, are an added danger.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 267
We live in a time when orators are heard praising
the magnanimity of white bears and the tender feelings
of panthers. Amnesty, clemency, grandeur of soul;
an era of felicity opens ; fatherly love is the order of
the day ; behold all that is already done ; it must
not be thought that the spirit of the time is not under
stood ; august arms are open ; rally still closer round
the Emperor ; Muscovy is kind-hearted. See how
happy the serfs are ! the streams are to flow with
milk, prosperity, liberty for all ; your princes groan,
like you, over the past ; they are excellent. Come,
fear nothing, little ones ! All very good ; but candidly,
we are of those who put no faith in the lachrymal
gland of crocodiles.
The reigning public monstrosities impose stern
obligations on the conscience of the thinker, the
philosopher, or the poet. Incorruptibility must
resist corruption. It is more than ever requisite to
show men the ideal, that mirror reflecting the face of
God.
CHAPTER V
IN literature and philosophy we encounter now and
then a man with tears and laughter at command,
Heraclitus masked as Democritus ; often a very great
man like Voltaire. Such a man is an irony, sometimes
tragic, which keeps its countenance.
These men, under the pressure of the influences
and prejudices of their time, speak with a double
meaning. One of the most profound is Bayle, the
man of Rotterdam, the powerful thinker. When
Bayle coolly utters this maxim : * It is better to
weaken the grace of a thought than to anger a tyrant,'
I smile, for I know the man ; I think of him perse
cuted, almost proscribed, and I know well that he
has given way to the temptation of aflirming merely
to give me the itch of contradiction. But when it
is a poet who speaks, a poet wholly free, rich, happy,
prosperous, inviolable, one expects clear, frank, and
258 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
wholesome instruction ; one cannot believe that such
a man can be guilty of anything like desertion of con
science ; and it is with a blush that one reads this :
' Here below, in time of peace, let every man sweep
before his own door. In war, if conquered, one must
make terms with the enemy.' ... * Let every
enthusiast be put on a cross when he reaches his*
thirtieth year. When once he comes to know the-
world, he ceases to be a dupe, and becomes a rogue.'
... ' What utility, wha" result, what advantage
does the holy liberty of the press offer you ? You
have the certain demonstration of it, — a profound con
tempt for public opinion.' . . . 'There are people
who have a mania for railing at everything that is
great ; they are men who have attacked the Holy
Alliance : and yet nothing has been invented more
august and more salutary for humanity.' These
things, belittling to the man who wrote them, are
signed Goethe. When he wrote them, Goethe was
sixty years old. Indifference to good and evil is
heady, liable to intoxicate ; and this is what comes
of it. The lesson is sad, the sight mournful ; for here
the helot is an intelligence.
A quotation may be a pillory. We post on the
public highway these lugubrious sentences ; it is
our duty. Goethe wrote that. Let it be remem
bered, and let no one among the poets fall again into
the same error *.
1 Never having known the real Goethe, Victor Hugo
never could do justice to him ; and possibly the relation
would not have been improved by better acquaintance.
The character and works that we call ' Goethe' make up
an exceedingly complex whole ; to condemn it is akin to
condemning an entire civilization. Burke professed himself
unable to draw up an indictment against a whole nation ;
and in Goethe's case any one broadly acquainted with the
facts would probably find the task almost equally awkward.
Hitherto, at least, it is observable that the severe judgments
have not emanated from the most patient and competent
investigators. It would be lamentable indeed should
sensible people be misled, by the garbled scraps here cited,
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 259
To become impassioned for the good, for the true,
for the just ; to suffer with the sufferers ; to feel
upon one's soul all the strokes inflicted by tormentors
upon human flesh ; to be scourged with Christ and
flogged with the negro ; to be strengthened and to
lament ; to scale, a Titan, that frowning summit
where Peter and Caesar make their swords fraternize,
gladium cum gladio copulemus ; to pile for that escalade
the Ossa of the ideal on the Pelkm of the real ; to
make a vast apportionment of hope ; to avail one's
self of the ubiquity of the book in order to be everywhere
at the same time with a consoling thought ; to push
pell-mell men, women, children, whites, blacks, peoples,
hangmen, tyrants, victims, impostors, the ignorant,
proletaries, serfs, slaves, masters, toward the future
(a precipice to some, to others a deliverance) ; to go
forth, to awaken, to hasten, to march, to run, to think,
to will — that is indeed well ; that makes it worth
while to be a poet. Take care ! You are losing
your temper. Certainly, but I am gaining wrath.
And now for thy blast in my pinions, O hurricane !
There was, of late years, a moment when impassi
bility was recommended to poets as a condition of
divinity. To be indifferent was called being Olym
pian. Where had they seen that ? That is an Olym
pus very unlike the real one. Read Homer. The
Olympians are passion, and nothing else. Boundless
humanity — such is their divinity. They fight inces
santly. One has a bow, another a lance, another a
sword, another a club, another thunderbolts. One
of them compels the leopards to draw him. Another —
Wisdom she — has cut off the serpent- bristling head
of Night, and nailed it to her shield. Such is the
calm of the Olympians. Their wraths cause the
thunders to roll from end to end of the Iliad and of
into hasty prejudgment of him whose spirit and work are
ao much more accurately indicated by this line of his,
• Wouldst thou give freedom to many, first dare to do ser
vice to many.' TR.
260 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the Odyssey. These wraths, when just, are good.
The poet who has them is the true Olympian. Juvenal,
Dante, Agrippa d'Aubigne, and Milton were subject
to these wraths, Moliere too. From the soul of Alceste
flashes constantly the lightning of ' vigorous hatreds.'
It was the hatred of evil which Jesus meant when he
said, * I am come to bring war.'
I like Stesichorus, indignant, preventing the alli
ance of Greece with Phalaris, and fighting the brazen
bull with strokes of the lyre.
Louis XIV found it good to have Racine sleeping
in his chamber when he, the King, was ill, thus turning
the poet into an assistant to his apothecary. Wonder
ful patronage of letters ! But he asked nothing
more from the men of letters, and the horizon of his
alcove seemed to him sufficient for them. One day
Racine, somewhat urged by Madame de Maintenon,
conceived the thought of leaving the King's chamber
and of visiting the garrets of the people. Thence a
memoir on the public distress. Louis XIV cast at
Racine a killing look. Poets fare ill when, being
courtiers, they do what royal mistresses ask of them.
Racine, at the suggestion of Madame de Maintenon,
risks a remonstrance which causes him to be driven from
court, and he dies of it ; Voltaire, at the instigation
of Madame de Pompadour, ventures a madrigal — an
awkward one, it appears — which causes him to be
driven from France, and he does not die of it. Louis
XV on reading the madrigal (' Et gardez tous deux
vos conquetes ') had exclaimed, ' What a fool this
Voltaire is ! '
Some years ago * a well-authorized pen,' as they
say in official and academic cant, wrote this : ' The
greatest service that poets can render us is to be good
for nothing. We ask of them nothing else.' Observe
the scope and sweep of this word, — * the poets ' —
which includes Linus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Homer,
Job, Hesiod, Moses, Daniel, Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah,
Jeremiah, ^Esop, David, Solomon, JSschylus, Sopho-
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 261
cles, Euripides, Pindar, Archilochus, Tyrtaeus,
Stesichorus, Menander, Plato, Asclepiades, Pytha
goras, Anacreon, Theocritus, Lucretius, Plautus,
Terence, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Juvenal, Apuleius,
Lucan, Persius, Tibullus, Seneca, Petrarch, Ossian,
Saadi, Firdusi, Dante, Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de
Vega, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Camoens, Marot, Ronsard,
Regnier, Agrippa d* Aubigne, Malherbe, Segrais, Racan,
Milton, Pierre Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Boileau,
La Fontaine, Fontenelle, Regnard, Lesage, Swift, Vol
taire, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Andre Chenier, Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland,
Schiller, Goethe, Hofmann, Alfieri, Chateaubriand,
Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns, Walter Scott,
Balzac, Musset, Beranger, Pellico, Vigny, Dumas,
George Sand, Lamartine, — all declared by the oracle
* good for nothing ', and having uselessness for the
excellence. That sentence — a ' success ', it appears —
has been very often repeated. We repeat it in our
turn. When the conceit of an idiot reaches such
proportions, it deserves registration. The writer
who uttered that aphorism is, so they assure us, one
of the high personages of the day. We have no
objection ; dignities shorten no ears.
Octavius Augustus, on the morning of the battle
of Actium, met an ass called by its driver * Triumphus '.
This Triumphus, endowed with the faculty of braying,
seemed to him of good omen. Octavius Augustus
won the battle ; and remembering Triumphus, had
him cast in bronze and set up in the Capitol. That
made a Capitoline ass ; but still — an ass.
One can understand kings saying to the poet,
* Be useless ' ; but one does not understand the
people saying so to him. The poet is for the people.
'Pro populo poeta', wrote Agrippa d' Aubigne.
* All things to all men ', exclaims Sant Paul. What
is an intelligence ? A feeder of souls. The poet is
at the same time a menace and a promise. The
distress he arouses in oppressors calms and consoles
262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
the oppressed. It is the glory of the poet to place
a restless pillow on the purple bed of the tormentors.
It is often thanks to him that the tryant awakes,
saying, ' I have slept badly.' Every slave, every
despondency, every sorrow, every misfortune, every
distress, every hunger, and every thirst has a claim
upon the poet ; he has one creditor — the human race.
Certainly it detracts nothing from the poet to be
the great servant. All the mysterious voices sing
within him none the less because upon occasion, and
impelled by duty, he has uttered the cry of a race,
because his bosom must needs swell with the deep
human sob. Speaking so loudly does not prevent
his speaking low. He is not less the confidant, and
sometimes the confessor, of hearts. He is not less
intimately connected with those who love, with those
who think, with those who sigh, thrusting his head
in the darkness between the heads of lovers. Andre
Chenier's love-verses are deprived of none of their
tender serenity by their proximity to the wrathful
iambic : * Weep thou, O virtue, if T die ! ' The
poet is the only living being to whom is given both
the voice of thunder and the whisper, having, like
Nature, within himself the rumbling of the cloud and
the rustling of the leaf. This is a double function,
individual and public ; and it is for this reason that
he needs, as it were, two souls.
Ennius said, ' I have three of them, — an Oscan
soul, a Greek soul, and a Latin soul.' It is true that he
referred only to the place of his birth, to the place
of his education, and to the place where he was a
citizen ; and moreover Ennius was but a rough cast
of a poet, vast, but shapeless.
No poet can exist without that activity of soul
which is the resultant of conscience. The primal
moral laws need to be confirmed ; the new moral
laws need to be revealed : these two series do not
coincide without some effort. This effort is incumbent
on the poet. At every turn he performs the function
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE TRUE 203
of the philosopher. He must defend, according to
the side attacked, now the liberty of the human mind,
now the liberty of the human heart, — to love being no
less holy than to think. There is nothing in all that
of ' Art for art's sake '.
Into the midst of those goers and comers that
we call the living, comes the poet, to tame, like ancient
Orpheus, the tiger in man, — his evil instincts, — and,
like legendary Amphion, to pull down the walls of
prejudice and superstition, to mount the new blocks,
to relay the foundations and the corner-stones, and
to build anew the city of human society.
That such a service, — to co-operate in the work
of civilization, — should involve loss of beauty for
poetry and of dignity for the poet, is a proposition
which one cannot enunciate without smiling. Useful
art preserves and augments all its graces, all its charms,
all its prestige. In truth ^Eschylus is not degraded
by taking part with Prometheus, the man progress
crucified by force on Caucasus, and gnawed alive
by hate ; Lucretius is no less great for having loosened
the grave-clothes of idolatry and disentangled human
thought from the knotted bonds of religions (arctis
nodis religionum) ; the branding of tyrants with the
red-hot iron of prophecy does not lessen Isaiah ; the
defence of his country does not taint Tyrtaeus. The
beautiful is not degraded by serving the ends of free
dom and the amelioration of the human multitudes.
The words, *a people liberated', would fitly end a
strophe. No, patriotic or revolutionary usefulness
robs poetry of nothing. For having screened under
its cliffs the three peasants who took the terrible
oath from which sprang Switzerland free, the huge
Griitli is none the less at nightfall a lofty mass of
serene shadow alive with herds, whence falls afar
the soft tintinnabulation of innumerable little bells
tinkling unseen through the clear twilight air.
PART THIRD
CONCLUSION
BOOK I
AFTER DEATH— SHAKESPEARE— ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
IN 1784, Bonaparte, then fifteen years old, arrived
at the military school of Paris from Brienne, being
one among four under the conduct of a minim priest.
He mounted one hundred and seventy-three steps
carrying his small valise, and reached in the attic
the barrack chamber he was to occupy. This chamber
had two beds, and a small window opening on the
great yard of the school. The young predecessors of
Bonaparte had bescrawled the whitewashed walls
with charcoal, and the new-comer could read in his
little cell these four inscriptions, which we ourselves
read there thirty-five years ago : ' An epaulet is very
long to win * : De Montgivray. ' The finest day in
life is that of a battle * : Vicomte de Tinteniac. ' Life
is but a prolonged lie ' : Le Chevalier Adolphe Delmas.
* The end of all is six feet of earth ' : Le Cornte de la
Villette. With the trifling substitution of the word
* empire ' for ' epaulet ', these four sentences contained
the whole destiny of Bonaparte, and formed a kind of
* Mene, Tekel, Upharsin ', written in advance upon that
wall. Desmazis, junior, who accompanied Bonaparte,
being his room-mate, and about to occupy one of
the two beds, saw him take a pencil — Desmazis him
self has related the incident — and draw, under the
inscriptions that he had just read, a rough sketch of
266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
his house at Ajaccio ; then, by the side of that house,
without suspecting that he was thus bringing near the
Island of Corsica another mysterious island then hid
in the far future, he wrote the last of the four sentences :
' The end of all is six feet of earth.'
Bonaparte was right. For the conqueror, for the
soldier, for the man of material fact, the end of all
is six feet of earth ; for the man of thought, all begins
there.
Death is a power.
For him who has had no activity but that of the
mind, the tomb is the elimination of the obstacle.
To be dead is to be all-powerful.
The man of war is formidable while alive ; he
stands erect ; the earth is silent, siluit : he has exter
mination in his' gesture ; millions of haggard men
rush after him, a fierce horde, sometimes a ruffianly
one ; it is no longer a human head, it is a conqueror,
it is a captain, it is a king of kings, it is an emperor,
it is a dazzling crown of laurels which passes, throwing
out lightning flashes, and showing, in a starry light
beneath, a vague profile of Caesar. This vision is
splendid and astounding ; but a little gravel in the
liver, or an abrasion of the pylorus, — six feet of earth,
and all is over. This solar spectrum vanishes. This
tumultuous life falls into a hole ; the human race
pursues its way, leaving behind this emptiness. If
this man-hurricane has made some lucky rupture —
like Alexander in India, Charlemagne in Scandinavia,
and Bonaparte in old Europe — that is all that remains
of him. But let some passer-by who has in him the
ideal ; let a poor wretch like Homer throw out a word
in the darkness, and die, — that word lights up the
gloom, and becomes a star.
This defeated man, driven from town to town, is
called Dante Alighieri, — take care ! This exile is
called ^Eschylus, this prisoner is called Ezekiel, —
beware ! This one-handed man is winged, — it is
Miguel Cervantes. Do you know whom you see
AFTER DEATH 267
wayfaring there before you ? It is a sick man, Tyrtaeus ;
it is a slave, Plautus ; it is a labourer, Spinoza ; it
is a valet, Rousseau. Well, that cibasement, that
labour, that servitude, that infirmity, is power, —
the supreme power, mind.
On the dunghill like Job, under the stick, like
Epictetus, under contempt like Moliere, mind re
mains mind. It is destined to have the last word.
The Caliph Almanzor makes the people spit on Averroes
at the door of the mosque of Cordova ; the Duke of
York himself spits on Milton ; a Rohan almost a
prince, ' Due ne daigne, Rohan suis ' *, attempts to
cudgel Voltaire to death ; Descartes is driven from
France in the name of Aristotle ; Tasso pays for a
kiss given a princess by twenty years in a prison
cell ; Louis XV sends Diderot to Vincennes : these
are mere incidents ; must there not be some clouds ?
