seventeenth century. Frenchmen were staggered by its originality. They
perceived the dramatist's colossal breaches of classical law. They
were shocked by his freedom of speech. When Louis the Fourteenth's
librarian placed on the shelves of the Royal Library in Paris a copy
of the Second Folio of his works which had been published in London in
1632, he noted in his catalogue that Shakespeare "has a rather fine
imagination; he thinks naturally; but these fine qualities are
obscured by the filth he introduces into his comedies." An increasing
mass of pedestrian literature was imported into France from England
through the middle and late years of the seventeenth century. Yet
Shakespeare had to wait for a fair hearing there till the eighteenth
century.
Then it was very gradually that Shakespeare's pre-eminence was
realised by French critics. It is to Voltaire that Frenchmen owe a
full knowledge of Shakespeare. Voltaire's method of teaching
Shakespeare to his countrymen was characteristically cynical. He
studied him closely when he visited England as a young man. At that
period of his career he not merely praised him with discerning
caution, but he paid him the flattery of imitation. Voltaire's tragedy
of _Brutus_ betrays an intimate acquaintance with Shakespeare's
_Julius Cæsar_. His _Eryphile_ was the product of many perusals of
_Hamlet_. His _Zaïre_ is a pale reflection of _Othello_. But when
Voltaire's countrymen showed a tendency to better Voltaire's
instruction, and one Frenchman conferred on Shakespeare the title of
"the god of the theatre," Voltaire resented the situation that he had
himself created. He was at the height of his own fame, and he felt
that his reputation as the first of French writers for the stage was
in jeopardy.
The last years of Voltaire's life were therefore consecrated to an
endeavour to dethrone the idol which his own hands had set up.
Voltaire traded on the patriotic prejudices of his hearers, but his
efforts to depreciate Shakespeare were very partially successful. Few
writers of power were ready to second the soured critic, and after
Voltaire's death the Shakespeare cult in France, of which he was the
unwilling inaugurator, spread far and wide.
In the nineteenth century Shakespeare was admitted without demur into
the French "pantheon of literary gods." Classicists and romanticists
vied in doing him honour. The classical painter Ingres introduced his
portrait into his famous picture of "Homer's Cortège" (now in the
Louvre). The romanticist Victor Hugo recognised only three men as
memorable in the history of humanity, and Shakespeare was one of the
three; Moses and Homer were the other two. Alfred de Musset became a
dramatist under Shakespeare's spell. To George Sand everything in
literature seemed tame by the side of Shakespeare's poetry. The prince
of romancers, the elder Dumas, set the English dramatist next to God
in the cosmic system; "after God," wrote Dumas, "Shakespeare has
created most."
III
It would be easy to multiply eulogies of Shakespeare from French lips
in the vein of Victor Hugo and Dumas--eulogies besides which the
enthusiasm of many English critics appears cold and constrained. So
unfaltering a note of admiration sounds gratefully in the ears of
Shakespeare's countrymen. Yet on closer investigation there seems a
rift within the lute. When one turns to the French versions of
Shakespeare, for which the chief of Shakespeare's French encomiasts
have made themselves responsible, an Englishman is inclined to
moderate his exultation in the French panegyrics.
No one did more as an admiring critic and translator of Shakespeare
than Jean François Ducis, who prepared six of Shakespeare's greatest
plays for the French stage at the end of the eighteenth century. Not
only did Ducis introduce Shakespeare's masterpieces to thousands of
his countrymen who might otherwise never have heard of them, but his
renderings of Shakespeare were turned into Italian and many languages
of Eastern Europe. They spread the knowledge of Shakespeare's
achievement to the extreme boundaries of the European Continent.
Apparently Ducis did his work under favourable auspices. He
corresponded regularly with Garrick, and he was never happier than
when studying Shakespeare's text with a portrait of Shakespeare at his
side. Yet, in spite of Ducis's unquestioned reverence and his
honourable intentions, all his translations of Shakespeare are gross
perversions of their originals. It is not merely that he is verbally
unfaithful. He revises the development of the plots; he gives the
_dramatis personæ_ new names.
