abhors them ; Apollo would attack them. Beyond
and above all these collective and anonymous pro-
ductions (the Romancero excepted), there are men
to represent the peoples. These men we have just
named. They give to nations and periods the
human countenance. They are, in art, the incar-
nations of Greece, of Arabia, of Judaea, of Pagan
Rome, of Christian Italy, of Spain, of France, of
England. As for Germany, ā the matrix, like Asia,
of races, hordes, and nations, ā she is represented
in art by a sublime man, equal, although in a differ-
ent category, to all those that we have characterized
above. That man is Beethoven. Beethoven is the
German soul.
What a shadow is this Germany ! She is the
India of the West. She contains everything ; there
is no formation more colossal. In the sacred mist
where the German spirit moves, Isidore of Seville
places theology; Albertus the Great, scholasti-
cism ; Hrabanus Maurus, linguistics ; Trithemius,
astrology ; Ottni, chivalry ; Reuchlin, vast curi-
osity ; Tutilo, universality ; Stadianus, method ;
Luther, inquiry; Albrecht Diirer, art; Leibnitz, sci-
ence ; Puffendorf, law; Kant, philosophy; Fichte,
metaphysics; Winkelmann, archaeology; Herder,
aesthetics ; the Vossii, ā of whom one, Gerard
88 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
John, was of the Palatinate, ā erudition ; Euler, the
spirit of integration ; Humboldt, the spirit of dis-
covery; Niebuhr, history; Gottfried of Strasburg,
fable ; Hoffmann, dreams ; Hegel, doubt ; Ancillon,
obedience ; Werner, fatalism ; Schiller, enthusiasm ;
Goethe, indifference ; Arminius, liberty.
Kepler lights this shadow with the stars.
Gerard Groot, the founder of the Fratres Com-
munis VitcE, makes in Germany a first attempt at
fraternity, in the fourteenth century. Whatever
may have been her infatuation for the indifference
of Goethe, do not deem her impersonal ; she is a
nation, and one of the most generous : for her,
Riickert, the military poet, forges the ' Geharnischte
Sonnette ' {'Sonnets in Coat of Mail'), and she
shudders when Korner hurls at her the Song of the
Sword. She is the German fatherland, the great
beloved land, Teutonia mater. Galgacus was to
the Germans what Caractacus was to the Britons.
Within herself and at home, Germany has every-
thing. She shares Charlemagne with France, and
Shakespeare with England ; for the Saxon element
is mingled with the British element. She has an
Olympus, the Valhalla. She must needs have her
own style of writing. Ulfilas, bishop of Moesia,
invents it for her, and the Gothic caligraphy will
henceforth form a pendant to the Arabic. The
capital letter of a missal rivals the fantastical
signature of a caliph. Like China, Germany has
invented printing. Her Burgraves (this remark has
been already made ^) are to us what the Titans are
to iEschylus. To the temple of Tanfana, destroyed
1 Preface to the Burgraves, 1843.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 89
by Germanicus, she caused the cathedral of Cologne
to succeed. She is the ancestress of our history,
the grandam of our legends. From all parts, ā
from the Rhine and from the Danube, from the
Rauhe Alp, from the ancient Sylva Gabresa, from
Upper Lorraine and from Lower Lorraine, through
the Wigalois and through the Wigamur, through
Henry the Fowler, through Samo King of the
Vends, through Rothe the chronicler of Thuringia,
through Zwinger the chronicler of Alsace, through
Gansbein the chronicler of Limburg, through all
those ancient popular songsters, Hans Folz, Jean
Viol, Muscatblut, through those rhapsodists the
Minnesingers, ā from all sources the tale, that
form of dream, reaches her and enters into her
genius. At the same time languages flow from
her. From her fissures gush, to the North, the
Danish and Swedish ; to the West, the Dutch
and Flemish. The German passes the Channel
and becomes the English. In the intellectual or-
der, the German genius has other frontiers than
Germany. A given people may resist Germany
and yield to Germanism. The German spirit as-
similates to itself the Greeks by Miiller, the Servians
by Gerhard, the Russians by Goetre, the Magyars
by Mailath. When Kepler, in the presence of
Rudolph n., was preparing the Rudolphine Tables,
it was with the aid of Tycho Brahe.^ German af-
finities extend far. Without any alteration in the
local and national autonomies, it is with the great
^ The Rudolphine Tables, published in 1627, appear to have
been prepared long after the death of Tycho, which occurred in
1601.ā Tr.