Those appearances that were taken for realities, those
princes, those kings, melt away ; there remain only
what should remain, the human mind on the one side,
the divine mind on the other ; the true work and
the true workers ; society to be perfected and made
fruitful, science seeking the true, art creating the
beautiful, the thirst of thought, the torment and
the happiness of man ; the lower life aspiring to
the higher. Real questions are tov be dealt with ;
progress in intelligence and by intelligence is to be
secured. The aid of the poets, the prophets, the
philosophers, the inspired thinkers is invoked. It
is perceived that philosophy is a nourishment, and
poetry a need. Man cannot live by bread alone.
Give up the poets, and you give up civilization. There
comes an hour when the human race is compelled
to reckon with Shakespeare the actor, and with Isaiah
the beggar.
They are the more present when they are no longer
seen. Once dead, these beings live.
1 ' I would not stoop to be a duke ; I am Rohan.' Tn.
2C8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
What life did they lead? What kind of men
were they ? What do we know of them ? Sometimes
but little, as of Shakespeare ; often nothing, as of
those of ancient days. Did Job exist ? Is Homer
one, or several ? Meziriac makes ^Esop straight,
and Planudes makes him a hunchback. Is it true that
the prophet Hosea, in order to show his love for his
country, even when she was fallen into opprobrium
and infamy, espoused a harlot, and named his children
Mourning, Famine, Shame, Pestilence, and Misery ?
Is it true that Hesiod must be divided between Cyme
in ^Eolis, where he was born, and Ascra in Bceotia,
where he is said to have been brought up ? Velleius
Paterculus places him one hundred and twenty ye^rs
after Homer, with whom Quintilian makes him con
temporary. Which of the two is right ? Wl at
matters it ? The poets being dead, their thoug ht
reigns. Having been, they are.
They do more work among us to-day than when they
were alive. Others who have departed this life rest
from their labours : dead men of genius work.
They work upon what ? Upon minds. They
make civilization.
The end of all is six feet of earth ? No ; there all
begins, germinates, flowers, grows, issues, streams
forth. Such maxims are very well for you, O men
of the sword !
Lay yourselves down, disappear, lie in the grave,
rot. So be it.
While life lasts, gilding, caparisons, drums and
trumpets, panoplies, banners in the wind, tumults,
delude the senses. The crowd gazes with admiration
on these things. It imagines that it sees something
grand. Who wears the casque ? Who the cuirass ?
Who the sword-belt ? Who is spurred, helmeted,
plumed, armed ? Hurrah for that one ! At death
the difference becomes plain. Juvenal takes Hannibal
in the hollow of his hand.
It is not Caesar, it is the thinker, who can say when
AFTER DEATH 209
he expires, ' Deu8 fio '. So long as he remains a man,
his flesh interposes between other men and him.
The flesh is a cloud upon genius. Death, that im
mense light, comes and penetrates the man with its
aurora. No more flesh, no more matter, no more
shadow. The unknown which was within him mani
fests itself and beams forth. In order that a mind
may give all its light, death is required. When that
which was a genius becomes a soul, the human race
begins to be dazzled. A book within which there is
something of the phantom is irresistible.
He who is still living does not appear disinterested.
People mistrust him. People dispute him because
they jostle against him. Both to be alive and to be
a genius is too much. This being goes and comes as
you do ; it walks the earth ; it has weight ; it casts
a shadow ; it obstructs. There seems a kind of
importunity in the presence of too great a man ; men
find him not sufficiently like themselves. As we have
said before, they owe him a grudge. Who is this
privileged person ? This functionary cannot be
dismissed. Persecution makes him greater, decapita
tion crowns him. Nothing can be done against him,
nothing for him, nothing with him. He is responsible,
but not to you. He has his instructions. What he
executes may be discussed, not modified. It seems
as though he had a mission to accomplish from some
one who is not a man. Such an exception displeases ;
hence more hisses than applause.
Once dead, he is out of the way. The useless hiss
dies out. Laving, he was a rival ; dead, he is a bene
factor. He becomes, in the beautiful expression of
Lebrun, * the irreparable man.' Lebrun says this
of Montesquieu ; Boileau says the same thing of
Moliere. * Avant qu'un peu de terre ', etc *. This
1 Part of the nineteenth line of Boileau's seventh epistle,
which is dedicated to Racine. The whole sentence may be
roughly rendered as follows :
270 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
handful of earth has equally exalted Voltaire. Vol
taire, so great in the eighteenth century, is still greater
in the nineteenth. The grave is a crucible. The
earth thrown on a man cleanses his name, and allows
it not to pass forth till purified. Voltaire has lost
his false glory and retained the true. To lose the
false is gain. Voltaire is neither a lyric poet, nor a
comic poet, nor a tragic poet ; he is the indignant
yet tender critic of the Old World ; he is the mild
reformer of manners ; he is the man who softens men.
Voltaire, having lost ground as a poet, has risen as
an apostle. He has done what is good rather than
what is beautiful. The good being included in the
beautiful, those who, like Dante and Shakespeare,
have produced the beautiful, surpass Voltaire ; but
below the poet, the place of the philosopher is still
very high, and Voltaire is the philosopher. Voltaire
is good-sense hi a continual stream. Excepting
literature, he is a good judge of everything. In
spite of his insulters, Voltaire was almost adored
during his lifetime ; to-day he is, on thoroughly
valid grounds, admired. The eighteenth century-
saw his mind ; we see his soul. Frederick II, who
liked to banter him, wrote to D' Alembert : ' Voltaire
plays the buffoon. This century resembles the old
courts ; it has its fool, and Arouet is he. ' This
fool of the century was its sage.
Such, for great minds, are the issues of the tomb.
That mysterious entrance otherwhere leaves light
behind. Their setting is resplendent. Death makes
their authority free and effective.
CHAPTER II
SHAKESPEARE is the chief glory of England. England
Before a little earth, obtained by intercession,
Had for ever hidden Moliere from human sight,
A thousand of those beauties, so highly praised to-day,
Were by silly people rejected before our very eyes.
TB.
AFTER DEATH 271
has in politics, Cromwell ; in philosophy, Bacon ;
in science, Newton ; three lofty men of genius. But
Cromwell is stained with cruelty, and Bacon with
meanness ; as to Newton, his edifice is at this moment
tottering. Shakespeare is pure, as Cromwell and
Bacon are not, and unshaken, as Newton is not.
Moreover, his genius is loftier. Above Newton are
Copernicus and Galileo ; above Bacon are Descartes
and Kant ; above Cromwell are Danton and Bona
parte ; above Shakespeare there is no one. Shake
speare has equals, but no superior. It is a singular
honour for a land to have borne such a man. One
may say to that land, Alma parens I The native
town of Shakespeare is a chosen city ; an eternal
light falls on that cradle ; Stratford-on-Avon has a
security that Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis,
Chios, Argos, and Athens, the seven towns which
dispute the birthplace of Homer, do not possess.
Shakespeare is a human mind ; he is also an English
mind. He is very English — too English ; he is
English so far as to subdue the horror surrounding
the abominable kings whom he places on the stage, —
when they are kings of England ; so far as to depre
ciate Philip Augustus in comparison with John Lack
land ; so far as to make a scapegoat, Falstaff, expressly
in order to load him with the princely misdeeds of
the young Henry V ; so far as in a certain measure
to share the hypocrises of a history alleged to be
national. Lastly, he is English so far as to attempt
to exculpate Henry VIII ; it is true that the eye of
Elizabeth is fixed upon him. But at the same time
we insist, — for therein consists his greatness — this
English poet is a humane genius. Art, like religion,
has its Ecce Homo. Shakespeare is one of those to
whom may be applied the noble name of Man.
England is selfish : selfishness is an island. This
Albion, who minds her own business and is apt to
be eyed askance by other nations, is a little lacking
in disinterested greatness ; of this, Shakespeare
275: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
gives her some portion. With that purple robe he
drapes his country's shoulders. By his fame he is
universal and cosmopolitan. He overflows island
and egotism on every side. Deprive England of
Shakespeare, and consider how soon this nation's
far-shining light would fade. Shakespeare modifies
the English countenance and makes it beautiful.
He lessens the resemblance of England to Carthage.
Strange meaning of the apparition of men of genius !
No great poet is born at Sparta, no great poet at
Carthage. This condemns these two cities. Search,
and you shall find this : Sparta is but the city of
logic ; Carthage is but the city of matter ; love is
wanting to both. Carthage immolates her children
by the sword, and Sparta sacrifices her virgins by
nudity ; here innocence is killed, and there modesty.
Carthage knows only her crates and bales ; Sparta
blends herself wholly with the law, there is her true
territory : it is for the laws that her men die at Ther
mopylae Carthage is hard, Sparta is cold. They
are two republics based on stone. Therefore no
books. The eternal sower, who is never deceived,
has scattered none of the seed of genius on their
thankless soil. Such wheat is not to be confided
to the rock.
Heroism, however, is not denied to them ; they
will have, if necessary, either the martyr or the captain.
Leonidas is possible for Sparta, Hannibal for Carthage ;
but neither Sparta nor Carthage is capable of Homer.
They are devoid of a certain sublime tenderness which
makes the poet spring from the loins of a people.
This latent tenderness, this ftebile nescio quid, England
possesses, witness Shakespeare ; one might also add,
witness Wilberforce.
England, mercantile like Carthage, legal like Sparta,
is better than Sparta and Carthage. She is honoured
by that august exception, a poet ; to have given
birth to Shakespeare makes England great.
Shakespeare's place is among the most sublime
AFTER DEATH 27i
in that select company of absolute intelligences whcv
ever and anon reinforced by some noble newcomei.
form the crown of civilization, lighting the human
race with a wide radiance. Shakespeare is legion.
Alone, he forms the counterpoise to our grand French
seventeenth century, and almost to the eighteenth.
When one arrives in England, the first thing the
eye seeks is the statue of Shakespeare ; it falls upon
the statue of Wellington.
Wellington is a general who, in collaboration
with chance, gained a battle.
If you insist, you are taken to a place called West
minster where there are kings a crowd of kings;
there is also a nook called * The Poets' Corner '. There,
in the shade of four or five magnificent monuments
where some royal nobodies shine in marble and bronze,
you are shown a statuette upon a little bracket, and be
neath this statuette the name, ' William Shakespeare '.
Furthermore, there are statues everywhere, —
statues to the heart's content. Statue of Charles,
statue of Edward, statue of William, statues of three
or four Georges, of whom one was an idiot. Statue of
the Duke of Richmond at Huntley ; statue of Napier
at Portsmouth ; statue of Father Mathew at Cork ;
statue of Herbert Ingram — I forget where. A man
has well drilled the riflemen — a statue to him ; a
man has commanded a manoeuvre of the Horse Guards
— a statue to him. Another has been a supporter of
the past, has squandered all the wealth of England
in paying a coalition of kings against 1789, against
democracy, against light, against the upward inove-
* ment of the human race — quick ! a pedestal for
that, a statue to Mr Pitt. Another has knowingly
fought against truth, in the hope that it might be
vanquished ; but finding, one fine morning, that
truth is hard-lived, that it is strong, that it might
come to be intrusted with forming a cabinet, has
then passed abruptly over to its side — one more
pedestal, a statue to Mr Peel. Everywhere, in every
T
274 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
street, in every square, at every step, gigantic notes
of admiration in the shape of columns, — a column
to the Duke of York, which should take the form of
a point of interrogation ; a column to Nelson, with
Caraccioli's ghost pointing the finger at it ; a column
to Wellington, already mentioned ; columns for
everybody : it is sufficient to have trailed a sabre
a little. At Guernsey, by the seaside, on a promontory,
there is a high column — almost a tower — resembling
alight-house. This one is struck by lightning. ^Eschy-
lus would have contented himself with it. To whom
is this ? To General Doyle. Who is General Doyle ?
A general. What did this general do ? He con
structed roads. At his own expense ? No, at the
expense of the inhabitants. A column to him. None
to Shakespeare, none to Milton, none to Newton ;
the name of Byron is obscene. Such is England,
that illustrious and powerful nation.
It avails little that this nation has for pioneer and
guide the generous British press, which is more than
free, which is sovereign, and which through innumer
able excellent journals throws light upon every ques
tion, — that is where England is ; and let not France
laugh too loudly, with her statue of Negrier ; nor,
Belgium, with her statue of Belliard ; nor Prussia
with her statue of Bliicher ; nor Austria, with the
statue that she probably has of Schwartzenberg ; nor
Russia, with the statue that she must have of Sou-
waroff. If it is not Schwartzenberg, it is Windis-
chgratz ; if it is not Souwaroff, it is Kutusoff.
Be Paskiewitch or Jellachich, statue ; be Auge-
reau or Bessieres, statue ; be an Arthur Wellesley,
they will make you a colossus, and the ladies will
dedicate you to yourself, quite naked, with this inscrip
tion : 'Achilles'. A young man, twenty years of
age, performs the heroic action of marrying a beautiful
young girl ; they prepare for him triumphal arches ;
they come to see him out of curiosity ; the garter is
sent to him as on the morrow of a battle ; the public
AFTER DEATH 275
squares are brilliant with fireworks ; people who
perhaps have grey beards put on perukes to come
and harangue him almost on their knees ; they shoot
into the air millions sterling in squibs and rockets,
amid the applause of a multitude in tatters who will
have no bread to-morrow ; starving Lancashire
forms a companion -piece to the wedding ; people
are in ecstasies, they fire guns, they ring the bells,
* Rule Britannia ! ' * God save the prince '. What !
this young man has the kindness to do this ? What
a glory for the nation! Universal admiration —
a great people becomes frantic, a great city falls into
a swoon, a balcony looking upon the passage of the
young man is rented for five hundred guineas, people
crowd themselves together, press upon each other,
thrust each other beneath the wheels of his carriage,
seven women are crushed to death in the enthusiasm,
their little children are picked up dead under the
trampling feet, a hundred persons, partially stifled,
are carried to the hospital ; the joy is inexpressible.
While this is going on in London, the cutting of the
Isthmus of Panama is postponed by a war ; the cutting
of the Isthmus of Suez depends on some Ismail Pasha ;
a company (limited) undertakes the sale of the water
of Jordan at a guinea a bottle ; walls are invented
proof against any cannon-ball, after which missiles
are invented which will go through any wall ; an
Armstrong cannon-shot costs fifty pounds ; Byzan
tium contemplates Abdul-Azis, Rome goes to con
fession ; the frogs, encouraged by the stork, call for
a heron ; Greece, after Otho, again wants a king ;
Mexico, after Iturbide, again wants an emperor ;
China wants two of them, the Middle King, a Tartar,
and the Celestial Emperor (Tien Wang), a China
man. . . O earth ! throne of stupidity.
CHAPTER III
THE glory of Shakespeare reached England from
abroad. There was almost a definite day and hour
276 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
when one might have been present at the landing
of his fame at Dover.
It required three hundred years for England to
catch those two words that the whole world shouted
in her ear — * William Shakespeare '.
What is England ? She is Elizabeth. No incar
nation is more complete. In admiring Elizabeth,
England worships her own image in the glass. Proud
and magnanimous, but strangely hypocritical, great
but pedantic, able but haughty, at once daring and
prudish, having favourites but no masters, even in
her bed her own mistress, all-powerful queen, inacces
sible woman — Elizabeth is a virgin as England is an
island. Like England, she calls herself Empress of
the sea, Basilea maris. A dreadful deep, swept by
the wraths that spare not even Essex, and by the
tempests that engulf armadas, defends this virgin
and this island from all approach. The ocean is the
guardian of this modesty. A certain celibacy, in
fact, constitutes the genius of England. Alliances
there may be, but no marriage. The world must
always keep its distance To live alone, to go
alone, to reign alone, to be alone — such is Eliza
beth, such is England.
On the whole, a remarkable queen, and a wonderful
nation.
Shakespeare, on the contrary, is a sympathetic
genius. To him, insularity, far from being a source
of strength, is a bond which he would gladly break.
A little more, and Shakespeare would be European.
He loves and praises France ; he calls her ' the soldier
of God '. Moreover, in that prudish nation he is the
free poet.
England has two books, one which she has made,
the other which has made her, — Shakespeare and
the Bible. These two books do not altogether agree ;
the Bible opposes Shakespeare.
