PR trrc CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ENGLISH COLLECTION THE GIFT OF JAMES MORGAN HART PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH puo^ivw t&Yfc-yn -iiir„8Qiy ft,iA JUU4^?*20O2 ^ If) IM! PR2896.H8°9 , 1886 VerS,,yUbrary William Shakespeare. 3 1924 0i"3 149 137™ The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 31 491 37 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE BY ' ' ; S ) VICTOR HUGO ! / IV SCranslatefo By MELVILLE B. ANDERSON CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 1887 % 4*101371 Copyright By A. C. McClurg and Co. a.d. £886. TO ENGLAND I BeWcatc Hjts Hook, THE GLORIFICATION OF HER POET. I TELL ENGLAND THE TRUTH; BUT AS A LAND ILLUSTRIOUS AND FREE, 1 ADMIRE HER, AND AS AN ASYLUM, I LOVE HER. VICTOR HUGO. Hauteville House, 1864. PREFACE. THE true title of this work should be, ' Con- cerning 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 privi- lege of commending the translation. 1 From an- other side, however, and still more closely, his conscience was engaged by the subject itself. In contemplating Shakespeare, all the questions re- lating 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 opportunity for speaking some true words imposes an obligation that is not to be shirked, especially in a time like ours. This the Author 1 Made by the poet's son, Franfois-Victor Hugo. — Tr. VU1 PREFACE. has understood. He has not hesitated to take every avenue of approach to these complex ques- tions 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. Hauteville House, 1864. 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 re- produce faithfully the text, and has taken the liberty to correct in footnotes (signed Tr.) the errors that seemed to him most noticeable, es- pecially 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 X TRANSLATORS PREFACE. - light it throws upon the life and genius of Shake- speare. 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 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 introduction to Shakespeare, to ^Eschylus, 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 pre- tence of being exhaustive. M. B. A. Purdue University, Lafayette, Ind., Octoter, 1886. Topical Table of Contents. part jFCrat. BOOK I. SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE. CHAPTER I. PAGE Description of Marine Terrace, Isle of Jersey. — The Exiles . 3 CHAPTER II. Shakespeare and the Ocean 7 CHAPTER III. Shakespeare's Birthplace. — Orthography of Name. — Youth- ful 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 9 xii TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. PAGE Shakespeare's Life embittered. — Contemporary Notice. — The Puritans close the Play-houses. — Shakespeare's Fame after the Restoration. — Dryden, Shaftesbury, Nahum Tate. — Shakespeare's " eclipse " 29 CHAPTER V. Recasts of Plays. — Voltaire, Garrick, Malone 34 BOOK II. MEN OF GENIUS. CHAPTER I. Art, Nature, God. — Science and the Supernatural. — The Poet's Inspiration 36 CHAPTER II. The Poet's Ascent to the Ideal. — Homer characterized. ■ J — Job characterized. — yEschylus characterized. — Isaiah characterized. — Ezekiel characterized. — Lucretius char- acterized. — Juvenal characterized. — Tacitus character- ized : Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. — Saint John characterized. — Saint Paul characterized. — Dante char- acterized. — Rabelais characterized. — Cervantes charac- terized. — Shakespeare characterized 41 CHAPTER III. The Dynasty of Genius. — The Wreck of ^Eschylus .... 82 CHAPTER IV. The Great, Anonymous, Collective Works of Orient and Occident. — The German Genius : Beethoven. — " Good Taste " an Incubus upon Genius 84 TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. xiii BOOK III. ART AND SCIENCE. CHAPTER I. PAGE Poetry made imperishable by Printing. — The Book the In- strument of Civilization 95 CHAPTER II. Number the Basis of Poetry and of Science 99 CHAPTER III. Poetry, being absolute in Nature, incapable of Progress . . 101 CHAPTER IV. The Relative and Progressive Nature of Science. — The Im- provement of the Telescope. — Examples of Outgrown Scientific Notions. — The Errors of Pythagoras. — The Errors of Chrysippus. — Science transitory, Art abiding. — The Eternal Power of Art illustrated by the Effect of Lucretius upon Hugo . , . 105 CHAPTER V. The Decline of Poetry impossible 118 xiv TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. BOOK IV. THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER I. PAGE Formidable Character of ^Eschylus. — Vastness and Compre- hensiveness of the Drama. — Tragic Terror of ^Eschylus . 122 CHAPTER II. Description of the Greek Theatre. — Description of the Rep- resentation of a Greek Play 126 CHAPTER III. The Renown of .(Eschylus after his Death 132 CHAPTER IV. Ptolemy Evergetes and the Alexandrian Library. — .lEschylus stolen from Athens and transferred to Alexandria. — The Alexandrian Library burned by Omar 135 CHAPTER V. Attempts to justify Omar. — Shakespeare nearly meets the fate of jEschylus 140 CHAPTER VI. '^schylus Lost." — The Number of Works irrevocably destroyed ,,, TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. XV CHAPTER VII. PAGE The Affinity of jEschylus with Asia. — His Geography. — His Priesthood of Nature. — His Bold Familiarity 146 CHAPTER VIII. The Relation of Aristophanes to ^Eschylus. — The Opposition of Socrates to their Religious Enthusiasm. — The Broad Farce of ^Eschylus. — The Alarming Mirth of Art. — The Two Ears of Poetry 153 CHAPTER IX. Greece the great Civilizer. — The Drama in her Colonies. — ^Eschylus the Poet of the Greek Fatherland 160 CHAPTER X. Explanation of the Loss of Books in Antiquity. — Gutenberg has made the Book immortal. — The Ruins of Greek and Roman Books. — Sources of our Knowledge of jEschylus. — Similarity of jEschylus to Shakespeare 164 BOOK V. SOULS. CHAPTER I. The Genesis of the Soul. — No Tangible Law. — The Coinci- dences of Genius. — The Sacred Horror of the Great Mys- tery.— The Reality of the Soul. — The Reality of Great Souls — Their Lofty Functions. — The Origin and the Mission of Genius 17° CHAPTER II. God the Exhaustless Source of Genius 183 xvi TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. part g>econU. BOOK I. SHAKESPEARE'S GENIUS. CHAPTER I. PAGE The Censurers of Shakespeare: Forbes, Greene, Rymer, Dryden, Ben Jonson, Warburton, Foote, Pope, Voltaire, Dr. Johnson, Frederick the Great, Coleridge, Knight, Hunter, Delandine l8 9 CHAPTER II. Shakespeare's Reality. — The Inexorable Law of his Genius. — His Sovereign Horror and his Charm. — His Philoso- phy. — His Imaginative Arabesque. — His Psychology. — His History. — His Universality 195 CHAPTER III. Shakespeare's Antithesis a Double Refraction of Nature . . 203 CHAPTER IV. The Orthodox and Academical School condemns the Luxu- riance of Great Poets. — No Flirtation with the Muses. — Genius bound over to keep the Peace 205 CHAPTER V. Shakespeare a Trial to the " Sober " Critics ; his Fertility and Virility. — Shakespeare intoxicated with Nature . . . .211 TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. xvii BOOK II. SHAKESPEARE'S WORK. — THE CULMI- NATING POINTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE The Great Poets Creators of Human Types. — Their Kinship with God. — The Infamy of their Censors 219 CHAPTER II. The Nature of the Living Types produced by the Poets. — How they differ from Historic Persons 223 CHAPTER III. The Man of ^Eschylus, Prometheus; the Man of Shake- speare, Hamlet 228 CHAPTER IV. Prometheus on Caucasus. — Hamlet 230 CHAPTER V. The Feigned Madness of Hamlet. — The Character of Ham- let -234 CHAPTER VI. Macbeth. — Othello. —Lear: Time of the Action; Nature of the Subject ; Character of Lear ; Lear and Cordelia . 240 b xviii TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. BOOK III. ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER. CHAPTER I. FAGE A Chapter of Calumnies Z S° CHAPTER II. The Pedants and the Police 2 S4 CHAPTER III. Calumniation of Voltaire and Rousseau. — Their Burial in the Pantheon. — Their Bones thrown into a Hole 257 CHAPTER IV. Pedantry solicitous about Genius 261 CHAPTER V. The Academical View of Genius. — The Comfortable Middle- Class View 263 CHAPTER VI. The Sun offensive to Weak Eyes. — Genius portentous. — Its Humanity, Sympathy, Love, Beauty 268 TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. XIX BOOK IV. CRITICISM. CHAPTER I. PAGE The Double Plots of Shakespeare's Plays a Reflection of all • the Art of the Renascence 274 CHAPTER II. Genius to be accepted as Nature is accepted 277 CHAPTER III. Pegasus a Gift-Horse. — Prometheus the Progenitor of Mab and Titania 279 CHAPTER IV. The Romantic School has imitated neither Shakespeare nor /Eschylus 282 CHAPTER V. The Poet original, personal, inimitable 285 CHAPTER VI. Definition of the Official French School of Letters. — How the Poet panders to the Mob. — The Mob described. — The High Mission of the Poet to make himself a Sacri- fice for many . 288 XX TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. BOOK V. THE MINDS AND THE MASSES. t CHAPTER I. PAGE Destruction and Construction 2 94 CHAPTER II. Literature secretes Civilization. — The True Socialism . . .295 CHAPTER III. The Nadir of Democracy . 298 CHAPTER IV. Animalism not the Goal of Man 301 CHAPTER V. Literature not for the Lettered only 303 CHAPTER VI. The Irony of Macchiavelli and of Voltaire 305 CHAPTER VII. The Poet a Teacher.— The Mob at the Theatre. —The Mob open to the Ideal 307 CHAPTER VIII. How to restore the Ideal to the Human Mind 310 TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. xxi BOOK VI. THE BEAUTIFUL THE SERVANT OF THE TRUE. CHAPTER I. PAGE Utility the Test of Art. — Utility of ^Eschylus and of the Bible. — The Poet a Helper 312 CHAPTER II. No Loss of Beauty from Goodness. — " Art for Art's sake." — Utility of Primitive Poetry. — Greatness of Juvenal . . . 320 CHAPTER III. The Power of Poetry in Barbarous Times 324 CHAPTER IV. The Obligation of the Poet to Political Vigilance 327 CHAPTER V. Bayle and Goethe. — The Poet's Passion for the Right. — Louis XIV. and Racine. — The Official and Academical Conception of the Poet's Function. — The Poet a Nour- ishes a Comforter, a Liberator 330 xxii TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. Part CijtrD. CONCLUSION. BOOK I. AFTER DEATH; SHAKESPEARE; ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. PAGE Six Feet of Earth the End of All for the Soldier, the Begin- ning of All for the Poet 34' CHAPTER II. Shakespeare the Chief Glory of England. — England, Sparta, Carthage. — England's Statues. — Her Snobbishness . . 348 CHAPTER III. Shakespeare and Elizabeth. — Shakespeare and the Bible. — Coldness of England to Shakespeare. — English Prudish- ness. — Philistine Criticism. — Shakespeare and Mr. Cal- craft, the Hangman 355 CHAPTER IV. England in Debt to Shakespeare. — France to Joan of Arc. — Voltaire the Reviler of both 362 CHAPTER V. Shakespeare's True Monument. — A Monument indifferent to Shakespeare, important to England 364 CHAPTER VI. The Centennial Anniversaries of Shakespeare 368 TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. xxiii BOOK II. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. CHAPTER I. PAGE The Nineteenth Century born of the French Revolution. — Romanticism. — " Literary '93." — The Eruption of Truth in the Soul. — The Need of Prompt Action on the part of Thinkers. — Discouragement. — The Practical Functions of Thinkers 371 BOOK III. TRUE HISTORY. — EVERY ONE PUT IN HIS PLACE. CHAPTER I. The Age of the Warrior gone. — Finance hostile to Heroes. — Cost of the Napoleonic Wars 385 CHAPTER II. Imbecility the Warrior's Excuse. — Things Tyrants, and Ty- rants Things. — Horrible Examples of Tyrannic Cruelty. — The Wolf the Fruit of the Forest. — The Thinker the Founder of Civilization 390 CHAPTER III. History must be rewritten. — Examples of its Triviality and Sycophancy. — Cantemir and Karamsin. — Loyal History: More Examples. — History ignorant of the Essential Facts of Civilization : Examples . 396 xxiv TOPICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. PAGE True History described and prophesied. — Truth coming to Light. — The Dynasty of Genius not oppressive . . • • 4°8 CHAPTER V. The New Aspect of Things. — The Potentates put to Flight by the Dreamers . . 4'5 PART I. PART FIRST. BOOK I. SHAKESPEARE. — HIS LIFE. CHAPTER I. A DOZEN years ago, on an island near the coast of France, a house, at every season of for- bidding aspect, was growing especially gloomy by reason of the approach of winter. The west wind, which had full sweep there, was piling thick upon this dwelling those enveloping fogs November in- terposes between sun and earth. In autumn, night falls early ; the narrow windows made the days still briefer within, and deepened the sombre twilight of the house. This house was flat-roofed, rectilinear, correct, square, and covered with a fresh coat of white- wash; 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. 4 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Adjoining the house was a quarter-acre of slop- ing garden-ground, walled in, broken by granite steps and breast-walls, — a bare, treeless garden, with more stones than leaves. This little uncul- tivated patch abounded in tufts of marigolds, which bloom in autumn, and which the poor people of the country eat cooked with the con- ger-eel. The neighboring 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 great piles set upright in the sand against a wall ; these dry, gaunt, knotty logs resem- bled an array of leg-bones and knee-caps afflicted with anchylosis. Revery, 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 look- ing out upon the lonely road, and a pretty large, dimly lighted study; on the second and third floors, neat, cold, freshly painted chambers, barely fur- nished, 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 5 (possibly the indications of chance are not always without design), had the form of a tomb. Its in- mates were a group — a family rather — of pro- scribed 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 assem- bly; 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 banish- ment. 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. 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 mourn- ful ; 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 6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 tradition, or perhaps a legend, has pre- served the memory was a Roman, Vipsanius Mi- nator, who employed his exile in extending, in the interest of his country's supremacy, the Ro- man 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 infatu- ated with Rome that he stood in the way of the Empire. Tiberius exiled him to this Cimmerian island, Casarea ; 1 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 pro- nounce the name of Vipsanius Minator. The ora- tors of the Forum and the Senate, and history, have obeyed, — a result regarding which Tiberius, for that matter, entertained no doubt. That arrogance in commanding, which proceeded so far as to give orders to men's thoughts, characterized certain an- cient governments newly arrived at one of those firm situations where the greatest sum of crime produces the greatest sum of security. Let us return to Marine Terrace. 1 The ancient name of the Island of Jersey, the place of Hugo's exile. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 7 One morning, near the end of November, two of the inhabitants of the place, the father and the youngest of the sons, were seated in the lower parlor. They were silent, like shipwrecked per- sons 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 speak : — "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 inex- orable going and coming, that noise of all the winds, that blackness and that translucency, that vegeta- tion peculiar to the deep, that democracy of clouds in full hurricane, those eagles flecked with foam, 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. those wonderful star-risings reflected in mysterious agitation by millions of luminous wave-tops, — con- fused 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 ship- wrecks, 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 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 savor 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 inexhaus- tibly varied monotony, that smoothness after an upheaval, those hells and those heavens of the unfathomed, infinite, ever-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. 1 1 The reader is invited to compare this passage with the elo- quent interpretation of it at the beginning of Swinburne's ' Study of Shakespeare.' — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER III. i. William Shakespeare was born at Strat- ford-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, situ- ated in Henley Street, was humble; the cham- ber in which Shakespeare came into the world, wretched : the walls were whitewashed, the black rafters laid crosswise ; at the farther end was a tol- erably large window with two small panes, where you may read to-day, among other names, that of Walter Scott. This poor dwelling sheltered a de- cayed 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 Shakespeare's tomb in the church of Stratford-on-Avon. 1 There is little agreement about 1 An application for a grant of coat-armor to his father was made in 1 jp6, and another in 1599; but the matter seems to have gone no farther 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." — Tk. 10 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 habitually written Shake- spear. The present translator 1 has adopted the spelling Shakespeare as the only true one, and gives for it unanswerable reasons. The only ob- jection 2 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 Shakspeare is necessary; however, convinced by the translator, we write, in prose, Shakespeare. 2. The Shakespeare family had some original drawback, probably its Catholicism, which caused its downfall. A little after the birth of William, Alderman Shakespeare was no more than " butcher John." William Shakespeare made his dtbut in a slaughter-house. At the age of fifteen he entered his father's shambles, bared his arm, and killed l That is, the translator of Shakespeare's works. a This " objection " is of course such to a Frenchman only. Indeed this whole orthographical excursus, unintelligibly as it must be to the English reader, is retained only upon the general princi- ple of fidelity. The translator referred to is Francois Victor Hugo (see Preface). It may be added that out of the scores of different spellings of the name, the New Shakspere Society has adopted the orthography Shakspere, upon the ground that it was so spelled by <• very eminent authority, — the bearer of the name himself. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. \ \ 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 neighboring 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 girl. 1 The wedding fol- lowed. 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, " em- ployed 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 poach- ing was made use of later to justify the statement 1 For the story, which Victor Hugo has, after his fashion, very much improved upon, see Halliwell-Phillipps's ' Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare,' 3d ed., pp. 205, 206, and the accompanying " illustrative notes," pp. 354-359. The quatrain referred to runs as follows : — " Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton, Dadgeing Exhall, Papist Wicksford, Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford." — Tk. 12 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 proceed- ings. These being spitefully followed up, he saved himself by flight to London. 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 to- gether 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 hu- manity; 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. Lon- don 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. Cheapside 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 Constanti- nople, 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 13 pickpocket with the flail, 1 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, break- fasted 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 in the court below. To dine 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 rehears- ing 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 bought her three linen chemises, at sixpence the ell, and promised her, for the Duke of Norfolk's ball, a pair of new shoes worth five shillings. 4. Under Elizabeth, in spite of the wrath of the Puritans, there were in London eight compa- nies of actors, — those of Newington Butts, Earl Pembroke's company, Lord Strange's retainers, the Lord Chamberlain's troop, the Lord High Admiral's troop, the company of Blackfriars, the children of St. Paul's, and, in the first rank, the 1 A purely conjectural translation, Victor Hugo's word being " drotschbloch." — Tr. 14 WILLIAM SNAKESPMKK- Bear-baiteri. Lord Southampton went to lite* play every evening Nearly nil the theatres wito situ- atctl on the banks of the Thames,— n !"*»«- 1 which increased the number of watermen. The plny- rooma were of two kinds : Home merely open liiveru-yurilH, u platform set up (i^nitiHt il wall, no celling, rows of benches placed on the ground, for boxes the windows of the tavern. The per- formance took place in the broad daylight ami in the open air. The principal of these theatres was the Olobe. The others, wliie.h were mostly closed play-rooms, IJ^Ittcil with lampH, wore used at night, the most frequented being Hlttckfrlnrs, The best actor of Lord Pembroke's troop was named Ilcnslowe; the best actor at Mlaeld'riars was Burbagc. The Globe was nil wiled on the bank-wide. Thin in known by it document at Sta- tioners' Hall, dated the 36th of November, 1607: "Jim Majesty's servants playing usually at the Globe, on the Hank Side." The scenery wan simple, Two swords laid crosswise — sometimes two liitlm — signified a battle; a shirt over the coat signified a knight; a broom-handle draped witli the petticoat of the players' hostess signified a palfrey caparisoned. A rich theatre, which made its inventory in i5 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 com- pleted 'Henry VI.' [1591-92]. In 1595, while Clement VIII. at Rome was solemnly striking Henry IV. with his crosier over the backs of Car- dinals du Perron and d'Ossat, he wrote ' Timon of Athens' [1607-8]. In 1596, the year when Eliz- abeth 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, 1 he composed ' Cymbeline ' [1609] and 'Richard III.' [1593]. In 1598, when the Earl of Essex ravaged Ireland, wearing on his hat the glove of the Virgin Queen 1 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 unannounced in 1S97- — TR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 21 Elizabeth, he composed ' The Two Gentlemen of Verona' [1592-93], 'King John' [1595], ' Love's Labor's Lost' [1590], 'The Comedy of Errors' [1591], 'All's Well that Ends Well' [1601-2], 'A Midsummer Night'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 Em- peror 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 No- thing' [1598]. In 1601, when Bacon published the eulogy on the execution of the Earl of Essex, 1 just as Leibnitz, eighty years afterwards, was to find out good reasons for the murder of Monaldes- chi (with this difference, however, that Monaldeschi was nothing to Leibnitz, and that Essex had been the benefactor of Bacqn), 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 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 Imputations concerning the Late Earl of Essex' (1604). — Tr. 22 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. rosary of the Virgin Mary on Saturday ; while fifteen cardinals, assisted by the heads of the Or- ders, were opening the discussion on Molinism at Rome ; and while the Holy See, at the request of the Crown of Spain, was " saving Christianity and the world " by the institution of the congregation de Auxiliis, — he composed 'Othello' [1604]. 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 Caesar' [1601] and ' Measure for Measure' [1603]. In 1604, at the time when James I. of England, the former James VI. of Scotland, wrote against Bellarmin the ' Tor- tura Torti,' and, faithless to Carr, began to smile upon Villiers, who was afterwards to honor him with the title of " Your Piggishness," he composed ' Coriolanus ' [1608]. In 1607, when the Univer- sity of York received the little Prince of Wales as doctor, according to the account of Father St. Ro- muald, " with all the ceremonies and the usual fur gowns," he wrote ' King Lear' [1 605-6]. In 1609, while the magistracy of France, placing the scaf- fold at the disposition of the King, gave upon trust a carte blanche for the sentence of the Prince of Conde " to such punishment as it might please his Majesty to order," Shakespeare composed ' Troi- lus and Cressida ' [1603? revised 1607?]. In 1 610, when Ravaillac assassinated Henry IV. by the dagger, and the French Parliament assassinated Ravaillac by the process of quartering his body, Shakespeare composed ' Antony and Cleopatra ' WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 23 [1607]. In 161 1, 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-n], '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 Mal- herbe sewing with coarse gray thread a fascicle of white paper, on which will soon appear some son- nets." 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; hence in his case, as in Moliere's, the dismemberment and loss of manuscripts. There were few or no entry books in those almost itine- rant theatres ; no coincidence in time between representation and publication of the plays; some- times not even a printed copy, the stage remaining the sole medium of publication. When the pieces by chance are printed, they bear titles which bewil- der 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.' 1 All this enables us to understand why so much obscurity rests on the dates when Shakespeare composed his dramas, and why it is difficult to fix them with 1 The plays thus entitled are older ones, of which ' Henry VI.' Parts II. and III. are recasts. — Tr. 24 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Caesar,' ' 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 'All's Well that Ends Well,' which Meres calls 'Love's Labour's Won.' 1 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 Day of that year, — a circum- stance of which Hemynge makes a special note ; and the year 161 1 for ' Henry VIII.,' inasmuch as ' Henry VIII.' was played at the time of the burning of the Globe Theatre. 2 Various circumstances — a disagreement with his company, a whim of the Lord Chamberlain — sometimes compelled Shakespeare 1 Francis Meres published in 1598 his 'Palladis Tanvia: Wit's Treasury,' in which he enumerates not six but twelve of Shake- speare's plays. This mention of course merely proves the exist- ence of the plays in 159S ; he does not state that any of them were produced in that year. — Tr. 2 This " most celebrated theatre the world has ever seen " was destroyed by fire on Tuesday, June 29, 1613. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 25 to change from one theatre to another. ' The Taming of the Shrew ' was played for the first time in 1 593, at Henslowe's theatre; 1 'Twelfth Night' in 1601 , at Middle Temple Hall ; ' Othello ' in 1602, at Harefield Castle. 