CHAPTER X.

There were some copies more or less complete of Æschylus.

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 scholars, who have left

us some fragments,--among others the comic fragment of "The Argians,"

the Bacchic fragment of the "Edons," the lines cited by Stobæus, and

even the probably apocryphal verses given by Justin the Martyr.

These copies, buried but perhaps not destroyed, have buoyed up the

persistent hope of searchers,--notably of Le Clerc, who published

in Holland, in 1709, the discovered fragments of Menander. Pierre

Pelhestre, of Rouen, the man who had read everything, for which the

worthy Archbishop Péréfixe scolded him, affirmed that the greater

part of the poems of Æschylus 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 Germany, and

the "Institutions" of Quintilian, in an old tower of the Abbey of St.

Gall.

A tradition, not undisputed, would have it that Euergetes II. had

returned to Athens, not the original copy of Æschylus, but a copy,

leaving the fifteen talents as a compensation.

Independently of the story about Euergetes and Omar that we have

related, and which, very true in the whole, is perhaps legendary

in more than one particular, the loss of so many beautiful works of

antiquity is but too well explained by the small number of copies.

Egypt, in particular, transcribed everything on papyrus. The papyrus,

being very dear, became very rare. People were reduced to write 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 the hoofs of an

ass, and this inscription, "The God of the Christians, hoof of an ass,"

in the third century, to make ten manuscripts of Tacitus yearly,--or,

as we should say to-day, to strike off ten copies of his works,--a

Cæsar must needs call himself Tacitus, and believe Tacitus to be his

uncle. And yet Tacitus is nearly lost. Of the twenty-eight years of his

"History of the Cæsars,"--from the year 69 to the year 96,--we have

but one complete year, 69, and a fragment of the year 70. Euergetes

prohibited the exportation of papyrus, which caused parchment to be

invented. The price of papyrus was so high that Firmius the Cyclop,

manufacturer of papyrus in 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 impossible at present.

Printing is the discovery of the inexhaustible. It is perpetual motion

found for social science. From time to time a despot seeks to stop or

to slacken it, and he is worn away by the friction. The impossibility

to shackle thought, the impossibility to stop progress, the book

imperishable,--such is the result of printing. Before printing,

civilization was subject to losses of substance; the essential signs

of progress, proceeding from such a philosopher or such a poet, were

all at once lacking: 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 in the present day. Henceforth the unseizable reigns. No one

could serve a writ upon thought and take up its body. It has no longer

a 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 a soul. Kill now this

immortal! Thanks to Gutenberg, the copy is no longer exhaustible.

Every copy is a root, and has in itself its own possible regeneration

in thousands of editions; the unit is pregnant with the innumerable.

This prodigy has saved universal intelligence. Gutenberg, 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 permanent fellow-workman in

the great work of civilization. Nothing is done without him. He has

marked the transition of the man-slave to the free-man. Try and deprive

civilization of him, you become Egypt. The decrease of the liberty of

the press is enough to diminish the stature of a people.

One of the great features in this deliverance of man by printing,

is, let us insist on it, the indefinite preservation of poets and

philosophers. Gutenberg is like the second father of the creations of

the mind. Before him, yes, it was possible for a _chef-d'œuvre_ to die.

Greece and Rome have left--mournful thing to say--vast ruins of books.

A whole facade of the human mind half crumbled, that is antiquity. Here

the ruin of an epic poem, there a tragedy dismantled; great verses

effaced, buried, and disfigured; pediments of ideas almost entirely

fallen; geniuses truncated like columns; palaces of thought without

ceiling and door; bleached bones of poems; a death's-head which has

been a strophe; immortality in ruins. Fearful nightmare! Oblivion,

dark spider, hangs its web between the drama of Æschylus and the

history of Tacitus.

Where is Æschylus? In pieces everywhere. Æschylus is scattered in

twenty texts. His ruins must be sought in innumerable different places.

Athenæus gives the dedication "To Time," Macrobius the fragment of

"Etna" and the homage to the Palic gods, Pausanias the epitaph. The

biographer is anonymous; Goltzius and Meursius give the titles of the

lost pieces.

We know from Cicero, in the "Disputationes Tusculanæ," that Æschylus

was a Pythagorean; from Herodotus, that he fought bravely at Marathon;

from Diodorus of Sicily, that his brother Amynias behaved valiantly at

Platæa; from Justin, that his brother Cynegyrus was heroic at Salamis.

We know by the didascalies that "The Persians" were represented under

the archon Meno, "The Seven Chiefs before Thebes" under the archon

Theagenides, and the "Orestias" under the archon Philocles; we know

from Aristotle that Æschylus was the first to venture to make two

personages speak at a time 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 tumbled down under the pressure

of the crowd; from Ælian, that he committed blasphemy; from Plutarch,

that he was exiled; from Valerius Maximus, that an eagle killed him by

letting a tortoise fall on his head; from Quintilian, that his plays

were re-cast; from Fabricius, that his sons are accused of this crime

of laze-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 East and replace it by the North;

take away Greece and put England, take away India and put Germany, that

other immense mother, _All-men_ (Allemagne); take away Pericles and

put Elizabeth; take away the Parthenon and put the Tower of London;

take away the plebs and put the mob; take away the fatality and put

the melancholy; take away the gorgon and put the witch; take away

the eagle and put the cloud; take away the sun and put on the heath,

shuddering in the evening wind, the livid light of the moon, and you

have Shakespeare.

Given the dynasty of men of genius, the originality of each being

absolutely reserved, the poet of the Carlovingian formation being the

natural successor of the poet of the Jupiterian formation and the

gothic mist of the antique mystery, Shakespeare is Æschylus II.

There remains the right of the French Revolution, creator of the third

world, to be represented in Art. Art is an immense gaping chasm, ready

to receive all that is within possibility.

BOOK V.

THE SOULS.

CHAPTER I.

The production of souls is the secret of the unfathomable depth. The

innate, what a shadow! What is that concentration of the unknown

which takes place in the darkness, and whence abruptly bursts forth

that light, a genius? What is the law of these events, O Love? The

human heart does its work on earth, and that moves the great deep.

What is that incomprehensible meeting of material sublimation and

moral sublimation in the atom, indivisible if looked at from life,

incorruptible if looked at from death? The atom, what a marvel! No

dimension, no extent, nor height, nor width, nor thickness, independent

of every possible measure, and yet, everything in this nothing!

For algebra, the geometrical point. For philosophy, a soul. As a

geometrical point, the basis of science; as a soul, the basis of faith.

Such is the atom. Two urns, the sexes, imbibe life from the infinite;

and the spilling of one into the other produces the being. This is the

normal condition of all, animal as well as 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 invokes it, incorporates it, and reduces it to a human

state? What part do the flesh and the blood take in this prodigy?

Why do certain terrestrial sparks seek certain celestial molecules?

Where do they plunge, those sparks? Where do they go? How do they

manage? What is this gift of man to set fire to the unknown? This

mine, the infinite, this extraction, a genius, what more wonderful!

Whence does that spring up? Why, at a given moment, this one and not

that one? Here, as everywhere, the incalculable law of affinities

appears and escapes. One gets a glimpse, but sees not. O forger of the

unfathomable, where art thou?

Qualities the most diverse, the most complex, the most opposed in

appearance, enter into the composition of souls. The contraries do

not exclude each other,--far from that; they complete each other.

More than one prophet contains a scholiast; more than one magian

is a philologist. Inspiration knows its own trade. Every poet is a

critic: witness that excellent piece of criticism on the theatre

that Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Hamlet. A visionary mind may

be at the same time precise,--like Dante, who writes a book on

rhetoric, and a grammar. A precise mind may be at the same time

visionary,--like Newton, who comments on the Apocalypse; like Leibnitz,

who demonstrates, _nova inventa logica_, the Holy Trinity. Dante knows

the distinction between the three sorts of words, _parola piana,

parola sdrucciola, parola tronca_; he knows that the _piana_ gives a

trochee, the _sdrucciola_ a dactyl, and the _tronca_ an iambus. Newton

is perfectly sure that the Pope is the Antichrist. Dante combines and

calculates; Newton dreams.

No law is to be grasped in that obscurity. No system is possible. The

currents of adhesions and of cohesions cross each other pell-mell. At

times one imagines that he detects the phenomenon of the transmission

of the idea, and fancies that he distinctly sees a hand taking the

light from him who is departing, to give it to him who arrives. 1642,

for example, is a strange year. Galileo dies, Newton is born, in that

year. Good. It is a thread; try and 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, Shakespeare and Cervantes die. Why are these two

flames extinguished at the same moment? No apparent logic. A whirlwind

in the night.

Enigmas constantly. Why does Commodus proceed from Marcus Aurelius?

These problems beset in the desert Jerome, that man of the caves,

that Isaiah of the New Testament He interrupted his deep thoughts on

eternity, and his attention to the trumpet of the archangel, in order

to meditate on the soul of some Pagan in whom he felt interested. He

calculated the age of Persius, connecting that research with some

obscure chance of possible salvation for that poet, dear to the

cenobite on account of his strictness; and nothing is so surprising as

to see this wild thinker, half naked on his straw, like Job, dispute on

this question, so frivolous in appearance, of the birth of a man, with

Rufinus and Theophilus of Alexandria,--Rufinus observing to him that

he is mistaken in his calculations, and that Persius having been born

in December under the consulship of Fabius Persicus and Vitellius, and

having died in November, 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. The mystery thus

attracts deep thinkers.

These calculations, almost wild, of Jerome, or other similar ones, 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, while fluttering about in the circular well, 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 clearness as a fear. He keeps on his way. He is the bird

under the vault. It is terrible. No matter, the dreamer goes on.

To dream is to think here and there,--_passim._ What means the birth

of Euripides during that battle of Salamis where Sophocles, a youth,

prays, and where Æschylus, in his manhood, fights? What means the

birth of Alexander in the night which saw the burning of the temple

of Ephesus? What tie between that temple and that man? Is it the

conquering and radiant spirit of Europe which, destroyed under the

form of the _chef-d'œuvre_, revives under the form of the hero? For

do not forget that Ctesiphon is the Greek architect of the temple of

Ephesus. We have mentioned just now the simultaneous disappearance of

Shakespeare and Cervantes. Here is another case not less surprising.

The day when Diogenes died at Corinth, Alexander died at Babylon.

These two cynics, the one of the tub, the other of the sword, depart

together; and Diogenes, longing to enjoy the immense unknown radiance,

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 this analogy between Hercules and Jesus which

struck the Fathers of the Church, which made Sorel indignant, but

edified Duperron, and which makes Alcides a kind of material mirror

of Christ? Is there not a community of souls, and, unknown to them, a

communication between the Greek legislator and the Hebrew legislator,

creating at the same moment, without knowing each other, and

without their suspecting the existence of each other, the first the

Areopagus, the second the Sanhedrim? Strange resemblance between the

jubilee of Moses and the jubilee of Lycurgus! What are these double

paternities,--paternity of the body, paternity of the soul, like that

of David for Solomon? Giddy heights, steeps, precipices.

