CHAPTER I.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

BY VICTOR HUGO

TRANSLATED BY A. BAILLOT

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON

ESTES AND LAURIAT

PUBLISHERS

1864

[Illustration: _Portrait of Victor Hugo._ Photogravure

by Goupil et Cie.--From Painting by Pannemaker.]

TO

ENGLAND

I Dedicate this Book,

THE GLORIFICATION OF HER POET.

I TELL ENGLAND THE TRUTH; BUT, AS A LAND ILLUSTRIOUS

AND FREE, I ADMIRE HER, AND AS AN ASYLUM.

I LOVE HER.

VICTOR HUGO.

Hauteville House, 1864.

PREFACE

The true title of this work should be, "Apropos to Shakespeare." The

desire of introducing, as they say in England, before the public,

the new translation of Shakespeare, has been the first motive of the

author. The feeling which interests him so profoundly in the translator

should not deprive him of the right to recommend the translation.

However, his conscience has been solicited on the other part, and

in a more binding way still, by the subject itself. In reference to

Shakespeare all questions which touch art are presented to his mind.

To treat these questions, is to explain the mission of art; to treat

these questions, is to explain the duty of human thought toward

man. Such an occasion for speaking truths imposes a duty, and he is

not permitted, above all at such an epoch as ours, to evade it. The

author has comprehended this. He has not hesitated to turn the complex

questions of art and civilization on their several faces, multiplying

the horizons every time that the perspective has displaced itself, and

accepting every indication that the subject, in its rigorous necessity,

has offered to him. This expansion of the point of view has given rise

to this book.

Hauteville House, 1864.

CONTENTS

PART I.

Book

I. Shakespeare.--His Life 1

II. Men of Genius.--Homer, Job, Æschylus, Isaiah,

Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, St. John,

St. Paul, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare 28

III. Art and Science 78

IV. The Ancient Shakespeare 102

V. The Souls 146

PART II.

I. Shakespeare.--His Genius 161

II. Shakespeare.--His Work.--The Culminating Points 187

III. Zoilus as Eternal as Homer 215

IV. Criticism 238

V. The Minds and the Masses 256

VI. The Beautiful tub Servant of the True 274

PART III.--CONCLUSION.

I. After Death.--Shakespeare.--England 298

II. The Nineteenth Century 325

III. True History.--Every one put in his Right Place 337

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Portrait op Victor Hugo Frontispiece

"In order to gain a Livelihood, he sought to take Care

of Horses at the Doors of the Theatres"

Shakespeare in his Garden

Anne Hathaway's Cottage

Portrait of Shakespeare [not included]

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

PART I.--BOOK I.

HIS LIFE.

CHAPTER I

Twelve years ago, in an island adjoining the coast of France, a house,

with a melancholy aspect in every season, became particularly sombre

because winter had commenced. The west wind, blowing then in full

liberty, made thicker yet round this abode those coats of fog that

November places between earthly life and the sun. Evening comes quickly

in autumn; the smallness of the windows added to the shortness of the

days, and deepened the sad twilight in which the house was wrapped.

The house, which had a terrace for a roof, was rectilinear, correct,

square, newly whitewashed,--a true Methodist structure. Nothing is

so glacial as that English whiteness; it seems to offer you the

hospitality of snow. One dreams with a seared heart of the old huts of

the French peasants, built of wood, cheerful and dark, surrounded with

vines.

To the house was attached a garden of a quarter of an acre, on an

inclined plane, surrounded with walls, cut in steps of granite, and

with parapets, without trees, naked, where one could see more stones

than leaves. This little uncultivated domain abounded in tufts of

marigold, which flourish in autumn, and which the poor people of the

country eat baked with the eel. The neighbouring seashore was hid from

this garden by a rise in the ground; on this rise there was a field of

short grass, where some nettles and a big hemlock flourished.

From the house you might perceive, on the right, in the horizon, on an

elevation, and in a little wood, a tower, which passed for haunted; on

the left you might see the dyke. The dyke was a row of big trunks of

trees, leaning against a wall, planted upright in the sand, dried up,

gaunt, with knots, ankylosès, and patellas, which looked like a row of

tibias. Revery, which readily accepts dreams for the sake of proposing

enigmas, might ask to what men these tibias of three fathoms in height

had belonged.

The south façade of the house looked on the garden, the north façade on

a deserted road.

A corridor at the entrance to the ground-floor, a kitchen, a

greenhouse, and a courtyard, with a little parlour, having a view of

the lonely road, and a pretty large study, scarcely lighted; on the

first and second floors, chambers, neat, cold, scantily furnished,

newly repainted, with white blinds to the window,--such was this

lodging, with the noise of the sea ever resounding.

This house, a heavy, right-angled white cube, chosen by those who

inhabited it apparently by chance, perhaps by intentional destiny, had

the form of a tomb.

Those who inhabited this abode were a group,--to speak more properly,

a family; they were proscribed ones. The most aged was one of those men

who, at a given moment, are _de trop_ in their own country. He had come

from an assembly; the others, who were young, had come from a prison.

To have written, that is sufficient motive for bars. Where shall

thought conduct except to a dungeon?

The prison had set them free into banishment.

The oldest, the father, had in that place all his own except his eldest

daughter, who could not follow him. His son-in-law was with her. Often

were they leaning round a table or seated on a bench, silent, grave,

thinking, all of them, and without saying it, of those two absent ones.

Why was this group installed in this lodging, so little suitable? For

reasons of haste, and from a desire to be as soon as possible anywhere

but at the inn. Doubtless, also, because it was the first house to let

that they had met with, and because proscribed people are not lucky.

This house,--which it is time to rehabilitate a little and console, for

who knows if in its loneliness it is not sad at what we have just said

about it; a home has a soul,--this house was called Marine Terrace. The

arrival was mournful; but after all, we declare, the stay in it was

agreeable, and Marine Terrace has not left to those who then inhabited

it anything but affectionate and dear remembrances. And what we say

of that house, Marine Terrace, we say also of that island of Jersey.

Places of suffering and trial end by having a kind of bitter sweetness

which, later on, causes them to be regretted. They have a stern

hospitality which pleases the conscience.

There had been, before them, other exiles in that island. This is not

the time to speak of them. We mention only that the most ancient of

whom tradition, a legend, perhaps, has kept the remembrance, was a

Roman, Vipsanius Minator, who employed his exile in augmenting, for

the benefit of his country's dominion, the Roman wall of which you

may still see some parts, like bits of hillock, near a bay named, I

think, St. Catherine's Bay. This Vipsanius Minator was a consular

personage,--an old Roman so infatuated with Rome that he stood in the

way of the Empire. Tiberius exiled him into this Cimmerian island,

Cæsarea; according to others, to one of the Orkneys. Tiberius did more;

not content with exile, he ordained oblivion. It was forbidden to the

orators of the senate and the forum to pronounce the name of Vipsanius

Minator. The orators of the forum and the senate, and history, have

obeyed; about which Tiberius, of course, did not have a doubt. That

arrogance in commanding, which proceeded so far as to give orders to

men's thoughts, characterized certain ancient governments newly arrived

at one of those firm situations where the greatest amount of crime

produces the greatest amount of security.

Let us return to Marine Terrace.

One morning at the end of November, two of the inhabitants of the

place, the father and the youngest of the sons, were seated in the

lower parlour. They were silent, like shipwrecked ones who meditate.

Without, it rained; the wind blew. The house was as if deafened by

the outer roaring. Both went on thinking, absorbed perhaps by this

coincidence between a beginning of winter and a beginning of exile.

All at once the son raised his voice and asked the father,--

"What thinkest thou of this exile?"

"That it will be long."

"How dost thou reckon to fill it up?"

The father answered,--

"I shall look on the ocean."

There was a silence. The father resumed the conversation:--

"And you?"

"I," said the son,--"I shall translate Shakespeare."

CHAPTER II.

There are men, oceans in reality.

These waves; this ebb and flow; this terrible go-and-come; this noise

of every gust; these lights and shadows; these vegetations belonging

to the gulf; this democracy of clouds in full hurricane; these eagles

in the foam; these wonderful gatherings of stars reflected in one

knows not what mysterious crowd by millions of luminous specks, heads

confused with the innumerable; those grand errant lightnings which seem

to watch; these huge sobs; these monsters glimpsed at; this roaring,

disturbing these nights of darkness; these furies, these frenzies,

these tempests, these rocks, these shipwrecks, these fleets crushing

each other, these human thunders mixed with divine thunders, this blood

in the abyss; then these graces, these sweetnesses, these _fêtes_ these

gay white veils, these fishing-boats, these songs in the uproar, these

splendid ports, this smoke of the earth, these towns in the horizon,

this deep blue of water and sky, this useful sharpness, this bitterness

which renders the universe wholesome, this rough salt without which

all would putrefy, these angers and assuagings, this whole in one,

this unexpected in the immutable, this vast marvel of monotony

inexhaustibly varied, this level after that earthquake, these hells and

these paradises of immensity eternally agitated, this infinite, this

unfathomable,--all this can exist in one spirit; and then this spirit

is called genius, and you have Æschylus, you have Isaiah, you have

Juvenal, you have Dante, you have Michael Angelo, you have Shakespeare;

and looking at these minds is the same thing as to look at the ocean.

CHAPTER III

William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in a house under

the tiles of which was concealed a profession of the Catholic faith

beginning with these words, "I, John Shakespeare." John was the

father of William. The house, situate in Henley Street, was humble;

the chamber in which Shakespeare came into the world, wretched,--the

walls whitewashed, the black rafters laid crosswise; at the farther

end a tolerably large window with two small panes, where you may read

to-day, among other names, that of Walter Scott. This poor lodging

sheltered a decayed family. The father of William Shakespeare had been

alderman; his grand-father had been bailiff. Shakespeare signifies

"shake-lance;" the family had for coat-of-arms an arm holding a

lance,--allusive arms, which were confirmed, they say, by Queen

Elizabeth in 1595, and apparent, at the time we write, on Shakespeare's

tomb in the church of Stratford-on-Avon. There is little agreement

on the orthography of the word Shake-speare, as a family name; it is

written variously,--Shakspere, Shakespere, Shakespeare, Shakspeare.

In the eighteenth century it was habitually written Shakespear; the

actual translator has adopted the spelling Shakespeare, as the only

true method, and gives for it unanswerable reasons. The only objection

that can be made is that Shakspeare is more easily pronounced than

Shakespeare, that cutting off the _e_ mute is perhaps useful, and

that for their own sake, and in the interests of literary currency,

posterity has, as regards surnames, a claim to euphony. It is evident,

for example, that in French poetry the orthography Shakspeare is

necessary. However, in prose, and convinced by the translator, we write

Shakespeare.

2. The Shakespeare family had some original draw-back, probably its

Catholicism, which caused it to fall. A little after the birth of

William, Alderman Shakespeare was no more than "butcher John." William

Shakespeare made his _début_ in a slaughter-house. At fifteen years

of age, with sleeves tucked up, in his father's shambles, he killed

the sheep and calves "pompously," says Aubrey. At eighteen he married.

Between the days of the slaughter-house and the marriage he composed a

quatrain. This quatrain, directed against the neighbouring villages,

is his _début_ in poetry. He there says that Hillbrough is illustrious

for its ghosts and Bidford for its drunken fellows. He made this

quatrain (being tipsy himself), in the open air, under an apple-tree

still celebrated in the country in consequence of this Midsummer

Night's Dream. In this night and in this dream where there were

lads and lasses, in this drunken fit, and under this apple-tree, he

discovered that Anne Hathaway was a pretty girl. The wedding followed.

He espoused this Anne Hathaway, older than himself by eight years,

had a daughter by her, then twins, boy and girl, and left her; and

this wife, vanished from Shakespeare's life, appears again only in his

will, where he leaves her the worst of his two beds, "having probably,"

says a biographer, "employed the best with others." Shakespeare, like

La Fontaine, did but sip at a married life. His wife put aside, he

was a schoolmaster, then clerk to an attorney, then a poacher. This

poaching has been made use of since then to justify the statement

that Shakespeare had been a thief. One day he was caught poaching in

Sir Thomas Lucy's park. They threw him in prison; they commenced

proceedings. These being spitefully followed up, he saved himself by

flight to London. In order to gain a livelihood, he sought to take care

of horses at the doors of the theatres. Plautus had turned a millstone.

This business of taking care of horses at the doors existed in London

in the last century, and it formed then a kind of small band or corps

that they called "Shakespeare's boys."

[Illustration: "_In order to gain a livelihood, he sought to take care

of horses at the doors of the theatres._"

Photogravure.--From A. Mongin's etching of painting by François

Flameng.]

3. You may call London the black Babylon,--gloomy the day, magnificent

the night To see London is a sensation; it is uproar under smoke.

Mysterious analogy! The uproar is the smoke of noise. Paris is the

capital of one side of humanity. London is the capital of the opposite

side,--splendid and melancholy town! Life there is a tumult; the people

there are an ant-hill; they are free, and yet dove-tailed. London is an

orderly chaos. The London of the sixteenth century did not resemble the

London of our day; but it was already a town without bounds. Cheapside

was the high-street; St Paul's, which is a dome, was a spire. The

plague was nearly as much at home in London as at Constantinople. It

is true that there was not much difference between Henry VIII. and a

sultan. Fires, also, as at Constantinople, were frequent in London,

on account of the populous parts of the town being built entirely of

wood. In the streets there was but one carriage,--the carriage of her

Majesty. Not a cross-road where they did not cudgel some pickpocket

with that drotsch-block which is still retained at Groningen for

thrashing the wheat. Manners were rough, almost ferocious; a fine lady

rose at six, and went to bed at nine. Lady Geraldine Kildare, to whom

Lord Surrey inscribed verses, breakfasted off a pound of bacon and a

pot of beer. Queens, the wives of Henry VIII., knitted mittens, and did

not even object to their being of coarse red wool. In this London,

the Duchess of Suffolk took care of her hen-house, and with her dress

tucked up to her knees, threw corn to the ducks in the court below. To

dine at midday was a late dinner. The pleasures of the upper classes

were to go and play at "hot cockles" with my Lord Leicester. Anne

Boleyn played there; she knelt down, with eyes bandaged, rehearsing

this game, without knowing it, in the posture of the scaffold. This

same Anne Boleyn, destined to the throne, from whence she was to

go farther, was perfectly dazzled when her mother bought her three

linen chemises at sixpence the ell, and promised her for the Duke of

Norfolk's ball a pair of new shoes worth five shillings.

4. Under Elizabeth, in spite of the anger of the Puritans, there were

in London eight companies of comedians, those of Newington Butts, Earl

Pembroke's company. Lord Strange's retainers, the Lord-Chamberlain's

troop, the Lord High-Admiral's troop, the company of Blackfriars,

the children of St. Paul's, and, in the first rank, the Showmen of

Bears. Lord Southampton went to the play every evening. Nearly all the

theatres were situate on the banks of the Thames, which increased the

number of water-men. The play-rooms were of two kinds: some merely

open tavern-yards, a trestle leaning against a wall, no ceiling, rows

of benches placed on the ground, for boxes the windows of the tavern.

The performance took place in the broad daylight and in the open air.

The principal of those theatres was the Globe; the others, which were

mostly closed play-rooms, lighted with lamps, were used at night. The

most frequented was Blackfriars. The best actor of Lord Pembroke's

troop was called Henslowe; the best actor at Blackfriars was Burbage.

The Globe was situate on Bank Side. This is known by a document at

Stationers' Hall, dated 26th November, 1607:--

"His Majesty's servants playing usually at the Globe on the

Bank Side."

The scenery was simple. Two swords laid crosswise, sometimes two laths,

signified a battle; a shirt over the coat signified a knight; the

petticoat of one of the comedians' wives on a broom-handle, signified a

palfrey caparisoned. A rich theatre, which made its inventory in 1598,

possessed "the limbs of Moors, a dragon, a big horse with his legs, a

cage, a rock, four Turks' heads, and that of the ancient Mahomet, a

wheel for the siege of London, and a _bouche d'enfer._" Another had

"a sun, a target, the three feathers of the Prince of Wales, with the

device _Ich Dien_, besides six devils, and the Pope on his mule." An

actor besmeared with plaster and immovable, signified a wall; if he

spread his fingers, it meant that the wall had crevices. A man laden

with a fagot, followed by a dog, and carrying a lantern, meant the

moon; his lantern represented the moonshine. People may laugh at this

_mise en scène_ of moonlight, become famous by the "Midsummer Night's

Dream," without imagining that there is in it a gloomy anticipation

of Dante.[1] The robing-room of these theatres, where the comedians

dressed themselves pell-mell, was a corner separated from the stage by

a rag of some kind stretched on a cord. The robing-room at Blackfriars

was shut off by an ancient piece of tapestry which had belonged to one

of the guilds, and represented a blacksmith's workshop; through the

holes in this partition, flying in rags and tatters, the public saw the

actors redden their cheeks with brick-dust, or make their mustaches

with a cork burned at a tallow-candle. From time to time, through an

occasional opening of the curtain, you might see a face grinning in a

mask, peeping to see if the time for going on the stage had arrived,

or the smooth chin of a comedian, who was to play the part of a woman.

"Glabri histriones," said Plautus. These theatres were frequented by

noblemen, scholars, soldiers, and sailors. They acted there the tragedy

of "Lord Buckhurst," "Gorbuduc," or "Ferrex and Porrex," "Mother

Bombic," by Lilly, in which the phip-phip of sparrows was heard; "The

Libertine," an imitation of the "Convivado de Piedra," which had a

European fame; "Felix and Philomena," a fashionable comedy, performed

for the first time at Greenwich, before "Queen Bess;" "Promos and

Cassandra," a comedy dedicated by the author, George Whetstone, to

William Fleetwood, recorder of London; "Tamerlane," and the "Jew of

Malta," by Christopher Marlowe; farces and pieces by Robert Greene,

George Peele, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Kid; and lastly, mediæval

comedies. For just as France has her "L'Avocat Pathelin," so England

has her "Gossip Gurton's Needle." While the actors gesticulated and

ranted, the noblemen and officers, with their plumes and band of gold

lace, standing or squatting on the stage, turning their backs, haughty

and easy in the midst of the constrained comedians, laughed, shouted,

played at cards, threw them at each other's heads, or played at post

and pair; and below in the shade, on the pavement, among pots of beer

and pipes, you might see the "stinkards" (the mob). It was by that very

theatre that Shakespeare entered on the drama. From being the guardian

of horses, he became the shepherd of men.

