William Shakespeare

As water, when heated to 100° C., is incapable of calorific increase, and can rise no higher, so human thought attains in certain men its maximum intensity. Æschylus, Job, Phidi...

William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in a house under the tiles of which was concealed a profession of the Catholic faith beginning with these words, "I, John Shak...

The nineteenth century springs from itself only; it does not receive its impulse from any ancestor; it is the offspring of an idea. Doubtless, Isaiah, Homer, Aristotle, Dante, S...

The production of souls is the secret of the unfathomable depth. The innate, what a shadow! What is that concentration of the unknown which takes place in the darkness, and when...

Everything stirs up in science, everything changes, everything is constantly renewed. Everything denies, destroys, creates, replaces everything. That which was accepted yesterda...

That history has to be re-made is evident. Up to the present time, it has been nearly always written from the miserable point of view of accomplished fact; it is time to write i...

To say, "Macbeth is ambition," is to say nothing. Macbeth is hunger. What hunger? The hunger of ten monsters, which is always possible in man. Certain souls have teeth. Do not w...

Ah, minds, 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 beautifu...

There are in literature and philosophy men who have tears and laughter at command,--Heraclituses wearing the mask of a Democritus; men often very great, like Voltaire. They are...

Poet must at the same time, and necessarily, be a historian and a philosopher. Herodotus and Thales are included in Homer. Shakespeare, likewise, is this triple man. He is, besi...

To the individual works that those men have left us, must be added various vast collective works, the Vedas, the Râmayana, the Mahâbhârata, the Edda, the Niebelungen, the Helden...

In 1784, Bonaparte, then fifteen years old, arrived at the Military School of Paris from Brienne, being one among four under the escort of a minim priest. He mounted one hundred...

It is time that all this should be altered. It is time that the men of action should take their place behind, and the men of ideas come to the front. The summit is the head. Whe...

What is England? She is Elizabeth. There is no incarnation more complete. In admiring Elizabeth, England loves her own looking-glass. Proud and magnanimous, yet full of strange...

Shakespeare is the great glory of England. England has in politics Cromwell, in philosophy Bacon, in science Newton,--three lofty men of genius. But Cromwell is tinged with crue...

Æschylus is incommensurate. There is in him something of India. The wild majesty of his stature recalls those vast poems of the Ganges which walk through art with the steps of a...

If ever a man was undeserving of the good character of "he is sober," it is most certainly William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is one of the worst rakes that serious æsthetics ever...

The theatre is a crucible of civilization. It is a place of human communion. All its phases require to be studied. It is in the theatre that the public soul is formed.

What is this? A recommendation for a domestic? No. It is the panegyric of a writer. A certain school, called "serious," has in our days hoisted this programme of poetry: sobriet...

One of the probable causes of the feigned madness of Hamlet has not been up to the present time indicated by critics. It has been said, "Hamlet acts the madman to hide his thoug...

Let us agree, by the way, respecting a qualificative much used everywhere: _Profanum vulgus_,--the saying of a poet on which pedants lay great stress. This _profanum vulgus_ is...

The discharge of the warrior is signed: it is splendour in the distance. The great Nimrod, the great Cyrus, the great Sennacherib, the great Sesostris, the great Alexander, the...

After all, let us admit it at last, and complete our statement; there is some truth in the reproaches that are hurled at them. This anger is natural. The powerful, the grand, th...

Besides the copies in the colonies, which were limited to a small number of pieces, it is certain that partial copies of the original at Athens were made by the Alexandrian crit...

One knows not on what to rely with them. Their lyric fever obeys them; they interrupt it when they like. They seem wild. All at once they stop. Their frenzy becomes melancholy....

Aristophanes, who is not yet judged, adhered to the mysteries, to Cecropian poetry, to Eleusis, to Dodona, to the Asiatic twilight, to the profound pensive dream. This dream, wh...

The power that Greece had to evolve her luminous effluvia is prodigious,--even like that to-day which we see in France. Greece did not colonize without civilizing,--an example t...

Here is the advent of the new constellation. It is certain that at the present hour that which has been till now the light of the human race grows pale, and that the old flame i...

Let us add that calumny loses its labour. Then what purpose can it serve? Not even an evil one. Do you know anything more useless than the sting which does not sting?

"Shakespeare," says Forbes, "had neither the tragic talent nor the comic talent. His tragedy is artificial, and his comedy is but instinctive." Johnson confirms the verdict: "Hi...

We speak of Art as we speak of Nature; here are two terms of an almost unlimited signification. To pronounce the one or the other of these words, Nature, Art, is to make a conju...

There are two poets,--the poet of caprice and the poet of logic; and there is a third poet, a component of both, amending them one by the other, completing them one by the other...

Twelve years ago, in an island adjoining the coast of France, a house, with a melancholy aspect in every season, became particularly sombre because winter had commenced. The wes...

In truth, a monument to Shakespeare, _cui bono?_ The statue that he has made for himself is worth more, with all England for a pedestal. Shakespeare has no need of a pyramid; he...

Let us mention it en passant, all these people were gods:--gods Soters, gods Euergetes, gods Epiphanes, gods Philometors, gods Philadelphi, gods Philopators. Translation: Gods s...

