Shakspeare and His Times

by François Guizot

Not more methodically does an engineer make his approaches to a place which he is besieging, than did those ambitious of vindicating the worthiness of their descent push their researches into the offices of the minister and the cabinets of Versailles. The Duke De Saint Simon, the most severe, the sincerest, and the most honorable man that ever lived at the court, devoted three fourths of his honorable life to the decision of points of precedence or respect, on his own account or for those connected with him—questions of which even the most important could, at the present day, only induce us to shrug our shoulders and to smile derisively. Sometimes he displayed more character than would have been necessary, on the other side of the Channel, to enable a Marlborough or a Bolingbroke to impose peace or war on their sovereign, and more erudition and research than a Benedictine would put into a folio volume.

Gallantry was a perpetual war between the two sexes—a war which had its tactics and stratagems, its principles of attack and defense, its appropriate times for resistance and surrender, its rights of conquest, and its law of nations.

In fact, the life of society was obliged to submit to all the exigencies of a conventional morality, very different from true morality, often in direct opposition to it, but quite as rigorous, and even more inaccessible to repentance. It recognized as the supreme law, even in its most minute details, a certain code of proprieties, the yoke of which must be borne gracefully—the sensibilities were to be controlled, while the scholar must appear perfectly at ease.

Good breeding was the highest of human attainments, and the art of living the first of all arts.

It is said that literature expresses the life of society— especially is this affirmed of dramatic literature. If this be true, and, in a certain sense, it undoubtedly is true, due limitations being conceded, then our general literature, and more especially our drama, must have reflected more or less accurately this two-fold character of frivolity as to the essence of things, and pedantry as to their forms.

Accordingly it has done both. Here, too, undoubtedly, exceptions must be made, and that to a considerable extent. Our literature has ruled in Europe for a hundred years, and never has it demanded from men an admiration to which it was not reasonably and justly entitled; but still, with regard to its most general features, we may admit that it has been neither learned, as the literature of Germany at the present time is, and as was Italian literature in the times of Petrarch and Politian, nor popular as the literature of Spain was during the period of its greatest vigor. It was essentially and pre-eminently a polite literature, in which the main result aimed at was conversation.

The same may be said of our drama. Regarded in its most general features, it was not so much a national drama as an elegant and fashionable amusement, a pastime for gentlemen of respectable station and bearing, at which the public might assist if it paid liberally for the honor; nearly as it is allowed occasionally to look on from the outer side of the barriers, and watch the progress of a dress ball or a state dinner.

Admiration for the ancients was universally affected; our watch-word was, "Imitate the Ancients;" this was our "Montjoie Saint-Denis!" in literature. And yet a true appreciation of antiquity was not possessed by really learned men, even by those who really did possess a hearty appreciation of the refinements of Greek and Latin idiom. It is, however, well known that the period of erudition quickly passed. It is not to be denied that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, sound learning and substantial erudition were every where on the decline, and that, at the end of the eighteenth, they had fallen almost into entire neglect. Accordingly, our dramatic productions only resembled the master-pieces of Greece in name and in the choice of subjects, by certain purely external characteristics, by the blind observance of certain maxims, whose origin was not cared for and whose relative importance was not appreciated, and by a punctilious deference to the distinction between different species of the drama. So far as the real character of the works was concerned, as to the characters, sentiments, ideas, and colorings introduced, all this was not only modern, but belonged to the existing state of society—not only French, but the French of Paris, or even of Versailles.

The appreciation of national history and monuments was hardly in a better position. There was no taste for antiquities; no sympathy with the recollections of the masses and the traditions of the country; there was nothing fresh and living in the study of foreign languages and literatures.