tion to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild translation to the ludicrous, a sort of cunning bravado bordering on the flights of delirium." How beautiful a dramatic poem we have in 'Hamlet' it is superfluous to say; but no ingenuity in the world can reconcile all its parts The king had murdered his father, and might proceed to murder him as next heir to the throne. He might also think himself in danger from Hamlet, if he suspected that the prince knew of his guilt. By pretending lunacy Hamlet might allay all such fears. In the play the feigned insanity seems rather to have excited than to have calmed the suspicion of the king. Neverthe--what the poet received, and what less, we may suppose him reasoning after this fashion; though, according to our notions, this feint of insanity would have thrown him at once into the power of the king, who would have been justified in the eyes of all Denmark in taking measures for his restraint and confinement. It would have doomed him to the keeper and the cell. But of all this Shakespeare takes very little heed. This feigned madness was in the story. He does not consider himself responsible for it. Being there, he uses it to introduce, as we have said, a wild, pungent, half-rational, half-irrational dialogue, which has added incalculably to the charm of the play. So completely has he liberated himself from all responsibility to explain the rationale of this affected madness that no one knows precisely where it begins or where it ends. There is no trace of it at the time when the fencingmatch is made with Laertes; in some unexplained way it has left the scene altogether. And where does it commence? Every one remembers those strange grotesque utterances which the poet has given to Hamlet immediately after the appearance of the ghost; 'You hear this fellow in the cellarage,' and the like. Here some commen 66 tators think that Hamlet already puts on a show of insanity; others have thought that his wish to avoid any further discourse with his friends about the awful apparition which they all had witnessed, is sufficient to explain this assumed levity. Coleridge, with his accustomed subtlety, sees in these wild and whirling words "the disposi he brought-so as to make a complete consistent representation of Hamlet's character. Each reader satisfies himself by taking what he pleases, and leaving what displeases, or by putting on the latter some fanciful interpretation. A sort of religious veneration steals over great poets as over great philosophers or great prophets: we no longer read all the text, or the text only; we read more and we read less; we read with preconceptions and predilections that disguise the literal meaning from us. Of course Victor Hugo has his word to say on the character of Hamlet, and it is an eloquent word, it being understood always that the eloquence of Victor Hugo throughout this book is of a very fitful order-flashes of lightning, with much cloud and darkness. starts well : He "The characteristic of men of genius of the first order, is to produce each a peculiar model of man. All bestow on humanity its portrait; some laughing, some weeping, others pensive. These last are the greatest. Plautus laughs, and gives and gives to man Gargantua; Cervantes to man Amphitryon; Rabelais laughs, laughs, and gives to man Don Quixote; Beaumarchais laughs, and gives to man Figaro; Molière weeps, and gives to man Alceste; Shakespeare dreams, and gives to man Hamlet; Eschylus meditates, and The others gives to man Prometheus. are great; Eschylus and Shakespeare are immense." We thought all men of great genius were equal. But let that pass. It would be idle to reason against what we never received as a proposition addressed to the reason. "Let us continue," as Victor Hugo says. "So, each of the men of genius tries on in his turn this immense human mask; and such is the strength of the soul which they cause to pass through the mysterious aperture of the eyes, that this look changes the mask, and from terrible makes it comic, then pensive; and it is Job, Ajax, Priam, &c. &c. 'Two marvellous Adams, we have just said, are the man of Eschylus, Prometheus, and the man of Shakespeare, Hamlet. "Prometheus is action, Hamlet is hesitation. "In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior; in Hamlet it is interior. "In Prometheus the will is securely nailed down by nails of brass, and cannot get loose; besides, it has by its side two watchers, Force and Power. In Hamlet the will is more tied down yet; it is bound by previous meditation, the endless chain of the undecided. Try to get out of yourself if you can! What a Gordian knot is our reverie! Slavery from within, that is slavery indeed. Scale this enclosure to dream!' Escape, if you can, from this prison to love! The only dungeon is that which walls conscience in. Prometheus, in order to be free, has but a bronze collar to break and a god to conquer. Hamlet must break and conquer himself. Prometheus can raise himself upright if he only lifts a mountain; to raise himself up, Hamlet must lift his own thoughts. If Prometheus plucks the vulture from his breast, all is said; Hamlet must tear Hamlet from his breast." It will be seen at once that it is the dreamy, undecided, meditative Hamlet, sketched by Coleridge and Goethe, that Victor Hugo adopts and exaggerates. 