Виктор Мари Гюго
William Shakespeare
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.
ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER
CHAPTER I
"Ce courtisan grossier du profane vulgaire."20
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!"21
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.22 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."23
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.
Everything can be written. Paper is patience itself. Last year a grave review printed this: "Homer is now going out of fashion."
The judgment passed on the philosopher, on the artist, on the poet is completed by the portrait of the man.
Byron has killed his tailor. Molière has married his own daughter. Shakespeare has "loved" Lord Southampton.
"Et pour voir à la fin tous les vices ensemble,
Le parterre en tumulte a demandé l'auteur."24
That ensemble of all vices is Beaumarchais.
As for Byron, we mention this name a second time; he is worth the trouble. Read "Glenarvon," and listen, on the subject of Byron's abominations, to Lady Bl – , whom he had loved, and who, of course, resented it.
Phidias was a procurer; Socrates was an apostate and a thief, décrocheur de manteaux; Spinosa was a renegade, and sought to obtain legacies by undue influence; Dante was a peculator; Michael Angelo was cudgelled by Julius II., and quietly put up with it for the sake of five hundred crowns; D'Aubigné was a courtier sleeping in the water-closet of the king, ill-tempered when he was not paid, and for whom Henri IV. was too kind; Diderot was a libertine; Voltaire a miser; Milton was venal, – he received a thousand pounds sterling for his apology, in Latin, of regicide: "Defensio pro se," etc. Who says these things? Who relates these histories? That good person, your old fawning friend, O tyrants, your ancient comrade, O traitors, your old auxiliary, O bigots, your ancient comforter, O imbeciles! – calumny.
CHAPTER II
Let us add a detail. Diatribe is, on certain occasions, a useful means of government.
Thus the hand of the police was in the print of Diderot Flogged, and the engraver of the Franciscan friar must have been kindred to the turnkey of Vincennes. Governments, more passionate than necessary, neglect to remain strangers to the animosities of the lower orders. Political persecution of former days – it is of former days that we are speaking – willingly availed itself of a dash of literary persecution. Certainly, hatred hates without being paid for it. Envy, to do its work, does not need a minister of State to encourage it and to give it a pension; and there is such a thing as unofficial calumny. But a money-bag does no harm. When Roy, the court-poet, rhymed against Voltaire, "Tell me, daring stoic," etc., the position of treasurer of the chamber of Clermont, and the cross of St. Michael, were not likely to damp his enthusiasm for the Court, and his spirit against Voltaire. A gratuity is pleasant to receive after a service rendered; the masters upstairs smile; you receive the agreeable order to insult some one you detest; you obey richly; you are free to bite like a glutton; you take your fill; it is all profit; you hate and you give satisfaction. Formerly authority had its scribes. It was a pack of hounds as good as any other. Against the free rebel spirit, the despot would let loose the scribbler. To torture was not sufficient; teasing was resorted to likewise. Trissotin held a confabulation with Vidocq, and from their tête-à-tête would burst a complex inspiration. Pedagogism, thus supported by the police, felt itself an integral part of authority, and strengthened its æsthetics with legal means. It was arrogant. The pedant raised to the dignity of policeman, – nothing can be so arrogant as that vileness. See, after the struggle between the Arminians and the Gomarists, with what a superb air Sparanus Buyter, his pocket full of Maurice of Nassau's florins, denounces Josse Vondel, and proves, Aristotle in hand, that the Palamède of Vondel's tragedy is no other than Barneveldt, – useful rhetoric, by which Buyter obtains against Vondel a fine of three hundred crowns, and for himself a fat prebend at Dordrecht.
The author of the book "Querelles Littéraires," the Abbé Irail, canon of Monistrol, asks of La Beaumelle: "Why do you insult M. de Voltaire so much?" "It is because it sells well," replies La Beaumelle. And Voltaire, informed of the question and of the reply, concludes: "It is just; the booby buys the writing, and the minister buys the writer. It sells well."
Françoise d'Issembourg de Happoncourt, wife of François Hugo, chamberlain of Lorraine, and very celebrated under the name of Madame de Graffigny, writes to M. Devaux, reader to King Stanislaus: —
My dear Pampam, – Atys being far off [read: Voltaire being banished], the police cause to be published against him a swarm of small writings and pamphlets, which are sold at a sou in the cafés and theatres. That would displease the marquise,25 if it did not please the king.
Desfontaines, that other insulter of Voltaire, by whom he had been taken out of Bicêtre, said to the Abbé Prévost, who advised him to make his peace with the philosopher: "If Algiers did not make war, Algiers would die of famine."
This Desfontaines, also an abbé, died of dropsy; and his well-known tastes gained for him this epitaph: "Periit aqua qui meruit igne."
Among the publications suppressed in the last century by decree of Parliament, can be observed a document printed by Quinet and Besogne, and destroyed doubtless because of the revelations it contained, and of which the title gave promise: "L'Arétinade, ou Tarif des Libellistes et Gens de Lettres Injurieux."
Madame de Staël, sent in exile forty-five leagues from Paris, stops exactly at the forty-five leagues, – at Beaumont-sur-Loire, – and thence writes to her friends. Here is a fragment of a letter addressed to Madame Gay, mother of the illustrious Madame de Girardin: —
"Ah, dear madame, what a persecution are these exiles!.. [We suppress some lines.] You write a book; it is forbidden to speak of it. Your name in the journals displeases. Permission is, however, fully given to speak ill of it."
