It is scarcely known 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 a warn-
ing, all the wretched names are unknown. An
obscure notoriety follows their equivocal existence.
Look at that Clement who called himself the " hy-
percritic," and whose profession it was to bite and
denounce Diderot; he disappears, and is con-
founded, although born at Geneva, with Clement
of Dijon, confessor to Mesdames; with David
Clement, author of the ' Bibliotheque Curieuse ' ;
with Clement of Baize, Benedictine of St. Maur;



222 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

and with Clement d'Ascain, Capuchin, definitor
and provincial of Beam. What avails it him to
have declared that the work of Diderot is but
" obscure verbiage," and to have died mad at Cha-
renton, to be afterward submerged in four or five
unknown Clements? In vain did Famien Strada
rabidly attack Tacitus : he is scarcely distinguished
now from Famien Spada, called " the Wooden
Sword," the jester of Sigismond Augustus, In
vain did Cecchi vilify Dante: we are not certain
that 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 Lender. The unknown De Vise,
who " smashed " Moli^re, turns out to be a certain
Donneau ; he had surnamed himself De Vise
through a taste for nobility. Those men relied,
in order to create for themselves a little notoriety,
on the greatness of those whom they outraged
But no ; they have remained obscure. These poor
insulters did not get their wages ; they are bank-
rupt of contempt. Let us pity them.

1 And rightly ; for he is indeed the same individual. See note,
p. 190. — Tr.



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 22$



CHAPTER II.

Let us add that calumny's labor is lost. Then
what purpose can it serve? Not even an evil one.
Do you know anything more useless than the inju-
rious which does not injure?

Better still. This injury is beneficial. In good
time it is found that calumny, envy, and hatred,
thinking to work harm, have worked benefit.
Their insults bring fame; their blackening adds
lustre. They succeed only in mingling with glory
an outcry which increases it.

Let us continue.

Thus each great poet tries on in his turn this
immense human mask. And such is the strength
of the soul which shines through the mysterious
aperture of the eyes, that this look changes the
mask, and from terrible makes it comic, then pen-
sive, then grieved, then young and smiling, then
decrepit, then sensual and gluttonous, then relig-
ious, then outrageous ; and it is Cain, Job, Atreus,
Ajax, Priam, Hecuba, Niobe, Clytemnestra, Nausi-
caa, Pistoclerus, Grumio, Davus, Pasicompsa, Chi-
mene, Don Arias, Don Diego, Mudarra, Richard
III., Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Juliet, Romeo,
Lear, Sancho Panza, Pantagruel, Panurge, Ar-
nolphe, Dandin, Sganarelle, Agnes, Rosine, Victo-
rine, Basile, Almaviva, Cherubin, Manfred.

From the direct divine creation proceeds Adam,
the prototype. From the indirect divine creation



224 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

' — that is to say, from the human creation — pro-
ceed other Adams, the types.

A type does not reproduce any man in particu-
lar; it cannot be exactly superposed upon any
individual ; it sums up and concentrates under one
human form a whole family of characters and
minds. A type is no abridgment : it is a conden-
sation. It is not one, it is all. Alcibiades is but
Alcibiades, Petronius is but Petronius, Bassom-
pierre is but Bassompierre, Buckingham is but
Buckingham, Fronsac is but Fronsac, Lauzun is
but Lauzun ; but take Lauzun, Fronsac, Bucking-
ham, Bassompierre, Petronius, and Alcibiades, and
bray them in the mortar of the dream, and there
issues from it a phantom more real than them all,
■ — Don Juan. Take usurers individually, and no
one of them is that fierce merchant of Venice,
crying : " Go, Tubal, fee me an officer, bespeak him
a fortnight before ; 1 will have the heart of him if
he forfeit." Take all the usurers together, from the
crowd of them is evolved a total, — Shylock. Sum
up usury, you have Shylock. The metaphor of
the people, who are never mistaken, confirms una-
wares the invention of the poet ; and while Shake-
speare makes Shylock, the popular tongue creates
the bloodsucker.^ Shylock is the embodiment of
Jewishness; he is also Judaism, — that is to say,
his whole nation, the high as well as the low, faith
as well as fraud ; and it is because he sums up a
whole race, such as oppression has made it, that
Shylock is great. The Jews are, however, right in
saying that none of them — not even the mediaeval
1 Happe-chair ; literally, " grab-flesh." — Tr.