5. Such was the theatre in London about the year 1580, under "the

great queen." It was not much less wretched, a century later, at

Paris, under "the great king;" and Molière, at his debut, had, like

Shakespeare, to make shift with rather miserable playhouses. There is

in the archives of the Comédie Française an unpublished manuscript of

four hundred pages, bound in parchment and tied with a band of white

leather. It is the diary of Lagrange, a comrade of Molière. Lagrange

describes also the theatre where Molière's company played by order of

Mr. Rateban, superintendent of the king's buildings: "Three beams,

the frames rotten and shored up, and half the room roofless and in

ruins." In another place, by date Sunday, 15th March, 1671, he says,

"The company have resolved to make a large ceiling over the whole

room, which, up to the said date (15th) has not been covered, save by

a large blue cloth suspended by cords." As for lighting and heating

this room, particularly on the occasion of the extraordinary expenses

necessary for the performance of "Psyche," which was by Molière and

Corneille, we read: "Candles, thirty livres; door-keeper, for wood,

three livres." This was the style of playhouse which "the great king"

placed at the disposal of Molière. These bounties to literature did

not impoverish Louis XIV. so much as to deprive him of the pleasure of

giving, for example, at one and the same time, two hundred thousand

livres to Lavardin, and the same to D'Epernon; two hundred thousand

livres, besides the regiment of France, to the Count de Médavid; four

hundred thousand livres to the Bishop of Noyon, because this bishop was

Clermont-Tonnerre, a family that had two patents of count and peer of

France,--one for Clermont and one for Tonnerre; five hundred thousand

livres to the Duke of Vivonne; and seven hundred thousand livres to

the Duke of Quintin-Lorges, besides eight hundred thousand livres to

Monseigneur Clement de Bavière, Prince-Bishop of Liége. Let us add that

he gave a thousand livres pension to Molière. We find in Lagrange's

journal in the month of April, 1663, this remark:--

"About the same time, M. de Molière received, as a great

wit, a pension from the king, and has been placed on the

civil list for the sum of a thousand livres."

Later, when Molière was dead and interred at St. Joseph, "Chapel of

ease to the parish of St. Eustache," the king pushed patronage so far

as to permit his tomb to be "raised a foot out of the ground."

6. Shakespeare, as we see, remained as an outsider a long time on the

threshold of theatrical life. At length he entered. He passed the

door and got behind the scenes. He succeeded in becoming call-boy,

vulgarly, a "barker." About 1586 Shakespeare was barking with Greene at

Blackfriars. In 1587 he gained a step. In the piece called "The Giant

Agrapardo, King of Nubia, worse than his late brother, Angulafer,"

Shakespeare was intrusted with carrying the turban to the giant. Then

from a supernumerary he became actor, thanks to Burbage, to whom, by

an interlineation in his will, he left thirty-six shillings, to buy

a gold ring. He was the friend of Condell and Hemynge,--his comrades

whilst alive, his publishers after his death. He was handsome; he had

a high forehead, a brown beard, a mild countenance, a sweet mouth, a

deep look. He took delight in reading Montaigne, translated by Florio.

He frequented the Apollo tavern, where he would see and keep company

with two _habitués_ of his theatre,--Decker, author of the "Gull's

Hornbook," in which a chapter is specially devoted to "the way a

man of fashion ought to behave at the play," and Dr. Symon Forman,

who has left a manuscript journal, containing reports of the first

representations of the "Merchant of Venice," and "A Winter's Tale." He

used to meet Sir Walter Raleigh at the Siren Club. Somewhere about that

time, Maturin Régnier met Philippe de Béthune at la Pomme de Pin. The

great lords and fine gentlemen of the day were rather prone to lend

their names in order to start new taverns. At Paris the Viscount de

Montauban, who was a Créqui, founded Le Tripot des Onze Mille Diables.

At Madrid, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the unfortunate admiral of the

"Invincible," founded the Puño-en-rostro, and in London Sir Walter

Raleigh founded the Siren. There you found drunkenness and wit.

7. In 1589, when James VI. of Scotland, looking to the throne of

England, paid his respects to Elizabeth, who, two years before, on the

8th February, 1587, had beheaded Mary Stuart, mother of this James,

Shakespeare composed his first drama, "Pericles." In 1591, while the

Catholic king was dreaming, after a scheme of the Marquis d'Astorga,

of a second Armada, more lucky than the first, inasmuch as it never

put to sea, he composed "Henry VI." In 1593, when the Jesuits obtained

from the Pope express permission to paint "the pains and torments of

hell," on the walls of "the chamber of meditation" of Clermont College,

where they often shut up a poor youth, who the year after, became

famous under the name of Jean Châtel, he composed "Taming the Shrew."

In 1594, when, looking daggers at each other and ready for battle,

the King of Spain, the Queen of England, and even the King of France,

all three said "my good city of Paris," he continued and completed

"Henry VI." In 1595, while Clement VIII. at Rome was solemnly aiming

a blow at Henry IV. by laying his crosier on the backs of Cardinals

du Perron and d'Ossat, he wrote "Timon of Athens." In 1596, the year

when Elizabeth published an edict against the long points of bucklers,

and when Philip II. drove from his presence a woman who laughed when

blowing her nose, he composed "Macbeth." In 1597, when this same Philip

II. said to the Duke of Alba, "You deserve the axe," not because the

Duke of Alba had put the Low Countries to fire and sword, but because

he had entered into the king's presence without being announced, he

composed "Cymbeline" and "Richard III." In 1598, when the Earl of Essex

ravaged Ireland, bearing on his headdress the glove of the virgin Queen

Elizabeth, he composed the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "King John,"

"Love's Labour's Lost," "The Comedy of Errors," "All's Well that Ends

Well," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "The Merchant of Venice." In

1599, when the Privy Council, at her Majesty's request, deliberated

on the proposal to put Dr. Hayward to the rack for having stolen some

of the ideas of Tacitus, he composed "Romeo and Juliet." In 1600,

while the Emperor Rudolph was waging war against his rebel brother

and sentencing his son, murderer of a woman, to be bled to death, he

composed "As You Like It," "Henry IV.," "Henry V.," and "Much Ado about

Nothing." In 1601, when Bacon published the eulogy on the execution

of the Earl of Essex, just as Leibnitz, eighty years afterward, was

to find out good reasons for the murder of Monaldeschi, with this

difference however, that Monaldeschi was nothing to Leibnitz, and that

Essex had been the benefactor of Bacon, he composed "Twelfth Night;

or, What you Will." In 1602, while in obedience to the Pope, the King

of France, styled "Renard de Béarn" by Cardinal Aldobrandini, was

counting his beads every day, reciting the litanies on Wednesday, and

the rosary of the Virgin Mary on Saturday, while fifteen cardinals,

assisted by the heads of the chapter, opened the discussion on Molinism

at Rome, and while the Holy See, at the request of the crown of

Spain, "was saving Christianity and the world" by the institution of

the congregation "de Auxiliis," he composed "Othello." In 1603, when

the death of Elizabeth made Henry IV. say, "She was a virgin just as

I am a Catholic," he composed "Hamlet." In 1604, while Philip III.

was losing his last footing in the Low Countries, he wrote "Julius

Cæsar" and "Measure for Measure." In 1606, at the time when James I.

of England, the former James VI. of Scotland, wrote against Bellarmin

the "Tortura Forti" and faithless to Carr began to look sweetly on

Villiers, who was afterward to honour him with the title of "Your

Filthiness," he composed "Coriolanus." In 1607, when the University of

York received the little Prince of Wales as doctor, according to the

account of Father St. Romuald "with all the ceremonies and the usual

fur gowns," he wrote "King Lear." In 1609, when the magistracy of

France, placing the scaffold at the disposition of the king, gave upon

trust a _carte blanche_ for the sentence of the Prince de Condé "to

such punishment as it might please his Majesty to order," Shakespeare

composed "Troilus and Cressida." In 1610, when Ravaillac assassinated

Henry IV. by the dagger, and the French parliament assassinated

Ravaillac by the process of quartering his body, Shakespeare composed

"Antony and Cleopatra." In 1611, while the Moors, driven out by Philip

III., and in the pangs of death, were crawling out of Spain, he wrote

the "Winter's Tale," "Henry VIII.," and "The Tempest."

8. He used to write on flying sheets, like nearly all poets. Malherbe

and Boileau are almost the only ones who have written on quires of

paper. Racan said to Mlle. de Gournay:--

"I have seen this morning M. de Malherbe sewing with coarse

gray thread a bundle of white papers, on which will soon

appear some sonnets."

Each of Shakespeare's dramas, composed according to the wants of his

company, was in all probability learned and rehearsed in haste by

the actors from the original itself, as they had not time to copy it;

hence, in his case as in Molière's, the mislaying of manuscripts which

were cut into parts. Few or no entry-books in those almost itinerant

theatres; no coincidence between the time of representation and the

publication of the plays; sometimes not even a printed copy,--the

stage the sole publication. When the pieces by chance are printed,

they bear titles which bewilder us. The second part of Henry VI. is

entitled "The First Part of the War between York and Lancaster." The

third part is called "The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York."

All this enables us to understand why so much obscurity rests on the

dates when Shakespeare composed his dramas, and why it is difficult

to fix them with precision. The dates that we have just given, and

which are here brought together for the first time, are pretty nearly

certain; notwithstanding, some doubt still exists as to the years when

the following were written, or indeed played,--"Timon of Athens,"

"Cymbeline," "Julius Cæsar," "Antony and Cleopatra," "Coriolanus,"

and "Macbeth." Here and there we meet with barren years; others there

are of which the fertility seems excessive. It is, for instance,

on a simple note by Meres, author of the "Treasure of Wit," that

we are compelled to attribute to the year 1598 the creation of six

pieces,--"The Two Gentlemen of Verona," the "Comedy of Errors," "King

John," "Midsummer Night's Dream," "The Merchant of Venice," and "All's

Well that Ends Well," which Meres calls "Love's Labour Gained." The

date of "Henry VI." is fixed, for the first part at least, by an

allusion which Nash makes to this play in "Pierce Penniless." The year

1604 is given as that of "Measure for Measure," inasmuch as this piece

had been represented on Stephen's Day of that year, of which Hemynge

makes a special note; and the year 1611 for "Henry VIII." inasmuch as

"Henry VIII." was played at the time of the fire of the Globe Theatre.

Various circumstances--a disagreement with his company, a whim of the

lord-chamberlain--sometimes compelled Shakespeare to change from one

theatre to another. "Taming the Shrew" was played for the first time in

1593, at Henslowe's theatre; "Twelfth Night" in 1601, at Middle Temple

Hall; "Othello" in 1602, at Harefield Castle. "King Lear" was played

at Whitehall during Christmas (1607) before James I. Burbage created

the part of Lear. Lord Southampton, recently set free from the Tower of

London, was present at this performance. This Lord Southampton was an

old _habitué_ of Blackfriars; and Shakespeare, in 1589, had dedicated

the poem of "Adonis" to him. Adonis was the fashion at that time;

twenty-five years after Shakespeare, the Chevalier Marini wrote a poem

on Adonis which he dedicated to Louis XIII.

9. In 1597 Shakespeare lost his son, who has left as his only

trace on earth one line in the death-register of the parish of

Stratford-on-Avon: "1597. August 17. Hamnet. Filius William

Shakespeare." On the 6th September, 1601, his father, John Shakespeare,

died. He was now the head of his company of comedians. James I. had

given him, in 1607, the lease of Blackfriars, and afterward that

of the Globe. In 1613 Madame Elizabeth, daughter of James, and the

Elector-palatine, King of Bohemia, whose statue may be seen in the ivy

at the angle of a big tower at Heidelberg, came to the Globe to see the

"Tempest" performed. These royal attendances did not save him from the

censure of the lord-chamberlain. A certain interdict weighed on his

pieces, the representation of which was tolerated, and the printing now

and then forbidden. On the second volume of the register at Stationers'

Hall you may read to-day on the margin of the title of three pieces,

"As You Like It," "Henry V.," "Much Ado about Nothing," the words "4

Augt. to suspend." The motives for these interdictions escape us.

Shakespeare was able, for instance without raising objection, to place

on the stage his former poaching adventure and make Sir Thomas Lucy

a buffoon (Judge Shallow), show the public Falstaff killing the buck

and belabouring Shallow's people, and push the likeness so far as to

give to Shallow the arms of Sir Thomas Lucy,--an outrageous piece of

Aristophanism by a man who did not know Aristophanes. Falstaff, in

Shakespeare's manuscripts, was written Falstaffe. In the mean time his

circumstances had improved, as later they did with Molière. Toward

the end of the century he was rich enough for a certain Ryc-Quiney

to ask, on the 8th October, 1598, his assistance in a letter which

bears the inscription: "To my amiable friend and countryman William

Shakespeare." He refused the assistance, as it appears, and returned

the letter, found since among Fletcher's papers, and on the reverse of

which this same Ryc-Quiney had written: "_Histrio! Mima!_" He loved

Stratford-on-Avon, where he was born, where his father had died, where

his son was buried. He there purchased or built a house, which he

christened "New Place." We say, bought or built a house, for he bought

it, according to Whiterill, and he built it according to Forbes, and on

this point Forbes disputes with Whiterill. These cavils of the learned

about trifles are not worth being searched into, particularly when we

see Father Hardouin, for instance, completely upset a whole passage of

Pliny by replacing _nos pridem_ by _non pridem._

[Illustration: _Shakespeare in his Garden._

Photogravure.--From R. de Los Rios' etching of painting by François

Flameng.]

10. Shakespeare went from time to time to pass some days at New Place.

In these short journeys he met half-way Oxford, and at Oxford the

Crown Hotel, and in the hotel the hostess, a beautiful, intelligent

creature, wife of the worthy innkeeper, Davenant. In 1606 Mrs. Davenant

was brought to bed of a son whom they named William, and in 1644

Sir William Davenant, created knight by Charles I., wrote to Lord

Rochester: "Know this, which does honour to my mother, I am the son

of Shakespeare," thus allying himself to Shakespeare in the same way

that in our days M. Lucas Montigny claimed relationship with Mirabeau.

Shakespeare had married off his two daughters,--Susan to a doctor,

Judith to a merchant; Susan had wit, Judith knew not how to read or

write, and signed her name with a cross. In 1613 it happened that

Shakespeare, having come to Stratford-on-Avon, had no further desire

to return to London. Perhaps he was in difficulties. He had just been

compelled to mortgage his house. The contract deed of this mortgage,

dated 11th March, 1613, and indorsed with Shakespeare's signature,

was up to the last century in the hands of an attorney, who gave it

to Garrick, who lost it. Garrick lost likewise (it is Miss Violetti,

his wife, who tells the story), Forbes's manuscript, with his letters

in Latin. From 1613 Shakespeare remained at his house at New Place,

occupied with his garden, forgetting his plays, wrapped up in his

flowers. He planted in this garden of New Place the first mulberry-tree

that was grown at Stratford, just as Queen Elizabeth wore, in 1561, the

first silk stockings seen in England. On the 25th March, 1616, feeling

ill, he made his will. His will, dictated by him, is written on three

pages; he signed each of them; his hand trembled. On the first page

he signed only his Christian name, "William;" on the second, "Willm.

Shaspr.;" on the third, "William Shasp." On the 23d April, he died.

He had reached that day exactly fifty-two years, being born on the

23d April, 1564. On that same day, 23d April, 1616, died Cervantes, a

genius of like growth. When Shakespeare died, Milton was eight years,

Corneille ten years of age; Charles I. and Cromwell were two youths,

the one sixteen, the other seventeen years old.

[Footnote 1: See L'Inferno, Chant xx.]

CHAPTER IV.

Shakespeare's life was greatly imbittered. He lived perpetually

slighted; he states it himself. Posterity may read this to-day in his

own verses:--

"Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdu'd.

Pity me, then,

Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink

Potions of eysel."[1]

"Your love and pity doth th' impression fill

Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow."[2]

"Nor thou with public kindness honour me,

Unless thou take that honour from thy name."[3]

"Or on my frailty why are frailer spies."[4]

Shakespeare had permanently near him one envious person, Ben

Jonson,--an indifferent comic poet, whose _début_ he assisted.

Shakespeare was thirty-nine when Elizabeth died. This queen had not

paid attention to him; she managed to reign forty-four years without

seeing that Shakespeare was there. She is not the least qualified,

historically, to be called the "protectress of arts and letters,"

etc. The historians of the old school gave these certificates to all

princes, whether they knew how to read or not.

Shakespeare, persecuted like Molière at a later date, sought, as

Molière, to lean on the master. Shakespeare and Molière would in our

days have had a loftier spirit. The master, it was Elizabeth,--"King

Elizabeth," as the English called her. Shakespeare glorified Elizabeth:

he called her the "Virgin Star," "Star of the West," and "Diana,"--a

name of a goddess which pleased the queen,--but in vain. The queen took

no notice of it; less sensitive to the praises in which Shakespeare

called her Diana than to the insults of Scipio Gentilis, who, taking

the pretensions of Elizabeth on the bad side, called her "Hecate," and

applied to her the ancient triple curse, "Mormo! Bombo! Gorgo!" As for

James I., whom Henry IV. called Master James, he gave, as we have seen,

the lease of the Globe to Shakespeare, but he willingly forbade the

publication of his pieces. Some contemporaries, Dr. Symon Forman among

others, so far took notice of Shakespeare as to make a note of the

occupation of an evening passed at the performance of the "Merchant of

Venice!" That was all which he knew of glory. Shakespeare, once dead,

entered into oblivion.

From 1640 to 1660 the Puritans abolished art, and shut up the

playhouses. All theatricals were under a funeral shroud. With Charles

II. the drama revived without Shakespeare. The false taste of Louis

XIV. had invaded England. Charles II. belonged rather to Versailles

than London. He had as mistress a French girl, the Duchess of

Portsmouth, and as an intimate friend the privy purse of the King of

France. Clifford, his favourite, who never entered the parliament-house

without spitting, said: "It is better for my master to be viceroy under

a great monarch like Louis XIV. than the slave of five hundred insolent

English subjects." These were not the days of the republic,--the time

when Cromwell took the title of "Protector of England and France," and

forced this same Louis XIV. to accept the title of "King of the French."