He who looks too long into this sacred horror feels immensity racking

his brain. What does the sounding-line give you when thrown into

that mystery? What do you see? Conjectures quiver, doctrines shake,

hypotheses float; all the human philosophy vacillates before the

mournful blast rising from that chasm.

The expanse of the possible is, so to speak, under your eyes. The

dream that you have in yourself, you discover it beyond yourself. All

is indistinct. Confused white shadows are moving. Are they souls? One

catches, in the depths below, a glimpse of vague archangels passing

along; will they be men at some future day? Holding your head between

your hands, you strive to see and to know. You are at the window

looking 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 is up to the present time nearly all our

science, experience gropes, observation lies in wait, supposition moves

about If you gaze at it very often, you become _vates._ Vast religious

meditation takes possession of you.

Every man has in him his Patmos. He is free to go or not to go on that

frightful promontory of thought from which darkness is seen. 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 the inward peace it is evidently the best.

If he ascends to that peak, he is caught. The profound waves of the

marvellous have appeared to him. No one sees with impunity that

ocean. Henceforth he will be the thinker enlarged, magnified, but

floating,--that is to say, the dreamer. He will partake of the poet and

of the prophet A certain quantity of him now belongs to darkness. The

boundless enters into his life, into his conscience, into his virtue,

into his philosophy. He becomes extraordinary in the eyes of other men,

for his measure is different from theirs. He has duties which they have

not. He lives in a sort of vague prayer, attaching himself, strangely

enough, to an indefinite 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 tie

up his soul again. 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 life, that entrance

into the forbidden, that effort to handle the impalpable and to see the

invisible; he returns to them, he leans and bends over them; he takes

one step forward, then two,--and thus it is that one penetrates into

the impenetrable; and thus it is that one plunges into the boundless

chasms of infinite meditation.

He who walks down them is a Kant; he who falls down them is a

Swedenborg.

To keep one's own free will in that dilatation, 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 mingled with shadows. The huge lineaments of truth seem

at times to appear for one moment, then go back, and are lost in the

absolute. Of all those questions, that among them all which besets the

intellect, that among them all which rends the heart, is the question

of the soul.

Does the soul exist? Question the first. The persistency of the self is

the thirst of man. Without the persistent self, all creation is for him

but an immense _cui bono?_ Listen to the astounding affirmation which

bursts forth from all consciences. The whole sum of God that there is

on the earth, within all men, condenses 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 in the

horizon? The great souls are seen as well as the great mountains. Then,

they exist. But here the interrogation presses further; interrogation

is anxiety: 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 Æschylus, this one Plato, this one Ezekiel, this one

Macchabœus, 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 Jean Huss,

this one Descartes, this one Vincent de Paul, this one Piranesi, this

one Washington, this one Beethoven, this one Garibaldi, this one John

Brown,--all these atoms, souls having a sublime function among men,

have they seen other worlds, and do they bring on earth the essence

of those worlds? The master souls, the leading intellects, who sends

them? Who determines their appearance? 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 atom

conjunction, 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 too little of

the one the too much of the other; to increase here liberty, there

science, there the ideal; to communicate to the inferiors patterns of

superior beauty; to exchange the effluvia; to bring the central fire to

the planet; to harmonize the various worlds of the same system; to urge

forward those which are behind; to mix the creations,--does not that

mysterious function exist?

Is it not fulfilled, unknown to them, by certain elects, who,

momentarily and during their earthly transit, partly ignore themselves?

Is not the function of such or such atom, divine motive power called

soul, to give movement to a solar man among earthly men? Since the

floral atom exists, why should not the stellary atom exist? That

solar man will be, in turn, the savant, the seer, the calculator, the

thaumaturge, 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 volutation of civilization will be

their task; that team of minds will drag the huge chariot. One being

unyoked, the others will start again. Each completion of a century

will be one stage on the journey. Never any solution of continuity.

That which one mind will begin, another mind will finish, soldering

phenomenon to phenomenon, sometimes without suspecting that welding

process. To each revolution in the fact will correspond an adequate

revolution in the ideas, 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, sometimes will adhere

by unexpected parts; and in these adherences will burst forth the

imperious logic of progress. Orpheus, Bouddha, Confucius, Zoroaster,

Pythagoras, Moses, Manou, Mahomet, with many more, will be the links

of the same chain. A Gutenberg discovering the method for the sowing

of civilization, and the means for the ubiquity of thought, will

be followed by a Christopher Columbus discovering a new field. A

Christopher Columbus discovering a world will be followed by a Luther

discovering a liberty. After Luther, innovator in the dogma, will come

Shakespeare, innovator in art. One genius completes the other.

But not in the same region. The astronomer follows the philosopher; the

legislator is the executor of the poet's wishes; the fighting liberator

lends his assistance to the thinking liberator; the poet corroborates

the statesman. Newton is the appendix to Bacon; Danton originates from

Diderot; Milton confirms Cromwell; Byron supports Botzaris; Æschylus,

before him, has assisted Miltiades. The work is mysterious even for

the very men who perform it. Some are conscious of it, others not. At

great distances, at intervals of centuries, the correlations manifest

themselves, wonderful. The modification in human manners, begun by the

religious revealer, will be completed by the philosophical reasoner,

so that Voltaire follows up Jesus. Their work agrees and coincides. If

this concordance rested with them, both would resist, perhaps,--the

one, the divine man, indignant in his martyrdom, the other, the human

man, humiliated in his irony; but that is so. Some one who is very high

orders it in that way.

Yes, let us meditate on these vast obscurities. The characteristic of

revery is to gaze at darkness so intently that it brings light out of

it.

Humanity developing itself from the interior to the exterior is,

properly speaking, civilization. Human intelligence becomes radiance,

and step by step, wins, conquers, and humanizes matter. Sublime

domestication! This labour has phases; and each of these phases,

marking an age in progress, is opened or closed by one of those beings

called geniuses. These missionary spirits, these legates of God, do

they not carry in them a sort of partial solution of this 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 necessary. Such is

the Messiah; such is Genius.

Now let us return,--for all questions which append to mystery form

the circle, and one cannot get out of it,--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 imbued with a ray from the unknown? In

what depths are such souls prepared? How long do they wait? What medium

do they traverse? What is the germination which precedes the hatching?

What is the mystery of the ante-birth? Where was this atom? It seems as

if it was the point of intersection of all the forces. How come all the

powers to converge and tie themselves into an indivisible unity in this

sovereign intelligence? Who has bred this eagle? The incubation of the

fathomless on genius, what an enigma! These lofty souls, momentarily

belonging to earth, have they not seen something else? Is it for that

reason that they arrive here with so many intuitions? Some of them seem

full of the dream of a previous world. Is it thence that comes to them

the scared wildness that they sometimes have? Is it that which inspires

them with wonderful words? Is it that which gives them strange

agitations? Is it thence that they derive the hallucination which makes

them, so to speak, see and touch imaginary things and beings? Moses

had his fiery thicket; Socrates his familiar demon; Mahomet his dove;

Luther his goblin playing with his pen, and to whom he would say, "Be

still, there!" Pascal his gaping chasm that he hid with a screen.

Many of those majestic souls are evidently conscious of a mission. They

act at times as if they knew. They seem to have a confused certainty.

They have it. They have it for the mysterious _ensemble._ They have it

also for the detail. Jean Huss dying predicts Luther. He exclaims, "You

burn the goose [Huss], but the swan will come." Who sends these souls?

Who creates them? What is the law of their formation anterior and

superior to life? Who provides them with force, patience, fecundation,

will, passion? From what urn of goodness have they drawn sternness?

In what region of the lightnings have they culled love? Each of these

great newly arrived souls renews philosophy or art or science or

poetry, and re-makes these worlds after its own image. They are as

though impregnated with creation. At times a truth emanates from these

souls which lights up the questions on which it falls. Some of these

souls are like a star from which light would drip. From what wonderful

source, then, do they proceed, that they are all different? Not one

originates from the other, and yet they have this in common, that they

all bring the infinite. Incommensurable and insoluble questions. That

does not stop the good pedants and the clever men from bridling up,

and saying, while pointing with the finger at the sidereal group of

geniuses on the heights of civilization: "You will have no more men

such as 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. We must make up our

minds to it We shall have no more men of genius."--Ah, you have seen

the bottom of the unfathomable, you!

CHAPTER II

No, Thou art not worn out. Thou hast not before thee the bourn, the

limit, the term, the frontier. Thou has 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 boundless.

The "Thou shalt not go farther," is spoken _by_ thee, and it is not

said _of_ thee. No, thou windest not a skein which diminishes, and the

thread of which breaks; no, thou stoppest not short; no, thy quantity

decreaseth not; no, thy thickness becometh not thinner; no, thy faculty

miscarrieth not; no, it is not true that they begin to perceive in

thy all-powerfulness that transparence which announces the end, and

to get a glimpse behind thee of another thing besides thee. Another

thing! And what then? The obstacle. The obstacle to whom? The obstacle

to creation, the obstacle to the everlasting, the obstacle to the

necessary! What a dream!

When thou hearest men say, "This is as far as God advances,--do not

ask 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,--he is empty. God does not begin again; he could do that

once, he cannot do it twice; he has spent himself altogether in this

man,--enough of God does not remain to make a similar man;"--when

thou hearest them say such things, if thou wast a man like them, thou

wouldst smile in thy terrible depth; but thou art not in a terrible

depth, and being goodness, thou hast no smile. The smile is but a

passing wrinkle, unknown to the absolute.

Thou struck by a powerless chill; thou to leave off; thou to break

down; thou to say "Halt!" Never. Thou shouldst be compelled to take

breath after having created a man! No; whoever that man may be,

thou art God. If this weak swarm of living beings, in presence of

the unknown, must feel wonder and fear at something, it is not at

the possibility of seeing the germ-seed dry up and the power of

procreation become 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, not less marvellous,

without disturbing the majestic tranquillity of the Being. This tumult

is harmony.

The huge concentric waves of universal life are boundless. The

starry sky that we study is but a partial apparition. We steal from

the network of the Being but some links. The complication of the

phenomenon, of which a glimpse can be caught, beyond our senses, only

by contemplation and ecstasy, makes the mind giddy. The thinker who

reaches so far, is, for other men, only a visionary. The necessary

entanglement of the perceptible and of the imperceptible strikes

the philosopher with stupor. This plenitude is required by thy

all-powerfulness, which does not admit any blank. The permeation of

universes into universes makes part of thy infinitude. Here we extend

the word universe to an order of facts that no astronomer can reach.

In the Cosmos that the vision spies, and which escapes our organs of

flesh, the spheres enter into the spheres without deforming each other,

the density of creations being different; so that, according to every

appearance, with our world is amalgamated, in some inexplicable way,

another world invisible to us, as we are invisible to it.

And thou, centre and place of all things, as though thou, the Being,

couldst be exhausted! that the absolute serenities could, at certain

moments, fear the want of means on the part of the Infinite! that there

would come an hour when thou couldst no longer supply humanity with the

lights which it requires! that mechanically unwearied, thou couldst be

worn out in the intellectual and moral order! that it would be proper

to say, "God is extinguished on this side!" No! no! no! O Father!