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 225

Jew — is Shylock. Men of pleasure may with rea-
son say that no one of them is Don Juan. No leaf
of the orange-tree when chewed gives the flavor of
the orange ; yet there is a deep affinity, an identity
of roots, a sap rising from the same source, a shar-
ing of the same subterranean shadow before life.
The fruit contains the mystery of the tree, and the
type contains the mystery of the man. Hence the
strange vitality of the type.

For — and this is the marvel — the type lives.
Were it but an abstraction, men would not recog-
nize it, and would allow this shadow to go its way.
The tragedy termed " classic " makes phantoms ;
the drama creates living types. A lesson which is
a man ; a myth with a human face so plastic that it
looks at you and that its look is a mirror; a para-
ble which nudges you ; a symbol which cries out
" Beware ! " an idea which is nerve, muscle, and
flesh, — which has a heart to love, bowels to
suffer, eyes to weep, and teeth to devour or to
laugh; a psychical conception with the relief of
actual fact, which, if it be pricked, bleeds red,
— such is the type. O power of all poetry !
These types are beings. They breathe, they pal-
pitate, their steps are heard on the floor, they
exist. They exist with an existence more intense
than that of any creature thinking himself alive
there in the street. These phantoms are more
substantial than man. In their essence is that
eternal element which belongs to masterworks,
which makes Trimalchio live, while M. Romieu is
dead.

Types are cases foreseen of God ; genius realizes
IS



226 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

them. It seems that God prefers to teach man a
lesson through man, in order to inspire confidence.
The poet walks the street with living men ; he has
their ear. Hence the efficacy of types. Man is a
premise, the type the conclusion ; God creates the
phenomenon, genius gives it a name ; God creates
the miser only, genius forms Harpagon ; God
creates the traitor only, genius makes lago ; God
creates the coquette, genius makes Celimene ;
God creates the citizen only, genius makes Chry-
sale ; God creates the king only, genius makes
Grandgousier. Sometimes, at a given moment,
the type issues full-grown from some unknown
collaboration of the mass of the people with a
great natural actor, an involuntary and powerful
realizer ; the crowd is a midwife ; in an epoch
which bears at one extreme Talleyrand, and at
another Chodruc-Duclos, there springs up sud-
denly, in a flash of lightning, under the mysterious
incubation of the theatre, that spectre Robert
Macaire.-^

Types go and come on a common level in Art
and in Nature ; they are the ideal realized. The
good and the evil of man are in these figures.
From each of them springs, in the eyes of the
thinker, a humanity.

As we have said before, as many types, as many
Adams. The man of Homer, Achilles, is an
Adam : from him comes the species of the slayers ;
the man of iEschylus, Prometheus, is an Adam :
from him comes the race of the wrestlers; the

1 For an entertaining account of Chodruc-Duclos, by Dr. Holmes,
see 'The Atlantic Monthly,' July, 1886, pp. 12, 13. — Tr.



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 22/

man of Shakespeare, Hamlet, is an Adam: to him
belongs the family of the dreamers. Other Adams,
created by poets, incarnate, — this one, passion;
another, duty; another, reason; another, con-
science ; another, the fall ; another, the ascension.

Prudence, drifting into trepidation, passes from
the old man Nestor to the old man Geronte. Love,
drifting into appetite, passes from Daphne to Love-
lace. Beauty, entwined with the serpent, passes
from Eve to Melusina. The types begin in Gene-
sis, and a link of their chain passes through Restif
de la Bretonne and Vade. The lyric suits them,
— Billingsgate does not misbecome them. They
speak a country dialect by the mouth of Gros-
Rene, and in Homer they say to Minerva, who
takes them by the hair : " What wouldst thou with
me. Goddess? "

A surprising exception has been conceded to
Dante. The man of Dante is Dante. Dante has,
so to speak, recreated himself in his poem : he is
his own type ; his Adam is himself. For the
action of his poem he has sought out no one. He
has taken Virgil only as a supernumerary. More-
over, he made himself epic at once, without even
giving himself the trouble to change his name.
What he had to do was in fact simple, — to
descend into hell, and remount to heaven. What
use was it to trouble himself for so little? He
knocks gravely at the door of the Infinite and
says: "Open! I am Dante."



228 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,



CHAPTER III.

The man of ^Eschylus, Prometheus, and the
man of Shakespeare, Hamlet, are as we have just
said, — two marvellous Adams.

Prometheus is action; Hamlet is hesitation.

In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior ; in
Hamlet it is interior.