90 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Germanic centre that the Scandinavian spirit in
Oehlenschlager and the Batavian spirit in Vondel
are connected. Poland unites herself to it, with
all her glory, from Copernicus to Kosciusko, from
Sobieski to Mickiewicz. Germany is the wellspring
of nations. They pass out of her like rivers ; she
receives them as a sea.
The vast murmur of the Hercynian forest seems
to be heard throughout Europe. The German
nature, profound and subtle, distinct from the Eu-
ropean nature, but in harmony with it, volatilizes
and floats above the nations. The German mind
is misty, luminous, dispersed ; it is a kind of im-
mense beclouded soul, with stars. Perhaps the
highest expression of Germany can be given only
by music. Music, by its very want of precision,
which in this case is a quality, goes wherever the
German soul goes.
If the German spirit had as much density as ex-
pansion, ā that is to say, as much will as power, ā
she could, at a given moment, lift up and save the
human race. Such as she is, she is sublime.
In poetry she has not said her last word. At
this hour the indications are excellent. Since the
jubilee of the noble Schiller, particularly, there has
been an awakening, and a generous awakening.
The great definitive poet of Germany will be neces-
sarily a poet of humanity, of enthusiasm, of liberty.
Perchance ā and some signs give token of it ā we
may soon see him arise from the young group of
contemporary German writers.
Music (we beg indulgence for the figure) is the
vapor of art. It is to poetry what revery is to
I ""^^
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 91
thought, what fluid is to liquid, what the ocean of
clouds is to the ocean of waves. If another analogy-
is desired, it is the indefinite of this infinite. The
same insufflation impels, sweeps away, transports,
and overwhelms it, fills it with agitation and gleams
and unutterable sounds, saturates it with electri-
city, and causes it to give forth sudden discharges
of thunder.
Music is the Word of Germany. The German
people, so much curbed as a nation, so emanci-
pated as thinkers, sing with a sombre delight. To
sing, seems a deliverance from bondage. Music
expresses that which cannot be said, and which
cannot be suppressed. Therefore is Germany all
music, in anticipation of the time when she shall
be all freedom. Luther's choral is a kind of ^ V^vXTltA. A^vvv^ft^-
Marseillaise. Everywhere are singing-clubs and
choral circles. In the fields of Swabian Esslingen,
on the banks of the Neckar, comes every year
the Festival of Song. The Liedermusik, of which
Schubert's ' Elf-King ' is the masterpiece, makes
a part of German hfe. Song is for Germany a
breathing: it is by singing that she respires and
conspires. The music-note being the syllable of a
kind of undefined universal language, Germany's
grand communication with the human race is made
through harmony, ā an admirable prelude to unity.
It is by the clouds that the rains which fertilize the
earth ascend from the sea ; it is by music that ideas
emanate from Germany to take possession of the
minds of men. Therefore we may say that Ger-
many's greatest poets are her musicians, of which
wonderful family Beethoven is the head.
92 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Homer is the great Pelasgian ; ^schylus, the
great Hellene ; Isaiah, the great Hebrew; Juvenal,
the great Roman ; Dante, the great Italian ; Shake-
speare, the great Englishman ; Beethoven, the great
German.
CHAPTER V.
The dethroned " Good Taste," ā that other
" right divine " which for so long a time weighed
upon Art, and which had succeeded in suppressing
the beautiful for the benefit of the pretty, ā the an-
cient criticism, not altogether dead, like the ancient
monarchy, find from their point of view the same
fault, exaggeration, in those sovereign men of ge-
nius whom we have enumerated.^ These men of
genius are extravagant. This arises from the in-
finite element within them ; they are, in fact, not
circumscribed. They contain something unknown.
Every reproach that is addressed to them might
be addressed to the Sphinx. People reproach Ho-
mer for the carnage which fills his den, the Iliad ;
i^schylus, for his monstrousness ; Job, Isaiah, Eze-
kiel, Saint Paul, for double meanings ; Rabelais,
^ To those unacquainted with the history of French literature
during the thirties and forties of this century, this sentence may
require explanation. Good taste {le bon goUt) and the ancient
criticism were the legitimate literary monarchs, against whose
regime Victor Hugo's career was a continuous insurrection. If I'
" Bon Goflt " is an ex-king, Victor Hugo is his Cromwell or his \ \
I Brutus. ā Tr.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 93
for obscene nudity and venomous ambiguity ; Cer-
vantes, for insidious laughter; Shakespeare, for his
subtlety; Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, for obscu-
rity; John of Patmos and Dante Alighieri, for
darkness.
