| If ever there was a remarkable
book it is surely the “William Shakespeare” which Victor Hugo
has left as a bequest to literature. Written on the island of Jersey while
the most versatile of Frenchmen was in exile it covers the whole world of
writing. The translator says the book belongs to the literature of power
rather than to the literature of knowledge. That reflection probably comes
from the fact that in places sundry quotations and references are obviously
inaccurate. But what after all is knowledge? Who shall say that the mere
orderly presentation of facts is what is demanded in books? Shakespeare
will probably endure longer in the world’s literature than, say, even
G. H. Knibbs. Yet it is certain that as expositor of recorded and tabulated
fact Knibbs is miles in advance of the immortal who spoke to Ann Hathaway
beneath the apple tree. Indeed, there are not a few who declare that apple
trees have more to do with knowledge, of good and evil, as the old yarn
goes, than all the white, red, and other coloured papers ever compiled for
the justification of statesman in an age when to be a statesman is to be
without justification.
In any case, Victor Hugo’s rhapsody with Shakespeare
as a title and universal art as a pulsing major theme is a tremendous
example of the use to which a man of genius can put the written word.
“Behold” said Ezekiel, “a hand was sent unto me; and
lo, a roll of a book was therein. The voice said unto me: ‘Eat this
roll.’ Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.”
Eating a book is a striking piece of imagery. But all literature that
is literature is imagery. It mirrors to each reader the whole geography
of philosophy. What the rainbow suggests towards the close of day is only
what books that are books picture for the minds of men. To be blind is
therefore a misfortune for which the writers of books are not responsible.
One page of the more than three hundred in which
Hugo states his ideas concerning the relation of literature to life is
enough for any review notice. |
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He talks of Orpheus, Hermes,
Job, Homer, Aeschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hippocrates, Phidias, Socrates,
Pluto, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, Lucretious, Platus, Juvenal,
Tacitus, St. Paul, John of Patmos, Tertullian, Pelagius, Dante, Gutenberg,
Joan of Arc, Columbus, Luther, Michael Angelo, Copernicus, Galileo, Rabelais,
Colderon ,Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Kepler, Milton, Moliere, Newton,
Descartes, Kant, Pireanesi, Beccari, Diderot, Voltaire, Beethhoven, Fulton,
Washington, Wellington, David, Solomon, Euripides, Seneca, Lessing, Dumas,
Walter Scott, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Goethe, and so on until our head reels
and we march off to where Mr. Lennox provides towels and other impedimenta
for wallowing in the long wash of the Indian surge. Science,
art, men of genius are all taken to pieces and put together again. So
is nature and God looked at, pondered on, and worshipped. Poetry, printing,
and the theatre all come in, and the most subtle of the psychological
mysteries interpreted in a phrase which the lightning sharpened and the
ocean savored. We are told that the greatest poets are the real creators
of human types; that they reproduce all living types, and that God is
the exhaustless source of genius. Prometheus is linked to Hamlet, and
the pedants and the police castigated as either bores or tyrants. For
the soldier, six feet of earth ends everything, while for the poet it
but makes a commencement.
This book has no rival. Its intensity and its comprehensiveness;
its eloquence and flaming fire – the wonderful short, snapping phrase
and the startling revelatory power of its synthesis make it a masterpiece
of letters. If it were nothing but a criticism of England’s greatest
playwright it would be a remarkable book. As it is the superlatives are
too insipid to supply a description.
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