42 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Repeat the names we have mentioned, and those
which we might have added. To choose between
these men is impossible. There is no method
for striking the balance between Rembrandt and
Michael Angelo. p

Confining ourselves solely to the authors and
poets, let us examine them one after the other.
Which is the greatest } Every one.

I. One, Homer, is the huge poet-child. The
world is born. Homer sings : he is the bird of this
dawn. Homer has the holy candor of morning.
The shadow is almost unknown to him. Chaos,
heaven, earth, Geo and Ceto, Jove god of gods,
Agamemnon king of kings, peoples, flocks from
the beginning, temples, towns, battles, harvests, the
ocean ; Diomedes fighting, Ulysses wandering;
the meanderings of a ship seeking its home ; the
Cyclops, the Pygmies ; a map of the world with a
crown of gods upon Olympus, and here and there
a glimpse of Erebus through furnace-mouths ;
priests, virgins, mothers, little children frightened
by the plumes, the unforgetting dog, great words
which fall from gray-beards, loving friendships, the
passions and the hydras, Vulcan for the laugh of
the gods, Thersites for the laugh of men ; the two
aspects of married life summed up for the benefit
of the centuries in Helen and in Penelope; the
Styx, Destiny, the heel of Achilles, without which
Destiny would be vanquished by the Styx ; mon-
sters, heroes, men, a thousand perspectives glimps-
ing in the haze of the antique world, — this is Homer.
Troy coveted, Ithaca longed for. Homer is war
and travel, — the two first methods for the meeting of



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 43

mankind. The camp attacks the fortress, the ship
attacks the unknown by penetrating it ; around war
every passion ; around travel every kind of adven-
ture ; two gigantic groups : the first, bloody, is
called the * Ihad,' the second, luminous, is called
the ' Odyssey.* Homer makes men preternatu-
rally big ; they hurl at each other masses of rock
which twelve yoke of oxen could not move ; the
gods hardly care to have to deal with them. Min-
erva takes Achilles by the hair ; he turns around
in anger: "What wouldst thou with me, goddess?"
There is, however, no monotony in these puissant
figures. These giants are graduated. After each
hero. Homer breaks the mould. Ajax son of
Olfleus is less high in stature than Ajax son of
Telamon. Homer is one of the men of genius who
solve that fine problem of art, — the finest of all,
perhaps, — truly to depict humanity by the en-
largement of man : that is, to generate the real
in the ideal. Fable and history, hypothesis and
tradition, the chimera and knowledge, make up
Homer. He is fathomless, and he is cheerful.
All the depth of ancient days moves, radiant and
luminous, in the vast azure of his mind. Lycur-
gus, that peevish sage, half a Solon and half a
Draco, was conquered by Homer. He turned out
of the way, while travelling, to go and read, at the
house of Cleophilus, Homer's poems, placed there
in remembrance of the hospitality that Homer,
it is said, had formerly received in that house.
Homer, to the Greeks, was a god ; he had priests,
the Homerides. Alcibiades gave a rhetorician a
cuff for boasting that he had never read Homer.



44 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

The divinity of Homer has survived Paganism.
Michael Angelo said, " When I read Homer, I
look at myself to see if I am not twenty feet in
height." Tradition will have it that the first verse
of the ' Iliad * is a verse of Orpheus ; and this
tradition, doubling Homer by Orpheus, increased
in Greece the religion of Homer. The shield of
Achilles, book xviii. of the ' Iliad,' was explained
in the temples by Danco, daughter of Pythagoras.
Homer, like the sun, has planets. Virgil who
writes the * .^neid,' Lucan who writes the ' Pharsa-
lia,' Tasso who writes the 'Jerusalem,' Ariosto with
his 'Roland,' Milton with 'Paradise Lost,' Camoens
with the ' Lusiad,' Klopstock with the ' Messiah,'
Voltaire with the ' Henriade,' all gravitate about
Homer, and, sending back to their own moons
his light reflected at different angles, move at un-
equal distances within his boundless orbit. Such
is Homer; such is the beginning of the epic.

