because it has licked Androcles? The unhelpful
genius, no matter how graceful, is really ugly. A
prodigy without love is a monster. Let us love !
let us love !
To love has never hindered from pleasing.
Where have you seen one form of the good ex-
cluding the other? On the contrary, all that is
good is allied. Let me, however, be understood :
it does not follow that to have one quality implies
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 32 1
necessarily the possession of the other; but it
would be strange that one quality added to an-
other should produce diminution. To be useful,
is but to be useful ; to be beautiful, is but to be
beautiful ; to be both useful and beautiful, is to be
sublime. Such are Saint Paul in the first century,
Tacitus and Juvenal in the second, Dante in the
thirteenth, Shakespeare in the sixteenth, Milton
and Moli^re in the seventeenth.
We have just now recalled a saying that has
become famous, " Art for art's sake." Let us,
once for all, explain ourselves touching this ex-
pression. If an assertion very general and very
often repeated (in good faith, we believe) can be
credited, the shibboleth, "Art for art's sake,"
must have been written by the author of this book.
Written? never. You may read, from the first
to the last line, all that we have published ; you
will not find these words. It is the contrary that
is written throughout our works, and, we insist,
in our entire life. As to the expression in itself,
what reality has it? Here is the fact, which sev-
eral of our contemporaries remember as well as
we do. One day, thirty-five years ago, in a dis-
cussion between critics and poets on Voltaire's
tragedies, the author of this book threw out this
interruption : " This tragedy is not a tragedy. It
does not contain living men ; it contains glib max-
ims. Rather, a hundred times, ' Art for art's
sake.' " This remark, turned ā doubtless invol-
untarily ā from its true sense to serve the ends
of the discussion, has since assumed, to the great
surprise of him who had uttered it, the propor-
322 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
tions of a formula. It is this phrase, limited to
' Alzire ' and to the ' Orphan of China,' and in-
contestable in that restricted application, which has
been turned into a perfect declaration of principles,
and an axiom to inscribe on the banner of Art
This point settled, let us go on.
Between two verses, ā the one by Pindar, deifying
a coachman or glorifying the brazen nails of a
chariot wheel ; the other by Archilochus, so pow-
erful that, after having read it, Jeffreys would leave
off his career of crime and would hang himself on
the gallows prepared by him for honest people, ā
between two such verses of equal beauty, I prefer
that of Archilochus.
In times anterior to history, when poetry is fabu-
lous and legendary, it has a Promethean grandeur.
What forms this grandeur? Utility. Orpheus
tames wild animals; Amphion builds cities; the
poet, tamer and architect, Linus aiding Hercules,
Musaeus assisting Daedalus, poetry a civilizing
power, ā such are the origins. Tradition agrees
with reason : in that, the good sense of the nations
is not deceived. The people have always invented
fables in the interest of truth. Magnified by that
hazy remoteness, everything is great. Now, the
beast-taming poet whom you admire in Orpheus,
you may recognize again in Juvenal.
We insist on Juvenal. Few poets have been
more insulted, more contested, more calumniated.
Calumny against Juvenal has been drawn at such
long date that it still lasts. It passes from one
knave of the pen to another. These grand haters
of evil are hated by all the flatterers of power and
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 323
success. The mob of servile sophists, of writers
who have the mark of the collar about their necks,
of bullying historiographers, of scholiasts kept and
fed, of court and school followers, stand in the way
of the punishers and avengers. They croak around
these eagles. Scant and grudging justice is ren-
dered to dispensers of justice. They hinder the
masters, and rouse the indignation of the lackeys,
ā for there is such a thing as the indignation of
baseness.
Moreover, the diminutives cannot do less than
help each other, and Caesarion must at least have
Tyrannion as a support. The pedant breaks ferules
for the satrap. For such jobs there are lettered
courtiers and official pedagogues. These poor,
dear vices, so open-handed, these excellent conde-
scending crimes, his Highness Rufinus, his Majesty
Claudius, the august Madame Messalina who en-
tertains so sumptuously and grants pensions out of
her privy purse, and who abides and perpetuates
her reign under the names of Theodora, Frede-
gonde, Agnes, Margaret of Burgundy, Isabel of
Bavaria, Catherine de' Medici, Catherine of Russia,
Caroline of Naples, etc., etc., ā all these great lords
the crimes, all these fine ladies the turpitudes, shall
they have the sorrow of witnessing the triumph
of Juvenal? No. War with the scourge in the
name of sceptres ! War with the rod in the name
of the cliques 1 That is well ! Go on, courtiers,
clients, eunuchs, and scribes. Go on, publicans
and pharisees. You will not hinder the republic
from thanking Juvenal, or the temple from approv-
ing Jesus.
