We may be told that tastes differ, that what through tradition or habit, perhaps, to us appear beauties, do not so strike a foreigner.
Let us test this by the criticism of another foreigner—not a German, but a Frenchman—and we will find him selecting, as prominent beauties on the first hearing of the play, the very passages which also strike us on long and familiar acquaintance.
In the winter of 1829-30, a French version of Othello was represented in a Parisian theatre, and that theatre—shades of Corneille and Racine—the Théâtre Français! Mademoiselle Mars was the Desdemona. The piece was a decided success, and in the Revue Française for January, 1830, there appeared an admirably written article which was at once a compte-rendu of the representation and a criticism of the tragedy. It was from the pen of the Duc de Broglie, and commanded universal attention. His description of the desperate struggles of the two cliques—the Classical and the Romantic—who were, of course, present in force, his account of the effect of the piece upon the general audience, his analysis of the motives of French admiration or blame of Shakespeare, are all most interesting. But what we specially have to do with is his criticism on the play and the dramatist. Here it is:
“The effect of Othello’s narration was irresistible. This portion of the play is translated into all languages—its beauty is perfectly entrancing, its originality is unequalled. Even La Harpe could not refuse it the tribute of his admiration. But perhaps the scene which precedes and that which follows are even still more adapted to exhibit Shakespeare in all his greatness. How wonderful a painter of human nature was this man! How true is it that he has received from on high something of that creative power which, by breathing on a little dust, can transform it into a creature of life and immortality!”
Even as the Christian Anglo-Saxon was doomed to suffer at M. Taine’s hands the outrage of attributed paganism, so also was Shakespeare ignominiously foreordained (from the thirty-sixth page of his first volume) to be a maniac Berserkir. And all because the author has his little theory to carry out. Do you find it wonderful that under such treatment the facts should suffer? Alas! other and more important things must also suffer if such a work as this is to receive the sanction of recognized critical authority, and be placed in the hands of the rising generation.
To do M. Taine justice, he does not for a moment lose sight of his Berserkir, and keeps him, in the soul of Shakespeare, well up to his work. And so, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is “an athlete of war, with a voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion’s soul in the body of a steer” (vol. i. p. 329).
For M. Taine, the grand trial act in the Merchant of Venice is “the horrible scene in which Shylock brandished his butcher’s knife before Antonio’s bare breast,” and King Lear is “the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason which reason could never have conceived.” But reason has so decidedly done the contrary that an experienced physician of long practice in an insane asylum (in the United States) has written an essay[12] to show that Shakespeare’s physiological and psychological knowledge and acquirements, as displayed in his tragedies, were in advance of those of his age by fully two centuries, and, he adds, that the wonderful skill and sagacity manifested by the great dramatist in seizing upon the premonitory signs of insanity (as in King Lear), which are usually overlooked by all, even the patient’s most intimate friends and the members of his family, and weaving them into the character of his hero as a necessary element, without which it would be incomplete, like those of inferior artists, is a matter of wonder to all modern psychologists.
To the Voltairian school of literature in the last century, the plays of Shakespeare were “ces monstrueuses farces que l’on appelle des tragedies,” and Hamlet, in particular, in Voltaire’s judgment, “seems the work of a drunken savage.” When you have read M. Taine on Shakespeare, first let the coruscations of his verbal pyrotechnics subside, await the end of his epileptic contortions of style, then scratch off a thin varnish of polite concession, and you will find under it a Voltairian: although not, we hope, brutal and cynical as was the great original in his denunciation of those Frenchmen who were willing to claim some talent for Shakespeare. Voltaire called them faquins, impudents, imbéciles, monstres, etc. Such people were, he said, a source of calamity and horror, and France did not contain a sufficient number of pillories to punish such a crime. (“Letter of Voltaire to Count d’Argental,” July 19, 1776.)
One of the most interesting books to be found in the English language is Carlyle’s French Revolution. But it is interesting only on condition that the reader is already familiar with the history of that period. And we pay M. Taine’s work a high compliment in saying that, in like manner, his History of English Literature will be found an interesting work to those whose opinions on art and literature are formed, whose religious principles are fixed, and whose judgments are sufficiently mature to be in no danger of being affected by the artificial, erroneous, and false views of man and his responsibilities, with which the book abounds.