2. Another, Job, begins the drama. This em-
bryo is a colossus. Job begins the drama, now
forty centuries ago, by placing Jehovah and Satan
in presence of each other ; the evil defies the good,
and behold ! the action is begun. The scene is laid
upon the earth, and man is the field of battle ; the
plagues are the actors. One of the wildest grand-
eurs of this poem is, that in it the sun is baleful.
The sun is in Job as in Homer; but it is no longer
the dawn, it is high noon. The mournful oppres-
sion of the brazen ray, falling perpendicularly on
the desert, pervades the poem, which is heated to
a white heat. Job sweats on his dunghill. The
shadow of Job is small and black, and hidden under



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 45

him, as the snake under the rock. Tropical flies
buzz on his sores. Job has above his head the
frightful Arabian sun — a breeder of monsters, an
intensifier of plagues, which changes the cat into
the tiger, the lizard into the crocodile, the pig into
the rhinoceros, the snake into the boa, the nettle
into the cactus, the wind into the simoom, the
miasma into the pestilence. Job is anterior to
Moses. Afar in the ages, by the side of Abraham
the Hebrew patriarch, there is Job the Arabian
patriarch. Before being tried, he had been happy :
" this man was the greatest of all the men of the
East," says his poem. This was the laborer-king:
he exercised the immense priesthood of solitude :
he sacrificed and sanctified. Toward evening he
gave the earth the blessing, the berakah. He was
learned ; he was acquainted with rhythm ; his
poem, of which the Arabian text is lost, was written
in verse : this, at least, is certain from verse 3 of
chap. iii. to the end. He was good ; he did not
meet a poor child without throwing him the small
coin kesitha ; he was " the foot of the lame, and the
eye of the blind." It is from this that he has fallen :
fallen, he becomes gigantic. The whole poem of
Job is the development of this idea, — the greatness
that may be found at the bottom of the pit. Job is
more majestic when unfortunate than when prosper-
ous ; his leprosy is a robe of purple. His misery
terrifies those who are there ; they speak not to him
until after a silence of seven days and seven nights.
His lamentation is marked by a certain tranquil and
gloomy magianism. While crushing the vermin on
his ulcers, he apostrophizes the stars. He addresses



46 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Orion, the Hyades, — which he names the Plei-
ades, — and *' the chambers of the south." He
says, " God setteth an end to darkness." He calls
the diamonds which are hidden, "the stones of
darkness." He mingles with his own distress the
misfortune of others, and has tragic words that
freeze, — " the widow is empty." ^ He smiles also,
and is then still more terrible. He has around him
Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, three implacable types of
the friendly busybody, of whom he says, " You
play on me as on a tambourine." His language,
submissive toward God, is bitter toward kings:
" kings and counsellors of the earth, which built
desolate places for themselves," — leaving our wit
to find out whether he speaks of their tomb or of
their kingdom. Tacitus says, solitudinem faciunt.
As to Jehovah, Job adores him; and under the
furious scourging of the plagues, all his resistance
is confined to asking of God : " How long wilt thou
not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow
down my spittle?" That dates from four thousand
years ago. At the same hour, perhaps, when the
enigmatical astronomer of Denderah carves in the
granite his mysterious zodiac. Job engraves his on
human thought; and his zodiac is not made of
stars, but of miseries. This zodiac turns yet above
our heads. We have of Job only the Hebrew ver-
sion, attributed to Moses. The thought of such a
poet, followed by such a translator, is impressive :
the man of the dunghill translated by the man of
Sinai ! Job is in reality a priest and a seer. Job

^ Is this an error ? Job xxii. 9 reads, " Thou hast sent widows
away empty." And where is the next quotation found ? — Tr.



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 47

extracts from his drama a dogma ; he suffers, and
draws an inference. Now, to suffer and draw an
inference is to teach ; sorrow leads logically to God.
Job teaches; having touched the summit of the
drama, he stirs the depths of philosophy. He first
shows that sublime madness of wisdom which, two
thousand years later, in resignation making itself
a sacrifice, will be the foolishness of the cross —
stultitiam crucis. The dunghill of Job, transfigured,
will become the Calvary of Jesus.

3. Another, ^schylus, enlightened by the un-
conscious divination of genius, without suspecting
that he has behind him, in the East, the resignation
of Job, completes it, unwittingly, by the revolt of
Prometheus ; so that the lesson may be complete,
and that the human race, to whom Job has taught
but duty, shall feel in Prometheus the dawn of
right. There is something ghastly in iEschylus
from one end to the other ; there is a vague out-
line of an extraordinary Medusa behind the figures
in the foreground, ^schylus is splendid and for-
midable ; as' though you saw a frowning brow above
the sun. He has two Cains, Eteocles and Polyni-
ces ; Genesis has but one. His troop of Oceanides
comes and goes under a dark sky, like a flock of
driven birds, ^schylus has none of the recognized
proportions. He is shaggy, abrupt, excessive, un-
susceptible of softened contour, almost savage, with
a grace all his own like that of the flowers of wild
nooks, less haunted by the nymphs than by the
furies, siding with the Titans, among the goddesses
choosing the austere and greeting the Gorgons
with a sinister smile, like Othryx and Briareus a



48 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

son of the soil, and ready to scale the skies anew
against the upstart Jupiter, ^schylus is ancient
mystery made man ; something like a Pagan
prophet. His work, if we had it all, would be a
kind of Greek Bible. Poet hundred-handed, having
an Orestes more fatal than Ulysses and a Thebes
grander than Troy, hard as rock, tumultuous like
the foam, full of steeps, torrents, and precipices,
and such a giant that at times one might take him
for a mountain. Coming later than the ' Iliad,' he
has the air of an elder brother of Homer.