Phidias created does not stop you from making Michael Angelo. Michael

Angelo completed, there still remains to thee the material for

Rembrandt. A Dante does not tire thee. Thou art no more exhausted

by a Homer than by a star. The auroras by the side of auroras, the

indefinite renewing of meteors, the worlds above the worlds, the

wonderful passage of these incandescent stars called comets, the

geniuses and again the geniuses, Orpheus, then Moses, then Isaiah, then

Æschylus, then Lucretius, then Tacitus, then Juvenal, then Cervantes

and Rabelais, then Shakespeare, then Molière, then Voltaire, those who

have been and those who will be,--that does not weary thee. Swarm of

constellations! there is room in thy immensity.

PART II.-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

instinctive." Johnson confirms the verdict: "His tragedy is the result

of industry, and his comedy the result of instinct." After Forbes and

Johnson had contested his claim to drama, Green contested his claim

to originality. Shakespeare is "a plagiarist;" Shakespeare is "a

copyist;" Shakespeare "has invented nothing;" he is "a crow adorned

with the plumes of others;" he pilfers Æschylus, Boccaccio, Bandello,

Holinshed, Belleforest, Benoist de St. Maur; he pilfers Layamon, Robert

of Gloucester, Robert of Wace, Peter of Langtoft, Robert Manning,

John de Mandeville, Sackville, Spenser; he steals the "Arcadia" of

Sidney; he steals the anonymous work called the "True Chronicle of King

Leir;" he steals from Rowley in "The Troublesome Reign of King John"

(1591), the character of the bastard Faulconbridge. Shakespeare pilfers

Thomas Greene; Shakespeare pilfers Dekker and Chettle. Hamlet is not

his;--Othello is not his; Timon of Athens is not his, nothing is

his. As for Green, Shakespeare is for him not only "a blower of blank

verses," a "shakescene," a _Johannes factotum_ (allusion to his former

position as call-boy and supernumerary); Shakespeare is a wild beast.

Crow no longer suffices; Shakespeare is promoted to a tiger. Here is

the text: "Tyger's heart wrapt in a player's hyde."[1]

Thomas Rhymer 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 Rhymer condescends to give up joking, and to take

Shakespeare in earnest:--

"What edifying and useful impression can the audience

receive from such poetry? To what can this poetry serve,

unless it is to mislead our good sense, to throw our

thoughts into disorder, to trouble our brain, to pervert our

instincts, to crack our imaginations, to corrupt our taste,

and to fill our heads with vanity, confusion, clatter, and

nonsense?"

This was printed eighty 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, play on words, puns; improbability, extravagance, absurdity;

obscenity; puerility; bombast; emphasis, exaggeration; false glitter,

pathos; far-fetched ideas, affected style; abuse of contrast and

metaphor; subtilty; immorality; writing for the mob; pandering to the

_canaille_; delighting in the horrible; want of grace; want of charm;

overreaching his aim; having too much wit; having no wit; overdoing his

works.

"This Shakespeare is a coarse and savage mind," says Lord Shaftesbury.

Dryden adds, "Shakespeare is unintelligible." Mrs. Lennox gives

Shakespeare this slap: "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

protégé, relates this. "I recollect that the comedians mentioned to the

honour of Shakespeare, that in his writings he never erased a line.

I answered, 'Would to God he had erased a thousand.'"[2] This wish,

moreover, was granted by the worthy publishers of 1623,--Blount and

Jaggard. They struck out of Hamlet alone two hundred lines; they cut

out two hundred and twenty lines of "King Lear." Garrick played at

Drury Lane only the "King Lear" of Nahum Tate. Listen again to Rhymer:

"'Othello' is a sanguinary farce without wit." Johnson adds, "'Julius

Cæsar,' 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 seventeenth century, Forbes, repeated by a critic of

the nineteenth, "the absurdity of such a spectacle." Samuel Foote, the

author of the "Young Hypocrite," makes this declaration: "The comic in

Shakespeare is too heavy, and does not make one laugh. It is buffoonery

without wit." At last, Pope, in 1725, finds a reason why Shakespeare

wrote his dramas, and exclaims, "One must eat!"

After these words of Pope, one cannot understand with what object

Voltaire, aghast about Shakespeare, writes: "Shakespeare whom the

English take for a Sophocles, 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 the jokes

usual to men of their profession." And, concluding, he qualifies thus

the whole scene,--"these follies." He characterizes Shakespeare's

pieces by this word, "monstrous farces called tragedies," and completes

the judgment 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 across the bed, and cries to Marmontel, "Your

Shakespeare is a barbarian!" "He is not my Shakespeare at all," replies

Marmontel.

Shakespeare was an occasion for Voltaire to show his skill at the

target Voltaire missed him rarely. Voltaire shot at Shakespeare as

the peasants shoot at the goose. It was Voltaire who had commenced

in France the attack against that barbarian. He nicknamed him the

Saint Christopher of Tragic Poets. He said to Madame de Graffigny,

"Shakespeare pour rire." He said to Cardinal de Bernis, "Compose pretty

verses; deliver us, monsignor, from plagues, witches, the school of

the King of Prussia, the Bull Unigenitus, the constitutionalists and

the convulsionists, and from that ninny Shakespeare! _Libera nos,

Domine_," The attitude of Fréron toward Voltaire has, in the eyes of

posterity, as an attenuating circumstance, the attitude of Voltaire

toward Shakespeare. Nevertheless, 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. Johnson

confesses the ignorance and vulgarity of Shakespeare. Frederic II.

comes in for a word also. He writes to Voltaire _à propos_ of "Julius

Cæsar:" "You have done well in re-casting, according to principles,

the crude piece of that Englishman." Behold, then, where Shakespeare

is in the last century. Voltaire insults him. La Harpe protects him:

"Shakespeare himself, coarse as he was, was not without reading and

knowledge."[3]

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.

In 1804 the author of one of those idiotic _Biographies Universelles_,

in which they contrive to relate the history of Calas without

pronouncing the name of Voltaire, and to which governments, knowing

what they are about, grant readily their patronage and subsidies, a

certain Delandine feels himself called upon to be a judge, and to

pass sentence on Shakespeare; and after having said that "Shakespear,

which is pronounced Chekspir," had, in his youth, "stolen the deer of

a nobleman," he adds: "Nature had brought together in the head of this

poet the highest greatness we can imagine, with the lowest coarseness,

without wit." Lately, we read the following words, written a short time

ago by an eminent dolt who is living: "Second-rate authors and inferior

poets, such as Shakespeare," etc.

[Footnote 1: A Groatsworth of Wit. 1592.]

[Footnote 2: Works, vol IX. p. 175, Gifford's edition.]

[Footnote 3: La Harpe: _Introduction au Cours de Littérature._]

CHAPTER II.

Poet must at the same time, and necessarily, be a historian and a

philosopher. Herodotus and Thales are included in Homer. Shakespeare,

likewise, is this triple man. He is, besides, the painter, and what

a painter!--the colossal painter. 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 burst

out from their brain, and which go on blazing forever on the gloomy

human wall. These phantoms have life. To exist as much as Achilles,

would be the ambition of Alexander. Shakespeare has tragedy, comedy,

fairy-land, hymn, farce, grand divine laughter, terror and horror, and,

to say all in one word, the drama. He touches the two poles. He belongs

to Olympus and to the travelling booth. No possibility fails him.

When he grasps you, you are subdued. Do not expect from him any pity.

His cruelty is pathetic. He shows you a mother,--Constance, mother

of Arthur; and when he has brought you to that point of tenderness

that your heart is as her heart, he kills her child. He goes farther

in horror even than history, which is difficult. He does not content

himself with killing Rutland and driving York to despair; he dips in

the blood of the son the handkerchief with which he wipes the eyes of

the father. He causes elegy to be choked by the drama, Desdemona by

Othello. No attenuation in 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 glides toward the terrible.

Shakespeare, Æschylus, Dante, are great streams of human emotion

pouring from the depth of their cave the um of tears.

The poet is only limited by his aim; he considers nothing but the idea

to be worked out; he does not recognize any other sovereignty, any

other necessity but the idea; for, art emanating from the absolute,

in art, as in the absolute, the end justifies the means. This is, it

may be said parenthetically, one of those deviations from the ordinary

terrestrial law which make lofty 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, astounds, strikes, then exalts or depresses,

often in inverse ratio to what you expected, diving into your soul

through surprise. Now, consider. Art has, like the Infinite, a Because

superior to all the _Why's._ Go and ask the wherefore of a tempest

from the ocean, that great lyric. What seems to you odious or absurd

has an inner reason for existing. Ask of Job why he scrapes the pus on

his ulcer with a bit of glass, and of Dante why he sews with a thread

of iron the eyelids of the larvas in purgatory, making the stitches

trickle with fearful tears![1] Job continues to clean his sore with his

broken glass and wipes it on his dungheap, and Dante goes on his way.

The same with Shakespeare.

His sovereign horrors reign, and force themselves upon you. He mingles

with them, when he chooses, the charm, that august charm of the

powerful, as superior to feeble sweetness, to slender attraction, to

the charm of Ovid or of Tibullus, as the Venus of Milo to the Venus

de Medici. The things of the unknown; the unfathomable metaphysical

problems; the enigmas of the soul and of Nature, which is also a

soul; the far-off intuitions of the eventual included in destiny;

the amalgams of thought and event,--can be translated into delicate

figures, and fill poetry with mysterious and exquisite types, the more

delightful that they are rather sorrowful, somewhat invisible, and at

the same time very real, anxious concerning the shadow which is behind

them, and yet trying to please you. Profound grace does exist.

Prettiness combined with greatness is possible (it is found in Homer;

Astyanax is a type of it); but the profound grace of which we speak

is something more than this epic delicacy. It is linked to a certain

amount of agitation, and means the infinite without expressing it. It

is a kind of light and shade radiance. The modern men of genius alone

have that depth in the smile which shows elegance and depth at the same

time.

Shakespeare possesses this grace, which is the very opposite to the

unhealthy grace, although it resembles it, emanating as it does

likewise from the grave.

Sorrow,--the great sorrow of the drama, which is nothing else but human

constitution carried into art,--envelops this grace and this horror.

Hamlet, doubt, is at the centre of his work; and at the two

extremities, love,--Romeo and Othello, all the heart. There is light

in the folds of the shroud of Juliet; yet nothing but darkness in the

winding-sheet of Ophelia disdained and of Desdemona suspected. These

two innocents, to whom love has broken faith, cannot be consoled.

Desdemona sings the song of the willow under which the water bears

Ophelia away. 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 chant of the calumniated who is about to

die, floats the dishevelled shadow of the drowned one.

Shakespeare in philosophy goes at times deeper than Homer. Beyond Priam

there is Lear; to weep at ingratitude is worse than weeping at death.

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 better 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, lowness. Sancho

Panza, in combination with the ass, is embodied with ignorance.

Falstaff-glutton, poltroon, savage, obscene, human face and stomach,

with the lower parts of the brute--walks on the four feet of turpitude;

Falstaff is the centaur man and pig.

Shakespeare is, above all, an 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 goes and sinks

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 calculation of

probabilities, in the infinitesimal calculus, in the calculations

of sonorous waves, in the application of algebra to geometry, the

imagination is the co-efficient of calculation, and mathematics

becomes poetry. I have no faith in the science of stupid learned men.