In Prometheus the four limbs of incarnate Will
are nailed down with brazen spikes, and cannot
move: besides, it has by its side two watchers.
Force and Power. In Hamlet the Will is still more
enthralled : it is bound by preliminary meditation,
the endless chain of the irresolute. Try to get out
of yourself if you can ! What a Gordian knot is
our revery ! Slavery from within, is slavery in-
deed. Scale me the barricade of thought ! escape,
if you can, from the prison of love ! The only
dungeon is that which immures the conscience.
Prometheus, in order to be free, has but a bronze
collar to break and a god to conquer; Hamlet
must break and conquer himself Prometheus can
rise upright, quit with lifting a mountain; in
order that Hamlet may stand erect, he must lift
his own thought. If Prometheus plucks the
vulture from his breast, all is done ; Hamlet must
rend from his flank Hamlet. Prometheus and
Hamlet are two livers laid bare: from the one
trickles blood, from the other doubt



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 229

We are in the habit of comparing ^schylus and
Shakespeare by Orestes and Hamlet, these two
tragedies being the same drama. Never in fact
was there more identity of subject. The learned
note an analogy between them ; the impotent, who
are also the ignorant, the envious, who are also
the imbecile, have the petty joy of thinking they
detect a plagiarism. There is here, for the rest,
a possible field for comparative erudition and for
serious criticism. Hamlet walks behind Orestes,
a parricide through filial love. This easy com-
parison, rather superficial than substantial, is less
striking than the mysterious confrontment of those
two captives, Prometheus and Hamlet.

Let it not be forgotten that the human mind,
half divine as it is, creates from time to time super-
human works. Furthermore, these superhuman
works of man are more numerous than is believed,
for they make up the whole of art. Outside of
poetry, where wonders abound, there is, in music,
Beethoven ; in sculpture, Phidias ; in architecture,
Piranesi ; in painting, Rembrandt; and in painting,
architecture, and sculpture, Michael Angelo. We
pass over many, and not the least.

Prometheus and Hamlet are among these more
than human works.

A kind of gigantic prepossession : the usual
measure exceeded ; greatness everywhere, — the
dismay of commonplace minds; the true demon-
strated, when necessary, by the improbable ;
destiny, society, law, religion, brought to trial and
judgment in the name of the Unknown, the abyss
of the mysterious equilibrium; the event treated



230 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

as a role to be played, and, on occasion, hurled as
a reproach against Fatality or Providence ; Passion,
terrible personage, going and coming in man ; the
audacity and sometimes the insolence of reason ;
the haughty forms of a style at ease in all extremes,
and at the same time a profound wisdom ; the
gentleness of the giant, the good nature of a
softened monster ; an ineffable dawn which cannot
be accounted for and which lights up everything:
such are the signs of these supreme works. In
certain poems there is starlight.

This light is in ^Eschylus and in Shakespeare.



CHAPTER IV.

Nothing can be more fiercely wild than Prome-
theus stretched on the Caucasus. It is gigantic
tragedy. The old punishment which our ancient
laws of torture called " extension," and which Car-
touche escaped because of a hernia, — this, Prome-
theus undergoes ; only the rack is a mountain.
What is his crime? The Right. To characterize
right as crime, and movement as rebellion, is the
immemorial skill of tyrants. Prometheus has done
on Olympus what Eve did in Eden, — he has
taken a little knowledge. Jupiter — identical, in-
deed, with Jehovah {lovi, lova) — punishes this
temerity of having desired to live. The ^ginetic
traditions, which localize Jupiter, deprive him of the
cosmic impersonality of the Jehovah of Genesis.



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 23 1

The Greek Jupiter — bad son of a bad father, in
rebellion against Saturn, who has himself been a
rebel against CceIus, — is an upstart. The Titans
are a sort of elder branch which has its legitimists,
of whom ^schylus, the avenger of Prometheus, was
one. Prometheus is the right conquered. Jupiter
has, as is always the case, consummated the usur-
pation of power by the punishment of right.
Olympus claims the aid of Caucasus. Prometheus
is fastened there by the brazen collar. There is
the Titan, fallen, prostrate, nailed down. Mercury,
everybody's friend, comes to give him such coun-
sel as generally follows the perpetration of coups
d'etat. Mercury is the cowardice of intelligence ;
the embodiment of all possible vice, but full of
cleverness : Mercury, the god Vice, serves Jupiter,
the god Crime. These flunkeys in evil are marked
to this day by the veneration of the thief for the
assassin. There is something of that law in the
arrival of the diplomatist behind the conqueror.
The masterworks are immense in this, — that they
are eternally present at the deeds of humanity.
Prometheus on the Caucasus, is Poland after 1772 ;
France after 1815 ; the Revolution after Brumaire.
Mercury speaks; Prometheus listens but little.
Offers of amnesty miscarry when it is the victim
alone who should have the right to grant pardon.
Prometheus, thrown to earth, scorns Mercury
standing proudly above him, and Jupiter standing
above Mercury, and Destiny standing above Jupi-
ter. Prometheus jests at the vulture which gnaws
at him ; he disdainfully shrugs his shoulders as
much as his chain allows. What does he care for



