William Shakespeare
Copyright© 2025 by Victor Hugo
Chapter 4
“He is reserved and discreet. You may trust him; he will take no advantage. He has, above all, a very rare quality, —he is sober.”
What is this? A recommendation for a domestic? No. It is the panegyric of a writer. A certain school, called “serious,” has in our days hoisted this programme of poetry: sobriety. It seems that the only question should be to preserve literature from indigestion. Formerly, the motto was “Prolificness and power;” to-day it is “tisane.” You are in the resplendent garden of the Muses, where those divine blossoms of the mind that the Greeks called “tropes” blow in riot and luxuriance on every branch; everywhere the ideal image, everywhere the thought-flower, everywhere fruits, metaphors, golden apples, perfumes, colours, rays, strophes, wonders; touch nothing, be discreet. Whoever gathers nothing there proves himself a true poet. Be of the temperance society. A good critical book is a treatise on the dangers of drinking. Do you wish to compose the Iliad, put yourself on diet Ah, thou mayest well open thy eyes wide, old Rabelais!
Lyricism is heady, the beautiful intoxicates, greatness inebriates, the ideal causes giddiness; whoever proceeds from it is no longer in his right senses; when you have walked among the stars, you are capable of refusing a prefecture; you are no longer a sensible being; they might offer you a seat in the senate of Domitian and you would refuse it; you no longer give to Cæsar what is due to Cæsar; you have reached that point of mental alienation that you will not even salute the Lord Incitatus, consul and horse. See what is the result of your having drunk in that shocking place, the Empyrean! You become proud, ambitious, disinterested. Now, be sober. It is forbidden to haunt the tavern of the sublime.
Liberty means libertinism. To restrain yourself is well, to geld yourself is better.
Pass your life in restraining yourself.
Observe sobriety, decency, respect for authority, an irreproachable toilet. There is no poetry unless it be fashionably dressed. An uncombed savannah, a lion which does not pare its nails, an unsifted torrent, the navel of the sea which allows itself to be seen, the cloud which forgets itself so far as to show Aldebaran—oh, shocking! The wave foams on the rock, the cataract vomits into the gulf, Juvenal spits on the tyrant. Fie!
We like not enough better than too much. No exaggeration. Henceforth the rose-tree shall be compelled to count its roses. The prairie shall be requested not to be so prodigal of daisies; the spring shall be ordered to restrain itself. The nests are rather too prolific. The groves are too rich in warblers. The Milky Way must condescend to number its stars; there are a good many.
Take example from the big Mullen Serpentaria of the Botanical Garden, which blooms only every fifty years. That is a flower truly respectable.
A true critic of the sober school is that garden-keeper who, to this question, “Have you any nightingales in your trees?” replied, “Ah, don’t mention it! For the whole month of May these ugly beasts have been doing nothing but bark.”
M. Suard gave to Marie Joseph Chénier this certificate: “His style has the great merit of not containing comparisons.” In our days we have seen that singular eulogium reproduced. This reminds us that a great professor of the Restoration, indignant at the comparisons and figures which abound in the prophets, crushes Isaiah, Daniel, and Jeremiah, with this profound apothegm: “The whole Bible is in ‘like’ (comme).” Another, a greater professor still, was the author of this saying, which is still celebrated at the normal school: “I throw Juvenal back to the romantic dunghill.” Of what crime was Juvenal guilty? Of the same as Isaiah, —namely, of readily expressing the idea by the image. Shall we return, little by little, in the walks of learning, to the metonymy term of chemistry, and to the opinion of Pradon on metaphor?
One would suppose, from the demands and clamours of the doctrinary school, that it has to supply, at its own expense, all the consumption of metaphors and figures that poets can make, and that it feels itself ruined by spendthrifts such as Pindar, Aristophanes, Ezekiel, Plautus, and Cervantes. This school puts under lock and key passions, sentiments, the human heart, reality, the ideal, life. Frightened, it looks at the men of genius, hides from them everything, and says, “How greedy they are!” Therefore it has invented for writers this superlative praise: “He is temperate.”
On all these points sacerdotal criticism fraternizes with doctrinal criticism. The prude and the devotee help each other.
A curious bashful fashion tends to prevail. We blush at the coarse manner in which grenadiers meet death; rhetoric has for heroes modest vine-leaves which they call periphrases; it is agreed that the bivouac speaks like the convent, the talk of the guardroom is a calumny; a veteran drops his eyes at the recollection of Waterloo, and the Cross of Honour is given to these modest eyes. Certain sayings which are in history have no right to be historical; and it is well understood, for example, that the gendarme who fired a pistol at Robespierre at the Hôtel-de-Ville was called La-garde-meurt-et-ne-se-rend-pas.
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