324 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Isaiah, Juvenal, Dante, are virgins. Obser\'e their
downcast eyes. There is chastity in the wrath of
the just against the unjust. The Imprecation can
be as holy as the Hosanna ; and indignation, honest
indignation, has the ver>' purit)' of virtue. In point
of whiteness, the foam has no reason to envy the
snow.
CHAPTER III.
All histor}'' proves the working partnership of
art and progress. Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres.
Rhjthm is a power, ā a power that the Middle
Ages recognize and submit to not less than an-
tiquity'. The second barbarism, feudal barbarism,
also dreads the power of verse. The barons, not
over-timid, are abashed before the poet, ā who is
this man? They fear lest " a manly song be sung."
Behind this unknown man is the spirit of civilization.
The old donjons full of carnage open their wild
eyes and scan the darkness ; anxiety seizes them.
Feudality trembles, the den is disturbed. The
dragons and the hydras are ill at ease. Why?
Because an invisible god is there.
It is curious to find this power of poetry in
countries where barbarism is densest, particularly
in England, in that extreme feudal darkness, " pe-
nitus toto divisos orbe Britannos." If we believe
the legend, ā a form of history as true and as false
as any other, ā it is due to poetry that Colgrim,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 325
besieged by the Britons, is relieved in York by his
brother Bardulf the Saxon ; that King Awlof pene-
trates into the camp of Athelstan ; that Werburgh,
prince of Xorthumbria, is delivered by the Welsh, ā
whence, it is said, that Celtic device of the Prince
of Wales, Ich dim; ^ that Alfred, King of England,
triumphs over Gitro, King of the Danes, and that
Richard the Lion-hearted escapes from the prison
of Losenstein. Ranulf, Earl of Chester, attacked in
his castle of Rothelan, is saved by the inten-ention
of the minstrels, ā the legend is confirmed by the
privileges still enjoyed under Elizabeth by the
minstrels, who were patronized by the Lords of
Dalton.
The poet had the right of reprimand and menace.
In 13 16, at Whitsuntide, Edward II. being at table
in the grand hall of Westminster with the peers of
England, a female minstrel entered the hall on
horseback, rode all around, saluted Edward II.,
predicted in a loud voice to the minion Spencer
the gibbet and castration by the hand of the exe-
cutioner, and to the King the horn by means of
which a red-hot iron should be buried in his intes-
tines, placed on the table before the King a letter,
and departed, unchallenged and unmolested.
At the festivals, the minstrels passed before the
priests, and were more honorably treated. At
Abingdon, at the festival of the Holy Cross, each
of the twelve priests received fourpence, and each
of the twelve minstrels two shillings. At the
prior>' of Maxtoke, the custom was to give supper
1 Welsh eich dyn, "behold your man." See Stormonth's Dic-
tionary, s. V. ā Tr.
326 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
to the minstrels in the Painted Chamber lighted
by eight huge wax candles.
As we advance toward the North, the rising fogs
seem to magnify the poet. In Scotland, his pro-
portions are colossal. If anything surpasses the
legend of the rhapsodists, it is the legend of the
scalds. At the approach of Edward of England,
the bards defend Stirling as the three hundred had
defended Sparta; and they have their Thermopylae,
equal to that of Leonidas. Ossiau, perfectly cer-
tain and real, has had a plagiarist. That is nothing ;
but this plagiarist has done more than rob him, ā
he has made him insipid. To know Fingal only
through Macpherson is as if one knew Amadis only
through Tressan. They show at Stafifa the poet's
stone, Clachan an Bairdh, ā so named, according
to many antiquaries, long before the visit of Walter
Scott to the Hebrides. This Bard's Chair, a great
hollow rock furnishing a proper seat for a giant, is
at the entrance of the grotto. Around it are the
waves and the clouds. Behind the Clachan an
Bairdh is piled the superhuman geometry of the
basaltic prisms, the chaos of colonnades and waves,
and all the mystery of that dread edifice. The
gallery of Fingal runs next to the poet's chair,
and there the sea breaks before entering beneath
that terrible ceiling. At nightfall the fishermen
of the Mackinnon clan think they see in that chair
a leaning figure. " It is the ghost," they say ; and
no one would venture, even in full daylight, to
ascend to that awful seat; for to the idea of the
stone is linked the idea of the tomb, and none but
the shadow-man may sit upon that granite chair.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 327
CHAPTER IV.
