BOOKS.

VICTOR HUGO ON SHAKESPEARE.* IT would he unjust, perhaps, to define this work as the wild rhapsody of a man of genius, and yet no other description approaches so nearly to the truth. It is a rhapsody, and a wild one,-- a medley in which sparkling epigrams and cloudy sen- tences, deep thoughts and shallow ideas, poetry and dirt, gleams of insight and morsels of inaccurate antiquarianism, sentences which are full of reverence and paragraphs stuffed with verbal blasphemies, fire and mud, are all poured out together. The smallest portion of the book is that which relates to Shakespeare, yet Victor Hugo obviously holds him one of the first among man- kind, and as obviously believes that he has in this book erected a column to his honour. So disjointed are the ideas that we question if any Englishman will have the patience to wade through them all, yet those who do will find that, though they will know little more of Shakespeare, they will have fertilized their minds, spread over them thoughts which, if not always savoury, still, like guano, quicken, and quicken rapidly, the germs within the soil. Victor Hugo has made of Shakespeare a peg whereon to hang his view of the rise of literature and the drama, and on literature and the drama he must always be worth a hearing. The very names of his chapters indicate the 'wide discursiveness of his range ; there are chapters on Shakespeare, his life, his genius, his work, and his countrymen, but there are more on a strange list of "men of genius," which begins with Homer and Job, and leads through St. Paul and Rabelais— "powers eternal such names mingled !"—up to Shakespeare, on the theory that " Zoilus is as eternal as Homer," on "Souls," on "The Minds and the Masses," and on" The Beautiful as the Ser- vant of the True." Even in each chapter he wanders from point to point, talks of Rabelais in order to burst into a mad flight on the part played by the belly in the human drama, and pauses in his review of men of genius to give us his opinion on table-turn- ing, which, by the way, is the clearest possible definition of the only scientific mode of scrutinizing those phenomena ;

"On the other hand, the table, turning or talking, has been very much laughed at ; to speak the truth, this raillery is out of place. To replace inquiry by mockery is convenient, but not very scientific. For our part, we think that the strict duty of science is to test all phenomena. Science is ignorant, and has no right to laugh ; a savant who laughs at the possible is very near being an idiot. The unexpected ought always to be expected by science. Her duty is to stop in her course and search it, rejecting the chimerical, establishing the real. Science has but the right to put a visa on facts ; she should verify and distinguish. All human knowledge is but picking and culling. Because the false mixes with the true, it is no excuse for rejecting the mass. When was the tare an excuse for refusing the corn ? Hoe the weed, error, but reap the fact, and place it beside others. Knowledge is the sheaf of facts."

Still every page is worth reading, for every page is gemmed with sentences such as the one we have italicized, sentences in which the most accurate thought,—new or old the author cares not,—is compressed or crystallized into the fewest and the clearest words. " Sorrow when logical leads to God." The English select a poet laureate, "in the time of Elizabeth he was named Drummond," not Shakespeare. Juvenal's invective "is a fearful flash of poetry, which, after centuries, still burns Rome." "Rabelais is the soul of Gaul, and who says Gaul says also Greece, for the Attic salt and the Gallic jest have at bottom the same flavour." The "advent of common sense is the great fact in Cervantes." "Music, we beg indulgence for this word, is the vapour of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves." "Music is the action (lit, the verb) of Germany.' " Good taste is the divine law which once succeeded in suppress- ng the Beautiful for the benefit of the Pretty." If" anything is

greater than God seen in the sun it is God seen in Homer." "Reading is nutriment." "Nature plus humanity raised lo the

second power gives art. This is the intellectual binomial theo- rem." "A savan may outshine a savan ; a poet never throws a poet into the shade." "Pascal the savan is outrun ; Pascal the writer is not." "You will have no more men, you say, such as those. They cannot be matched. There are no more of them. We de- clare to you that the earth has exhausted its contingent of master spirits. Now for decadence and general closing. We must

• Williams Shakespeare. By Victor Hugo. Authorized translation. London : Hurst and Blaokott.

make up our minds to it. We shall have no more men of genius. Au I you have seen the bottom of the unfathomable, you!" "God is no more exhausted by Homer than by a star.' "Science reaching the lowest depths, meets imagination. In conic' sections, in logarithms, in the differential and integral calculus, in the cal- culation of probabilities, in the infinitesimal calculus, in the cal- culations of sonorous waves, in the application of algebra to geome- try, the imagination is the co-efficient of calculation, and mathe- matics becomes poetry. I have no faith in the science of stupid learned men." Sobriety, men shout, decency,respect for authority, irreproachable toilet. No poetry unless it is 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 I shocking ! The wave foams on the rock, the cataract vomits into the gulf, Juvenal spits on the tyrant. Fie I" They are but sentences these, which we have taken almost at random ; but what a richness of mature thought do some of those collections of words contain. Epigrams merely, it may be said ; but then the sentences which have changed the course of all human life, "love your enemies," "God is God, Mehemet is the prophet of God," "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—what in their literary sense are these but epigrams ?

