William Shakespeare

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."15

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.'"16 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."17

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.

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!18 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.

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!