Thought is power.
All power is duty. Should this power enter into
repose in our age? Should duty shut its eyes?
and is the moment come for art to disarm ? Less
than ever. Thanks to 1789, the human caravan
has reached a high plateau ; and, the horizon being
vaster, art has more to do. This is all. To every
widening of the horizon, an enlargement of con-
science corresponds.
We have not reached the goal. Concord con-
densed into felicity, civilization summed up in
harmony, ā that is yet far off. In the eighteenth
century that dream was so distant that it seemed
guilty. The Abbe de St. Pierre was expelled from
the Academy for having dreamed that dream, ā
an expulsion which appears rather severe at a
period when pastorals carried the day even with
Fontenelle, and when St. Lambert invented the
idyl for the use of the nobility. The Abb6 de St.
Pierre has left behind him a word and a dream ;
the word is his own, ā * Beneficence ; ' his dream is
the dream of us all, ā * Fraternity.' This dream,
which made Cardinal de Polignac foam, and Vol-
taire smile, is now less hidden than it once was
in the mist of the improbable ; it is a little nearer :
but we have not attained it. The people, those
orphans seeking their mother, do not yet hold in
their hand the hem of the robe of peace.
328 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
There remains about us enough of slavery, of
sophistry, of war, and of death, to make it essential
that the spirit of civilization should relinquish none
of its resources. The idea of the right divine is
not yet entirely dissipated. The spirit which ani-
mated Ferdinand VII. in Spain, Ferdinand II.
in Naples, George IV. in England, Nicholas in
Russia, is still in the air. A spectral remnant
still flits about. From that fatal cloud inspira-
tions descend upon wearers of crowns bent in dark
meditation.
Civilization has not yet done with the granters of
constitutions, with the proprietors of nations, and
with the legitimate and hereditary madmen who
assert themselves kings by the grace of God, and
think that they have the right of manumission over
the human race. It is becoming important to raise
some obstacle, to show bad will to the past, and to
bring some check to bear on these men, on these
dogmas, on these chimeras which stand in the way.
Intelligence, thought, science, austere art, philoso-
phy, ought to watch and beware of misunderstand-
ings. False rights contrive very easily to put
actual armies in the field. There are murdered
Polands at the horizon. "All my anxiety," said
a contemporary poet, recently deceased, " is the
smoke of my cigar." My anxiety is also a smoke,
ā the smoke of the cities which are burning
yonder. Let us, therefore, bring the tyrants to
grief, if we can.
Let us again, in the loudest possible voice, re-
peat the lesson of the just and the unjust, of right
and usurpation, of sworn truth and perjury, of
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 329
good and evil, oi fas et nefas ; let us display all
our old antitheses, as they say. Let us contrast
what ought to be with what actually is. Let us
dispel all confusion touching these things. Bring
light, ye that have it ! Let us oppose dogma to
dogma, principle to principle, energy to obstinacy,
truth to imposture, dream to dream, ā the dream
of the future to the dream of the past, ā liberty to
despotism. We shall be able to stretch ourselves
at full length and smoke out the cigar of fanciful
poetry, and laugh over Boccaccio's ' Decameron,'
with the soft blue sky over our heads, on the day
when the sovereignty of a king shall be exactly
of the same dimensions as the liberty of a man.
Until then, little sleep ; I am distrustful.
Place sentinels everywhere. Do not expect from
despots a large share of liberty. Let all the Po-
lands effect their own deliverance. Unlock the
future with your own hand. Do not hope that
your chain will forge itself into the key of freedom.
Up, children of the fatherland ! O mowers of the
steppes, arise ! Trust to the good intentions of
orthodox czars just enough to take up arms.
Hypocrisies and apologies, being traps, are an
added danger.
We live in a time when orators are heard prais-
ing the magnanimity of white bears and the tender
feelings of panthers. Amnesty, clemency, grandeur
of soul ; an era of felicity opens ; fatherly love is
the order of the day; behold all that is already
done ; it must not be thought that the spirit of the
time is not understood; august arms are open;
rally still closer round the Emperor ; Muscovy is
330 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
kind-hearted. See how happy the serfs are ! the
streams are to flow with milk, prosperity, Hberty
for all; your princes groan, like you, over the
past ; they are excellent. Come, fear nothing, little
ones ! All very good ; but candidly, we are of
those who put no faith in the lachrymal gland of
crocodiles.