Ducis's _Othello_ was accounted his greatest triumph. The play shows
Shakespeare's mastery of the art of tragedy at its highest stage of
development, and rewards the closest study. But the French translator
ignored the great tragic conception which gives the drama its pith and
moment. He converted the piece into a romance. Towards the end of his
rendering Iago's villanies are discovered by Othello; Othello and
Desdemona are reconciled; and the Moor, exulting in his newly
recovered happiness, pardons Iago. The curtain falls on a dazzling
scene of domestic bliss.
Ducis frankly acknowledged that he was guilty of a somewhat strained
interpretation of Shakespeare's tragic scheme, but he defended himself
on the ground that French refinement and French sensitiveness could
not endure the agonising violence of the true catastrophe. It is,
indeed, the fact that the patrons of the Comédie Française strictly
warned the adapter against revolting their feelings by reproducing the
"barbarities" that characterised the close of Shakespeare's tragic
masterpiece.
If so fastidious a flinching from tragic episode breathe the true
French sentiment, what, we are moved to ask, is the significance of
the unqualified regard which Ducis and his countrymen profess for
Shakespearean drama? There seems a strange paradox in the situation.
The history of France proves that Frenchmen can face without quailing
the direst tragedies which can be wrought in earnest off the stage.
There is a startling inconsistency in the outcry of Ducis's French
clients against the terror of Desdemona's murder. For the protests
which Ducis reports on the part of the Parisians bear the date 1792.
In that year the tragedy of the French Revolution--a tragedy of real
life, grimmer than any that Shakespeare imagined--was being enacted in
literal truth by the Parisian playgoers themselves. It would seem that
Ducis and his countrymen deemed the purpose of art to be alone
fulfilled when the artistic fabric was divorced from the ugly facts of
life.
A like problem is presented by Dumas's efforts in more pacific
conditions to adapt Shakespeare for the Parisian stage. With his
friend Paul Meurice Dumas prepared the version of _Hamlet_ which long
enjoyed a standard repute at the Comédie Française. Dumas's ecstatic
adoration for Shakespeare's genius did not deter him, any more than
Ducis was deterred by his more subdued veneration, from working havoc
on the English text. Shakespeare's blank verse was necessarily turned
into Alexandrines. That was comparatively immaterial. Of greater
moment is it to note that the _dénouement_ of the tragedy was
completely revolutionised by Dumas. The tragic climax is undermined.
Hamlet's life is spared by Dumas. The hero's dying exclamation, "The
rest is silence," disappears from Dumas's version. At the close of the
play the French translator makes the ghost rejoin his son and
good-naturedly promise him indefinite prolongation of his earthly
career. According to the gospel of Dumas, the tragedy of Hamlet ends,
as soon as his and his father's wrongs have been avenged, in this
fashion:--
_Hamlet._ Et moi, vais-je rester, triste orphelin sur terre,
À respirer cet air imprégné de misère?...
Est-ce que Dieu sur moi fera peser son bras,
Père? Et quel châtiment m'attend donc?
_Le Fantôme._ Tu vivras.
Such defiant transgressions of the true Shakespearean canon as those
of which Ducis and Dumas stand convicted may well rouse the suspicion
that the critical incense they burn at Shakespeare's shrine is
offered with the tongue in the cheek. But that suspicion is not
justified. Ducis and Dumas worship Shakespeare with a whole heart.
Their misapprehensions of his tragic conceptions are due,
involuntarily, to native temperament. In point of fact, Ducis and
Dumas see Shakespeare through a distorting medium. The two Frenchmen
were fully conscious of Shakespeare's towering greatness. They
perceived intuitively that Shakespeare's tragedies transcended all
other dramatic achievement. But their æsthetic sense, which, as far as
the drama was concerned, was steeped in the classical spirit, set many
of the essential features of Shakespeare's genius outside the focus of
their vision.
