Aristophanes, for Aristophanes is bad. Rabelais is
good, ā Rabelais would have defended Socrates.
In the order of lofty genius, Rabelais chronologi-
cally follows Dante ; after the stern face, the sneer-
ing visage. Rabelais is the formidable mask of
ancient comedy detached from the Greek pro-
1 La Rapee Bercy is an eastern suburb of Paris, on the Seine.
It gives its name to a station on the belt railroad. ā Tr.
yi WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
scenium, from bronze made flesh, henceforth a
human living face, remaining enormous, and com-
ing among us to laugh at us and with us. Dante
and Rabelais spring from the school of the Fran-
ciscan friars, as, later, Voltaire springs from the
Jesuits ; Dante the incarnate sorrow, Rabelais
parody, Voltaire irony, ā these issue from the
Church against the Church. Every genius has his
invention or his discovery ; Rabelais has made his,
ā the belly. The serpent is in man, it is the in-
testine. It tempts, betrays, and punishes. Man,
single being as a spirit, and complex as man, has
within himself for his earthly mission three centres,
ā the brain, the heart, the belly; each of these
centres is august by one great function which is
peculiar to it: the brain has thought, the heart
has love, the belly has paternity and maternity.
The belly may be tragic. " Feri ventrem," says
Agrippina. Catherine Sforza, threatened with the
death of her children, who were hostages, exhibits
herself naked to the navel on the battlements of
the citadel of Rimini, and says to the enemy,
"With this I can bring forth others." In one of
the epic convulsions of Paris, a woman of the
people, standing on a barricade, raised her petti-
coat, showed the soldiery her naked belly, and
cried, " Kill your mothers ! " The soldiers riddled
that belly with bullets. The belly has its heroism ;
but it is from it that flow, in life, corruption, ā in
art, comedy. The breast, where the heart rests,
has for its summit the head ; the belly has the
phallus. The belly, being the centre of matter,
is our gratification and our danger; it contains
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 73
appetite, satiety, and putrefaction. The devotion,
the tenderness, which seize us there, are Hable to
death; egoism replaces them. Easily do the affec-
tions become lusts. That the hymn can be used
in the service of Bacchus, the strophe deformed
into a tippler's catch, is sad. This is the work of
the beast which is in man. The belly is essen-
tially this beast; degradation seems to be its law.
The ladder of sensual poetry has for its topmost
round the Song of Songs, and for its lowest the
jingling ballad. The belly god is Silenus ; the
belly emperor is Vitellius; the belly animal is
the pig. One of those horrid Ptolemies was called
the Belly {Pkyscon). The belly is to humanity a
formidable weight ; it breaks at every moment the
equilibrium between the soul and the body. It
fills history; it is responsible for nearly all crimes;
it is the matrix of all vices. It is the belly that by
voluptuousness makes the sultan, and by drunk-
enness the czar; this it is that shows Tarquin to
the bed of Lucrece ; this it is that makes the Senate
which had awaited Brennus and dazzled Jugurtha,
end by deliberating on the sauce of a turbot. It
is the belly which counsels the ruined libertine,
Caesar, the passage of the Rubicon, To pass the
Rubicon, how well that pays your debts ! To
pass the Rubicon, how readily that throws women
into your arms ! What good dinners afterward !
And the Roman soldiers enter Rome with the
cry, " Urbani, claudite uxores ; mcechum calvum
adducimus." The appetite debauches the intellect.
Voluptuousness replaces will. At starting, as is al-
ways the case, there is some nobleness : this is the
74 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
stage of the revel. There is a distinction between
being fuddled and being dead drunk. Then the
revel degenerates into guzzling. Where there was
a Solomon there is Ramponneau. Man becomes
a barrel; thought is drowned in an inner deluge
of cloudy notions ; conscience, submerged, cannot
warn the drunken soul. Brutalization is consum-
mated; it is not even any longer cynical, it is
empty and sottish. Diogenes disappears ; there
remains but the tub. Beginning with Alcibiades,
we end with Trimalchio, and the thing is com-
plete; nothing is left, neither dignity, nor shame,
nor honor, nor virtue, nor wit, ā crude animal
gratification, thorough impurity. Thought is dis-
solved in satiety; carnal gorging absorbs every-
thing; nothing survives of the grand sovereign
creature inhabited by the soul ; the belly (pass the
expression) eats the man. Such is the final state
of all societies where the ideal is eclipsed. This
passes for prosperity, and gets the name of growth.