2 'King Lear' was played at Whitehall during Christmas (1607) before James I. 3 Burbage created the part of Lear. Lord South- ampton, recently set free from the Tower of Lon- don, was present at this performance. This Lord Southampton was an old frequenter of Blackfriars, and Shakespeare, in 1589,* had dedicated the poem of ' Venus and Adonis ' to him. Adonis was the fashion at that time ; twenty-five years after Shake- speare, 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 6th of September, 1601, the poet's father, John Shakespeare, died. He was now the head of his company of actors. James I. had given him in 1607 the management of Blackfriars, and afterward the privilege of the Globe. In 1613, the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James, and the Elector Pala- tine, King of Bohemia, whose statue may be seen in the ivy at the angle of a great tower at Heidel- berg, came to the Globe to see ' The Tempest ' 1 This must have been the older play, ' The Taming of a Shrew/ published in 1594. — Tr. 2 Halliwell-Phillipps (' Outlines,' p. 180) says that ' Othello ' is first heard of in 1604. — Tr. 8 The true date is Dec. 26, 1606. — Tr. 1 ' Venus and Adonis ' was published in 1593. — Tr. 26 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. performed. These royal attendances did not save him from the censure of the Lord Chamberlain. 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 Angt. to be stated." The motives for these interdictions escape us. Shakespeare was able, for instance, without arous- ing 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 belaboring Shallow's people ; and to push the likeness so 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 Shakespeare's manuscripts, was written " Falstaffe." In the mean- time 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, 1 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 ! 1 The author has the date wrong. It should be the 25th of October. The letter is signed " Rye. Quyney" which Hugo prints thus: " Ryc-Quiney." — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 27 Mima!' 1 Shakespeare loved Stratford-on-Avon, where he was born, where his father had died, where his son was buried. 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 disputes with Whiterill. 2 These cavils of the learned about tri- fles are not worth being searched into, particularly when we see Father Hardouin, for instance, com- pletely upset a whole passage of Pliny by replacing nos pridem by non pridem. IO. 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 Wil- liam ; and in 1644 Sir William Davenant, created knight by Charles I., wrote to Rochester: "Know this, which does honor to my mother, — I am the son of Shakespeare ; " thus allying himself to Shake- speare in the same way that in our days M. Lucas- Montigny has claimed relationship with Mirabeau. 1 Halliwell-Phillipps, who gives at p. 144 of the ' Outlines ' a fac-simile of this, the only letter directly addressed to Shakespeare known to exist, is silent about this part of the anecdote. The let- ter was found in the Corporation archives at Stratford. — Tr. 2 Shakespeare bought the Great House, or New Place, in the spring of 1597. For interesting particulars, see Halliwell-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. 447-479. — Tr. 28 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Shakespeare had married his two daughters, — Susanna to a doctor, Judith to a merchant. Su- sanna 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-on-Avon, had no further desire to return to London. Perhaps he was in difficul- ties. He had just been compelled to mortgage his house. The contract deed of this mortgage, dated the nth of March, 1613, and indorsed with Shakespeare's signature, was in the last cen- tury 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 story) Forbes's 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 Eliza- beth wore, in 1561, the first silk stockings seen in England. On the 25th of March, 16 16, 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. 1 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 ' Biography of Shakspere.' In at least five of the six signatures the spelling is apparently Shakspere ; in the other (the last upon the will) it is obscure. The WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 29 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, 16 16, died Cervantes, a genius of like stature. When Shakespeare died, Milton was eight years, and Corneille 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." Sonnei in. "Your love and pity doth th' impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow." Sonnet nz. " Nor thou with public kindness honor me, Unless thou take that honor 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 common spelling, Shakespeare, is based upon "the mode in which it was usually printed during the poet's life." — Tr. 30 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. poet, whose first steps he had aided. 1 Shake- speare was thirty-nine when Elizabeth died. This Queen had not paid much attention to him ; she managed to reign forty-four years without recog- nizing Shakespeare. None the less is she histori- cally styled " protectress of arts and letters," etc. The historians of the old school gave these certifi- cates 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 mas- ter. Shakespeare and Moliere would in our days have had a loftier spirit. The master was Eliza- beth, " King Elizabeth," as the English say. Shake- speare 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 the publication of his pieces. Some contempora- 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. 148-150. 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 honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any." — Tr. WILLIAM" SHAKESPEARE. 3 \ ries, 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 perform- ance of ' The Merchant of Venice ! ' 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 favorite, 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." 1 See note p. 19. 2 Apart from the commendatory verses prefixed to the folio of 1623, Halliwell-Phillipps ('Outlines,' pp. 569-582) cites no less than eighteen contemporary references by name to the great dram- atist, 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 time is in truth remarkably abundant. — Tr. 32 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Under this restoration of the Stuarts, Shake- speare'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. Dry- den speaks of Shakespeare on one occasion in order to say that he is "out of date." 1 Lord Shaftesbury calls him " a wit out of fashion." Dry- den and Shaftesbury were two oracles. Dryden, a converted Catholic, had two sons, ushers in the chamber of Clement XI. ; he made tragedies wor- thy 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 ac- count, had asked of his brother, Charles II., "Why don't you hang Milton ? " The Earl of Shaftes- bury, a friend of Locke, was the man who wrote an ' Essay on Sprightliness in Important Conversa- tions,' 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 1 Dryden spoke of Shakespeare often, sometimes critically, but always with the highest respect. It was he who wrote in the pro- logue 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 Rival 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. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 33 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 1 was total. In 1707, a certain Nahum Tate published a ' King Lear,' informing his readers " that he had borrowed the idea of it from a play which he had read by chance, the work of some nameless author." This " nameless author " was Shakespeare. 2 1 Victor Hugo's smoked glass very much darkens the " eclipse " of Shakespeare at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Ge- rard 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. 32. — Tr. 2 The statement that Tate styled the original ' Lear ' the work of " some nameless author " is piquant, but untrue. His Dedica- tion 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 Shakespear' s 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 Shadwell (Dryden's successor) as poet laureate of England. — Tr. 34 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER V. In 1728 Voltaire imported from England to France the name of Will Shakespeare ; only, in- stead of Will, he pronounced it Gilles. Jeering began in France, and oblivion continued in England. What the Irishman Nahum Tate had done for ' King Lear,' others did for other pieces. 'All's 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 1 761 by Garrick. ' Coriolanus ' was recast four times, — in 1682, for the Theatre Royal, by Tate; in 1720, for Drury Lane, by John Dennis; 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 Richmond 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 cer- tain revival of interest. Garrick, while correcting WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 35 Shakespeare, played him, and acknowledged that it was Shakespeare that he played. They reprinted him at Glasgow. An imbecile, Malone, made com- mentaries on his plays, and, as a logical sequence, whitewashed his tomb. There was on this tomb a little bust, of a doubtful resemblance, and indiffer- ent 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 Shake- speare have been made that we now see. The bust was whitewashed. Malone, critic and white- washer of Shakespeare, spread a coat of plaster over his face, and of stupid 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 mani- festation 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. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 37 Art is as natural as Nature. By 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 great Workman has made this tool for himself; he has no other. Forbes, in the curious little work perused by Warburton and lost by Garrick, affirms that Shake- speare 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 familiar 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 ap- pearing 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. 38 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 ig- norant, 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 hu- man 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 refusing the corn? Hoe out the weed error, but reap the fact, and place it beside others. Science is the sheaf of facts. The mission of Science is to study and sound everything. All of us, according to our degree, are the creditors of investigation ; we are its debt- ors 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 phe- nomenon of the tripod of old, and of the table of to-day, is entitled, like anything else, to inves- tigation. Psychic science will gain by it, without doubt. Let us add, that to abandon phenomena WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 39 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 Daedalus 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 ! Fiddlier mentions, at page 52 of his 'History of Theodosius,' — referring to the great conspiracy of the magicians of the fourth century against the Emperor, —*■ a tipping table, of which we shall perhaps speak elsewhere, 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 re- jected 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 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 40 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 resul- tant 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 Shakespeare or Calderon. Then let us set aside the tripod. Poetry is the poet's own. Let us be respectful before the possi- ble, 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 hypotheses 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 41 attains in certain men its maximum intensity. ^Eschylus, Job, Phidias, Isaiah, Saint Paul, Juve- nal, Dante, Michael Angelo, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven, with some others, rise to the hundredth degree of genius. The human mind has a summit, — the ideal ; to this summit God descends, man rises. In each age three or four men of genius under- take 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 any- thing 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 be- neath 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, O Homer ! 42 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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. i. One, Homer, is the huge poet-child. The world is born, Homer sings : he is the bird of this dawn. Homer has the holy candor of morning. The shadow is almost unknown to him. Chaos, heaven, earth, Geo and Ceto, Jove god of gods, Agamemnon king of kings, peoples, flocks from the beginning, temples, towns, battles, harvests, the ocean; Diomedes fighting, 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 gray-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 ; mon- sters, heroes, men, a thousand perspectives glimps- ing 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 43 mankind. The camp attacks the fortress, the ship attacks the unknown by penetrating it ; around war every passion ; around travel every kind of adven- ture; two gigantic groups: the first, bloody, is called the ' Iliad,' the second, luminous, is called the ' Odyssey.' Homer makes men preternatu- rally 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. Min- erva takes Achilles by the hair ; he turns around in anger: "Whatwouldst 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 Olleus 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 en- largement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal. Fable and history, hypothesis and tradition, the chimera and knowledge, make up Homer. He is fathomless, and he is cheerful. All the depth of ancient days moves, radiant and luminous, in the vast azure of his mind. Lycur- gus, 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. 44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 it 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 '^Eneid,' Lucan who writes the ' Pharsa- lia,' Tasso who writes the 'Jerusalem,' Ariosto with his 'Roland,' Milton with 'Paradise Lost,' Camoe'ns 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 un- equal distances within his boundless orbit. Such is Homer ; such is the beginning of the epic. 2. Another, Job, begins the drama. This em- bryo is a colossus. Job begins the drama, now forty 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 grand- eurs of this poem is, that in it the sun is baleful. The sun is in Job as in Homer ; but it is no longer the dawn, it is high noon. The mournful oppres- sion of the brazen 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 45 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 patriarch. Before being tried, he had been happy : " this man was the greatest of all the men of the East," says his poem. This was the laborer-king: he exercised the immense priesthood of solitude : he sacrificed and sanctified. Toward evening he gave the earth the blessing, the berakah. 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 chap. 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 : 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 prosper- ous; 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 46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Orion, the Hyades, — which he names the Plei- ades, — and " the chambers of the south." He says, " God setteth an end to darkness." He calls the diamonds which are hidden, "the stones of darkness." He mingles with his own distress the misfortune of others, and has tragic words that freeze, — '* the widow is empty." 1 He smiles also, and is then still more terrible. He has around him Eliphaz, Bildad, 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, solitudinem 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 ver- sion, 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 1 Is this an error ? Job xxii. 9 reads, " Thou hast sent widows away empty." And where is the next quotation found ? — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 47 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 of philosophy. 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 — stultitiam cruets. The dunghill of Job, transfigured, will become the Calvary of Jesus. 3. Another, ^Eschylus, enlightened by the un- conscious 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 out- line of an extraordinary Medusa behind the figures in the foreground. ^Eschylus is splendid and for- midable ; as' though you saw a frowning brow above the sun. He has two Cains, Eteocles and Polyni- ces ; Genesis has but one. His troop of Oceanides 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, un- susceptible 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 48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 hundred-handed, having an Orestes more fatal than Ulysses and a Thebes grander than Troy, hard as rock, tumultuous like the foam, full of steeps, torrents, and precipices, 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 human- ity, and resembles a rumbling of continual thun- der. He is the great reproacher. His style, a kind of nocturnal cloud, is lighted up with images which suddenly empurple all the depths of his obscure thought, and make us exclaim, " It light- ens ! " Isaiah engages in battle, hand to hand, with the evil which, in civilization, makes its ap- pearance before the good. He cries " Silence ! " at the noise of chariots, of festivals, of triumphs. The foam of his prophecy falls even on Nature ; he gives Babylon over to the moles and bats, Nin- eveh 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, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 49 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 in- carnate 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, ignor- ance, — still exist. Isaiah is the undying contem- porary of the vices that make themselves servants, and of the crimes that make themselves kings. 5. Another, Ezekiel, is the wild soothsayer: a genius of the cavern, whose thought is best ex- pressed by a beast-like growling. But listen. This savage makes a prophecy to the world, — the pro- phecy 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 .iEs- chylus, the conception of right. Ezekiel intro- duces the resultant third conception, — the human race ameliorated, the future more and more eman- cipated. It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset. Time pre- sents works for time to come; work, then, and hope ! Such is Ezekiel's cry. Ezekiel is in Chal- daea, and from Chaldaea he sees distinctly Judsea, just as from oppression one may see liberty. He declares peace as others declare war. He proph- esies harmony, goodness, gentleness, union, the blending of races, love. Notwithstanding, he is 4 50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. terrible. He is the fierce benefactor, the univer- sal, 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 Vol- taire's laughter to burst forth, and our sobs. Ah, Ezekiel, so far does thy devotion go ! Thou ren- derest shame visible by horror; thou compellest ignominy to avert the head when recognizing her- self 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 transfigu- ration that he announces, he proves. How ? By transfiguring himself. From this horrible and de- filed mouth there issues splendid poetry. Never has grander language been spoken, never more extraordinary. " I saw visions of God. A whirl- wind 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 ter- rible crystal. The wheels of the chariot were WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 51 made of eyes, and so high that they were dread- ful. 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 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, O 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 exceeding 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 everything there? Search for a higher formula, you will not find it: a free man under a sovereign God. This vision- ary 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 pro- phetic fury was incontestable; he had evidently 52 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 ; 1 impos- sible to divine what was the hashmal, this metal which he pictured as in fusion in the furnace of the dream. 2 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. No- thing is forgotten; it is the entire future, from Aristotle to Christopher Columbus, from Triptole- mus to Montgolfier. Later on, the Gospel also will become quadruple in the four evangelists, making Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John subser- vient 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 Eze- kiel; and this kind of first Messiah makes prece- dents 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 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 Last, i. 446 sea. 2 The mysterious word hashmal is rendered by " amber " in our common version (Ezekiel i. 4). — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 53 to the temple, — "No priests here, neither they, nor their kings, nor the carcases of their kings" (xliii. 7). 1 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 sig- nifies " 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 Ju- piter. Lucretius has travelled and he has mused, and musing 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 Anaximander 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 deci- phered the papyri of Sepphoris, which in his time was not yet transformed into Diocaesarea ; he has lived with the pearl-fishers of the Isle of Tylos. We find in the Apocrypha traces of a strange an- cient itinerary, recommended, according to some, 1 The curious reader will discover that the citations from Eze- kiel are either paraphrased or garbled, or both. Pedantic exact- itude is not one of Hugo's faults. — Tr. 54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. to philosophers by Empedocles, the magician of Agrigentum, and, according to others, to the rabbis by the high-priest Eleazer, who corre- sponded with Ptolemy Philadelphus. This itin- erary 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 Ccele-Syria; Apamea on the Orontes, where Nicanor fed his elephants; the harbor 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 emer- ald ; the Nasamones, who pillaged the ship- wrecked; 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 Lucre- tius make this pilgrimage? One cannot tell. His numerous 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 55 sounded until he feels the plummet float. He has questioned the vague spectres of Byblos; he has conversed with the tree-trunk cut from Cithaeron, which represents Juno Thespia. Per- haps he has spoken in the reeds to Oannes, the man-fish of Chaldasa, 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 gullet, 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 some- times in torrents, sometimes drop by drop, a som- bre poesy. The boundless 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 outlined in the forest : — " Tunc 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 perceives the void ; thence his two aspects, equally profound, of denial and of affirmation. One day this traveller commits suicide. This is his last de- parture. He puts himself en route for Death. He 56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. wishes to see for himself. He has embarked suc- cessively upon every sort of vessel, — on the galley of Trevirium for Sanastrea in Macedonia; on the trireme of Carystos for Metapontum 1 in Greece; on the Cyllenian skiff for the Island of Samothrace ; on the sandale of Samothrace for Naxos, the home of Bacchus ; on the ceroscaph of Naxos for Syria ; on the Syrian pinnace 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 slip- ping 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 local- ity ! 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 flapping 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 1 Metapontum was a Greek colony in Lucania. Sanastrea the translator is unable to find. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 57 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. Juve- nal 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 Ly- curgus. Beware of him ; he is severe ! Not a cord is wanting to his lyre, nor to the lash he uses. He is lofty, rigid, austere, glowing, violent, grave, inex- haustible 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 un- dulations 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 some- thing of the epic in this satire ; Juvenal holds in his hand the golden sceptre with which Ulysses beats Thersites. " Bombast, declamation, exagger- ation, 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 Tille- mont, 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. 58 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. From it proceed rays in behalf of liberty, probity, heroism; and it may be said that Juvenal sends even into our civilization spirits born of his light. What is Regnier? what DAubigne? what Cor- neille? 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 winding-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 delicto those criminals, the Caesars. The Roman Empire is a long crime. This crime is begun by four demons, — ■ 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 ; know- ing Greek, intellectual, sagacious, sarcastic, elo- quent, 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, Caprea? 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- legged, fetid, eaten up with leprosy, covered with suppurations, masked with plasters, crowned with WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 59 laurels; having ulcers like Job, and the sceptre besides; surrounded by an oppressive silence; seeking a successor, scenting out Caligula, and finding him good : a viper choosing a tiger. Calig- ula, the man who has known fear, the slave be- come 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 says, " 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, — Dru- silla ; 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 prostitute, 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, wish- ing 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 60 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. himself; 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 more 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 mod- erns call Spleen, gives us this riddle to guess, — Nero. Nero seeks simply a distraction. Poet, come- dian, singer, coachman, exhausting ferocity to find voluptuousness, trying a change of sex, the husband of the eunuch Sporus and bride of the slave Pythag- oras, and promenading the streets of Rome between his husband and his wife. He has two pleasures, — one, to see the people clutching gold-pieces, dia- monds, 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 gib- bets. Their reigns he hangs about their necks like a collar. His book of ' Caligula ' is lost. Nothing WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 6 1 is easier to comprehend than the loss and oblitera- tion of books of this sort. To read them 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 insur- rection 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 chat- ting with their lovers, of sticking gold pins in the breasts of the Persian or Gallic slaves who dressed their hair. Such is the human specta- cle 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. 