The reigning public monstrosities impose stern
obligations on the conscience of the thinker, the
philosopher, or the poet. Incorruptibility must
resist corruption. It is more than ever requisite
to show men the ideal, ā that mirror reflecting the
face of God.
CHAPTER V.
In literature and philosophy we encounter now
and then a man with tears and laughter at com-
mand, ā Heraclitus masked as Democritus ; often
a very great man like Voltaire. Such a man is
an irony, sometimes tragic, which keeps its coun-
tenance.
These men, under the pressure of the influences
and prejudices of their time, speak with a double
meaning. One of the most profound is Bayle, the
man of Rotterdam, the powerful thinker. (Do not
write Beyle.) When Bayle coolly utters this max-
im : " It is better to weaken the grace of a thought
than to anger a tyrant," I smile, for I know the
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 33 1
man ; I think of him persecuted, almost proscribed,
and I know well that he has given way to the temp-
tation of affirming merely to give me the itch of
contradiction. But when it is a poet who speaks,
a poet wholly free, rich, happy, prosperous, invio-
lable, one expects clear, frank, and wholesome
instruction ; one cannot believe that such a man
can be guilty of anything like desertion of con-
science ; and it is with a blush that one reads this :
" Here below, in time of peace, let every man sweep
before his own door. In war, if conquered, one
must make terms with the enemy. . . . Let every
enthusiast be put on a cross when he reaches his
thirtieth year. When once he comes to know the
world, he ceases to be a dupe, and becomes a
rogue, . . . What utility, what result, what ad-
vantage does the holy liberty of the press offer
you? You have the certain demonstration of it,
ā a profound contempt for public opinion. . , .
There are people who have a mania for railing
at everything that is great; they are men who
have attacked the Holy Alliance : and yet nothing
has been invented more august and more salutary
for humanity." These things, belittling to the man
who wrote them, are signed Goethe. When he
wrote them, Goethe was sixty years old. Indif-
ference to good and evil is heady, liable to intoxi-
cate ; and this is what comes of it. The lesson is
sad, the sight mournful; for here the helot is an
intelligence.
A quotation may be a pillory. We post on the
public highway these lugubrious sentences ; it is
our duty. Goethe wrote that. Let it be remem-
332 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
bered, and let no one among the poets fall again
into the same error.^
To become impassioned for the good, for the
true, for the just; to suffer with the sufferers; to
feel upon one's soul all the strokes inflicted by
tormentors upon human flesh ; to be scourged with
Christ and flogged with the negro ; to be strength-
ened and to lament ; to scale, a Titan, that frowning
summit where Peter and Caesar make their swords
fraternize, gladiiim cum gladio copulemus ; to pile
for that escalade the Ossa of the ideal on the
Pelion of the real ; to make a vast apportionment
of hope ; to avail one's self of the ubiquity of the
book in order to be everywhere at the same time
with a consoling thought ; to push pell-mell men,
women, children, whites, blacks, peoples, hangmen,
tyrants, victims, impostors, the ignorant, proletaries,
serfs, slaves, masters, toward the future (a preci-
pice to some, to others a deliverance) ; to go forth,
to awaken, to hasten, to march, to run, to think,
^ ^ Never having known the real Goethe, Victor Hug q^ never
^ could do justice to him ; and possibly the relation would not have
been improved by better acquaintance. The character and works
that we call " Goethe " make up an exceedingly complex whole ; to
condemn it is akin to condemning an entire civilization. Burke
professed himself unable to draw up an indictment against a whole
nation ; and in Goethe's case any one broadly acquainted with the
f icts would probably find the task almost equally awkward. Hith-
erto, at least, it is observable that the severe judgments have not
emanated from the most patient and competent investigators. It
would be lamentable indeed should sensible people be misled, by
the garbled scraps here cited, into hasty prejudgment of him
whose spirit and work are so much more accurately indicated by
this line of his, ā
" Wouldst thou give freedom to many, first dare to do service to many."
ā Tr.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 333
to will, ā that is indeed well ; that makes it worth
while to be a poet. Take care ! You are losing
your temper. Certainly, but I am gaining wrath.
And now for thy blast in my pinions, O hurricane !
There was, of late years, a moment when impas-
sibility was recommended to poets as a condition
of divinity. To be indifferent was called being
Olympian. Where had they seen that? That is
an Olympus very unlike the real one. Read
Homer. The Olympians are passion, and nothing
else. Boundless humanity, ā such is their divinity.