Sometimes even philosophers heedlessly further
this degradation by inserting in their doctrines the
materialism which is in men's consciences. This
sinking of man to the level of the human beast is
a great calamity. Its first-fruit is the turpitude
visible at the summit of all professions : the venal
judge, the ^simoniacal priest, the hirehng soldier;
laws, manners, and beliefs are a dung-heap, ā totus
homo fit excretnejituin.
In the sixteenth century, all the institutions of
the past are in that state. Rabelais gets hold of
the situation ; he verifies it ; he authenticates that
belly which is the world. Civilization is, then, but
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 75
a mass, science is matter, religion is blessed with
hams, feudality digests, royalty is obese. What is
Henry VIII.? A paunch. Rome is a squab-
pampered old dame: is it health? is it sickness?
It is perhaps obesit}', perhaps dropsy. Rabelais,
doctor and priest, feels the pulse of the Papacy ;
he shakes his head, and bursts out laughing. Is
it because he has found life? No, it is because
he has felt death; the Papacy is, in reality,
breathing its last. While Luther reforms, Rabe-
lais jests. Which best attains his end? Rabelais
ridicules the monk, the bishop, the Pope ; laugh-
ter and death-rattle together; fool's bell sounding
the tocsin ! But look ! I thought it was a feast
ā it is a death-agony ; one may be deceived in
the nature of the hiccup. Let us laugh all the
same : death is at the table ; the last drop toasts
tlie last sigh. A death-agony in the merry mood,
ā it is superb ! The large intestine is king ; all
that old world feasts and bursts; and Rabelais
enthrones a dynasty of bellies, ā Grangousier,
Pantagruel, and Gargantua. Rabelais is the
.^schylus of victuals ; and this is grand when we
think that eating is devouring. There is some-
thing of the gulf in the glutton. Eat, then, my
masters, and drink, and come to the finale. To
hve, is a song, of which death is the refrain. Be-
neath the depraved human race others may dig
dreadful dungeons; but in the direction of the
subterranean, Rabelais takes you no farther than
the wine-cellar. This universe, which Dante put
into Hell, Rabelais confines in a wine-cask ; his
book is nothing else. The seven circles of Alighieri
76 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
bound and encompass this extraordinary tun. Look
within the monstrous cask, and there you see
them again. In Rabelais they are entitled Idle-
ness, Pride, Envy, Avarice, Wrath, Lechery, Glut-
tony; and it is thus that you suddenly meet again
the formidable jester. Where? In church. The
seven deadly sins form the text of this parson's
sermon. Rabelais is a priest. Castigation, prop-
erly understood, begins at home ; it is therefore at
the clergy that he strikes first. That is what it is
to be at home ! The Papacy dies of indigestion.
Rabelais plays the Papacy a trick, ā the trick of a
Titan. The Pantagruelian merriment is not less
grandiose than the mirth of a Jupiter. Cheek by
jowl: the monarchical and priestly jowl eats;
the Rabelaisian cheek laughs. Whoever has read
Rabelais has forever before his eyes this stern con-
frontment: the mask of comedy fixing its stare
upon the mask of theocracy.
13. Another, Cervantes, is also a form of epic
mockery; for as the writer of these lines said in
1827,^ there are between the Middle Ages and
modern times, after the feudal barbarism, and
placed there as it were to make an end of it, two
comic Homers, ā Rabelais and Cervantes. To
epitomize the horrible in a jest, is not the least
terrible manner of doing it. This is what Rabelais
did ; it is what Cervantes did : but the raillery of
Cervantes has nothing of the broad Rabelaisian
grin. It is the fine humor of the noble after the
joviality of the parson. Gentlemen, I am the
Seignior Don Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, poet-
1 Preface to Cromwell.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 'J'J
soldier, and, as a proof, one-armed. No coarse
jesting in Cervantes ; scarcely a flavor of elegant
cynicism. The satirist is fine, acute, polished,
delicate, almost gallant, and would even run the
risk sometimes of diminishing his power, with all
his affected ways, if he had not the deep poetic
spirit of the Renascence. That saves his charm-
ing grace from becoming prettiness. Like Jean
Goujon, like Jean Cousin, like Germain Pilon, like
Primatice, Cervantes is not devoid of illusion.