1 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 flagitii blandi- tias ; " and he denounces to the world this effort of a monstrous and trembling mother to make matri- l The original reads : " La Putiphar mere du Joseph, c'est ce qu'on ne rencontre que dans Rome." — Te. 62 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. cide miscarry by means of incest. Whatever Jus- tus 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 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 Cassar, on the people, everywhere; he is lavish, like hail; his strokes 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 dis- contented, changes itself at the end of life into an outflow of gloomy fancies. The woman wants man; otherwise man, instead of human poetry, will have a phantom poetry. Some beings, how- ever, resist the universal generative tendency, and then they are in that peculiar state in which men are subject to monstrous inspirations. The Apoc- alypse is the almost insane masterpiece of this dreadful chastity. John, while young, was gentle and shy. Having loved Jesus, he could love noth- ing else. There is a profound resemblance be- tween the Song of Songs and the Apocalypse; they are both explosions of pent-up virginity. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 63 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, — volup- tuousness 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, henceforth forever 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, general- ize it, 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. Empires 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 Golgotha 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; proscribed, 64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 passes 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 language of a wild, harsh charm. He went to Ephesus, he went to Media, he went among the Parthians. He dared to enter Cfesi- phon, a town of the Parthians, built as a coun- terpoise to Babylon. He faced the living idol, Cobaris, king, god, and man, forever immovable on his pierced block of nephritic jade, which serves him as throne and latrine. He evangelized Per- sia, which the Scriptures call Paras. When he appeared at the Council of Jerusalem, he was 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 ques- tioned 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. 1 Cav- erns there are in which these mysterious mortals 1 On Kyffhauser, the German legends say. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 6$ 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 meta- phors 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 un- derstand it — scorn it, and laugh. " My dear Thiriot," says Voltaire, "the Apocalypse is a piece of ordure." Religions, 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, 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, forever wondering, of the man con- quered by the light. Paul, born a Pharisee, had been a weaver of camel's-hair for tents, and servant 5 66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 be- come 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 cor- responds to the 25th of January in our Gregorian calendar. The road to Damascus is essential to the march of Progress. 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 conviction, this harsh stroke from on high reveals to him his genius. Once more upon his feet, he goes for- ward ; he will not pause again. " Forward ! " is his cry. He is a cosmopolite. He loves the out- siders, whom Paganism calls Barbarians, and Chris- tianity 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 Ga- latians ! how can ye go back to the yokes to which ye were tied ? There are no longer either Jews, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 6j 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. Jt is all-important that man become a new crea- ture. Ye are called to liberty." On Mars 1 1 ill at Athens there were steps hewn in rock, 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 arc simple and profound, with the subtlety so marked in its in- fluence over savages. There are in these messages gleams of hallucination; Paul speaks of the celes- tial 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 an- other from beyond the dark wall of the tomb. This half-possession of death gives him a personal cer- tainty often wholly apart from dogma, and stamps his individual convictions with an emphasis which makes him almost heretical. J lis humility, resting upon the mystery, is lofty. Peter says: "The words of Paul may be taken in a bad sense." Ililarius Diaconus 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 68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. the hand of the common 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, and above all his Apoc- alypse, 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 restless- ness 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 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. Who- ever, 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 69 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 rev- elation, 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 Christian- ity; and two thousand years after, France also, struck to earth by the light, arouses herself, hold- ing 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 he 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, however, has nothing contra- dictory 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 architecture ! At the threshold is the sacred mist; across the entrance is stretched the corpse of Hope ; all that you per- ceive 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 •JO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. region ; what seems vapor 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 unknown abyss. In this poem the imponder- able 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 chastisement may have a hold upon it; sin in the abstract state, but preserving the human counte- nance. 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 continues; but man no longer comprehends it. Purgatory and Paradise are not less extraordinary than Gehenna; but as we ascend we lose our interest. We were somewhat at home in Hell, but are no longer so in Heaven. We cannot recognize our WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Jl 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 imparadise 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 philoso- pher is this visionary! what a sage is this mad- man ! Dante lays down the law for Montesquieu ; 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 flavor ; and if anything, buildings apart, resembles the Piraeus, it is La Rapde. 1 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 chronologi- cally follows Dante ; after the stern face, the sneer- ing visage. Rabelais is the formidable mask of ancient comedy detached from the Greek pro- 1 La Rapee Bercy is an eastern suburb of Paris, on the Seine. It gives its name to a station on the belt railroad. — Tr. 72 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. s'cenium, from bronze made flesh, henceforth a human living face, remaining enormous, and com- ing among us to laugh at us and with us. Dante and Rabelais spring from the school of the Fran- ciscan friars, as, later, Voltaire springs from the Jesuits; Dante the incarnate sorrow, Rabelais parody, Voltaire irony, — these issue from the Church against the Church. Every genius has his invention or his discovery ; Rabelais has made his, — the belly. The serpent is in man, it is the in- testine. 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 convulsions of Paris, a woman of the people, standing on a barricade, raised her petti- coat, 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 73 appetite, satiety, and putrefaction. The devotion, the tenderness, which seize us there, are liable to death; egoism replaces them. Easily do the affec- tions 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 essen- tially 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 (PAyscon). The belly is to humanity a formidable weight ; it breaks at every moment the equilibrium 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 drunk- enness 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;. mcechum calvum adducimus." The appetite debauches the intellect. Voluptuousness replaces will. At starting, as is al- ways the case, there is some nobleness : this is the 74 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Solomon 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 consum- mated; 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 com- plete ; nothing is left, neither dignity, nor shame, nor honor, nor virtue, nor wit, — crude animal gratification, thorough impurity. Thought is dis- solved in satiety; carnal gorging absorbs every- thing; nothing survives of the grand sovereign creature inhabited by the soul ; the belly (pass the expression) 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. Sometimes even philosophers heedlessly further this degradation by inserting in their doctrines the materialism 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. Rabelais gets hold of the situation ; he verifies it ; he authenticates that belly which is the world. Civilization is, then, but WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 75 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, Rabe- lais jests. Which best attains his end? Rabelais ridicules the monk, the bishop, the Pope ; laugh- ter and death-rattle together; fool's bell sounding the tocsin ! But look ! I thought it was a feast — it is a death-agony ; one may be deceived in the nature of the hiccup. 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 iEschylus of victuals ; and this is grand when we think that eating is devouring. There is some- thing 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. Be- neath 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 confines in a wine-cask; his book is nothing else. The seven circles of Alighieri j6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. bound and encompass this extraordinary tun. Look within the monstrous cask, and there you see them again. In Rabelais they are entitled Idle- ness, Pride, Envy, Avarice, Wrath, Lechery, Glut- tony ; 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, prop- erly 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 forever before his eyes this stern con- frontment: 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, 1 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 humor of the noble after the joviality of the parson. Gentlemen, I am the Seignior Don Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, poet- 1 Preface to Cromwell. WILL/AM SHAKESPEARE. JJ soldier, and, as a proof, one-armed. No coarse jesting in Cervantes; scarcely a flavor 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 charm- ing grace from becoming prettiness. Like Jean Goujon, 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 multi- form philosophy which seems to possess a new and complete chart of the human heart. Cervan- tes 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 unfor- seen, magnificent adventure. Personages remain- ing 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 cham- pions of the intelligence. Where have they learned fighting? On the battle-field itself. Juve- nal was a military tribune ; Cervantes comes home from Lepanto, as Dante from Campalbino, as ^Eschylus from Salamis. Afterward, they pass to a new trial : ^Eschylus goes into exile, Juvenal in- to exile, Dante into exile, Cervantes into prison. 78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 pas- sions 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 acqui- sition, 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 Plautus, and he may also say, " I am the god mounted on an ass." Wisdom in the begin- ning, reason by and by : such is the strange history of the human mind. What more replete with wisdom than all the religions? What less reason- able? 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, completing 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 79 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 con- noisseur 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 sixteenth 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, Machiavelli 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 dis- suaded Aristides ; Leonidas has no common-sense, Regulus has no common-sense: but in face of selfish and ferocious monarchies dragging their 80 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 honor, warlike glory, obedience to orders, etc., etc., — this Common-Sense is an admirable 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 mys- tery. Lucretius is being, Shakespeare is exist- ence. Hence the shadow that is in Lucretius ; hence the teeming life in Shakespeare. Space — "the blue," as the Germans say — is certainly not denied to Shakespeare. The earth sees and trav- erses 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 multi- ple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 8 1 diamonds and pearls, dung-hills and charnel- houses, the ebb 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. Shake- speare 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 con- terminous 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 exhibits 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 Pros- pero, the forest of Ardennes, the heath of Har- muir, 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, Shake- speare overflows with it; everywhere tha quick flesh. Shakespeare has emotion, instinct, the true 6 82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. voice, the right tone, the whole human multitude with its clamor. His poetry is himself, and at the same time it is you. Like 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 ; Shake- speare 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 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 Barbarism, — the ancient gate, and the Gothic. That was their mission — they have fulfilled it ; that was their task — they have accom- plished it. The third great human crisis is the French Revolution; the third huge gate of bar- barism, 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 inde- pendent of Shakespeare and of Homer. CHAPTER III. HOMER, Job, Jischylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucre- tius, Juvenal, Saint John, Saint Paul, Tacitus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, — that is the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 83 avenue of 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, iEschylus, 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 Shake- speare, represent especially the drama. yEschylus, a kind of genius out of his time, wor- thy to mark either a beginning or an end in hu- manity, appears not to be placed in his right turn in the series, and, as we have said, seems an elder brother of Homer. If we remember that ^Eschylus is nearly sub- merged by the darkness rising over human mem- ory; 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 84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. and what forms had he in all this shadow ? JEs- chylus 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 neighboring 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 in- dividual works that these men have left us must be added various vast collective works, — the Vedas, the Ramayana, 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 omi- nous fulness of the possible, as imagined by in- sanity or related in the vision. These works seem to have been composed in common with beings to whom our world is no longer accustomed. Leg- endary horror covers these epics. " These books were not composed by man alone," says the in- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 85 scription of Ash-Nagar. Djinns have alighted upon them, polypteral magi have mused over them; the texts have been interlined by invisible hands, the demi-gods have been aided by demi-demoris ; the elephant, which India calls the Sage, has been consulted. Thence comes a majesty almost hor- rible. The great enigmas are in these poems: they are full of mysterious Asia. Their promi- nent 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 extra- ordinary. One reads these poems with that won- dering 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 Mazdaean traditions is discernible under the name of Siva; Manicheism is apparent between Brahma and Booddha. All kinds of traces blend, cross, and recross each other in these poems. One perceives 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. 86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 to- gether, 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, Nufio Salido, the Seven Infantes of Lara, the Constable Alvar de Luna, — no Orien- tal or Hellenic type surpasses these figures. The horse of Campeador is equal to the dog of Ulys- ses. Between Priam and Lear you must place Don Arias, the old man of Zamora's tower, sacri- ficing his seven sons to his duty, and tearing them from his heart one by one. There is grandeur in that. In presence of these sublimities the reader suffers a sort of sun-stroke. These works are anonymous; and, owing to tte great reason of the homo 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 87 makes them the polypi of poetry, vague and won- derful 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 silhouette 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 incar- nations of Greece, of Arabia, of Judsea, of Pagan Rome, of Christian 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 differ- ent category, to all those 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, scholasti- cism; Hrabanus Maurus, linguistics; Trithemius, astrology ; Ottni, chivalry ; Reuchlin, vast curi- osity ; Tutilo, universality ; Stadianus, method ; Luther, inquiry ; Albrecht Diirer, art ; Leibnitz, sci- ence; Puffendorf, law; Kant, philosophy; Fichte, metaphysics; Winkelmann, archaeology; Herder, aesthetics ; the Vossii, — of whom one, Gerard 88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. John, was of the Palatinate, — erudition ; Euler, the spirit of integration ; Humboldt, the spirit of dis- covery; 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 Vitce, 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 Sonnette ' (' 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, Teutonia 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 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 *) are to us what the Titans are to ^Eschylus. To the temple of Tanfana, destroyed 1 Preface to the Burgraves, 1843. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 89 by Germanicus, she caused the cathedral of Cologne to succeed. She is the ancestress of our history, the grandam 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 Minnesingers, — 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 or- der, the German genius has other frontiers than Germany. A given people may resist Germany and yield to Germanism. The German spirit as- similates to itself the Greeks by Muller, 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. 1 German af- finities extend far. Without any alteration in the local and national autonomies, it is with the great 1 The Rudolphine Tables, published in 1627, appear to have been prepared long after the death of Tycho, which occurred in 1601. — Tr. go WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Germanic centre that the Scandinavian spirit in Oehlenschlager and the Batavian spirit in Vondel are connected. 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 Eu- ropean nature, but in harmony with it, volatilizes and floats above the nations. The German mind is misty, luminous, dispersed ; it is a kind of im- mense beclouded soul, with stars. Perhaps the highest expression of Germany 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 ex- pansion, — 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 neces- sarily 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 vapor of art. It is to poetry what revery is to WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 91 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 electri- city, and causes it to give forth sudden discharges of thunder. Music is the Word of Germany. The German people, so much curbed as a nation, so emanci- pated 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 suppressed. Therefore is Germany all music, in anticipation 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. 92 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Homer is the great Pelasgian; ^Eschylus, the great Hellene ; Isaiah, the great Hebrew ; Juvenal, the great Roman ; Dante, the great Italian ; Shake- speare, 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 in suppressing the beautiful for the benefit of the pretty, — the an- cient criticism, not altogether dead, like the ancient monarchy, find from their point of view the same fault, exaggeration, in those sovereign men of ge- nius whom we have enumerated. 1 These men of genius are extravagant. This arises from the in- finite 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 Ho- mer for the carnage which fills his den, the Iliad ; ^Eschylus, for his monstrousness ; Job, Isaiah, Eze- kiel, Saint Paul, for double meanings ; Rabelais, 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 go-iU) 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. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 93 for obscene nudity and venomous ambiguity ; Cer- vantes, for insidious laughter ; Shakespeare, for his subtlety; Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, for obscu- rity; John of Patmos and Dante Alighieri, for darkness. There are other minds, very great, but less great, who can be reproached with none of these faults. Hesiod, iEsop, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Thu- cydides, Anacreon, Theocritus, Titus Livius, Sal- lust, Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, La Fontaine, Beaumarchais, Vol- taire, have neither exaggeration nor darkness, nor obscurity nor monstrousness. What, then, do they lack? Something the others have; that some- thing is the Unknown, 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 Mo- liere had that " something," he would be the equal of Shakespeare. It is the misfortune of Corneille that he muti- lated and contracted the old native tragedy in obedience to fixed rules. It is the misfortune of Milton that, through Puritan melancholy, he ex- cluded from his work Nature, the great Pan. It is Moliere's failing that, in dread of Boileau, he quickly extinguishes the luminous style of the ' fitourdi,' that, for fear of the priests, he 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. 1 The scene referred to is the second of the third act. — Tr. 94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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, Shake- speare. 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. BOOK III. ART AND SCIENCE. CHAPTER I. MANY people in our day, especially stock- brokers, and often attorneys, say and re- peat, " 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 facul- ties of the human mind, deepened and enriched by the mysterious ploughing of revolution, been profounder and loftier. g6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. And wait a little ; give time for the realization of that element of social well-being now impend- ing, — gratuitous and compulsory education. How long will it take? A quarter of a century. Im- agine the incalculable sum of intellectual develop- ment implied in this single expression : " 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 print- ing. His miracle is this marvel. Here is a book : with it I will feed five 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 begin- ning 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 instruc- tion from the clouds, from the firmament, from meteors, flowers, animals, forests, seasons, phe- nomena. The Ionian fisherman studies the wave; the Chaldsean 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 any- thing is greater than God seen in the sun, it is God seen in Homer. The universe without the book, is science be- coming rudely outlined; the universe with the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 97 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 effective 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. Compulsory education is a recruitment of souls for "the light. Henceforth all human advancement will be accomplished by swell- ing 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 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 importance of the school, everywhere ade- quate 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 pass- ing away ! " We might say, on the contrary, poetry 7 98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. is coming. For who says poetry, says philosophy and light. Now, the reign of the book is begin- ning; 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 beautiful; 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, combined with the simplification of hand-labor by machinery, and with the increased leisure of man, the body less fatigued leaving the mind freer, vast appetites for thought will spring up in all brains ; the insatiable thirst for knowledge and meditation will become more and more the human preoc- cupation; low places will be deserted for high places, — an ascent natural to every growing in- telligence ; 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 refinement of minds augments in proportion to their force; and a day will come when, the fulness of civilization making itself manifest, those mountain-tops, Lucretius, Dante, Shake- speare, for ages almost deserted, and visited only by the select few, will be crowded with intelli- gences seeking their food upon the heights. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 99 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 prin- ciple, 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 inci- dence. 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 intel- lectual binomial. Now, replace this A -f- B by the number proper to each great artist and each great poet, and you will have, in its multiple physiog- nomy and in its strict total, each of the creations 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, locomo- tive, 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 IQO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 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 pal- pitation of man, the bursting forth of love, the irradiation of the imagination, the lightning-cloud of passion, all are lorded over by this mysterious word " number,'' even as are geometry and arith- metic. Ajax, Hector, Hecuba, the seven chiefs before Thebes, GEdipus, 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 radi- cal difference. Science is perfectible; Art, not. Why? WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. IOI 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 en- dowed with this property. To increase, to aug- ment, 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 of the 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! 