They fight incessantly. One has a bow, another
a lance, another a sword, another a club, another
thunderbolts. One of them compels the leopards
to draw him. Another ā Wisdom she ā has cut
off the serpent-bristling head of Night, and nailed it
to her shield. Such is the calm of the Olympians,
Their wraths cause the thunders to roll from end
to end of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. These
wraths, when just, are good. The poet who has
them is the true Olympian, Juvenal, Dante,
Agrippa d'Aubigne, and Milton were subject to
these wraths, Moli^re too. From the soul of
Alceste flashes constantly the lightning of " vig-
orous hatreds." It was the hatred of evil which
Jesus meant when he said, " I am come to bring
war."
I like Stesichorus, indignant, preventing the alli-
ance of Greece with Phalaris, and fighting the
brazen bull with strokes of the lyre,
Louis XIV. found it good to have Racine sleep-
ing in his chamber when he, the King, was ill, ā thus
turning the poet into an assistant to his apothe-
334 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
cary. Wonderful patronage of letters ! But he
asked nothing more from the men of letters, and
the horizon of his alcove seemed to him sufficient
for them. One day Racine, somewhat urged by
Madame de Maintenon, conceived the thought of
leaving the King's chamber and of visiting the
garrets of the people. Thence a memoir on the
public distress. Louis XIV. cast at Racine a kill-
ing look. Poets fare ill when, being courtiers, they
do what royal mistresses ask of them. Racine,
at the suggestion of Madame de Maintenon, risks
a remonstrance which causes him to be driven
from court, and he dies of it ; Voltaire, at the in-
stigation of Madame de Pompadour, ventures a
madrigal, ā an awkward one, it appears, ā which
causes him to be driven from France, and he does
not die of it. Louis XV. on reading the madrigal
("Et gardez tous deux vos conquetes ") had ex-
claimed, " What a fool this Voltaire is ! "
Some years ago " a well-authorized pen," as
they say in official and academic cant, wrote this :
"The greatest service that poets can render us is
to be good for nothing. We ask of them nothing
else." Observe the scope and sweep of this word,
ā "the poets," ā which includes Linus, Musaeus,
Orpheus, Homer, Job, Hesiod, Moses, Daniel,
Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, .^sop, David,
Solomon, .^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pin-
dar, Archilochus, Tyrtaeus, Stesichorus, Menander,
Plato, Asclepiades, Pythagoras, Anacreon, Theoc-
ritus, Lucretius, Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Horace,
Catullus, Juvenal, Apuleius, Lucan, Persius, Ti-
bullus, Seneca, Petrarch, Ossian, Saadi, Firdusi,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 335
Dante, Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de Vega, Chau-
cer, Shakespeare, Camoens, Marot, Ronsard, Reg-
nier, Agrippa d'Aubigne, Malherbe, Segrais, Racan,
Milton, Pierre Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Boileau,
La Fontaine, Fontenelle, Regnard, Lesage, Swift,
Voltaire, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Andre Chenier, Klopstock, Les-
sing, Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, Hofmann, Alfieri,
Chateaubriand, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns,
Walter Scott, Balzac, Musset, Beranger, Pellico,
Vigny, Dumas, George Sand, Lamartine, ā all
declared by the oracle " good for nothing," and
having uselessness for their excellence. That sen-
tence ā a "success," it appears ā has been very
often repeated. We repeat it in our turn. When
the conceit of an idiot reaches such proportions, it
deserves registration. The writer who uttered
that aphorism is, so they assure us, one of the
high personages of the day. We have no objec-
tion; dignities shorten no ears.
Octavius Augustus, on the morning of the battle
of Actium, met an ass called by its driver " Tri-
umphus," This Triumphus, endowed with the
faculty of braying, seemed to him of good omen.
Octavius Augustus won the battle; and remem-
bering Triumphus, had him cast in bronze and set
up in the Capitol. That made a Capitoline ass;
but still ā an ass.
One can understand kings saying to the poet,
" Be useless ; " but one does not understand the peo-
ple saying so to him. The poet is for the people,
" Pro populo poeta," wrote Agrippa d'Aubigne.
" All things to all men," exclaims Saint Paul.
336 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
What is an intelligence? A feeder of souls. The
poet is at the same time a menace and a promise.
The distress he arouses in oppressors calms and
consoles the oppressed. It is the glory of the
poet to place a restless pillow on the purple bed
of the tormentors. It is often thanks to him that
the tyrant awakes, saying, " I have slept badly."
Every slave, every despondency, every sorrow,
every misfortune, every distress, every hunger,
and every thirst has a claim upon the poet; he
has one creditor, ā the human race.