Under this restoration of the Stuarts, Shakespeare completed his

eclipse. He was so thoroughly dead that Davenant, possibly his son,

re-composed his pieces. There was no longer any "Macbeth" but the

"Macbeth" of Davenant. Dryden speaks of Shakespeare on one occasion in

order to say that he is "out of date." Lord Shaftesbury calls him "a

wit out of fashion." Dryden and Shaftesbury were two oracles. Dryden,

a converted Catholic, had two sons, ushers in the Chamber of Clément

XI., made tragedies worth putting into Latin verse, as Atterbury's

hexameters prove; and he was the servant of that James II. who, before

being king on his own account, had asked of his brother, Charles II.,

"Why don't you hang Milton?" The Earl of Shaftesbury, a friend of

Locke, was the man who wrote an "Essay on Sprightliness in Important

Conversations," and who, by the manner in which Chancellor Hyde helped

his daughter to the wing of a chicken, divined that she was secretly

married to the Duke of York.

These two men having condemned Shakespeare, the oracle had spoken.

England, a country more obedient to conventional opinion than is

generally believed, forgot Shakespeare. Some purchaser pulled down

his house, New Place. A Rev. Dr. Cartrell cut down and burned his

mulberry-tree. At the commencement of the eighteenth century the

eclipse was total. In 1707, one called Nahum Tate published a "King

Lear," warning his readers "that he had borrowed the idea of it from a

play which he had read by chance,--the work of some nameless author."

This "nameless author" was Shakespeare.

[Footnote 1: Sonnet 111.]

[Footnote 2: Sonnet 112.]

[Footnote 3: Sonnet 36.]

[Footnote 4: Sonnet 121.]

CHAPTER V.

In 1728 Voltaire imported from England to France the name of Will

Shakespeare. Only in place of Will, he pronounced it _Gilles._

Jeering began in France, and oblivion continued in England. What

the Irishman Nahum Tate had done for "King Lear," others did for

other pieces. "All's Well that Ends Well" had successively two

arrangers,--Pilon for the Haymarket, and Kemble for Drury Lane.

Shakespeare existed no more, and counted no more. "Much Ado about

Nothing" served likewise as a rough draft twice,--for Davenant in

1673, for James Miller in 1737. "Cymbeline" was recast four times:

under James II., at the Theatre Royal, by Thomas Dursey; in 1695 by

Charles Marsh; in 1759 by W. Hawkins; in 1761 by Garrick. "Coriolanus"

was recast four times: in 1682, for the Theatre Royal, by Tates; in

1720, for Drury Lane, by John Dennis; in 1755, for Covent Garden, by

Thomas Sheridan; in 1801, for Drury Lane, by Kemble. "Timon of Athens"

was recast four times: at the Duke's Theatre, in 1678, by Shadwell;

in 1768, at the Theatre of Richmond Green, by James Love; in 1771, at

Drury Lane, by Cumberland; in 1786, at Covent Garden, by Hull.

In the eighteenth century the persistent raillery of Voltaire ended in

producing in England a certain waking up. Garrick, while correcting

Shakespeare, played him, and acknowledged that it was Shakespeare that

he played. They reprinted him at Glasgow. An imbecile, Malone, made

commentaries on his plays, and as a logical sequence, whitewashed his

tomb. There was on this tomb a little bust, of a doubtful resemblance,

and moderate as a work of art; but, what made it a subject of

reverence, contemporaneous with Shakespeare. It is after this bust that

all the portraits of Shakespeare have been made that we now see. The

bust was whitewashed. Malone, critic and whitewasher of Shakespeare,

spread a coat of plaster on his face, of idiotic nonsense on his work.

BOOK II.

MEN OF GENIUS.

CHAPTER I.

Great Art, using this word in its arbitrary sense, is the region of

Equals.

Before going farther, let us fix the value of this expression, Art,

which often recurs in our writing.

We speak of Art as we speak of Nature; here are two terms of an

almost unlimited signification. To pronounce the one or the other of

these words, Nature, Art, is to make a conjuration, to extract from

the depths the ideal, to draw aside one of the two grand curtains of

a 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

There is here below a pontiff,--it is genius.

_Sacerdos Magnus._

Art is the second branch of Nature.

Art is as natural as Nature.

By the word _God_--let us fix the sense of this word--we mean the

Living Infinite.

The I latent of the Infinite patent, that is God.

God is the Invisible seen.

The world concentrated is God. God expanded, is the world.

We, who are speaking, we believe in nothing out of God.

That being said, let us proceed. God creates art by man. He has for a

tool the human intellect. This tool the Workman has made for himself;

he has no other.

Forbes, in the curious little work perused by Warburton and lost by

Garrick, affirms that Shakespeare devoted himself to the practice of

magic, that magic was in his family, and that what little good there

was in his pieces was dictated to him by one "Alleur," a spirit.

Let us say on this point, for we must not avoid any of the questions

about to arise, that it is a wretched error of all ages to desire to

give the human intellect assistance from without,--_antrum adjuvat

vatem._ To the work which seems superhuman, people wish to bring the

intervention of the extra-human,--in antiquity, the tripod; in our

days, the table. The table is nothing but the tripod come back. To

accept _au pied de la lettre_ the demon that Socrates talks of, the

thicket 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 the truth, 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. 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.

Because the false mixes with the true, it is no excuse for rejecting

the mass. When was the tare an excuse for refusing the corn? Hoe the

weed, error, but reap the fact, and place it beside others. Knowledge

is the sheaf of facts.

The mission of science,--to study and try the depth of everything. All

of us, according to our degree, are the creditors of investigation;

we are its debtors also. It is owed to us, and we owe it to others.

To avoid a phenomenon, to refuse to pay it that attention to which it

has a right, to lead it out, to shut to the door, to turn our back on

it laughing, is to make truth a bankrupt, and to leave the draft of

science to be protested. The phenomenon of the tripod of old, and of

the table of to-day, is entitled, like anything else, to observation.

Psychic science will gain by it, without doubt. Let us add that to

abandon phenomena to credulity is to commit treason against human

reason.

Homer affirms that the tripods of Delphi walked of their own accord;

and he explains the fact[1] by saying that Vulcan forged invisible

wheels for them. The explanation does not much simplify the phenomenon.

Plato relates that the statues of Dædalus gesticulated in the darkness,

had a will of their own, and resisted their master; and that he was

obliged to tie them up, so that they might not walk off. Strange dogs

at the end of a chain! Fléchier mentions, at page 52 of his "Histoire

de Thédodose"--referring to the great conspiracy of the magicians of

the fourth century against the emperor--a table-turning of which,

perhaps, we shall speak elsewhere, in order to say what Fléchier

did not say, and seemed to ignore. This table was covered with a

round plating of several metals, _ex diversis metallicis materiis

fabrefacta_, like the plates of copper and zinc actually employed in

biology. So you may see that the phenomenon, always rejected and always

reappearing, is not a matter of yesterday.

Besides, whatever credulity has said or thought about it, this

phenomenon of the tripods and tables is without any connection, and

it is the very thing we want to come to, with the inspiration of the

poets,--an inspiration entirely direct. The sibyl has a tripod, the

poet none. The poet is himself a tripod. He is a tripod of God. God has

not made this marvellous distillery of thought, the brain of man, not

to be made use of. Genius has all that it wants in its brain; every

thought passes by there. Thought ascends and buds from the brain, as

the fruit from the root. Thought is man's consequence; the root plunges

into earth, the brain into God,--that is to say, into the Infinite.

Those who imagine (there are such, witness Forbes) that a poem like "Le

Médecin de son Honneur," or "King Lear," can be dictated by a tripod or

a table, err in a strange fashion; these works are the works of man.

God has no need to make a piece of wood aid Shakespeare or Calderon.

Then let us dispose of the tripod. 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 diminish the great workers of earth

by hypotheses of mysterious assistance, which is not necessary. Let us

leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the

men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

[Footnote 1: Song XVIII of the Iliad.]

CHAPTER II.

Supreme Art is the region of Equals.

The _chef d'œuvre_ is adequate to the _chef d'œuvre._

As water, when heated to 100° C., is incapable of calorific increase,

and can rise no higher, so human thought attains in certain men its

maximum intensity. Æschylus, Job, Phidias, Isaiah, Saint Paul, Juvenal,

Dante, Michael Angelo, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rembrandt,

Beethoven, with some others, mark the 100° of genius.

The human mind has a summit.

This summit is the Ideal.

God descends, man rises to it.

In each age three or four men of genius undertake the ascent. From

below, the world follow them with their eyes. These men go up the

mountain, enter into the clouds, disappear, re-appear. People watch

them, mark them. They walk by the side of precipices. A false step does

not displease certain of the lookers-on. They daringly pursue their

road. See them aloft, see them in the distance; they are but black

specks. "How small they are!" says the crowd. They are giants. On they

go. The road is uneven, its difficulties constant. At each step a wall,

at each step a trap. As they rise, the cold increases. They must make

their ladder, cut the ice, and walk on it, hewing the steps in haste.

Every storm is raging. Nevertheless, they go forward in their madness.

The air becomes difficult to breathe. The abyss increases around them.

Some fall. It is well done. Others stop and retrace their steps; there

is sad weariness.

The bold ones continue; those predestined persist. The dreadful

declivity sinks beneath them and tries to draw them in; glory is

traitorous. They are eyed by the eagles; the lightning plays about

them; the hurricane is furious. No matter, they persevere. They ascend.

He who arrives at the summit is thy equal, Homer!

Those names that we have mentioned, and those which we might have

added, repeat them again. To choose between these men is impossible.

There is no method for striking the balance between Rembrandt and

Michael Angelo.

And, to confine ourselves solely to the authors and poets, examine them

one after the other. Which is the greatest? Every one.

1. One, Homer, is the huge poet-child. The world is born, Homer sings.

He is the bird of this aurora. Homer has the holy sincerity of the

early dawn. He almost ignores shadow. Chaos, heaven, earth; Geo and

Ceto; Jove, god of gods; Agamemnon, king of kings; peoples; flocks

from the beginning; temples, towns, battles, harvests; the ocean;

Diomedes fighting; Ulysses wandering; the windings of a sail seeking

its home; Cyclops; dwarfs; a map of the world crowned by the gods of

Olympus; and here and there a glimmer of the furnace permitting a

sight of hell; priests, virgins, mothers; little children frightened

by the plumes; the dog who remembers; great words which fall from

gray-beards; friendships, loves, passions, and the hydras; Vulcan for

the laugh of the gods, Thersites for the laugh of men; two aspects of

married life summed up for the benefit of ages in Helen and Penelope;

the Styx; Destiny; the heel of Achilles, without which Destiny would

be vanquished by the Styx; monsters, heroes, men; thousands of

landscapes seen in perspective in the cloud of the old world,--this

immensity, this is Homer. Troy coveted, Ithaca desired. Homer is war

and travel,--the first two methods for the meeting of mankind. The

camp attacks the fortress, the ship sounds the unknown, which is

also an attack; around war every passion; around travels every kind

of adventure,--two gigantic groups; the first, bloody, is called the

Iliad; the second, luminous, is called the Odyssey. Homer makes men

greater than Nature; they hurl at each other rocks which twelve pairs

of oxen could not move. The gods hardly care to come in contact with

them. Minerva takes Achilles by the hair; he turns round in anger:

"What do you want with me, goddess?" No monotony in these puissant

figures. These giants are graduated. After each hero, Homer breaks the

mould. Ajax, son of Oïleus, is less high in stature than Ajax, son of

Telamon. Homer is one of the men of genius who resolve that beautiful

problem of art (the most beautiful of all, perhaps),--the true picture

of humanity obtained by aggrandizing man; that is to say, the creation

of the real in the ideal. Fable and history, hypothesis and tradition,

the chimera and knowledge, make up Homer. He is fathomless, and he

is cheerful. All the depth of ancient days moves happily radiant and

luminous in the vast azure of this spirit. Lycurgus, that peevish

sage, half way between a Solon and a Draco, was conquered by Homer.

He turned out of the way, while travelling, to go and read, at the

house of Cleophilus, Homer's poems, placed there in remembrance of

the hospitality that Homer, it is said, had formerly received in that

house. Homer, to the Greeks, was a god; he had priests,--the Homerides.

Alcibiades gave a bombastic orator a cuff for boasting that he had

never read Homer. The divinity of Homer has survived Paganism. Michael

Angelo said, "When I read Homer, I look at myself to see if I am not

twenty feet in height." Tradition will have it that the first verse of

the Iliad should be a verse of Orpheus. This doubling Homer by Orpheus,

increased in Greece the religion of Homer. The shield of Achilles[1]

was commented on in the temples by Damo, daughter of Pythagoras.

Homer, as the sun, has planets. Virgil, who writes the Æneid, Lucan,

who writes "Pharsalia," Tasso, who writes "Jerusalem," Ariosto, who

composes "Roland," Milton, who writes "Paradise Lost," Camoëns, who

writes the "Lusiades," Klopstock, who wrote the "Messiah," Voltaire,

who wrote the "Henriade," gravitate toward Homer, and sending back

to their own moons his light reflected in different degrees, move at

unequal distances in his boundless orbit. This is Homer. Such is the

beginning of the epic poem.

2. Another, Job, began the drama. This embryo is a colossus. Job begins

the drama, and it is forty centuries ago, by placing Jehovah and

Satan in presence of each other; the evil defies the good, and behold

the action is begun. The earth is the place for the scene, and man

the field of battle; the plagues are the actors. One of the wildest

grandeurs of this poem is that in it the sun is inauspicious. The sun

is in Job as in Homer; but it is no longer the dawn, it is midday. The

mournful heaviness of the brazen ray falling perpendicularly on the

desert pervades this poem, heated to a white heat. Job sweats on his

dunghill. The shadow of Job is small and black, and hidden under him,

as the snake under the rock. Tropical flies buzz on his sores. Job has

above his head the frightful Arabian sun,--a bringer-up of monsters, an

amplifier of plagues, who changes the cat into the tiger, the lizard

into the crocodile, the pig into the rhinoceros, the snake into the

boa, the nettle into the cactus, the wind into the simoon, the miasma

into the plague. Job is anterior to Moses. Far into ages, by the side

of Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch, there is Job, the Arabian patriarch.

Before being proved, he had been happy,--"the greatest man in all

the East," says his poem. This was the labourer-king. He exercised

the immense priesthood of solitude; he sacrificed and sanctified.

Toward evening he gave the earth the blessing,--the "berac." He was

learned; he knew rhythm; his poem, of which the Arabian text is lost,

was written in verse,--this, at least, is certain as regards from

verse 3 of chap. III. to the end. He was good; he did not meet a poor

child without throwing him the small coin kesitha; he was "the foot

of the lame man, and the eye of the blind." It is from that that he

was precipitated; fallen, he became gigantic. The whole poem of "Job"

is the development of this idea,--the greatness that may be found at

the bottom of the abyss. Job is more majestic when unfortunate than

when prosperous. His leprosy is a purple cloth. His misery terrifies

those who are there; they speak not to him until after a silence of

seven days and seven nights. His lamentation is marked by they know

not what quiet and sad sorcery. As he is crushing the vermin on his

ulcers, he calls on the stars. He addresses Orion, the Hyades, which he

names the Pleiades, and the signs that are at noonday. He says, "God

has put an end to darkness." He calls the diamond which is hidden,

"the stone of obscurity." He mixes with his distress the misfortune of

others, and has tragic words that freeze,--"The widow is desolate." He

smiles also, and is then more frightful yet. He has around him Eliphaz,

Bildad, Zophar,--three implacable types of the friendly busybody,

of whom he says, "You play on me as on a tambourine." His language,

submissive toward God, is bitter toward kings: "The kings of the earth

build solitudes," leaving our wit to find out whether he speaks of

their tomb or their kingdom. Tacitus says, "Solitudinem faciunt." As

to Jehovah, he adores him; and under the furious scourging of the

plagues, all his resistance is confined to asking of God, "Wilt thou

not permit me to swallow my spittle?" That dates four thousand years

ago. At the same hour, perhaps, when the enigmatical astronomer of

Denderah carves in the granite his mysterious zodiac, Job engraves

his on human thought; and his zodiac is not made of stars, but of

miseries. This zodiac turns yet above our heads. We have of Job only

the Hebrew version, written by Moses. Such a poet, followed by such

a translator, makes us dream! The man of the dunghill is translated

by the man of Sinai. It is that, in reality, Job is a minister and a

prophet. Job extracts from his drama a dogma. Job suffers, and draws an

inference. Now, to suffer and draw an inference is to teach; sorrow,

when logical, leads to God. Job teaches. Job, after having touched the

summit of the drama, stirs up the depths of philosophy. He shows first

that sublime madness of wisdom which, two thousand years later, by

resignation making itself a sacrifice, will be the foolishness of the

cross,--_stultitiam crucis._ The dunghill of Job, transfigured, will

become the Calvary of Jesus.

3. Another, Æschylus, enlightened by the unconscious divination of

genius, without suspecting that he has behind him, in the East, the

resignation of Job, completes it, unwittingly, by the revolt of

Prometheus; so that the lesson may be complete, and that the human

race, to whom Job has taught but duty, shall feel in Prometheus Right

dawning. There is something ghastly in Æschylus from one end to the

other; there is a vague outline of an extraordinary Medusa behind the

figures in the foreground. Æschylus is magnificent and powerful,--as

though you saw him knitting his brows beyond the sun. He has two

Cains,--Eteocles and Polynices; Genesis has but one. His swarm of

sea-monsters come and go in the dark sky, as a flock of driven birds.

Æschylus has none of the known proportions. He is rough, abrupt,

immoderate, incapable of smoothing the way, almost ferocious, with

a grace of his own which resembles the flowers in wild places, less

haunted by nymphs than by the Eumenides, of the faction of the Titans;

among goddesses choosing the sombre ones, and smiling darkly at the

Gorgons; a son of the earth like Othryx and Briareus, and ready to

attempt again the scaling of heaven against that _parvenu Jupiter._

Æschylus is ancient mystery made man,--something like a Pagan prophet.

His work, if we had it all, would be a kind of Greek bible. Poet

hundred-handed, having an Orestes more fatal than Ulysses and a Thebes

grander than Troy, hard as a rock, raging like the foam, full of

steeps, torrents, and precipices, and such a giant that at times you

might suppose that he becomes mountain. Coming later than the Iliad, he

has the appearance of an elder son of Homer.