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 charac- teristic 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 102 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. admirable 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 respect their elders. They succeed, they do not replace each other. The beautiful does not drive out the beautiful. Neither wolves nor master- pieces devour each other. Saint-Simon says (I quote from memory) : " There was through the whole winter but one cry of admiration 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 Euripi- des ; the Divine Comedy is not above Genesis, the Romancero is not above the Odyssey; Sirius is not above Arcturus. Sublimity is equality. The human mind is the infinite possible. The master-works, immense worlds, are generated with- in it unceasingly, and abide there forever. No WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 103 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 for- ward 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 cer- tainly do not overlook, and that we shall examine farther on. Art is not susceptible of intrinsic progress. From Phidias to Rembrandt, there is movement, but not progress. The frescos 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 Pyra- mids; 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 monumentum," says Horace; and on that occa- sion he derides bronze. " Plaudite cives," says 104 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Plautus. Corneille, at sixty-five years, wins the love (a tradition in the Escoubleau family) of the very young Marquise de Contades, by promising to send her name down to posterity : — " Lady, to that future race In whose day I '11 have some credit, You '11 be known as fair of face But because my verse has said it." 1 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 progress. 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 transfor- mation of language, upon no death or birth of idioms. It has within itself the incommensurable and the innumerable; 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 infi- nite variety of genius, but always equal to itself, always supreme. Such is the law, scarcely known, of Art. 1 " Chez cette race nouvelle, Oil j'aurai quelque credit, Vous ne passerez pour belle Qu'autant que je l'aurai dit." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. I°5 CHAPTER IV. SCIENCE is different. The relative, which gov- erns 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. 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, re- places all. What was ground yesterday is put into the hopper again to-day. The colossal machine, Science, never rests. It is never satis- fied; 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 106 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ladder : one savant mounts above his fellow. Poe- try 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 im- provement of Galileo; then Descartes, who, al- though going somewhat astray in taking a concave glass for eyepiece instead of a convex one, makes fruitful the improvement of Kepler ; then the Ca- puchin Reita, who rectifies the reversing of objects ; then Huyghens, who makes a great step by plac- ing the two convex glasses at the focus of the objective; and in less than fifty years, from 1610 to 1659, during the short interval which separates the ' Nuncius Sidereus ' of Galileo from the ' Oculus Elise et Enoch ' of Father Reita, behold the origi- nal inventor, Metzu, obliterated. And it is con- stantly 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 pha- lanx 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 cen- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. \0J tury, nor lansquenets, 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 Homceomeria of Anaximenes, which perhaps be- longs 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. Entomology 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 Plu- tarch, 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, chi- merical as it is, gives up the ' Holy Meadow ' of Moschus, laughs at the ' Holy Ladder ' of John Climacus, and is ashamed of the century in which Saint Bernard, adding fuel to the pyre which the 108 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 in anthropology. The Steyardes of the great Arnauld are decayed. However un- certain 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 astrol- oger Marcian Posthumus was for Jupiter ; Tertul- lian 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 fa- mous journey from Dijon to Paris, lasting a month ; and we could not understand to-day the amazement of Henry IV., asking of Joseph Scaliger : " Is it true, Monsieur l'Escale, that you have been from Paris to Dijon without relieving your bowels?" Micrography is now far beyond Leuwenhoeck, who was himself far beyond Swammerdam. Look at the point at which spermatology and ovology have already arrived, and recall Mariana reproaching Ar- naud 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- secretary 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 09 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. Orffyreus, who destroyed his machine rather than allow the Landgrave of Hesse to see inside it, — Orffyreus, so admired by S'Gravesande, the author of the ' Matheseos Uni- versalis 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, Desmarres 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 Tari- cheutes, 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 be- fore Jesus Christ, it was perfectly 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. IIO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Ammianus Marcellinus has preserved for us his confession, received by Zosimus, count and fiscal advocate. " Construximus, magnifici judices, ad cortinae similitudinem Delphicae infaustam hanc mensulam quam videtis; movimus tandem." Hi- larius 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 Execestidas, Zeno the Stoic, Antipater, Eudoxus, Lysis of Tarentum, Cebes, Menedemus, Plato, Epi- curus, Aristotle, and Epimenides, if one were to say to Solon that it is not the moon which regu- lates 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 burn- ing them, and the Pseonians throwing them into ponds, the Paeonians are those who are right ; to Lysis of Tarentum, that it is not correct that the sight is a hot vapor ; to Cebes, that it is false that the principle of the elements is the oblong tri- angle and the isosceles triangle ; to Menedemus, 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 1 1 infinitely divisible ; to Aristotle, that the fifth ele- ment 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 improbable it is that he should have been wounded at the siege of Troy — he, Pythagoras — by Men- elaus, 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 Branchidas, although entirely rotted away, ex- cept the ivory face ; that at the siege of Troy his own name was Euphorbus, and that before being Euphorbus he was ^Ethalides, son of Mercury, and that after having been Euphorbus he was Her- motimus, then Pyrrhus, fisherman at Delos, then Pythagoras ; that it is all evident and clear, — as clear as that he was present the same day and the same minute at Metapontum and at Crotona, as evident as that by writing with blood on a mirror exposed to the moon one may see in the moon what one wrote on the mirror; and lastly, that he is Pythagoras, 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 112 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. hundred and thirtieth olympiad, forms an era in science. This philosopher (the same who died — actually died — of laughter caused by seeing a don- key eat figs out of a silver basin) had studied everything, gone to the bottom of everything, and had written seven hundred and 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 con- densed 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 innu- merable 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, An- dron 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 Swearer; " the phoenix of Arabia and the moths live in the fire ; the earth is carried by the air as WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 113 by a car; the sun drinks from the ocean, and the moon from the rivers. For these reasons the Athe- nians raised a statue to him on the Ceramicus, with this inscription : " To Chrysippus, who knew everything." At very nearly the same time Sophocles wrote ' CEdipus Rex.' And Aristotle believed in the story about An- dron 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 Her- modamantes that magic words mastered the ox and the eagle and the bear and the serpent, and Echecrates believed in the immaculate maternity of Themistoclea, and Pythagoras in Jupiter's scep- tre 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 everything else. Such is the long groping course of Science. Cuvier was mistaken yesterday, Lagrange the day before yesterday; Leibnitz before Lagrange, Gas- sendi before Leibnitz, Cardan before Gassendi, Cornelius Agrippa before Cardan, Averroes, before Agrippa, Plotinus before Averroes, Artemidorus Daldian before Plotinus, Posidonius before Ar- temidorus, Democritus before Posidonius, Em- pedocles before Democritus, Carneades before Empedocles, Plato before Carneades, Pherecydes 8 1 14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. before Plato, Pittacus before Pherecydes, Thales before Pittacus ; and before Thales, Zoroaster, and before Zoroaster, Sanchoniathon, and before San- choniathon, 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 ! Some savants, such as Kepler, Euler, Geoffroy 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 ardor of progress, and even fits of bravery. Witness La Perouse ; witness Pilastre des Rosiers ; witness Sir John Franklin ; witness Jacquemont ; witness Living- stone; witness Mazet; witness, at this very hour, Nadar. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. I15 But Science is series. It proceeds by proofs superposed 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, Newton is outrun, Clair- aut 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 Cleostratus, the zoology of Pliny, the algebra of Diophantus, 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 meteor- ology of Stoffler, the anatomy of Gassendi, the pathology of Fernel, the jurisprudence of Robert Barmne, the agronomy of Quesnay, the hydrog- raphy of Bouguer, the navigation of Bourd6 de Villehuet, the ballistics of Gribeauval, the veter- inary practice of Garsault, the architectonics of Desgodets, the botany of Tournefort, the scho- lasticism of Abelard, the politics of Plato, the Il6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 were as beautiful as those of Homer, although Orpheus had, to raise the waves, but two winds, the Phcenicias and the Aparctias ; that is to say, the south wind and the north wind, — often con- founded, 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. 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. 1 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 pro- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Wj fessors 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 : 1 " 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 beholding all with a peaceful soul." I stopped in thought; then I began to read again. Some moments afterward I could see nothing, hear nothing; I was immersed 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. 1 Nee pietas ulla est, velatum saepe videri Vertier ad lapidem, atque omnes accedere 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. Il8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER V. POETRY cannot grow less. Why? Because it cannot grow greater. Those words, so often used, even by the let- tered, " decadence," " renascence," show to what an extent the essence of Art is unknown. Super- ficial intellects, easily becoming pedantic, take for renascence or decadence some effects of juxta- position, some optical mirage, some event in the history of a language, some ebb and flow of ideas, all the vast movement of creation 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 1 9 to unity. This diversity in what seems monoto- nous 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 ever- lasting 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 copier of Aga- memnon? "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 Pegasus. All these poets ! A crew of cheats ! They pillage each other, and there 's an end. Inspiration is involved with swin- dling. Cervantes plunders Apuleius, Alceste cheats Timon of Athens. The Smynthian Wood is the Forest of Bondy. Out of whose pocket was Shake- speare seen to draw his hand ? Out of the pocket of ^Eschylus. No ! neither decadence, nor renascence, nor plagiarism, 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 Beaumarchais ; Grangousier is Silenus in the image of Rabelais. 120 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Ezekielto the preci- pice that is called Juvenal, there is no interruption of continuity for the thinker. Lean over this anath- ema, 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 splendors; its interpo- sitions of sudden opacity, for which it is not re- sponsible: but in the end it brings light into the human soul always with the same intensity. It re- mains 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 beauti- ful : O poets ! the first rank is ever free. Let us remove everything which may disconcert daring WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 121 minds and break their wings. Art is a species of valor. 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 iEschylus 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 remembrance of Socra- tes, 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, Demosthenes, 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 23 stood iEschylus alone, and underneath this word : " TlMEO." ^Eschylus in reality is formidable. He cannot be approached without trembling. He has magni- tude and mystery. Barbarous, extravagant, em- phatic, antithetical, bombastic, absurd, — such is the judgment passed on him by the official rhetoric of the present day. This rhetoric will be changed. ^Eschylus is one of those men whom superficial criticism scoffs 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 Philosopher Without Knowing it,' and from Brid'oison to CEdipus. 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. 124 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 view-point of absolute art, the charac- teristic of the epic poem is grandeur ; the charac- teristic 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 iEschylus ; it is by vastness that it continues in Shakespeare. What person- ages does ^Eschylus take? Volcanoes: one of his lost tragedies is called '^Etna;' then the moun- tains : 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 approaches nearer to humanity, but remains colossal. Macbeth seems a polar Atrides. You see that the drama re- veals 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 iEschylus and Shake- speare throughout. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 25 The vast, in ^Eschylus, is a will. It is also a temperament. ^Eschylus invents the buskin, which makes the man taller, and the mask, which increases the voice. His metaphors are enormous. He calles Xerxes " the man with the dragon eyes." The sea, which is a plain for so many poets, is for ^Eschylus "a forest" (aXo-os). These magnifying figures, peculiar to the highest poets, and to them only, have the basal truth which springs from imaginative musing. ^Eschylus excites you to the very brink of convulsion. His tragical effects are like blows struck at the spectators. When the furies of jEschylus make their appearance, preg- nant women miscarry. Pollux, the lexicographer, affirms that at the sight of those serpent faces and of those flickering torches, children were seized with fits of epilepsy, of which they died. That is evidently " going beyond the mark." Even in the grace of ^Eschylus, that strange and sovereign grace of which we have spoken, there is something Cyclopean. It is Polyphemus smiling. At times the smile is formidable, 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 ad- mires; his admiration is forgiveness. yEschylus is moved, but remains grave. He calls Helen " fatal flower ; " then he adds, " soul as calm as the tranquil sea." One day Shakespeare will say, " false as the wave." 1 l 'Othello,' V. ii. 1. 134: "She was false as water." — Tr. 126 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripi- des, 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 go- ing 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 swarm- ing crowd of the Piraeus come to turn Athenians; there it is that the multitude becomes the pub- lic, in anticipation of the day when the public shall become the people. The multitude is in fact WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 27 there, — the whole multitude, including the women, the children, and the slaves, and Plato, who knits his hrows. If it is a fete-day, if we are at the Panathenaea, at the Lenaea, or at the great Dionysia, the magis- trates form part of the audience ; the proedri, the epistati, and the prytanes sit in their place of honor. If the trilogy is to be a tetralogy ; if the representation is to conclude by a piece with satyrs; if the fauns, the aegipans, 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 favorite actor who excels in the two modes of declamation, in paralogy as well as paracatology ; if the poet is sufficiently 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 ^ratinus Ari- stophanesque poetae," 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 Bacchides ' remarks, it will be to Plautus, — "a swarm of men on seats, coughing, spit- ting, sneezing, making grimaces and noises with the mouth (ore concreparid), 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- 128 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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, — " Metamorphoserait 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 the other, young ^Eschylus. ^Eschy- lus is twenty- eight years old. He gives his trilogy of the ' Promethei, ' — ' Prometheus the Fire- bearer,' ' Prometheus Bound,' ' Prometheus Deliv- ered;' followed by some piece with satyrs, — 'The Argians,' perhaps, of which Macrobius has pre- served a fragment for us. The ancient quarrel between youth and old age breaks out, — gray beards against black hair. They discuss, they dis- pute: the old men are for the old school; the young are for ^Eschylus. The young defend ^Eschylus against Thespis, as they will defend Corneille against Gamier. The old men are indignant. Listen to the Nes- tors grumbling. What is tragedy? It is the song of the he -goat. Where is the he-goat in this ' Pro- 2 "He would transmogrify Nebuchadnezzar.'' — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 129 metheus Bound? ' Art is in its decline. And they repeat the celebrated objection: Quid pro Bac- cko? (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 iso- lated in a play an episode in the life of Bacchus, — the story of Pentheus. They hate this innovator, ./Eschylus. They blame all these inventions, the end of which is to bring about a closer connection 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, in- deed, was to come.) Where will they stop ? These are impieties. And how does this ^Eschylus dare to call Jupiter "the prytanis 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 sacrifice, is now a seat for the corypheus ! The chorus ought to limit it- self to executing the strophe, — that is to say, the turn to the right; then the antistrophe, — that is 9 130 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Io? 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 our- selves with a recitation of the ancient paeans 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 fami- lies at work upon the stage, the Dactyli finding the metal, the Cabiri inventing the forge, the Coryban- tes forging the sword and the ploughshare, the Curetes making the shield, and the Telchines chas- ing the jewelry. It was sufficiently 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 sum- moned 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 criticise as well, but in another fashion. What an old brute is that Solon ! It is he who has insti- tuted the eponymous archonship. What do they want with an archon giving his name to the year? WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 31 Hoot the eponymous archon who has lately caused a poet 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 Phoenicians ; 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 JEs- chylus 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 al- lowed 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 promulgated, by which the chorus is reduced from fifty to fifteen? And how are they to play ' The Danaifdes ' ? and won't there be chuckling at the line of ^Eschylus, — " Egyptus, the father of fifty sons ? " The fifty will be fifteen. These magis- trates are idiots. Quarrel, uproar all around. One prefers Phrynichus, another prefers ^Eschylus, an- other 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 oommotion. Later on, after the death of 132 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ^Eschylus, or after he has been exiled, there will be silence. It is right to be silent before a god. "^Equum est" — it is Plautus who speaks — "vos deo facere silentum." CHAPTER III. A GENIUS is an accused man. As long as JEs- chylus lived, his life was a strife. His genius was contested, then he was persecuted : a natural pro- gression. According to Athenian practice, his private life was unveiled ; he was traduced, sland- ered. A woman whom he had loved, Planesia, sister of Chrysilla, mistress of Pericles, has dis- honored herself in the eyes of posterity by the out- rages 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 respectfully of- fered to him their first laurels. It is curious to see this reproach constantly reappearing. Pezay and St. Lambert repeat it in the eighteenth cen- tury : " Why, Voltaire, in all thy notes to the au- thors who address thee with complimentary verses, dost thou reply with excessive praises ? " 1 1 " Pourquoi, Voltaire, a ces auteurs Qui t'adressent des vers flatteurs, Repondre, en toutes tes missives, Par des louanges excessives ? " WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 133 ^Eschylus, while alive, was a kind of public tar- get for all haters. Young, the ancient poets, Thes- pis 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, be- cause the theatre had fallen in during the perform- ance 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 yEschylus 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, where ^Eschylus had fought. The Areop- agus itself was ashamedtfc.lt felt that it had been ungrateful toward the man who, in ' The Ores- teia,' had paid to that tribunal the supreme honor of summoning before it Minerva and Apollo. JEs- chylus 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 honor of ^Eschylus. An official copy of his nine- ty-seven dramas was made at the expense of the 1 34 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 dedication : — "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 blas- phemy. Palingenius seeks it in an ' Asterope,' 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 thou- sand three hundred years later, Davenant, Shake- speare's illegitimate son, recast ' Macbeth.' But in the face of the universal respect for ^Eschylus after his death, such impudent tamperings were impossible; and what is true of Davenant is evi- dently untrue of Bion and Euphorion. The renown of ^Eschylus filled the world of those days. Egypt, feeling with reason that he WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 135 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 Chris- tians, 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 iEschylus 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 Evergetes, brother-in-law to Antiochus the god. Let us mention, by the way, that all these peo- ple were gods, — gods Soters, gods Evergetes, gods Epiphanes, gods Philometors, gods Philadel- phi, gods Philopators. Translation : Gods saviors, gods beneficent, gods illustrious, gods loving 136 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. their mother, gods loving their brothers, gods loving their father. Cleopatra 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 Cleopatra ; Ptolemy IV. was " God-love- Father" (Philopator), because he had poisoned his father; Ptolemy II. was " God'-love-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 at- tributes 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 un- der the eyes of Euclid and by the efforts of Callimachus, Diodorus Cronus, Theodorus the Atheist, Philetas, Apollonius, Aratus, the Egyp- tian priest Manetho, Lycophron, and Theocritus, had for its first librarian, according to some Zenodotus of Ephesus, according to others De- metrius of Phalerum, to whom the Athenians 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 ^Eschylus," — exactly as, at WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 37 a later time, Leidrade, archbishop of Lyons and librarian of Charlemagne, said to Charlemagne, "The Emperor has not Scaeva Memor." Ptolemy Evergetes, wishing to complete the work of Philadelphus his father, resolved to give jEschylus to the Alexandrian library. He de- clared 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 demanded a security. The King of Egypt offered fifteen silver talents. Now, those who wish to comprehend the value of fif- teen talents, have but to know that it was three fourths of the annual tribute of ransom paid by Judaea to Egypt, which was twenty 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 ^Eschylus was delivered to the King of Egypt. The King gave up the fifteen talents, and kept the book. Athens, indignant, had some thought of declar- ing 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, conquered 138 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 honors. The King refused, it is said, to allow the works to be transcribed, stupidly bent on posses- sing 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 com- bined with what have been called the testimonies of polytheism, and great pains have been taken to make pagans say Christian things. " Teste David cum Sibylla." People came to the Alexan- drian library, as on a pilgrimage, to examine the ' Prometheus,' — constant visits which perhaps de- ceived the Emperor Hadrian, making him write to the Consul Servianus : " Those who worship Serapis are Christians; those who profess to be bishops of Christ are at the same time devotees of Serapis." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 139 Under the Roman dominion, the library of Alexandria belonged to the Emperor. Egypt was Caesar's property. " Augustus," says Tacitus, " seposuit ^Egyptum." 