For a long time, I thought that Shakespeare was a writer who was unique
and different from all others. It seemed to me that the difference
between him and other writers was one of quality rather than of
quantity. I felt that, as a man, Shakespeare was of a different kind of
humanity; but I do not think so now. Shakespeare is no more the
quintessence of the world's literature than Plato and Kant are the
quintessence of universal philosophy. I once admired the philosophy and
characters of the author of Hamlet; when I read him today, what most
impresses me is his rhetoric, and, above all, his high spirit.
Cervantes is not very sympathetic to me. He is tainted with the perfidy
of the man who has made a pact with the enemy (with the Church, the
aristocracy, with those in power), and then conceals the fact.
Philosophically, in spite of his enthusiasm for the Renaissance, he
appears vulgar and pedestrian to me, although he towers above all his
contemporaries on account of the success of a single invention, that of
Don Quixote and Sancho, which is to literature what the discovery of
Newton was to Physics.
As for Molière, he is a poor fellow, who never attains the exuberance of
Shakespeare, nor the invention that immortalizes Cervantes. But his
taste is better than Shakespeare's and he is more social, more modern
than Cervantes. The half-century or more that separates the work of
Cervantes from that of Molière, is not sufficient to explain this
modernity. Between the Spain of _Quixote_ and the France of _Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, lies something deeper than time. Descartes
and Gassendi had lived in France, while, on the other hand, the seed of
Saint Ignatius Loyola lay germinating in the Spain of Cervantes.