The poet philosophizes because he imagines. That is why Shakespeare

has that sovereign management of reality which enables him to have his

way with it; and his very whims are varieties of the true,--varieties

which deserve meditation. Does not destiny resemble a constant whim?

Nothing more incoherent in appearance, nothing less connected, nothing

worse as deduction. Why crown this monster, John? Why kill that child,

Arthur? Why have Joan of Arc burned? Why Monk triumphant? Why Louis XV.

happy? Why Louis XVI. punished? Let the logic 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, nearly animals, pass clumsily; larvas--women

perhaps, perhaps smoke--float about; souls, libellulas of darkness,

flies of the twilight, quiver among all these 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 arabesque

grows, increases, knots, exfoliates, multiplies, becomes green, blooms,

branches, and creeps around every dream. The arabesque is endless; it

has a strange power of extension and aggrandizement; it fills horizons,

and opens up others; it intercepts the luminous deeds by innumerable

intersections; and, if you mix the human figure with these entangled

branches, the _ensemble_ makes you giddy; it is striking. Behind

the arabesque, and through its openings, all philosophy can be seen;

vegetation lives; man becomes pantheist; a combination of infinite

takes place in the finite; and before such work, in which are found

the impossible and the true, the human soul trembles with an emotion

obscure and yet supreme.

For all this, the edifice ought not to be overrun by vegetation, nor

the drama by arabesque.

One of the characteristics of genius is the singular union of faculties

the most distant. To draw an astragal like Ariosto, then to dive into

souls like Pascal,--such is the poet Man's inner conscience belongs

to Shakespeare; he surprises you with it constantly. He extracts

from conscience every unforeseen contingence that it contains. Few

poets surpass him in this psychical research. Many of the strangest

peculiarities of the human mind are indicated by him. He skilfully

makes us feel the simplicity of the metaphysical fact under the

complication of the dramatic fact. That which the human creature does

not acknowledge inwardly, 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 virgins and the heart of murderers;

for the soul of Juliet and the soul of Macbeth. The innocent fears and

longs for love, just as the wicked one for ambition. Perilous kisses

given on the sly to the phantom, smiling here, fierce there.

To all these prodigalities, analysis, synthesis, creation in flesh

and bone, revery, fancy, science, metaphysics, add history,--here the

history of historians, there the history of the tale; 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 intellectual tyrant Cæsar, to the bestial tyrant Henry VIII.; of

the carnivorous, from the lion down to the usurer. One may say to

Shylock: "Well bitten, Jew!" And, in the background of this wonderful

drama, on the desert heath, in the twilight, in order to promise crowns

to murderers, three black outlines appear, in which Hesiod, through

the vista of ages, perhaps recognizes the Parcæ. Inordinate force,

exquisite charm, epic ferocity, pity, creative faculty, gayety (that

lofty gayety unintelligible to narrow understandings), sarcasm (the

cutting lash for the wicked), star-like greatness, microscopic tenuity,

boundless poetry, which has a zenith and a nadir; the _ensemble_ vast,

the detail profound,--nothing is wanting in this mind. One feels, on

approaching the work of this man, the powerful wind which would burst

forth from the opening of a whole world. The radiancy of genius on

every side,--that is Shakespeare. "Totus in antithesi," says Jonathan

Forbes.

[Footnote 1:

And as the sun does not reach the blind, so the spirits of

which I was just speaking have not the gift of heavenly

light. An iron wire pierces and fastens together their

eyelids, as it is done to the wild hawk in order to tame it.

--_Purgatory, chap. XIII._]

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, chemistry searches. As for genius, it exists. It is

sufficient to read one verse of Æschylus 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 rhetoricians call antithesis,--that is to say, the

sovereign faculty of seeing the two sides of things.

I dislike Ovid, that proscribed coward, that licker of bloody hands,

that fawning cur of exile, that far-away flatterer disdained by the

tyrant, and I hate the _bel esprit_ of which Ovid is full; but I do not

confound that _bel esprit_ with the powerful antithesis of Shakespeare.

Complete minds having everything, Shakespeare contains Gongora as

Michael Angelo contains Bernini; and there are on that subject

ready-made sentences: "Michael Angelo is a mannerist, Shakespeare is

antithetical." These are the formulas of the school; but it is the

great question of contrast in art seen by the small side.

_Totus in antithesi._ Shakespeare is all in antithesis. Certainly, it

is not very just to see all the man, and such a man, in one of his

qualities. But, this reserve being made, let us observe that this

saying, _Totus in antithesi_, which pretends to be a criticism, might

be simply a statement. 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 bifronted. And this

antithesis, whence comes the antiphrasis, is found in all the habits

of man; it is in fable, in history, in philosophy, in language. Are

you the Furies, they call you Eumenides,--the Charming; do you kill

your brothers, you are called Philadelphus; kill your father, they

will call you Philopator; be a great general, they will call you _le

petit caporal._ The antithesis of Shakespeare is universal antithesis,

always and everywhere; it is the ubiquity of antinomy,--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, the objective and subjective, marvel and miracle,

type and monster, soul and shadow. It is from this sombre palpable

difference, from this endless ebb and flow, from this perpetual yes

and no, from this irreducible opposition, from this immense antagonism

ever existing, that Rembrandt obtains his chiaroscuro and Piranesi his

vertiginous height.

Before removing this antithesis from art, commence 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 the panegyric

of a writer. A certain school, called "serious," has in our days

hoisted this programme of poetry: sobriety. It seems that the only

question should be to preserve literature from indigestion. Formerly,

the motto was "Prolificness and power;" to-day it is "tisane." You

are in the resplendent garden of the Muses, where those divine

blossoms of the mind that the Greeks called "tropes" blow in riot and

luxuriance on every branch; everywhere the ideal image, everywhere the

thought-flower, everywhere fruits, metaphors, golden apples, perfumes,

colours, rays, strophes, wonders; touch nothing, be discreet. Whoever

gathers nothing there proves himself a true poet. Be of the temperance

society. A good critical book is a treatise on the dangers of drinking.

Do you wish to compose the Iliad, put yourself on diet Ah, thou mayest

well open thy eyes wide, old Rabelais!

Lyricism is heady, the beautiful intoxicates, greatness inebriates,

the ideal causes giddiness; whoever proceeds from it is no longer

in his right senses; when you have walked among the stars, you are

capable of refusing a prefecture; you are no longer a sensible being;

they might offer you a seat in the senate of Domitian and you would

refuse it; you no longer give to Cæsar what is due to Cæsar; you have

reached that point of mental alienation that you will not even salute

the Lord Incitatus, consul and horse. See what is the result of your

having drunk 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 geld

yourself is better.

Pass your life in restraining yourself.

Observe sobriety, decency, respect for authority, an irreproachable

toilet. There is no poetry unless it be fashionably dressed. An

uncombed savannah, a lion which does not pare its nails, an unsifted

torrent, the navel of the sea which allows itself to be seen, 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 not enough better than too much. No exaggeration. Henceforth

the rose-tree shall be compelled to count its roses. The prairie shall

be requested not to be so prodigal of daisies; the spring shall be

ordered to restrain itself. The nests are rather too prolific. The

groves are too rich in warblers. The Milky Way must condescend to

number its stars; there are a good many.

Take example from the big Mullen Serpentaria of the Botanical Garden,

which blooms only every fifty years. That is a flower truly respectable.

A true critic of the sober school is that garden-keeper who, to this

question, "Have you any nightingales in your trees?" replied, "Ah,

don't mention it! For the whole month of May these ugly beasts have

been doing nothing but bark."

M. Suard gave to Marie Joseph Chénier 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 Restoration, indignant at the comparisons and figures

which abound in the prophets, crushes Isaiah, Daniel, and Jeremiah,

with this profound apothegm: "The whole Bible is in 'like' (_comme_)."

Another, a greater professor still, was the author of this saying,

which is still celebrated at the normal school: "I throw Juvenal back

to the romantic dunghill." Of what crime was Juvenal guilty? Of the

same as Isaiah,--namely, of readily expressing the idea by the image.

Shall we return, little by little, in the walks of learning, to the

metonymy term of chemistry, and to the opinion of Pradon on metaphor?

One would suppose, from the demands and clamours of the doctrinary

school, that it has to supply, at its own expense, all the consumption

of metaphors and figures that poets can make, and that it feels

itself ruined by spendthrifts such as Pindar, Aristophanes, Ezekiel,

Plautus, and Cervantes. This school puts under lock and key passions,

sentiments, the human heart, reality, the ideal, life. Frightened,

it looks at the men of genius, hides from them everything, and says,

"How greedy they are!" Therefore it has invented for writers this

superlative praise: "He is temperate."

On all these points sacerdotal criticism fraternizes with doctrinal

criticism. The prude and the devotee help each other.

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 which they call periphrases; it is agreed that the bivouac

speaks like the convent, the talk of the guardroom is a calumny; a

veteran drops his eyes at the recollection of Waterloo, and the Cross

of Honour is given to these modest 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

Hôtel-de-Ville was called _La-garde-meurt-et-ne-se-rend-pas._

One salutary reaction is the result of the combined effort of two

critics watching over public tranquillity. This reaction has already

produced some specimens of poets,--steady, well-bred, prudent, whose

style always keeps good time; who never indulge in an orgy with all

those mad things, ideas; who are never met at the corner of a wood,

_solus cum sola_, with that Bohemian, Revery; who are incapable of

having connection either with Imagination, a dangerous vagabond, or

with Inspiration, a Bacchante, or with Fancy, a _lorette_; who have

never in their life given a kiss to that beggarly chit, the Muse;

who do not sleep out, and who are honoured with the esteem of their

door-keeper, Nicholas Boileau. If Polyhymnia goes by with her hair

rather flowing, what a scandal! Quick, they call the hairdresser. M.

de la Harpe comes hastily. These two sister critics, the doctrinal and

the sacerdotal, undertake to educate. They bring up writers from the

birth. They keep houses to wean them, a boarding-school for juvenile

reputations.

Thence a discipline, a literature, an art. Dress right, fall into line!

Society must be saved in literature as well as in politics. Every one

knows that poetry is a frivolous, insignificant thing, childishly

occupied in seeking rhymes, barren, vain; therefore nothing is more

formidable. It behooves us to well secure the thinkers. Lie down,

dangerous beast! What is a poet? For honour, nothing; for persecution,

everything.

This race of writers requires repression. It is useful to have

recourse to the secular arm. The means vary. From time to time a

good banishment is expedient. The list of exiled writers opens with

Æschylus, and does not close with Voltaire. Each century has its

link in this chain. But there must be at least a pretext for exile,

banishment, and proscription. That cannot apply to all cases. It is

rather unmanageable; it is important to have a lighter weapon for

every-day skirmishing. A State criticism, duly sworn in and accredited,

can render service. To organize the persecution of writers by means 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 by good order. Sober writers are the

counterpart of prudent electors. Inspiration is suspected of love for

liberty. Poetry is rather outside of legality; there is, therefore, an

official art, the offspring of official criticism.