Thence come all the unexpected marvels of his
imagination. Add to that a wonderful intuition
of the inmost processes of the mind and a multi-
form philosophy which seems to possess a new
and complete chart of the human heart. Cervan-
tes sees the inner man. His philosophy blends
with the comic and romantic instinct. Hence the
unexpected, breaking out at every moment in his
characters, in his action, in his style; the unfor-
seen, magnificent adventure. Personages remain-
ing true to themselves, but facts and ideas whirling
around them, with a perpetual renewing of the
original idea and a steady current of that wind which
brings the lightning-flash : such is the law of great
works. Cervantes Is militant; he has a thesis, he
makes a social book. Such poets are the cham-
pions of the intelligence. Where have they
learned fighting? On the battle-field itself. Juve-
nal was a military tribune ; Cervantes comes home
from Lepanto, as Dante from Campalbino, as
iEschylus from Salamis. Afterward, they pass to
a new trial : ^Eschylus goes into exile, Juvenal in-
to exile, Dante into exile, Cervantes into prison.
78 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
This is just, since they have done you a service.
Cervantes, as poet, has the three sovereign gifts, ā
creation, which produces types and clothes ideas
with flesh and bone; invention, which hurls pas-
sions against events, kindles in man a flame that
outshines the star of destiny, and brings forth the
drama ; imagination, sun of the brain, which throws
light everywhere, giving to its figures the high-
relief of life. Observation, which comes by acqui-
sition, and is, therefore, not so much a gift as
an accomplishment, is included in creation ; were
the miser not observed, Harpagon would not be
created. In Cervantes, a new-comer, glimpsed in
Rabelais, puts in a decided appearance. You have
caught sight of him in Panurge, you see him
plainly in Sancho Panza. He comes like the
Silenus of Plautus, and he may also say, " I am the
god mounted on an ass." Wisdom in the begin-
ning, reason by and by : such is the strange history
of the human mind. What more replete with
wisdom than all the religions? What less reason-
able? Morals true, dogmas false. Wisdom exists
in Homer and in Job ; reason, such as it must
needs be to overcome prejudices, that is to say,
complete and armed cap-a-pie, will come in only
with Voltaire. Common-sense is not wisdom,
neither is it reason ; it is a little of one and a little
of the other, with a dash of egoism. Cervantes
makes it bestride ignorance, and, at the same time,
completing his profound satire, he mounts heroism
upon fatigue. Thus he shows one after the other,
one with the other, the two profiles of man, and
parodies them, without more pity for the sublime
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 79
than for the grotesque; the hippogriff becomes
Rosinante. Behind the equestrian personage,
Cervantes creates and sets in motion the asinine
personage. Enthusiasm takes the field, Irony
locks step with it. The wonderful feats of Don
Quixote, his riding and spurring, his big lance
steady in the rest, are judged by the ass, ā a con-
noisseur in windmills. The invention of Cervantes
is so masterly that there is, bet\veen the human
type and the quadruped complement, statuary
adhesion ; the babbler, like the adventurer, is part
of the beast that is proper to him, and you can no
more dismount Sancho Panza than Don Quixote.
The Ideal is in Cervantes as in Dante; but it is
called the Impossible, and is scoffed at. Beatrice
is become Dulcinea. To rail at the ideal would be
the failing of Cervantes ; but this failing is only
apparent. Look well, ā the smile has a tear ; in
reality, Cervantes sides with Don Quixote, as
Moliere sides with Alceste. One must learn how
to read, especially in the books of the sixteenth
century ; there is in almost all, on account of the
threats hanging over freedom of thought, a secret
that must be unlocked, and whose key is often
lost. Rabelais has his reserves, Cervantes has an
aside, Machiavelli wears a mask, ā more than one,
perhaps. At all events, the advent of common-
sense is the great fact in Cervantes. Common-
sense is not a virtue ; it is the eye of self-interest.