There are other minds, very great, but less great,
who can be reproached with none of these faults.
.Hesiod, vEsop, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Thu-
cydides, Anacreon, Theocritus, Titus Livius, Sal-
lust, Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch,
Tasso, Ariosto, La Fontaine, Beaumarchais, Vol-
taire, have neither exaggeration nor darkness, nor
obscurity nor monstrousness. What, then, do they
lack? Something the others have; that some-
thing is the Unknown, the Infinite.
If Corneille had that " something," he would be
the equal of .^schylus. If Milton had that " some-
thing," he would be the equal of Homer. If Mo-
li^re had that " something," he would be the equal
of Shakespeare.
It is the misfortune of Corneille that he muti-
lated and contracted the old native tragedy in
obedience to fixed rules. It is the misfortune of
Milton that, through Puritan melancholy, he ex-
cluded from his work Nature, the great Pan, It
is Moliere's failing that, in dread of Boileau, he
quickly extinguishes the luminous style of the
' fitourdi,' that, for fear of the priests, he writes
too few scenes like that of the poor man in ' Don
Juan.' 1
To give no occasion for attack, is a negative per-
fection. It is fine to be open to attack.
1 The scene referred to is the second of the third act ā Tr-
94 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Indeed, penetrate the meaning of those words,
placed as masks upon the mysterious qualities of
genius, and under obscurity, subtlety, and darkness,
you find depth ; under exaggeration, imagination ;
under monstrousness, grandeur.
Therefore in the upper region of poetry and
thought there are Homer, Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel,
Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, John of Patmos, Paul
of Damascus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shake-
speare,
These supreme men of genius do not form a
closed series. The author of All adds to it a
name when the needs of progress require it.
BOOK III.
ART AND SCIENCE.
CHAPTER I.
MANY people in our day, especially stock-
brokers, and often attorneys, say and re-
peat, *' Poetry is passing away." It is almost as
if they said : " There are no more roses ; spring
has breathed its last ; the sun has lost the habit of
rising; you may roam all the fields of earth, and
not find a butterfly ; there is no more moonlight,
and the nightingale sings no more ; the lion's roar
is no longer heard ; the eagle no longer soars ; the
Alps and the Pyrenees have passed away; there
are no more lovely girls and handsome young
men ; no one ever muses now over a grave ; the
mother no longer loves her child ; heaven is
quenched ; the human heart is dead."
Were it permitted us to mingle the fortuitous
with the eternal, it would be rather the contrary
which would prove true. Never have the facul-
ties of the human mind, deepened and enriched
by the mysterious ploughing of revolution, been
profounder and loftier.
96 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
And wait a little ; give time for the realization
of that element of social well-being now impend-
ing, ā gratuitous and compulsory education. How
long will it take? A quarter of a century. Im-
agine the incalculable sum of intellectual develop-
ment implied in this single expression : " Every one
can read." The multiplication of readers is the
multiplication of loaves. On the day when Christ
created that symbol, he caught a glimpse of print-
ing. His miracle is this marvel. Here is a book :
with it I will feed five thousand souls, a hundred
thousand souls, a million souls ā all humanity. In
the action of Christ bringing forth the loaves, there
is Gutenberg bringing forth books. One sower
heralds the other.
What has the human race been since the begin-
ning of time? A reader. For a long time he has
spelled ; he spells yet : soon he will read.
This child, six thousand years old, has been at
school from the first Where? In Nature. At
the beginning, having no other book, he spelled
the universe. He has had his primary instruct
tion from the clouds, from the firmament, from
meteors, flowers, animals, forests, seasons, phe-
nomena. The Ionian fisherman studies the wave;
the Chaldaean shepherd spells the star. Then
came the first books, ā a sublime advance. The
book is vaster yet than that grand scene, the
world; for to the fact it adds the idea. If any-
thing is greater than God seen in the sun, it is
God seen in Homer.
The universe without the book, is science be-
coming rudely outlined; the universe with the
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 97
book, is the ideal making its appearance. Thence
an immediate modification in human affairs ; where
there had been only force, power is revealed. The
application of the ideal to actual facts produces
civilization. Poetry written and sung begins its
work, ā a gloriously effective deduction from the
poetry only seen. It is startling to perceive that
where science was dreaming, poetry acts. With
a touch of the lyre, the thinker dispels ferocity.
