London, April to September 1822;
Revised in February 1845
MY READINGS correlative to The Genius of Christianity had little by little (as I have said) led me to a more thorough consideration of English literature. When I took refuge in England in 1792, I had to reform most of the judgments that I had gathered from critics. As regards historians, Hume had a reputation as a Tory and a reactionary: he was accused, as was Gibbon, of having overburdened the English language with Gallicisms; his proponent, Smollett, was preferred. A philosopher all his life who became a Christian at his death, Gibbon remained, as such, impeached and convicted of being a no-good man. Robertson was still discussed, because he was dry.
Where poets were concerned, the Elegant Extracts served to introduce the exile to a few pieces by Dryden. Pope’s rhymes were unpardonable, but everyone paid a visit to his house in Twickenham and cut twigs from the weeping willow which he had planted, and which was now withering, like his reputation.
Blair was regarded as a tedious critic in the French style and ranked far below Johnson. As for the old Spectator, it was stacked up and gathering dust in the attic.
The English political works were of little interest to us. Economic treatises were somewhat less circumscribed, since calculations of the wealth of nations, the employment of capital, and the balance of trade were equally applicable to European societies.
Burke emerged as a spokesman for the nation’s politics; by declaring himself opposed to the French Revolution, he drew his country into that long campaign of hostilities which ended on the fields of Waterloo.
Still, a few great figures remained. One stumbled across Milton and Shakespeare everywhere. Did Montmorency, Biron, or Sully (by turns the ambassadors of France to Elizabeth and James I) ever hear of a strolling player who acted in his own plays and in those of others? Did they ever pronounce the name, so barbarous in French, of Shakespeare? Did they suspect that in this name there was a glory before which their honors, their pomp, and their rank would sink into insignificance? Who knows! The actor who took on the role of the ghost in Hamlet was the great phantom, the shade of the Middle Ages who rose over the world like a star in the night at the very moment when those ages went down among the dead: enormous centuries that Dante opened and that Shakespeare sealed.
In the Précis historique by Whitelock, a contemporary of the bard of Paradise Lost, one reads of “a certain blind man, named Milton, Latin Secretary to the Parliament.” Molière, the buffoon, played Pourceaugnac, just as Shakespeare, the mountebank, pulled faces as Falstaff.
These veiled travelers who come to sit at our table from time to time are treated like common guests. We are ignorant of their real nature until the day they disappear. When they leave the earth, they are transfigured, and they say to us, as the angel said to Tobit, “I am one of the seven who stand continually in the presence of the Lord.”[1]
But if, in their passage, they are misunderstood by men, these divinities never misunderstand one another. “What needs my Shakespeare,” Milton writes,
for his honour’d bones,
the labour of an age in piled stones?
Michelangelo, envying Dante’s fate and genius, exclaims:
“Had I been such as he! For his bitter exile, together with his talent, I would give up all the happiness in the world!”
Tasso celebrated Camões when the latter was almost unknown and thereby garnered him a “reputation.” Is there anything more admirable than this society of illustrious equals, revealing themselves to one another by signs, hailing one another, and conversing in a language understood by themselves alone?
Was Shakespeare lame like Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Homer’s Prayers, the daughters of Jupiter?[3] If in fact he was, the boy from Stratford was far from being ashamed of his infirmity and, like Childe Harold, was unafraid to speak of it to one of his mistresses:
. . . lame by fortune’s dearest spite.[4]
Shakespeare would have had a great number of lovers if we reckoned them one per sonnet. The creator of Desdemona and Juliet grew old without losing his taste for love. Was the unnamed woman addressed in such charming verse proud or happy to be the object of Shakespeare’s sonnets? One might doubt it, for an old man’s fame is like an old woman’s diamonds: they may adorn her, but they cannot make her pretty.
The tragic Englishman wrote his mistress:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead:
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse,
When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay;
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love ever with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.[5]
Shakespeare loved, but he gave no more credence to love than to other things. A woman for him was a bird, a breeze, a flower: some charming thing that happens past. Owing to his insouciance, or to his ignorance of his fame, or to the accident of his birth, which kept him far from high society, and far from conditions he could not hope to attain, he seems to have taken life as a light and unoccupied hour—a swift, sweet leisure-time.
Shakespeare, in his youth, met with aged monks who had been driven from their cloisters, monks who had seen the reforms, the destruction of the monasteries, the fools, wives, mistresses, and heads-men of Henry VIII. When the poet left this world, Charles I was sixteen years old.
Thus, with one hand, Shakespeare could have touched the gray-haired heads threatened by the blade of the second-to-last of the Tudors; with the other, he could have touched the brown-haired head of the second of the Stuarts, which the Parliamentarian ax would fell. Leaning on these tragic brows, the great tragedian sank into the grave. He filled the interval of days when he lived with his ghosts and his blind kings, his punished pretenders and his ill-fated women, attempting, by analogous fictions, to connect the realities of the past with the realities of the future.
Shakespeare is one of five or six writers who have everything needed to nourish the mind. These mother-geniuses seem to have birthed and brought up all the others. Homer impregnated Antiquity; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace, and Virgil are his sons. Dante gave rise to modern Italy, from Petrarch to Tasso. Rabelais created French letters; Montaigne, La Fontaine, and Molière are his descendants. And England is all Shakespeare, even down to the latest times; he has lent his language to Byron, his dialogue to Walter Scott.
These supreme masters are often disowned. We rebel against them and tally up their faults; we accuse them of being boring, tedious, bizarre, tasteless, and all the while we deplume them we adorn ourselves with their feathers; but we struggle in vain under their yoke. Everything takes on their colors. Every place is imprinted with their traces. They invented the words and the names that have gone to swell the vocabularies of whole populations; their expressions have become proverbs; their imagined characters have changed into real characters with heirs and lineage. They open up horizons from which rays of light shine forth like honey; they sow ideas that yield a thousand others; they furnish images, subjects, and styles for every art. Their works are the mines, or the wombs, of the human spirit.
Such geniuses occupy the first rank. Their immensity, their variety, their fecundity, their originality: these things cause them to be regarded from the first as laws, examples, molds, types of the various forms of intelligence, as there are four or five races of men issuing from a single trunk, of which the rest are merely branches. Let us beware of denigrating the disorder into which these mighty beings sometimes fall; let us not imitate Ham; not laugh if we encounter, naked and asleep, in the shadow of the ark stranded in the mountains of Armenia, the solitary boatman of the abyss. Let us respect this diluvian navigator who began creation anew after heaven’s downpour. Pious children, blessed by our father, let us cover him chastely with our cloak.
Shakespeare, when he lived, gave no thought to whether he would live after death. What does my canticle of admiration matter to him today? Making all these suppositions, examining the truth or error with which the human mind is penetrated or imbued, what can fame mean to Shakespeare? Its noise will never rise to his ear. If a Christian, in the bliss of eternal happiness, would he trouble himself with the nothingness of the world? If a Deist, free from the shades of matter, and lost among the splendors of God, would he lower his eyes to the grain of sand where he passed his days? If an atheist, he sleeps a sleep without breath or reawakening, which is called death. Nothing is more vain than glory from the other side of the grave, unless it has given life to friendship, been useful to virtue, lent a hand to the unfortunate—unless it be granted to us to enjoy in heaven the consoling, generous, and liberating idea left by us on earth.