4. Another, Isaiah, seems, above humanity, as a roaring of continual

thunder. He is the great censure. His style, a kind of nocturnal

cloud, lightens up unceasingly with images which suddenly empurple

all the depths of this dark mind, and makes us exclaim, "He gives

light!" Isaiah takes hand-to-hand the evil which, in civilization,

makes its appearance before the good. He cries "Silence!" at the

noise of chariots, of _fêtes_, of triumphs. The foam of his prophecy

surges even on Nature. He denounces Babylon to the moles and bats,

promises Nineveh briers, Tyre ashes, Jerusalem night, fixes a date for

the wrong-doers, warns the powers of their approaching end, assigns

a day against idols, high citadels, the fleets of Tarsus, the cedars

of Lebanon, the oaks of Basan. He is standing on the threshold of

civilization, and he refuses to enter. He is a kind of mouthpiece of

the desert speaking to multitudes, and claiming for quicksands, briers,

and breezes the place where towns are, because it is just; because the

tyrant and the slave--that is to say, pride and shame--exist wherever

there are walled enclosures; because evil is there incarnate in man;

because in solitude there is but the beast, while in the city there is

the monster. That which Isaiah made a reproach of in his day--idolatry,

pride, war, prostitution, ignorance--still exists. Isaiah is the

eternal contemporary of vices which turn valets, and crimes which exalt

themselves into kings.

5. Another, Ezekiel, is the wild soothsayer,--the genius of the

cavern; thought which the roar suits. But listen. This savage makes

a prophecy to the world,--Progress. Nothing more astonishing. Ah,

Isaiah overthrows? Very well! Ezekiel will reconstruct. Isaiah refuses

civilization. Ezekiel accepts, but transforms it. Nature and humanity

blend together in that softened howl which Ezekiel throws forth. The

idea of duty is in Job; of right, in Æschylus. Ezekiel brings before

us the resulting third idea,--the human race ameliorated, posterity

more and more free. That posterity may be a rising instead of a setting

star is man's consolation. Time present works for time to come. Work,

then, and hope. Such is Ezekiel's cry. Ezekiel is in Chaldæa; and

from Chaldæa he sees distinctly Judæa, as from oppression you may

see liberty. He declares peace as others declare war. He prophesies

harmony, goodness, sweetness, union, the blending of races, love.

Notwithstanding, he is terrible. He is the austere benefactor. He is

the universal kind-hearted grumbler at the human race. He scolds, he

almost gnashes his teeth; and people fear and hate him. The men about

are thorns to him. "I live among the briers," he says. He condemns

himself to be a symbol, and makes in his person, become hideous, a sign

of human misery and popular degradation. He is a kind of voluntary

Job. In his town, in his house, he causes himself to be bound with

cords, and rests mute: behold the slave. In the public place he eats

dung: behold the courtier. This makes Voltaire burst into laughter,

and causes our tears to flow. Ah, Ezekiel, so far does your devotion

go! You render shame visible by horror; you compel ignominy to turn

the head when recognizing herself in the dirt; you show that to

accept a man for master is to eat dung; you cause a shudder to the

cowards who follow the prince, by putting into your stomach what

they put into their souls; you preach deliverance by vomiting; be

reverenced! This man, this being, this figure, this swine-prophet, is

sublime. And the transfiguration that he announces he proves. How? By

transfiguring himself. From this horrible and soiled lip comes forth

the blaze of poetry. Never has grander language been spoken, never more

extraordinary.

"I saw the vision of God. A whirlwind comes from the north,

and a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself. I saw a

chariot and a likeness of four animals. Above the creatures

and the chariot was a space like a terrible crystal. The

wheels of the chariot were made of eyes, and so high that

they were dreadful. The noise of the wings of the four

angels was as the noise of the All-Powerful, and when they

stopped they lowered their wings. And I saw a likeness which

was as fire, and which put forth a hand. And a voice said,

'The kings and the judges have in their souls gods of dung.

I will take from their breasts the heart of stone, and I

will give them a heart of flesh.' I went to them that dwelt

by the river of Chebar, and I remained there astonished

among them seven days."

And again:--

"There was a plain and dry bones; and I said, 'Bones, rise

up,' and I looked, and there came nerves on these bones, and

flesh on these nerves, and a skin above; but the spirit was

not there. And I cried, 'Spirit, come from the four winds,

breathe, so that these dead revive.' The spirit came. The

breath entered into them, and they rose up, and it was an

army, and it was a people. Then the voice said, 'You shall

be one nation, you shall have no king or judge but me; and

I will be the God who has one people, and you shall be the

people who have one God.'"

Is not everything there? Search for a higher formula, you will not

find it. A free man under a sovereign God. This visionary eater of

dung is a resuscitator. Ezekiel has mud on the lips and sun in the

eyes. Among the Jews the reading of Ezekiel was dreaded. It was not

permitted before the age of thirty years. Priests, disturbed, put a

seal on this poet. People could not call him an impostor. His terror

as a prophet was incontestable. He had evidently seen what he related.

Thence his authority. His very enigmas made him an oracle. They could

not tell which it was, these women sitting toward the north weeping for

Tammuz. Impossible to divine what was the "hasmal," this metal which he

pictured as in fusion in the furnace of the dream; but nothing was more

clear than his vision of Progress. Ezekiel saw the quadruple man,--man,

ox, lion, and eagle; that is to say, the master of thought, the master

of the field, the master of the desert, the master of the air. Nothing

forgotten. It is posterity complete, from Aristotle to Christopher

Columbus, from Triptolemus to Montgolfier. Later on, the Gospel also

will become quadruple in the four Evangelists, making Matthew, Mark,

Luke, and John subservient to man, the ox, the lion, and the eagle,

and, remarkable fact, to symbolize progress will take the four faces

of Ezekiel. At all events, Ezekiel, like Christ, calls himself the

"Son of Man." Jesus often in his parables invokes and cites Ezekiel;

and this kind of first Messiah paves the way for the second. There are

in Ezekiel three constructions,--man, in whom he places progress; the

temple, where he puts a light that he calls glory; the city, where

he puts God. He cries to the temple,--no priest here, neither they,

nor their kings, nor the carcasses of their kings.[2] One cannot help

thinking that this Ezekiel, a species of biblical demagogue, would help

'93 in the terrible sweeping of St. Denis. As for the city built by

him, he mutters above it this mysterious name, Jehovah Schammah, which

signifies "the Eternal is there." Then he is silent and thoughtful in

the darkness, pointing at humanity; farther on, in the depth of the

horizon, a continued increase of azure.

6. Another, Lucretius, is that vast obscure thing, All. Jupiter is

in Homer; Jehovah is in Job; in Lucretius Pan appears. Such is Pan's

greatness that he has under him Destiny, which is above Jupiter.

Lucretius has travelled and he has mused, which is another voyage.

He has been at Athens; he has been in the haunts of philosophers; he

has studied Greece and made out India. Democritus has made him dream

on matter, and Anaximander on space. His dreams have become doctrine.

Nothing is known of the incidents of his life. Like Pythagoras, he

frequented the two mysterious schools on the Euphrates,--Neharda and

Pombeditha; and he may have met there the Jewish doctors. He spelt

the papyri of Sepphoris, which, at his time, was not yet transformed

into Diocæsarea. He lived with the pearl-fishers of the isle of Tylos.

We may find in the Apocrypha traces of an ancient strange itinerary

recommended, according to some, to the philosophers by Empedocles, the

magician, of Agrigentum, and, according to others, to the rabbis by

the high-priest Eleazer who corresponded with Ptolemy Philadelphus.

This itinerary would have served at a later time as a standard for the

travels of the Apostles. The traveller who followed this itinerary went

through the five satrapies of the country of the Philistines, visited

the people who charm serpents and suck poisonous sores,--the Psylli;

drank of the torrent Bosor, which marks the frontier of Arabia Deserta;

then touched and handled the bronze _carcan_ of Andromeda, still

sealed to the rock of Joppa; Balbec in Syria; Apamea, on the Orontes,

where Nicanor nourished his elephants; the harbour of Eziongeber,

where the vessels of Ophir, laden with gold, stopped; Segher, which

produced white incense, preferred to that of Hadramauth; the two

Syrtes, the mountain of Emerald Smaragdus; the Nasamones, who pillaged

the shipwrecked; the black nation, Agysimba; Adribe, the town of

crocodiles; Cynopolis, town of aloes; the wonderful cities of Comagena,

Claudia, and Barsalium; perhaps even Tadmor, the town of Solomon,--such

were the stages of this almost fabulous pilgrimage of the thinkers.

This pilgrimage, did Lucretius make it? One cannot tell. His numerous

travels are beyond doubt He had seen so many men that at the end they

were all mixed up in his eye, and this multitude had become to him

shadows. He is arrived at that excess of simplification of the universe

which is almost its entire fading away. He has sounded until he feels

the plummet float He has questioned the vague spectres of Byblos; he

has conversed with the severed tree of Chyteron, who is Juno-Thespia.

Perhaps he has spoken in the reeds to Oannes, the man-fish of Chaldæa,

who had two heads,--at the top the head of a man, below the head of

a hydra, and who, drinking chaos by his lower orifice, re-vomited it

on the earth by his upper lip; in knowledge awful. Lucretius has this

knowledge. Isaiah borders on the archangels, Lucretius on larvas.

Lucretius twists the ancient veil of Isis, steeped in the waters of

darkness, and expresses out of it sometimes in torrents, sometimes

drop by drop, a sombre poetry. The boundless is in Lucretius. At times

there passes a powerful spondaic verse almost terrible, and full of

shadow: "Circum se foliis ac frondibus involventes." Here and there a

vast image is sketched in the forest,--"Tunc Venus in sylvis jungebat

corpora amantum;" and the forest is Nature. These verses are impossible

with Virgil. Lucretius turns his back on humanity, and looks fixedly on

the Enigma. Lucretius's spirit, working to the very deeps, is placed

between this reality, the atom, and this impossibility, the vacuum; by

turns attracted by these two precipices. Religious when he contemplates

the atom, sceptical when he sees the void; thence his two aspects,

equally profound, whether he denies, whether he affirms. One day this

traveller commits suicide. This is his last departure. He puts himself

_en route_ for Death. He departs to see. He has embarked successively

on all the pinnaces,--on the galley of Trevirium for Sanastrea in

Macedonia; on the trireme of Carystus for Metapon in Greece; on the

skiff of Cyllenus for the island of Samothrace; on the sandal of

Samothrace for Naxos, where is Bacchus; on the _ceroscaph_ of Naxos for

Syria; on the vessel of Syria for Egypt, and on the ship of the Red

Sea for India. It remains for him to make one voyage. He is curious

about the dark country; he takes his passage on the coffin, and himself

unfastening the mooring, pushes with foot into space this dark vessel

that floats on the unknown wave.

7. Another, Juvenal, has everything in which Lucretius

fails,--passion, emotion, fever, tragic flame, passion for honesty,

avenging sneer, personality, humanity. He dwells in a certain given

point in creation, and he contents himself with it, finding there what

may nourish and swell his heart with justice and anger. Lucretius is

the universe, Juvenal the locality. And what a locality! Rome. Between

the two they are the double voice which speaks to land and town,--_urbi

et orbi._ Juvenal has, above the Roman Empire, the enormous flapping

of wings of the griffin above the rest of the reptiles. He pounces

upon this swarm and takes them, one after the other, in his terrible

beak,--from the adder who is emperor and calls himself Nero, to the

earthworm who is a bad poet and calls himself Codrus. Isaiah and

Juvenal have each their harlot; but there is something more gloomy than

the shadow of Babel,--it is the crashing of the bed of the Cæsars; and

Babylon is less formidable than Messalina. Juvenal is the ancient free

spirit of the dead republics; in him there is a Rome, in the bronze

of which Athens and Sparta are cast. Thence in his poetry something

of Aristophanes and something of Lycurgus. Take care of him; he is

severe. Not a cord is wanting to his lyre or to the lash he uses. He is

lofty, rigid, austere, thundering, violent, grave, just, inexhaustible

in imagery, harshly gracious when he chooses. His cynicism is the

indignation of modesty. His grace, thoroughly independent and a true

figure of liberty, has talons; it appears all at once, enlivening, by

we cannot tell what supple and spirited undulations, the well-formed

majesty of his hexameter. You may imagine that you see the Cat of

Corinth roaming on the frieze of the Parthenon. There is the epic in

this satire; that which Juvenal has in his hand is the sceptre of gold

with which Ulysses beat Thersites. "Bombast, declamation, exaggeration,

hyperbole," cry the slaughtered deformities; and these cries, stupidly

repeated by rhetoricians, are a noise of glory. "Crime is quite equal

to committing things or relating them," say Tillemont, Marc Muret,

Garasse, etc.,--fools, who, like Muret, are sometimes knaves. Juvenal's

invective blazes since two thousand years ago,--a fearful flash of

poetry which still burns Rome in the presence of centuries. This

splendid fire breaks out and, far from diminishing with time, increases

under the whirl of its mournful smoke. From it proceed rays in behalf

of liberty, probity, heroism; and it may be said that it throws even

into our civilization minds full of his light. What is Régnier? what

D'Aubigné? what Corneille?--scintillations of Juvenal.

8. Another, Tacitus, is the historian. Liberty is incarnate in him

as in Juvenal, and rises, dead, to the judgment-seat, having for a

toga its winding-shroud, and summons to his bar tyrants. The soul of

a people become the soul of man, is Juvenal, as we have just said:

thus it is with Tacitus. By the side of the poet who condemns stands

the historian who punishes. Tacitus, seated on the curule chair of

genius, summons and seizes _in flagante delicto_ these guilty ones,

the Cæsars. The Roman Empire is a long crime. This crime commences

by four demons,--Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. Tiberius, the

emperor's spy; the eye which watches the world; the first dictator who

dared to twist for himself the law of power made for the Roman people;

knowing Greek, intellectual, sagacious, sarcastic, eloquent, terrible;

loved by informers; the murderer of citizens, of knights, of the

senate, of his wife, of his family; having rather the air of stabbing

people than massacring them; humble before the barbarians; a traitor

with Archelaus, a coward with Artabanes; having two thrones,--Rome

for his ferocity, Caprea for his baseness; an inventor of vices and

names for vices; an old man with a seraglio of children; gaunt, bald,

crooked, bandy-legged, sour-smelling, eaten up with leprosy, covered

with suppurations, masked with plasters, crowned with laurels; having

ulcers like Job, and the sceptre as well; surrounded by an oppressive

silence; seeking a successor; smelling out Caligula, and finding him

good; a viper who selects a tiger. Caligula, the man who has known

fear, the slave become master, trembling under Tiberius, terrible

after Tiberius, vomiting his fright of yesterday in atrocity. Nothing

comes up to this mad fool. An executioner makes a mistake and kills,

instead of the condemned one, an innocent man; Caligula smiles, and

says, "The condemned had not more deserved it." He gets a woman eaten

alive by dogs, for the sake of seeing it. He lies publicly with his

three sisters, stark naked. One of them dies,--Drusilla. He says,

"Behead those who do not bewail her, for she is my sister; and crucify

those who bewail her, for she is a goddess." He makes his horse a

pontiff, as, later on, Nero made his monkey god. He offers to the

universe this wretched spectacle: the annihilation of intellect by

power. Prostitute, sharper, a robber, breaking the busts of Homer and

Virgil, his head dressed as Apollo with rays, and booted with wings

like Mercury; franticly master of the world, desiring incest with his

mother, a plague to his empire, famine to his people, rout to his

army, resemblance to the gods, and one sole head to the human race

that he might cut it off,--such is Caius Caligula. He forces the son

to assist at the torment of his father and the husband the violation

of his wife, and to laugh. Claudius is a mere sketch of a ruler. He is

nearly a man made a tyrant, a noodle-head crowned. He hides himself;

they discover him, they drag him from his hole, and they throw him

terrified on the throne. Emperor, he still trembles, having the crown

but not sure that he has his head. He feels for his head at times, as

if he searched for it. Then he gets more confident, and decrees three

new letters to be added to the alphabet. He is a learned man, this

idiot. They strangle a senator. He says, "I did not order it but since

it is done, it is well." His wife prostitutes herself before him. He

looks at her, and says, "Who is this woman?" He scarcely exists: he

is a shadow; but this shadow crushes the world. At length the hour

for his departure arrives: his wife poisons him, his doctor finishes

him. He says, "I am saved," and dies. After his death they come to

see his corpse. While alive they had seen his ghost. Nero is the most

formidable figure of _ennui_ that has ever appeared among men. The

yawning monster that the ancients called Livor and the moderns call

Spleen, gives us this enigma to divine,--Nero. Nero seeks simply a

distraction. Poet, comedian, singer, coachman, exhausting ferocity to

find voluptuousness, trying a change of sex, the husband of the eunuch

Sporus, and bride of the slave Pythagoras, and promenading the streets

of Rome between his husband and wife. Having two pleasures--one to

see the people clutching pieces of gold, diamonds and pearls, and the

other to see the lions clutch the people; an incendiary for curiosity's

sake, and a parricide for want of employment. It is to these four that

Tacitus dedicates his four first pillories. He hangs their reign to

their necks: he fastens that _carcan_ to theirs. His book of Caligula

is lost. Nothing easier to comprehend than the loss and obliteration

of these kinds of books. To read them was a crime. A man having been

caught reading the history of Caligula by Suetonius, Com modus had him

thrown to the wild beasts. "Feris objici jussit," says Lampridius. The

horror of those days is wonderful. Manners, below and above stairs,

are ferocious. You may judge of the cruelty of the Romans by the

atrocity of the Gauls. A row breaks out in Gaul: the peasants place

the Roman ladies, naked and still alive, on harrows whose points enter

here and there into the body; then they cut their breasts from them

and sew them in their mouths, as though they had the appearance of

eating them. "These are scarcely reprisals" (_Vix vindicta est_), says

the Roman general, Turpilianus. These Roman ladies had the practice,

while chattering with their lovers, of sticking pins of gold in the

breasts of their Persian or Gallic slaves who dressed their hair. Such

is the humanity at which Tacitus is present. This view renders him

terrible. He states the facts, and leaves you to draw your conclusions.

You only meet a Potiphar in Rome. When Agrippina, reduced to her last

resource, seeing her grave in the eyes of her son, offers him her bed,

when her lips seek those of Nero, Tacitus is there, following her with

his eyes, _lasciva oscula et prœnuntias flagitii blanditias_; and he

denounces to the world this effort of a monstrous and trembling mother

to make the parricide miscarry by incest. Whatever Justus Lipsius,

who bequeathed his pen to the Holy Virgin, has said, Domitian exiled

Tacitus, and did well. Men like Tacitus are unhealthy subjects for

authority. Tacitus applies his style to the shoulder of an emperor,

and the marks remain. Tacitus always makes his thrust at the required

spot. A deep thrust. Juvenal, all-powerful poet, deals about him,

scatters, makes a show, falls and rebounds, strikes right and left, a

hundred blows at a time, on laws, manners, bad magistrates, corrupt

verses, libertines and the idle, on Cæsar, on the people,--everywhere.