66 Hamlet, appalling, unaccountable being, complete in the incomplete. All, in order to be nothing. He is prince and demagogue, sagacious and extravagant, profound and frivolous, man and neuter. He has but little faith in the sceptre, rails at the throne, has a student for his comrade, converses with any one passing by, argues with the first comer, understands the people, despises the mob, hates strength, suspects success, questions obscurity, and says 'thou' to mystery. Hamlet, ever full of life, is not sure of his existence. In this tragedy, which is at the same time a philosophy, everything floats, hesitates, delays, staggers, becomes discomposed, scatters, and is dispersed. Thought is a cloud, will is a vapour, resolution is a crepuscule; the action blows each moment in an inverse direction, man is governed by the winds. "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. Livid hesitation is in his mind. "Nevertheless, at least one half of Hamlet is anger, transport, outrage, hurricane, sarcasm to Ophelia, malediction on his mother, insult to himself. He talks with the grave-diggers, nearly laughs, then clutches Laertes by the hair in the very grave of Ophelia, and stamps furiously upon the coffin. Swordthrusts at Polonius, sword-thrusts at Laertes, sword-thrusts at Claudius. From time to time his inaction is torn in twain, and from the rent comes forth thunder. "He is tormented by that possible life, intermixed with reality and chimera, the anxiety of which is shared by all of us. There is in all his actions an expanded somnambulism. One might almost consider his brain as a formation; there is a layer of suffering, a layer of thought, then a layer of dreaminess. It is through this layer of dreaminess that he feels, comprehends, learns, perceives, drinks, eats, frets, mocks, weeps, and reasons. There is between life and him a transparency; it is the wall of dreams; one sees beyond, but one cannot step over it. A kind of cloudy obstacle everywhere surrounds Hamlet. Hamlet is not He has upon the spot where his life is. ever the appearance of a man who talks to you from the other side of a stream. He is at a distance from the catastrophe in which he takes part, from the passerby whom he interrogates, from the thought that he carries, from the action that he performs. It is isolation in its highest degree. It is as if your own self was absent and had left you there." We have selected the most intelligible parts of this elaborate description, and if our quotation is "garbled," it is the quite obscure or quite grotesque that we have omitted. Victor Hugo selects one phase of the character of Hamlet, and dwells upon it, in his exaggersomething not only unlike Shakeating manner, till he has produced speare, but unlike anything in nature. Hamlet is a somnambulist, living in a perpetual nightmare; indeed, in a passage which space did not permit us to quote, he expressly compares Hamlet's habitual state of mind to the incapacity for movement we feel in a nightmare. As we have already said, Shakespeare makes the indecision or the delay of Hamlet one of the causes that postpone the act of revenge. Hamlet speaks of himself as hampered by doubts, and as sometimes shrinking from his purpose; but Shakespeare does not represent a morbid individual, generally incapable of action. Placed in Hamlet's position, who would not pause and hesitate? After all, it was the wild justice of revenge he was prosecuting. It was a deathblow he had to inflict. Who would not have Macbeth pauses, and paused? Othello hesitates. There are situations in which every rational, every reflective man, feels the torture of conflicting motives. When Victor Hugo describes this torture, as he does most forcibly in the hero of 'Les Misérables' (on an occasion which every one who has read the novel will remember), he does not therefore imply that Valjean is an undecided man. The indecision of Hamlet does in part belong to the man and in part to the situation; but Shakespeare assuredly never meant to portray a sort of Prince Athanase, a man in whom the nerve of action had been destroyed, a weak and morbid individual. Victor Hugo's Hamlet is a favourable specimen of his manner of delineating the characters of Shakespeare. Macbeth, Othello, Lear, all sit for their portraits; but it is not so much as if they were drawn on the cloud, as if the cloud itself were the pencil that drew them, so vague is the outline presented to us. What could be more awfully indefinite than this of Othello, and more grotesque withal? "What is Othello? He is Night. An immense fatal figure. Night is amorous of Day. Darkness loves the Dawn. The African adores the white woman. Desdemona is Othello's brightness and frenzy! And then how easy to him is jealousy! How speedily has night beckoned to death! "Sound this profound thing. Othello is the night, and, being night, and wishing to kill, what does he take to slay The knife? No, the pillow. To kill is to lull