The human mind is the infinite …

The human mind is the infinite possible. The master-works, immense worlds, are generated within it unceasingly; and abide there forever. No crowding of one against the other; no recoil. The occlusions, when there are any, are but apparent, and quickly cease. The expanse of the boundless admits all creations.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo

Poets do not climb over …

Poets do not climb over each other. The one is not the stepping-stone of the other. The poet rises alone, without any other lever than himself. He does not tread his equal under foot. The new-comers respect their elders. They succeed, they do not replace each other. The beautiful does not drive out the beautiful. Neither wolves nor masterpieces devour each other. 

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

A savant may outshine a …

A savant may outshine a savant; a poet never throws a poet into the shade.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

Progress is the motive …

Progress is the motive-power of Science; the ideal is the generator of Art. 

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo

Nothing so starts and prolongs the thrill felt by the thinker as …

Nothing so starts and prolongs the thrill felt by the thinker as those mysterious exfoliations of abstraction into reality in the double region ( the one positive, the other infinite) of human thought, – a region double, and nevertheless one: the infinite is an exactitude. The profound word “number” is at the base of man`s thought; it is, to our intelligence, elemental; it signifies harmony as well as mathematics. Number reveals itself to Art by rhythm, which is the beating of the heart of the Infinite. In rhythm, the law of order, God if felt. A verse is numerous, like a crowd; its feet march with the cadenced step of a legion. Without number, no science; without number, no poetry. The strophe, the epic, the drama, the riotous palpitation of man, the bursting forth of love, the irradiation of the imagination, the lightning-cloud of passion, all are lorded over by this mysterious word “number,” even as are geometry and arithmetic.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo

Poetry, like Science, has an abstract …

Poetry, like Science, has an abstract root. Science produces from that root masterpieces of metal, wood, fire, or air,- machine, ship, locomotive, aerostat; Poetry causes to grow from it the masterpiece of flesh and blood, Iliad, Song of Songs, Romancero, Divine Comedy, Macbeth.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

There can be but one law; the unity of law results from the …

There can be but one law; the unity of law results from the unity of essence: Nature and Art are the two slopes of the same fact. And in principle, saving the restriction which we shall indicate very shortly, the law of one is the law of the other. The angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence. All being equity in the moral order, and equilibrium in the material order, all is equation in the intellectual order. The binomial, that marvel adjustable to everything, is included in poetry no less than in algebra. Nature plus humanity, raised to the second power, give Art. Such is the intellectual binomial. 

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

The human mind has a summit …

The human mind has a summit, – the ideal; to this summit God descends, man rises.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

Supreme Art is the region of …

Supreme Art is the region of Equals. There is no primacy among masterpieces. Like water, which heated to a hundred degrees will bear no increase of temperature, human thought attains in certain men its maximum intensity. Eschylus, Job, Phidias, Isaiah, Saint Paul, Juvenal, Dante, Michael Angelo, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven, with some others, rise to the hundredth degree of genius. 

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

Poetry is the poet`s own. Let us be respectful before the …

Poetry is the poet`s own. Let us be respectful before the possible, of which no one knows the limit. Let us be attentive and serious before the extra – human, out of which we come, and which awaits us; but let us not degrade the great workers of the world by hypotheses of a mysterious assistance which is not necessary; let us leave to the brain that which belongs to it, and agree that the productions of genius are a superhuman offspring of man.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

God has not made this marvelous distillery of …

God has not made this marvelous distillery of thought, – the brain of man, – in order to make no use of it.The man of genius has need of no apparatus but his brain; through it his every thought must pass. Thought ascends, and buds from the brain, as the fruit from the root. Thought is the resultant of man; the root plunges into the earth, the brain into God, – that is to say, into the Infinite.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

The mission of Science is …

The mission of Science is to study and sound everything. All of us, according to our degree, are the creditors of investigation; We are its debtors also. It is due to us, and we owe it to others. To evade a phenomenon, to refuse to pay it that attention to which it has a right, to bow it out, to show it the door, to turn our back on it laughing, is to make truth a bankrupt, and to leave the Signature of Science to be protested. The phenomenon of the tripod of old, and of the table of today, is entitled, like anything else, to investigation. Psychic science will gain by it, without doubt. Let us add, that to abandon phenomena to credulity, is to commit treason against human reason. 

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

Science is ignorant, and has no right to …

Science is ignorant, and has no right to laugh: a savant who laughs at the possible, is very near being an idiot. The unexpected ought always to be expected by Science. Her duty is to stop it in its course and search it, rejecting the chimerical, establishing the real. Science has but the right to put a visa on facts; she should verify and distinguish. All human knowledge is but picking and culling. The circumstance that the false is mingled with the true, furnishes no excuse for rejecting the whole mass. When was the tare an excuse for refusing the corn ? Hoe out the weed error, but reap the fact, and place it beside others. Science is the sheaf of facts.

William Shakespare by Victor Hugo

The work appearing superhuman, people wish to …

The work appearing superhuman, people wish to exhibit the intervention of the extra-human: in antiquity. the tripod; in our days, the table. The table is nothing but the tripod come again. To accept in a literal sense, the demon that Socrates talks of, the bush of Moses, the nymph of Numa, the spirit of Plotinus, and Mahomet`s dove, is to be the victim of a metaphor.

On the other hand, the table, turning or talking, has been very much laughed at. To speak plainly, this raillery is out of place. To replace inquiry by mockery is convenient, but not very scientific. For our part, we think that the strict duty of Science is to test all phenomena.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

God creates Art by …

God creates Art by man, having for a tool the human intellect. The great Workman has made this tool for himself; he has no other.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

God is the invisible made …

God is the invisible made evident. The world concentrated, is God. God expanded, is the world.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

Art is …

Art is as natural as Nature.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

Art is the …

Art is the second branch of Nature.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

We speak of Art as we speak of …

We speak of Art as we speak of Nature. Here are two terms of almost indeterminate meaning; to pronounce the one or the other of these words – Nature, Art – is to make a conjuration to call forth the ideal from the deeps, to draw aside one of the two great curtains of the divine creation. God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art. Hence this reality: the poet is a priest.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo 

There are, indeed, men whose souls are like …

There are, indeed, men whose souls are like the sea. Those billows, that ebb and flood, that inexorable going and coming, that noise of all the winds, that blackness and that translucency, that vegetation peculiar to the deep, that democracy of clouds in full hurricane, those eagles flecked with foam, those wonderful star-risings reflected in mysterious agitation by millions of luminous wave-tops, – confused heads of the multitudinous sea, – the errant lightnings which seem to watch, those prodigious sobbings, those half-seen monsters, those nights of darkness broken by howlings, those furies, those frenzies, those torments, those rocks, those shipwrecks, those fleets crushing each other, mingling their human thunders with the divine thunders and staining the sea with blood; then that charm, that mildness, those festivals, those gay white sails, those fishing-boats, those songs amid the uproar, those shining ports, those mists rising from the shore, those cities at the horizon`s edge, that deep blue of sky and water, that useful asperity, that bitter savor which keeps the world wholesome, that harsh salt without which all would putrefy; those wraths and those appeasements, that all in one, the unforeseen amid the changeless, the vast marvel of inexhaustibly varied monotony, that smoothness after an upheaval, those hells and those heavens of the unfathomed, infinite, ever-moving deep, – all this may exist in a mind and then that mind is called genius, and you have Eschylus, you have Isaiah, you have Juvenal, you have Dante, you have Michael Angelo, you have Shakespeare; and it is all one whether you look at these souls or at the sea.

William Shakespeare by Victor Hugo