Certainly, as a literary book, the Bible — that
vast Oriental beaker, brimming with poetry even
AFTER DEATH 277
more than Shakespeare — might harmonize with him ;
but from a social and religious point of view it abhors
him. Shakespeare thinks, Shakespeare dreams, Shake
speare doubts. There is in him something of that
Montaigne whom he loved. The ' To be, or not to
be ', comes from the ' What do I know ? ' of Mon
taigne.
Moreover, Shakespeare has the grievous habit
of invention. Faith excommunicates imagination.
In respect to fables, Faith is a bad neighbour, and
licks none but her own cubs. One recollects Solon's
staff raised against Thespis ; one recollects Omar's
firebrand waved over Alexandria. The situation is
always the same. Modern fanaticism has inherited
that staff and that firebrand. This is true in Spain,
and is not false in England. I have heard an Anglican
bishop, in discussing the Iliad, sum up all in this
crushing assertion : ' It is not true '. Now, Shake
speare can be described, much more truly than Homer,
as ' a liar '.
Two or three years ago the journals announced
that a French writer had just sold a novel for four
hundred thousand francs. This made a noise in
England. A conformist paper exclaimed, * How
can a falsehood be sold at such a price ? '
Besides, two words, all-powerful in England, range
themselves against Shakespeare and block his way —
* Improper ! ' ' Shocking ! ' Let it be noted that in
a multitude of places the Bible also is * improper ',
and Holy Writ is * shocking '. The Bible, even in
French, and through the rough lips of Calvin, does
not hesitate to say, * Tu as paillarde, Jerusalem ' J.
These crudities form a part of poetry as well as of
anger, and the propehts, those angry poets, do not
abstain from them. Coarse words are constantly on
their lips. But England, which is continually read
ing the Bible, pretends not to notice this. Nothing
equals the power of voluntary deafness in fanatics.
1 Ezekiel xvi 28, and passim. TB.
278 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Would you have another example of this deafness ?
Roman orthodoxy has not to this day admitted the
brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, although authenti
cated by the four Evangelists. It is in vain that
Matthew says : * Behold, his mother and his brethren
stood without '. . . . ' And his brethren, James,
and Joses, and Simon, and Judas. And his sisters,
are they not all with us ? ' In vain Mark insists :
* Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother
of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon ? and
are not his sisters here with us ? ' In vain Luke
repeats : * Then came to him his mother and his
brethren '. In vain John adds : ' He, and his mother
and his brethren '. . . . ' Neither did his brethren
believe in him '. . . . ' But when his brethren were
gone up ', — Catholicism does not hear.
To make up for this deafness, Puritanism turns
a sensitive ear toward Shakespeare, — of whom the
Rev. John Wheeler says, he is ' like all poets, some
thing of a Pagan '. Intolerance and inconsistency
are sisters. Besides, in the matter of proscribing
and damning, logic is superfluous. When Shakespeare,
by the mouth of Othello, calls Desdemona * whore ',
there is general indignation, unanimous revolt, uni
versal scandal. Who is this Shakespeare ? All the
Biblical sects stop their ears, forgetting that Aaron
applies exactly the same epithet to Sephora, wife of
Moses. It is true that this occurs in an apocryphal
work, * The Life of Moses ' ; but the apocryphal works
are quite as authentic as the canonical ones.
Hence the dogged coldness of England toward
Shakespeare. Her attitude toward him is still that
of Elizabeth — at least we fear so ; we should be
happy to be contradicted. We are more ambitious
for the glory of England than England is herself.
This cannot displease her.
England has a strange institution, ' the poet laure
ate ', which attests the official, and perhaps the national
admirations. Under Elizabeth, and during Shake-
AFTER DEATH 279
speare's life, England's poet was named Drum-
mond1.
Past, indeed, are the days when the playbills read :
* Macbeth, Opera of Shakespeare, altered by Sir
William Davenant '. But if Macbeth is played, it is
before a small audience. Kean and Macready have
failed in it.
At this hour they would not play Shakespeare
on any English stage without erasing from the text
the word * God * wherever they find it. In the full
tide of the nineteenth century, the Lord Chamber
lain is still an incubus upon Shakespeare. In England,
outside the church, the word ' God ' is not made use
of. In conversation they replace ' God ' by * Good
ness '. In the editions or in the representations of
Shakespeare, ' God ' is replaced by * Heaven *. What
matters it that the sense is perverted, that the verse
limps ? * Lord ! Lord ! Lord ! ' the last outcry of
expiring Desdemona, was suppressed by official
command in the edition of Blount and Jaggard in
1623. They do not utter it on the stage 2. ' Sweet
Jesus ! ' would be a blasphemy ; a devout Spanish
woman on the English stage is bound to exclaim
* Sweet Jupiter ! ' Do we exaggerate ? Would you
have a proof ? Let us open Measure for Measure.
There is a nun, Isabella. Whom does she invoke ?
Jupiter. Shakespeare wrote it ' Jesus ' 3.
1 This ' strange institution ' seems not to have existed in
Elizabeth's time ; and it is difficult to understand in what
sense Scottish Drummond of Hawthorndon can be called
' England's poet ' under Elizabeth, since he was but eighteen
when Elizabeth died, and published his first volume of
poetry ten years later. TR.
2 The last words of Desdemona are
Commend me to my kinde Lord : oh farewell.
Her ' kinde Lord ' is not, as a Frenchman might naturally
think, her God, but her husband. TR.
3 On the other hand, however, in spite of all the Lord Cham
berlains, it is difficult to beat the French censorship. Reli
gions are diverse, but bigotry is one, and is the same in all
its specimens. What we are about to write is an extract
2»0 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The tone of a certain Puritanical criticism toward
Shakespeare is, most certainly, improved ; yet the
cure is not complete.
It is not many years since an English economist,
a man of authority, making, in the midst of social
questions, a literary excursion, affirmed, in a lofty
digression, and without showing the slightest diffi
dence, this : * Shakespeare cannot live because he
has treated subjects for the most part foreign or
ancient, — Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth,
Lear, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, etc.
Now, nothing is viable in literature except matters
of immediate observation, and works relating to
subjects of contemporary interest'. What say you
to this theory ? We should not mention it if it had
not found approvers in England and propagators in
from the notes added to his translation by the new trans
lator of Shakespeare :
' Jesus ! Jesus ! ' This exclamation of Shallow was
expunged in the edition of 1623, conformably to the statute
which forbade the utterance of the name of the Divinity
on the stage. It is worthy of remark that our modern
theatre has had to undergo, under the scissors of the Bourbon
censorship, the same stupid mutilations to which the censor
ship of the Stuarts condemned the theatre of Shakespeare.
I read what follows in the first page of the manuscript of
Herncms which I have in my hands :
4 Received at the Theatre-FranQais, Oct. 8, 1829.
'The Stage-manager.
' ALBERTIN/
And below, in red ink :
' On condition of expunging the name of " Jesus " wher
ever found, and conforming to the alterations marked at
pages 27, 28, 29, 62, 74, and 76.
' The Secretary of State for the Department of the Interior,
' LA BOURDONNAYE.' <
(Vol XI. Notes on Richard II and Henry IV, note 71,
p. 462.)
We may add that in the scenery representing Saragossa
(second act of Hernani) it was forbidden to introduce any
belfry or any church, — a prohibition which made resem
blance rather difficult, Sagarossa having had, in the sixteenth
century, three hundred and nine churches, and six hundred
411 ul seventeen convents.
AFTER DEATH 281
France. Besides Shakespeare, it simply excludes from
literary 'life' Schiller, Corneille, Milton, Virgil,
Euripides, Sophocles, ^Eschylus, and Homer. It
is true that it surrounds with a halo of glory Aulus
Gellius and Restif de la Bretorme. O critic, thia
Shakespeare is not viable — he is only immortal !
About the same time another — English also, but of
the Scotch school, a Puritan of that discontented variety
of which Knox is the head — declared poetry to be
childishness ; rejected beauty of style as an obstacle
interposed between the thought and the reader ;
saw in Hamlet's soliloquy only * a cold lyricism ',
and in Othello's adieu to camps and banners only
* a declamation ' ; likened the metaphors of poets
to coloured prints in books, fit only to amuse babies ;
and showed a particular contempt for Shakespeare,
as * bedaubed from one end to the other with those
bright pictures'.
Not longer ago than last January, a witty London
paper was asking with indignant irony who is the
more celebrated in England, Shakespeare, or * Mr
Calcraft, the hangman '. ' There are localities in
this enlightened country where, if you utter the name
of Shakespeare, they will answer you : "I don't
know what this Shakespeare may be, about whom you
make all this fuss, but I will back Hammer Lane of
Birmingham to fight him for five pounds ". But no
mistake is made about Calcraft ' *.
CHAPTER TV
AT all events, Shakespeare has not the monument
that England owes to him.
France, let us admit, is not, in like cases, much
•prompter. Another glory, very different from Shake
speare, but not less grand, Joan of Arc, waits also,
and has waited long, for a national monument — a
monument worthy of her.
i Daily Telegraph, Jon. 13, 1864.
282 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
This land, which was once Gaul, and where the
Velledas reigned, has, in a Catholic and historic sense,
as patronesses two august figures, Mary and Joan.
The one, holy, is the Virgin ; the other, heroic, is
the Maid. Louis XIII gave France to the one ; the
other gave back France to France. The monument
of the second should not be less lofty than the monu
ment of the first. Joan of Arc must have a trophy
as grand as Notre Dame. When shall she have it ?
England is insolvent toward Shakespeare, but France
is bankrupt toward Joan of Arc.
These ingratitudes need to be sternly denounced.
Doubtless the governing aristocracies, which blind
the eyes of the masses, are, in the first instance, guilty.
But on the whole, conscience exists for a people as
for an individual ; ignorance is only an extenuating
circumstance ; and when these denials of justice last
for centuries, they remain the fault of governments,
while becoming the fault of nations. Let us know,
when necessary, how to tell nations of their short
comings. France and England, you are both wrong !
To flatter a people would be worse than to flatter
a king. The one is base, the other would be dastardly.
Let us go farther, and, since the thought presents
itself, make a useful generalization from it, even
should it take us for a moment from our subject.
No, the people are not right in ascribing the blame
indefinitely to the governments. The acceptance
of oppression by the oppressed ends in complicity ;
cowardice is consent whenever the duration of a
bad thing, which weighs upon a people, and which
that people could prevent if it would, goes beyond
the bounds of an honest man's patience ; there is
an appreciable solidarity and a partnership in shame
between the government guilty of the evil and the
people submitting to it. It is venerable to suffer ; to
submit is contemptible. Let us pass on.
It is a coincidence worthy of note that Voltaire,
the denier of Shakespeare, is also the reviler of Joan
AFTER DEATH 283
of Arc. What are we to think of Voltaire ? Voltaire
(we say it with mingled joy and grief) is the French
mind — the French mind up to the Revolution, solely.
Since the Revolution, the French mind has grown
with the growth of France, and tends to become the
European mind. It is less local and more fraternal,
less Gallic and more human. It represents more
and more Paris, the urban heart of the world. As for
Voltaire, he remains what he is — the man of the
future ; but also the man of the past. He is one of
those glories which make the thinker say yes and
no : he has against him two sarcasms — Joan of Arc,
and Shakespeare. He is punished through what he
sneered at.
CHAPTER V
WHEREFORE, indeed, a monument to Spakespeare ?
The statue he has made for himself, with all England
for a pedestal, is better. Shakespeare has no need
of a pyramid ; he has his work.
What do you suppose marble could do for him t
What can bronze do, where there is glory ? Mala
chite and alabaster are of no avail ; jasper, serpen
tine, basalt, red porphyry like that at the Invalides,
granite, marble of Paros and Carrara, are a waste
of pains : genius is genius without them. What
though every variety of stone had its place there,
would that add a cubit to this man's stature ? What
arch shall be more indestructible than this — The
Winter's Tale, The Tempest, The Merry Wives of
Windsor, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julius Ccrsar,
Coriolanus? What monument sublimer than Lear,
sterner than The Merchant of Venice, more dazzling
than Romeo and Juliet, more amazing than Richard HI?
What moon could shed about the pile a light more
mystic than that of A Midsummer -NigMs Dream ?
What capital, were it even London, could rumble around
it as tumultuously as Macbeth's perturbed soul ?
What framework of cedar or of oak will last as long as
284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Othello ? What bronze can equal the bronze of Ham
let ? No construction of lime, of rock, of iron, and
of cement, is worth the deep breath of genius, which
is the respiration of God through man. A head con
taining an idea, such is the summit ; no heaps of
brick and stone can rival it. What edifice equals a
thought ? Babel is less lofty than Isaiah ; Cheops
is smaller than Homer ; the Colosseum is inferior to
Juvenal ; the Giralda of Seville is dwarfish by the
side of Cervantes ; St. Peter's of Rome does not reach
to the ankle of Dante. What architect has skill to
build a tower as high as the name of Shakespeare ?
Add anything, if you can, to a mind !
Imagine a monument. Suppose it splendid,
suppose it sublime. A triumphal arch, an obelisk,
a circus with a pedestal in the centre, a cathedral.
No people is more illustrious, more noble, more splen
did, more high-minded, than the English people.
Wed these two ideas, England and Shakespeare, and
let their issue be a monument. Such a nation cele
brating such a man, — the spectacle would be superb.
Imagine the monument, imagine the inauguration.
The Peers are there, the Commons follow, the bishops
officiate, the princes join the procession, the Queen
is present. The virtuous woman, in whom the English
people, royalist as we know, see and revere their living
personification, this worthy mother, this noble widow,
comes, with the deep respect which is befitting, to
incline material majesty before ideal majesty, — the
Queen of England salutes Shakespeare ; the homage of
Victoria repairs the disdain of Elizabeth. As for
Elizabeth, she is probably there also, sculptured
somewhere on the surbase, with Henry VIII her
father, and James I her successor, — pigmies beneath
the poet. Cannons boom, the curtain drops, the
unveiled statue seems to say : ' At length ! ' It has
grown in the darkness for three hundred years, three
centuries, the youth of a colossus ; how vast it is !
To compose it, the bronze statues of York, of Cumber-
AFTER DEATH 285
land, of Pitt, and of Peel, have been utilized ; the
public squares have been relieved of a heap of unjusti
fiable castings ; all sorts of Henrys and Edwards
have been blended in that lofty figure ; for it the
various Williams and the numerous Georges have
been melted down ; the Hyde Park Achilles forms
its great toe : it is noble, — behold Shakespeare almost
as great as a Pharoah or a Sesostris ! Bells, drums,
trumpets, applause, hurrahs.
What then ?
To England this is honourable ; to Shakespeare
indifferent.
What is the salutation of royalty, of aristocracy,
of the army, and even of the English populace —
like almost all other nations, still ignorant — what is the
acclamation of all these variously enlightened groups,
to one who has the eternal and well-considered applause
of all centuries and of all men ? What oration of the
Bishop of London or of the Archbishop of Canter
bury is worth the cry of a woman before Desdemona,
of a mother before Arthur, of a soul before Hamlet ?
When, therefore, a universal voice demands of
England a monument to Shakespeare, it is not for
the sake of Shakespeare, it is for the sake of England.
There are cases in which the repayment of a debt
is of greater import to the debtor than to the creditor.
A monument is an example. The lofty head of
a great man is a light. Crowds, like the waves,
require beacons above them. It is good that the
passer-by should know that there are great men.
People may not have time to read : they are forced
to see. One passes that way, and stumbles against
the pedestal ; one is almost obliged to raise the head
and to glance a little at the inscription. Men escape
a book ; they cannot escape the statue. One day on
the bridge of Rouen, before the beautiful statue
carved by David d' Angers, a peasant mounted on a
donkey said to me, * Do you know Pierre Corneille ? *
* Yes ', I replied. * So do I ', he rejoined. * And
286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
do you know The Cid ? ' I resumed. ' No ', said he.
To him the statue was Corneille.
The people need such an introduction to their
great men. The monument incites them to know
more of the man. They desire to learn to read, in
order to know what this bronze means. A statue
is a nudge to ignorance.
The erection of such monuments is therefore not
merely a matter of national justice, but of popular
utility.
In the end, England will certainly yield to the
temptation of performing an act at once useful and
just. She is the debtor of Shakespeare. To leave
such a debt in abeyance is an attitude hardly com
patible with national pride. It is a point of morality
that nations should pay their debts of gratitude.