To a Frenchman a tragedy of classical rank connotes "correctness," an
absence of tumult, some observance of the classical law of unity of
time, place, and action. The perpetration of crime in face of the
audience outraged all classical conventions. Ducis and Dumas
recognised involuntarily that certain characteristics of the
Shakespearean drama could not live in the classical atmosphere of
their own theatre. Excision, expansion, reduction was inevitable
before Shakespeare could breathe the air of the French stage. The
grotesque perversions of Ducis and Dumas were thus not the fruit of
mere waywardness, or carelessness, or dishonesty; they admit of
philosophical explanation.
By Englishmen they may be viewed with equanimity, if not with
satisfaction. They offer strong proof of the irrepressible strength or
catholicity of the appeal that Shakespeare's genius makes to the mind
and heart of humanity. His spirit survived the French efforts at
mutilation. The Gallicised or classicised contortions of his mighty
work did not destroy its saving virtue. There is ground for
congratulation that Ducis's and Dumas's perversions of Shakespeare
excited among Frenchmen almost as devoted an homage as the dramatist's
work in its native purity and perfection claims of men whose souls are
free of the fetters of classical tradition.
IV
If any still doubt the sincerity of the worship which is offered
Shakespeare in France, I would direct the sceptic's attention to a
pathetically simple tribute which was paid to the dramatist by a
French student in the first year of the last century, when England and
France were in the grip of the Napoleonic War. It was then that a
young Frenchman proved beyond cavil by an ingenuous confession that
the English poet, in spite of the racial differences of æsthetic
sentiment, could touch a French heart more deeply than any French or
classical author. In 1801 there was published at Besançon, "de
l'imprimerie de Métoyer," a very thin volume in small octavo, under
fifty pages in length, entitled, _Pensées de Shakespeare, Extraites de
ses Ouvrages_. No compiler's name is mentioned, but there is no doubt
that the book was from the pen of a precocious native of Besançon,
Charles Nodier, who was in later life to gain distinction as a
bibliographer and writer of romance.
This forgotten volume, of which no more than twenty-five copies were
printed, and only two or three of these seem to survive, has escaped
the notice of M. Jusserand. No copy of it is in the British Museum,
or in La Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, with which the author, Nodier, was
long honourably associated as librarian. I purchased it a few years
ago by accident in a small collection of imperfectly catalogued
Shakespeareana. Lurking in the rear of a very ragged regiment on the
shelves of the auctioneer stood Charles Nodier's _Pensées de
Shakespeare_. None competed with me for the prize. A very slight
effort delivered into my hands the little chaplet of French laurel.
The major part of the volume consists of 190 numbered sentences--each
a French rendering of an apophthegm or reflection drawn from
Shakespeare's plays. The translator is not faithful to his English
text, but his style is clear and often rises to eloquence. The book
does not, however, owe its interest to Nodier's version of
Shakespearean maxims. Nor can one grow enthusiastic over the
dedication "A elle"--an unidentified fair-one to whom the youthful
writer proffers his homage with respectful propriety. The salt of the
little volume lies in the "Observations Préliminaires," which cover
less than five widely-printed pages. These observations breathe a
genuine affection for Shakespeare's personality and a sense of
gratitude for his achievement in terms which no English admirer has
excelled for tenderness and simplicity.
"Shakespeare," writes this French worshipper, "is a friend whom Heaven
has given to the unhappy of every age and every country." The writer
warns us that he offers no eulogy of Shakespeare; that is to be found
in the poet's works, which the Frenchman for his own part prefers to
read and read again rather than waste time in praising them. "The
features of Alexander ought only to be preserved by Apelles." Nodier
merely collects some of Shakespeare's thoughts on great moral truths
which he thinks to be useful to the conduct of life. But such
extracts, he admonishes his reader, supply no true knowledge of
Shakespeare. "From Shakespeare's works one can draw forth a
philosophy, but from no systems of philosophy could one construct one
page of Shakespeare." Nodier concludes his "Observations" thus:--
"I advise those who do not know Shakespeare to study him in
himself. I advise those who know him already to read him
again.... I know him, but I must needs declare my admiration
for him. I have reviewed my powers, and am content to cast a
flower on his grave since I am not able to raise a monument
to his memory."
