SHAKESPEARE IN FRANCE

I

NOTHING but good can come of a comparative study of English and French literature. The political intercourse of the two countries has involved them in an endless series of broils. But between the literatures of the two countries friendly relations have subsisted for over five centuries. In the literary sphere the interchange of neighbourly civilities has known no interruption. The same literary forms have not appealed to the tastes of the two nations; but differences of æsthetic temperament have not prevented the literature of the one from levying substantial loans on the literature of the other, and that with a freedom and a frequency which were calculated to breed discontent between any but the most cordial of allies. While the literary geniuses of the two nations have pursued independent ideals, they have viewed as welcome courtesies the willingness and readiness of the one to borrow sustenance of the other on the road. It is unlikely that any full or formal balance-sheet of such lendings and borrowings will ever be forthcoming, for it is felt instinctively by literary accountants and their clients on both shores of the Channel that the debts on the one side keep a steady pace with the debts on the other, and there is no balance to be collected.

No recondite research is needed to establish this general view of the situation. It is well known how the poetic career of Chaucer, the earliest of great English poets, was begun under French masters. The greatest poem of medieval France was turned into English by his youthful pen, and the chief French poet of the day, Eustace Deschamps, held out to him the hand of fellowship in the enthusiastic balade, in which he apostrophised 'le grant translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucer.' Following Chaucer's example, the great poets of Elizabeth's reign and of James the First's reign most liberally assimilated the verse of their French contemporaries, Ronsard, du Bellay, and Desportes. Frenchmen of the sixteenth century returned the compliment by naturalising in French translations the prose romances of Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Greene. From the accession of Charles the Second until the accession of George the Third, the English drama framed itself on French models, and Pope, who long filled

the throne of a literary dictator in England, acknowledged discipleship to Boileau. A little later the literary philosophers of FranceRousseau and the Encyclopédistes-drew their nutrition from the writings of Hobbes and Locke; French novel-readers of the eighteenth century found the chief joy of life in the tearful emotions excited by the sentimentalities of Richardson and Sterne, and French novel-writers had small chance of recognition, as M. Texte has amply proved, if they disdained to traffic in the lachrymose wares which the English novelists had brought into fashion. At the present moment the cultured Englishman finds his most palatable fiction in the publications of Paris. Within recent memory the English playgoer viewed with impatience any theatrical programme which lacked a Parisian flavour. To-night, at the London theatre which during this generation has sustained the best traditions of the English drama, an original play on a theme of French history by the greatest living dramatist of France is performed by English actors. Corresponding tendencies are visible acrose the Channel. The French stage offers as cordial a reception to plays of English manufacture as is offered in London to the plays derived from France. No histrionic event attracts higher interest in Paris than the assumption by a great actor or actress of a Shakespearean rôle for the first time, and French dramatic critics have been known of late to generate such heat in debates over the right conception of a Shakespearean character that their differences become only capable of adjustment at the sword's point. Moreover, in all the cultivated centres of France a new and unparalleled energy is devoted to-day to the study of English literature of both the present and the past. The research expended on the topic by French scholars has not been excelled in Germany, and has rarely been equalled in England. Critical biographies of James Thomson (of The Seasons), of Burns, and of Wordsworth have recently come from the pens of French professors of English literature, and their volumes breathe a minute accuracy and a fulness of knowledge which are certainly not habitual to English professors of English literature. This scholarly movement shows signs of rapid extension. It was therefore to be expected that a serious effort should be made in France to determine the character and dimensions of the influence exerted on French literature by the greatest of all English men of letters-by Shakespeare. That work has been undertaken by M. Jusserand. Last year he gave to the world the results of his investigation in his native language. Now with a welcome consideration for the linguistic incapacities of Shakespeare's countrymen, he repeats his conclusions in their tongue. In the English translation he has embellished his labours with many pictorial illustrations of historic interest and value.1

1 Shakespeare in France under the Ancien Régime, by J. J. Jusserand. London: T. Fisher Unwin.

1899.

II

Among French writers on English literature, M. Jusserand is the most learned and the most voluminous. He has already treated of almost all periods in published books, and he has been long engaged on an exhaustive Literary History of the English People, of which the only volume yet published brings the narrative as far as the close of the Middle Ages. M. Jusserand enjoys the rare faculty of writing with almost equal facility and felicity in both French and English. His learning is profound, but he is not overburdened by it, and he preserves his native gaiety of style even when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times discursive, but he is never tedious, and he shows no trace of that philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision which the detailed study of literary history has been known to breed in English and German investigators.

M. Jusserand handles his present theme with all the lightness of touch and wealth of minute detail to which he has accustomed his readers. Nowhere have so many facts been brought together illustrating the literary intercourse of Frenchmen and Englishmen between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It is true that his opening chapters have little concern with Shakespeare, but their intrinsic interest and novelty atone for their irrelevance. They shed a flood of welcome light on that interchange of literary information and ideas which is a constant feature in the literary history of the two countries. Many will read here for the first time of the great poet Ronsard's visits to this country; of the distinguished company of English actors which delighted the Court of Henry IV. of France; and of Ben Jonson's discreditable exploits in the French capital when he went thither as tutor to Sir Walter Ralegh's son. By some freak of fortune Shakespeare's fame was slow in crossing the Channel. The French dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived and died in the paradoxical faith that the British drama reached its apogee in the achievement of the Scottish Latinist, George Buchanan, in whose classical tragedies Montaigne played a part, while he was a student at Bordeaux. Another mistaken belief which French men of letters long cherished was that Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and the father of Lord Chancellor Bacon were the greatest authors which England had begotten or was likely to beget. When Shakespeare's work first arrived in France, Frenchmen were staggered by its originality. They perceived his colossal breaches of classical law. They were shocked by his freedom of speech. When Lewis the Fourteenth's librarian placed a copy of the Second Folio of his works on the shelves of the Royal Library, he noted in his catalogue that Shakespeare 'has a rather fine imagina

