The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3080]
Secondly, having freed themselves from this hypnotic state, men will understand that the trivial and immoral works of Shakespeare and his imitators, aiming merely at the recreation and amusement of the spectators, can not possibly represent the teaching of life, and that, while there is no true religious drama, the teaching of life should be sought for in other sources.
Extracts from WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE by Victor Hugo
In 1864 Hugo published a large non-fiction work titled William Shakespeare. When he had begun writing the book, he had intended for it to be an introduction for a collection of French translations written by his son, Francois Victor Hugo. However, the work grew to be approximately 300 pages in length and Hugo had to write a separate introduction to the plays.
William Shakespeare begins with an approximately twenty page biography, filled with many inaccuracies, and then becomes a work of literary criticism focusing on the literary geniuses of history, focusing on not only Shakespeare, but also Homer, Aeschylus, Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, Dante and Cervantes, to name but a few. Deciding there was more of Hugo in the work than Shakespeare, some French critics cynically suggested he should have entitled the work Myself.
To provide readers with a sample of this unusual work, selections from Book V, The Mind and the Masses, are available in this collection.
Hugo in Jersey, 1855
THE MINDS AND THE MASSES
THE PEOPLE
For the last eighty years memorable things have been done. A wonderful heap of demolished materials covers the pavement.
What is done is but little by the side of what remains to be done.
To destroy is the task: to build is the work. Progress demolishes with the left hand; it is with the right hand that it builds.
The left hand of Progress is called Force; the right hand is called Mind.
There is at this hour a great deal of useful destruction accomplished; all the old cumbersome civilisation is, thanks to our fathers, cleared away. It is well, it is finished, it is thrown down, it is on the ground. Now, up with you all, intellects! to work, to labour, to fatigue, to duty; it is necessary to construct.
Here three questions: To construct what? To construct where? To construct how?
We reply: To construct the people. To construct the people according to the laws of progress. To construct the people according to the laws of light.
SOCIALISM
To work for the people,—that is the great and urgent necessity.
The human mind—an important thing to say at this minute—has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real.
It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. Now, do you wish to realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives.
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 and the evil. To live, is to have justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity, commonsense, right, and duty nailed to the heart. To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience. Cato would not rise before Ptolemy. Cato lived.
Literature is the secretion of civilisation, poetry of the ideal. That is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors of the people. That is why Shakespeare must be translated in France. That is why Molière must be translated in England. That is why comments must be made on them. That is why there must be a vast public literary domain. That is why all poets, all philosophers, all thinkers,