4. Another, Isaiah, seems placed above human-
ity, and resembles a rumbling of continual thun-
der. He is the great reproacher. His style, a
kind of nocturnal cloud, is lighted up with images
which suddenly empurple all the depths of his
obscure thought, and make us exclaim, " It light-
ens ! " Isaiah engages in battle, hand to hand,
with the evil which, in civilization, makes its ap-
pearance before the good. He cries " Silence ! "
at the noise of chariots, of festivals, of triumphs.
The foam of his prophecy falls even on Nature ;
he gives Babylon over to the moles and bats, Nin-
eveh to the briers, Tyre to ashes, Jerusalem to
night; he fixes a date for oppressors, warns the
powers of their approaching end, assigns a day
against idols, against high citadels, against the fleets
of Tarsus, against all the cedars of Lebanon, and
against all the oaks of Bashan. He stands upon
the threshold of civilization, and he refuses to
enter. He is a kind of mouthpiece of the desert
speaking to the multitudes, and demanding, in the
name of the sands, the brambles, and the winds,



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 49

the sites of the cities. And this upon the score
of justice : because the tyrant and the slave, that
is to say, pride and shame, exist wherever there
are walled enclosures ; because evil is there in-
carnate in man ; because in solitude there is but
the beast, while in the city there is the monster.
Those things with which Isaiah reproached his time,
— idolatry, debauchery, war, prostitution, ignor-
ance, — still exist. Isaiah is the undying contem-
porary of the vices that make themselves servants,
and of the crimes that make themselves kings.

5. Another, Ezekiel, is the wild soothsayer: a
genius of the cavern, whose thought is best ex-
pressed by a beast-like growling. But listen. This
savage makes a prophecy to the world, — the pro-
phecy of progress. Nothing more astonishing.
Ah ! Isaiah overthrows ? Very well ! Ezekiel will
reconstruct, Isaiah refuses civilization ; Ezekiel
accepts, but transforms it. Nature and humanity
blend together in that softened howl which Ezekiel
utters. The conception of duty is in Job ; in -^s-
chylus, the conception of right, Ezekiel intro-
duces the resultant third conception, — the human
race ameliorated, the future more and more eman-
cipated. It is man's consolation that the future
is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset. Time pre-
sents works for time to come; work, then, and
hope ! Such is Ezekiel's cry, Ezekiel is in Chal-
daea, and from Chaldaea he sees distinctly Judssa,
just as from oppression one may see liberty. He
declares peace as others declare war. He proph-
esies harmony, goodness, gentleness, union, the
blending of races, love. Notwithstanding, he is

4



50 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

terrible. He is the fierce benefactor, the univer-
sal, beneficent grumbler at the human race. He
scolds, he almost gnashes his teeth, and people
fear and hate him. The men about are thorns to
him. " I live among the briers," he says. He
condemns himself to be a symbol, and makes of
his person, become hideous, a sign of human
misery and popular degradation. He is a kind
of voluntary Job. In his town, in his house, he
causes himself to be bound with cords, and remains
mute : behold the slave ! In the public place he
eats filth : behold the courtier ! This causes Vol-
taire's laughter to burst forth, and our sobs. Ah,
Ezekiel, so far does thy devotion go ! Thou ren-
derest shame visible by horror ; thou compellest
ignominy to avert the head when recognizing her-
self in ordure ; thou showest that to accept a man
as master is to eat filth ; thou causest a shudder to
che sycophants who follow the prince, by putting
into thy stomach what they put into their souls;
tthou preachest deliverance by vomiting. Accept
our veneration ! This man, this being, this figure,
this swine-prophet, is sublime. And the transfigu-
ration that he announces, he proves. How ? By
transfiguring himself. From this horrible and de-
filed mouth there issues splendid poetry. Never
has grander language been spoken, never more
extraordinary. ** I saw visions of God. A whirl-
wind came out of the North, and a great cloud,
and a fire infolding itself. I saw a chariot, and a
likeness of four living creatures. Above the living
creatures and the chariot was a space like a ter-
rible crystal. The wheels of the chariot were