He is lavish, like hail; he is careless, like the whip. Tacitus has the

conciseness of red iron.

9. Another, John, is the virgin old man. All the ardent sap of man,

become smoke and mysterious shaking, is in his head, as a vision.

One does not escape love. Love, unsatiated and discontented, changes

itself at the end of life into a gloomy overflowing of chimeras. The

woman wants man; otherwise man, instead of human, will have a phantom

poetry. Some beings, however, resist universal procreation, and then

they are in that peculiar state where monstrous inspiration can weaken

itself on them. The Apocalypse is the almost mad _chef-d'œuvre_ of

this wonderful chastity. John, while young, was pleasant and wild. He

loved Jesus; then could love nothing else. There is a deep resemblance

between the Canticle of Canticles and the Apocalypse; the one and

the other are explosions of pent-up virginity. The heart, mighty

volcano, bursts open; there proceeds from it this dove, the Canticle of

Canticles, or this dragon, the Apocalypse. These two poems are the two

poles of ecstasy,--voluptuousness and horror; the two extreme limits

of the soul are attained. In the first poem ecstasy exhausts love; in

the second, terrifies it, and carries to mankind, henceforth forever

disquieted, the dreadful fright of the eternal precipice. Another

resemblance, not less worthy of attention, there is between John and

Daniel. The nearly invisible thread of affinity is carefully followed

by the eye of those who see in the prophetic spirit a human and normal

phenomenon, and who, far from disdaining the question of miracles,

generalize it, and calmly attach it to existing phenomena. Religions

lose, and science gains, by it. It has not been sufficiently remarked

that the seventh chapter of Daniel contains the root of the Apocalypse.

Empires are there represented as beasts. Therefore has the legend

associated the two poets; it makes the one traverse the den of lions,

and the other the caldron of boiling oil. Independently of the legend,

the life of John is fine. An exemplary life which undergoes strange

openings, passing from Golgotha to Patmos, and from the execution of

Messiah to the exile of the prophet. John, after having been present

at the sufferings of Christ, finished by suffering on his own account;

the suffering seen made him an apostle, the suffering endured made him

a magician,--the growth of the spirit was the result of the growth of

the trial. Bishop, he writes the gospel; proscribed, he composes the

Apocalypse,--tragic work, written under the dictation of an eagle, the

poet having above his head we know not what mournful flapping of wings.

The whole Bible is between two visionaries,--Moses and John. This poem

of poems merges out of chaos in Genesis, and finishes in the Apocalypse

by thunders. John was one of the great vagrants of the language of

fire. During the Last Supper his head was on the breast of Jesus, and

he could say, "My ear has heard the beating of God's heart." He went

to relate it to men. He spoke a barbarous Greek, mixed with Hebrew

expressions and Syrian words, harsh and grating, yet charming. He went

to Ephesus, he went to Media, he went among the Parthians. He dared to

enter Ctesiphon, a town of the Parthians, built as a counterpoise to

Babylon. He faced the living idol, Cobaris, king, god, and man, forever

immovable on his block, which serves him as throne and latrine. He

evangelized Persia, which the Gospel calls Paras. When he appeared at

the Council of Jerusalem, they thought they saw a pillar of the Church.

He looked with stupefaction at Cerintus and Ebion, who said that Jesus

was but a man. When they questioned him on the mystery, he answered,

"Love you one another?" He died at the age of ninety-four years, under

Trajan. According to tradition, he is not dead; he is spared, and John

is ever living at Patmos as Barberousse at Kaiserslautern. There are

some waiting-caverns for these mysterious everlasting beings. John,

as a historian, has his equals,--Matthew, Luke, Mark; as a visionary

he is alone. There is no dream approaches his, so deep it is in the

infinite. His metaphors pass out from eternity, distracted; his poetry

has a profound smile of madness; the reverberation of the Most High

is in the eye of this man. It is the sublime going fully astray. Men

do not understand it--scorn it, and laugh. "My dear Thiriot," says

Voltaire, "the Apocalypse is filth." Religions, being in want of this

book, have taken to worshipping it; but, in order not to be thrown to

the common sewer, it must be put on the altar. What does it matter?

John is a spirit. It is in the John of Patmos, among all, that the

communication between certain men of genius and the abyss is apparent.

In all other poets men get a glimpse of this communication; in John

they see it, at times they touch it, and have a shivering fit in

placing, so to speak, the hand on this sombre door. That is the way to

the Deity. It seems, when you read the poem of Patmos, that some one

pushes you from behind; you have a confused outline of the dreadful

opening. It fills you with terror and attraction. If John had only

that, he would be immense.

10. Another, Paul, a saint for the Church, a great man for

humanity, represents this prodigy, at the same time human and

divine,--conversion. He is the one who has had a glimpse of the future.

It leaves him haggard; and nothing can be more magnificent than this

face, forever wondering, of the man conquered by the light. Paul, born

a Pharisee, had been a weaver of camel's-hair for tents, and servant

of one of the judges of Jesus Christ, Gamaliel; then the scribes had

advanced him, trusting to his natural ferocity. He was the man of

the past; he had taken care of the mantles of the stone-throwers. He

aspired, having studied with the priests, to become an executioner; he

was on the road for this. All at once a wave of light emanates from

the darkness, throws him down from his horse, and henceforth there

will be in the history of the human race this wonderful thing,--the

road to Damascus. That day of the metamorphosis of Saint Paul is a

great day; keep the date,--it corresponds to the 25th January in our

Gregorian calendar. The road to Damascus is necessary to the march of

Progress. To fall into the truth and to rise a just man, a fall and

transfiguration, that is sublime. It is the history of Saint Paul.

From his day it will be the history of humanity. The flash of light

is beyond the flash of lightning. Progress will carry itself on by a

series of scintillations. As for Saint Paul, who has been turned aside

by the force of new conviction, this harsh stroke from on high opens

to him genius. Once on his feet again, behold him proceed: he will

no more stop. "Forward!" is his cry. He is a cosmopolite. He loves

the outsiders, whom Paganism calls barbarians, and Christianity calls

Gentiles; he devotes himself to them. He is the apostle of the outer

world. He writes to the nations epistles on behalf of God. Listen to

him speaking to the Galatians: "O insane Galatians! how can you go back

to the yokes to which you were tied? There are no more Jews, or Greeks,

or slaves. Do not carry out your grand ceremonies ordained by your

laws. I declare unto you that all that is nothing. Love each other.

Man must be a new creature. Freedom is awaiting you." There were at

Athens, on the hill of Mars, steps hewn in rock, which may be seen to

this day. On these steps sat the great judges before whom Orestes had

appeared. There Socrates had been judged. Paul went there; and there,

at night (the Areopagus only sat at night), he said to the grave men,

"I come to announce to you the unknown God." The Epistles of Paul to

the Gentiles are simple and profound, with the subtlety so marked in

its influence over savages. There are in these messages gleams of

hallucination; Paul speaks of the Celestials as if he distinctly saw

them. Like John, half-way between life and eternity, it seems that he

had one part of his thought on the earth and one in the Unknown; and

it may be said, at moments, that one of his verses answers to another

from beyond the dark wall of the tomb. This half-possession of death

gives him a personal certainty, and one often distinctly apart from

the dogma, and a mark of conviction on his personal conceptions, which

makes him almost heretical. His humility, bordering on the mysterious,

is lofty. Peter says, "The words of Paul may be taken in a bad sense."

The deacon Hilaire and the Luciferians ascribe their schism to the

Epistles of Paul. Paul is at heart so anti-monarchical that King James

I., very much encouraged by the orthodox University of Oxford, caused

the Epistle to the Romans to be burned by the hand of the common

hangman. It is true it was one with a commentary by David Pareus. Many

of Paul's works are rejected by the Church: they are the finest; and

among them his Epistle to the Laodiceans, and above all his Apocalypse,

erased by the Council of Rome under Gelasius. It would be curious to

compare it with the Apocalypse of John. On the opening that Paul had

made to heaven the Church wrote, "Entrance forbidden." He is not less

holy for it. It is his official consolation. Paul has the restlessness

of the thinker; text and formulary are little for him. The letter does

not suffice; the letter, it is matter. Like all men of progress, he

speaks with reserve of the written law; he prefers grace, as we prefer

justice. What is grace? It is the inspiration from on high; it is the

breath, _flat ubi vult_; it is liberty. Grace is the spirit of law.

This discovery of the spirit of law belongs to Saint Paul; and what

he calls "grace" from a heavenly point of view, we, from an earthly

point, call "right." Such is Paul. The greatness of a spirit by the

irruption of clearness, the beauty of violence done by truth to one

spirit, breaks forth in this man. In that, we insist, lies the virtue

of the road to Damascus. Henceforth, whoever wishes this increase, must

follow the guide-post of Saint Paul. All those to whom justice shall

reveal itself, every blindness desirous of the day, all the cataracts

looking to be healed, all searchers after conviction, all the great

adventurers after virtue, all the holders of good in quest of truth,

shall go by this road. The light that they find there shall change

nature, for the light is always relative to darkness; it shall increase

in intensity. After having been revelation, it shall be rationalism;

but it shall always be light. Voltaire is like Saint Paul on the road

to Damascus. The road to Damascus shall be forever the passage for

great minds. It shall also be the passage for peoples,--for peoples,

these vast individualisms, have like each of us their crisis and their

hour. Paul, after his glorious fall, rose up again armed against

ancient errors, with that flaming sword, Christianity; and two thousand

years after, France, struck by the light, arouses herself, she also

holding in hand this sword of fire, the Revolution.

11. Another, Dante, has mentally conceived the abyss. He has made

the epic poem of spectres. He rends the earth; in the terrible hole

he has made he puts Satan. Then he pushes through purgatory up to

heaven. Where all end Dante begins. Dante is beyond man; beyond,

not without,--a singular proposition, which, however, has nothing

contradictory in it, the soul being a prolongation of man into the

indefinite. Dante twists light and shade into a huge spiral; it

descends, then it ascends. Wonderful architecture! At the threshold is

the sacred mist; across the entrance is stretched the corpse of Hope;

all that you perceive beyond is night. The infinite anguish is sobbing

somewhere in the invisible darkness. You lean over this gulf-poem. Is

it a crater? You hear reports; the verse shoots out narrow and livid,

as from the fissures of a solfatara. It is vapour now, then lava. This

paleness speaks; and then you know that the volcano, of which you have

caught a glimpse, is hell. This is no longer the human medium; you are

in the unknown abyss. In this poem the imponderable submits to the laws

of the ponderable, with which it is mixed, as in the sudden tumbling

down of a building on fire, the smoke, carried down by the ruins, falls

and rolls with them, and seems caught under the timber and the stones;

thence strange effects: the ideas seem to suffer and to be punished in

men. The idea, sufficiently man to undergo expiation, is the phantom

(a form that is shade), impalpable, but not invisible,--an appearance

retaining yet a sufficient amount of reality for the chastisement to

have a hold on it; sin in the abstract state, but having kept the human

figure. It is not only the wicked who grieves in this Apocalypse,

it is the evil; there all possible bad actions are in despair. This

spiritualization of pain gives to the poem a powerful moral import. The

depth of hell once sounded, Dante pierces it, and remounts to the other

side of the infinite. In rising, he becomes idealized; and thought

drops the body as a robe. From Virgil he passes to Beatrice. His guide

to hell, it is the poet; his guide to heaven, it is poetry. The epic

poem continues, and has more grandeur yet; but man comprehends it no

more. Purgatory and paradise are not less extraordinary than gehenna;

but the more he ascends the less interested is man. He was somewhat at

home in hell, but he is no longer so in heaven. He cannot recognize

himself in angels. The human eye is perhaps not made for so much sun;

and when the poem draws happiness, it becomes tedious. It is generally

the case with all happiness. Marry the lovers, or send the souls to

dwell in paradise, it is well; but seek the drama elsewhere than there.

After all, what does it matter to Dante if you no longer follow him? He

goes on without you. He goes alone, this lion. His work is a wonder.

What a philosopher is this visionary! What a sage is this madman! Dante

lays down the law for Montesquieu; the penal divisions of "L'Esprit

des Lois" are an exact copy of the classifications in the hell of the

"Divina Commedia." That which Juvenal does for the Rome of the Cæsars,

Dante does for the Rome of popes; but Dante is a more terrible judge

than Juvenal. Juvenal whips with cutting thongs; Dante scourges with

flames. Juvenal condemns; Dante damns. Woe to the living on whom this

awful traveller fixes the unfathomable glare of his eyes!

12. Another, Rabelais, is the soul of Gaul. And who says Gaul says also

Greece, for the Attic salt and the Gallic jest have at bottom the same

flavour; and if anything, buildings apart, resembles the Piræus, it is

La Rapée. Aristophanes is distanced; Aristophanes is wicked. Rabelais

is good; Rabelais would have defended Socrates. In the order of lofty

genius, Rabelais chronologically follows Dante; after the stem face,

the sneering visage. Rabelais is the wondrous mask of ancient comedy

detached from the Greek proscenium, from bronze made flesh, henceforth

a human living face, remaining enormous, and coming among us to laugh

at us, and with us. Dante and Rabelais spring from the school of the

Franciscan friars, as later Voltaire springs from the Jesuits. Dante

the incarnate sorrow, Rabelais the parody, Voltaire the irony,--they

came from the Church against the Church. Every genius has his invention

or his discovery. Rabelais has made this one: the belly. The serpent is

in man; it is the intestines. It tempts, betrays, and punishes. Man,

single being as a spirit and complex as man, has within himself for his

earthly mission three centres,--the brain, the heart, the stomach. Each

of these centres is august by one great function which is peculiar to

it: the brain has thought, the heart has love, the belly has paternity

and maternity. The belly may be tragic. "Feri ventrem," says Agrippina.

Catherine Sforza, threatened with the death of her children, kept in

hostage, exhibits herself naked to her navel on the battlements of

the citadel of Rimini and says to the enemy, "With this I can give

birth to others." In one of the epic convulsions of Paris a woman of

the people, standing on a barricade, raised her petticoat, showed the

soldiery her naked belly, and cried, "Kill your mothers!" The soldiers

perforated that belly with balls. The belly has its heroism; but it

is from it that flows in life corruption, in art comedy. The breast,

where the heart rests, has for its summit the head; the belly has the

phallus. The belly being the centre of matter, is our gratification

and our danger; it contains appetite, satiety, and putrefaction. The

devotion, the tenderness, which we feel then are subject to death;

egotism replaces them. Easily do the affections become intestines.

That the hymn can become a drunkard's brawl, that the strophe can be

deformed into a couplet, is sad. That comes from the beast that is

in man. The belly is essentially this beast. Degradation seems to be

its law. The ladder of sensual poetry has for its topmost round the

Canticle of Canticles, and for its lowest the coarse jest. The belly

god is Silenus; the belly emperor is Vitellius; the belly animal is the

pig. One of those horrid Ptolemies was called the Belly,--_Physcon._

The belly is to humanity a formidable weight: it breaks every moment

the equilibrium between the soul and the body. It fills history. It is

responsible for nearly all crimes. It is the bottle of all vices. It is

the belly which by voluptuousness makes the sultan and by drunkenness

the czar; it is this that shows Tarquin the bed of Lucrece; it is

this that ends by making that senate which had waited for Brennus

and dazzled Jugurtha deliberate on the sauce of a turbot. It is the

belly which counsels the ruined libertine, Cæsar, the passage of the

Rubicon. To pass the Rubicon, how well that pays one's debts! To pass

the Rubicon, how readily that throws women, into one's arms! What good

dinners afterward! And the Roman soldiers enter Rome with the cry,

"Urbani, claudite uxores; mœchum calvum adducimus." The appetite

debauches the intellect. Voluptuousness replaces will. At starting, as

is always the case, there is some nobleness. It is the orgy. There is a

gradation between being fuddled and being dead drunk.

Then the orgy degenerates into bestial gluttony. Where there was

Solomon there is Ramponneau. Man becomes a barrel; an inner sea of dark

ideas drowns thought; conscience submerged cannot warn the drunken

soul. Beastliness is consummated; it is not even any longer cynical,

it is empty and beastly. Diogenes disappears; there remains but the

barrel. We commence by Alcibiades, we finish by Trimalcion. It is

complete; nothing more, neither dignity, nor shame, nor honour, nor

virtue, nor wit,--animal gratification in all its nakedness, thorough

impurity. Thought dissolves itself in satiety; carnal gorging absorbs

everything; nothing survives of the grand sovereign creature inhabited

by the soul. As the word goes, the belly eats the man. Such is the

final state of all societies where the ideal is eclipsed. That passes

for prosperity, and is called aggrandizing one's self. Sometimes even

philosophers thoughtlessly aid this degradation by inserting in their

doctrines the materialism which is in the consciences. This sinking

of man to the level of the human beast is a great calamity. Its first

fruit is the turpitude visible at the summit of all professions,--the

venal judge, the simoniacal priest, the hireling soldier; laws,

manners, and beliefs are a dungheap,--_totus homo fit excrementum._

In the sixteenth century all the institutions of the past are in

that state. Rabelais gets hold of that situation; he proves it; he

authenticates that belly which is the world. Civilization is, then,

but a mass; science is matter; religion is blessed with a stomach;

feudality is digesting; royalty is obese. What is Henry VIII.? A

paunch. Rome is a fat-gutted old woman. Is it health? Is it sickness?

It is perhaps obesity; it is perhaps dropsy-query. Rabelais, doctor

and priest, feels the pulse of Papacy; he shakes his head and bursts

out laughing. Is it because he has found life? No, it is because he

has felt death; it is, in reality, breathing its last. While Luther

reforms, Rabelais jests. Which tends best to the end? Rabelais

ridicules the monk, the bishop, the Pope; laughter and death-rattle

together; fool's bell sounding the tocsin! Well, then, what? I thought

it was a feast; it is agony. One may be deceived by the nature of

the hiccough. Let us laugh all the same. Death is at the table; the

last drop toasts the last sigh. The agony feasting,--it is superb.