232 WILL/AM SHAKESPEARE.

Jupiter, and of what good is Mercury? There is
no hold upon this haughty sufferer. The scorch-
ing thunderbolt causes a smart, which is a constant
appeal to pride. Meanwhile tears flow around
him, the earth despairs, the cloud-women — the
fifty Oceanides — come to worship the Titan,
forests cry aloud, wild beasts groan, winds howl,
waves sob, the elements moan, the world suffers
in Prometheus, — his brazen collar chokes the
universal life. An immense participation in the
torture of the demigod seems to be henceforth
the tragic delight of all Nature ; anxiety for the
future mingles with it: and what is to be done
now? How are we to move? What will become
of us? And in the vast whole of created beings,
things, men, animals, plants, rocks, all turned
toward the Caucasus, is felt this unspeakable
anguish : the liberator is enchained.

Hamlet, less gigantic and more human, is not
less great.

Hamlet, that awful being complete in incom-
pleteness; all, in order to be nothing! He is
prince and demagogue, sagacious and extravagant,
profound and frivolous, man and neuter. He has
little faith in the sceptre, rails at the throne, has
a student for his comrade, converses with any one
passing by, argues with the first comer, understands
the people, despises the mob, hates violence, dis-
trusts success, questions obscurity, and is on
speaking terms with mystery. He communicates
to others maladies that he has not himself; his
feigned madness inoculates his mistress with real
madness. He is familiar with spectres and with



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 2$$

actors. He jests, with the axe of Orestes in his
hand. He talks Hterature, recites verses, composes
a theatrical criticism, plays with bones in a church-
yard, dumfounds his mother, avenges his father,
and closes the dread drama of life and death with
a gigantic point of interrogation. He terrifies, and
then disconcerts. Never has anything more over-
whelming been dreamed. It is the parricide
saying, "What do I know?"

Parricide? Let us pause upon that word. Is
Hamlet a parricide? Yes, and no. He confines
himself to threatening his mother ; but the threat
is so fierce that the mother shudders. " Thy word
is a dagger! . . . What wilt thou do? Thou wilt
not murder me? Help! help! ho!" — and when
she dies, Hamlet, without grieving for her, strikes
Claudius with the tragic cry : " Follow my
mother ! " Hamlet is that sinister thing, the
possible parricide.^

Instead of the North, which he has in his brain,
let him have, like Orestes, the South in his veins,
and he will kill his mother.

This drama is stern. In it truth doubts, sin-
cerity lies. Nothing can be vaster, nothing subtler.
In it man is the world, and the world is zero.
Hamlet, even in full life, is not sure of his exist-
ence. In this tragedy — which is at the same time
a philosophy — everything floats, hesitates, shuffles,
staggers, becomes discomposed, scatters, and is
dispersed. Thought is a cloud, will is a vapor,
resolution a twilight; the action blows every

1 The quotation from ' Hamlet ' is left in the inexact form that
Hugo gave it. — Tr.



234 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

moment from a different direction: the mariner's
card governs man. A work which disturbs and
makes dizzy ; in which the bottom of everything
is laid bare ; where the pendulum of thought
oscillates only from the murdered king to buried
Yorick; and where that which is most real is
kingliness impersonated in a ghost, and mirth
represented by a death's-head.

Hamlet is the supreme tragedy of the human
dream.



CHAPTER V.

One of the probable causes of the feigned mad-
ness of Hamlet has not been, up to the present
time, indicated by critics. It has been said,
" Hamlet acts the madman to hide his thought,
like Brutus." In fact, it is easy for apparent im-
becility to hatch a great project; the supposed
idiot can take aim deliberately. But the case of
Brutus is not that of Hamlet. Hamlet acts the
madman for his safety. Brutus screens his pro-
ject, Hamlet his person. Given the manners of
those tragic courts, from the moment that, through
the revelation of the ghost, Hamlet is acquainted
with the crime of Claudius, he is in danger. The
superior historian within the poet is manifested,
and one feels the deep insight of Shakespeare
into the darkness of the ancient royalty. In the
Middle Ages and in the Eastern Empire, and