Language like this admits no questioning of its sincerity. Nodier's
modest tribute handsomely atones for his countrymen's misapprehensions
of Shakespeare's tragic conceptions. None has phrased more delicately
or more simply the sense of personal devotion, which is roused by
close study of his work.
XI
THE COMMEMORATION OF SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON[44]
[Footnote 44: This paper was first printed in _The Nineteenth Century
and After_, April 1905.]
I
The public memory is short. At the instant the suggestion that
Shakespeare should receive the tribute of a great national monument in
London is attracting general attention. In the ears of the vast
majority of those who are taking part in the discussion the proposal
appears to strike a new note. Few seem aware that a national memorial
of Shakespeare has been urged on Londoners many times before. Thrice,
at least, during the past eighty-five years has it exercised the
public mind.
At the extreme end of the year 1820, the well-known actor Charles
Mathews set on foot a movement for the erection of "a national
monument to the immortal memory of Shakespeare." He pledged himself to
enlist the support of the new King, George the Fourth, of members of
the royal family, of "every man of rank and talent, every poet,
artist, and sculptor." Mathews's endeavour achieved only a specious
success. George the Fourth, readily gave his "high sanction" to a
London memorial. Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Tom Moore,
and Washington Irving were among the men of letters; Sir Thomas
Lawrence, [Sir] Francis Chantrey, and John Nash, the architect, were
among the artists, who approved the general conception. For three or
four years ink was spilt and breath was spent in the advocacy of the
scheme. But nothing came of all the letters and speeches.
In 1847 the topic was again broached. A committee, which was hardly
less influential than that of 1821, revived the proposal. Again no
result followed.
Seventeen years passed away, and then, in 1864, the arrival of the
tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth seemed to many men of eminence in
public life, in letters or in art, an appropriate moment at which to
carry the design into effect. A third failure has to be recorded.
The notion, indeed, was no child of the nineteenth century which
fathered it so ineffectually. It was familiar to the eighteenth. One
eighteenth century effort was fortunate enough to yield a little
permanent fruit. To an eighteenth-century endeavour to offer
Shakespeare a national memorial in London was due the cenotaph in
Westminster Abbey.
II
The suggestion of commemorating Shakespeare by means of a monument in
London has thus something more than a "smack of age" about it,
something more than a "relish of the saltness of time"; there are
points of view from which it might appear to be already "blasted with
antiquity." On only one of the previous occasions that the question
was raised was the stage of discussion passed, and that was in the
eighteenth century when the monument was placed in the Poets' Corner
of Westminster Abbey. The issue was not felicitous. The memorial in
the Abbey failed to satisfy the commemorative aspirations of the
nation; it left it open to succeeding generations to reconsider the
question, if it did not impose on them the obligation. Most of the
poets, actors, scholars, and patrons of polite learning, who in 1741
subscribed their guineas to the fund for placing a monument in
Westminster Abbey, resented the sculpturesque caricature to which
their subscriptions were applied. Pope, an original leader of the
movement, declined to write an inscription for this national memorial,
but scribbled some ironical verses beginning:--
Thus Britons love me and preserve my fame.
A later critic imagined Shakespeare's wraith pausing in horror by the
familiar monument in the Abbey, and lightly misquoting Shelley's
familiar lines:--
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, ...
And long to unbuild it again.
One of the most regrettable effects of the Abbey memorial, with its
mawkish and irrelevant sentimentality, has been to set a bad pattern
for statues of Shakespeare. Posterity came to invest the design with
some measure of sanctity.
The nineteenth century efforts were mere abortions. In 1821, in spite
of George the Fourth's benevolent patronage, which included an
unfulfilled promise to pay the sum of 100 guineas, the total amount
which was collected after six years' agitation was so small that it
was returned to the subscribers. The accounts are extant in the
Library of Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon. In 1847 the
subscriptions were more abundant, but all was then absorbed in the
purchase of Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford; no money was
available for a London memorial. In 1864 the expenses of organising
the tercentenary celebration in London by way of banquets, concerts,
and theatrical performances, seem to have left no surplus for the
purpose which the movement set out to fulfil.