We shall return, later on, to this power of the
book; we do not insist on it at present: it is
clear as light. Many writers then, few readers:
such has the world been up to this day. But a
change is at hand. Compulsory education is a
recruitment of souls for the light. Henceforth all
human advancement will be accomplished by swell-
ing the legions of those who read. The diameter
of the moral and ideal good corresponds always to
the calibre of men's minds. In proportion to the
worth of the brain is the worth of the heart.
The book is the tool of this transformation.
What humanity requires, is to be fed with light;
such nourishment is found in reading. Thence
the importance of the school, everywhere ade-
quate to civilization. The human race is at last
on the point of spreading the book wide open.
The immense human Bible, composed of all the
prophets, of all the poets, of all the philosophers,
is about to shine and blaze under the focus of that
enormous luminous lens, ā compulsory education-
Humanity reading is humanity knowing.
What nonsense, then, it is to cry, " Poetry is pass-
ing away ! " We might say, on the contrary, poetry
7
98 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
is coming. For who says poetry, says philosophy
and light Now, the reign of the book is begin-
ning; the school is its purveyor. Exalt the
reader, you exalt the book. Not, certainly, in
intrinsic value, ā this remains what it was ; but in
efficient power: it influences where it had no
influence ; men's souls become its subjects to
good ends. It was only beautiful; it becomes
useful.
Who would venture to deny this? The circle of
readers enlarging, the circle of books read will in-
crease. Now, the desire to read being a train of
powder, once lighted it will not stop : and this,
combined with the simplification of hand-labor by
machinery, and with the increased leisure of man,
the body less fatigued leaving the mind freer, vast
appetites for thought will spring up in all brains ;
the insatiable thirst for knowledge and meditation
will become more and more the human preoc-
cupation; low places will be deserted for high
places, ā an ascent natural to every growing in-
teUigence ; people will quit * Faublas ' to read
* The Oresteia ; ' there they will taste the noble,
and, once tasting it, they will never be satiated;
men will make the beautiful their food, because
the refinement of minds augments in proportion
to their force; and a day will come when, the
fulness of civilization making itself manifest,
those mountain-tops, Lucretius, Dante, Shake- s
speare, for ages almost deserted, and visited only
by the select few, will be crowded with intelli-
gences seeking their food upon the heights.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 99
CHAPTER II.
There can be but one law; the unity of law
results from the unity of essence : Nature and Art
are the two slopes of the same fact. And in prin-
ciple, saving the restriction which we shall indicate
very shortly, the law of one is the law of the other.
The angle of reflection equals the angle of inci-
dence. All being equity in the moral order, and
equilibrium in the material order, all is equation in
the intellectual order. The binomial, that marvel
adjustable to everything, is included in poetry no
less than in algebra. Nature plus humanity, raised
to the second power, give Art Such is the intel-
lectual binomial. Now, replace this A -}- B by the
number proper to each great artist and each great
poet, and you will have, in its multiple physiog-
nomy and in its strict total, each of the creations
of the human mind. What more beautiful than the
variety of masterpieces resulting from the unity of
law? Poetry, like Science, has an abstract root.
Science produces from that root masterpieces of
metal, wood, fire, or air, ā machine, ship, locomo-
tive, aerostat; Poetry causes to grow from it the
masterpiece of flesh and blood, Iliad, Song of
Songs, Romancero, Divine Comedy, Macbeth.
Nothing so starts and prolongs the thrill felt by
the thinker as those mysterious exfoliations of
abstraction into reality in the double region
(the one positive, the other infinite) of human
100 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
thought, ā a region double, and nevertheless one :
the infinite is an exactitude. The profound word
" number" is at the base of man's thought; it is, to
our intelligence, elemental ; it signifies harmony as
well as mathematics. Number reveals itself to Art
by rhythm, which is the beating of the heart of
the Infinite. In rhythm, the law of order, God is
felt. A verse is numerous, like a crowd ; its feet
march with the cadenced step of a legion. Without
number, no science; without number, no poetry.
The strophe, the epic, the drama, the riotous pal-
pitation of man, the bursting forth of love, the
irradiation of the imagination, the lightning-cloud
of passion, all are lorded over by this mysterious
word " number," even as are geometry and arith-
metic. Ajax, Hector, Hecuba, the seven chiefs
before Thebes, CEdipus, Ugolino, Messalina, Lear
and Priam, Romeo, Desdemona, Richard III.,
Pantagruel, the Cid, Alceste, all belong to it, as
well as conic sections and the differential and
integral calculus. It starts from "two and two
make four," and ascends to the region where the
lightning sits.