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 ^Eschylus was exposed to the perusal of Timocharis, Aristarchus, Athenaeus, Stobaeus, Diodorus of Sicily, Macrobius, Plotinus, Jambli- chus, 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 con- quered half Asia and Africa, taken or burned thirty-six thousand towns, villages, fortresses, and castles, destroyed four thousand pagan or Chris- tain temples, built fourteen hundred mosques, con- quered 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 in- justice, for he burned the Rupertine library at Heidelberg. 140 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 incendiary. 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 received final judg- ment. 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 scimitar, — the scimitar being the ideal sabre. It is better than brute, it is Turk. Omar, then, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 14 1 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 Caesar, — another sabre ! Then a second argument was found in a second conflagra- tion, 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 Alexandrian 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 caused her to be murdered with broken pieces of earthen pots. Touching Omar, we are willing to believe the Arabs. Ab- dallatif saw at Alexandria, about 1220, "a shaft of the pillars supporting a cupola," 1 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 His- tory ' 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 Gib- bon, there were at Alexandria four thousand baths. Ibn-Khaldoon, in his ' Historical Prolegomena,' re- lates another wanton destruction, — the annihila- tion of the library of the Medes by Saad, Omar's lieutenant. Now, Omar having caused the burn- ing of the Median library in Persia by Saad, was logical in causing the destruction of the Egyptian- 1 The original reads : " la colonne des piliers supportant une coupole.'' — Tr. 142 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Greek library in Egypt by Amroo. His lieuten- ants 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 fanat- icisms. 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 in- cluded, and we maintain Omar in possession of his conflagration. Evergetes, through his wish for exclusive pos- session, treating a library as a seraglio, has robbed us of ^Eschylus. Imbecile contempt may have the same results as imbecile adoration. Shakespeare came very near meeting the fate of ^Eschylus. He also has had his conflagration. Shakespeare was so little printed, printing existing so little for him, thanks to the stupid indifference of his im- mediate posterity, that in 1666 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 He- mynge and Condell disappeared, with the exception WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 143 of the forty-eight copies which had been sold in fifty years. Those forty-eight purchasers saved from death the works of Shakespeare. 1 CHAPTER VI. THE disappearance of ^Eschylus ! Extend this catastrophe hypothetically to a few more names, and it seems as though one perceived a vacuum forming in the human mind. The work of ^Eschylus was, by its extent, the greatest, certainly, of all antiquity. By the seven plays which remain to us, we may judge what that universe was. Let us point out what ' ^Eschylus 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 in Sicily, and in which the " Sicilianism " of ^Eschylus is traceable ; ' La'fus,' 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 seventeenth century, single plays of Shakespeare appeared in quarto form. See Dowden's 'Primer,' pp. 30-31. In the last chapter of this useful little book some facts are given which show that Shakespeare was by no means so unknown and unpopular throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as Victor Hugo would persuade us that he was. — Tr. 144 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. which included 'CEdipus; ' 'Athamas,' which end- ed with ' The Isthmiastes ; ' ' Perseus,' the node of which was ' The Phorcydes ; ' ' .-Etna,' which had as prologue 'The ^Etnean Women; ' ' Iphigenia,' the denouement of which was the tragedy of ' The Priestesses ; ' ' The Ethiopid,' the titles of which are nowhere to be found ; ' Pentheus,' in which were ' The Hydrophori ' (Water-carriers) ; ' Teu- cer,' which opened with ' The Judgment of Arms ; ' ' Niobe,' which began with ' The Nurses ' and ended with ' The Men of the Train ; ' a trilogy in honor of Achilles, ' The Tragic Iliad,' composed of ' The Myrmidons,' ' The Nereids,' and ' The Phry- gians ; ' one in honor 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 Labdacides ; ' 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,' ' Amym- one,' ' Circe,' ' Cercyon,' ' Glaucus the Mariner,' — comedies in which was found the mirth of that wild genius. That is what we have lost. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 145 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. Jean Deslyons, doctor of the Sorbonne, lecturer on divinity at Senlis, author of the ' Discours ecclesiastique contre le paganisme dii Roi boit,' 1 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 Lycomides. 2 This title, 'The Apotheosis of Orpheus,' sets one to thinking. ^Eschylus speaking of Orpheus, the Titan measuring the hundred-handed, the god 1 ' Ecclesiastical Discourse against the Paganism of the King drinks.' (?) 2 Sic in original. 10 I46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. interpreting 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 homage is splendid. ^Eschylus raises to Orpheus a temple of which he might occupy the altar himself: this is grand ! CHAPTER VII. ^ESCHYLUS 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 mam- moth, and which have, among the Iliads and the Odysseys, the appearance of hippopotami among lions. ^Eschylus, a thorough Greek, is yet some- thing more than a Greek ; he has the Oriental incommensurableness. Salmasius declares that he is full of Hebraisms and Syrianisms : " Hebralsmis et Syrianismis." ^Eschylus 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 47 ^Eschylus. He plays, for instance, in reference to Jupiter and Europa, on the Phoenician word ilpha, which has the 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, Io, 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 reli- giously 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. Corinth, Epidaurus, CEdepsus, Gythium, Chaeroneia, which was to be the birthplace of Plutarch, Thebes, where Pindar's house was, Mantineia, where the glory of Epaminondas shone, — all these golden towns repu- diated the Unknown, a glimpse of which was seen like a cloud behind the Caucasus. It seemed as though the sun was Greek. The sun, used to the Parthenon, was not made to enter the diluvian forests of Grand Tartary, under the thick mould of gigantic endogens, under the lofty ferns of 148 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. five hundred cubits, where swarmed all the first dreadful models of Nature, and under whose shadows existed unknown, shapeless cities, such as that fabled Anarodgurro, the existence of which was denied until it sent an embassy to Claudius. Gagasmira, Sambulaca, Maliarpha, Barygaza, Ca- veripatnam, 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 Pro- metheus. 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 shape- less, on account of its very greatness, has the Titanic gayety 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 49 Diogenes to throw away his plate of olives and eat a tart. The father of iEschylus, Euphorion, was a disci- ple of Pythagoras. The soul of Pythagoras, that philosopher half magian and half Brahmin, seemed to have entered through Euphorion into ^Eschylus. We have already said that in the dark and myste- rious quarrel between the celestial and the terres- trial 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 ^Eschylus 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." x He makes the chorus celebrate " Susicanes and Pega- stagon, born in Egypt, and the chief of Memphis the sacred city." Like the Phoenicians, he gives the name " Oncea " to Minerva. In ' The ^Etna ' 1 The epitaph is translated by John Stuart Blackie as follows : '* Here /Eschylus lies, from his Athenian home Remote, 'neath Gela's wheat-producing loam J How brave in battle was Euphorion's son, The long-haired Mede can tell who fell at Marathon." — Tr. 150 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. he celebrates the Sicilian Dioscuri, the Palici, those twin gods whose worship, connected with the local worship of Vulcan, had reached Asia through Sa- repta and Tyre. He calls them "the venerable Palici." Three of his trilogies are entitled 'The Persians,' 'The Ethiopid,' 'The Egyptians.' 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 Gor- gonian city, Cysthenes, which he placed in Asia, as well as a River Pluto, rolling sands of gold, and defended by men with a single eye, — the Arimas- pians. The pirates to whom he makes allusion somewhere are, according to all appearance, the pirates of Angria, 1 who inhabited the rock Vizin- druk. 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 neighborhood 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 Ma- cispe, from Macispe to Messapius, from Mount 1 The original reads : " les pirates angrias." — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 5 I Messapius over the River Asopus to Mount Cythe- ron, from Mount Cytheron over the morass of Gorgopis to Mount Egiplanctus, from Mount Egi- planctus 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 dia- logues mora 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 ex- claims: "There is but one free god, — Jupiter." ^Eschylus has his own geography; he has also his fauna. 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 unex- plained, — as, for our part, we are little disposed to admit the odd hypothesis of Japanese manufac- turers of monsters. iEschylus at times sees Nature with simplifica- 152 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. tions stamped with a mysterious disdain. Here the Pythagorean disappears, and the magian shows himself. All beasts are the beast, ^schylus 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 Pro- metheus. 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 eve*i 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 ad- dresses 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 Salmy- dessus, " 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, he has seen him when a babe, and he speaks of him as "wetting his swaddling-clothes" {humec- tatio ex urina). He goes even beyond this Latin. The expression, which we do not repeat here, is WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 153 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 ^Eschylus and Aristophanes. They are the two inspired wearers of the antique mask. Aristophanes, who is not yet finally judged, ad- hered 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 Ari- 1 ' Les Plaideurs,' act iii. scene iii. 154 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. stophanes loved it. This sphinx breathed trage- dy 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 the Dionysia, or from the Ascolia, 1 or from the great trieterical Orgy, and he strikes one as a raving maniac of the Mysteries. His stag- gering verse recalls the Bacchant hopping giddily upon air-bladders. Aristophanes has the sacerdo- tal obscenity. He is for nudity against love. He denounces the Phaedras and the Sthenobaeas, 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 Ge- nius of Greece. It was called poetry and philo- sophy. 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 wis- dom. Thales and Pythagoras reduced to im- mediate truth: such was the operation, — a sort 1 "Aschosie" in the original. The translator supposes the "Ascoliasmus" or "Ascolia" to be intended. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. iS5 of filtration, which, purifying and weakening, allowed the ancient divine doctrine to perco- late, 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, So- crates had an uncomfortable, sly half-smile. There is in Socrates something of Voltaire. Socrates de- nounces all the Eleusinian philosophy as unintelli- gible and inconceivable ; and he said to Euripides, that to understand Heraclitus and the old philoso- phers, "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 im- piety 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 pun- ishment ! — has remained in the eyes of posterity in the predicament 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 I S 6 WILLIAM SHAKES PEA RE. is to see in the background the hand of Aristo- phanes 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 Shake- speare 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 ' ('The Imaginary Invalid'). Racine also is, to some extent, one of them ; see ' Les Plaideurs ' ('The Litigants'), already mentioned. The Abb6 Camus was a witty bishop, — a rare thing at all times; and, what is more, he was a good man. He would have deserved this re- proach 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;" 1 and although he did not like new-comers in sainthood, he was the friend of Saint Francois de Sales, by whose advice he wrote 1 This saw involves a quaint pun between chasse (chase) and chdsse (shrine). — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 157 romances. He relates in one of his letters that Francois 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 seri- ous masterpieces, 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 gayety. 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 ugliness. It seems to forget its responsi- bility. It does not forget it, however; for sud- denly, behind the grimace, there shines the countenance of philosophy, — a smooth-browed philosophy, less sidereal, more terrestrial, quite as mysterious, as the gloomy philosophy. The unknown in 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 anxie- ties, befools, — whom? Itself. A mirth, which is not serenity, gushes out from the incomprehen- sible. An unknown, austere, and sinister raillery flashes its lightning through the human darkness. The shadows piled around us play with our soul. 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. 158 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. When Pratinas the Dorian had invented the play with satyrs, — comedy making its appear- ance 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 con- sult 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 the new style was not impious, and 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. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 59 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 civi- lizing, — an example that more than one modern nation might follow ; to buy and sell is not all. 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 im- perfect 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 and scattered on the outskirts of the known world, possessed, all of them, theatres. In the interest of civilization, Greece began always by the con- struction of an academy, of a portico, or of a logeum. Whoever could have seen, at almost the l60 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Corinthian 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 Corsica, Marseilles in France, — all had theatres. The gadfly having pursued Io all along the Adriatic Gulf, the Ionian Sea reached as far as the harbor 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 Lysimachia, founded by Lysimachus, Alexander's lieutenant; 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 Chimsera performed whom Apuleius admired on the Pcecile ; a theatre in Pan- nonia, at Buda, where the Metanastes were, — that is to say, " the Transplanted." Many of these WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. \6\ 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 Ulyrians; Tomis, the future resting-place of Ovid, the Scordiscae ; Mile- tus, in Anatolia, the Massagetae ; Denia, in Spain, the Cantabrians; Salmydessus, the Molossians; Carsina, the Tauro-Scythians ; Gelonus, the Arym- phseans of Sarmatia, who lived on acorns; Apol- lonia, 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 im- perative 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 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. 162 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Eleu- sinian, but Eleusiac, 1 — 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 Dionysus — that Bacchus common to Occident and Orient — came in dreams to dictate to him his tragedies. You find again here the " familiar spirit " of Shakespeare. iEschylus, Eupatrid and ^Eginetic, struck the Greeks as more Greek than themselves. In those times of mingled code and dogma, to be sacer- dotal 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 ^Eschylus, 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. .^Eschy- lus 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 1 Victor Hugo's word is " eleusiaque.'' Neither the word nor the distinction is to be found in the ordinary books of reference. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 63 Queen maltreats and frightens the slave whom the chorus tries to reassure and soothe. ^Eschylus had introduced the people in his grandest works, — in ' Pentheus,' by the tragedy of ' The Wool-card- ers ; ' in ' Niobe,' by the tragedy of ' The Nurses ; ' in ' Athamas,' by the tragedy of ' The Net-draw- ers ; ' 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.' 1 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 or- dered by the magistrates. It was as if to the gigantic ^Eschylean theatre the task had been in- trusted of watching over the infancy of the colo- nies. It threw around them the Greek spirit, it protected them from the influence of bad neigh- bors and from all temptations of being led astray. It preserved them from contact with Barbarism, 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 good- ness 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 dis- tance. The mother is not with them, she is at 1 The Psychostasia. 1 64 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 treach- erous; 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 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 ^Eschy- lus were at one time in existence. Besides the 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 Sto- baeus, 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, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 65 in 1709, the discovered fragments of Menander. Pierre Pelhestre of Rouen, the man who had read everything (for which the worthy Archbishop Pere- fixe scolded him), affirmed that the greater part of the poems of ^Eschylus would be found in the libraries of the monasteries of Mount Athos, just as the five books of ' The Annals ' of Tacitus had been discovered in the convent of Corwey in Ger- many, 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, in particular, tran- scribed everything on papyrus. Papyrus,' being very dear, became very rare. People were re- duced 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 man- uscripts 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 1 66 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ' History of the Caesars,' 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 invention of printing, are now impossible. Printing is the discovery of the inexhaustible; it is per- petual 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 imperishable, — 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 soul, — the work. The work, made a printed sheet, is delivered. It is now only WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. l6? 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 forever the auxiliary of life; he is the per- manent 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 civilization of him, and you have Egypt. The simple diminution 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 in- definite 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 dis- mantled; great verses effaced, buried, and dis- figured, 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, immor- tality in rubbish ! These things inspire bodeful 1 68 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. dreams. Oblivion, a black spider, hangs its web between the drama of ^Eschylus and the history of Tacitus. Where is ^Eschylus? In scraps everywhere. ^Eschylus is scattered about in twenty texts. His ruins must be sought in innumerable places. Athe- n£us gives the dedication ' To Time,' Macrobius the fragment of '^Etna' and the homage to the Palici, Pausanias the epitaph; the biographer is anonymous ; Goltzius and Meursius give the titles of the lost pieces. We know from Cicero, in the ' Disputationes Tusculanse,' that ^Eschylus was a Pythagorean; from Herodotus that he fought bravely at Mara- thon; 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 appearance of his Furies ; from Philostratus that he abridged the monodies ; from Suidas that his theatre fell in under the weight of the crowd ; from .-Elian 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 ; WILLIAM ShAKESPEARE. 1 69 from Quintilian that his plays were recast; from Fabricius that his sons are accused of this 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 in 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 fatal- ity 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 origi- nality 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 Shakespeare is ^Eschylus II. There remains the right of the French Revolu- tion, 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 un- fathomable depth. The innate, what a shadow ! What is that concentration of the unknown which takes place in the darkness ; and 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, in- divisible 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 measurement ; and yet, everything in this nothing ! For algebra a geometrical point, for phi- losophy 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. I J I 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 ce- lestial molecules? Where do they plunge, those sparks ? Whither do they go ? How do they pro- ceed? What 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 incalcula- ble law of affinities appears but to escape our ken. One gets a glimpse, but sees not. O forgeman of the gulf! where art thou? Qualities the most diverse, the most complex, the most opposed in appearance, enter into the composition 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 theatrical criticism that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Hamlet- A visionary mind may also be precise, like Dante, who writes a book on rhet- oric, 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 plana, parola sdrucciola, parola tronca ; he knows 172 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. that the piana gives a trochee, the sdrucciola a dac- tyl, and the tronca an iamb. Newton is perfectly sure that the Pope is the Antichrist. Dante com- bines 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 departing, 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 clew; but try to tie it, it breaks at once. Here is a disappearance: on the 23d of April, 1616, on the same day, almost at the same minute, Shake- speare and Cervantes die. Why are these two flames extinguished at the same 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 ob- scure chance of possible salvation for that poet, dear to the Cenobite on account of his austerity. And nothing is so surprising as to see this wild thinker, half naked on his straw like Job, dispute on this question, apparently so frivolous, of the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 173 birth of a man, with Rufinus and Theophilus of Alexandria, — Rufinus observing to him that he is mistaken in his calculations, and that Persius hav- ing been born in December, under the consulship of Publius Marius and Asinius Gallus, 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 sometimes clear- ness 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 where ^Eschylus, a mature man, fights? What means the 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 for- gotten that Ctesiphon is the Greek architect of the 174 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. temple of Ephesus. We mentioned just now the simultaneous disappearance of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Here is another case not less sur- prising. The day Diogenes dies at Corinth, Alex- ander dies at Babylon. These two cynics — the one of the tub, the pther 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 He- brew 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 be- tween 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. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 75 The expanse of the possible is in some sort under your eyes. The dream that you have within your- self, you discover beyond yourself. All is indis- tinct. Confused white shadows are moving. Are they souls? In the deeps of space there are pass- ings 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, lives in darkness. The choice between darkness and darkness, — that is all we have. In that darkness, which thus far is nearly all our sci- ence, experience gropes, observation lies in wait, supposition wanders about. If you gaze into it very often, you become the vates. Protracted re- ligious 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 promontory 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, en- larged, but floating; that is to say, the dreamer. He will partake of the poet and of the prophet. 