A whole special rhetoric proceeds from those premises. Nature has in

that particular art but a narrow entrance, and goes in through the side

door. Nature is infected with demagogy. The elements are suppressed as

being bad company, and making too much uproar. The equinox is guilty of

breaking into reserved grounds; the squall is a nightly 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 lifting up, said, "The style does not admit of wind."

After all, reaction does not despair. We get on; some progress is

accomplished. A ticket of confession sometimes gains admittance for

its bearer into the Academy. Jules Janin, Théophile Gautier, Paul de

Saint-Victor, Littré, Renan, please to recite your creed.

But that does not suffice; the evil is deep-rooted. The ancient

Catholic society, and the ancient legitimate literature, are

threatened. Darkness is in peril To war with new generations! to war

with the modern spirit! and down upon Democracy, the daughter of

Philosophy!

Cases of rabidness--that is to say, the 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 about. What is Authority thinking of? Let us take care. Intellects

can be bitten; there is danger. It is certain, evident. It is rumoured

that Shakespeare has been met without a muzzle on.

This Shakespeare without a muzzle is the present translation.[1]

[Footnote 1: The Complete Works of Shakespeare, translated by François

Victor Hugo.]

CHAPTER V.

If ever a man was undeserving of the good character of "he is sober,"

it is most certainly William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is one of the

worst rakes that serious æsthetics ever had to lord over.

Shakespeare is fertility, force, exuberance, the overflowing breast,

the foaming cup, the brimful tub, the overrunning sap, the overflooding

lava, the whirlwind scattering germs, the universal rain of life,

everything by thousands, everything by millions, no reticence, no

binding, no economy, the inordinate and tranquil prodigality of

the creator. To those who feel the bottom of their pocket, the

inexhaustible seems insane. Will it stop soon? Never. Shakespeare is

the sower of dazzling wonders. At every turn, the image; at every turn,

contrast; at every turn, light and darkness.

The poet, we have said, is Nature. Subtle, minute, keen, microscopical

like Nature; immense. Not discreet, not reserved, not sparing. Simply

magnificent. 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, is

simplicity. Simplicity is justice. The whole law of taste is in that.

Each thing put in its place and spoken with its own word. On the only

condition that a certain latent equilibrium is maintained and a certain

mysterious proportion 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. Lofty criticism alone, which

takes its starting-point from enthusiasm, penetrates and comprehends

these learned laws. Opulence, profusion, dazzling radiancy, may be

simplicity. The sun is simple.

Such simplicity does not evidently resemble the simplicity recommended

by Le Batteux, the Abbé d'Aubignac, and Father Bouhours.

Whatever may be the abundance, whatever may be the entanglement, even

if perplexing, confused, and inextricable, all that is true is simple.

A root is simple.

That simplicity which is profound is the only one that art recognizes.

Simplicity, being true, is artless. Artlessness is the characteristic

of truth. Shakespeare's simplicity is the great simplicity. He is

foolishly full of it. He ignores the small simplicity.

The simplicity which is impotence, the simplicity which is meagreness,

the simplicity which is short-winded, is a case for pathology. It has

nothing to do with poetry. An order for the hospital suits it better

than a ride on the hippogriff.

I admit that the hump of Thersites is simple; but the breastplates of

Hercules are simple also. I prefer that simplicity to the other.

The simplicity which belongs to poetry may be as bushy as the oak. Does

the oak by chance produce on you the effect of a Byzantine and of a

refined being? Its innumerable antitheses,--gigantic trunk and small

leaves, rough bark and velvet mosses, reception of rays and shedding

of shade, crowns for heroes and fruit for swine,--are they marks of

affectation, corruption, subtlety and bad taste? Could the oak be too

witty? Could the oak belong to the Hôtel Rambouillet? Could the oak

be a _précieux ridicule?_ Could the oak be tainted with Gongorism?

Could the oak belong to the age of decadence? Is by chance complete

simplicity, _sancta simplicitas_, condensed in the cabbage?

Refinement, excess of wit, affectation, Gongorism,--that is what they

have hurled at Shakespeare's head. They say that those 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; he strides over

proprieties; he overthrows Aristotle; he spreads havoc among the

Jesuits, methodists, the Purists, and the Puritans; he puts Loyola

to flight, and upsets Wesley; he is valiant, bold, enterprising,

militant, direct. His inkstand smokes like a crater. He is always

laborious, ready, spirited, disposed, going forward. Pen in hand, his

brow blazing, he goes on driven by the demon of genius. The stallion

abuses; there are he-mules passing by to whom this is offensive. To

be prolific is to be aggressive. A poet like Isaiah, like Juvenal,

like Shakespeare, is, in truth, exorbitant. By all that is holy!

some attention ought to be paid to others; one man has no right to

everything. What! always virility, inspiration everywhere, as many

metaphors as the prairie, as many antitheses as the oak, as many

contrasts and depths as the universe; what! forever generation,

hatching, hymen, parturition, vast ensemble, exquisite and robust

detail, living communion, fecundation, plenitude, production! It is too

much; it infringes the rights of human geldings.

For nearly three centuries Shakespeare, this poet all brimming with

virility, has been looked upon by sober critics with that discontented

air that certain bereaved spectators must have in the seraglio.

Shakespeare has no reserve, no discretion, no limit, no blank. What

is wanting in him is that he wants nothing. No box for savings, no

fast-day with him. He overflows like vegetation, like germination,

like light, like flame. Yet, it does not hinder him from thinking

of you, spectator or reader, from preaching to you, from giving

you advice, from being your friend, like any other kind-hearted La

Fontaine, and from rendering you small services. You can warm your

hands at the conflagration he kindles.

Othello, Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard III., Julius Cæsar,

Oberon, Puck, Ophelia, Desdemona, Juliet, Titania, men, women, witches,

fairies, souls,--Shakespeare is the grand distributor; take, take,

take, all of you! Do you want more? Here is Ariel, Parolles, Macduff,

Prospero, Viola, Miranda, Caliban. More yet? Here is Jessica, Cordelia,

Cressida, Portia, Brabantio, Polonius, Horatio, Mercutio, Imogene,

Pandarus 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 with him

is impossible. There is in him something of the fathomless. He fills

up again, and spends himself; then recommences. He is the bottomless

treasury of genius.

In license and audacity of language Shakespeare equals Rabelais, whom,

a few days ago, a swan-like critic called a swine.

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 stomachs

that are candidates for the Academy. The gastritis called "good

taste," he does not labour under it. He is powerful. What is this vast

intemperate song that he sings through ages,--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

have the lumbago from reading Shakespeare," said M. Auger.

His poetry has the sharp perfume of honey made by the vagabond

bee without a hive. Here prose, there verse; all forms, being but

receptacles for the idea, suit him. This poetry weeps and laughs. The

English tongue, a language little formed, now assists, now harms him,

but everywhere the deep mind gushes forth translucent Shakespeare's

drama proceeds 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 excited grandeur. Shakespeare, shuddering, has in himself the

winds, the spirits, the philters, the vibrations, the fluctuations

of transient breezes, the obscure penetration of effluvia, the great

unknown sap. Thence his agitation, in the depth of which is repose.

It is this agitation in which Goethe is wanting, wrongly praised for

his impassiveness, which is inferiority. This agitation, all minds

of the first order have it. It is in Job, in Æschylus, in Alighieri.

This agitation is humanity. On earth the divine must be human. It

must propose to itself its own enigma and feel disturbed about it.

Inspiration being prodigy, a sacred stupor mingles with it. A certain

majesty of mind resembles solitudes and is blended with astonishment.

Shakespeare, like all great poets, like all great things, is absorbed

by a dream. His own vegetation astounds 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 intellects. It

is his own vastness which shakes him and imparts to him unaccountable

huge oscillations. There is no genius without waves. An inebriated

savage it may be. He has the wildness of the virgin forest; he has the

intoxication of the high sea.

Shakespeare (the condor alone gives some idea of such gigantic gait)

departs, arrives, starts again, mounts, descends, hovers, dives, sinks,

rushes, plunges into the depths below, plunges into the depths above.

He is one of those geniuses that God purposely leaves unbridled, so

that they may go headlong and in full flight into the infinite.

From time to time comes on 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 one end to another of

time; and it is perceived that each of these men was the human mind

itself contained whole in one brain, and coming, at a given moment, to

give on earth an impetus to progress.

These supreme spirits, once life achieved and the work completed, go in

death to rejoin the mysterious group, and are probably at home in the

infinite.

BOOK II.

SHAKESPEARE.--HIS WORK.--THE CULMINATING POINTS.

CHAPTER I.

The characteristic of men of genius of the first order is to

produce each a peculiar model of man. All bestow on humanity its

portrait,--some laughing, some weeping, others pensive. These last are

the greatest. Plautus laughs, and gives to man Amphitryon; Rabelais

laughs, and gives to man Gargantua; Cervantes laughs, and gives to man

Don Quixote; Beaumarchais laughs, and gives to man Figaro; Molière

weeps, and gives to man Alceste; Shakespeare dreams, and gives to man

Hamlet; Æschylus meditates, and gives to man Prometheus. The others are

great; Æschylus and Shakespeare are immense.

These portraits of humanity, left to humanity as a last farewell by

those passers-by, the poets, are rarely flattered, always exact,

striking likenesses. Vice, or folly, or virtue, is extracted from the

soul and stamped on the visage. The tear congealed becomes a pearl;

the smile petrified ends by looking like a menace; wrinkles are the

furrows of wisdom; some frowns are tragic. This series of models of man

is the permanent lesson for generations; each century adds in some

figures,--sometimes done in full light and strong relief, like Macette,

Célimène, Tartuffe, Turcaret, and the Nephew of Rameau; sometimes

simple profiles, like Gil Bias, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa Harlowe, and

Candide.

God creates by intuition; man creates by inspiration, 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 Providence,

and call the poet "the liar;" the conscience of man, taken in the act

and placed in a medium which it combats, governs or transforms,--such

is the drama. And there is in this something superior. This handling

of the human soul seems a kind of equality with God,--equality, the

mystery of which is explained when we reflect that God is within

man. This equality is identity. Who is our conscience? He. And He

counsels good acts. Who is our intelligence? He. And He inspires the

_chef-d'œuvre._

God may be there, but it removes nothing, as we have proved, from

the sourness of critics; the greatest minds are those which are most

brought into question. It even sometimes happens that true intellects

attack genius; the inspired, strangely enough, do not recognize

inspiration. Erasmus, Bayle, Scaliger, St. Evremond, Voltaire, many of

the Fathers of the Church, whole families of philosophers, the whole

School of Alexandria, Cicero, Horace, Lucian, Plutarch, Josephus, Dion

Chrysostom, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Philostratus, Metrodorus of

Lampsacus, Plato, Pythagoras, have severally criticised Homer. In this

enumeration we omit Zoïlus. Men who deny are not critics. Hatred is

not intelligence. To insult is not to discuss. Zoïlus, Mævius, Cecchi,

Green, Avellaneda, William Lauder, Visé, Fréron,--no cleansing of these

names is possible. These men have wounded the human race through her

men of genius; these wretched hands forever retain the colour of the

mud that they have thrown.