to sleep. Shakespeare himself perhaps did not take this into account. The creator sometimes, almost unknown to himself, yields to his type, so much is that type a power. And it is thus that Desdemona, spouse of the man Night, dies stifled by the pillow, which has had the first kiss, and which has the last sigh.' with? Poison? The club? The axe? We can well believe that Shakespeare himself had not taken this into account. Othello-NightPillow-this association of ideas had probably never occurred to any one before. We suspect there is very little in any of these delineations of Victor Hugo that Shakespeare had taken into account. Our author succeeds better when he discourses in general terms of the genius of Shakespeare, commends its riotous fertility, rejoices in its untameable exuberance, its amazing prodigality :— "Othello, Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, Shylock, Oberon, Puck, Ophelia, Desdemona, Juliet, Titania-men, women, witches, fairies, souls-Shakespeare is the grand distributor; take, take, take, all of you! Do you want more? Here is Ariel, Parolles, Macduff, Prospero, Viola, Miranda, Caliban. More yet? Here is Jessica, Cordelia, Portia, Polonius, Horatio, Mercutio, Imogene, Pandarus of Troy, Bottom, Theseus. Ecce Deus, it is the poet: he offers himself; squanders himself; he is never empty. who will have me? He gives, scatters, Why? He cannot be. Exhaustion with him is impossible. There is in him something of the fathomless.' "What then?" he says farther on, in a strain that, at all events, suits the present occasion. "No criticising? No. No blame? No. You explain everything? Yes. Genius is an entity like nature, and requires, like nature, to be accepted purely and simply. A mountain must be accepted as such, or left alone. There are men who would make a criticism on the Himalayas, pebble by pebble. Mount Etna blazes and slavers, throws out its glare, its wrath, its lava, and its ashes; these men take scales and weigh those ashes, pinch by pinch. Meanwhile genius continues its eruption. Everything in it has its reason for exist ing. It is, because it is. Its shadow is the inverse of its light. Its smoke comes from its flame. Its depth is the result of its height. We love this more and that less, but we remain silent wherever we feel God. We are in the forest; the tortuosity of the tree is its secret. The sap knows what it is doing. The root knows its own business. We take things as they are; we are indulgent for that which is excellent, tender, or magnificent; we acquiesce in chefs-d'œuvre; we do not make use of one to find fault with the other; we do not insist upon Phidias sculpturing cathedrals, or upon Pinaigrier glazing temples; the temple is the harmony, the cathedral is the mystery; they are two different forms of the sub lime we do not claim for the minster the perfection of the Parthenon, or for the Parthenon the grandeur of the minster. We are so far whimsical as to be satisfied with both being beautiful. We do not reproach for its sting the insect that gives us honey. We renounce our right to criticise the feet of the peacock, the cry of the swan, the plumage of the nightingale, the butterfly for having been caterpillar, the thorn of the rose, the smell of the lion, the skin of the elephant, the din of the cascade, the immobility of the Milky Way, the saltness of the ocean, the spots on the sun. "The quandoque bonus dormitat is permitted to Horace. We raise no objection. What is certain is, that Homer would not say it of Horace. He would not take the trouble. Himself the eagle, he would find charming, indeed, Horace the chattering humming-bird. I grant it is pleasant for a man to feel himself superior, and say, 'Homer is puerile, Dante is childish.' It is indulging in a pretty smile. To crush these poor geniuses a little, why not? To be the Abbé Trublet, and say, 'Milton is a schoolboy,' it is pleasing. How witty is the man who finds that Shakespeare has no wit! That man is La Harpe, Delandine, Auger; he is, was, or shall be an academician. All these great men are made up of extravagance, bad taste, and childishness. What a fine decree to issue! These fashions tickle voluptuously those who have them; and, indeed, when one has said, 'This giant is small,' one fancies one is great. Every man has his own way. As for myself, the writer of these lines, I admire everything like a simpleton. "That is why I have written this book. "To admire. To be an enthusiast. It has struck me that it was right to give to our century this example of folly.' Victor Hugo strikes a chord here to which every generous spirit will respond. It is good to admire, heartily, enthusiastically, and sometimes to insist on doing nothing but admire. There is another chord on which he strikes, where also he will find, in this country at least, a cordial response. It is when he insists upon it, that Art is not its own end or aim; it is not Art for art's sake; it is Art for the sake of Humanity, that we admire and should cultivate. There appears to be in some critics, and in some authors who have written in their prefaces criticisms of their own works, some confusion of ideas