III
The causes of the sweeping failure of the proposal when it came before
the public during the nineteenth century are worthy of study. There
was no lack of enthusiasm among the promoters. Nor were their high
hopes wrecked solely by public apathy. The public interest was never
altogether dormant. More efficient causes of ruin were, firstly, the
active hostility of some prominent writers and actors who declaimed
against all outward and visible commemoration of Shakespeare; and
secondly, divisions in the ranks of supporters in regard to the
precise form that the memorial ought to take. The censorious refusal
of one section of the literary public to countenance any memorial at
all, and the inability of another section, while promoting the
endeavour, to concentrate its energies on a single acceptable form of
commemoration had, as might be expected, a paralysing effect.
"England," it was somewhat casuistically argued in 1864, "has never
been ungrateful to her poet; but the very depth and fervour of the
reverence in which he is held have hitherto made it difficult for his
scholars to agree upon any common proceeding in his name." Neither in
1864 nor at earlier and later epochs have Shakespearean scholars
always formed among themselves a very happy family. That amiable
sentiment which would treat the realisation of the commemorative aim
as a patriotic obligation--as an obligation which no good citizen
could honourably repudiate--has often produced discord rather than
harmony among the Shakespearean scholars who cherish it. One school of
these has argued in the past for a work of sculpture, and has been
opposed by a cry for a college for actors, or a Shakespearean theatre.
"We do not like the idea of a monument at all," wrote _The Times_ on
the 20th of January 1864. "Shakespeare," wrote _Punch_ on the 6th of
February following, "needs no statue." In old days it was frequently
insisted that, even if the erection of a London monument were
desirable, active effort ought to be postponed until an adequate
memorial had been placed in Stratford-on-Avon where the poet's memory
had been hitherto inadequately honoured. At the same time a band of
students was always prepared to urge the chilling plea that the
payment of any outward honour to Shakespeare was laboursome futility,
was "wasteful and ridiculous excess." Milton's query: "What needs my
Shakespeare for his honoured bones?" has always been quoted to satiety
by a vociferous section of the critics whenever the commemoration of
Shakespeare has come under discussion.
IV
Once again the question of a national memorial of Shakespeare in
London has been revived in conditions not wholly unlike those that
have gone before. Mr Richard Badger, a veteran enthusiast for
Shakespeare, who was educated in the poet's native place, has offered
the people of London the sum of £3500 as the nucleus of a great
Shakespeare Memorial Fund. The Lord Mayor of London has presided over
a public meeting at the Mansion House, which has empowered an
influential committee to proceed with the work. The London County
Council has promised to provide a site. With regard to the form that
the memorial ought to take, a variety of irresponsible suggestions has
been made. It has now been authoritatively determined to erect a
sculptured monument on the banks of the Thames.[45]
[Footnote 45: The proceedings of the committee which was formed in the
spring of 1905 have been dilatory. Mr Badger informs me that he paid
the organisers, nearly two years ago, the sum of £500 for preliminary
expenses, and deposited bonds to the value of £3000 with Lord Avebury,
the treasurer of the committee. The delay is assigned to the
circumstance that the London County Council, which is supporting the
proposal, is desirous of associating it with the great Council Hall
which it is preparing to erect on the south side of the Thames, and
that it has not yet been found practicable to invite designs for that
work. (Oct. 1, 1906.)]
The propriety of visibly and outwardly commemorating Shakespeare in
the capital city of the Empire has consequently become once more an
urgent public question. The public is invited anew to form an opinion
on the various points at issue. No expression of opinion should carry
weight which omits to take into account past experience as well as
present conditions and possibilities. If regard for the public
interest justify a national memorial in London, it is most desirable
to define the principles whereby its precise form should be
determined.