And these men have not even either the sad renown that they seem to

have acquired by right, or the whole quantity of shame that they have

hoped for. One scarcely knows 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 an example, all these

wretched names are unknown. An obscure notoriety follows their

equivocal existence. Look at this Clement, who had called himself

the "hypercritic," and whose profession it was to bite and denounce

Diderot; he disappears, and is confounded, although born at Geneva,

with Clement of Dijon, confessor to Mesdames; with David Clement,

author of the "Bibliothèque Curieuse;" with Clement of Baize,

Benedictine of St. Maur; and with Clement d'Ascain, Capuchin, definator

and provincial of Béarn. What avails it him to have declared that the

work of Diderot is but an "obscure verbiage," and to have died mad at

Charenton, to be afterward submerged in four or five unknown Clements?

In vain did Famien Strada rabidly attack Tacitus; one scarcely knows

him now from Fabien Spada, called _L'Epée de Bois_, the jester of

Sigismond Augustus. In vain did Cecchi vilify Dante; we are not

certain whether his name was not Cecco. In vain did Green fasten on

Shakespeare; he is now confounded with Greene. Avellaneda, the "enemy"

of Cervantes, is perhaps Avellanedo. Lauder, the slanderer of Milton,

is perhaps Leuder. The unknown De Visé, who tormented Molière, turns

out to be a certain Donneau; he had surnamed himself De Visé, through a

taste for nobility. Those men relied, in order to create for themselves

a little _éclat_, on the greatness of those whom they outraged. But

no, they have remained obscure. These poor insulters did not get their

salary. Contempt has failed them. Let us pity them.

CHAPTER II.

Let us add that calumny loses its labour. Then what purpose can it

serve? Not even an evil one. Do you know anything more useless than the

sting which does not sting?

Better still. This sting is beneficial. In a given time it is found

that calumny, envy, and hatred, thinking to labour against, have worked

in aid of truth. Their insults bring fame, their blackening makes

illustrious. They succeed only in mingling with glory an outcry which

increases it.

Let us continue.

So, each of the men of genius tries on in his turn this immense human

mask; and such is the strength of the soul which they cause to pass

through the mysterious aperture of the eyes, that this look changes the

mask, and, from terrible, makes it comic, then pensive, then grieved,

then young and smiling, then decrepit, then sensual and gluttonous,

then religious, then outrageous; and it is Cain, Job, Atreus, Ajax,

Priam, Hecuba, Niobe, Clytemnestra, Nausicaa, Pistoclerus, Grumio,

Davus, Pasicompsa, Chimène, Don Arias, Don Diego, Mudarra, Richard

III., Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Juliet, Romeo, Lear, Sancho Panza,

Pantagruel, Panurge, Arnolphe, Dandin Sganarelle, Agnes, Rosine,

Victorine, Basile, Almaviva, Cherubin, Manfred.

From the direct divine creation proceeds Adam, the prototype. From

the indirect divine creation,--that is to say, from the human

creation,--proceed other Adams, the types.

A type does not produce any man in particular; it cannot be exactly

superposed upon any individual; it sums up and concentrates under

one human form a whole family of characters and minds. A type is no

abridgment; it is a condensation. It is not one, it is all Alcibiades

is but Alcibiades, Petronius is but Petronius, Bassompierre is

but Bassompierre, Buckingham is but Buckingham, Fronsac is but

Fronsac, Lauzun is but Lauzun; but take Lauzun, Fronsac, Buckingham,

Bassompierre, Petronius, and Alcibiades, and pound them in the mortar

of imagination, and from that process you have a phantom more real

than them all,--Don Juan. Take the usurers one by one; 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

comes a total,--Shylock. Sum up usury, you have Shylock. The metaphor

of the people, who are never mistaken, confirms, without knowing it,

the inventions of the poet; and while Shakespeare makes Shylock, it

creates the _gripe-all._ Shylock is the Jewish bargaining. 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. Jews, even

those of the Middle Ages, might with reason say that not one of them

is Shylock. Men of pleasure may with reason say that not one of them

is Don Juan. No leaf of the orange-tree when chewed gives the flavour

of the orange, yet there is a deep affinity, an identity of roots, a

sap rising from the same source, the sharing of the same subterraneous

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 prodigy--the type lives. If it were

but an abstraction, men would not recognize it, and would allow this

shadow to pass by. The tragedy termed classic makes larvæ; the drama

creates types. A lesson which is a man; a myth with a human face so

plastic that it looks at you, and that its look is a mirror; a parable

which warns you; a symbol which cries out "Beware!" an idea which

is nerve, muscle, and flesh, and which has a heart to love, bowels

to suffer, eyes to weep, and teeth to devour or laugh, a psychical

conception with the relief of actual fact, and which, if it bleeds,

drops real blood,--that is the type. O power of true poetry! Types are

beings. They breathe, palpitate, their steps are heard on the floor,

they exist. They exist with an existence more intense than that of any

creature thinking himself living there in the street. These phantoms

have more density than man. There is in their essence that amount of

eternity which belongs to _chefs-d'œuvre_, and which makes Trimalcion

live, while M. Romieu is dead.

Types are cases foreseen by God; genius realizes them. It seems that

God prefers to teach man a lesson through man, in order to inspire

confidence. The poet is on the pavement of the living; he speaks to

them nearer to their ear. Thence the efficacy of types. Man is a

premise, the type the conclusion; God creates the phenomenon, genius

puts a name on it; God creates the miser only, genius Harpagon; God

creates the traitor only, genius makes Iago; God creates the coquette,

genius makes Célimène; God creates the citizen only, genius makes

Chrysale; God creates the king only, genius makes Grandgousier.

Sometimes, at a given moment, the type proceeds complete from some

unknown partnership of the mass of the people with a great natural

comedian, involuntary and powerful realizer; the crowd is a mid-wife.

In an epoch which bears at one of its extremities Talleyrand, and at

another Chodruc-Duclos, springs up suddenly, in a flash of lightning,

under the mysterious incubation of the theatre, that spectre, Robert

Macaire.

Types go and come firmly 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 results, in the eyes of the thinker, a humanity.

As we have said before, so many types, so many Adams. The man of Homer,

Achilles, is an Adam; from him comes the species of the slayers: the

man of Æschylus, Prometheus, is an Adam; from him comes the race of the

fighters: Shakespeare's man, Hamlet, is an Adam; to him belongs the

family of the dreamers. Other Adams, created by poets, incarnate, this

one passion, another duty, another reason, another conscience, another

the fall, another the ascension. Prudence, drifting to trepidation,

goes on from the old man Nestor to the old man Géronte. Love, drifting

to appetite, goes on from Daphne to Lovelace. Beauty, entwined with the

serpent, goes from Eve to Melusina. The types begin in Genesis, and a

link of their chain passes through Restif de la Bretonne and Vadé. The

lyric suits them, Billingsgate is not unbecoming to them. They speak

in country dialects by the mouth of Gros-René; and in Homer they say

to Minerva, holding them by the hair of the head: "What dost thou want

with me, goddess?"

A surprising exception has been conceded to Dante. The man of Dante

is Dante. Dante has, so to speak, created himself a second time 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 only taken Virgil as

supernumerary. Moreover, he made himself epic at once, without even

giving himself the trouble to change his name. What he had to do was

in fact simple,--to descend into hell and remount to heaven. What good

was it to trouble himself for so little? He knocks gravely at the door

of the infinite and says, "Open! I am Dante."

CHAPTER III.

Two marvellous Adams, we have just said, are the man of Æschylus,

Prometheus, and the man of Shakespeare, Hamlet.

Prometheus is action. Hamlet is hesitation.

In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior; in Hamlet it is interior.

In Prometheus the will is securely nailed down by nails of brass and

cannot get loose; besides, it has by its side two watchers,--Force

and Power. In Hamlet the will is more tied down yet; it is bound by

previous meditation,--the endless chain of the undecided. Try to get

out of yourself if you can! What a Gordian knot is our revery! Slavery

from within, that is slavery indeed. Scale this enclosure, "to dream!"

escape, if you can, from this prison, "to love!" The only dungeon is

that which walls conscience in. 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 raise himself upright, if he

only lifts a mountain; to raise himself up, Hamlet must lift his own

thoughts. If Prometheus plucks the vulture from his breast, all is

said; Hamlet must tear Hamlet from his breast. Prometheus and Hamlet

are two naked livers; from one runs blood, from the other doubt.

We are in the habit of comparing Æschylus and Shakespeare by Orestes

and Hamlet, these two tragedies being the same drama. Never in fact was

a subject more identical. The learned mark an analogy between them; the

impotent, who are also the ignorant, the envious, who are also the

imbeciles, have the petty joy of thinking they establish a plagiarism.

It is after all a possible field for erudition and for serious

criticism. Hamlet walks behind Orestes, parricide through filial

love. This easy comparison, rather superficial than deep, strikes us

less than the mysterious confronting of those two enchained beings,

Prometheus and Hamlet.

Let us not forget that the human mind, half divine as it is, creates

from time to time superhuman works. These superhuman works of man are,

moreover, more numerous than it is thought, for they entirely fill art.

Out of poetry, where marvels 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 many

over, and not the least.

Prometheus and Hamlet are among those more than human works.

A kind of gigantic determination; the usual measure exceeded; greatness

everywhere; that which astounds ordinary intellects demonstrated when

necessary by the improbable; destiny, society, law, religion, brought

to trial and judgment in the name of the Unknown, the abyss of the

mysterious equilibrium; the event treated as a _rôle_ played out, 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 goodness of a softened monster; an ineffable dawn

which cannot be accounted for and which lights up everything,--such are

the signs of those supreme works. In certain poems there is starlight.

This light is in Æschylus and in Shakespeare.

CHAPTER IV.

Nothing can be more fiercely wild than Prometheus stretched on the

Caucasus. It is gigantic tragedy. The old punishment that our ancient

laws of torture call extension, and which Cartouche escaped because

of a hernia, Prometheus undergoes it; only, the wooden horse is a

mountain. What is his crime? Right. To characterize right as crime,

and movement as rebellion, is the immemorial talent of tyrants.

Prometheus has done on Olympus what Eve did in Eden,--he has taken

a little knowledge. Jupiter, identical with Jehovah (_Iovi, Iova_),

punishes this temerity,--the desire to live. The Eginetic traditions,

which localize Jupiter, deprive him of the cosmic personality of

the Jehovah of Genesis. The Greek Jupiter, bad son of a bad father,

in rebellion against Saturn, who has himself been a rebel against

Cœlus, is a _parvenu._ The Titans are a sort of elder branch, which

has its legitimists, of whom Æschylus, the avenger of Prometheus, was

one. Prometheus is right conquered. Jupiter has, as is always the

case, consummated the usurpation of power by the punishment of right.

Olympus claims the aid of Caucasus. Prometheus is fastened there to the

_carcan._ There is the Titan, fallen, prostrate, nailed down. Mercury,

the friend of everybody, comes to give him such counsel as follows

generally the perpetration of _coups d'état._ Mercury is the type of

cowardly intellect, of every possible vice, but of vice full of wit.