Enthusiasm is probity. When a man is a glory upon
his nation's brow, the nation that fails to recognize
the fact excites the amazement of the raoe.
CHAPTER VI
As it was easy to foresee, England will build a monu
ment to her poet.
At the very moment when we finished writing
the pages you have just read, announcement was
made in London of the formation of a committee
for the solemn celebration of the three-hundredth
anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare. This com
mittee will dedicate to Shakespeare, on the 23d of
April, 1864, a monument and a festival, which will
surpass, we doubt not, the incomplete programme
we have just sketched out. They will spare nothing.
The act of admiration will be a striking one. One
may expect everything, in point of magnificence,
from the nation which has created the prodigious
palace at Sydenham, that Versailles of a people.
The initiative taken by the committee will certainly
receive support from the powers that be. We dis-
AFTER DEATH 287
card, for our part, and the committee will discard, we
think, all idea of a testimonial by subscription. A
subscription, unless of one penny — that is to say, open
to all the people — is necessarily fractional. What is
due to Shakespeare is a national testimonial — a
holiday, a public festival, a popular monument,
voted by the Chambers and entered in the Budget.
England would do it for her king. Now, what is
the King of England beside the Man of England ?
All confidence is due to the Shakespeare Jubilee
Committee, — a committee composed of persons highly
distinguished in the Press, the peerage, literature, the
theatre, and the Church. Eminent men from all
countries, representing the intelligence of France,
of Germany, of Belgium, of Spain, of Italy, complete
this committee, which is from all points of view excel
lent and competent. Another committee, formed at
Stratford-on-Avon, seconds the London committee.
We congratulate England.
Nations are hard of hearing, but so long of life
that their deafness is in no way irreparable. They
have time to change their minds. The English are
at last awakening to their glory. England begins
to spell that name, Shakespeare, upon which the
World has laid her finger.
In April, 1664, a hundred years after Shakespeare's
birth, England was engaged in applauding Charles II,
who had sold Dunkirk to France for two hundred and
fifty thousand pounds sterling, and in looking at
something, that was a skeleton and had been Cromwell,
whitening in the northeast wind and the rain on the
gallows at Tyburn. In April, 1764, two hundred years
after Shakespeare's birth, England was contemplating
the aurora of George III, a king destined to imbecility,
who, at that epoch, in secret councils, and in somewhat
unconstitutional asides with the Tory chiefs and
the German Landgraves, was sketching out that
policy of resistance to progress which was to strive,
first against liberty in America, then against demo-
288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
cracy in France, and which, under the single ministry
of the first Pitt, had in 1778 raised the debt of England
to the sum of eighty millions sterling. In April, 1864,
three hundred years after Shakespeare's birth, England
raises a statue to Shakespeare. It is late — but it is
well.
BOOK II
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER I
THE nineteenth century holds tenure of itself only ;
it receives its impulse from no ancestor ; it is the
offspring of an idea. Doubtless Isaiah, Homer,
Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, have been or could
be great starting-points for important philosophical
or poetical growths ; but the nineteenth century has
for its august mother the French Revolution. This
redoubtable blood flows in its veins. It honours men
of genius, and if need be salutes them when despised,
proclaims them when ignored, avenges them when
persecuted, re-enthrones them when dethroned : it
venerates them, but it does not proceed from them.
The nineteenth century has for family itself, and
itself alone. It is the characteristic of its revolution
ary nature to dispense with ancestors.
Itself a genius, it fraternizes with men of genius.
As for its source, it is where theirs is, — beyond man.
The mysterious gestations of progress succeed each
other according to a providential law. The nineteenth
century is a birth of civilization. It has a continent
to bring into the world. France has borne this century,
and this century bears Europe.
When civilization was coexistent with Greece, it
was at first circumscribed by the narrow limits of
the Morea, or Mulberry Leaf ; then, widening by
degrees, it spread over the Roman group of nations.
To-day it distinguishes the French group ; that is to
say, all Europe, with beginnings in America, in Africa,
and in Asia.
290 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The greatest of these beginnings is a democracy,
the United States, whose first tender growth was
fostered by France in the last century. France,
sublime essayist in progress, founded a republic in
America before making one in Europe. Et vidit
quod esset bonum. After having lent to Washington
an auxiliary, Lafayette, France, returning home,
gave to Voltaire, dismayed within his tomb, that
formidable successor, Danton. When the Past,
that grisly monster, being brought to bay, was hurling
all its thunderbolts, exhaling all its miasmas, belching
black vapours, protruding horrible talons, Progress,
forced to use the same weapons, suddenly put forth
a hundred arms, a hundred heads, a hundred fiery
tongues, a hundred bellowings. The good took the
form of the hydra. And this is what is called the
Revolution.
Nothing can be more august.
The Revolution ended one century and began
another.
An agitation in the world of mind preparatory
to an upheaval in the world of fact : such is the
eighteenth century. The political revolution, once
accomplished, seeks its expression, and the literary
and social revolution takes place : such is the nine
teenth century. It has been said with truth, although
with hostile intent, that romanticism and socialism
are the same fact. Hatred, wishing to injure, often
affirms, and, so far as in it lies, consolidates.
A parenthesis. This word ' romanticism ' has,
like all war-cries, the advantage of sharply epito
mizing a group of ideas ; it is brief, which pleases in
the contest: but it has, to our mind, through its
militant signification, the inconvenience of appearing
to limit to a warlike action the movement that it
represents. Now this movement is intelligence, an
act of civilization, an act of soul ; and this is why the
writer of these lines has never used the words ' roman
ticism ' and ' romantic '. They will be found hi none
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 291
of the pages of criticism that he has had occasion to
write. If to-day he departs from his usual prudence
in polemics, it is for the sake of greater rapidity, and
with every reservation. The same observation may
be made on the subject of the word ' socialism ',
which admits of so many different interpretations.
The triple movement — literary, philosophical, and
social — of the nineteenth century, which is one single
movement, is nothing but the current of the revolu
tion in ideas. This current, after having swept away
so many facts, flows on, broad and deep, through the
minds of men.
The term ' literary '93 ', so often repeated in 1830
against the contemporaneous literature, was not so
much an insult as it was meant to be. It was certainly
as unjust to employ it to characterize the whole liter
ary movement as it is wrong to employ it to describe
the whole political revolution ; there is in these two
phenomena something besides '93. But this term,
* literary '93 ', was so far relatively exact that it
indicated, confusedly but truthfully, the origin of
the literary movement of our epoch, while endeavouring
to dishonour that movement. Here again the clair
voyance of hatred was blind. Its daubings of mud
upon the face of Truth are gilding, light, and glory.
The Revolution, that grand climacteric of humanity,
is made up of several years. Each of these years
expresses a period, represents an aspect, or realizes
a phase of the phenomenon. Tragic '93 is one of
these colossal years. Good news must sometimes be
spoken through a brazen mouth ; such a mouth is '93.
Listen to the tremendous proclamation issuing
from it. Bow down, remain awestruck, and be touched.
In the beginning God himself said, ' Fiat lux ' ; the
second time, He had it said.
By whom ?
By '93.
Hence it is that we men of the nineteenth century
glory in the reproach, ' You are of '93 '.
292 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
But we must not stop here. We are of '89 as
well as of '93. The Revolution, the whole Revolu
tion, — this is the source of the literature of the nine
teenth century.
Then put this literature on trial, or seek its triumph ;
hate it or love it ; according to the amount of your
faith in the future, insult it or salute it : little does
it care for your animosity and fury. It is a logical
deduction from the great chaotic and primordial fact
which our fathers witnessed, and which has given the
world a new point of departure. He who is against
that fact is against that literature. He who is for
that fact is on its side. What the fact is worth the
literature is worth. Reactionary writers are not at
fault. Wherever there is revolution, patent or latent,
the Catholic and Royalist scent is unerring. These
ancient men of letters award to contemporary litera
ture an honourable portion of diatribe ; their aversion
is convulsive. One of their journalists, who is, I be
lieve, a bishop, pronounces the word ' poet ' with the
same accent as the word ' Septembrist ' ; another,
less episcopal but equally angry, writes : ' I feel in
all this literature Marat and Robespierre '. This
latter writer is slightly in error ; Danton, rather than
Marat, is to be felt in this literature.
But the fact is true ; this literature is full of demo
cracy.
The Revolution forged the bugle ; the nineteenth
century sounds it.
Ah ! this avowal suits us, and in truth we do not
shrink from it ; let us admit our glory, we are the
Revolutionists. The thinkers of this time — poets,
publicists, historians, orators, philosophers — trace
their lineage, every one, to the French Revolution.
From it they descend, and from it alone. '89 de
molished the Bastile ; '93 discrowned the Louvre.
Deliverance sprang from '89 ; victory from '93.
'89 and '93, — from that source issue the men of the
nineteenth century. This is their father and their
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 203
mother. Seek for them no other lineage, no other
inspiration, no other breath of life, no other origin.
They are the democrats of thought, successors to the
democrats of action. They are liberators. Freedom
was the nurse that bent over their cradles ; that ample
breast suckled them all ; they all have her milk in
their bodies, her marrow in their bones, her granite
in their will, her rebellion in their reason, her fire in
their intelligence.
Even those among them (and there are some )
who were by birth aristocrats, who came into the
world strangers in old-time families, who received
that fatal early training whose stupid endeavour it
is to counteract progress, and who began their message
to the century by some unmeaning stammering of
royalism,— even these (they will not contradict me)
felt within them, even from their infancy, the sublime
monster. They felt the inward ferment of the vast
reality. In the deeps of consciousness they felt an
uprising of mysterious thoughts ; their souls were
shaken by the profound perturbation of false certi
tudes ; little by little they parceived the sombre
surface of their monarchism, Catholicism, and aristo
cracy, trembling, quaking, gaping open. One day
the swelling of truth within them abruptly culminated,
and suddenly the crust was rent, the eruption took
place, and behold them opened, shivered by a light
which fell not upon them from without, but — nobler
miracle ! — issued from these astonished men, and
illuminated them while it set them aflame. All un
awares, they had become volcanic craters.
They have been reproached with this phenomenon,
as with treason. In fact, they passed over from
right divine to human rights. They turned the back
upon false history, false tradition, false dogmas, false
philosophy, false daylight, false truth. That dawn-
summoned bird, the free-soaring spirit, is offensive
to minds saturated with ignorance and to embryons
preserved in alcohol. He who sees, offends the blind ;
294 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
he who hears, enrages the deaf ; he who walks, insults
the cripple in his wooden bowl. In the eyes of dwarfs,
abortions, Aztecs, myrmidons, and pigmies forever
stunted with the rickets, growth is apostasy.
The writers and poets of the nineteenth century
have the admirable good fortune of proceeding from
a genesis, of arriving after an end of the world, of
accompanying a reappearance of light, of being the
organs of a new beginning. This imposes on them
duties unknown to their predecessors, — the duties of
intentional reformers and direct civilizers. They
continue nothing ; they form everything anew. The
new time brings new duties. The function of thinkers
in our days is complex ; it no longer suffices to think, —
one must love ; it no longer suffices to think and to
love, — one must act. To think, to love, and to act, no
longer suffice, — one must suffer. Lay down the pen,
and go where you hear the grape-shot. Here is a barri
cade ; take your place there. Here is exile ; accept it.
Here is the scaffold, — be it so. Let the Montesquieu
be able, in case of need, to act the part of John Brown.
The Lucretius of this travailing century should contain
a Cato. JEschylus, who wrote The Oresteia, had a
brother, Cynegirus, who grappled the enemy's ships;
that was sufficient for Greece at the time of Salamis,
but it no longer suffices for France after the Revolu
tion. That ^Eschylus and Cynegirus are brothers,
is but little ; they must needs be the same man.
Such are the present requirements of progress. Those
who devote themselves to great and urgent causes can
never be too great. To set ideas in motion, to heap
up evidence, to scaffold up principles, such is the
formidable endeavour. To heap Pelion on Ossa is
the labour of infants beside that work of giants, the
establishing of right upon truth. Afterward to scale
that height, and to dethrone usurpations in the midst
of thunders, — such is the task.
The future presses. To-morrow cannot wait.
Humanity has not a minute to lose. Quick ! quick !
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 296
let us hasten. The wretched have their feet on red-
hot iron ; they hunger, they thirst, they suffer. Alas !
terrible emaciation of the poor human body. Parasi
tism laughs, the ivy grows green and thrives, the
mistletoe flourishes, the solitary slug is happy. How
frightful is the prosperity of the tapeworm ! To
destroy that which devours, in that is safety. Within
your life death itself lives and thrives robustly. There
is too much poverty, too much privation, too much
immodesty, too much nakedness, too many houses of
shame, too many convict prisons, too many tatters,
too many defalcations, too many crimes, too much
darkness ; not enough schools ; too many little inno
cents growing up for evil ! The pallet of the poor girl
is suddenly covered with silk and lace — and in that
is the worst misery ; by the side of misfortune there
is vice, the one urging on the other. Such a society
requires prompt succour. Let us seek out the best.
Go, all of you, in this search ! Where are the promised
lands ? Civilization must march forward ; let us
test theories, systems, ameliorations, inventions,
reforms, until the shoe for that foot shall be found.
The experiment costs nothing, or costs but little.
To try is not to adopt. But before all, above all, let
us be lavish of the light. All sanitary purification
begins by opening the windows wide. Let us open
wide all intellects ; let us supply souls with air.
Quick, quick, O thinkers ! Let the human race
breathe. Shed abroad hope, sow the ideal, do good.
One step after another, horizon after horizon, conquest
after conquest ; because you have given what you
promised, do not hold yourself quit of obligation. To
perform is to promise. To-day's dawn pledges the
sun for to-morrow.
Let nothing be lost. Let not one force be isolated.
Every one to work ! the urgency is supreme. No more
idle art. Poetry the worker of civilization, — what
could be more admirable ? The dreamer should be
a pioneer ; the strophe should mean something. The
296 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
beautiful should be at the service of honesty. I am
the valet of my conscience ; it rings for me : I come.
' Go ', I go. What do you require of me, 0 Truth !
sole monarch of this world ? Let each one have
within him an eagerness for well-doing. A book is
sometimes looked forward to for succour. An idea is a
balm, a word may be a dressing for wounds ; poetry
is a physician. Let no one delay. While you tarry,
suffering man grows weaker. Let men throw off this
dreamy laziness. Leave hashish to the Turks. Let
men labour for the welfare of all ; let them rush
forward, and put themselves out of breath. Do not
be sparing of your strides. Let nothing remain useless.
No inertia. What do you call dead nature ? Every
thing lives. The duty of all is to live. To walk, to
run, to fly, to soar, — such is the universal law. What
are you waiting for ? Who stops you ? Ah ! there
are times when one might wish to hear the stones
cry out against the sluggishness of man.
Sometimes one wanders away into the woods.
To whom does it not sometimes happen to be de
jected ? one sees so many sad things. The goal does
not appear, the results are long in coming, a generation
is behindhand, the work of the age languishes. What !
so many sufferings yet ? One would say there had
been retrogression. There is everywhere increase of
superstition, of cowardice, of deafness, of blindness,
of imbecility. Brutishness is weighted down by penal
laws. The wretched problem has been set, to augment
comfort by neglecting right ; to sacrifice the superior
side of man to the inferior side ; to yield up principle
to appetite. Caesar takes charge of the belly, I make
over to him the brains : it is the old sale of the
birthright for the mess of lentils. A little more, and
this fatal counter-movement would set civilization
upon the wrong road. The swine fattening for the
knife would no longer be the king, but the people. . . .
Alas ! this ugly expedient does not even succeed ;
there is no diminution of wretchedness. For the last
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 207
ten years — for the last twenty years — the low-water
mark of prostitution, of mendicity, of crime, has been
constantly visible ; evil has not fallen a single degree.
Of true education, of free education, there is none.
Nevertheless, the child needs to be told that he is
a man, and the father that he is a citizen. Where
is the promise ? Where is the hope ? Oh ! poor,
wretched humanity, one is tempted to shout for
help in the forest, one is tempted to claim support
and material assistance from vast and sombre Nature.
Can this mysterious union of forces be indifferent to
progress ? We supplicate, we call, we lift our hands
toward the shadow. We listen, wondering if the
rustlings will become voices. The duty of the springs
and streams should be to babble forth the word ' For
ward ' ! and one would wish to hear the nightingale
sing new Marseillaises.
