William Shakespeare
Copyright© 2025 by Victor Hugo
Chapter 1
“Ce courtisan grossier du profane vulgaire.”[1]
This Alexandrine is by La Harpe, who hurls it at Shakespeare. Somewhere else La Harpe says, “Shakespeare panders to the mob.”
Voltaire, as a matter of course, reproaches Shakespeare with antithesis: that is well. And La Beaumelle reproaches Voltaire with antithesis: that is better.
Voltaire, when he is himself in question, pro domo sua, gets angry. “But,” he writes, “this Langleviel, alias La Beaumelle, is an ass. I defy you to find in any poet, in any book, a fine thing which is not an image or an antithesis.”
Voltaire’s criticism is double-edged. He wounds and is wounded. This is how he characterizes the Ecclesiastes and the Canticle of Canticles: “Works without order, full of low images and coarse expressions.”
A little while after, furious, he exclaims, —
“On m’ose préférer Crébillon le barbare!”[2]
An idler of the Œil-de-Bœuf, wearing the red heel and the blue ribbon, a stripling and a marquis, —M. de Créqui, —comes to Ferney, and writes with an air of superiority: “I have seen Voltaire, that childish old man.”
That injustice should receive a counterstroke from injustice, is nothing more than right; and Voltaire gets what he deserved. But to throw stones at men of genius is a general law, and all have to bear it. Insult is a crown, it appears.
For Saumaise, Æschylus is nothing but farrago.[3] Quintilian understands nothing of the “Orestias.” Sophocles mildly scorned Æschylus. “When he does well, he does not know it,” said Sophocles. Racine rejected everything, except two or three scenes of the “Choephori,” which he condescended to spare by a note in the margin of his copy of Æschylus. Fontenelle says in his “Remarques”: “One does not know what to make of the ‘Prometheus’ of Æschylus. Æschylus is a kind of madman.” The eighteenth century, without exception, railed at Diderot for admiring the “Eumenides.”
“The whole of Dante is a hotch-potch,” says Chaudon. “Michael Angelo wearies me,” says Joseph de Maistre. “Not one of the eight comedies of Cervantes is supportable,” says La Harpe. “It is a pity that Molière does not know how to write,” says Fénélon. “Molière is a worthless buffoon,” says Bossuet. “A schoolboy would avoid the mistakes of Milton,” says the Abbé Trublet, an authority as good as another. “Corneille exaggerates, Shakespeare raves,” says that same Voltaire, who must always be fought against and fought for.
“Shakespeare,” says Ben Jonson, “talked heavily and without any wit.” How prove the contrary? Writings remain, talk passes away. Well, it is always so much denied to Shakespeare. That man of genius had no wit: how nicely that flatters the numberless men of wit who have no genius!
Some time before Scudéry called Corneille “Corneille déplumée” (unfeathered carrion crow), Green had called Shakespeare “a crow decked out with our feathers.” In 1752 Diderot was sent to the fortress of Vincennes for having published the first volume of the “Encyclopædia,” and the great success of the year was a print sold on the quays which represented a Franciscan friar flogging Diderot. Although Weber is dead, —an attenuating circumstance for those who are guilty of genius, —he is turned into ridicule in Germany; and for thirty-three years a chef-d’œuvre has been disposed of with a pun. The “Euryanthe” is called the “Ennuyante” (wearisome).
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