176 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Henceforth a certain portion of him belongs 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 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 fathomless 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 77 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. With- out 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 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 Maccabaeus, 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 Pira- nesi, 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 intelligences, — who sends 178 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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? That solar man will be, in turn, the savant, the seer, the calculator, the thau- maturgus, 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 civiliza- tion will be their task ; these spirit-teams will draw the huge chariot. One being unyoked, an- other 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. \jg mind will finish, chaining phenomenon to phe- nomenon, sometimes without suspecting the links. To each revolution in fact will correspond an ade- quate 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 un- expected points of contact, and in these alliances the imperious logic of progress will be made plain. Orpheus, Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, Pythago- ras, Moses, Manu, Mahomet, with many more, will be links of the same chain. A Gutenberg dis- covering a method for the sowing of civilization 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 discover- ing a new liberty. After Luther, innovator in dog- ma, 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 libera- tor 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 Boz- zaris; ^Eschylus, before him, has assisted Miltia- des. The work is mysterious even for the men who perform it. Some are conscious of it, others are not. At great distances, at intervals of centu- ries, the correlations manifest themselves, wonder- ful ; the softening of human manners begun by l8o WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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, hu- miliated in his irony. But the fact remains. Some power that is very high ordains it thus. Yes, let us meditate upon these vast obscurities. Revery fixes its gaze upon the shadow until there issues from it light. Properly speaking, civilization is humanity de- veloping itself from within outward. Human intelligence radiates, and, little by little, wins, sub- dues, and humanizes matter. Sublime domestica- tion ! This labor 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 per- tain 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. l8l through? What medium do they traverse? What is the germination which precedes the hatching? What is the antenatal mystery? Where was this atom? It seems to be the point of intersection of all the forces. How come 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 pre- vious 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 de- mon ; Mahomet his dove ; Luther his goblin play- ing with his pen, and 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 con- scious 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 1 82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. superior to life? Who provides them with force, patience, fruitfulness, will, wrath? From what urn of goodness have they drawn their austerity? In what regions of the lightnings have they gathered love ? Each of these great new-born souls renews philosophy, or art, or science, or poetry, and re- creates 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 pro- ceed, that they are all different? No one springs from the other, and yet they have this in common, — that they all bring in the infinite. Incommen- surable 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 contingent 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 ! WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 183 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. " Hither- to 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 om- nipotence 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 ob- stacle 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 Homer, 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 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 1 84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 complica- tion of the phenomenon, of which a glimpse can be caught beyond our senses only by contempla- tion 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-perceptible strikes the philosopher with stupor. This plenitude is re- quired by Thy omnipotence, which admits no gap. The interpenetration of universe with universe makes part of Thy infinitude. Here we extend WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 185 the word " universe " to an order of facts that no astronomer can reach. In the Cosmos, invisible to fleshly eye, but revealed to vision, sphere blends with sphere without change of form, the creations 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 mak- ing Michael Angelo. Michael Angelo formed, there still remains to Thee the material for Rem- brandt. 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 re- newal of meteors, worlds above worlds, the porten- tous passage of those flaming stars called comets, men of genius, Orpheus, then Moses, then Isaiah, then ^Eschylus, then Lucretius, then Tacitus, then Juvenal, then Cervantes and Rabelais, then Shake- speare, then Moliere, then Voltaire, those who have been and those to come, — all that does not weary Thee. Chaos of constellations ! there is room in 1 Thy immensity. PART II. PART SECOND. BOOK I. SHAKESPEARE. — HIS GENIUS. CHAPTER I. SHAKESPEARE," says Forbes, " had neither the tragic talent nor the comic talent. His tragedy is artificial, and his comedy is but instinc- tive." Dr. Johnson confirms the verdict. " His tragedy is the product of industry, and his comedy the product of instinct." After Forbes and John- son have contested his claim to dramatic talent, Greene contests his claim to originality. Shake- speare is " a plagiarist;" Shakespeare is "a copy- ist ; " Shakespeare " has invented nothing ; " he is " a crow adorned with the plumes of others ; " he pilfers from ^Eschylus, Boccaccio, Bandello, Hol- linshed, Belleforest, Benoist de St. Maur; he pil- fers from Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, Robert of Wace, Peter of Langtoft, Robert Manning, John de Mandeville, Sackville, Spenser ; he pilfers from the ' Arcadia ' of Sidney ; he pilfers from the anonymous work called ' The True Chronicle of 190 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. King Leir; ' he pilfers from Rowley, in 'The Troublesome Reign of King John' ( 1 591), the character of the bastard Faulconridge. Shake- speare plunders Robert Greene ; Shakespeare plun- ders 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 Johannes factotum (allusion to his former position as call-boy and supernumer- ary) ; Shakespeare is a wild beast. Crow no longer suffices ; Shakespeare is promoted to a tiger. Here is the text : " Tyger's heart wrapt in a player's hide" ('A Groats-worth of Wit,' 1592). 1 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 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, sup- poses he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you ; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, 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 dramatist. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 191 what can this poetry serve, unless it is to mislead our good sense, to throw our thoughts into dis- order, 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, exag- geration. False glitter, pathos. Far-fetched ideas, affected style. Abuse of contrast and metaphor. Subtilty. Immorality. Writing for the mob. Pandering to the rabble. 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, " Shake- speare is unintelligible." Mrs. 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 protigt, relates (ix. 175, Gifford's edition) : " I recollect that the players of- ten mentioned it as an honor 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, more- 192 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. over, 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.' 1 Garrick played at Drury Lane only the ' King Lear ' of Nahum Tate. 2 Listen again to Rymer : " ' Othello' is a sanguinary farce without wit." Dr. Johnson adds : " 'Julius Caesar,' 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 Shadwell." As for the witches in ' Macbeth,' " nothing equals," says that critic of the seven- teenth century, Forbes, repeated by a critic of the nineteenth, " the absurdity of such a spectacle." Samuel Foote, the author of ' The Young Hypo- crite,' 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 under- stand with what object Voltaire, aghast about 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, entitled, ' What we really know about Shakespeare.' — Tr. 2 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. Macready ('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." — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 193 Shakespeare, writes : " Shakespeare, whom the English take for a Sophocles, flourished 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 pro- fession." And, concluding, he characterizes the whole scene by the term " these fooleries." He characterizes Shakespeare's pieces as " monstrous farces called tragedies," and completes the judg- ment by declaring that Shakespeare " has ruined the English theatre." Marmontel comes to see Voltaire at Ferney. Voltaire 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 In- dian." " 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 nick- named him the " Saint Christopher of Tragic Poets." He said to Madame de Graffigny : " Shakespeare for a jest." He said to Cardinal de Bernis, " Com- pose 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. Libera nos, Domine." The 13 194 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. attitude of Freron toward Voltaire has in the eyes of posterity as an extenuating circumstance the attitude of Voltaire toward Shakespeare. Never- theless, throughout the eighteenth century Voltaire gives the law. The moment that Voltaire sneers at Shakespeare, Englishmen of wit, such as my Lord Marshal, follow suit. Dr. Johnson admits " the ig- norance and vulgarity " of Shakespeare. Frederick II. also puts in a word. He writes to Voltaire in respect of Julius Caesar: " You have done well in recasting, according to principles, the formless piece of that Englishman." Thus stood Shake- speare in the last century. Voltaire insults him; La Harpe protects him : " Shakespeare himself, coarse as he was, was not without reading and knowledge." * In our days, the class of critics of whom we have just seen some samples have not lost courage. Coleridge 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 Uni- versal 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 1 La Harpe, ' Introduction to the Course in Literature.' 2 Victor Hugo could hardly have betrayed with more charming simplicity his unique and delightful ignorance of English litera- ture than by thus confusing with Shakespeare's revilers such devout worshippers as Coleridge and Knight. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 195 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 great- ness we can imagine, with the lowest coarseness, without wit." Lately we read the following words, written 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 in- cluded in Homer. Shakespeare, likewise, is this triple man. 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, observation, and a condenser, emotion ; thence those grand, luminous spectres which issue from their brain, and which go on shining forever against the murky human wall. These phantoms have life. To have an existence 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 196 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 tenderness that your heart is as her heart, he kills the child. He goes farther in horror even than his- tory, — a difficult feat : he does not content him- self with killing Rutland and driving York to despair ; he dips in the blood of the son the hand- kerchief with which he wipes the father's eyes. He causes Elegy to be choked by the Drama, Des- demona 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, iEschylus, Dante, are great streams of human emotion pouring from the depth of their cavern the urn of tears. The poet is only limited by his aim ; he con- siders 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 criticism 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 de- presses, often in inverse ratio to your expectation, ploughing into your very soul through surprise. Now, consider. Art, like the Infinite, has a Because WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1 97 superior to all the Whys. Go and ask of the Ocean, that great lyric poet, the wherefore 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 N attraction, of Ovid or of Tibullus, as the Venus of Milo excels the Venus of Medici. The things of the unknown; the metaphysical 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 eventual included in des- tiny ; the amalgams of thought 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 endeavoring to give you pleasure. Profound grace does exist. 1 " 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." — Purgatory, canto xiii. 198 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 contrary of morbid grace, although resembling it, emanating, as it also does, from the tomb. Sorrow, the deep sorrow of the drama, which is but the human social atmosphere transferred to Art, en- velops 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 Desde- mona suspected. These two innocents, to whom love has broken faith, cannot be consoled. Desde- mona 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 in philosophy goes at times deeper than Homer. Beyond Priam there is Lear; to weep at ingratitude is worse than to weep at death. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 199 Homer meets envy and strikes it with the sceptre ; Shakespeare gives the sceptre to the envious, and out of 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 altogether 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, inaugurated 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 ap- plication 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. 200 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. That is why Shakespeare has that sovereign man- agement 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 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 clumsily; 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 Macbeth, 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 ara- besque 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 enlarge- ment; it fills horizons, and opens up others; it intercepts the luminous background by innumer- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 201 able interlacements ; 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 pan- theistic ; an infinite combination takes form in the finite ; 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 sin- gular 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 tribunal belongs to Shakespeare, and he finds you constant surprises there. He extracts from human consciousness whatever it contains of the unforeseen. Few poets surpass him in this psychical research. Many of the strangest pecu- liarities of the human mind are indicated by him. He skilfully makes us feel the simplicity of the metaphysical fact under the complication 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. 202 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. To all this prodigality — analysis, synthesis, cre- ation in flesh and bone, revery, 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 assassin of his guest, up to Coriolanus, the assassin of his country ; of the despot, from the tyrant brain, Caesar, to the tyrant belly, Henry VIII. ; of the carnivore, from the lion down to the usurer. One may say to Shy- lock, "Well bitten, Jew!" And in the back- ground of this wonderful drama, on the desert heath, there appear in the twilight three black shapes promising crowns to murderers, — sil- houettes in which Hesiod, through the vista of ages, perhaps recognizes the Parcse. Inordinate force, exquisite charm, epic ferocity, pity, creative faculty, gayety (that lofty gayety unintelligible to narrow understandings), sarcasm (the cutting lash for the wicked), sidereal grandeur, microscopic tenuity, a universe of poetry, with its zenith and its nadir, the vast whole, the profound 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. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 203 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 rheto- ricians call "antithesis; " that is to say, the sove- reign 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 antithesis of Shakespeare. Complete minds have everything. Shakespeare contains Gongora, as Michael Angelo 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 204 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. the school which express the petty view of the great question of contrast in Art. Totus in antithesi. Shakespeare is all in an- tithesis. 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, — 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 philoso- phy, 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 Philopator; 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 205 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 a 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 litera- ture from indigestion. Formerly the device was "fecundity and power; " to-day it is "barley-gruel." You are in the resplendent 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, everywhere fruits, metaphors, golden apples, perfumes, colors, 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 your- 206 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. self 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 Do- mitian, 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 been drinking in that shocking place, the Empyrean ! You become proud, ambitious, disinterested. 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 fashion- ably 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 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 2Q"J requested not to be so prodigal of daisies; the spring to be commanded to calm itself. The nests are rather toa prolific. Attention, groves ! not so many warblers, 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 fowls have been doing nothing but bawl." M. Suard gave to Marie Joseph Chdnier this certificate : " His style has the great merit of not containing comparisons." In our days we have seen that singular eulogium reproduced. This reminds us that a great professor of the Restora- tion, indignant at the comparisons and figures which abound in the prophets, put a crusher on Isaiah, Daniel, and Jeremiah, with this profound apothegm : " The whole Bible is in like." An- other, a greater professor still, was the author of this saying, still celebrated at the Iscole Normale : " I toss Juvenal back upon the romantic dunghill." Of what crime was Juvenal guilty? Of the same crime as Isaiah ; namely, of being fond of express- ing 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 208 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. clamors 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 by spendthrifts like Pin- dar, 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 wri- ters 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 Honor 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 H6tel de Ville rejoiced in the name " The-guard-dies-and-never-surrenders." l From the combined effort of the two schools of criticism, guardians of public tranquillity, there 1 It is said that an indecent word of Cambronne (a commander of the Old Guard at Waterloo), in answer to the summons to sur- render, was translated by some big-wig historian into this bit of heroic claptrap. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 200, results a salutary reaction. This reaction has al- ready produced 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 Revery, that gypsy girl ; who are incapable of having relations either with Imagination, 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, the Muse ; who never sleep away from home, and who are honored 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 doctrinaire 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 reputations. Thence a discipline, a literature, and art. Fall into line, — right dress ! Society must be saved in literature as well as politics. Every one knows that poetry is a frivolous, insignificant thing, child- ishly occupied in seeking rhymes, barren, vain ; consequently nothing is more formidable. It be- hooves us to tie up the thinkers securely. To the kennel with him ! He is dangerous ! What is a poet? For honor, 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 banish- 14 2IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. ment 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 pru- dent 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. Nature has in this particular art but a narrow entrance, and goes in through the side- door. 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 confes- sion sometimes gets its bearer admitted into the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 2 1 1 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 legitimate literature are threatened. Dark- ness is in peril. To arms against the new gen- erations ! To arms against the modern spirit ! And down with Democracy, 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 rumor is confirmed that Shakespeare has been met without a muzzle on. This Shakespeare without a muzzle is the pres- ent translation. 1 CHAPTER V. If ever a man was undeserving of the good character, " he is sober," 2 it is most certainly Wil- liam Shakespeare. Shakespeare is one of the 1 The Complete Works of Shakespeare, translated by Fran- 501s Victor Hugo. 2 See the beginning of the preceding chapter. — Tr. 212 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 univer- sal 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. Shakespeare 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 parsimoni- ous; magnificently 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 taste is in that. Each thing put in its own place and spoken with its own word. On the sin- gle condition that a certain latent equilibrium is maintained and a certain mysterious 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 compre- hends these profound laws. Opulence, profusion, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 213 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. 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 simpli- city 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 pro- duce 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 H6tel Rambouillet? could the oak be a finical prude? could the oak be tainted with Gongorism? could the oak belong to an age 2 14 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. of decadence? Is it possible that all simplicity, sancta simplicitas,\s, 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 the demon of genius. The stallion is over-demonstrative; 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, exorbi- tant. By all that is holy, some attention ought to be paid to others; one man has no right to everything ! What ! virility always, inspiration everywhere; 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, fe- cundation, 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 2 1 5 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 germination, like light, like flame. Yet this does not hinder him from thinking of you, specta- tor 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 conflagration he kindles. Othello, Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, Shylock, Rich- ard III., Julius Caesar, Oberon, Puck, Ophelia, Desdemona, Juliet, Titania, men, women, witches, fairies, souls, — Shakespeare is the grand dis- tributor ; take, take, take, all of you ! Do you want more ? Here is Ariel, Parolles, Macduff, Prospero, Viola, Miranda, Caliban. More yet ? Here is Jessica, Cordelia, Cressida, Portia, Braban- tio, Polonius, Horatio, Mercutio, Imogen, Panda- rus of Troy, Bottom, Theseus. Ecce Deus ! It is the poet, he offers himself: who will have me ? He gives, scatters, squanders himself ; he is never empty. Why ? He cannot be. Exhaustion is impossible with him. In him is something of the fathomless. He fills up again, and spends himself; then recommences. He is the spendthrift of genius. In license and audacity of language Shakespeare equals Rabelais, whom, a few days ago, a swan-like critic called a " swine." 2l6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Like all lofty minds in full riot of omnipotence, Shakespeare decants all Nature, drinks it, and makes you drink it. Voltaire reproached him for his drunkenness; and was quite right. Why on earth, we repeat, why has this Shakespeare such a temperament? He does not stop, he does not feel fatigue, he is without pity for the poor weak stom- achs that are candidates for the Academy. The gastritis called " good taste " does not afflict him. He is powerful. What is this vast intemperate song that he sings through the centuries — war- song, drinking-song, love-ditty — which passes from King Lear to Queen Mab, and from Hamlet to Falstaff, heart-rending at times as a sob, grand as the Iliad? "I am stiff all over from reading Shakespeare," said M. Auger. His poetry has the sharp tang of honey made by the vagabond hiveless bee. Here prose, there verse ; all forms, being but receptacles for the idea, suit him. This poetry mourns and jests. The English tongue, a language little formed, now serves, now hinders him ; but everywhere the deep mind makes itself seen and felt. Shakespeare's drama moves forward with a kind of distracted rhythm ; it is so vast that it staggers ; it has and gives the vertigo: but nothing is so solid as this palpitating grandeur. Shakespeare, shuddering, has within himself winds, spirits, magic potions, vibrations ; he sways in the passing breeze, obscure effluences pervade him, he is filled with the un- known sap of life. Thence his agitation, at the core of which is peace. It is this agitation which is lacking in Goethe, wrongly praised for his im- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 2\J passiveness, which is inferiority. All minds of the first order have this agitation. It is in Job, in JEs- chylus, in Alighieri. This agitation is humanity. On earth the divine must be human. It must pro- pose to itself its own riddle, and be distressed by it. Inspiration being a miracle, a sacred stupor min- gles with it. A certain majesty of mind resembles solitude and is blended with wonder. Shakespeare, like all great poets, like all great things, is ab- sorbed by a dream. His own vegetation dismays him ; his own tempest appals him. It seems at times as if Shakespeare terrified Shakespeare. He shudders at his own depth. This is the sign of supreme intelligence. It is his own vastness which shakes him and imparts to him strange and mighty oscillations. There is no genius without billows. An intoxicated savage, it may be. He has the savagery of the virgin forest ; he has the intoxica- tion of the high sea. Shakespeare — the condor alone gives some idea of such gigantic flight — departs, arrives, starts again, mounts, descends, hovers, sinks, dives, drops, submerges himself in the depths below, merges into the depths above. He is one of those ge- niuses that God purposely leaves unbridled, so that they may go headlong and in full flight into the infinite. From time to time there comes to this globe one of these spirits. Their passage, as we have said, renews art, science, philosophy, or society. They fill a century, then disappear. Then it is not one century alone that their light illumines, it is humanity from the beginning to the end of time ; 218 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. and we perceive that each of these men was the human mind itself contained whole in one brain, and coming, at a given moment, to impart new impetus to earthly progress. These supreme spirits, their life ended and their work done, in death rejoin the mysterious group of those who are at home in the infinite. BOOK II. SHAKESPEARE.— HIS WORK. — THE CULMI- NATING 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 Amphitryon; Rabelais laughs, and gives to man Gargantua; Cervantes laughs, and gives to man Don Quixote ; Beaumarchais laughs, and gives to man Figaro; Moliere weeps, and gives to man Alceste; Shakespeare 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 220 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 perma- nent lesson for the generations : each century adds in some figures, sometimes done in full light and strong relief, like Macette, Celimene, Tartuffe, Tur- caret, and Rameau's Nephew; sometimes simple profiles, like Gil Bias, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa Harlowe, and Candide. God creates by intuition ; man creates by inspi- ration, 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 of 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 con- science? He; and He counsels right action. Who is our intelligence? He ; and He inspires the masterpiece. 