William Shakespeare (1864), Part I, Book II, chapter IV, in the A. Baillot translation

What Speech Cannot Carry

In 1863 Victor Hugo lived in exile at Hauteville House on the island of Guernsey. The French emperor had banished him twelve years earlier. In the house, his son François-Victor Hugo worked on a French translation of Shakespeare. The father decided to write a short preface for the project. The preface soon grew into a separate book of three hundred pages. Hugo finished the manuscript in March 1864 to mark three hundred years since Shakespeare was born. He was thinking about how people speak under tyranny.

People often assume Hugo was writing a gentle compliment about feelings. He was not. In Part I, Book II, chapter IV of William Shakespeare, in the A. Baillot translation, he was analyzing German politics. German citizens lived under tight police control, and the state silenced their speech. Hugo argued that the public turned to music because rulers could not censor a melody. He wrote: "Music expresses that which cannot be said, and on which it is impossible to be silent." When you cannot speak safely, you do not simply keep quiet. A song takes the weight that speech had to drop.

Therefore

When a feeling is too heavy for plain words, stop trying to phrase it. Put on a record and let the sound do the work.

A small reminder, on the desk or the speaker, that some things are too heavy for speech and need music instead.

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