It would have encouraged Themistocles, and dis-
suaded Aristides ; Leonidas has no common-sense,
Regulus has no common-sense : but in face of
selfish and ferocious monarchies dragging their
80 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
unhappy peoples into their own private wars,
decimating families, making mothers desolate, and
driving men to kill each other with all those fine
words, ā military honor, warlike glory, obedience
to orders, etc., etc., ā this Common-Sense is an
admirable personage, arising suddenly, and crying
out to the human race, " Take care of your skin ! "
14. Another, Shakespeare: what is he? You
might almost answer. He is the earth. Lucretius
is the sphere, Shakespeare is the globe. There is
more and less in the globe than in the sphere. In
the sphere there is the All ; on the globe there is
man. Here the outer, there the inner mys-
tery. Lucretius is being, Shakespeare is exist-
ence. Hence the shadow that is in Lucretius;
hence the teeming life in Shakespeare. Space ā
" the blue," as the Germans say ā is certainly not
denied to Shakespeare. The earth sees and trav-
erses the heavens ; the earth knows them under
their two aspects, ā darkness and azure, doubt and
hope. Life comes and goes in death. All life is a
secret, a sort of enigmatical parenthesis between
birth and the death-throe, between the opening
and the closing eye. The possession of this
secret renders Shakespeare restless. Lucretius
is; Shakespeare lives. In Shakespeare the birds
sing, the bushes are clothed with green, hearts
love, souls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot,
it is cold, night falls, time passes, forests and
multitudes speak, the vast eternal dream hovers
over all. Sap and blood, all forms of the multi-
ple reality, actions and ideas, man and humanity,
the living and the life, solitudes, cities, religions,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 8 1
diamonds and pearls, dung-hills and charnel-
houses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of
comers and goers, all, all are on Shakespeare and
in Shakespeare ; and, this genius being the earth,
the dead emerge from it. Certain sinister sides
of Shakespeare are haunted by spectres. Shake-
speare is a brother of Dante : the one completes
the other. Dante incarnates all supernaturalism,
Shakespeare all Nature; and as these two regions,
Nature and the supernatural, which appear to us
so different, are really the same unity, Dante
and Shakespeare, however dissimilar, have con-
terminous boundaries and domains in common :
there is something of the human in Alighieri,
something of the spectre in Shakespeare. The
skull passes from the hands of Dante into the
hands of Shakespeare. Ugolino gnaws it, Hamlet
questions it; and it exhibits perhaps even a
deeper meaning and a loftier teaching in the
second than in the first. Shakespeare shakes it
and makes stars fall from it. The isle of Pros-
pero, the forest of Ardennes, the heath of Har-
muir, the platform of Elsinore, are illuminated,
no less than the seven circles of Dante's spiral,
by the sombre, reflected light of hypothesis.
Doubt, half chimera and half truth, is outlined
there as well as here. Shakespeare, as well as
Dante, gives us glimpses of the dim horizon of
conjecture. In the one as in the other there is
the possible, that window of the dream opening
upon reality. As for the real, we insist, Shake-
speare overflows with it; everywhere the quick
flesh. Shakespeare has emotion, instinct, the true
6
82 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
voice, the right tone, the whole human multitude
with its clamor. His poetry is himself, and at the
same time it is you. Like Homer, Shakespeare is
elemental. Men of genius, renewers, ā that is the
name for them, ā arise at all the decisive crises of
humanity; they epitomize epochs, and complete
revolutions. In civilization. Homer indicates the
end of Asia and the beginning of Europe ; Shake-
speare the end of the Middle Ages. Rabelais and
Cervantes also mark the close of the Middle Ages;
but, being essentially satirists, they give but a
partial view. Shakespeare's mind is a total ; like
Homer, Shakespeare is a cyclic man. These two
intelligences, Homer and Shakespeare, close the
two gates of Barbarism, ā the ancient gate, and
the Gothic. That was their mission ā they have
fulfilled it; that was their task ā they have accom-
plished it. The third great human crisis is the
French Revolution; the third huge gate of bar-
barism, the monarchical gate, is closing at this
moment. The nineteenth century hears it rolling
on its hinges. Thence for poetry, for the drama,
and for art, arises the present era,' equally inde-
pendent of Shakespeare and of Homer.
CHAPTER III.
Homer, Job, ^Eschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucre-
tius, Juvenal, Saint John, Saint Paul, Tacitus, Dante,
Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, ā that is the
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 83
avenue of the immovable giants of the human
mind.
Men of genius form a dynasty : indeed, there is
no other. They wear all the crowns, even that of
thorns. Each of them represents the sum-total of
absolute truth realizable to man.
We repeat it : to choose between these men, to
prefer one to the other, to point with the finger to
the first among these first, is impossible. All are
the Mind. Perhaps, by the strictest measurements,
ā and yet every objection would be legitimate, ā
one might mark out as the highest among these
summits. Homer, .^schylus. Job, Isaiah, Dante,
and Shakespeare.
It is understood that we speak here only from
the artistic standpoint ; to be still more specific,
from the standpoint of literary art.
Two men in this group, .^schylus and Shake-
speare, represent especially the drama.
iEschylus, a kind of genius out of his time, wor-
thy to mark either a beginning or an end in hu-
manity, appears not to be placed in his right turn
in the series, and, as we have said, seems an elder
brother of Homer.
If we remember that ^Eschylus is nearly sub-
merged by the darkness rising over human mem-
ory; if we remember that ninety of his plays
have disappeared, that of that sublime hundred
there remain no more than seven dramas, which
are also seven odes, ā we are astounded by what
we see of this genius, and almost terrified by what
we do not see.