tion; he thinks naturally; but these fine qualities are obscured by the filth he introduces into his comedies.' In spite of the mass of pedestrian literature that was imported into France from England in the seventeenth century, it so happened that Shakespeare had to wait for a fair hearing there till the eighteenth century. Then it was only gradually that his pre-eminence was realised by French critics. It is to Voltaire that Frenchmen owe a full knowledge of Shakespeare. Voltaire's method of teaching Shakespeare to his countrymen was characteristically cynical. He studied him closely when he visited England as a young man. At that period of his career he not merely praised him with discerning caution, but he paid him the flattery of imitation. Voltaire's tragedy of Brutus betrays an intimate acquaintance with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. His Eryphile was the product of many perusals of Hamlet. His Zaïre is a pale reflection of Othello. But when Voltaire's countrymen showed a tendency to better Voltaire's instruction, and one Frenchman conferred on Shakespeare the title of the god of the theatre,' Voltaire resented the situation that he had himself created. He was at the height of his own fame, and he felt that his reputation as the first of French writers for the stage was in jeopardy. The last years of his life were therefore consecrated to an endeavour to dethrone the idol which his own hands had set up. He traded on the patriotic prejudices of his hearers, but Voltaire's efforts to depreciate Shakespeare were very partially successful. Few writers of power were ready to second him, and after his death the Shakespeare cult in France, of which he was the unwilling inaugurator, spread far and wide. In the nineteenth century Shakespeare was admitted without demur into the French 'pantheon of literary gods.' Classicists and romanticists vied in doing him honour. The classical painter Ingres introduced his portrait into his famous picture of 'Homer's Cortège' (now in the Louvre). The romanticist Victor Hugo recognised only three men as memorable in the history of humanity, and Shakespeare was one of the three; Moses and Homer were the other two. Alfred de Musset became a dramatist under Shakespeare's spell. To George Sand everything in literature seemed flat by the side of Shakespeare's poetry. The prince of romancers, the elder Dumas, set the English dramatist next to God in the cosmic system of the universe; 'after God,' wrote Dumas, Shakespeare has created most.'

III.

It would be easy to multiply eulogies of Shakespeare from French lips in the vein of Victor Hugo and Dumas-eulogies beside which the enthusiasm of most English critics appears cold and constrained. So unfaltering a note of admiration sounds gratefully in the ears of Shakespeare's countrymen. Yet on closer investigation there seems a

rift within the lute. When one turns to the French versions of Shakespeare, for which the chief of Shakespeare's French encomiasts have made themselves responsible, an Englishman is inclined to moderate his exultation in the French panegyrics. No one did more as an admiring critic and translator of Shakespeare than Jean François Ducis, who prepared six of Shakespeare's greatest plays for the French stage at the end of the last century. Not only did Ducis thus introduce Shakespeare's masterpieces to thousands of his countrymen who might otherwise never have heard of them, but his renderings of Shakespeare were turned into Italian and many languages of Eastern Europe, and spread the knowledge of Shakespeare's achievement to the extreme boundaries of Europe. Apparently Ducis did his work under favourable auspices. He corresponded regularly with Garrick, and he was never happier than when studying Shakespeare's text with a portrait of Shakespeare at his side. Yet all his translations of Shakespeare are gross perversions of their originals. He is never verbally faithful; he revises the development of the plots; he gives the dramatis persone new names. His Othello was accounted his greatest triumph. But he declined to treat it as a tragedy. Towards the end of his rendering Iago's villanies are discovered by Othello; Othello and Desdemona are reconciled, and the Moor, exulting in his newly recovered happiness, pardons Iago. The curtain falls on a scene of dazzling domestic bliss. Ducis acknowledged that he was guilty of a somewhat strained interpretation of Shakespeare's tragic scheme, but he defended himself on the ground that French refinement and French sensitiveness could not endure the agonising incidents of the true catastrophe. It is, indeed, the fact that the patrons of the Comédie Française warned the adapter in the strongest terms against revolting their feelings by reproducing the barbarities that characterised the close of Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece. If such be the true French sentiment, what, we are moved to ask, is the significance of the unqualified regard which Ducis and his countrymen profess for Shakespearean drama ? There seems a strange paradox in the situation. Certainly there is a startling paradox in the outcry of Ducis' French clients against the terror of Desdemona's murder. For the protests which Ducis reports on the part of the Parisians bear the date 1792, when the tragedy of the French Revolution-a tragedy of real life, grimmer than any that Shakespeare imagined-was being enacted in literal earnest by the Parisian playgoers themselves.

A like problem is presented by Dumas's efforts under more pacific conditions to adapt Shakespeare for the Parisian stage. With his friend Paul Meurice Dumas prepared the version of Hamlet which long enjoyed a standard repute at the Comédie Française. Dumas's ecstatic veneration for Shakespeare's genius did not deter him, any more than Ducis was deterred by his veneration, from work