on this subject. Impatient and irritated at that formal requisition which we suppose it was the custom at one time to make, of a distinct specific moral -what is sometimes called poetical justice; as if a whole drama or novel were written, like a fable in Esop, for no other purpose than to illustrate some virtuous precept or maxim of prudence ;-irritated, we say, at this narrow method of estimating the morality of art, they seem to have thrown themselves into the quite opposite and untenable doctrine, that art was to find its end in itself. In other words, art was to be cultivated solely for the pleasure which it gives. Truth of imitation is the only truth to be required from it. Like nature or like history, it is there, a positive fact. Like nature and like history, you may study it, and derive what good lesson you can from it. But this is no affair of the artist. He is not responsible for the lessons you extract; he gives you a truth, and because he has to please, it must be a truth that shall not shock, or disgust, or scandalise you: but beyond this he has no concern with your beliefs or your moralities. Now this, which seems to give to art an enviable freedom, really robs art of all its greatness. If the poet no longer feels that he is ministering to the greatness of man, to his moral elevation, to his tenderness— to his highest cultivation, in short what is he better than any fiddler that stands upon the green, and collects the crowd around him for half an hour? His high occupation is gone. We do not ask the poet or the novelist to mould his incidents after some ideal of retributive justice; let him rather fashion them with all the licence and variety that he finds in real life: but he, the narrator he is there he cannot efface himself—he must know what passions, what sentiments, he is waking out of the human heart. He is there to please, but he is there also to move and elevate this human heart. He cannot throw aside his responsibility, or if he does, he throws aside his own greatness and the greatness of his art, and all its high aspirations. It is now generally understood that the lesson to be learned when the curtain falls at the last act of the drama, and not till then, or at the last page of the last volume of the novel, is of the least possible importance. But whether, through the drama or the novel, we have been raised to a high level of thought and sentiment, or sunk to a very low level, is a question which the critic still asks. And he only ceases to ask it, when the drama or the novel is beneath his serious notice altogether-is evidently powerless for good or for evil. Victor Hugo does well, therefore, when he links the great fact of human genius to the great fact of human progress, and insists that our admiration of the one and our faith in the other shall be indissolubly connected. The literature of mere literati—the literature of a caste-where "to be a poet was something like being a mandarin," he holds in slight estimation. He calls on minds of the highest power, to be also of the highest utility. "Be useful! Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when it is necessary to be efficient and good. Art for art may be beautiful, but art for progress is more beautiful yet. Ah! you must think? Then think of making man better. You must dream? Here is the dream for you the ideal of humanity. VOL. XCVI.-NO. DLXXXVI. humanity in one way, by the wings, by "That the poet should be beyond the immense flight, by the sudden possible disappearance in the fathomless, it is well, it must be so, but on condition of reappearance. He may depart, but he must return. Let him have wings for the infinite, provided he has feet for the flying, he is seen walking. Let him beearth, and that, after having been seen come man again, after he has gone out of humanity. After he has been seen an archangel, let him be once more brother. Let the star which is in that eye weep a tear, and that tear be the human tear. Thus, human and superhuman, he shall be the poet. But to be altogether beyond man is not to be. Show me thy foot, genius, and let me see if, like myself, thou hast earthly dust in thy heel. "If thou hast not some of that dust, a if thou hast never walked in my pathway, thou dost not know me and I do not know thee. Go away. Thou believest thyself an angel, thou art but a bird. "Aid from the strong for the weak, help from the great for the small, help from the free for the slaves, help from the thinkers for the ignorant, help from the solitary for the multitude. Such is the law." At first approach to the subject, one would say of Shakespeare that he had pre-eminently followed art for art. His object was to amuse, and sway, and agitate with tears and laughter the pit of a theatre. All varieties of passion he brought before them, leaving the multitude, if it pleased, to make selection-to approve or disapprove. But, in reality, no writer has been more frequently recognised amongst the people as "guide, philosopher, and friend," and this owing to the genuine human sympathy he has with all those very passions he gives utterance to. In his dramas we see ourselves; we watch, we N |