But, after all, these seasons of halting have in them
nothing but what is normal. Discouragement would
be weakness. There are halts, rests, breathing-
times in the march of nations, as there are winters
in the progress of the seasons. The gigantic step, '89,
is none the less a fact. To despair would be absurd,
but to stimulate is necessary.
To stimulate, to press, to chide, to awaken, to
suggest, to inspire — these are the functions which,
fulfilled everywhere by writers, impress on the litera
ture of this century so marked a stamp of power and
originality. To remain faithful to all the laws of art,
while combining them with the law of progress — such
is the problem triumphantly solved by so many noble
and lofty minds.
Thence the word * Deliverance ', shining aloft in
the light as if it were written on the very brow of the
Ideal.
The Revolution is France sublimated.
There came a day when France entered the furnace —
the furnace breeds wings upon such warrior martyrs —
and from these flames the giantess came forth an
298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
archangel. Throughout the earth to-day the name
of France is revolution ; and henceforth this word
' revolution ' will be the name of civilization, until it
can be replaced by the word ' harmony.' Seek
nowhere else, I repeat, the starting-point and the birth
place of the literature of the nineteenth century.
Ay ! every one of us, great and small, powerful and
despised, illustrious and obscure, in all our works, good
or bad, whatever they may be, poems, dramas, ro
mances, history, philosophy, at the tribune of assem
blies as before the crowds of the theatre or in solitary
meditation ; ay ! everywhere and always ; ay J
to combat violence and imposture ; ay ! to restore
those who are stoned and run down ; ay ! to draw
logical conclusions and to march straight onward;
ay ! to console, to succour, to relieve, to encourage,
to teach ; ay ! to dress wounds, in hope of curing
them ! ay ! to transform charity into fraternity,
alms into helpfulness, sloth into industry, idleness
into usefulness, to make centralized power give place
to the family, to convert iniquity to justice, the bour
geois into the citizen, the populace into the people,
the rabble into the nation, nations into humanity,
war into love, prejudice into free inquiry, frontiers
into welded joints, barriers into thoroughfares, ruts
into rails, vestry-rooms into temples, the instinct of
evil into the desire of good, life into right, kings into
men ; ay ! to deprive religions of hell, and societies
of the prison-den ; ay ! to be brothers to the wretched,
the serf, the fellah, the poor labourer, the disinherited,
the victim, the betrayed, the conquered, the sold, the
shackled, the sacrificed, the harlot, the convict, the
ignorant, the savage, the slave, the negro, the con
demned, the damned — ay ! for all these things were
thy sons, O Revolution !
Ay ! men of genius ; ay ! poets, philosophers,
historians ; ay ! giants of that great art of the early
ages which is all the light of the past — O men eternal,
the minds of this day salute you, but do not follow
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 290
you. Concerning you they hold this law : Admire
everything, imitate nothing. Their function is no>
longer yours. They have to do with the manhood
of the human race. The hour of man's majority has
struck. We assist, under the full light of the ideal,
at the majestic union of the Beautiful with the Useful.
No present or possible genius can surpass you, ye
ancient men of genius ; to equal you is all the ambition
allowed : but to equal you we must provide for the
needs of our time, as ye supplied the wants of yours !
Writers who are sons of the Revolution have a holy
task. Their epic must sob, O Homer ! their history
must protest, O Herodotus ! their satire must dethrone,
O Juvenal ! their ' thou shalt be king ' must be said
to the people, O Shakespeare ! their Prometheus
must smite down Jupiter, O ^Eschylus ! their dunghill
must be fruitful, O Job ! their hell must be quenched,
O Dante ! thy Babylon crumbles, O Isaiah ! theirs
must be radiant with light They do what you have
done, they contemplate creation directly, they observe
humanity directly ; they accept as lodestar no re
fracted ray, not even yours. Like you, they have for
their sole starting-point, outside themselves the Univer
sal Being, within themselves the soul ; as the source
of their work they have the one source whence flows
Nature and whence flows Art, the Infinite. As the
writer of these lines declared nearly forty years ago * :
* The poets and the writers of the nineteenth century
have neither masters nor models.' No, in all that
vast and sublime art of all nations, among all those
grand creations of all epochs, they find neither masters
nor models, — not even thee, O ^Eschylus ! not even
thee, O Dante ! not even thee, O Shakespeare ! And
why have they neither masters nor models ? It is
because they have one model, Man, and because they
have one master, God.
* Preface to Cromwell.
BOOK III
TRUE HISTORY— EVERY ONE PUT IN HIS
PLACE
CHAPTER I
BEHOLD tlie rising of the new constellation !
It is now certain that what has hitherto been the
light of the human race begins to pale its ineffectual
fire, and that the ancient beacons are flickering out.
From the beginning of human tradition men of
force alone have glittered in the empyrean of his
tory ; theirs was the sole supremacy. Under the
various names of king, emperor, chief, captain, prince
— epitomized in the word ' hero ' — this apocalyptic
group shone resplendent. Terror raised acclamations
to salute them, dripping with the blood of victories.
They were followed by a train of tumultuous flames ;
their dishevelled light gleamed portentous upon the
children of men. If they lit the sky, it was with
flames. They seemed to wish to extend their sway
over the Infinite. Amid their glory was heard the
crash of ruin. That red glare — was it the purple ?
was it blood ? was it shame ? Their light suggested
the face of Cain. They hated one another. They
exchanged flashing bolts. At times these vast stars
crashed together amid volleys of lightning. Their
look was furious. Their radiance stretched into
sword- blades. All this hung terrible above us.
Such is the tragic glare that fills the past ; to-day
it is rapidly waning.
There is decline in war, decline in despotism, decline
in theocracy, decline in slavery, decline in the scaffold.
TRUE HISTORY 301
The s word- blade grows shorter, tlie tiara is fading away,
the crown is vulgarized, war is coming to seem but
madness, the plume is abased, usurpation is circmn-
scribed, shackles are growing lighter, the rack is out
of joint. The antique violence of the few against all,
called right divine, is nearing its end. Legitimate
sovereignty by the grace of God, the Pharamond
monarchy, nations branded on the shoulder with the
fleur-de-lys, the possession of nations by the fact of
birth, rights over the living acquired through a long
line of dead ancestors, — these things still maintain
the struggle for existence here and there, as at Naples,
in Prussia, etc, ; but it is a struggle, not a battle, —
it is death straining after life. A stammering, which
to-morrow will be speech, and the day after to-morrow
a gospel, proceeds from the bruised lips of the serf,
of the vassal, of the labouring- man, of the pariah.
The gag is breaking between the teeth of the human
race. The patient human race has had enough of
the path of sorrow, and refuses to go farther.
Already certain kinds of despots are no longer
possible. The Pharaoh is a mummy, the Sultan is
a phantom, the Ceesar is a counterfeit. This stylite
of the Trajan columns is anchylosed upon its pedestal ;
its head is covered with the excrement of the free
eagles ; it is nonentity rather than glory ; this laurel
garland is bound on with grave-clothes.
The period of the men of violence is past. They
have been glorious, certainly, but with a glory that
melts away. That species of great men is soluble
in progress. Civilization rapidly oxidizes these bronzes.
The French Revolution has already brought the
universal conscience to such a degree of maturity
that the hero can no longer be a hero without render
ing account ; the captain is discussed, the conqueror
is inadmissible. A Louis XIV invading the Palatinate
would, in our day, be regarded as a robber. Already
in the last century these truths began to dawn. Fred
erick II in the presence of Voltaire felt and owned
302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
himself something of a brigand. To be, materially,
a great man, to be pompously violent, to reign by
virtue of the sword-knot and the cockade, to forge a
legal system upon the anvil of force, to hammer out
justice and truth by dint of accomplished facts, to
possess a genius for brutality — this is to bejgreat,
if you will, but it is a coarse way of being great. Glory
advertised by drum-beats is met with a shrug of the
shoulder. These sonorous heroes have, up to the
present day, deafened human reason, which begins
to be fatigued by this majestic uproar. Reason
stops eyes and ears before those authorized butcheries
called battles. The sublime cut-throats have had
their day. Henceforth they can remain illustrious
and august only in a certain relative oblivion. Human
ity, grown older, asks to be relieved of them. The
cannon's prey has begun to think, and, thinking
twice, loses its admiration for being made a target.
A few figures, in passing, would do no harm.
Our subject includes all tragedy. The tragedy
of the poets is not the only one ; there is the tragedy
of the politicians and the statesmen. Would you
know how much the latter tragedy costs ?
Heroes have an enemy named finance. For a
long time the amount of money paid for that kind
of glory was unknown. In order to disguise the total,
there were convenient little fireplaces, like that in
which Louis XIV burned the accounts of Versailles.
That day the smoke of one thousand millions of francs
issued from the royal stove-pipe. The nations did
not so much as look. Nowadays the nations have
one great virtue, — they are stingy. They know
that prodigality is the mother of humiliation. They
keep score, they understand double-entry book
keeping. Henceforth there is a debit and credit
account with Warlike Glory, which is thus rendered
impossible.
The greatest warrior of modern times is not Na
poleon, it is Pitt. Napoleon waged war ; Pitt created
TRUE HISTORY 303
war. It IB Pitt who willed all the ware of the Revolu
tion and of the empire. He is their fountain-head.
Replace Pitt by Fox, and that outrageous battle of
twenty-three years would be deprived of its motive-
power ; there would be no coalition. Pitt was the soul
of the coalition ; and, he dead, his soul still animated
the universal war. Here is what Pitt cost England
and the world ; we add this bas-relief to his pedestal :
First, the expenditure of men. From 1791 to
1814, France, constrained and forced, wrestling alone
against Europe confederated by England, expended
in slaughter for military glory — and also, let us add,
for the defence of her territory — five millions of men ;
that is, six hundred men per day. Europe, including
France, expended sixteen millions six hundred thousand
men ; that is, two thousand men destroyed daily for a
period of twenty- three years.
Secondly, the expenditure of money. Unfortu
nately, we have no authentic account, except the
account of England. From 1791 to 1814, England,
in order to get France crushed by Europe, incurred
a debt of twenty milliards three hundred and sixteen
millions four hundred and sixty thousand and fifty-
three francs. Divide this sum by the number of men
killed, at the rate of two thousand per day for twenty -
three years, and you arrive at the result that each
corpse stretched on the field of battle cost England
alone fifty pounds sterling.
Add the figures for all Europe — numbers unknown,
but enormous.
With these seventeen millions of men the European
population of Australia might have been formed.
With the eight hundred millions of English pounds
sterKng shot from the cannon's mouth, the face of the
earth might have been changed, civilization planted
everywhere, and ignorance and poverty suppressed
throughout the world.
England pays eight hundred millions sterling for
the two statues of Pitt and of Wellington.
304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
It is fine to have heroes, but it is a costly luxury.
Poets are less expensive.
CHAPTER II
THE discharge of the warrior is signed. His splendour
is fading in the distance. Nimrod the Great, Cyrus
the Great, Sennacherib the Great, Sesostris the Great,
Alexander the Great, Pyrrhus the Great, Hannibal
the Great, Frederick the Great, Caesar the Great,
Timour the Great, Louis the Great, still other Greats, —
all this greatness is passing away.
To think that we indiscriminately reject these men
would be a mistake. Five or six of those just named
have in our eyes a legitimate title to glory ; they
have even mingled some good with their havoc ; a
final estimate of them is embarrassing to the thinker
of absolute equity, who is forced to weigh in almost
equal scale the harmful and the useful.
Others have been nothing but harmful. These
are numerous, innumerable even ; for the masters of
the world are legion.
The thinker is the weigher ; clemency is his dis
tinction. Let us then admit that those who have
done only evil may plead one extenuating circumstance
— imbecility.
They have still another excuse — the mental con
dition of the race at the time of their advent ; the
modifiable but obstructive realities of their environ
ment.
Not men, but things, are tyrants. The true tyrants
are the frontier, the beaten track, routine, the blindness
of fanaticism, deafness and dumbness caused by
diversity of language, dispute caused by diversity
of weights and measures and coin, hate born of dis
pute, war born of hate. All these tyrants have a
single name — Separation. Division, whence issues
the Reign, is the despot in the abstract state.
Even the tyrants of flesh are mere things. Caligula
TRUE HISTORY 305
is much more a fact than a man, a result rather than a
living being. The Roman proscriber, dictator, or
caesar, prohibits fire and water to the vanquished, —
that is, deprives them of life. One day of Gelon
represents twenty thousand prescripts ; one day of
Tiberius, thirty thousand ; one day of Sulla, seventy
thousand. Vitellius, being ill one evening, sees a
house lighted up for a merry-making. * Do they
think me dead ? ' says Vitellius. It is Junius Vlesus
supping with Tuscus Caecina. The Emperor sends
a cup of poison to these drinkers, that, by the fatal
conclusion of too merry a night, they may feel that
Vitellius still lives l. Otho and this Vitellius make
friendly exchanges of assassins. Under the Ceesars,
to die in one's bed is a marvel. Piso, to whom this
happened, is remarked for this eccentricity. Balerius
Asiaticus has a garden that pleases the Emperor ;
Statilius a face that displeases the Empress : treason !
Valerius is strangled for having a garden, and Statilius
for having a face. Basil II, Emperor of the East,
captures fifteen thousand Bulgarians ; he divides
them into bands of a hundred each, and puts out
the eyes of all save one in each band. This one leads
his ninety-nine blind comrades home to Vulgaria.
History characterizes Basil II as follows : * He loved
glory too much * (Delandine). Paul of Russia utters
this axiom : * No man possesses power except whom
the Emperor addresses, and his power continues only
so long as the word he hears.' Philip V of Spain, so
ferociously calm at the auto-da fe, is stricken with
fright at the thought of changing his shirt, and lies
in bed six months at a time without washing and
without trimming his nails, for fear of being poisoned
by the scissors, or by the water is his basin, or by his
shirt, or by his shoes. Ivan, grandfather of Paul,
puts a woman to the rack before admitting her to
his bed ; hangs a bride and sets the bridegroom on
1 ' Reddenham pro intempeativa licentia moestam et
funebrem noctem qua sentiat vivere Vitellium et imperare. '
X
306 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
guard to keep the rope from being cut ; has the father
executed by the son ; invents a method of sawing
men in two with a cord ; burns Bariatinsky by a
slow fire, and, deaf to his victim's shrieks, adjusts the
firebrands with the end of his stick. Peter aspires
to excel as an executioner; he practises the art of
decapitation. At first he can cut off but a trifle of
five heads a day ; by strict application, however, he
becomes expert enough to cut off twenty-five. What
an accomplishment for a Czar, to be able to tear out
a woman's breast with a stroke of the knout ! What
are all these monsters ? Symptoms, angry pustules,
pus issuing from an unhealthy body. They are
hardly more responsible than the sum of a column
is responsible for the figures. Basil, Ivan, Philip,
Paul, and the rest, are the product of the vast environ
ing stupidity. The Greek clergy having, for example,
this maxim, ' Who could make us judges of those who
are our masters ? ' it follows as a matter of course
that a Czar, this same Ivan, should sew an archbishop
in a bearskin and have him eaten by dogs. It is
right that the Czar amuse himself. Under Nero,
the man whose brother has been put to death goes to
the temple to give thanks to the gods ; under Ivan,
an impaled boyard employs his death-agony of twenty-
four hours in repeating : ' O Lord, protect the Czar ! '
The Princess Sanguzko comes weeping and upon her
knees to present a petition to Nicholas ; she begs
mercy for her husband, she implores the master to
spire Sanguzko— a Pole guilty of loving Poland—
the terrible journey to Siberia. Nicholas mutely
listens, takes the petition, and writes at the bottom
the words, ' On foot.' Then Nicholas goes into the
street, and the people throw themselves on the ground
to kiss his boot. What can you say ? Nicholas is
mad, his people imbruted. From the khan comes
the knez, from the knez the tzar, from the tzar the
czar,— a series of phenomena rather than a lineage of
men. What is more logical than that after this Ivan
TRUE HISTORY 307
should come this Peter, after Peter, Nicholas, after
Nicholas, Alexander ? You all desire it more or less.
The tortured consent to the rack. You have your
selves made * this Czar, half putrefied, half frozen ',
as says Madame de Stael. To be a nation, to be a
force, and to witness these things, is to approve them.
To be present is to assent. He who assists at the
crime assists the crime. The presence of the inert
is an encouraging sign of abjection.