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 ques- tion. It even sometimes happens that real in- telligences attack genius; the inspired, strangely WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 221 enough, do not recognize inspiration. Erasmus, Bayle, Scaliger, St. Evremond, Voltaire, many of the Fathers of the Church, whole families of phi- losophers, the whole Alexandrian School, Cicero, Horace, Lucian, Plutarch, Josephus, Dion Chryso- stom, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Philostratus, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, Plato, Pythagoras, have severely criticised Homer. In this enumeration we omit Zollus. Men who deny are not critics. Hatred is not intelligence. To insult is not to discuss. Zoi'lus, Msevius, Cecchi, Green, Avella- neda, William Lauder, Vise, Fr^ron, — no cleansing of these names is possible. These men have wounded the human race in her men of genius ; these wretched hands forever retain the color of the mud that they have thrown. Nor have these men even the miserable renown 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 warn- ing, all the wretched names are unknown. An obscure notoriety follows their equivocal existence. Look at that Clement who called himself the " hy- perergic," and whose profession it was to bite and denounce Diderot; he disappears, and is con- founded, although born at Geneva, with Clement of Dijon, confessor to Mesdames; with David Clement, author of the ' Bibliotheque Curieuse ' ; with Clement of Baize, Benedictine of St Maur; 222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Cha- renton, 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. 1 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 outraged. But no ; they have remained obscure. These poor insulters did not get their wages ; they are bank- rupt of contempt. Let us pity them. 1 And rightly ; for he is indeed the same individual. See note, p. 190. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 223 CHAPTER II. Let us add that calumny's labor is lost.' Then what purpose can it serve? Not even an evil one. Do you know anything more useless than the inju- rious 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 pen- sive, then grieved, then young and smiling, then decrepit, then sensual and gluttonous, then relig- ious, then outrageous ; and it is Cain, Job, Atreus, Ajax, Priam, Hecuba, Niobe, Clytemnestra, Nausi- caa, Pistoclerus, Grumio, Davus, Pasicompsa, Chi- mene, Don Arias, Don Diego, Mudarra, Richard III., Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Juliet, Romeo, Lear, Sancho Panza, Pantagruel, Panurge, Ar- nolphe, Dandin, Sganarelle, Agnes, Rosine, Victo- rine, Basile, Almaviva, Cherubin, Manfred. From the direct divine creation proceeds Adam, the prototype. From the indirect divine creation 224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. — that is to say, from the human creation — pro- ceed other Adams, the types. A type does not reproduce any man in particu- lar; 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 conden- sation. It is not one, it is all. Alcibiades is but Alcibiades, Petronius is but Petronius, Bassom- pierre is but Bassompierre, Buckingham is but Buckingham, Fronsac is but Fronsac, Lauzun is but Lauzun ; but take Lauzun, Fronsac, Bucking- ham, 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 una- wares the invention of the poet ; and while Shake- speare 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 1 Happe-chair; literally, "grab-flesh." — Tr. WILL/AM SHAKESPEARE. 225 Jew — is Shylock. Men of pleasure may with rea- son say that no one of them is Don Juan. No leaf of the orange-tree when chewed gives the flavor of the orange ; yet there is a deep affinity, an identity of roots, a sap rising from the same source, a shar- ing 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 recog- nize 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 para- ble which nudges you ; a symbol which cries out " Beware ! " an idea which is nerve, muscle, and flesh, — which has a heart to love, 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. O power of all poetry ! These types are beings. They breathe, they pal- pitate, 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 is 226 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Iago ; God creates the coquette, genius makes Celimene ; God creates the citizen only, genius makes Chry- sale; God creates the king only, genius makes Grandgousier. Sometimes, 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 sud- denly, in a flash of lightning, under the mysterious incubation of the theatre, that spectre Robert Macaire. 1 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. 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 iEschylus, Prometheus, is an Adam : from him comes the race of the wrestlers; the 1 For an entertaining account of Chodruc-Duclos, by Dr. Holmes, see 'The Atlantic Monthly,' July, 1886, pp. 12, 13. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 22"J man of Shakespeare, 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, con- science ; 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 Gene- sis, 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. More- over, 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." 228 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER III. The man of ^Eschylus, Prometheus, and the man of Shakespeare, Hamlet, are as we have just said, — two marvellous Adams. 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 revery ! Slavery from within, is slavery in- deed. 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 mountain; in order that Hamlet may stand erect, he must lift his own thought. If Prometheus plucks the vulture 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 220, We are in 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 imbecile, 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 criticism. Hamlet walks behind Orestes, a parricide through filial love. This easy com- parison, 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 super- human 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 demon- strated, 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 equilibrium ; the event treated 230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. as a rdle 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 profound 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 Prome- theus stretched on the Caucasus. It is gigantic tragedy. The old punishment which our ancient laws of torture called " extension," and which Car- touche escaped because of a hernia, — this, Prome- theus 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 tyrants. Prometheus has done on Olympus what Eve did in Eden, — he has taken a little knowledge. Jupiter — identical, in- deed, with Jehovah (lovi, Iova) — 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. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 23 1 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 legitimists, of whom ^Eschylus, the avenger of Prometheus, was one. Prometheus is the right conquered. Jupiter has, as is always the case, consummated the usur- pation 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 coun- sel 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 in evil are marked to this day by the veneration 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 181 5; 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 Jupi- ter. Prometheus jests at the vulture which gnaws at him; he disdainfully shrugs his shoulders as much as his chain allows. What does he care for 232 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Jupiter, and of what good is Mercury? There is no hold upon this haughty sufferer. The scorch- ing 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, dis- trusts 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 233 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 church- yard, 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 over- whelming been dreamed. It is the par-icide saying, "What do I know?" 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. 1 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, sin- cerity 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 exist- ence. 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 vapor, resolution a twilight; the action blows every 1 The quotation from ' Hamlet ' is left in the inexact form that Hugo gave it. — Tr. 234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 mad- ness of Hamlet has not been, up to the present time, indicated by critics. It has been said, " Hamlet acts the madman to hide his thought, like Brutus." In fact, it is easy for apparent im- becility to hatch a great project; the supposed idiot can take aim deliberately. But the case of Brutus is not that of Hamlet. Hamlet acts the madman for his safety. Brutus screens his pro- ject, 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 Shakespeare into the darkness of the ancient royalty. In the Middle Ages and in the Eastern Empire, and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 235 even at earlier periods, woe unto him who found out a murder or a poisoning committed by a king ! 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 wit- ness, 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 inno- cent : " 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 1 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 re- course to the same means. He gets himself de- clared insane like Heraclides, and puts on madness like Hugolin. This does not prevent the uneasy Claudius from twice making an effort to get rid 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 men- tioned by Freeman. — Tr. 236 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 apparent 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 savage- ness 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. Ham- let has seen his dead father and has spoken to him. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 237 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 con- jectures, systems, monstrous apparitions, bloody recollections, veneration for the ghost, hate, tender- ness, anxiety to act and not to act, his father, his mother, conflicting duties, — a profound storm. His mind is occupied with ghastly hesitation. Shakespeare, wonderful 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 him- self. He talks with the grave-diggers, almost laughs, then clutches Laertes by the hair in the very grave of Ophelia, and tramples furiously up- on 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 238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. through this layer of dream that he feels, compre- hends, learns, perceives, drinks, eats, frets, mocks, weeps, and reasons. There is between life and him a transparency, — 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 nightmare Hamlet suffers while awake. Hamlet is not upon the spot where his life is. He has ever the air 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 catastrophe in which he moves, from the passer-by he questions, from the thought he bears, from the action he per- forms. 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. Inde- cision 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 repre- sents them all. Agnosco fratrem. If at certain hours we felt our own pulse, we should be con- scious of his fever. His strange reality is our own WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 239 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 are mass, block, majesty, bible ; and their unity is what renders them impressive. Have you never gazed upon a beclouded head- land running out beyond 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 outline 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, 240 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. let your humanity wander in the eternal uproar, penetrate the impenetrable. 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 ap- ple 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 accomplishes with Gruoch is murder. Covetousness easily becoming violence, violence easily becoming crime, crime easily becoming mad- ness: this progression is in Macbeth. Covetous- ness, Crime, Madness — these three night-hags have spoken to him in the solitude, and have invited him to the throne. The cat Gray-malkin has called him : WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 241 Macbeth will be cunning; the toad Paddock has called him : Macbeth will be horror. The unsexed being, Gruoch, completes him. It is done ; Mac- beth is no longer a man. He is no longer anything but an unconscious energy rushing wMdly toward evil. Henceforth, no notion of right; appetite is everything. The transitory right of royalty, the eternal right of hospitality — 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 conse- quence, 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 precipitated ; 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 flame of war, a beast of prey, a scourge. He marches over all Scotland, king as he is, his barelegged kernes and his heavily armed gallow- glasses slaughtering, pillaging, massacring. He decimates the thanes, he murders Banquo, he mur- ders all the Macduff's except the one that shall slay him, he murders the nobility, he murders the peo- ple, he murders his country, he murders " sleep." At length the catastrophe 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. 16 242 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 rep- resents that frightful hungry creature who prowls throughout history — in the forest called brigand, and on the throne, conqueror. The ancestor of Macbeth is Nimrod. These men of force, are they forever 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 Cam- byses, 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 ma- jestic, 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 243 Iago, 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 falsehood ! 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. Iago near Othello is the precipice near the land- slip. " This way ! " he says in a low voice. The snare 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 Iago the traitor pitted against white- ness and candor: what more formidable? These ferocities of darkness act in unison. These two incarnations of the eclipse conspire, the one roar- ing, 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. 244 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Lear is the occasion for Cordelia. Maternity of the daughter toward the father. Profound subject ! A maternity venerable among all other materni- ties, 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 3105, 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 ; the eclipse of the sun is calculated by the Chinese; three hundred and twelve years have passed since Orestes, accused by the Eumenides before the Areopagus, 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 is- lands. Jonas, Holofernes, Draco, Solon, Thespis, Nebuchadnezzar, Anaximenes who is to invent the signs of the zodiac, Cyrus, Zorobabel, Tarquin, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 245 Pythagoras, ^Eschylus, are not yet born ; Coriola- nus, Xerxes, Cincinnatus, Pericles, Socrates, Bren- nus, Aristotle, Timoleon, Demosthenes, Alexander, Epicurus, Hannibal, are ghosts awaiting their hour to enter among men ; Judas Maccabaeus, 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 " 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 Eng- glishman then. 1 It is this twilight that Shake- speare 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- speare 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 Mul- mutius, Cinigisil, Ceolulf, Cassibelan, Cymbeline, 1 Victor Hugo is responsible for the words "English" and " Englishman," instead of " British " and " Briton." — Tr. 246 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Cynulphus, Arviragus, Guiderius, Escuin, Cudred, Vortigern, Arthur, Uther Pendragon, he has every right to believe in King Lear and to create Corde- lia. 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 Gornerille, and Regan, whom the legend calls Ragaii ; 1 he takes paternity ; he takes royalty ; he 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 stair- cases, their sculptures, their cellars, their caecums, 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. 1 In Holinshed's Chronicle, Shakespeare's source, the names are, Gonorilla, Regan, and Cordeilla ; in Layamon's ' Brut,' Gor- noille, Regan, and Cordoille or Gordoylle. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 247 That admirable human creature, Lear, serves as a support to this ineffable divine creation, Cor- delia. All that chaos of crimes, vices, manias, and miseries finds its justification in this shining vision of virtue. Shakespeare, 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 caryatid ! 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 hur- ricane 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 ." 1 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. 1 " Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters : I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness ; I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children, You owe me no subscription." Act iii., Scene ii. 248 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 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 murderers. Cordelia dies. Nothing more heart-rending than this. The old man is stunned ; he no longer understands anything; and, embrac- ing 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 249 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. 1 1 Perhaps the reader will pardon, in view of the remarkable parallelism, a reference to Charles Lamb's ' Essay on the Trage- dies 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 life the only decorous thing for him." — Tr. BOOK III. ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER. CHAPTER I. "That vulgar flatt'rer of the ignoble herd." 1 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 doma 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 ex- pressions." i " Ce courtisan grossier du profane vulgaira" WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 25 1 A little while after he exclaims, furious, — " The barb'rous Crebillon 's preferred to me I " 1 An idler of the CEil-de-Bceuf, wearing the red heel and the blue ribbon, a stripling and a marquis, — M. de Cr6qui, — 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 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. 2 Quintilian understands nothing of 'The Oresteia.' Sophocles mildly scorned ^Eschylus. " When he does well, he does not know it," said Sophocles. Racine rejected everything, except two or three scenes of ' The Choephori,' which, by a note in the margin of his copy of ^Eschylus, he condescended to spare. Fontenelle says in his 'Remarks' : "One does not know what to make of the ' Prometheus ' of -iEschylus. ^Eschylus is a kind of madman." The eighteenth century, without exception, ridi- cules Diderot for admiring 'The Eumenides.' "The whole of Dante is a hotch-potch," says Chaudon. " Michael Angelo wearies me," says 1 " On m'ose prefeVer Crebillon le barbare ! " 2 The passage in Salmasius is curious, and worth transcribing : "Unus ejus Agamemnon obscuritate superat quantum est librorum sacrorum cum suis hebraismis et syrianismis et tota hellenistica' supellectile vel farragine." — De Re HellenisticA, p. 38, ep. dedic. 252 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Joseph de Maistre. " Not one of the eight come- dies 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 mounte- bank," 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 re- sisted, 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 called Shakespeare "a crow beautified with our feathers." 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 ' Ennuyante ' [tedious woman]. DAlembert hits at one blow Calderon and Shakespeare. He writes to Voltaire [letter cv.J : " I have announced to the Academy your ' Herac- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 253 lius ' of Calderon. The Academy will read it with as much pleasure as the harlequinade of Gilles Shakespeare." That everything should be perpetually re-exam- ined, that everything should be contested, even the incontestable, — 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 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 ! " At last, with their appetites whetted for vices, The pit roared for the author, that compend of all." 1 This compendium of all the vices is Beaumarchais. As for Byron, we mention this name a second time ; 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 apos- tate and a thief, " a detacher of mantles ; " Spinoza 1 " Et pour voir a la fin tous les vices ensemble, Le parterre en tumulte a demands l'auteur." 254 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 sleep- ing 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 ster- ling for his Latin apology for regicide : ' Defensio pro se,' 1 etc. Who says these things? who re- lates these stories? That good person, your old fawning friend, O 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 pas- sionate 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 speaking — willingly availed itself of a dash of literary persecution. Certainly, hatred 1 The work referred to is probably Milton's ' Defensio Populi Anglican],' written by way of reply to Salmasius. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 255 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 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 Vol- taire. A gratuity is pleasant to receive after a ser- vice 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, autho- rity 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 tite-a-tite 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 bum- bailiff. See, after the struggle between the Armin- ians 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 Palamedes of Vondel's tragedy is no other than Barneveldt ! — useful rhetoric, by which Buyter obtains against 2$6 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Vondel a fine of three hundred crowns, and for himself a fat prebend at Dordrecht. The author of the book, ' Literary Quarrels,' the Abbe Irail, canon of Monistrol, asks of La Beau- melle, " Why do you insult M. de Voltaire so much ? " " It is because it sells well," replies La Beaumelle. And Voltaire, informed of the ques- tion and of the reply, concludes : " Precisely so : the simpleton buys the writing, and the minister buys the writer. It sells well." Francoise d'Issembourg de Happoncourt, wife of Francois Hugo, chamberlain of Lorraine, and celebrated under the name of Madame de Graf- figny, writes to M. Devaux, reader to King Stan- islaus : " My dear Pampan, Atys being sent away (Read: Voltaire being banished), the police cause to be published against him a swarm of small writ- ings and pamphlets, which are sold at a sou in the caf/s and theatres. That would displease the Mar- quise, 1 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 abb6, died of dropsy ; and his well-known tastes gained for him this epi- taph : " Periit aqua qui meruit igne." Among the publications suppressed in the last century by decree of parliament, is found a docu- ment printed by Quinet and Besogne, and destroyed 1 Madame de Pompadour. WILL/AM SHAKESPEARE, 2tf doubtless because of the revelations which it con- tained, and of which the title gave promise : ' The Aretiniad ; 1 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 let- ter addressed to Madame Gay, mother of the illus- trious Madame de Girardin : " Ah, dear madame, what a persecution are these exiles ! " (We sup- press some lines.) " You write a book ; it is for- bidden 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 quick- lime. All these black pen-nibs end by digging dismal pits. Among the writers abhorred for having been useful, Voltaire and Rousseau stand in the first rank. Living, they were lacerated ; dead, they were man- gled. 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 1 From Pietro Aretino, the literary jackal of the sixteenth cen- tury. — Te. 17 2$ 8 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Prus- sia, Maupertuis, Frederick, the Encyclopaedia, the Academy, even Labarre, Sirven, and Calas. 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} At the house of the Abbess of Nivelles, Princess of the Holy Empire, half recluse and half wordling, — 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-taire. 2 A celebrated member of the Academy of Sciences, Napoleon Bonaparte, seeing in 1803, in the library of the Institute, this inscrip- tion 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 Desfontairies 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. 1 Deserving of being broken on the wheel. — Tr. 2 Vol, " theft," taire, " to be silent. " — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 259 It was at the Bastile that Voltaire made his dibut. His 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. 1 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 con- tinued, 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 forever in their thought that vision of two ^sepulchres side by side : the elliptical arch of the vault, the antique form of the two monuments 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 1 Voltaire died May 30, 1778 ; Rousseau, four days later. — Tr. 260 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Stuarts had torn Cromwell from his grave; the restoration 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 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 1 and Director of the Mint, accompanied 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 witnesses, 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 1 " Chambre introuvable," referring to the French Chamber of Deputies of 181 5. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 26 1 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. CHAPTER IV. SALMASIUS, that worse Scaliger, does not com- prehend ^Eschylus, and rejects him. Who is to blame? Salmasius much; ^Eschylus 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 262 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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, gather- ing from century to century, and continually gain- ing 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, tumul- tuous, violent, passionate, hard riders of winged steeds, " overleaping all boundaries," 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 Pole 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," refrac- tory to official rhetoric, not amiable to asthmatic literati, unsubdued 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 263 fall. Compassionate cripples lament for Shake- speare. 