Mercury, the god of vice, serves Jupiter the god of crime. This fawning

in evil is still marked to-day by the veneration of the pickpocket

for the assassin. There is something of that law in the arrival of the

diplomatist behind the conqueror. The _chefs-d'œuvre_ are immense

in this, that they are eternally present to the deeds of humanity.

Prometheus on the Caucasus, is Poland after 1772; France after 1815;

the Revolution after Brumaire. Mercury speaks; Prometheus listens but

little. Offers of amnesty miscarry when it is the victim who alone

should have the right to grant pardon. Prometheus, though conquered,

scorns Mercury standing proudly above him, and Jupiter standing above

Mercury, and Destiny standing above Jupiter. Prometheus jests at the

vulture which gnaws at him; he shrugs disdainfully his shoulders as

much as his chain allows. What does he care for Jupiter, and what good

is Mercury? There is no hold on this haughty sufferer. The scorching

thunderbolt causes a smart, which is a constant call upon pride.

Meanwhile tears flow around him, the earth despairs, the women-clouds

(the fifty Oceanides), come to worship the Titan, the forests scream,

wild beasts groan, winds howl, the waves sob, the elements moan, the

world suffers in Prometheus; his _carcan_ chokes 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 inexpressible anguish,--the liberator is enchained.

Hamlet, less of a giant and more of a man, is not less grand,--Hamlet,

the appalling, the unaccountable, complete in incompleteness; all,

in order to be nothing. He is prince and demagogue, sagacious and

extravagant, profound and frivolous, man and neuter. He has but

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 strength,

suspects success, questions obscurity, and says "thou" to mystery. He

gives to others maladies which he has not himself: his false madness

inoculates his mistress with true madness. He is familiar with spectres

and with comedians. He jests with the axe of Orestes in his hand. He

talks of literature, recites verses, composes a theatrical criticism,

plays with bones in a cemetery, dumbfounds his mother, avenges his

father, and ends the wonderful drama of life and death by a gigantic

point of interrogation. He terrifies and then disconcerts. Never has

anything more overwhelming been dreamed. It is the parricide saying:

"What do I know?"

Parricide? Let us pause on 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. His words are like daggers. "What wilt

thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help! help! ho!" And when she dies,

Hamlet, without grieving for her, strikes Claudius with this tragic

cry: "Follow my mother!" Hamlet is that sinister thing, the possible

parricide.

In place of the northern ice which he has in his nature, let him have,

like Orestes, southern fire in his veins, and he will kill his mother.

This drama is stern. In it truth doubts, sincerity lies. Nothing can

be more immense, more subtile. In it man is the world, and the world

is zero. Hamlet, even full of life, is not sure of his existence.

In this tragedy, which is at the same time a philosophy, everything

floats, hesitates, delays, staggers, becomes discomposed, scatters,

and is dispersed. Thought is a cloud, will is a vapour, resolution is

a crepuscule; the action blows each moment in an opposite direction;

man is governed by the winds. Overwhelming and vertiginous work, in

which is seen the depth of everything, in which thought oscillates only

between the king murdered and Yorick buried, and in which what is best

realized is royalty represented by a ghost, and mirth represented by a

death's-head.

"Hamlet" is the _chef-d'œuvre_ of the tragedy-dream.

CHAPTER V.

One of the probable causes of the feigned madness 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 imbecility 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

project, Hamlet his person. The manners of those tragic courts being

known, from the moment that Hamlet, through the revelation of the

ghost, is acquainted with the crime of Claudius, Hamlet is in danger.

The superior historian within the poet is here manifested, and one

feels the deep insight of Shakespeare into the ancient darkness of

royalty. In the Middle Ages and in the Lower Empire, and 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 witness, it was a matter

involving one's head to ignore everything. It was bad policy to have

good eyes. A man suspected of suspicion was lost. He had but one

refuge,--folly; to pass for "an innocent" He was despised, and that was

all. Do you remember the advice that, in Æschylus, the Ocean gives to

Prometheus: "To look a fool is the secret of the wise man." When the

Chamberlain Hugolin found the iron spit with which Edrick the Vendee

had empaled Edmond II., "he hastened to put on madness," says the Saxon

Chronicle of 1016, and saved himself in that way. Heraclian of Nisibe,

having discovered by chance that Rhinomete was a fratricide, had

himself declared mad 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 peril,

and has recourse to the same means. He gets himself declared mad like

Heraclian, and puts on folly like Hugolin. This does not prevent the

restless Claudius from twice making an effort to get rid of him,--in

the middle of the drama by the axe or the dagger in England, and toward

the conclusion by poison.

The same indication is again found in "King Lear;" the Earl of

Gloster's son takes refuge also in apparent lunacy. There is in that a

key to open and understand Shakespeare's thought. In the eyes of the

philosophy of art, the feigned folly of Edgar throws light upon the

feigned folly of Hamlet.

The Amleth of Belleforest is a magician; the Hamlet of Shakespeare

is a philosopher. We just now spoke of the strange reality which

characterizes poetical creations. There is no more striking example

than this type,--Hamlet. Hamlet has nothing belonging to an abstraction

about him. He has been at the University; he has the Danish rudeness

softened by Italian politeness; he is small, plump, somewhat

lymphatic; he fences well with the sword, but is soon out of breath.

He does not care to drink too soon during the assault of arms with

Laërtes,--probably for fear of producing perspiration. After having

thus supplied his personage with real life, the poet can launch him

into full ideal. There is ballast enough.

Other works of the human mind equal "Hamlet;" none surpasses it. The

whole majesty of melancholy is in "Hamlet." An open sepulchre from

which goes forth a drama,--this is colossal "Hamlet" is to our mind

Shakespeare's chief work.

No figure among those that poets have created is more poignant and

stirring. Doubt counselled by a ghost,--that is Hamlet. Hamlet has

seen his dead father and has spoken to him. Is he convinced? No, he

shakes his head. What shall he do? He does not know. His hands clench,

then fall by his side. Within him are conjectures, systems, monstrous

apparitions, bloody recollections, veneration for the spectre, hate,

tenderness, anxiety to act and not to act, his father, his mother,

his duties in contradiction to each other,--a deep storm. Livid

hesitation is in his mind. Shakespeare, wonderful plastic poet, makes

the grandiose pallor of this soul almost visible. Like the great larva

of Albert Dürer, Hamlet might be named "Melancholia." He also has above

his head the bat which flies disembowelled; and at his feet science,

the sphere, the compass, the hour-glass, love; and behind him in the

horizon an enormous, terrible sun, which seems to make the sky but

darker.

Nevertheless, at least one half of Hamlet is anger, transport, outrage,

hurricane, sarcasm to Ophelia, malediction on his mother, insult to

himself. He talks with the gravediggers, nearly laughs, then clutches

Laërtes by the hair in the very grave of Ophelia, and stamps furiously

upon the coffin. Sword-thrusts at Polonius, sword-thrusts at Laërtes,

sword-thrusts at Claudius. From time to time his inaction is tom in

twain, and from the rent comes forth thunder.

He is tormented by that possible life, intermixed with reality and

chimera, the anxiety of which is shared by all of us. There is in

all his actions an expanded somnambulism. One might almost consider

his brain as a formation; there is a layer of suffering, a layer of

thought, then a layer of dreaminess. It is through this layer of

dreaminess that he feels, comprehends, learns, perceives, drinks, eats,

frets, mocks, weeps, and reasons. There is between life and him a

transparency; it is the wall of dreams. One sees beyond, but one cannot

step over it. A kind of cloudy obstacle everywhere surrounds Hamlet.

Have you ever while sleeping, had the nightmare of pursuit or flight,

and tried to hasten on, and felt anchylosis in the knees, heaviness in

the arms, the horror of paralysed hands, the impossibility of movement?

This nightmare Hamlet undergoes while waking. Hamlet is not upon the

spot where his life is. He has ever the appearance 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 takes part, from the passer-by whom he interrogates, from the

thought that he carries, from the action that he performs. He seems not

to touch even what he grinds. It is isolation in its highest degree. It

is the loneliness of a mind, even more than the loftiness of a prince.

Indecision is in fact a solitude. You have not even your will to keep

you company. It is as if your own self was absent and had left you

there. The burden of Hamlet is less rigid than that of Orestes, but

more undulating. Orestes carries predestination; Hamlet carries fate.

And thus apart from men, Hamlet has still in him a something which

represents them all. _Agnosco fratrem._ At certain hours, if we felt

our own pulse, we should be conscious of his fever. His strange reality

is our own reality after alL He is the mournful man that we all are in

certain situations. Unhealthy as he is, Hamlet expresses a permanent

condition of man. He represents the discomfort of the soul in a life

which is not sufficiently adapted to it He represents the shoe that

pinches and stops our walking; the shoe is the body. Shakespeare

frees him from it, and he is right Hamlet--prince if you like, but

king never--Hamlet is incapable of governing a people; he lives too

much in a world beyond. On the other hand, he does better than to

reign; he _is._ Take from him his family, his country, his ghost, and

the whole adventure at Elsinore, and even in the form of an inactive

type, he remains strangely terrible. That is the consequence of the

amount of humanity and the amount of mystery that is in him. Hamlet is

formidable, which does not prevent his being ironical. He has the two

profiles of destiny.

Let us retract a statement made above. The chief work of Shakespeare

is not "Hamlet" The chief work of Shakespeare is all Shakespeare. That

is, moreover, true of all minds of this order. They are mass, block,

majesty, bible, and their solemnity is their ensemble.

Have you sometimes looked upon a cape prolonging itself under the

clouds and jutting out, as far as the eye can go, into the deep

water? Each of its hillocks contributes to make it up. No one of its

undulations is lost in its dimension. Its strong outline is sharply

marked upon the sky, and enters as far as possible into the waves, and

there is not a useless rock. Thanks to this cape, you can go amidst the

boundless waters, walk among the winds, see closely the eagles soar

and the monsters swim, let your humanity wander mid the eternal hum,

penetrate the impenetrable. The poet renders this service to your mind.

A genius is a promontory into the infinite.

CHAPTER VI

Near "Hamlet," and on the same level, must be placed three grand

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 ten monsters, which is always possible in

man. Certain souls have teeth. Do not wake up their hunger.

To bite at the apple, that is a fearful thing. The apple is called

_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 given 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 madness,--this progression is Macbeth.

Covetousness, crime, madness,--these three vampires have spoken to him

in the solitude, and have invited him to the throne. The cat Graymalkin

has called him: Macbeth will be cunning. The toad Paddock has called

him: Macbeth will be horror. The _unsexed_ being, Gruoch, completes

him. It is done; Macbeth is no longer a man. He is nothing more than

an unconscious energy rushing wildly toward evil. Henceforth, no

notion of right; appetite is everything. Transitory right, royalty;

eternal right, hospitality,--Macbeth murders them all. He does more

than slay them,--he ignores them. Before they fell bleeding under

his hand, they already lay dead within his soul. Macbeth commences

by this parricide,--the murder of Duncan, his guest; a crime so

terrible that from the counter-blow in the night, when their master

is stabbed, the horses of Duncan again become wild. The first step

taken, the fall begins. It is the avalanche. Macbeth rolls headlong.