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 23$

even at earlier periods, woe unto him who found
out a murder or a poisoning committed by a
king ! Ovid, according to Voltaire's conjecture,
was exiled from Rome for having seen something
shameful in the house of Augustus. To know
that the King was an assassin, was a state crime.
When it pleased the prince not to have had a wit-
ness, it was a matter of life and death to know
nothing; it was bad policy to have good eyes.
A man suspected of suspicion was lost. He had
but one refuge, — madness ; to pass for " an inno-
cent: " he was despised, and that was all. You
remember the advice that, in ^schylus, the Ocean
gives to Prometheus : " To seem mad is the secret
of the sage." When the Chamberlain Hugolin
found the iron spit with which Edric of Mercia^
had impaled Edmund II., " he hastened to put on
madness," says the Saxon chronicle of 1016, and
saved himself in that way. Heraclides of Nisibis,
having discovered by chance that Rhinometer was
a fratricide, had himself declared insane by the
doctors, and succeeded in getting himself shut up
for life in a cloister. He thus lived peaceably,
growing old, and waiting for death with a vacant
stare. Hamlet runs the same risk, and has re-
course to the same means. He gets himself de-
clared insane like Heraclides, and puts on madness
like Hugolin. This does not prevent the uneasy
Claudius from twice making an effort to get rid

' Freeman says : " The chronicles are silent as to the manner
of Eadmund's death." — Norman Conquest, i. 470. The reality
of the murder is very doubtful. The story of Hugolin is not men-
tioned by Freeman. — Tr.



236 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

of him, — in the middle of the drama by the axe
or the dagger, and toward the end by poison.

The same indication is again found in * King
Lear : ' the Earl of Gloucester's son takes refuge
also in apparent lunacy. Herein is a key to open
and understand Shakespeare's thought. To the
eyes of the philosophy of Art, the feigned madness
of Edgar throws light upon the feigned madness
of Hamlet.

The Hamblet of Belleforest is a magician ; the
Hamlet of Shakespeare is a philosopher. We
just now spoke of the singular reality which
characterizes poetical creations. There is no
more striking example than this type, Hamlet.
Hamlet is not in the least an abstraction. He has
been at the university ; he has the Danish savage-
ness softened by the ItaHan politeness ; he is short,
plump, somewhat lymphatic ; he fences well, but
is soon out of breath. He does not care to drink
too soon during the fencing-bout with Laertes, —
probably for fear of sweating. After having thus
supplied his personage with real life, the poet can
launch him into the full ideal; there is ballast
enough.

Other works of the human mind equal ' Hamlet;'
none surpasses it. There is in * Hamlet ' all the
majesty of the mournful. A drama issuing from
an open sepulchre, — this is colossal. 'Hamlet* is
to our mind Shakespeare's capital work.

No figure among those that poets have created
is more poignant and more disquieting. Doubt
counselled by a ghost, — such is Hamlet. Ham-
let has seen his dead father and has spoken to him.



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 237

Is he convinced? No; he shakes his head. What
shall he do? He does not know. His hands
clench, then fall by his side. Within him are con-
jectures, systems, monstrous apparitions, bloody
recollections, veneration for the ghost, hate, tender-
ness, anxiety to act and not to act, his father, his
mother, conflicting duties, — a profound storm.
His mind is occupied with ghastly hesitation.
Shakespeare, wonderful plastic poet, makes the
grandiose pallor of this soul almost visible. Like
the great spectre of Albrecht Diirer, Hamlet might
be named ' Melancholia.' Above his head, too,
there flits the disembowelled bat; at his feet are
science, the sphere, the compass, the hour-glass,
love ; and behind him, at the horizon, a great and
terrible sun, which seems to make the sky but
darker.

Nevertheless, at least one half of Hamlet is
anger, transport, outrage, hurricane, sarcasm to
Ophelia, malediction on his mother, insult to him-
self He talks with the grave-diggers, almost
laughs, then clutches Laertes by the hair in the
very grave of Ophelia, and tramples furiously up-
on that cofiin. Sword-thrusts at Polonius, sword-
thrusts at Laertes, sword-thrusts at Claudius. At
times his inaction gapes open, and from the rent,
thunderbolts flash out.

He is tormented by that possible life, interwoven
of reality and dream, concerning which we are all
anxious. Somnambulism is diffused through all
his actions. One might almost consider his brain
as a formation : there is a layer of suffering, a
layer of thought, then a layer of dream. It is



238 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

through this layer of dream that he feels, compre-