William Shakespeare
Copyright© 2025 by Victor Hugo
Chapter 3
Homer, Job, Æschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, Saint John, Saint Paul, Tacitus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare.
That is the avenue of the immovable giants of the human mind.
The men of genius are 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 that man can realize.
We repeat it, to choose between these men, to prefer one to the other, to mark with the finger the first among these first, it cannot be. All are the Mind.
Perhaps, in an extreme case—and yet every objection would be legitimate—you might mark out as the highest summit among those summits, Homer, Æschylus, Job, Isaiah, Dante, and Shakespeare.
It is understood that we speak here only in an Art point of view, and in Art, in the literary point of view.
Two men in this group, Æschylus and Shakespeare, represent specially the drama.
Æschylus, a kind of genius out of time, worthy to stamp either a beginning or an end in humanity, does not seem to be placed in his right turn in the series, and, as we have said, seems an elder son of Homer’s.
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