The inner colon is king; all that old world feasts and bursts, and

Rabelais enthrones a dynasty of bellies,--Grangousier, Pantagruel, and

Gargantua. Rabelais is the Æschylus of victuals; indeed, it is grand

when we think that eating is devouring. There is something of the

gulf in the glutton. Eat then, my masters, and drink, and come to the

finale. To live is a song, of which to die is the refrain. Others dig

under the depraved human race fearful dungeons. For subterraneous caves

the great Rabelais contents himself with the cellar. This universe,

which Dante put into hell, Rabelais confines in a wine-cask; his book

is nothing else. The seven circles of Alighieri bung and encompass

this extraordinary tun. Look within the monstrous cask, and you see

them there. In Rabelais they are entitled, Idleness, Pride, Envy,

Avarice, Anger, Luxury, Gluttony; and it is thus that you suddenly

meet again the formidable jester. Where?--in church. The seven sins

are this _curé's_ sermon. Rabelais is priest. Castigation, properly

understood, begins at home; it is therefore on the clergy that he

strikes first. It is something, indeed, to be at home! The Papacy dies

of indigestion. Rabelais plays the Papacy a trick,--the trick of a

Titan. The Pantagruelian joy is not less grandiose than the mirth of

a Jupiter,--jaw for jaw. The monarchical and priestly jaw eats; the

Rabelaisian jaw laughs. Whoever has read Rabelais has forever before

his eyes this stem opposition: the mask of Theocritus gazed at fixedly

by the mask of Comedy.

13. Another, Cervantes, is also a form of epic mockery; for as the

writer of these lines said in 1827,[3] there are between the Middle

Ages and the modern times, after the feudal barbarism, and placed

there as it were for a conclusion, two Homeric buffoons,--Rabelais and

Cervantes. To sum up horror by laughter, is not the least terrible

manner of doing it. It is what Rabelais did; it is what Cervantes did.

But the raillery of Cervantes has nothing of the large Rabelaisian

grin. It is the fine humour of the noble after the joviality of the

_curé._ I am the Signor Don Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra, Caballeros,

poet-soldier, and, as a proof, one-armed. No broad, coarse jesting in

Cervantes. Scarcely a flavour of elegant cynicism. The satirist is

fine, sharp-edged, polished, delicate, almost gallant, and would even

run the risk sometimes of diminishing his power with all his affected

ways if he had not the deep poetic spirit of the Renaissance. That

saves his charming grace from becoming prettiness. Like Jean Goujon,

like Jean Cousin, like Germain Pilon, like Primatice, Cervantes has

the chimera within himself. Thence all the unexpected marvels of his

imagination. Add to that a wonderful intuition of the inmost deeds

of the mind, and a philosophy, inexhaustible in aspects, which seems

to possess a new and complete chart of the human heart. Cervantes

sees the inner man. His philosophy blends with the comic and romantic

instinct. Thence does the unexpected break in at each moment in his

characters, in his action, in his style,--the unforeseen, magnificent

adventure. Personages remaining true to themselves, but facts and

ideas whirling around them, with a perpetual renewing of the original

idea, with the unceasing breathing of that wind which carries flashes

of lightning,--such is the law of great works. Cervantes is militant;

he has a thesis; he makes a social book. Such poets are the fighting

champions of the mind. Where have they learned fighting? On the

battle-field itself. Juvenal was a military tribune; Cervantes arrives

from Lepanto, as Dante from Campalbino, as Æschylus from Salamis. After

which they pass to a new trial. Æschylus goes into exile, Juvenal into

exile, Dante into exile, Cervantes into prison. It is just, for they

have served you well. Cervantes, as poet, has the three sovereign

gifts,--creation, which produces types, and clothes ideas with flesh

and bone; invention, which hurls passions against events, makes man

flash brightly over destiny, and brings forth the drama; imagination,

sun of the brain, which throws light and shade everywhere, and, giving

relieve, creates life. Observation, which is acquired, and which, in

consequence, is a quality rather than a gift, is included in creation.

If the miser was not observed, Harpagon would not be created. In

Cervantes, a new-comer, glimpsed at in Rabelais, puts in a decided

appearance; it is common-sense. You have caught sight of it in Panurge;

you see it plainly in Sancho Panza. It arrives like the Silenus of

Plautus; and it may also say, "I am the god mounted on an ass." Wisdom

at once, reason by-and-by; it is indeed the strange history of the

human mind. What more wise than all religions? What less reasonable?

Morals true, dogmas false. Wisdom is in Homer and in Job; reason, such

as it ought to be to overcome prejudices,--that is to say, complete

and armed _cap-à-pie_,--will be found only in Voltaire. Common-sense

is not wisdom and is not reason; it is a little of one and a little

of the other, with a dash of egotism. Cervantes makes it bestride

ignorance; and, at the same time, completing his profound satire, he

gives fatigue as a nag to heroism. Thus he shows one after the other,

one with the other, the two profiles of man, and parodies them, without

more pity for the sublime than for the grotesque. The hippogriff

becomes Rosinante. Behind the equestrian figure, Cervantes creates and

gives movement to the asinine personage. Enthusiasm takes the field,

Irony follows in its footsteps. The wonderful feats of Don Quixote,

his riding and spurring, his big lance, steady in the rest, are judged

by the donkey, a connoisseur in windmills. The invention of Cervantes

is so masterly that there is between the man type and the quadruped

complement statuary adhesion; the reasoner, like the adventurer, is

part of the beast which belongs to him, and you can no more dismount

Sancho Panza than Don Quixote. The Ideal is in Cervantes as in Dante;

but it is called the impossible, and is scoffed at. Beatrice is become

Dulcinea. To rail at the ideal would be the failing of Cervantes; but

this failing is only apparent. Look well! The smile has a tear. In

reality, Cervantes is for Don Quixote what Molière is for Alcestes.

One must learn how to read in a peculiar manner in the books of the

sixteenth century; there is in almost all, on account of the threats

hanging over the liberty of thought, a secret that must be opened, and

the key of which is often lost Rabelais had something unexpressed,

Cervantes had an aside, Machiavelli had a secret recess,--several

perhaps; at all events, the advent of common-sense is the great fact

in Cervantes. Common-sense is not a virtue; it is the eye of interest.

It would have encouraged Themistocles and dissuaded Aristides.

Leonidas has no common-sense; Regulus has no common-sense; but in the

face of egotistical and ferocious monarchies dragging poor peoples

into wars undertaken for themselves, decimating families, making

mothers desolate, and driving men to kill each other with all those

fine words,--military honour, warlike glory, obedience to discipline

etc.,--it is an admirable personification, that common-sense coming all

at once and crying to the human race, "Take care of your skin!"

14. Another, Shakespeare, what is he? You might almost answer, He is

the earth. Lucretius is the sphere; Shakespeare is the globe. There is

more and less in the globe than in the sphere. In the sphere there is

the whole; on the globe there is man. Here the outer, there the inner,

mystery. Lucretius is the being; Shakespeare is the existence. Thence

so much shadow in Lucretius; thence so much movement in Shakespeare.

Space,--_the blue_, as the Germans ay,--is certainly not forbidden

to Shakespeare. The earth sees and surveys heaven; the earth knows

heaven under its two aspects,--darkness and azure, doubt and hope. Life

goes and comes in death. All life is a secret,--a sort of enigmatical

parenthesis between birth and the death-throe, between the eye which

opens and the eye which closes. This secret imparts its restlessness to

Shakespeare. Lucretius is; Shakespeare lives. In Shakespeare the birds

sing, the bushes become verdant, the hearts love, the souls suffer,

the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes,

forests and crowds speak, the vast eternal dream hovers about. The sap

and the blood, all forms of the fact multiple, the actions and the

ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, the solitudes, the

cities, the religions, the diamonds and pearls, the dung-hills and the

charnel-houses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of the comers and

goers,--all, all are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare; and this genius

being the earth, the dead emerge from it. Certain sinister sides of

Shakespeare are haunted by spectres. Shakespeare is a brother of Dante.

The one completes the other. Dante incarnates all supernaturalism,

Shakespeare all Nature; and as these two regions, Nature and

supernaturalism, which appear to us so different, are really the same

unity, Dante and Shakespeare, however dissimilar, commingle outwardly,

and are but one innately. There is something of the Alighieri,

something of the ghost in Shakespeare. The skull passes from the hands

of Dante into the hands of Shakespeare. Ugolino gnaws it, Hamlet

questions it; and it shows perhaps even a deeper meaning and a loftier

teaching in the second than in the first. Shakespeare shakes it and

makes stars fall from it The isle of Prospero, the forest of Ardennes,

the heath of Armuyr, the platform of Elsinore, are not less illuminated

than the seven circles of Dante's spiral by the sombre reverberation

of hypothesis. The unknown--half fable, half truth--is outlined there

as well as here. Shakespeare as much as Dante allows us to glimpse at

the crepuscular horizon of conjecture. In the one as in the other there

is the possible,--that window of the dream opening on reality. As for

the real, we insist on it, Shakespeare overflows with it; everywhere

the living flesh. Shakespeare possesses emotion, instinct, the true

cry, the right tone, all the human multitude in his clamour. His poetry

is himself, and at the same time it is you. Like Homer, Shakespeare

is element Men of genius, re-beginners,--it is the right name for

them,--rise at all the decisive crises of humanity; they sum up the

phases and complete the revolutions. In civilization, Homer stamps

the end of Asia and the commencement of Europe; Shakespeare stamps

the end of the Middle Ages. This closing of the Middle Ages, Rabelais

and Cervantes have fixed also; but, being essentially satirists, they

give but a partial aspect Shakespeare's mind is a total; like Homer,

Shakespeare is a cyclic man. These two geniuses, Homer and Shakespeare,

close the two gates of barbarism,--the ancient door and the gothic one.

That was their mission; they have fulfilled it. That was their task;

they have accomplished it. The third great human crisis is the French

Revolution; it is the third huge gate of barbarism, the monarchical

gate, which is closing at this moment. The nineteenth century hears it

rolling on its hinges. Thence for poetry, the drama, and art arises the

actual era, as independent of Shakespeare as of Homer.

[Footnote 1: Song XVII. of the Iliad.]

[Footnote 2: Ezekiel, XLIII. 7.]

[Footnote 3: Preface to "Cromwell."]

CHAPTER III.

Homer, Job, Æschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, Saint John,

Saint Paul, Tacitus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare.

That is the avenue of the immovable giants of the human mind.

The men of genius are a dynasty. Indeed there is no other. They wear

all the crowns,--even that of thorns.

Each of them represents the sum total of absolute that man can realize.

We repeat it, to choose between these men, to prefer one to the other,

to mark with the finger the first among these first, it cannot be. All

are the Mind.

Perhaps, in an extreme case--and yet every objection would be

legitimate--you might mark out as the highest summit among those

summits, Homer, Æschylus, Job, Isaiah, Dante, and Shakespeare.

It is understood that we speak here only in an Art point of view, and

in Art, in the literary point of view.

Two men in this group, Æschylus and Shakespeare, represent specially

the drama.

Æschylus, a kind of genius out of time, worthy to stamp either a

beginning or an end in humanity, does not seem to be placed in his

right turn in the series, and, as we have said, seems an elder son of

Homer's.

If we remember that Æschylus is nearly submerged by the darkness

rising over human memory; if we remember that ninety of his plays have

disappeared, that of that sublime hundred there remain no more than

seven dramas, which are also seven odes, we are stupefied by what we

see of that genius, and almost frightened by what we do not see.

What, then, was Æschylus? What proportions and what forms had he in

all this shadow? Æschylus is up to his shoulders in the ashes of ages.

His head alone remains out of that burying; and, like the giant of the

desert, with his head alone he is as immense as all the neighbouring

gods standing on their pedestals.

Man passes before this insubmergible wreck. Enough remains for an

immense glory. What the darkness has taken adds the unknown to this

greatness. Buried and eternal, his brow projecting from the grave,

Æschylus looks at generations.

CHAPTER IV.

To the eyes of the thinker, these men of genius occupy thrones in the

ideal.

To the individual works that those men have left us, must be

added various vast collective works, the Vedas, the Râmayana, the

Mahâbhârata, the Edda, the Niebelungen, the Heldenbuch, the Romancero.

Some of these works are revealed and sacred. Unknown assistance is

marked on them. The poems of India in particular have the ominous

fulness of the possible imagined by insanity, or related by dreams.

These works seem to have been composed in common with beings to whom

our world is no longer accustomed. Legendary horror covers these epic

poems. _These books have not been composed by man alone_; the Ash-Nagar

inscription says it. Djinns have alighted upon them; polypterian magi

have thought over them; the texts have been interlined by invisible

hands; the demi-gods have been aided by demi-demons; the elephant,

which India calls the sage, has been consulted. Thence a majesty

almost horrible. The great enigmas are in these poems. They are full

of mysterious Asia. Their prominent parts have the supernatural and

hideous outline of chaos. They are a mass in the horizon like the

Himalayas. The distance of the manners, beliefs, ideas, actions,

persons, is extraordinary. One reads these poems with that wondering

stoop of the head which is induced by the profound distance that

there is between the book and the reader. This Holy Writ of Asia has

evidently been yet more difficult to reduce and put into shape than

our own. It is in every part refractory to unity. In vain have the

Brahmins, like our priests, erased and interpolated. Zoroaster is

there; Ized Serosch is there. The Eschem of the Mazdæan traditions

appears under the name of Siva; Manicheism is discernible between

Brahma and Bouddha. All kinds of traces blend, cross, and recross each

other in these poems. One may see in them the mysterious tramp of a

crowd of minds who have worked at them in the mist of ages. Here the

measureless toe of the giant; there the claw of the chimera. Those

poems are the pyramid of a vanished colony of ants.

The Niebelungen, another pyramid of another ant-hill, has the same

greatness. What the dives have done there, the elves have done here.

These powerful epic legends, the testaments of ages, tattooings marked

by races on history, have no other unity than the very unity of the

people. The collective and the successive, combining together, are one.

_Turba fit mens._ These recitals are mists, and wonderful flashes of

light traverse them. As to the Romancero, which creates the Cid after

Achilles, and the chivalric after the heroic, it is the Iliad of many

lost Homers. Count Julian, King Roderigo, Cava, Bernard del Carpio, the

bastard Mudarra, Nuño Salido, the Seven Infantes of Lara, the Constable

Alvar de Luna,--no Oriental or Hellenic type surpasses these figures.

The horse of Campeador is equal to the dog of Ulysses. Between Priam

and Lear you must place Don Arias, the old man of Zamora's tower,

sacrificing his seven sons to his duty, and tearing them from his heart

one after another. There is grandeur in that. In presence of these

sublimities the reader undergoes a sort of insolation.

These works are anonymous, and owing to the great reason of the _homo

sum_, while admiring them, while holding them as the summit of art, we

prefer to them the acknowledged works. With equal beauty, the Râmayana

touches us less than Shakespeare. The "I" of a man is more vast and

profound even than the "I" of a people.

However, these composite myriologies, the great testaments of India

particularly, with a coat of poetry rather than real poems, expression

at the same time sideral and bestial of humanities passed away, derive

from their very deformity an indescribable supernatural air. The "I"

multiple expressed by those myriologies makes them the polypi of

poetry,--vague and wonderful enormities. The strange joinings of the

antediluvian rough outline seem visible there as in the ichthyosaurus

or in the pterodactyl. Any one of these black _chefs-d'œuvre_ with

several heads makes on the horizon of art the silhouette of a hydra.

The Greek genius is not deceived by them, and abhors them. Apollo

would attack them. The Romancero excepted, beyond and above all these

collective and anonymous productions, there are men to represent

peoples. These men we have just named. They give to nations and periods

the human face. They are in art the incarnations of Greece, of Arabia,

of India, of Pagan Rome, of Christian Italy, of Spain, of France, of

England. As for Germany, the matrix, like Asia, of races, hordes, and

nations, she is represented in art by a sublime man, equal, although in

a different category, to all those that we have characterized above.

That man is Beethoven. Beethoven is the German soul.

What a shadow this Germany! She is the India of the West. She holds

everything. There is no formation more colossal. In the sacred mist

where the German spirit breathes, Isidro de Seville places theology;

Albert the Great, scholasticism; Raban Maur, the science of language;

Trithemius, astrology; Ottnit, chivalry; Reuchlin, vast curiosity;

Tutilo, universality; Stadianus, method; Luther, inquiry; Albert Dürer,

art; Leibnitz, science; Puffendorf, law; Kant, philosophy; Fichte,

metaphysics; Winckelmann, archæology; Herder, æsthetics; the Vossiuses,

of whom one, Gerard John, was of the Palatinate, learning; Euler, the

spirit of integration; Humboldt, the spirit of discovery; Niebuhr,

history; Gottfried of Strasburg, fable; Hoffman, dreams; Hegel, doubt;

Ancillon, obedience; Werner, fatalism; Schiller, enthusiasm; Goethe,

indifference; Arminius, liberty.

Kepler gives Germany the heavenly bodies.

Gerard Groot, the founder of the Fratres Communis Vitæ, brings his

first attempt at fraternity in the fourteenth century. Whatever may

have been her infatuation for the indifference of Goethe, do not

consider her impersonal, that Germany. She is a nation, and one of

the most generous; for it is for her that Rückert, the military poet,

forges the "geharnischte Sonnette," and she shudders when Körner hurls

at her the Song of the Sword. She is the German fatherland, the great

beloved land, _Teutonia mater._ Galgacus was to the Germans what

Caractacus was to the Britons.

Germany has everything in herself and at home. She shares Charlemagne

with France and Shakespeare with England; for the Saxon element is

mingled with the British element. She has an Olympus,--the Valhalla.

She must have her own style of writing. Ulfilas, Bishop of Moesia,

composes it for her, and the Gothic mode of caligraphy will henceforth

keep its ground along with the writing of Arabia. The capital letter

of a missal strives to outdo in fancy the signature of a caliph. Like

China, Germany has invented printing. Her Burgraves (this remark has

been already made[1]) are to us what the Titans are to Æschylus. To the

temple of Tanfana, destroyed by Germanicus, she caused the cathedral of

Cologne to succeed. She is the grandmother of our history, the grandam

of our legends. From all parts,--from the Rhine to the Danube, from

the Rauhe-Alp, from the ancient _Sylva Gabresa_, from the Lorraine on

the Moselle, and from the ripuarian Lorraine by the Wigalois and the

Wigamur, with Henry the Fowler, with Samo, King of the Vends, with

the chronicler of Thuringia, Rothe, with the chronicler of Alsace,

Twinger, with the chronicler of Limbourg, Gansbein, with all these

ancient popular songsters, Jean Folz, Jean Viol, Muscatblüt, with the

minnesingers, those rhapsodists,--the tale, that form of dream, reaches

her, and enters into her genius. At the same time, idioms are flowing

from her. From her fissures rush, to the north, the Danish and Swedish,

to the west, the Dutch and Flemish. The German idiom passes the Channel

and becomes the English language. In the order of intellectual facts,

the German genius has other frontiers besides Germany. Such people

resists Germany and yields to Germanism. The German spirit assimilates

to itself the Greeks by Müller, the Serbians by Gerhard, the Russians

by Goethe, the Magyars by Mailath. When Kepler, in the presence of

Rudolph II., was preparing the Rudolphian Tables, it was with the

aid of Tycho Brahé German affinities go far. Without any alteration

in the local and national autonomies, it is with the great Germanic

centre that the Scandinavian spirit in Oehlenschläger, and the Batavian

spirit in Vondel, is connected. Poland unites herself to it, with all

her glory, from Copernicus to Kosciusko, from Sobieski to Mickiewicz.