Let it be added that, even before the commission
of the crime, some pre-existing corruption has given
rise to the complicity ; some foul fermentation of
original baseness engenders the oppressor.
The wolf is the fact of the forest. He is the wild
fruit of the defenceless solitude. Group and combine
silence, darkness, ease of conquest, monstrous infatua
tion, abundance of prey, security in murder, the
connivance of all present, weakness, want of weapons,
abandonment, isolation, — from the point of intersection
of all these things springs the ferocious beast. A
gloomy region, where no cries for succour can he heard,
produces the tiger. A tiger is blindness armed and
hungry. Is it a creature ? Hardly. The beast's
claw is no more conscious than the thorn of the plant.
The fatal condition of things brings forth the uncon
scious organism. In point of personality, and apart
from the power of killing for a living, the tiger does
not exist. If Muravieff thinks himself some one, he
is mistaken.
Bad men spring from bad things ; hence, let ua
correct the things.
And here we return to our starting-point : the ex
tenuating circumstance of despotism is — idiocy.
We have just pleaded this extenuating circum
stance.
The idiotic despots, a legion, are the mob of the
purple ; but beyond and above them, at the immeasur
able distances separating that which shines from that
which stagnates, are the despots of genius.
308 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Among them are captains, conquerors, strong
men of war, civilizers by force, ploughmen of the
sword.
These we have just now recalled. The really
great among them are Cyrus, Sesostris, Alexander,
Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon ; and,
with the restrictions mentioned, we admire them.
But we admire them on condition of their disappear
ance.
Make room for better, greater men !
Are these greater, these better men anything new ?
No. Their line is as ancient as the other, — more
ancient, perhaps, for the thought must have preceded
the deed, and the thinker goes before the fighter ;
but their place was taken, — taken by violence. This
usurpation is about to cease ; the thinker's hour has
struck at last, his predominance becomes evident.
Civilization, returning to its truer vision, recognizes
him as its sole founder ; the brightness of his line
outshines the rest ; the future, like the past, belongs
to him ; and his line it is that God will henceforward
establish.
CHAPTER III
IT is evident that history must be re-written. Up
to the present time it has nearly always been written
from the petty standpoint of fact ; it is time to write
it from the standpoint of principle. And this under
penalty of becoming null and void.
Royal deeds, warlike uproar, coronations, the
marriage, baptism, and mourning of princes, execu
tions and festivals, the splendour of one crushing
all, the insolence of regal birth, the prowess of sword
and axe, great empires, heavy taxes, the tricks which
chance plays chance, the world swayed by the haps
of the first best head, — provided it be a crowned
head ; the destiny of a century changed by a lance
thrust by a giddy fellow against the skull of an imbe
cile ; Louis XIV's majestic fistula in ano ; the grave
TRUE HISTORY 309
words of the dying Emperor Matthias to his physician,
who was groping under his coverlet to feel his pulse
for the last time : * Erras, amice, hoc est membrum
nostrum imperiale sacrocscsareum '; Cardinal Richelieu,
in the disguise of a shepherd, performing a Castanet
dance before the Queen of France in the little villa of
the Rue de Gaillon ; Hildebrand completed by Cisne-
ros ; the little dogs of Henri III ; the various Potem •
kins of Catherine II, — here Orloff, there Godoy, etc. ;
a great tragedy with a paltry intrigue, — such, down
to our own day, was history, oscillating between throne
and altar, giving one ear to Dangeau, the other to
Dom Calmet, sanctimonious rather than severe, not
comprehending the real transitions from age to age,
incapable of distinguishing the turning-points of
civilization, exhibiting the human race as climbing
up by ladders of stupid dates, learned in puerilitea
while ignorant of law, of justice, and of truth, — a
history modelled rather upon Le Ragois than upon
Tacitus.
So true is this that Tacitus has, in our time, been
made the object of an official requisition.
We are not to be weary of repeating the fact that
Tacitus is, like Juvenal, Suetonius and Lampridius,
the object of special and well-earned hatred. The
day when the professors of rhetoric in the colleges
place Juvenal above Virgil, and Tacitus above Bos-
suet, will be the morrow of humanity's day of deliver
ance. Before this happens, all forms of oppression
shall have disappeared, — from the slave-dealer to the
Pharisee, from the cabin where the slave weeps, to
the chapel where the eunuch sings. Cardinal du
Perron, who received for Henri IV the strokes of
the Pope's staff, was kind enough to say : ' I despise
Tacitus. '
Down to the present time, history has been a courtier.
The double identification of the king with the
nation and with God, is the work of this courtly
history. The Grace of God begets the Right Divine.
310 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Louis XIV declares : ' I am the state.' Madame
du Barry, a plagiarist of Louis XIV, gives to Louis XV
the name of France ; and the pompously haughty
saying of the great Asiatic King of Versailles ends
with the words : ' France, thy coffee is going to the
devil ! '
Bossuet wrote without winking, although palli
ating the facts here and there, the frightful legend of
the crime-laden thrones of antiquity ; and, applying
to the surface of things his vague theocratic declama
tion, he satisfies himself with this formula : ' God
holds in his hand the heart of kings.' Such is not
the case, for two reasons, — God has no hand, and
kings have no heart. But of course we are speaking
of the kings of Assyria only.
This elder History is a good old dame to princes.
When a Royal Highness says, * History, do not look
this way ', she shuts her eyes. With the face of a
harlot, she has imperturbably denied the dreadful
skull -crushing helmet with its inner spike, intended
by the Archduke of Austria for the Swiss magistrate
Gundoldingen. This instrument is to-day hanging
upon a nail in the town-hall of Lucerne, — any one can
see it for himself ; but History denies it still. Moreri
calls the massacre of Saint Bartholomew ' a distur
bance.' Chaudon, another biographer, thus charac
terizes the author of the witticism for Louis XV cited
above : ' A lady of the court, Madame du Barry '.
History accepts as an attack of apoplexy the mattress
under which John II of England smothers the Duke of
Gloucester at Calais *. Why, in his coffin at the
Escurial, is the head of the Infante Don Carlos severed
from the trunk ? The father, Philip II, replies :
* Because, the Infante having died a natural death, the
coffin when made was found too short, and the head
had to be cut off.' History blandly accepts this
coffin story. But that the father should have had
1 So in the original. Richard II is probably meant. Tn.
TRUE HISTORY 3-H
his son beheaded — out upon it ! Only demagogues
would say such things.
The ingenuousness with which History glorifies
the fact, whatever and however impious it be, appears
nowhere better than in Cantemir and Karamsin —
the one the Turkish, the other the Russian historian.
The Ottoman fact and the Muscovite fact evince,
when confronted and compared, the Tartar identity.
Moscow is no less darkly Asiatic than Stamboul. Ivan
bears sway over the one as Mustapha over the other.
Between this Christianity and this Mahometanism
the distinction is imperceptible. The pope is brother
to the ulema, the boyard to the pasha, the knout
to the cord, and the moujik to the mute. To the
passers in the streets there is little to choose between
Selim who transfixes them with arrows, and Basil
who lets bears loose upon them. Cantemir, a man
of the South, a former Moldavian hospodar and long
a Turkish subject, feels, although he has passed over
to the Russians, that in deifying despotism he does
not displease the Czar Peter ; and he prostrates his
metaphors before the sultans. This grovelling is
Oriental, and somewhat Occidental too. The sultans
are divine, their scimitar is sacred, their dagger sub
lime, their exterminations magnanimous, their parri
cides good. They call themselves clement, as the
Furies call themselves Eumenides. The blood they shed
smokes with an odour of incense in Cantemir, and the
prolonged assassination which constitutes their reign
expands into an aureole. They massacre the peo
ple for the people's good. When some padisha, I
forget which — Tiger IV or Tiger VI — strangles his
nineteen young brothers one after another, as they
run terrified about the room, the historian of Turkish
birth declares that ' this was a wise execution of the
law of the empire '. The Russian historian Karamsin
is no less tender to the czar than Cantemir to the
sultan. Nevertheless it must be admitted that, com
pared with Cantemir, Karamsin's fervour is lukewarm.
312 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Thus Peter is glorified by Karamsin for killing his
brother Alexis ; but the tone is apologetic. This
is not the pure and simple acceptance of Cantemir,
who is more natural in the kneeling posture. The
Russian historian only admires ; the Turkish historian
adores. In Karamsin there is no fire, no dash ; his
^enthusiasm is sluggish, his deifications want unction,
his good-will is congealed, his caresses are numb ;
his flattery is not first-rate. The climate evidently
counts for something — Karamsin is a half-frozen
Cantemir.
Such is the history dominant to this day ; it passes
from Bossuet to Karamsin by way of the Abbe Pluche.
This history is based upon the principle of obedience.
Obedience to whom ? To Success. Heroes are well
treated, but kings are preferred. To reign is to be
successful every morning. To-morrow belongs to the
king. He is solvent. It is foreseen that a hero may
turn out ill ; in that case he is only a usurper. Before
this history, genius itself, were it the highest expres-
tion of force served by intelligence, is held to continual
success : if it trips, ridicule ; if it falls, insult. After
Marengo, you are the hero of Europe, the man of Provi
dence, anointed of the Lord ; after Austerlitz, Napo
leon the Great ; after Waterloo, the Corsican ogre.
It was an ogre that the Pope anointed.
Nevertheless, in consideration of the services ren
dered, impartial Father Loriquet dubs you marquis.
The man of our time who has best swept this aston
ishing scale, from the hero of Europe to the ogre of
'Corsica, is Fontanes, the man chosen during so many
years to cultivate, develop, and direct the moral sense
of youth.
This history keeps alive the notions of legitimacy,
•divine right, denial of universal suffrage ; it regards
the throne as a fief, and nations as entailed estates.
The hangman figures in it largely, — Joseph de Maistre
identifies him, delightfully enough, with the king.
This kind of history is called in England * loyal '.
TRUE HISTORY 313
The English aristocracy, which is subject to these
happy inspirations, has bethought itself to give to a
political opinion the name of a virtue, Iiutrumentum
regni. In England, to be a royalist is to be loyal;
a democrat is disloyal, — a variety of the dishonest
man. This man believes in the people ? For shame !
He would like universal suffrage, — he is a Chart
ist ; are you sure of his honesty ? There goes a
republican : beware of pickpockets ! This method
is ingenious. Society in general is cleverer than
Voltaire ; the English aristocracy is shrewder than
Macchiavelli.
The king pays, the people do not pay : such is
pretty much the whole secret of this species of history.
It also has its sale of indulgences.
Honour and profit are divided : the master gets
the honour, the historian the profit. Procopius is
a prefect, and, what is more, Illustrious by decree,
a fact which in no wise debars him from being a traitor ;
Bossuet is a bishop ; Fleury is prelate-prior of Argen-
teuil ; Karamsin is a senator ; Cantemir is a prince.
Best of all is to be paid successively by For and by
Against, and, like Fontanes, to be made a senator
for idolatry, and a peer of France for spitting upon
the idol.
What is going on at the Louvre ? at the Vatican ?
in the Seraglio ? at Buen Retiro ? at Windsor ? at
Schonbrunn ? at Potsdam ? at the Kremlin ? at
Oranienbaum ? That »s the question. The human
race is interested in nothing outside of these half-
score of houses, of which history is the door-keeper.
Nothing that relates to war, to the warrior, to
the prince, to the throne, to the court, is trifling.
He who lacks a talent for solemn puerility cannot
be a historian. A question of etiquette, a hunt, a
gala, a grand levee, a retinue, Maximilian's triumph,
the number of carriages bearing ladies to the King's
camp before Mans, the necessity of having vices
in conformity with his Majesty's foibles, the clocks
314 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
of Charles V, the locks of Louis XVI ; how Louis
XV announced himself to be a good king by refus
ing a broth before his coronation ; and how the
Prince of Wales sits in the House of Lords not as
Prince of Wales but as Duke of Cornwall ; and how
drunken Augustus made Prince Lubormirsky, Starost
of Kasimiroff, under-cupbearer to the Crown ; and how
Charles of Spain gave the command of the army of
Catalonia to Pimentel, because the Pimentels had been
lords of Benavente since 1308 ; and how Frederick
of Brandenburg granted a fief of forty thousand crowns
to a huntsman who had enabled him to kill a fine
stag ; and how Louis Antoine, Grand Master of the
Teutonic Order and Prince Palatine, died at Liege of
disappointment at not having been able to get him
self elected bishop ; and how the Princess Borghese,
dowager of Mirandola, and related to the Pope, married
the Prince of Cellamare, son of the Duke of Gioven-
azzo ; and how my Lord Seaton, a Montgomery,
followed James II to France ; and how the Emperor
ordered the Duke of Mantua, a vassal of the Empire,
to drive the Marquis Amorati from his court ; and
how there came to be always two Cardinals Barberini
living, etc. — all that is important business. A snub-
nose is made historic. Two little meadows adjacent
to the ancient Mark and to the Duchy of Zell are
memorable for having almost caused a war between
England and Prussia. In fact, the skill of the govern
ing and the apathy of the obeying classes have so
arranged and confused affairs that all these regal
nothings take their places in human destiny, and war
and peace, the movement of armies and fleets, the
recoil or the advance of civilization, depend upon
Queen Anne's cup of tea or the Dey of Algiers' fly-
flap.
History stands behind the royal seat, registering
these fooleries.
Knowing so many things, it is quite natural that
it should be ignorant of some. Should you be so
TRUE HISTORY 315
curious as to ask it the name of tho English merchant
who first, in 1612, entered China from the north ; of
the glass-workman who first, in 1CG3, cstal Dished a
manufactory of crystal glass ; of the citizen who,
under Charles VIII, carried in the States-General at
Tours the fruitful principle of the elective magistracy —
a principle subsequently adroitly suppressed ; of the
pilot who, in 1405, discovered the Canary Isles ; of
the Byzantine lute-maker who, in the eighth century,,
by the invention of the organ, gave to music its most
sonorous voice ; of the Campanian mason who origin
ated the clock by placing the first sun-dial upon the-
temple of Quirinus at Rome ; of the Roman toll-
collector who, by the construction of the Appian Way
in the year 312 B. c., invented the paving of towns ;
of the Egyptian carpenter who conceived the dove
tail — one of the keys of architecture, found under
the obelisk of Luxor ; of the Chaldaean goat-herd who,
by the observation of the signs of the zodiac, founded
astronomy and gave a starting-point to Anaximenes ;
of the Corinthian calker who, nine years before the
first Olympiad, calculated the force of the triple-
lever, conceived the trireme, and built a towboat two-
thousand six hundred years before the first steamboat ;
of the Macedonian ploughman who discovered the first
gold-mine on Mount Pangaeus — these names history
cannot give you ; these people are unknown to history.
Who are these ? A ploughman, a calker, a goat
herd, a carpenter, a toll-gatherer, a mason, a lute-
maker, a sailor, a burgher, and a merchant. The
dignity of history must be preserved.
In Nuremberg, near the Aegidienplatz, in a room
on the second floor of a house facing the church of St.
Aegidius, there lies upon an iron tripod a wooden globe
twenty inches in diameter, covered with a dingy vellum
streaked with lines which were once red and yellow
and green. Upon this globe is a sketch of the earth's
divisions as they could be conceived in the fifteenth
century. At the twenty-fourth degree of latitude.
316 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
under the sign of Cancer, there is vaguely indicated a
kind of island called ' Antilia ', which attracted, one
day, the attention of two men. The one who had
made the globe and drawn Antilia, showed this island
to the other, laid his finger upon it, and said, * There
it is.' The man looking on was Christopher Co
lumbus ; the man who said, * There it is ', was Martin
Behaim. Antilia was America. Of Fernando Cortez,
who ravaged America, history speaks ; but not of
Martin Behaim, who guessed its existence.
If a man has ' cut to pieces ' his fellow-men, if
he has * put them to the edge of the sword ', if he
has ' made them bite the dust ', — -horrible phrases,
which have grown hideously familiar, — whatever
this man's name may be, you will find it in history.
Search there for the name of him who invented the
compass, — you will not find it !
In 1747, in the full tide of the eighteenth century,
under the very eyes of the philosophers, the battles
of Raucoux and of Laffeld, the siege of the Sas van
Ghent, and the taking of Bergen-op-Zoom, overshadow
and hide the sublime discovery of electricity, which
is to-day effecting the transformation of the world.