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 b...

Among the writers abhorred for having been useful, Voltaire and Rousseau hold a conspicuous rank. They were reviled when alive, mangled when dead. To have a bite at these renown...

Nothing can be more fiercely wild than Prometheus stretched on the Caucasus. It is gigantic tragedy. The old punishment that our ancient laws of torture call extension, and whic...

Many people in our day, readily merchants and often lawyers, say and repeat, "Poetry is gone." It is almost as if they said, "There are no more roses; spring has breathed its la...

All power is duty. Should this power enter into repose in our age? Should duty shut its eyes? and is the moment come for art to disarm? Less than ever. The human caravan is, tha...

The beauty of everything here below lies in the power of reaching perfection. Everything is endowed with that property. To increase, to augment, to win strength, to march forwar...

A man whom we do not know how to class in his own century, so little does he belong to it, being at the same time so much behind it and so much in advance of it, the Marquis de...

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 pens...

To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall. To live, is to have in one's self a balance, and to weigh in it the good...

No, Thou art not worn out. Thou hast not before thee the bourn, the limit, the term, the frontier. Thou has nothing to bound thee, as winter bounds summer, as lassitude the bird...

"Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdu'd. Pity me, then, Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink Potions of eysel."[1]

These words, so often used, even by the lettered, "decline," "revival," show to what an extent the essence of art is ignored. Superficial intellects, easily becoming pedantic, t...

Every play of Shakespeare's, two excepted, "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" (thirty-four plays out of thirty-six), offers to our observation one peculiarity which seems to have...

A genius is an accused man. As long as Æschylus lived, his life was a strife. His genius was contested, then he was persecuted,--a natural progression. According to Athenian pra...

Do not look, then, for any criticism. I admire Æschylus, I admire Juvenal, I admire Dante, in the mass, in a lump, all. I do not cavil at those great benefactors. What you chara...

As for Shakespeare,--since Shakespeare is the poet who claims our attention now,--he is, in the highest degree, a genius human and general; but like every true genius, he is at...

History proves the working partnership of art and progress. _Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres._ Rhythm is a power,--a power that the Middle Ages recognize and submit to not less than...

Now, is not that incident a complete drama? It might be entitled "Æschylus Lost." Recital, node, and _dénouement._ After Euergetes, Omar. The action begins with a robber and end...

Thus the hand of the police was in the print of Diderot Flogged, and the engraver of the Franciscan friar must have been kindred to the turnkey of Vincennes. Governments, more p...

The progress of man by the education of minds,--there is no safety but in that. Teach! learn! All the revolutions of the future are enclosed and imbedded in this phrase: Gratuit...

The democratic idea, the new bridge of civilization, undergoes at this moment the formidable trial of overweight. Every other idea would certainly give way under the load that i...

This new aspect of facts history henceforth is compelled to reproduce. To change the past, that is strange; yet it is what history is about to do. By falsehood? No, by speaking...

Fourteen trilogies: the "Promethei," of which "Prometheus Bound" formed a part; the "Seven Chiefs before Thebes," of which there remains one piece, "The Danaid," which comprised...

What then? 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 moun...

An eminent man of our day, a celebrated historian a powerful orator, one of the former translators of Shakespeare, is mistaken, according to our views, when he regrets, or appea...

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 tie...

France, let me admit, is not, in like cases, much more speedy. Another glory, very different from Shakespeare, but not less grand,--Joan of Arc,--waits also, and has waited long...

One of the characteristics which distinguish men of genius from ordinary minds, is that they have a double reflection,--just as the carbuncle, according to Jerome Cardan, differ...

Macchiavelli had a strange idea of the people. To heap the measure, to overflow the cup, to exaggerate horror in the case of the prince, to increase the crushing in order to sti...

At the very moment we finished writing the pages you have just read, was announced in London the formation of a committee for the solemn celebration of the three-hundredth anniv...

Up to this day there has been a literature of _literati._ In France, particularly, as we have said, literature had a disposition to form a caste. To be a poet was something like...

There can be but one law; the unity of law results from the unity of essence. Nature and art are the two sides of the same fact; and in principle, saving the restriction which w...

The Ex-"Good Taste," that other divine law which has for so long a time weighed on Art, and which had succeeded in suppressing the Beautiful for the benefit of the Pretty, the a...

It is necessary to restore some ideal in the human mind. Whence shall you take your ideal? Where is it? The poets, the philosophers, the thinkers are the urns. The ideal is in Æ...

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 u...

We repeat it, to choose between these men, to prefer one to the other, to mark with the finger the first among these first, it cannot be. All are the Mind.

Jeering began in France, and oblivion continued in England. What the Irishman Nahum Tate had done for "King Lear," others did for other pieces. "All's Well that Ends Well" had s...

Certainly, a good salary is a fine thing. To tread on this firm ground, high wages, is pleasant. The wise man likes to want nothing. To insure his own position is the characteri...

These waves; this ebb and flow; this terrible go-and-come; this noise of every gust; these lights and shadows; these vegetations belonging to the gulf; this democracy of clouds...

There is at this hour a great deal of useful destruction accomplished; all the old cumbersome civilization is, thanks to our fathers, cleared away. It is well, it is finished, i...