French critics’ gradual emancipation from Voltairean influence.
Although Voltaire’s censure was rejected by the majority of later French critics, it expressed a sentiment born of the genius of the nation, and made an impression that was only gradually effaced. Marmontel, La Harpe, Marie-Joseph Chénier, and Chateaubriand, in his ‘Essai sur Shakespeare,’ 1801, inclined to Voltaire’s view; but Madame de Staël wrote effectively on the other side in her ‘De la Littérature, 1804 (i. caps. 13, 14, ii. 5.) ‘At this day,’ wrote Wordsworth in 1815, ‘the French critics have abated nothing of their aversion to “this darling of our nation.” “The English with their bouffon de Shakespeare” is as familiar an expression among them as in the time of Voltaire. Baron Grimm is the only French writer who seems to have perceived his infinite superiority to the first names of the French theatre; an advantage which the Parisian critic owed to his German
blood and German education.’ [350a] The revision of Le Tourneur’s translation by François Guizot and A. Pichot in 1821 gave Shakespeare a fresh advantage. Paul Duport, in ‘Essais Littéraires sur Shakespeare’ (Paris, 1828, 2 vols.), was the last French critic of repute to repeat Voltaire’s censure unreservedly. Guizot, in his discourse ‘Sur la Vie et les Œuvres de Shakespeare’ (reprinted separately from the translation of 1821), as well as in his ‘Shakespeare et son Temps’ (1852), Villemain in a general essay, [350b] and Barante in a study of ‘Hamlet,’ [350c] acknowledge the mightiness of Shakespeare’s genius with comparatively few qualifications. Other complete translations followed—by Francisque Michel (1839), by Benjamin Laroche (1851), and by Emil Montégut (1867), but the best is that in prose by Francois Victor Hugo (1859-66), whose father, Victor Hugo the poet, published a rhapsodical eulogy in 1864. Alfred Mézières’s ‘Shakespeare, ses Œuvres et ses Critiques’ (Paris, 1860), is a saner appreciation.