Voltaire himself at about that time is distractedly
celebrating who knows what exploit of Trajan (read,
Louis XV).
From this history is evolved a kind of public stupid
ity. This history is almost everywhere superposed
upon education. If you doubt this, see, among
others, the publications of Perisse Brothers, — designed,
eays a parenthesis, for primary schools.
It makes us laugh if a prince assumes the name
of an animal. We ridicule the Emperor of China
for having himself styled ' His Majesty the Dragon ',
and we ourselves complacently talk of * Monseigneur
the Dauphin.'
History is domestic ; the historian is a mere master-
of-ceremonies to the centuries. In the model court of
Louis the Great there are four historians, as there are
TRUE HISTORY 317
four bedchamber violinists. Lulli leads the latter,
Boileau the former.
In this old-fashioned history — the only style autho
rized down to 1789, and classic in the complete sense
of the word — the best narrators, even the honest ones,
of whom there are a few, even those who think them
selves free, remain mechanically subordinate, make
a patchwork of traditions, yield to the force of habit,
receive the countersign in the antechamber, go with
the crowd in accepting the stupid divinity of the coarse
personages of the foreground, — kings, ' potentates ',
* pontiffs ', soldiers, — and, though devoutly believing
themselves historians, end by wearing the livery of
historiographers, and are lackeys without knowing it.
This history is taught, imposed, commanded, and
recommended ; all young minds are more or less
imbued with it. The mark remains ; their thought
suffers from it, recovering only with difficulty ; school
boys are compelled to learn it by heart, and I, who am
speaking, was, as a child, its victim.
This history contains everything except history,
— displays of princes, of ' monarchs ', and of captains.
Of the people, the laws, the manners, very little ; of
letters, arts, sciences, philosophy, the trend of univesral
thought, — in one word, of man, — nothing. Civili
zation is made to date by reigns, not by progress.
Some king forms a stage. The true relays, the relays
of great men, are nowhere indicated. It is explained
how Francis II succeeds Henri II, how Charles IX
succeeds Francis II, and Henri III Charles IX ; but
no one teaches how Watt succeeds Papin, and how
Fulton succeeds Watt. Behind the heavy upholstery
of hereditary monarchy the mysterious dynasty of
genius is scarcely glimpsed. The smoky torch upon
the opaque facade of royal accessions hides the starry
light streaming down upon the centuries from the
creators of civilization. Not a single one of this series
of historians points to the divine lineage of human
miracles, that applied logic of Providence ; not one
318 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
exhibits the manner in which progress gives birth to
progress. It would be shameful not to know that
Philip IV comes after Philip III, and Charles II after
Philip IV ; but that Descartes continues Bacon and
that Kant continues Descartes, that Las Casas con
tinues Columbus, that Washington continues Las
Casas and that John Brown continues and rectifies
Washington, that John Huss continues Pelagius, that
Luther continues John Huss and that Voltaire con
tinues Luther, — it is almost a scandal to be aware of
these things.
CHAPTER IV
IT is time to change all this. It is time that men of
action should step back, and that men of thought
should take the lead. The summit is the head. Where
thought is, there power exists. It is time that the
genius take precedence of the hero. It is time to
render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to
the book the things that belong to the book. Such a
poem, such a drama, such a novel, is doing more ser
vice than all the courts of Europe put together. It
is time that history should proportion itself to reality,
that it should give every influence its ascertained
value, that it should cease to thrust regal masks upon
epochs made in the image of poets and of philosophers.
To whom belongs the eighteenth century, — to Louis
XV, or to Voltaire ? Compare Versailles and Ferney,
and consider from which of the two sources civiliza
tion flows.
A century is a formula ; an epoch is an expressed
thought. One such thought expressed, Civilization
passes to another. The centuries are the phrases
of Civilization ; what she says here she does not repeat
there. But these mysterious phrases are linked to
gether — ; logic — the logos is within them, and their
series constitutes progress. In all these phrases,
TRUE HISTORY 319
expressions of a single thought, the divine thought,
we are slowly deciphering the word Fraternity.
All light is at some point condensed into a flame ;
likewise every epoch is condensed in a man. The
man dead, the epoch is concluded. God turns over
the leaf. Dante dead, a period is placed at the end
of the thirteenth century ; John Huss may come.
Shakespeare dead, a period is placed at the end of the
sixteenth century. After this poet, who contains
and epitomizes all philosophy, may come the philoso
phers, Pascal, Descartes, Molidre, Le Sage, Montes
quieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais. Voltaire
dead, a period is placed at the end of the eighteenth
century. The French Revolution, that winding-up
of the first social form of Christianity, may come.
Each of these various periods, which we call epochs,
has its dominant note. What is this dominant, a
head wearing a crown, or a head bearing a thought ?
Is it an aristocracy, or an idea ? Make your own answer.
Consider where the power lies. Weigh Francis I against
Gargantua ; put the whole of chivalry into the balance
with Don Quixote.
Each one to his own place, therefore. About
face ! And now consider the centuries as they are.
In the first rank, mind ; in the second, third, twen
tieth, soldiers and princes. Down with the warrior ;
the thinker retakes possession of the pedestal. Pull
down Alexander, and set up Aristotle. Strange that
to this day people should have read the Iliad in such
a manner as to overshadow Homer by Achilles !
It is time, I repeat, to change all this. The initiative,
indeed, is taken. Noble minds are already at work ;
the future history is approaching ; some superb
partial rehandlings exist as specimens ; a general
recasting is about to take place. Ad usum populi.
Compulsory education requires true history ; true
history is begun, and will be made.
The old medals will be re-minted : that which
was the reverse will become the face ; that which
320 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
was the head will become the tail ; Urban VIII will
be the reverse of Galileo.
The true profile of humanity will reappear upon the
various prints of civilization offered by the succession
of the centuries.
The historical effigy will no longer be the man king,
it will be the man people.
No one shall reproach us with failing to insist
that real and veracious history, while pointing to
the real sources of civilization, will not underesti
mate the appreciable utility of the sceptre-holders
and sword-racks at certain moments and in pres
ence of certain human conditions. Wrestling-matches
require some equality between the two combatants ;
barbarity must sometimes be pitted against barbarism.
There are cases of violent progress. Caesar is good in
Cimmeria, and Alexander in Asia. But to Alexander
and to Caesar the second rank suffices.
The veracious history, the true history, the de
finitive history, charged henceforward with the edu
cation of that royal child, the people, will reject all
fiction, will be wanting in complaisance, will logically
classify phenomena, will unravel hidden causes, will
study, philosophically and scientifically, the successive
disorders of humanity, and will take less account of
great sabre-strokes than of great strokes of thought.
The deeds of the light will form the van ; Pytha
goras will be a greater event than Sesostris. We said
just now that heroes, crepuscular men, are relatively
bright in the darkness ; but what is a conqueror beside a
sage ? what is the invasion of kingdoms compared
with the opening of the mind ? The winners of
minds overshadow the winners of provinces. The
true conqueror is the man who does the thinking
for others. In the coming history, the slave ^Esop
and the slave Plautus will take precedence of kings ;
such a vagabond will outweigh such a victor, such an
actor will outweigh such an emperor. To make what
we are saying obvious by examples, it is certainly
TRUE HISTORY 321
useful that a man of power should have marked the
period of stagnation between the crumbling of the
Latin world and the outgrowth of the Gothic world ;
it is useful that another man of power, following the
first, the shrewd after the bold, should have outlined,
in the form of a catholic empire, the future universal
group of nations and the wholesome encroachments of
Europe upon Africa, Asia, and America. But it
is still more useful to have made the Divina Commedia
and Hamlet ; no wicked deed is mingled with these
master- works ; here the account of the civilizer bears
no debit charge of nations crushed ; and the enlarge
ment of the human mind being taken as a result,
Dante counts for more than Charlemagne, Shakespeare
for more than Charles the Fifth.
In history, as it is to be made upon the pattern
of absolute truth, that commonplace intelligence,
that unconscious and vulgar being, the * Non pluribus
impar ', the sultan-sun of Marly, becomes merely the
almost mechanical fabricator of the shelter required
by the thinker who wore the theatrical mask, — of the
environment of ideas and of men requisite for the philo
sophy of Alceste. Louis XIV is bed-maker to Moliere.
These reversals of role will exhibit characters in
their true light ; the new historical optics will map
out the still chaotic sky of civilization ; perspective,
that geometrical justice, will take possession of the
past, placing this in the foreground, that in the back
ground ; every man will resume his real stature ;
tiaras, crowns, and other head-dresses will serve
simply to render dwarfs ridiculous ; stupid prostra
tions will disappear. From such readjustments will
stream forth the right.
That great judge, We All, having henceforth as
a standard a clear conception of that which is ab
solute and of that which is relative, the deductions
and restitutions will take place of themselves. The
innate moral sense of man will find its bearings. It
will no longer be forced to ask itself questions like
322 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
this : Why do people revere in Louis XV, and in the
rest of the royalty, the act for which they are at the
same moment burning DeschaufTours in the Place de
Greve ? The authority of the king will no longer
impose a false moral weight. The facts, well-balanced,
will balance conscience well. A good light will arise,
mild to the sons of men, serene, equitable. Hence
forward there is to be no interposition of clouds between
the truth and the brain of man. Definitive ascension
of the good, the just, the beautiful, to the zenith of
civilization.
Nothing can escape the law of simplification. By
the sheer force of things, the material side of events and
of men scales off and vanishes. There is no such
thing as solidity of darkness. Whatever the mass
or the block, every compound of ashes — and matter is
nothing else — returns to ashes. The idea of the grain
of dust is embodied in the very word ' granite '.
Pulverization is inevitable. All those granites, oli
garchy, aristocracy, theocracy, are the promised prey
of the four winds. The ideal alone is indestructible.
Nothing is abiding but mind.
In this indefinite inundation of light called civili
zation, phenomena of levelling and of setting up
are taking place. The imperious dawn penetrates
everywhere, enters as master, and enforces obedi
ence. The light is working ; under the great eye
of posterity, before the light of the nineteenth century,
a simplification is going on, the fungus is collapsing,
glory falls like the leaf, great names are divided up.
Take Moses, for example. In Moses there are three
glories, — the captain, the lawgiver, the poet. Of
these three men contained in Moses, where is the
captain to-day ? In the dark, with the brigands and
assassins. Where is the lawgiver ? Buried under
the rubbish of dead religions. Where is the poet ?
By the side of ^Eschylus.
The day has an irresistible corrosive power upon
the things of night. Hence a new historic sky over
TRUE HISTORY 323
• >'ir 1 loads. Hence a new philosophy of cause and effect.
Hence a new aspect of facts.
Some minds, however, whose honest and austere
solicitude is not displeasing, object : * You have said
that men of genius form a dynasty ; we are as un
willing to submit to this dynasty as to any other '.
This is to misunderstand, to be frightened kby a word
when the thought is reassuring. The very law which
requires that mankind should have no owners,
requires that it should have guides. To be enlight
ened is the reverse of being subjected. Between
' Homo sum ' and * I am the state ' is the whole space
between fraternity and tyranny. The march forward
requires a directing hand ; to rebel against the pilot
scarcely advances the ship ; one does not see what
would be gained by throwing Columbus overboard.
The word, ' This way ', never humiliated the man who
was seeking the road. At night, I accept the authority
of the torches. Furthermore, there is little that is
oppressive in the dynasty of genius, whose kingdom
is Dante's exile, whose palace is Cervantes' donjon,
whose budget is Isaiah's wallet, whose throne is
Job's dunghill, whose sceptre is Homer's staff.
Let us resume.
CHAPTER V
MANKIND no longer owned, but guided : such is the
new aspect of things.
Henceforward history is bound to reproduce this
new aspect of things. It is a strange thing to alter
the past ; but that is what history is about to under
take. By lying ? No ; by telling the truth. History
has been only a picture ; it is about to become a mirror.
This new reflection of the past will modify the future.
The former King of Westphalia, a man of wit,
was one day examining an inkstand upon the table
of some one we know. The writer at whose house
324 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Jerome Bonaparte was at that moment, had brought
back from a trip to the Alps, made in company with
Charles Nodier some years before, a bit of steatitic
serpentine, carved and hollowed into an inkstand,
which he had purchased of a chamois-hunter of the
Mer-de-Glace. Jerome Bonaparte was looking at
this. ' What is it ? ' he asked. ' My inkstand ',
replied the writer. Then he added : * It is steatite.
Admire Nature, who makes this charming green stone
out of a little dirt and oxide.' ' I admire much more
the men,' responded Jerome Bonaparte, ' who make an
ink-stand out of this stone.'
For a brother of Napoleon, this was not a bad
reply ; and he should be credited with it, for the
inkstand is to destroy the sword.
The diminution of the men of war, of violence, of
prey ; the indefinite and superb expansion of the
men of thought and of peace ; the entrance of the
real giants upon the scene of action : this is one of the
greatest facts of our great era.
There is no more sublime and pathetic spectacle,
— mankind's deliverance from above, the potentates
put to flight by the dreamers, the prophet crushing
the hero, the sweeping away of violence by thought,
the heaven cleansed, a majestic expulsion !
Lift up your eyes, the supreme drama is enacting !
The legions of light are in full pursuit of the hordes
of flame.
The masters are going out, the liberators are coming
in.
The hunters of men, the trailers of armies, Nimrod,
Sennacherib, Cyrus, Rameses, Xerxes, Cambyses,
Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alexander, Csesar,
Bonaparte, — all these vast, ferocious men are vanishing.
Slowly they flicker out ; now they touch the horizon ;
mysteriously the darkness attracts them ; they have
kinship with the shades, — hence their fatal descent ;
their resemblance to the other phenomena of night
draws them on to this dreadful union with blind
TRUE HISTORY 3.'5
immensity — submersion of all light. Oblivion, that
shadow of darkness, awaits them.
They are hurled down, but they remain formid
able. Insult not what has been great. Hootings
would be misbecoming at the burial of heroes ; the
thinker should remain grave in presence of this en
shrouding. The old glory abdicates ; the strong
are lying down. Clemency to these vanquished
conquerors ! Peace to these fallen warriors ! The
shades of the grave interpose between their light
and ours. Not without a kind of pious terror can
one behold stars changing to spectres.
While smitten with the fatal wanness of approach
ing doom, the flamboyant pleiad of the men of violence
descends the steep slope to the gulf of devouring time ;
lo ! at the other extremity of space, where the last
cloud has but now faded, in the deep sky of the future,
azure for evermore, rises, resplendent, the sacred
galaxy of the true stars, Orpheus, Hermes, Job,
Homer, ^Eschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hippocrates,
Phidias, Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Archi
medes, Euclid, Pythagoras, Lucretius, Plautus, Juvenal,
Tacitus, Saint Paul, John of Patmos, Tertullian,
Pelagius, Dante, Gutenberg, Joan of Arc, Christopher
Columbus, Luther, Michael Angelo, Copernicus, Galileo,
Rabelais, Calderon, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rem
brandt, Kepler, Milton, Moliere, Newton, Descartes,
Kant, Piranesi, Beccaria, Diderot, Voltaire, Beet
hoven, Fulton, Montgolfier, Washington ; and the
marvellous constellation, brighter from moment to
moment, radiant as a tiara of celestial diamonds,
shines in tin* dear horizon, and, as it rises, blends
with the boundless dawn of Jesus Christ.
THE END
INDEX
characterized,
35-37 ; a grand ruin, 64,
65 ; not understood by
commonplace minds, 95 ;
vast and terrible nature of
his drama, 95-97 ; repre
sentation of a play de
scribed, 98-102 ; a target
for hate during life, 103 ;
glory after death, 104,
105 ; how his works were
added to the Alexandrian
library, 106-108; con
sulted by Fathers of the
Church, 1 08 ; destroyed
by Omar, 109-111; Christ
prophesied in the Prome
theus, 107 ; the lost dra
mas, 111-113; Oriental
character and style, 114,
115 ; a Pythagorean, 115 ;
epitaph, 116; his geo
graphy, 116, 117 ; his fau
na, 118 ; a priest of Na
ture, 118 ; his bold famili
arity, 118, 119 ; his com
edy, 121 ; a favourite in
the Greek colonies, 126,
127 ; may copies of his
works be discovered ? 1 28;
sources of our knowledge
of him, 130, 131 ; affinity
with Shakespeare, 131 ;
Prometheus compared
with Hamlet, 176-178 ;
^5schylus contrasted with
Shakespeare, 220, 221 ;
his opinion of art for art's
sake, 246 ; not degraded
by his partisanship, 263.