Germany is the well of nations. They pass out of her like rivers; she

receives them as a sea.

It seems as though one heard through all Europe the wonderful murmur of

the Hercynian forest. The German nature, profound and subtle, distinct

from European nature, but in harmony with it, volatilizes and floats

above nations. The German mind is misty, luminous, scattered. It is a

kind of immense soul-cloud, with stars. Perhaps the highest expression

of Germany can only be given by music. Music, by its very want of

precision, which in this special case is a quality, goes where the

German soul proceeds.

If the German spirit had as much density as expansion,--that is to say,

as much will as power,--she could, at a given moment, lift up and save

the human race. Such as she is, she is sublime.

In poetry she has not said her last word. At this hour, the symptoms

are excellent. Since the jubilee of the noble Schiller, particularly,

there has been an awakening, and a generous awakening. The great

definitive poet of Germany will be necessarily a poet of humanity, of

enthusiasm, and of liberty. Perchance, and some signs give token of it,

we may soon see him arise from the young group of contemporary German

writers.

Music, we beg indulgence for this word, is the vapour of art. It is to

poetry what revery is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what

the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves. If another description is

required, it is the indefinite of this infinite. The same insufflation

pushes it, carries it, raises it, upsets it, fills it with trouble and

light and with an ineffable sound, saturates it with electricity and

causes it to give suddenly discharges of thunder.

Music is the Verb of Germany. The German race, so much curbed as a

people, so emancipated as thinkers, sing with a sombre love. To sing

resembles a freeing from bondage. Music expresses that which cannot

be said, and on which it is impossible to be silent. Therefore is

Germany all music until she becomes all liberty. Luther's choral is

somewhat a Marseillaise. Everywhere singing clubs and singing tables.

In Swabia every year the fête of song, on the banks of the Neckar, in

the plains of Enslingen. The _Liedermusik_, of which Schubert's "Le Roi

des Aulnes" is the _chef-d'œuvre_, is part of German life. Song is for

Germany a breathing. It is by singing that she respires and conspires.

The note being the syllable of a kind of undefined universal language,

Germany's grand communication with the human race is made through

harmony,--an admirable commencement to unity. It is by the clouds that

the rains which fertilize the earth ascend from the sea; it is by music

that the ideas which go deep into souls pass out of Germany.

Therefore we may say that Germany's greatest poets are her musicians,

of which wonderful family Beethoven is the head.

Homer is the great Pelasgian; Æschylus, the great Hellene; Isaiah,

the great Hebrew; Juvenal, the great Roman; Dante, the great Italian;

Shakespeare, the great Englishman; Beethoven, the great German.

[Footnote 1: Preface of the Burgraves, 1843.]

CHAPTER V.

The Ex-"Good Taste," that other divine law which has for so long a time

weighed on Art, and which had succeeded in suppressing the Beautiful

for the benefit of the Pretty, the ancient criticism, not altogether

dead, like the ancient monarchy, prove, from their own point of view,

the same fault, exaggeration, in those sovereign men of genius whom we

have named above. They are exaggerated.

This is caused by the quantity of the infinite that they have in them.

In fact, they are not circumscribed. They contain something unknown.

Every reproach that is addressed to them might be addressed to

sphinxes. People reproach Homer for the carnage which fills his cavern,

the Iliad; Æschylus, for his monstrousness; Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Saint

Paul, for double meanings; Rabelais, for obscene nudity and venomous

ambiguity; Cervantes, for insidious laughter; Shakespeare, for his

subtlety; Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, for obscurity; John of Patmos

and Dante Alighieri for darkness.

None of those reproaches can be made to other minds very great, but

less great. Hesiod, Æsop, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Thucydides,

Anacreon, Theocritus, Titus Livius, Sallust, Cicero, Terence, Virgil,

Horace, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, La Fontaine, Beaumarchais, Voltaire,

have neither exaggeration nor darkness nor obscurity nor monstrousness.

What, then, fails them? _That_ which the others have.

_That_ is the Unknown.

_That_ is the Infinite.

If Corneille had "that," he would be the equal of Æschylus. If Milton

had "that," he would be the equal of Homer. If Molière had "that," he

would be the equal of Shakespeare.

It is the misfortune of Corneille that he mutilated and contracted the

old native tragedy in obedience to fixed rules. It is the misfortune of

Milton that by Puritan melancholy he excluded from his work the vast

Nature, the great Pan. It is Molière's failing that, out of dread of

Boileau, he quickly extinguishes the luminous style of the "Etourdi;"

that, for fear of the priests, he writes too few scenes like "The Poor"

in "Don Juan."

To give no occasion for attack is a negative perfection. It is fine to

be open to attack.

Indeed, dig out the meaning of those words, placed as masks to the

mysterious qualities of geniuses. Under obscurity, subtlety, and

darkness you find depth; under exaggeration, imagination; under

monstrousness, grandeur.

Therefore, in the upper region of poetry and thought there are Homer,

Job, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Lucretius, Juvenal, Tacitus, John of Patmos, Paul

of Damascus, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare.

These supreme men of genius are not a closed series. The author of All

adds to it a name when the wants of progress require it.

BOOK III.

ART AND SCIENCE.

CHAPTER I.

Many people in our day, readily merchants and often lawyers, say and

repeat, "Poetry is gone." It is almost as if they said, "There are no

more roses; spring has breathed its last; the sun has lost the habit

of rising; roam about all the fields of the earth, you will not find

a butterfly; there is no more light in the moon, and the nightingale

sings no more; the lion no longer roars; the eagle no longer soars;

the Alps and the Pyrenees are gone; there are no more lovely girls or

handsome young men; no one thinks any more of the graves; the mother no

longer loves her child; heaven is quenched; the human heart is dead."

If it was permitted to mix the contingent with the eternal, it would be

rather the contrary which would prove true. Never have the faculties of

the human soul, investigated and enriched by the mysterious excavation

of revolutions, been deeper and more lofty.

And wait a little; give time for the realization of the acme of social

salvation,--gratuitous and compulsory education. How long will it

take? A quarter of a century; and then imagine the incalculable sum of

intellectual development that this single word contains: every one can

read! The multiplication of readers is the multiplication of loaves.

On the day when Christ created that symbol, he caught a glimpse of

printing. His miracle is this marvel. Behold a book. I will nourish

with it five thousand souls, a hundred thousand souls, a million

souls,--all humanity. In the action of Christ bringing forth the

loaves, there is Gutenberg bringing forth books. One sower heralds the

other.

What is the human race since the origin of centuries? A reader. For a

long time he has spelt; he spells yet. Soon he will read.

This infant, six thousand years old, has been at school. Where? In

Nature. At the beginning, having no other book, he spelt the universe.

He has had his primary teaching of the clouds, of the firmament, of

meteors, flowers, animals, forests, seasons, phenomena. The fisherman

of Ionia studies the wave; the shepherd of Chaldæa spells the star.

Then the first books came. Sublime progress! The book is vaster yet

than that grand scene, the world; for to the fact it adds the idea. If

anything is greater than God seen in the sun, it is God seen in Homer.

The universe without the book is science taking its first steps; the

universe with the book is the ideal making its appearance,--therefore

immediate modification in the human phenomenon. Where there had been

only force, power reveals itself. The ideal applied to real facts is

civilization. Poetry written and sung begins its work, magnificent and

efficient deduction of the poetry only seen. A striking statement to

make,--science was dreaming; poetry acts. With the sound of the lyre,

the thinker drives away brutality.

We shall return later on to this power of the book; we do not insist on

it at present; that power blazes forth. Now, many writers, few readers;

such has the world been up to this day. But a change is at hand.

Compulsory education is a recruiting of souls for light. Henceforth

every progress of the human race will be accomplished by the literary

legion. The diameter of the moral and ideal good corresponds always to

the opening of intelligences. In proportion to the worth of the brain

is the worth of the heart

The book is the tool to work this transformation. A constant supply of

light, that is what humanity requires. Reading is nutriment. Thence

the importance of the school, everywhere adequate to civilization. The

human race is at last on the point of stretching open the book. The

immense human Bible, composed of all the prophets, of all the poets, of

all the philosophers, is about to shine and blaze under the focus of

this enormous luminous lens, compulsory education.

Humanity reading is humanity knowing.

What, then, is the meaning of that nonsense, "Poetry is gone"? We might

say, on the contrary, "Poetry is coming!" For he who says "poetry"

says "philosophy" and "light." Now, the reign of the book commences;

the school is its purveyor. Increase the reader, you increase the

book,--not, certainly, in intrinsic value; that remains what it was;

but in efficient power: it influences where it had no influence. The

souls become its subjects for good purpose. It was but beautiful; it is

useful.

Who would venture to deny this? The circle of readers enlarging, the

circle of books read will increase. Now, the want of reading being a

train of powder, once lighted it will not stop; and this, combined with

the simplification of hand-labour by machinery, and with the increased

leisure of man, the body less fatigued leaving intelligence more free,

vast appetites for thought will spring up in all brains; the insatiable

thirst for knowledge and meditation will become more and more the human

preoccupation; low places will be deserted for high places,--a natural

ascent for every growing intelligence. People will quit Faublas to read

"Orestes." There they will taste greatness; and once they have tasted

it, they will never be satiated. They will devour the beautiful because

the refinement of minds augments in proportion to their force; and a

day will come when the fulness of civilization making itself manifest,

those summits, almost desert for ages, and haunted solely by the

_élite_,--Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare,--will be crowded with souls

seeking their nourishment on the lofty peaks.

CHAPTER II.

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

of essence. Nature and art are the two sides 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 theorem, that marvel fitting

everything, is included in poetry not less than in algebra. Nature

plus humanity, raised to the second power, gives art That is the

intellectual binomial theorem. Now replace this A + B by the number

special to each great artist and each great poet, and you will have,

in its multiple physiognomy and in its strict total, each of the

creations of the human mind. What more beautiful than the variety of

_chefs-d'œuvre_ resulting from the unity of law. Poetry like science

has an abstract root; out of that science evokes the _chef-d'œuvre_ of

metal, wood, fire, or air,--machine, ship, locomotive, æroscaph; out

of that poetry evokes the _chef-d'œuvre_ of flesh and blood,--Iliad,

Canticle of Canticles, Romancero, Divine Comedy, "Macbeth." Nothing so

starts and prolongs the shock felt by the thinker as those mysterious

exfoliations of abstraction into realities in the double region, the

one positive, the other infinite, of human thought. A region double,

and nevertheless one; the infinite is a precision. The profound word

_number_ is at the base of man's thought. It is, to our intelligence,

elemental; it has a harmonious as well as a mathematical signification.

Number reveals itself to art by rhythm, which is the beating of the

heart of the Infinite. In rhythm, law of order, God is felt. A verse is

a gathering like a crowd; its feet take the cadenced step of a legion.

Without number, no science; without number, no poetry. The strophe,

the epic poem, the drama, the riotous palpitation of man, the bursting

forth of love, the irradiation of the imagination, all this cloud with

its flashes, the passion,--all is lorded over by the mysterious word

number, even as geometry and arithmetic. Ajax, Hector, Hecuba, the

seven chiefs before Thebes, Œdipus, Ugolino, Messalina, Lear and

Priam, Romeo, Desdemona, Richard III., Pantagruel, the Cid, Alcestes,

all belong to it, as well as conic sections and the differential and

integral calculus. It starts from two and two make four, and ascends to

the region where the lightning sits.

Yet, between art and science, let us note a radical difference. Science

may be brought to perfection; art, not.

Why?

CHAPTER III.

Among human things, and inasmuch as it is a human thing, art is a

strange exception.

The beauty of everything here below lies in the power of reaching

perfection. Everything is endowed with that property. To increase, to

augment, to win strength, to march forward, to be worth more to-day

than yesterday,--that is at once glory and life. The beauty of art lies

in not being susceptible of improvement.

Let us insist on these essential ideas, already touched on in some of

the preceding pages.

A _chef-d'œuvre_ exists once for all. The first poet who arrives,

arrives at the summit. You will ascend after him, as high, not higher.

Ah, you call yourself Dante! well; but that one calls himself Homer.

Progress, goal constantly displaced, halting-place forever varying, has

a shifting horizon. Not so with the ideal.

Now, progress is the motive power of science; the ideal is the

generator of art.

Thus is explained why perfection is the characteristic of science, and

not of art.

A savant may outlustre a savant; a poet never throws a poet into the

shade.

Art progresses after its own fashion. It shifts its ground like

science; but its successive creations, containing the immutable, live,

while the admirable attempts of science, which are, and can be nothing

but combinations of the contingent, obliterate each other.

The relative is in science; the positive is in art. The _chef-d'œuvre_

of to-day will be the _chef d'œuvre_ of to-morrow. Does Shakespeare

interfere in any way with Sophocles? Does Molière take anything from

Plautus? Even when he borrows Amphitryon he does not take him from him.

Does Figaro blot out Sancho Panza? Does Cordelia suppress Antigone? No.

Poets do not climb over each other. The one is not the stepping-stone

of the other. They rise up alone, without any other lever than

themselves. They do not tread their equal under foot. Those who are

first in the field respect the old ones. They succeed, they do not

replace each other. The beautiful does not drive away the beautiful.

Neither wolves nor _chefs-d'œuvre_ devour each other.

Saint-Simon says (I quote from memory): "There has been through the

whole winter but one cry of admiration for M. de Cambray's book, when

suddenly appeared M. de Meaux's book, which devoured it." If Fénélon's

book had been Saint-Simon's, the book of Bossuet would not have

devoured it.

Shakespeare is not above Dante, Molière is not above Aristophanes,

Calderon is not above Euripides, the Divine Comedy is not above

Genesis, the Romancero is not above the Odyssey, Sirius is not above

Arcturus. Sublimity is equality.

The human mind is the infinite possible. The _chefs-d'œuvre_, immense

worlds, are hatched within it unceasingly, and last forever. No pushing

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.

Art, taken as art, and in itself, goes neither forward nor backward.

The transformations of poetry are but the undulations of the

Beautiful, useful to human movement. Human movement,--another side of

the question that we certainly do not overlook, and that we shall

attentively examine farther on. Art is not susceptible of intrinsic

progress. From Phidias to Rembrandt there is onward movement, but not

progress. The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel are absolutely nothing to

the metopes of the Parthenon. Retrace your steps as much as you like,

from the palace of Versailles to the castle of Heidelberg, from the

castle of Heidelberg to Notre-Dame of Paris, from Notre-Dame of Paris

to the Alhambra, from the Alhambra to St. Sophia, from St. Sophia to

the Coliseum, from the Coliseum to the Propylæons, from the Propylæons

to the Pyramids; you may recede into ages, you do not recede in art.

The Pyramids and the Iliad stand on the fore plan.

Masterpieces have a level, the same for all,--the absolute.

Once the absolute reached, all is said. That cannot be excelled. The

eye can bear but a certain quantity of dazzling light.

Thence comes the assurance of poets. They lean on posterity with a

lofty confidence. "Exegi monumentum," says Horace. And on that occasion

he insults bronze. "Plaudite, cives," says Plautus. Corneille, at

sixty-five years, wins the love (a tradition in the Escoubleau family)

of the very young Marquise de Contades, by promising her to send her

name down to posterity:--

"Chez cette race nouvelle,

Où j'aurai quelque crédit,

Vous ne passerez pour belle

Qu'autant que je l'aurai dit."

In the poet and in the artist there is the infinite. It is this

ingredient, the infinite, which gives to this kind of genius the

irreducible grandeur.

This amount of the infinite in art is not inherent to progress. It may

have, and it certainly has, duties to fulfil toward progress, but it is

not dependent on it. It is dependent on no perfections which may result

from the future, on no transformation of language, on no death or birth

of idioms. It has within itself the immeasurable and the innumerable;

it cannot be subdued by any occurrence; it is as pure, as complete,

as sidereal, as divine in the heart of barbarism as in the heart of

civilization. It is the Beautiful, diverse according to the men of

genius, but always equal to itself. Supreme.

Such is the law, scarcely known, of Art.

CHAPTER IV.

Science is different.

The relative, which governs it, leaves its mark on it; and these

successive stamps of the relative, more and more resembling the real,

constitute the movable certainty of man.

In science, certain things have been masterpieces which are so no more.

The hydraulic machine of Marly was a _chef-d'œuvre._

Science seeks perpetual movement. She has found it; it is itself

perpetual motion.

Science is continually moving in the benefit it confers.

Everything stirs up in science, everything changes, everything is

constantly renewed. Everything denies, destroys, creates, replaces

everything. That which was accepted yesterday is put again under the

millstone to-day. The colossal machine, Science, never rests. It is

never satisfied; it is everlastingly thirsting for improvement, which

the absolute ignores. Vaccination is a problem, the lightning-rod is a

problem. Jenner may have erred, Franklin may have deceived himself; let

us go on seeking. This agitation is grand. Science is restless around

man; it has its own reasons for this restlessness. Science plays in

progress the part of utility. Let us worship this magnificent servant.

Science makes discoveries, art composes works. Science is an

acquirement of man, science is a ladder; one savant overtops the other.

Poetry is a lofty soaring.

Do you want examples? They abound. Here is one,--the first which occurs

to our mind.

Jacob Metzu, scientifically Metius, discovers the telescope by chance,

as Newton did gravitation and Christopher Columbus, America. Let us

open a parenthesis: there is no chance in the creation of "Orestes"

or of "Paradise Lost." A _chef-d'œuvre_ is the offspring of will.