What, then, was .^schylus ? What proportions
84 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
and what forms had he in all this shadow ? iEs-
chylus is up to his shoulders in the ashes of ages ;
his head alone rises above that burial, and, like the
colossus of the desert, with his head alone he is as
tall as all the neighboring gods, upright upon their
pedestals.
Man passes before the insubmergible wreck.
Enough remains for an immense glory. What
oblivion has swallowed, adds an unknown element
to his grandeur. Buried and eternal, his brow
projecting from the sepulchre, ^Eschylus looks
forth upon the generations of men.
CHAPTER IV.
To the eyes of the thinker, these men of genius
occupy thrones in the ideal kingdom. To the in-
dividual works that these men have left us must
be added various vast collective works, ā the
Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Edda,
the Nibelungen, the Heldenbuch, the Romancero.
Some of these works are revealed and sacred.
They bear the marks of unknown collaboration.
The poems of India, in particular, have the omi-
nous fulness of the possible, as imagined by in-
sanity or related in the vision. These works seem
to have been composed in common with beings
to whom our world is no longer accustomed. Leg-
endary horror covers these epics. " These books
were not composed by man alone," says the in-
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 85
scription of Ash-Nagar. Djinns have alighted upon
them, polypteral magi have mused over them ;
the texts have been interlined by invisible hands,
the demi-gods have been aided by demi-demons ;
the elephant, which India calls the Sage, has been
consulted. Thence comes a majesty almost hor-
rible. The great enigmas are in these poems :
they are full of mysterious Asia. Their promi-
nent parts have the supernatural and hideous
outline of chaos. They form a mass above the
horizon, like the Himalayas. The distance of the
manners, beliefs, ideas, actions, persons, is extra-
ordinary. One reads these poems with that won-
dering droop of the head induced by the profound
distance between the book and the reader. This
Holy Writ of Asia has evidently been still more
difficult to reduce and to co-ordinate than our own.
It is in every part refractory to unity. In vain
have the Brahmins, like our priests, erased and
interpolated: Zoroaster is there; Ized Serosch is
there. The Eschem of the Mazdaean traditions is
discernible under the name of Siva; Manicheism
is apparent between Brahma and Booddha. All
kinds of traces blend, cross, and recross each
other in these poems. One perceives in them the
mysterious footprints of a race of intelligences
who have worked at them in the darkness of the
centuries. Here is the enormous toe of the giant ;
there, the claw of the chimera. These poems are
the pyramid of a vanished colony of ants.
The Nibelungen, another pyramid of another
multitudinous race, has the same greatness. What
the divinities did in Asia, the elves have done here.
'86 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
These powerful epic legends, the testaments of
ages, tattooings stamped by races on history, have
no other unity than the unity of the people itself.
The collective and the successive, combining to-
gether, are one. Turba fit mens. These recitals
are clouds, laced by wonderful flashes of light.
As to the Romancero, which creates the Cid after
Achilles, and the chivalric after the heroic, it is
the Iliad of several lost Homers. Count Julian,
King Roderigo, Cava, Bernardo del Carpio, the
bastard Mudarra, Nuiio Salido, the Seven Infantes
of Lara, the Constable Alvar de Luna, ā no Orien-
tal or Hellenic type surpasses these figures. The
horse of Campeador is equal to the dog of Ulys-
ses. Between Priam and Lear you must place
Don Arias, the old man of Zamora's tower, sacri-
ficing his seven sons to his duty, and tearing them
from his heart one by one. There is grandeur in
that. In presence of these sublimities the reader
suffers a sort of sun-stroke.
These works are anonymous ; and, owing to tire
great reason of the homo sum, while admiring
them, while assigning them a place at the summit
of art, we prefer the acknowledged works. With
equal beauty, the Ramayana touches us less than
Shakespeare. The ego of a man is more vast and
profound even than the ego of a people.
However, these composite myriologues, the great
testaments of India particularly, expanses of poetry
rather than poems, an expression, at once sidereal
and bestial, of vanished races, derive from their
very deformity an indescribable supernatural air.
The multiple ego expressed by those myriologues
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 8/
makes them the polypi of poetry, vague and won-
derful monstrosities. The strange seams of the
antediluvian rough outline are visible there, as in
the ichthyosaurus or the pterodactyl. One of these
black, many-headed masterpieces throws upon the
horizon of art the silhouette of a hydra.
The Greek genius is not deceived by them, and