Agrippina, mother of Nero,
47.
Alexandrian library, its si/e,
106 ; possessed the unique
copy of yEschylus, 106-
108 ; destroyed by Omar,
108-110.
Anaxagoras, his cosmo
graphy, 83.
Aristophanes, his opinion of
^schylus, 104 ; his affi
nity with JSschylus, 119-
121 ; his antique, sacred
immodesty, 120 ; his an
tipathy for Socrates, 121.
Art, and Nature, 27 ; rela
tion of God to human art,
27 ; unity of art and na
ture, 77-78 ; non-perfecti
bility the law of art, 79-
81 ; art contrasted with
science, 81-90; enjoys a
laugh, 122; art not de
graded by descending to
humanity, 244, 245 ; no
loss of beauty from good
ness, 249 ; origin of the
phrase, ' Art for art's
sake,' 250. (See Poetry.)
BAYLE of Rotterdam, his
profound irony, 257.
Beethoven, the typical man
of Germany, 68, 71.
Behaim, Martin, and Colum
bus, 316.
Bible, the, poetry of, 247 ;
not less poetical for taking
part in human affairs, 248 ;
contrasted with Shake
speare, 276, 277.
Bonaparte, Jerome, anec
dote of, 324.
Books, the best civilizers,75-
T\T>KX
327
77; their immortality due
to Gutenberg, 129-130;
Ezekiel's allegory of, L'.'i I .
P.I i--uft. his opinion of Mo-
Here, 195 ; his history,
310.
Bourgeois let. (See Philistines.)
CALCRAFT, the hangman,
more renewed in England
than Shakespeare, Us I.
Caligula, the emperor, char
acterized, 45, 46.
Calumny against men of
genius, 195-197.
Cantemir, historian of Tur
key, 311, :U -2.
Carthage, like England, ex
cept that she had no poet,
272.
Cervantes, characterized, 59-
62 ; La Harpe on come
dies, 195.
Chrysippus of Tarsus, erro
neous beliefs of, 87, 88.
Civilization, not yet at its
goal of beneficence and
fraternity, 254-257.
Classic school of letters (ecole
classique), eschews imagi
nation, 159-164; charac
terized, 224; outgr..\\n.
235-237 ; its view of ih,
poet's service, 260, 201.
Claudius, the emperor, char-
acterized, 46.
Columbus and Behaim, anec
dote of, 316.
Cordelia, characterized, 189,
191-193.
Corneille, and the Marquise
de Contades, 80-81 ; anec
dote of his statue at
Rouen, 285, 286.
DANTE, characterized, 63-
55 ; quoted, 153 ; re-cre
ated himself in his poem,
176 ; Chaudon's opinion
<>f. 195 ,• his work greater
than that of Charlemagne,
811.
Danton, a successor of Vol-
tiiii-f, 290.
Death, the end of all to the
great captain, 265-268 ;
the beginning of life to the
thinker, 269, 270.
Desdemona and Ophelia,
sisters, 164 ; Desdemona
characterized, 188, 189.
KUZABETH, QUEEN, her
want of regard for Shake
speare, 22 ; characterized,
276 ; typical of England,
ib.
England, her debt to Shake
speare, 270, 271 ; selfish
ness, 271, 272 ; compared
to Carthage and Sparta,
272 ; made superior to
them by Shakespeare, ib. ;
her statue of Shakespeare,
273 ; her statues of kings,
generals, and statesmen,
273, 274; her generous
press, 274 ; her flunkey-
ism, 275 ; tardiness in ren
dering justice to Shake
speare, 275-276 ; her pru-
dishness, 277-279 ; dog
ged coldness toward S hake-
speare, 278 ; tone of some
English critics of Shake
speare, 280, 281.
Epic poetry, Oriental, 65-
67 ; Spanish and German,
66.
Ezekiel, characterized,37-40
FALSTAFF.characterized, 155.
F6nelon, his opinion of M. >-
Here, 195.
Freedom, essential to hu
manity. 232-234.
GENIUS, extravagance and
monstrouaness, 71-73 ; its
divine mission, 139-143;
328
INDEX
subject to calumny, 194-
197 ; its unshackled na
ture, 203, 204 ; attitude
of Philistinism toward,
204-208 ; to be accepted
like nature, 215-217 ; hu
manity of true genius, 248,
249 ; death a liberation of,
268-270.
Germany, characterized, and
her art described, 68-71.
God, meaning of word, 27 ;
His creative force unex
hausted, 143-145 ; use of
His name prohibited upon
the English stage, 279.
(See Jesus.)
Goethe, his indifference to
good and evil, 258 ; Hugo
unjust to him, 258 (note).
Good taste, an incubus upon
art, 71 ; sobriety, bash-
fulness, and weakness of
the French ecole classique,
159-164.
Greece, cause of her immor
tality, 123 ; how the dra
ma was fostered in her
colonies, 123-128.
Greene, Robert, attack upon
Shakespeare, 148 (arid
note).
Gutenberg, a redeemer, 129,
130.
HAMLET, contrasted with
Prometheus, 176-178 ;
characterized, 1 80- 186;
greatness of, 321.
History, the false, with
many exemplifications,
308-318; the true,318-323.
Homer, characterized, 31-
33 ; his Olympians far
from impossible, 259.
Hugo, Francois Victor, tran
slator of Shakespeare, Pre
face ; the unmuzzlef of
Shakespeare, 164.
Hugo, Victor, exile at Mar-
ine Terrace, 1-4; anec
dote of youth, 91 ; his ig
norance of English litera
ture, 151 (note) ; his en
thusiastic admiration for
works of genius, 217 ; un-
just to Goethe, 258 (note).
IAGO, characterized, 188-189.
Imagination, abhorred by
the ecole classique, 1 59- 162.
Inspiration, nature of poet's,
27-30.
Isaiah, characterized, 36,
37.
JESUS, use of the name in
' Hernani ' prohibited, 280
(note) ; dawn of his era of
peace, 325.
Joan of Arc, her greatness,
282 ; like Shakespeare,
without a monument, ib. ;
like him, sneered at by
Voltaire, 282, 283.
Job, characterized, 33, 36.
John, the apostle, character
ized, 48-50.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, opin
ion of Shakespeare, 147,
149.
Jonson, Ben, relation to
Shakespeare, 22 ; remark
on Shakespeare's conver
sation, 195.
Juvenal, characterized, 43,
44 ; a great justiciary,
251-252.
KARAMSIN, historian of Rus
sia, 311, 312.
LEAR, characterized, 189-
193.
Literature. (See Poetry.)
Locomotion, improvements
in, H4.
London, in Shakespeare's
time, 8, 9,
INDEX
Lucre! ni--. rluuart'-n/' 'I.
tu \',l ; liis view <>f n-li-
-n.ii.!H:lilwrHtrd thought
from superstition, '2M.
MACBETH, characterized, 186
-188.
Macchiavelli, his real mean
ing, 237, 238.
Malone, critic and white-
washer of Shakespeare, 26.
Man, Ilia goal not that of the
brute, 234-235 ; his pro
gress must be through in
tellectual advancement,
238, 240.
Marine Terrace, 1, 4.
Military science, improve
ments in, 82. s:{.
Milton, the Abbe Trublet
on, 196, accused of ven
ality, 197.
Mind, compared to ocean,
4, 6.
Mirabeau, his opinion of
JSschylus, 95.
Mob. (See People.)
Moliere, disapproved of by
Fenelonand Bossuet, 195 ;
Louis XIV. his bed-maker,
321.
Monument to a great man,
value of, 285. (Sec Sta
tues.)
Muses, the, dangerous com
panions for the * sober '
I "•••!. 163.
Music, the, highest e\| r
sion of the German spirit
found in, 70-71.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, an-
ecdotes of, 200, 223 ; his
view of the end of all,
265, 266 ; compared with
I'm. 302 ; his treatment by
historians, 312.
Nero, the emperor charac
terized. lf>.
Nineteenth century, the
< liild of the French Revo
lution, 289, 293.
. compared with mind
4,5.
Omar, destroys the Alexan
drian library and JSschy-
In-. 108, 111.
Ophelia and Desdetnona,
sisters, 154.
Oriental literature, 66, 67.
Orthodoxy, literary in
France, characterized, 159
-164, 223, 224. (See So
briety) ; outgrown, 235,
236 ; its view of the poet's
service, 260.
in. a real poet, 254.
Othello, characterized, 188,
189.
PAUL the apostle, character
ized, 60, 53.
People (the masses), their
Behaviour at the theatre,
2 (9, 240 ; their need, the
ideal, 241 ; their servants,
the thinkers, 242 ; to
them minds must be use
ful, 243, 244 ; complicity
in their own oppression,
281, 282.
Philistines (lea bourgeois),
their attitude toward
works of poetic genius,
204, 208.
Pitt, William, his cost to
England, 302-303.
Poet, the, his relation to the
superhuman, 27-30 ; his
dangers and obstacles, 31 ;
reality of his creations,
152, 153 ; a philosopher
and an historian, 152-
157; the well-bred poet;
of the classic school, 163 ;
330
INDEX
the poet's method of crea
tion. 171 ; his function to
produce types of human
character, 170, 171, 173-
176 ; his brusque ways,
208-210 ; his hospitality
and tenderness, 211-212;
panders to the mob, 225-
228 ; an instructor of the
people, 230 ; his high
duty, 234-235 ; his hu
manity, 347-348 ; a civil-
izer, 251 ; need of vigil -
lance, 255-257 ; of enthu
siasm for useful work, 259,
260 ; capable of wrath,
259 ; sufferings of, 266,
268. (See Poetry ; Gen
ius ; Thinker.)
Poetry, its ennobling and hu
manizing influences, 74-
77 ; its potential life, 90 ;
its absolute and definitive
nature, 91-94; its two
ears, 123 ; sovereign hor
ror of great poetry, 152,
153 ; for the benefit of the
people, 224-228 , not for
the lettered alone, 235,
236 ; utility the true test
of, 243, 252 ; goodness in
volves no loss of beauty,
249 ; poetry feared by op
pressors, 252 ; honoured
in Middle Ages, 253; in
Scotland, 254; dignified
by its co-operation in the
work of civilization, 261-
263.
Printing, its value illustrated
by the destruction of the
works of ^Eschylus and
others, 129, 131.
Prometheus, contrasted with
Hamlet, 176-178 ; char
acterized, 178-180 ; the
grandsire of Mab and Ti-
tania, 218, 219.
Ptolemy Evergetes, adds
to the Alexan
drian library, 105-108.
Puritanism, its voluntary
deafness, 277 ; its sensi
tiveness to Shakespeare's
alleged impurity, 276-
280 ; its criticism of Shake
speare, 280, 281.
Pythagoras, erroneous be
liefs of, 86 ; greater than
Sesostris, 320.
RABELAIS, characterized, 55,
59.
Racine, his relation to Louis
XIV, 260 ; contrasted
with Voltaire, ib.
Revolution, the French, the
mother of the nineteenth
century, 289, 290 ; charac
terized, 290 ; romanticism
and socialism sprung from
'93, 291-294.
Romanticism, called ' liter
ary '93', 291-294.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, per
secuted during life, 201 ;
desecration of his grave,
202.
SALMASIUS, his opinion of
yEschylus, 195.
Scaliger, Joseph, anecdote
of, 84.
Science, the mission of, 29 ;
its tentative, perfectible
nature contrasted with the
absolute nature of art, 81-
90 ; erroneous science of
antiquity, 85, 88.
Service, greatness to be
gained in, 248.
Shakespeare, William, birth
place, 5 ; coat of arms, 5
(and note) ; spelling of
name, 6 (and note) ; a
butcher, 6 ; frolics of
youth, 6-8 ; marriage, 7 ;
appearance and manners,
INDEX
331
12; dates of plays, 13-1 H;
composition and publi
cation of plays, 16-19;
death of Hamnet and of
John Shakespeare, 18 ;
inhibition of plays, 19 ;
Quiney's letter, ib. ; New
Place, 20 ; the Davenant
story, ib. ; daughters, 20 ;
he returns to Stratford, ib.;
the will and signatures, ib.;
death, 21 ; life embittered
16. ; his great popularity,
23 (note) ; ' eclipse * of
his fame at the Restora
tion and in the eighteenth
century, 23, 24 ; revisions
of his plays, 25-26 ; his
genius characterized, 62,
64; compared with Lucre
tius, 62 ; with Dante, 63 ;
with Homer, 64 ; affinity
with ^Eschylus, 132 ; dis"-
paraging criticisms upon
him, 147-152 ; his tragic
horror, 152-154 ; his phil
osophy immanent in his
imagination, 154—159;
his psychological insight,
156; his antithesis the an
tithesis of creation, 168-
159 ; his freedom from
4 sobriety', 164-168 ; his
simplicity, 166-167 ; his
virility, 167-168 ; his agi
tation, 168-169 ; com
pared with ^Eschylus by
Prometheus and Hamlet,
176, 177 ; double action
in his dramas, 213-215 ;
contrasted with ^Eschylus,
220 ; his independence
and originality, 221-223 ;
panders to the mob, 224,
227 ; he is the chief glory
of England, 270; con
trasted with Cromwell,
Bacon, Newton, ib. ; too
English, 272 ; indecency
of no greater thnnthatof
the Bible, 276-278; less
renowned in England than
Calcraft, the hangman,
281 ; superfluity of a monu
ment to In in", 283-286;
his centennial annivers
aries, 286-288 ; his work
greater than that of
Charles V, 320, 321.
Shylock, 174.
Sobriety in poetry, its emas
culating effect, 159-164 ;
not found in Shakespeare,
164-169. (See Orthodoxy.)
Socialism, the true, 231,232 ;
aims at freedom, 232, 234.
Socrates, his scepticism, 120,
121.
Sophocles, his opinion of
^Eschylus, 195.
Soul, the, its genesis, 133,
135 ; reality of its exist-
tence, 138, 139.
Sparta, city of law, 272 ;
compared with England,
ib.
Stael, Madame de, on her
exile, 199.
Staffa, the bard's chair, 254.
Stage. (See Theatre.)
Statues (See Monument),
England's statue of Shake
speare, 273 ; her statues
of kings, generals, and
statesmen, 273, 276.
Swinburne's 'Study of Shako
speare,' 6 (note).
TABLE-TIPPING, in the timr
of Homer, 29 ; of Theodo-
sius, 29; in 371 A.D., 85.
Tacitus, characterized, 44-
48 ; hateful to official in-
structors, 309.
Telescope, improvements in
the, 82.
Theatre, the English, in
Shakespeare's time, 9-11 ;
332
INDEX
that of Moliere, 11-12 ; in
England tinder the Puri
tans, 23 ; under the Stu
art Restoration, 23, 24 ;
that of Athens in the time
of ^schylus, 98-102 ;' that
of the nineteenth century
independent of models,
219-221 ; God's name pro
hibited in English, 279.
Thinker, his mission to-day,
294, 296 ; his discourage
ments, 296-297 ; his bene
ficence and independence,
297, 299 ; his place above
the warrior and the mon
arch, 308; ib., 318-325.
(See Poet ; Genius.)
Tiberius, the emperor, char
acterized, 45.
Types of character produced
by the poets, 173-176.
Tyrants, not to be trusted,
255-257 ; acceptance of
their oppression becomes
complicity, 282 ; their
blind cruelty, 304, 307.
VOLTAIRE, reproached with
kindness to young poets,
10!J ; attacks upon Shake
speare, 150-151 ; re
proaches Shakespeare
with antithesis, 194 ; IK
himself reproached with
it, ib. ; his remark upon
Corneille and Shakespeare,
195 ; writers paid to in
sult him, 198, 199, 200 ;
desecration of his grave,
201-202 ; his advice to
Louis XV, 238 ; com
pared wTith Macchiavelli,
ib. ; Louis XV. calls him
fool, 260 ; contrasted with
Racine, ib. : typical of the
French mind, 283 ; and
Frederick the Great, 301 ;
a civilizer, 318.
Vondel, Joost, denounced by
Buyter, 198.
WAR, the decline of, 300-304.
Writer. (See Poet; Thinker;
Genius.)
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