M. Hugo's theory of men of genius seems clear, though every now and then as he advances the reader doubts if he has seized it. Human faculty, like the face of nature, has here and there summits which from time to time one or two men attain, those are the men of genius. Why they attain them is as vain a query as to ask why the heart beats, they are there, self-demonstrated, and man has only to accept the new datum. Each man of the first class bears some distinct relation to the age which preceded him and the age which will follow him, but why he bears that relation is not known, any more than why nature after long periods com- pletes some grand process sometimes with an explosion. Shakes- peare was in lkl. Hugo's view the winding up of the middle ages, the final expression, if we understand him, the jibs, and outcome, and perfect embodiment of all which that long period produced of thought, or greatness, or capacity. That is his position ; for himself he is the man of all others most rich, most fertile in all things, fullest, as it were, and with most to give to man. To use M. Hugo's own words, always his own best interpreters :—

" Shakespeare is fertility, force, exuberance, the overflowing breast, the foaming cup, the brimful tub, the overrunning sap, the overflooding lava, the whirlwind scattering germs, the universal rain of life, every- thing by thousands, everything by millions, no reticence, no binding, no economy, the inordinate and tranquil prodigality of the creator. To those who feel the bottom of their pocket, the inexhaustible seems insane."

Even his " blemishes," the wild riot of his imagination, and

his diction are to his critic beauties, beauties so great that he rises in denouncing "expurgated editions, those nasty produc- tions of inherently dirty minds, into his highest vein of irony.

"Why not have literary policemen ? Good taste is a precaution taken by good order. Sober writers are the counterpart of prudent electors. Inspiration is suspected of love for liberty. Poetry is rather outside of legality ; there is, therefore, an official art, the offspring of official criticism. A whole special rhetoric proceeds from those pre- misses. Nature has in that particular art but a narrow entrance, and goes in through the side door. Nature is infected with demagogy. The elements are suppressed as being bad company, and making too much uproar. The equinox is guilty of breaking into reserved grounds • the squall is a nightly row. The other day; at the School of Fine Arts' a pupil-painter having caused the wind to lift up the folds of a mantle during a storm, a local professor, shocked at this lifting up, said, 'The style does not admit of wind.' After all, reaction does not despair. We get on ; some progress is accomplished. A ticket of confession sometimes gains admittance for its bearer into the Academy. Jules Janin, Theophile Gautier, Paul de Saint-Victor Littre, Ronan, please to recite your creed. But that does not suffice ; the evil is deep-rooted. The ancient catholic society, and the ancient legitimate literature, are threatened. Darkness is in peril. To war with new generations ! to war with the modern spirit ! and down upon Democracy, the daughter of Philosophy ! Cases of rabidness—that is to say, the works of genius—are to be feared. Hygienic prescriptions are renewed. The public high-road is evidently badly watched. It appears that there are some poets wandering about. The prefect of police, a negligent man, allows some spirits to rove about. What is Authority thinking of ? Let us take care. Intellects can be bitten ; there is danger. It is certain, evident. It is rumoured that Shakespeare has been met without a muzzle on."

And but that "the chief work of Shakespeare is all Shakes- peare" his most perfect creation would be Hamlet, about whom Victor Hugo seems to an English reader to rave, but of whom he expresses the following singularly just conception :—

"No figure among those that poets have created is more poignant and stirring. Doubt counselled by a ghost, that is Hamlet. Hamlet has seen his dead father and has spoken to him. Is he convinced ? No, he shakes his head. What shall he do? He does not know. His hands clench, then fall by his side. Within him are conjectures, systems, monstrous apparitions, bloody recollections, veneration for the spectre, hate, tenderness, anxiety to act and not to act, his father, his mother, his duties in contradiction to each other, a deep storm. Livid hesitation is in his mind. Shakespeare, wonderful plastic poet, makes the grandiose pallor of this soul almost visible."

Scattered, indeed, through the book are fragments of the most searching criticism, which are always, it is true, appreciative, for the object of the author is to build a pedestal for his figure, not to discover flaws in the marble, but always expressed with a new and striking beauty. Here is an illustration, for example, which explains Cordelia better than a ream of analysis :—

"Lear is the occasion for Cordoba. Maternity of the daughter towards the father ; profound subject; maternity venerable among all other maternities, so admirably translated by the legend of that Roman girl, who, in the depth of a prison, nurses her old father. The young breast near the white beard, there is not a spectacle more holy. This filial breist is Cordelia."

But of special criticism of Shakespeare as a whole, apart from the estimate of his rank in humanity, there is little, and that little may be summed up in a sentence. Shakespeare is England in all her virtues and her foibles, save only her insularity. The "ocean is the guardian of the English modesty. A certain celibacy, in fact, constitutes all the genius of England. Alli- ances, be it so ; no marriage. The universe always kept at some distance. To live alone, to go alone, to reign alone, to be alone, such is Elizabeth, such is England. On the whole, a remarkable queen and an admirable nation. Shakespeare, on the contrary, is a sympathetic genius. Insularism is his ligature, not his strength. He would break it willingly. A little more and Shakespeare would be European." M. Hugo will convince all who read him that there is one Frenchman alive who does Shakes- peare justice, but leaves a doubt whether the Frenchman who is one day to understand Shakespeare thoroughly has yet been found.