Yet between Art and Science let us note a radi-
cal difference. Science is perfectible ; Art, not.
Why?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. lOI
CHAPTER III.
Among human things, and inasmuch as it is a
human thing, Art is a strange exception.
The beauty of everything here below lies in the
power of reaching perfection. Everything is en-
dowed with this property. To increase, to aug-
ment, to win strength, to make some gain, some
advance, to be worth more to-day than yesterday :
this is at once glory and life. The beauty of Art
lies in not being susceptible of improvement.
Let us insist on these essential ideas, already
touched upon in some of the preceding pages.
A masterpiece exists once for all. The first
poet who arrives, arrives at the summit. You
shall ascend after him, as high, not higher. Ah !
your name is Dante? Very well; but he who sits
yonder is named Homer!
Progress, its goal incessantly changing, its stages
constantly renewed, has a shifting horizon. Not
so the ideal.
Now, progress is the motive-power of Science ;
the ideal is the generator of Art.
Thus is explained why perfection is the charac-
teristic of Science, and not of Art.
A savant may outshine a savant; a poet never
throws a poet into the shade.
Art progresses after its own fashion, it shifts its
ground, like Science ; but its successive creations,
containing the unchangeable, abide ; while the
102 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
admirable guesses of Science, which are and can
be nothing but combinations of the contingent,
obhterate each other.
Science is relative ; Art definitive. The master-
piece of to-day will be the masterpiece of to-morrow.
Does Shakespeare change anything in Sophocles ?
Does Moliere take anything from Plautus? Even
when he borrows Amphitryon, he does not take it
from him. Does Figaro blot out Sancho Panza?
Does Cordelia suppress Antigone? No. Poets do
not climb over each other. The one is not the
stepping-stone of the other. The poet rises alone,
without any other lever than himself He does
not tread his equal under foot. The new-comers
respect their elders. They succeed, they do not
replace each other. The beautiful does not drive
out the beautiful. Neither wolves nor master-
pieces devour each other.
Saint-Simon says (I quote from memory):
"There was through the whole winter but one cry
of admiration for M. de Cambray's book; when
suddenly appeared M. de Meaux's book, which
devoured it." If Fenelon's book had been Saint-
Simon's, the book of Bossuet would not have
devoured it.
Shakespeare is not above Dante, Moliere is not
above Aristophanes, Calderon is not above Euripi-
des ; the Divine Comedy is not above Genesis, the
RomancerĀ© is not above the Odyssey; Sirius is
not above Arcturus. Sublimity is equality.
The human mind is the infinite possible. The
master-works, immense worlds, are generated with-
in it unceasingly, and abide there forever. No
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. IO3
crowding of one against the other ; no recoil. The
occlusions, when there are any, are but apparent,
and quickly cease. The expanse of the boundless
admits all creations.
Art, taken as art, and in itself, goes neither for-
ward nor backward. The transformations of
poetry are but the undulations of the beautiful,
useful to human movement. Human movement is
another side of the question, a side that we cer-
tainly do not overlook, and that we shall examine
farther on. Art is not susceptible of intrinsic
progress. From Phidias to Rembrandt, there is
movement, but not progress. The frescos of the
Sistine Chapel take absolutely nothing from the
metopes of the Parthenon. Retrace your steps as
far as you like, ā from the palace of Versailles to
Heidelberg Castle, from Heidelberg Castle to Notre
Dame of Paris, from Notre Dame of Paris to the
Alhambra, from the Alhambra to St. Sophia, from
St. Sophia to the Colosseum, from the Colosseum
to the Propylaea, from the Propylaea to the Pyra-
mids ; you may go backward in centuries, you do
not go backward in art. The Pyramids and the
Iliad remain in the foreground.
Masterpieces have a level, the same for all, the
absolute.
The absolute once reached, all is said. That
cannot be excelled. The eye can bear but a
certain quantity of dazzling light.
Thence comes the assurance of poets. They
lean upon the future with a lofty grace. " Exegi
monumentum," says Horace ; and on that occa-
sion he derides bronze. " Plaudite cives," says
I04 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Plautus. Corneille, at sixty-five years, wins the
love (a tradition in the Escoubleau family) of the
very young Marquise de Contades, by promising
to send her name down to posterity : ā
" Lady, to that future race
In whose day I '11 have some credit,
You '11 be known as fair of face
But because my verse has said it."^
In the poet and in the artist there is something
of the infinite. It is this ingredient, the infinite,
which gives to this kind of genius an irreducible