Виктор Мари Гюго
William Shakespeare
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.19
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.
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.
