William Shakespeare
Copyright© 2025 by Victor Hugo
Chapter 4
Saumaise, that worse Scaliger, does not comprehend Æschylus, and rejects him. Who is to blame? Saumaise much, Æschylus little.
The attentive man who reads great works feels at times, in the middle of reading, certain sudden fits of cold followed by a kind of excess of heat (“I no longer understand!—I understand!”), shivering and burning, —something which causes him to be a little upset, at the same time that he is very much struck. Only minds of the first order, only men of supreme genius, subject to heedless wanderings in the infinite, give to the reader this singular sensation, —stupor for most, ecstasy for a few. These few are the élite. As we have already observed, this élite, gathered from century to century, and always adding to itself, at last makes up a number, becomes in time a multitude, and composes the supreme crowd, —the definitive public of men of genius, sovereign like them.
It is with that public that at the end one must deal.
Nevertheless, there is another public, other appraisers, other judges, to whom we have lately alluded. They are not content.
The men of genius, the great minds, —this Æschylus, this Isaiah, this Juvenal, this Dante, this Shakespeare, —are beings, imperious, tumultuous, violent, passionate, extreme riders of winged steeds, “overleaping all boundaries,” having their own goal, which “goes beyond the goal,” “exaggerated,” taking scandalous strides, flying abruptly from one idea to another, and from the north pole to the south pole, crossing the heavens in three steps, making little allowance for short breaths, tossed about by all the winds, and at the same time full of some unaccountable equestrian confidence amidst their bounds across the abyss, untractable to the “aristarchs,” refractory to state rhetoric, not amiable to asthmatical literati, unsubdued to academic hygiene, preferring the foam of Pegasus to asses’ milk.
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