He is precipitated. He falls and rebounds from one crime to another,

always 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, flame of war, beast of prey, scourge. He marches over all

Scotland, king as he is, his bare legged kernes and his heavily-armed

gallowglasses, devouring, pillaging, slaying. He decimates the Thanes,

he kills Banquo, he kills all the Macduffs except the one who shall

slay him, he kills the nobility, he kills the people, he kills his

country, he kills "sleep." At length the catastrophe arrives,--the

forest of Birnam moves against him. Macbeth has infringed all, burst

through everything, violated everything, torn everything, and this

desperation ends in arousing even Nature. Nature loses patience, Nature

enters into action against Macbeth, Nature becomes soul against the man

who has become brute force.

This drama has epic proportions. Macbeth represents that frightful

hungry one who prowls throughout history, called brigand in the forest

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 Cæsar, what?--the world; they are appeased. Geoffroy St.

Hilaire said to me one day: "When the lion has eaten, he is at peace

with Nature." For Cambyses, Sennacherib, and Genghis Khan, and their

parallels, to have eaten is to possess all the earth. They would calm

themselves down in the process of digesting the human race.

Now, what is Othello? He is night; an immense fatal figure. Night is

amorous of day. Darkness loves the dawn. The African adores the white

woman. Desdemona is Othello's brightness and frenzy! And then how easy

to him is jealousy! He is great, he is dignified, he is majestic, he

soars above all heads, he has as an escort bravery, battle, the braying

of trumpets, the banner 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 monster, the

black becomes the negro! How speedily has night beckoned to death!

By the side of Othello, who is night, there is 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! To have ink or treason in the veins is the same thing.

Whoever has jostled against imposture and perjury knows it. One must

blindly grope one's way with roguery. Pour hypocrisy upon the break

of day, and you put out the sun; and this, thanks to false religions,

happens to God.

Iago near Othello is the precipice near the landslip. "This way!"

he says in a low voice. The snare advises blindness. The being of

darkness guides the black. Deceit takes upon itself to give what

light may be required by night. Jealousy uses falsehood as the

blind man his dog. Othello the negro, Iago the traitor, opposed to

whiteness and candour,--what can be more terrible! These ferocities

of the darkness act in unison. These two incarnations of the eclipse

conspire together,--the one roaring, the other sneering; the tragic

extinguishment 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 much is

that type a power. And it is thus that Desdemona, spouse of the man

Night, dies stifled by the pillow, which has had the first kiss, and

which has the last sigh.

Lear is the occasion for Cordelia. Maternity of the daughter toward

the father,--profound subject; maternity venerable among all other

maternities, so admirably translated by the legend of that Roman girl,

who, in the depth of a prison, nurses her old father. The young breast

near the white beard,--there is not a spectacle more holy. This filial

breast is Cordelia.

Once this figure dreamed of and found, Shakespeare created his

drama. Where should he put this consoling vision? In an obscure age.

Shakespeare has taken the year of the world 3105, the time when

Joas was king of Judah, Aganippus, king of France, and Leir, king

of England. The whole earth was at that time mysterious. Represent

to yourself that epoch: the temple of Jerusalem is still quite new;

the gardens of Semiramis, constructed nine hundred years previously,

begin to crumble; the first gold coin appears in Ægina; the first

balance is made by Phydon, tyrant of Argos; the first 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 East

the chariot fire which carries Elias away. It is at that period that

Leir--Lear--lives, and reigns over the dark islands. Jonas, Holofernes,

Draco, Solon, Thespis, Nebuchadnezzar, Anaximenes who is to invent the

signs of the zodiac, Cyrus, Zorobabel, Tarquin, Pythagoras, Æschylus,

are not born yet Coriolanus, Xerxes, Cincinnatus, Pericles, Socrates,

Brennus, Aristotle, Timoleon, Demosthenes, Alexander, Epicurus,

Hannibal, are larvæ waiting their hour to enter among men. Judas

Maccabæus, Viriatus, Popilius, Jugurtha, Mithridates, Marius and Sylla,

Cæsar and Pompey, Cleopatra and Antony, are far away in the future;

and at the moment when Lear is king of Brittany 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 Englishman then. It is this twilight that

Shakespeare has chosen,--a broad night well adapted to the dream in

which this inventor at his pleasure puts everything that he chooses,

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 Gloster.

What does your history matter to him who has humanity? Besides, he

has with him the legend, which is a kind of science also, and as

true as history perhaps, but in another point of view. Shakespeare

agrees with Walter Mapes, archdeacon of Oxford,--that is something;

he admits, from Brutus to Cadwalla, the ninety-nine Celtic kings who

have preceded the Scandinavian Hengist and the Saxon Horsa: and since

he believes in Mulmutius, Cinigisil, Ceolulf, Cassibelan, Cymbeline,

Cynulphus, Arviragus, Guiderius, Escuin, Cudred, Vortigern, Arthur,

Uther Pendragon, he has every right to believe in King Lear, and to

create Cordelia. This land adopted, the place for the scene marked out,

this foundation established, he takes everything and builds his work.

Unheard of edifice. He takes tyranny, of which, at a later period,

he will make weakness,--Lear; he takes treason,--Edmond; 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 Ragaü; he takes paternity;

he takes royalty; he takes feudality; he takes ambition; he takes

madness, which he divides into three, and he puts in presence three

madmen,--the king's buffoon, madman by trade; Edgar of Gloster, mad for

prudence's sake; the king mad through misery. It is at the summit of

this tragic heap that he raises Cordelia.

There are some formidable cathedral towers, like, for instance, the

Giralda of Seville, which seem made all complete, with their spirals,

their staircases, their sculptures, their cellars, their cœcums, their

aerial cells, their sounding chambers, their bells, and their mass

and their spire, and all their enormity, in order to carry an angel

spreading on their summit her golden wings. Such is this drama, "King

Lear."

The father is the pretext for the daughter. This admirable human

creation, Lear, serves as a support to that ineffable divine creation,

Cordelia. The reason why that chaos of crimes, vices, madnesses, and

miseries exists is, for the more splendid setting forth of virtue.

Shakespeare, carrying Cordelia in his thoughts, created that tragedy

like a god who, having an Aurora to put forward, makes a world

expressly for it.

And what a figure is that father! What a caryatid! He is man bent down

by weight, but shifts his burdens for others that are heavier. The more

the old man becomes enfeebled, the more his load augments. He lives

under an overburden. 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 shadow on him, the hurricane

beats on the nape of his neck, the tempest makes his mantle heavy as

lead, the rain falls on his shoulders, he walks bent and haggard as if

he had the two knees of night upon his back. Dismayed and yet immense,

he throws to the winds and to the hail this epic cry: "Why do you hate

me, tempests? Why do you persecute me? _You are not my daughters._"

And then it is over; the light is extinguished,--reason loses courage

and leaves him. Lear is in his dotage. Ah, he is childish, this old

man. Very well! he requires a mother. His daughter appears,--his one

daughter Cordelia; for the two others Regan and Goneril, are no longer

his daughters, save to that extent which gives them a right 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

bewilderment. From this moment the adorable nursing commences. Cordelia

applies herself to nourish 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 revives. 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 on 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 embracing

the corpse, he expires. He dies on this dead one. The supreme anguish

is spared him 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 dost not allow to survive.

To live after the flight of the angel; to be the father orphaned of

his child; to be the eye which no longer has light; to be the deadened

heart which has 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,--that would be

indeed a gloomy destiny. Thou hast done well, poet, to kill this old

man.

BOOK III.

ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER.

CHAPTER I.

"Ce courtisan grossier du profane vulgaire."[1]

This Alexandrine is by La Harpe, who hurls it at Shakespeare. Somewhere

else La Harpe says, "Shakespeare panders to the mob."

Voltaire, as a matter of course, reproaches Shakespeare with

antithesis: that is well. And La Beaumelle reproaches Voltaire with

antithesis: that is better.

Voltaire, when he is himself in question, _pro domo sua_, gets angry.

"But," he writes, "this Langleviel, alias La Beaumelle, is an ass. I

defy you to find in any poet, in any book, a fine thing which is not an

image or an antithesis."

Voltaire's criticism is double-edged. He wounds and is wounded. This is

how he characterizes the Ecclesiastes and the Canticle of Canticles:

"Works without order, full of low images and coarse expressions."

A little while after, furious, he exclaims,--

"On m'ose préférer Crébillon le barbare!"[2]

An idler of the Œil-de-Bœuf, wearing the red heel and the blue

ribbon, a stripling and a marquis,--M. de Créqui,--comes to Ferney,

and writes with an air of superiority: "I have seen Voltaire, that

childish old man."

That injustice should receive a counterstroke from injustice, is

nothing more than right; and Voltaire gets what he deserved. But to

throw stones at men of genius is a general law, and all have to bear

it. Insult is a crown, it appears.

For Saumaise, Æschylus is nothing but farrago.[3] Quintilian

understands nothing of the "Orestias." Sophocles mildly scorned

Æschylus. "When he does well, he does not know it," said Sophocles.

Racine rejected everything, except two or three scenes of the

"Choephori," which he condescended to spare by a note in the margin of

his copy of Æschylus. Fontenelle says in his "Remarques": "One does

not know what to make of the 'Prometheus' of Æschylus. Æschylus is a

kind of madman." The eighteenth century, without exception, railed at

Diderot for admiring the "Eumenides."

"The whole of Dante is a hotch-potch," says Chaudon. "Michael Angelo

wearies me," says Joseph de Maistre. "Not one of the eight comedies of

Cervantes is supportable," says La Harpe. "It is a pity that Molière

does not know how to write," says Fénélon. "Molière is a worthless

buffoon," says Bossuet. "A schoolboy would avoid the mistakes of

Milton," says the Abbé Trublet, an authority as good as another.

"Corneille exaggerates, Shakespeare raves," says that same Voltaire,

who must always be fought against and fought for.

"Shakespeare," says Ben Jonson, "talked heavily and without any wit."

How prove the contrary? Writings remain, talk passes away. Well, it is

always so much denied to Shakespeare. That man of genius had no wit:

how nicely that flatters the numberless men of wit who have no genius!

Some time before Scudéry called Corneille "Corneille déplumée"

(unfeathered carrion crow), Green had called Shakespeare "a crow

decked out with our feathers." In 1752 Diderot was sent to the

fortress of Vincennes for having published the first volume of the

"Encyclopædia," and the great success of the year was a print sold

on the quays which represented a Franciscan friar flogging Diderot.

Although Weber is dead,--an attenuating circumstance for those who

are guilty of genius,--he is turned into ridicule in Germany; and for

thirty-three years a _chef-d'œuvre_ has been disposed of with a pun.

The "Euryanthe" is called the "Ennuyante" (wearisome).

D'Alembert hits at one blow Calderon and Shakespeare. He writes to

Voltaire:--

"I have announced to the Academy your 'Heraclius,' of

Calderon. The Academy will read it with as much pleasure as

the harlequinade of Gilles Shakespeare."[4]

That everything should be perpetually brought again into question, that

everything should be contested, even the incontestable,--what does it

matter? The eclipse is a good trial for truth as well as for liberty.

Genius, being truth and liberty, has a claim to persecution. What

matters to genius that which is transient? It was before, and will be

after. It is not on the sun that the eclipse throws darkness.