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 5 1

mads of eyes, and so high that they were dread-
ful. The noise of the wings of the four angels
was as the voice of the Almighty, and when they
stood they let down their wings. And I saw a
likeness which was as fire, and which put forth a
hand. And a voice said, ' The kings and the
judges have in their souls gods of dung. I will
take the stony heart out of their flesh, and I will
give them an heart of flesh.' ... I came to them
that dwelt by the river of Chebar, and I remained
there astonished among them seven days." And
again : " There was a plain and dry bones, and I
said, ' Bones, rise up ; ' and when I beheld, lo !
the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and
the skin covered them above; but there was no
breath in them. And I cried, ' Come from the
four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain
that they may live ! * The spirit came. The breath
came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon
their feet, an exceeding great army. Then the
voice said, * Ye shall be one nation, ye shall have
no king or judge but me ; and I will be the God
who has one people, and ye shall be the people
who have one God.'" Is not everything there?
Search for a higher formula, you will not find it :
a free man under a sovereign God. This vision-
ary eater of filth is a resuscitator. Ezekiel has
offal on his lips, and the sun in his eyes. Among
the Jews the reading of Ezekiel was dreaded, and
was not permitted before the age of thirty years.
The rabbis, disturbed, put a seal upon this poet.
People could not call him an impostor: his pro-
phetic fury was incontestable; he had evidently



52 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

seen what he related : thence his authority. His
very enigmas made him an oracle. They could
not tell who were meant by those women sitting
toward the North weeping for Tammuz ; ^ impos-
sible to divine what was the kashmal, this metal
which he pictured as in fusion in the furnace of
the dream.^ But nothing was more clear than his
vision of Progress. Ezekiel saw the quadruple
man, — man, ox, lion, and eagle; that is to say,
the master of thought, the master of the field, the
master of the desert, the master of the air. No-
thing is forgotten ; it is the entire future, from
Aristotle to Christopher Columbus, from Triptole-
mus to Montgolfier. Later on, the Gospel also
will become quadruple in the four evangelists,
making Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John subser-
vient to man, the ox, the lion, and the eagle, and,
remarkable fact, to symbolize progress it will take
the four faces of Ezekiel. Furthermore, Ezekiel,
like Christ, calls himself the " Son of Man."
Jesus often in his parables invokes and cites Eze-
kiel; and this kind of first Messiah makes prece-
dents for the second. There are in Ezekiel three
constructions, — man, in whom he places progress ;
the temple, where he puts a light that he calls
"glory ; " the city, where he places God. He cries

^ Ezekiel viii. 14. This " enigma " was not such to Milton,
who sings of Zion's daughters, —

" Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch
Ezekiel saw, when, by the vision led,
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries
Of alienated Judah."

Paradise Lost, i. 446 seg,

* The mysterious word kashmal is rendered by " amber " in our
common version (Ezekiel i. 4). — Tr.



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 5 J

to tiie temple, — "No priests here, neither they,
nor their kings, nor the carcases of their kings "
(x)iii. 7).^ One cannot help thinking that this
Ezekiel, a species of Biblical demagogue, would
help '93 in the terrible sweeping of St. Denis. As
for the city built by him, he mutters above it this
nriysterious name, yehovah Schammak, which sig-
nifies " the Eternal is there." Then, standing
silent in the darkness, he shows men, on the far
horizon, an ever-widening space of azure sky.

6. Another, Lucretius, is that vast, obscure thing,
All. Jupiter is in Homer; Jehovah is in Job; in
Lucretius, Pan appears. Such is Pan's greatness,
that he has under him Destiny, which is above Ju-
piter. Lucretius has travelled and he has mused,
and musing is another form of travel. He has
been at Athens; he has been in the haunts of
philosophers ; he has studied Greece and divined
India. Democritus has set him to thinking about
the molecule, and Anaximander about space. His
dreams have become doctrine. Nothing is known
of the incidents of his life. Like Pythagoras, he
has frequented the two mysterious schools of the
Euphrates, Neharda and Pombeditha, and he may
have met there the Jewish doctors. He has deci-
phered the papyri of Sepphoris, which in his time
was not yet transformed into Diocaesarea ; he has
lived with the pearl-fishers of the Isle of Tylos.
We find in the Apocrypha traces of a strange an-
cient itinerary, recommended, according to some,

1 The curious reader will discover that the citations from Eze-
kiel are either paraphrased or garbled, or both. Pedantic exact'
hude is not one of Hugo's faults. — Tk.