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 ^Eschylus is lost ! This Dante is near falling ! A god spreads his wings for flight: the Philis- tines cry out to him, " Mind yourself! " 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 meditation 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 revery needs the absolute and the unfathomable for its expansion. They meditate as the suns shine, con- ditioned by the medium of the abyss around them. Their roving to and fro in the ideal dizzies the observer. Nothing is too high for them, and noth- ing 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. 264 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Sinite parvulos venire. One of their eyes is a tele- scope, 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 one should not reproach them for all this ! In- deed, 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 relent- lessly followed up to its extreme consequence ! These poets see only their own aim; and in every- thing 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 com- placently 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 Athensea, 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 liter- ature and art the great party of order. What can be more natural? The cough quarrels with the hurricane. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 26$ 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 ex- ceptions, are proud and stern ; that is in the very- marrow of their bones. They have in their com- pany 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 disinter- estedness ! you bring together those two firebrands, faith and will, in order to draw flame from them ! So 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 honor, — 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 grumbling geniuses accustomed to greatness, and scornful of what is not great. They are slow of movement when honor is at stake; their back is struck with anchylosis for anything like bowing and cringing ; when success passes along, deserved 266 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Revolution 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 gen- eration is not bound to imitate another. Cato took example from Phocion ; Trimalchio, who is suf- ficiently 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 our- selves. You wish for a revolt, — there it is. You wish for an insurrection, — we rise up against our rights. We enfranchise ourselves from the solici- tudes 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 267 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 sometimes resent it, and would rebel; but that was the ancient fashion, ridiculous now; and tire- some people and croakers must just be allowed to go on affirming that there was a better notion of right, justice, and honor 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, colorists, 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 pal- ette all bedaubed with the sun's rays ; they are Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, — excessive. They bring with them a style of art wild, howling, flam- ing, dishevelled like the lion and the comet. Oh, shocking! People are right in forming combina- tions against them. It is a fortunate circumstance that the " teetotallers " of eloquence and poetry 268 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. exist. " I admire pallor," said a literary Philistine one day, — for there is a literary Philistine. Rhet- oricians, 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, — conti- nence, abstinence, 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 ad- mire Origen less. CHAPTER VI. SUMMARY statement: Great minds are impor- tunate; 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 re- proaches 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 269 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 Pira- nesi disconcerts you ; the hand-grasp of Hercules 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 inhospitable dwelling-place ; the infinite is scarcely tenantable. 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 unawares, because it is genius. What familiarity is possible with ^Eschylus, with Ezekiel, with Dante ? 270 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 sen- sibilities ; 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 turn you encounter the unfore- seen. 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 muck men. Where you have but the part, they WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 27 1 have the whole; they carry in their vast heart entire humanity, and they are you more than your- self; 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 company, and no taste for neighborly intimacy with them. Whoever has not a soul well attempered by a vigorous education prefers to avoid them. For colossal books there must be athletic readers. To open Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job, Pindar, Lucretius, and this Alighieri, and this Shakespeare, one must be robust. Let it be owned that commonplace habits, a vulgar life, the dead calm of the con- science, "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 as- sume a lofty gentleness, as unexpected as the rest. They say to you, " Come in ! u They receive you at home with an archangelic fraternity. They are affectionate, sad, melancholy, consoling. You 272 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. are suddenly at your ease. You feel yourself loved by them ; you almost imagine yourself per- sonally known to them. Their sternness and their pride veil a profound sympathy; 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 sur- prise 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 suffi- cient to change the zone. Go up, it is the tem- pest; 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 the extremes is a law in Nature, in which the theatrical strokes of the sub- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 273 lime are exhibited at every moment. A moun- tain, a genius, — both possess an austere majesty. These masses evolve a sort of religious intimida- tion. Dante is not less precipitous than Etna; Shakspeare's heights equal the steeps of Chimbo- razo. 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, extraordinary 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 per- petually 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 meadows 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. 18 BOOK IV. CRITICISM. CHAPTER I. ALL Shakespeare's plays, with the exception of ' Macbeth ' and ' Romeo and Juliet,' — thirty-four plays out of thirty-six, — offer to the observer one peculiarity which seems to have es- caped, up to this day, the most eminent commen- tators and critics ; one which is unnoticed by the Schlegels, and even by M. Villemain himself, in his remarkable labors, and of which it is impossible not to speak. It is the double action which trav- erses 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 him- self a Hamlet ; he kills Polonius, father of Laertes, — and there stands Laertes over against him ex- actly 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, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 2?$ 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 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 Shakespearian. 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 six- teenth century was reflected in a mirror. Every 1 Preface to ' Cromwell.' 276 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. idea of the Renascence has a double compartment. Look at the rood-lofts in the churches. The Re- nascence, with an exquisite and fantastical art, always makes the Old Testament an adumbration of the New. The double action is there in every- thing. The symbol explains the personage by repeating his gesture. If, in a low-relief, Jehovah sacrifices his son, he has for a neighbor, 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 the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, in paintings 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 Christophorus ; 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 Chris- topher; it also carries Christ. This treble illus- tration of the idea is immortalized by Rubens in the cathedral of Antwerp. The twin idea, the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 277 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 en- tity 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 sput- ters, throws out its glare, its wrath, its lava, and its ashes; these men take scales and weigh these ashes, pinch by pinch. Quot libras in monte summof Meanwhile genius continues its erup- tion. 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 precipice is the condition of its height. We love 278 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 mag- nificent ; 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 cathe- drals, 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 odor 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 supe- rior, and to say, "Homer is puerile, Dante is child- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 279 ish." The smile accompanying such a remark is rather becoming. Why not crush these poor ge- niuses 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 taste, and childishness." What a fine decision to render ! These manners tickle their possessors voluptuously; 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 my- self, 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. I 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 280 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 but- tock of the night; " I admire the eye plucked from Gloucester. I have no more intelligence than that comes to. Having recently had the honor to be called " silly" by several distinguished writers and critics, and even by my illustrious friend M. de Lamar- tine, 1 I am determined to justify the epithet. 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 .ZEschylus and Shakespeare ; we have noted a relation, less easily perceptible, 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 be- 1 " The whole biography, sometimes rather puerile, even rather silly, of Bishop Myriel." — Lamartine : Course in Literature {Dis- course lxxxiv.),p. 385. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 28 1 come legendary, — like Solomon, like Caesar, like Mahomet, like Charlemagne, like the Cid, like Joan of Arc, like Napoleon, — has a double con- tinuation, 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 romances 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 Beauti- ful; then Oberon; then Mab. Wonderful fable, which, with a profound meaning, unites the si- dereal and the microscopic, the infinitely great and the infinitely small. And it is thus that the animalcule of Shake- speare is connected with the giant of ^Eschylus. The fairy, — drawn athwart men's noses as they lie asleep, in her chariot covered with the wings of grasshoppers, by eight little atomies harnessed with moonbeams and whipped with a lash of film, — the fairy atom has for ancestor the huge Titan, robber of stars, nailed on the Caucasus, having 282 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 pro- jected by the sun, according to its 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 Tullius 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 his- torian, a powerful orator, an earlier translator of Shakespeare, is in our opinion mistaken when he regrets, or appears to regret, the slight influence of Shakespeare upon the theatre of the nineteenth WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 283 century. We cannot share that regret. An in- fluence of any sort, even that of Shakespeare, could but mar the originality of the literary move- ment of our epoch. " The system of Shakespeare," says this honorable and grave writer, with refer- ence to that movement, " may furnish, it seems to me, the plans after which genius must henceforth work." We have never been of that opinion, and we said so, in anticipation, forty years ago. 1 For us, Shakespeare is a genius, and not a system. On this point we have already explained 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 revert- ing to it. Admire or criticise, but do not recast. It is finished. A distinguished critic, recently deceased, M. Chaudesaigues, lays stress on this reproach. " Shakespeare," says he, " has been revived with- out 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 1 Preface to ' Cromwell.' 284 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. continued nor begun anew. Another age, another art. "The theatre of our day has no more followed Shakespeare 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 de- parture of the other. ^Eschylus is concentration, Shakespeare is diffusion. One deserves applause because he is condensed, and the other because he is dispersed ; to ^Eschylus unity, 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 agi- tation 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.' Extra- ordinary 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 be- tween Greek unity and Shakespearian ubiquity. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 285 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 idiosyncratic 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 of Macchiavelli, nor the art of Calderon, nor the art of Moliere, nor the art of Beaumarchais, 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 under- stood 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 286 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. which, — it is always, foremost and above all, Shakespeare. What more personal than ' Troilus and Cres- sida ' ? 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. Shakespeare is at home in his work. Would you see a despotism? — consider his imagination. What arbitrary determination to dream ! What despotic resolution 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 be- comes disintegrated, and wears away. Leontes in ' The Winter's Tale ' is an Othello who fades out. In ' Cymbeline ' one thinks that Iachimo will be- come an Iago ; 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 pick up children there. Theseus, a duke, espouses Hippolyta, the Amazon. Oberon comes in also. For here it is Shakespeare's will to dream ; elsewhere he thinks. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 287 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 ori- ginality. There is something wild in these mysteri- ous 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-power- ful 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, unneighborly, 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. 288 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. CHAPTER VI. Let us agree, by the way, respecting a designa- tion much used on every hand, — " profanum vul- gus," a word of a poet emphasized by pedants. This " profanum 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." 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 pedantry ; the school is the liter- ary excrescence of the budget; the school is in- tellectual mandarinship governing in the various authorized and official teachings, either of the press or of the state, from the theatrical feuilleton of the prefecture to the biographies and encyclo- paedias duly examined and stamped and hawked about, and made sometimes, by way of refinement, 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 lit- erati, — 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 289 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 par- tisans, all the justice of placemen, 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 labor 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." If anything is great, it is 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, or, 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, wellnigh 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, — 19 20X> WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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, catastrophes, — a war, a pestilence, a royal favorite, a famine. This causes a tremor of but brief duration, the deeps of sor- row being calm, like the deeps of the sea. Despair leaves in the soul a dreadful weight, as of lead. The 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 ap- pears 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 destitution it resembles the pitcher, so insipid or corrupt is what it offers to the thirst of the mind. Mournfur households ! The group of the little ones is wan. This whole mass expires and creeps, not having even the power to love; and perhaps unknown to them, while they bow and submit, from all that vast WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 29 1 unconsciousness in which Right dwells, from the inarticulate murmur of those wretched breaths mingled together proceeds an indescribable, con- fused voice, a mysterious fog of expression, suc- ceeding, syllable by syllable in the darkness, in uttering wonderful words : Future, Humanity, Liberty, Equality, Progress. And the poet lis- tens, 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 flaming 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. Eru- dimini. 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 suffering. The ignorant who enjoy and the ignorant who suffer have equal need of instruction. The law of fraternity is derived from the law of labor. The practice of killing one another has had its day; the hour has come for loving one another. It is to promulgate 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- 292 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 promis- cuous contact with trivial things, to the popular metaphor, to the great 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 flavor 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, vaga- bond, 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 Methymna, 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. Sacrifice 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 every- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 293 thing except justice. Receive its complaint; listen to it touching its faults and touching the faults of others ; hear its confession and its accu- sation. Give it thy ear, thy hand, thy arm, thy heart. Do everything for it, excepting evil. Alas ! it suffers so much, and it knows nothing. Correct 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- 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 be- yond, — it is beautiful that Force should have Right for a master, that Progress should have Courage as a leader, that Intelligence should have Honor as a sovereign, that Conscience should have Duty as a despot, that Civilization 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 yourselves 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? WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 295 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 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. 1 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 1 Perhaps it should be noted that, in the original, existence is made the higher, more absolute mode of being ; e. g-, " Les ani- maux vivent, l'homme existe." — Tr. 296 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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." That dreadful and consoling Ezekiel, the tragic revealer of progress, has all kinds of singular pas- sages 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, whithersoever 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 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 297 I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness." 1 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 repre- sented by numbers decreasing as you rise toward the enlightened professions ; and you arrive at this final result, — goldsmiths and jewellers in the prison, four; ecclesiastics, 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 labor that the men called Socialists have devoted themselves during the last forty years. The author of this book, however insignificant he may be, is one of the oldest in this labor. ' The Last Day of a Condemned Pris- oner' dates from 1828, and 'Claude Gueux ' from 1834. If he claims his place among these philoso- 1 In this passage, as elsewhere, the quotations appear to be made from memory. — Tr. 298 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. phers, 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. Neverthe- less, O Romans, if the Tiber overflows, or if the Nile does not, you cry, ' To . the lions with the Christians ! ' " CHAPTER III. The democratic idea, the new bridge of civiliza- tion, is just now undergoing the formidable trial of overweight. Every other idea would certainly give way under the load that it is made to bear. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 299 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 be- lieved that progress can continue without freedom. We have heard him put forth, probably without in- tention, 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 progress. To attempt, because freedom has inconveniences and even perils, to produce civilization without it, would be like attempting to cultivate the ground without the sun, — which is also a not unexcep- tionable 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 300 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. too warm, exclaimed as he mended his pen: "I am going to write down the sun." Certain social theories, very distinct from Social- ism as we understand it and desire it, have gone astray. Let us discard all that resembles the con- vent, 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 themselves 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 of activities and ener- gies, and of what they call " anarchy," 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 Ancillon, perhaps without suspecting it; for these ingenious theorists, the partisans of the " deed accomplished," have — or fancy they have — dem- ocratic intentions, and speak energetically of " the WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 30 1 principles of '89." Let these involuntary philoso- phers of a possible despotism reflect that to indoc- trinate the masses against freedom, to allow appetite and fatalism to get a hold upon the minds of men, to saturate them with materialism and expose them to the results, — this would be to understand pro- gress in the fashion of that worthy man who ap- plauded 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 his own position is the char- acteristic of an 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 302 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 Quodvultdeus embarks with a smile. There is something beyond satisfying one's ap- petite. 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 de- pression ; 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 re- placed 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 intelligence 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. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 303 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 ; registration was granted or refused by the dictio- nary. The dictionary had a will of its own. Imag- ine the botanist declaring to a vegetable that it does not exist, and Nature timidly offering an in- sect to entomology which refuses it as incorrect ! Imagine astronomy cavilling at the stars ! We recollect having heard an academician, now dead, say before the full Academy that French had been spoken in France only in the seventeenth century, and then for but twelve years, — we no longer re- collect 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 conclave, 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, 304 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. inspiration 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 Cor- neilles, 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 litera- ture, a fine century — is after all, at bottom, noth- ing 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 civiliza- tion, henceforth a grown-up matron, is a popular literature. The year 1832 opened a debate, on the surface literary, at bottom social and human. The time has come to conclude the debate. We conclude it in favor 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 con- science has been the rule of his life. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 305 CHAPTER VI. Macchiavelli cast upon the people a strange glance. To heap the measure, to overflow the cup, to exaggerate 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. Mac- chiavelli 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 his mon- ster 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 Cas- sius. He had perhaps plotted with the Soderini for the deliverance of Florence. Does he remem- ber this? Does he continue? His advice is fol- lowed, 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 him to whom he gives it? One day at Florence, in the garden of Cosmo 306 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Ruccelai, there being present the Duke of Mantua and John de' Medici, who afterward 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 ad- vice coincide more than one would think. Vol- taire with hidden claws is purring at the feet of the King. Voltaire and Macchiavelli are two for- midable, indirect revolutionists, dissimilar in every- thing, 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. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 307 CHAPTER VII. THE progress of man through intellectual ad- vancement : there is no safety but in that. Teach ! learn ! All the revolutions of the future are en- closed and engulfed in this phrase : Gratuitous and obligatory 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 one can foresee the quantity of light that will be evolved by placing the people in commu- nication 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 teaching? 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 intelligent? Do you know, even in the forest, a vibration more pro- 308 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, found? 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 Cour- tille, 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 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 this monster. The tumultuous crowd trembles, blushes, palpitates; its modesty is sur- prising: the crowd is a virgin. No prudery, how- ever; 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 1 The places mentioned are banlieues, or low quarters of Paris, full of drinking-dens. — Tr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 309 enemy at the gates? is the country in danger? Give the word to this populace, and it will re-enact Thermopylae. What has produced this transfor- mation ? 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 rela- tion 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 is due to the people. The more divine the light, the more is it made for this simple soul. We would have in every village a chair from which Homer should be explained to the peasants. 3IO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 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 the ideal ? Wherever it is to be found. The poets, the philosophers, the thinkers are its urns. The ideal is in .