54 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

to philosophers by Empedocles, the magician of
Agrigentum, and, according to others, to the
rabbis by the high-priest Eleazer, who corre-
sponded with Ptolemy Philadelphus. This itin-
erary would have served at a later time as a
model for the journeyings of the Apostles. The
traveller who followed this itinerary traversed the
five satrapies of the country of the Philistines;
visited the people who charm serpents and suck
poisonous sores, — the Psylli ; drank of the torrent
Bosor, which marks the frontier of Arabia Deserta ;
then touched and handled the bronze collar of
Andromeda, still sealed to the rock of Joppa;
Baalbec in Coele-Syria ; Apamea on the Orontes,
where Nicanor fed his elephants; the harbor of
Ezion-geber, where rode the vessels of Ophir,
laden with gold; Segher, which produced white
incense, preferred to that of Hadramauth ; the
two Syrtes; Smaragdus, the mountain of emer-
ald; the NasamoneS, who pillaged the ship-
wrecked; the black nation, Agyzimba; Adribe,
the city of crocodiles ; Cynopolis, the city of
dogs ; the wonderful cities of Comagena, Claudia,
and Barsalium; perhaps even Tadmor, the city
of Solomon : such were the stages of this almost
fabulous pilgrimage of the thinkers. Did Lucre-
tius make this pilgrimage? One cannot tell. His
numerous travels are beyond doubt. He has seen
so many men that at the last to his eye they all
seem indistinguishably blended, and have become
to him a spectral multitude. He is arrived at
that excess of simplification of the universe
which almost causes it to disappear. He has



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 55

sounded until he feels the plummet float. He
has questioned the vague spectres of Byblos ;
he has conversed with the tree-trunk cut from
Cithaeron, which represents Juno Thespia. Per-
haps he has spoken in the reeds to Cannes, the
man-fish of Chaldaea, who had two heads, — at the
top, the head of a man, below, the head of a hydra,
— and who, drinking up chaos by his lower gullet,
revomited it on the earth through his upper mouth
in the form of dreadful knowledge. Isaiah stands
next to the archangels, Lucretius to the spectres.
Lucretius twists the ancient veil of Isis, steeped in
the waters of darkness, and wrings from it some-
times in torrents, sometimes drop by drop, a som-
bre poesy. The boundless is in Lucretius. At
times there passes a powerful spondaic verse,
almost monstrous, and full of shadow : —

•' Circum se froliis ac frondibus involventes."

Here and there a vast image of pairing is dimly
outlined in the forest : —

" Tunc Venus in sylvis jungebat corpora amantum ; "

and the forest is Nature. These verses are impos-
sible with Virgil. Lucretius turns his back on hu-
manity, and fixes his gaze upon the enigma. His
searching spirit is placed between that reality, the
atom, and that impossibility, the vacuum : by turns
attracted by these \^vo precipices, he is religious
when he contemplates the atom, sceptical when he
perceives the void ; thence his two aspects, equally
profound, of denial and of affirmation. One day
this traveller commits suicide. This is his last de-
parture. He puts himself en route for Death. He



56 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

wishes to see for himself. He has embarked suc-
cessively upon every sort of vessel, — on the galley
of Trevirium for Sanastrea in Macedonia; on the
trireme of Carystos for Metapontum^ in Greece;
on the Cyllenian skiff for the Island of Samothrace ;
on the sandale of Samothrace for Naxos, the home
of Bacchus ; on the ceroscaph of Naxos for Syria ;
on the Syrian pinnace for Egypt ; and on the ship
of the Red Sea for India. It remains for him to
make one voyage: he is curious about the dark
country; he takes passage on the coffin, and slip-
ping the hawser himself, he pushes off into the
shadow the obscure barque that is tossed by an
unknown sea.

7. Another, Juvenal, has everything in which
Lucretius fails, — passion, emotion, fever, tragic
flame, passion for honesty, the avenging sneer,
personality, humanity. He dwells at a certain
given point in creation, and he contents himself
with it, finding there what may nourish and swell
his heart with justice and anger. Lucretius is the
universe, Juvenal the locality. And what a local-
ity ! Rome. Between the two they are the double
voice which speaks to world and town — urbi et
orbi. As Juvenal hovers above the Roman Empire,
one hears the terrific flapping of the lammergeyer's
wings above a nest of reptiles. He pounces upon
this swarm and takes them, one after the other, in
his terrible beak, — from the adder who is emperor
and calls himself Nero, to the earthworm who is
a bad poet and calls himself Codrus. Isaiah and