After Metzu comes Galileo, who improves the discovery of Metzu; then

Kepler, who improves on the improvement of Galileo; then Descartes,

who, although going somewhat astray in taking a concave glass for

eyepiece instead of a convex one, fructifies the improvement of Kepler;

then the Capuchin Reita, who rectifies the reversing of objects; then

Huyghens, who makes a great step by placing the two convex glasses on

the focus of the objective; and in less than fifty years, from 1610 to

1659, during the short interval which separates the "Nuncius Sidereus"

of Galileo from the "Oculus Eliæ et Enoch" of Father Reita, behold the

original inventor, Metzu, obliterated. And it is constantly the same in

science.

Vegetius was Count of Constantinople; but that is no obstacle to his

tactics being forgotten,--forgotten like the strategy of Polybius,

forgotten like the strategy of Folard. The pig's-head of the phalanx

and the pointed order of the legion have for a moment re-appeared,

two hundred years ago, in the wedge of Gustavus Adolphus; but in our

days, when there are no more pikemen as in the fourteenth century,

nor lansquenets as in the seventeenth, the ponderous triangular

attack, which was in other times the base of all tactics, is replaced

by a crowd of Zouaves charging with the bayonet. Some day, sooner

perhaps than people think, the charge with the bayonet will be itself

superseded by peace, at first European, by-and-by universal, and then

a whole science--the military science--will vanish away. For that

science, its improvement lies in its disappearance.

Science goes on unceasingly erasing itself,--fruitful erasures. Who

knows now what is the "Homœomeria" of Anaximenes, which perhaps

belongs in reality to Anaxagoras? Cosmography is notably amended

since the time when this same Anaxagoras told Pericles that the

sun was almost as large as the Peloponnesus. Many planets, and

satellites of planets, have been discovered since the four stars of

Medici. Entomology has made some advance since the time when it was

asserted that the scarabee was somewhat of a god and a cousin of

the sun,--firstly, on account of the thirty toes on its feet, which

correspond to the thirty days of the solar month; secondly, because the

scarabee is without a female, like the sun; and when Saint Clement, of

Alexandria, out-bidding Plutarch, made the remark that the scarabee,

like the sun, passes six months in the earth and six months under it.

Do you wish to have the proof of this?--refer to the "Stromates,"

paragraph IV. Scholasticism itself, chimerical as it is, gives up the

"Holy Meadow" of Moschus, laughs at the "Holy Ladder" of John Climacus,

and is ashamed of the century in which Saint Bernard, adding fuel to

the stake which the Viscounts of Campania wished to put out, called

Arnaud de Bresse "a man with the head of the dove and the tail of the

scorpion." The cardinal virtues are no longer the law in anthropology.

The _steyardes_ of the great Arnauld are decayed. However uncertain is

meteorology, it is far from discussing now, as it did in the twelfth

century, whether a rain which saves an army from dying of thirst is

due to the Christian prayers of the Melitine legion or to the Pagan

intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. The astrologer, Marcian Posthumus,

was for Jupiter; Tertullian was for the Melitine legion. No one stood

in favour of the cloud and of the wind. Locomotion, if we go from the

antique chariot of Laïus to the railway, passing by the _patache_, the

track-boat, the _turgotine_, the diligence, and the mail, has made

some progress indeed. The time is gone by for the famous journey from

Dijon to Paris, lasting a month; and we could not understand to-day

the amazement of Henry IV. asking of Joseph Scaliger, "Is it true,

Monsieur l'Escale, that you have been from Paris to Dijon without

relieving your bowels?" Micrography is now far beyond Leuwenhoeck,

who was himself far beyond Swammerdam. Look at the point to which

spermatology and ovology are arrived to-day, and recollect Mariana

reproaching Arnaud de Villeneuve, who discovered alcohol and the oil

of turpentine, with the strange crime of having tried human generation

in a pumpkin. Grand-Jean de Fouchy, the not over-credulous life

secretary of the Academy of Sciences, a hundred years ago, would have

shaken his head if any one had told him that from the solar spectrum

one would pass to the igneous spectrum, then to the stellar spectrum,

and that by the aid of the spectrum of flames and of the spectrum of

stars, would be discovered an entirely new method of grouping the

heavenly bodies, and what might be called the chemical constellations.

Orffyreus, who destroyed his machine rather than allow the Landgrave

of Hesse to see inside it,--Orffyreus, so admired by S'Gravesande, the

author of the "Matheseos Universalis Elements,"--would be laughed at

by our mechanicians. A village veterinary surgeon would not inflict

on horses the remedy with which Galen treated the indigestions of

Marcus Aurelius. What is the opinion of the eminent specialists of

our times, Desmarres at the head of them, respecting the learned

discoveries of the seventeenth century by the Bishop of Titiopolis in

the nasal chambers? The mummies have got on; M. Gannal makes them

differently, if not better, than the Taricheutes, the Paraschistes,

and the Cholchytes made them in the days of Herodotus,--the first by

washing the body, the second by opening it, and the third by embalming

it. Five hundred years before Jesus Christ it was perfectly scientific,

when a king of Mesopotamia had a daughter possessed by the devil, to

send to Thebes for a god to cure her. It is not exactly our way to

treat epilepsy. In the same way have we given up expecting the kings of

France to cure scrofula.

In 371, under Valens, son of Gratian le Cordier, the judges summoned

to their bar a table accused of sorcery. This table had an accomplice

named Hilarius. Hilarius confessed the crime. Ammianus Marcellinus has

preserved for us his confession, received by Zosimus, count and fiscal

advocate:--

"Construximus, magnifici judices, ad cortinæ similitudinem

Delphicæ infaustam hanc mensulam quam videtis; movimus

tandem."

Hilarius was beheaded. Who was his accuser? A learned geometrician and

magician,--the same who advised Valens to decapitate all those whose

names began with a _Theod._ To-day you may call yourself Theodore, and

even make a table turn, without the fear of a geometrician causing your

head to be cut off.

One would very much astonish Solon the son of Execestidas, Zeno the

stoic, Antipater, Eudoxus, Lysis of Tarentum, Cebes, Menedemus, Plato,

Epicurus, Aristotle, and Epimenides, if one were to tell Solon that

it is not the moon which regulates the year; to Zeno, that it is

not proved that the soul is divided into eight parts; to Antipater,

that the heaven is not formed of five circles; to Eudoxus, that it

is not certain that between the Egyptians embalming the dead, the

Romans burning them, and the Pæonians throwing them into ponds, the

Pæonians are those who are right; to Lysis of Tarentum, that it is not

exact that the sight is a hot vapour; to Cebes, that it is false that

the principle of elements is the oblong triangle and the isosceles

triangle; to Menedemus, that it is not true that in order to know

the secret bad intentions of men it suffices to stick on one's head

an Arcadian hat with the twelve signs of the zodiac; to Plato, that

sea-water does not cure all diseases; to Epicurus, that matter is

divisible _ad infinitum_; to Aristotle, that the fifth element has not

an orbicular movement, for the reason that there is no fifth element;

to Epimenides, that the plague cannot be infallibly got rid of by

letting black and white sheep go at random, and sacrificing to unknown

gods hidden in the places where the sheep happen to stop.

If you should try to hint to Pythagoras how improbable it is that he

should have been wounded at the siege of Troy,--he Pythagoras, by

Menelaus, two hundred and seven years before his birth,--he would reply

that the fact is incontestable, and that it is proved by the fact that

he perfectly recognizes, as having already seen it, the shield of

Menelaus suspended under the statue of Apollo at Branchides, although

entirely rotten, except the ivory face; that at the siege of Troy

his own name was Euphorbus, and that before being Euphorbus he was

Æthalides, son of Mercury, and that after having been Euphorbus, he was

Hermotimus, then Pyrrhus, fisherman at Delos, then Pythagoras; that it

is all evident and clear,--as clear as it is clear that he was present

the same day and the same minute at Metapontum and Crotona, as evident

as it is evident that by writing with blood on a mirror exposed to the

moon, one may see in the moon what he wrote on the mirror; and lastly,

that he is Pythagoras, living at Metapontum, in the Street of the

Muses, the author of the multiplication-table, and of the square of the

hypothenuse, the greatest of all mathematicians, the father of exact

science, and that you, you are an imbecile.

Chrysippus of Tarsus, who lived about the hundred and thirtieth

Olympiad, forms an era in science. This philosopher, the same who

died, literally died, of laughing on seeing a donkey eat figs out

of a silver basin, had studied everything, gone into the depth of

everything, written seven hundred and five volumes, of which three

hundred and eleven were on dialectics, without having dedicated a

single one to a king,--a fact which astounds Diogenes Laërtius. He

condensed in his brain all human knowledge. His contemporaries named

him Light. Chrysippus signifying "golden horse," they said that he had

got detached from the chariot of the sun. He had taken for device "To

Me." He knew innumerable things,--among others these: The earth is

flat. The universe is round and limited. The best food for man is human

flesh. The community of women is the base of the social order. The

father ought to espouse his daughter. There is a word which kills the

serpent, a word which tames the bear, a word which arrests the flight

of eagles, and a word which drives the oxen from the beanfield. By

pronouncing from hour to hour the three names of the Egyptian Trinity,

Amon-Mouth-Khons, Andron of Argos contrived to cross the deserts of

Libya without drinking. Coffins ought not to be manufactured of cypress

wood, the sceptre of Jupiter being made of that wood. Themistoclea,

priestess of Delphi, had given birth to children, and yet had remained

a virgin. The just alone having authority to swear, it is by equity

that Jupiter has received the name of The Swearer. The phœnix of

Arabia lives in the fire. The earth is carried by the air as by a car.

The sun drinks from the ocean, and the moon from the rivers. For these

reasons the Athenians raised a statue to him on the Ceramicus, with

this inscription: "To Chrysippus, who knew everything."

About the same time, Sophocles wrote "Œdipus Rex."

And Aristotle believed in the story about Andron of Argos, and Plato in

the social principle of the community of women, and Gorgisippus in the

earth being flat; and Epicurus admitted as a fact that the earth was

supported by the air, and Hermodamantes that magic words mastered the

ox, the eagle, the bear, and the serpent; and Echecrates believed in

the immaculate maternity of Themistoclea, and Pythagoras in Jupiter's

sceptre made of cypress wood, and Posidonius in the ocean affording

drink to the sun and in the rivers quenching the thirst of the moon,

and Pyrrho in the phœnix existing in fire.

Excepting in this particular, Pyrrho was a sceptic. He made up for his

belief in that phœnix by doubting everything else.

All that long groping is science. Cuvier was mistaken yesterday,

Lagrange the day before yesterday, Leibnitz before Lagrange,

Gassendi before Leibnitz, Cardan before Gassendi, Cornelius Agrippa

before Cardan, Averroes before Agrippa, Plotinus before Averroes,

Artemidorus Daldian before Plotinus, Posidonius before Artemidorus,

Democritus before Posidonius, Empedocles before Democritus, Carneades

before Empedocles, Plato before Carneades, Pherecydes before Plato,

Pittacus before Pherecydes, Thales before Pittacus, and before Thales

Zoroaster, and before Zoroaster Sanchoniathon, and before Sanchoniathon

Hermes,--Hermes, which signifies science, as Orpheus signifies art. Oh,

wonderful marvel, this heap swarming with dreams which engender the

real! Oh, sacred errors, slow, blind, and sainted mothers of truth!

Some savants, such as Kepler, Euler, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Arago, have

brought into science nothing but light; they are rare.

At times science is an obstacle to science. The savants give way to

scruples and cavil at study. Pliny is scandalized at Hipparchus;

Hipparchus, with the aid of an imperfect astrolabe, tries to count the

stars and to name them,--an impropriety toward God, says Pliny ("Ausus

rem Deo improbam").

To count the stars is to commit a wickedness toward God. This

accusation, started by Pliny against Hipparchus, is continued by the

Inquisition against Campanella.

Science is the asymptote of truth. It approaches unceasingly and never

touches. Nevertheless it has every greatness. It has will, precision,

enthusiasm, profound attention, penetration, shrewdness, strength,

patience by concatenation, permanent watching for phenomena, the ardour

of progress, and even flashes of bravery,--witness La Pérouse; witness

Pilastre des Rosiers; witness John Franklin; witness Victor Jacquemont;

witness Livingstone: witness Mazet; witness, at this very hour, Nadar.

But science is series. It proceeds by tests heaped one above the other,

and the thick obscurity of which rises slowly to the level of truth.

Nothing like it in art. Art is not successive. All art is _ensemble._

Let us sum up these few pages.

Hippocrates is outrun, Archimedes is outrun, Aratus is outrun,

Avicennus is outrun, Paracelsus is outrun, Nicholas Flamel is outrun,

Ambrose Paré is outrun, Vésale is outrun, Copernicus is outrun, Galileo

is outrun, Newton is outrun, Clairaut is outrun, Lavoisier is outrun,

Montgolfier is outrun, Laplace is outrun. Pindar not, Phidias not.

Pascal the savant is outrun; Pascal the writer is not.

We no longer teach the astronomy of Ptolemy, the geography of Strabo,

the climatology of Cleostratus, the zoology of Pliny, the algebra

of Diophantus, the medicine of Tribunus, the surgery of Ronsil, the

dialectics of Sphœrus, the myology of Steno, the uranology of

Tatius, the stenography of Trithemius, the pisciculture of Sebastien

de Medici, the arithmetic of Stifels, the geometry of Tartaglia, the

chronology of Scaliger, the meteorology of Stoffler, the anatomy of

Gassendi, the pathology of Fernel, the jurisprudence of Robert Barmne,

the agriculture of Quesnay, the hydrography of Bouguer, the nautics

of Bourdé de Villehuet, the ballistics of Gribeauval, the veterinary

practice of Garsault, the architectonics of Desgodets, the botany of

Tournefort, the scholasticism of Abailard, the politics of Plato, the

mechanics of Aristotle, the physics of Descartes, the theology of

Stillingfleet. We taught yesterday, we teach to-day, we shall teach

to-morrow, we shall teach forever, the "Sing, goddess, the anger of

Achilles."

Poetry lives a potential life. The sciences may extend its sphere, not

increase its power. Homer had but four winds for his tempests; Virgil

who has twelve, Dante who has twenty-four, Milton who has thirty-two,

do not make their storms grander.

And it is probable that the tempests of Orpheus were as beautiful as

those of Homer, although Orpheus had, to raise the waves, but two

winds, the Phœnicias and the Aparctias,--that is to say, the wind

of the south and the wind of the north (often confounded, let us say

in passing, with the Argestes, westerly summer wind, and the Libs, the

westerly winter wind).

Some religions die away; and when they disappear, they bequeath a great

artist to other religions coming after them. Serpio makes for the Venus

Aversative of Athens a vase that the Holy Virgin accepts from Venus,

and which to-day is used in the baptistery of Notre Dame at Gaëta.

Oh, eternity of art!

A man, a corpse, a shade, from the depth of the past, through the long

ages, lays hold of you.

I remember, when a youth, one day at Romorantin, in an old house we had

there, under a vine arbour open to air and light, I espied a book on

a plank, the only book there was in the house,--"De Rerum Natura," of

Lucretius. My professors of rhetoric had spoken very ill of it, which

was a recommendation to me. I opened the book. It was at that moment

about midday. I came on these powerful and calm lines:--

"Religion does not consist in turning unceasingly toward

the veiled stone, nor in approaching all the altars, nor in

throwing one's self prostrated on the ground, nor in raising

the hands before the habitations of gods, nor deluging the

temples with the blood of beasts, nor in heaping vows upon

vows, but in beholding all with a peaceful soul." [1]

I stopped in thought; then I began to read again. Some moments

afterward I could see nothing, hear nothing; I was immersed in the

poet. At the dinner-hour I made a sign that I was not hungry; and at

night, when the sun set, and when the herds were returning to their

sheds, I was still in the same place reading the wonderful book; and

by my side my father, with his white locks, seated on the door-sill of

the low room, where his sword hung on a nail, indulging my prolonged

reading, was gently calling the sheep; and they came in turn to eat a

little salt in the hollow of his hand.

[Footnote 1:

Nec pietas ulla est, velatum saepe videri

Vertier ad lapidem, atque omnes accedere ad aras.

Nec procumbere humi prostratum, et pandere palmas

Ante deum delubra, neque aras sanguine multo

Spargere quadrupedum, nec votis nectere vota;

Sed mage placata posse omnia mente tueri.

]

CHAPTER V.

Poetry cannot grow less. Why? Because it cannot grow greater.

These words, so often used, even by the lettered, "decline," "revival,"

show to what an extent the essence of art is ignored. Superficial

intellects, easily becoming pedantic, take for revival and decline some

effects of juxtaposition, some optical mirages, some exigencies of

language, some ebb and flow of ideas, all the vast movement of creation

and thought, the result of which is universal art. This movement is the

very work of the infinite passing through the human brain.

Phenomena are only seen from the culminating point; and seen from the

culminating point, poetry is immovable. There is neither rise nor

decline in art. Human genius is always at its full; all the rain of

heaven adds not a drop of water to the ocean. A tide is an illusion;

water falls on one shore only to rise on another. You take oscillations

for diminutions. To say, "There will be no more poets," is to say,

"There will be no more ebbing."

Poetry is element. It is irreducible, incorruptible, and refractory.

Like the sea, it says each time all it has to say; then it re-begins

with a tranquil majesty, and with the inexhaustible variety which

belongs only to unity. This diversity in what seems monotonous is the

marvel of immensity.

Wave upon wave, billow after billow, foam behind foam, movement and

again movement: the Iliad is moving away, the Romancero comes; the

Bible sinks, the Koran surges up; after the aquilon Pindar comes the

hurricane Dante. Does everlasting poetry repeat itself? No. It is the

same and it is different. Same breath, another sound.

Do you take the Cid for an imitation of Ajax? Do you take Charlemagne

for a plagiary of Agamemnon? "There is nothing new under the sun."

"Your novelty is the repetition of the old," etc. Oh, the strange

process of criticism! Then art is but a series of counterfeits!

Thersites has a thief, Falstaff. Orestes has an imitator, Hamlet. The

Hippogriff is the jay of Pegasus. All these poets! A crew of cheats!

They pillage each other, _voilà tout!_ Inspiration and swindling

compounded. Cervantes plunders Apuleius; Alcestes cheats Timon of

Athens. The Smynthean wood is the forest of Bondy. Out of which pocket

comes the hand of Shakespeare? Out of the pocket of Æschylus.

No! neither decline, nor revival, nor plagiary, nor repetition, nor

imitation: identity of heart, difference of mind,--that is all. Each

great artist (we have said so already) appropriates; stamps art anew

after his own image. Hamlet is Orestes after the effigy of Shakespeare.

Figaro is Scapin, with the effigy of Beaumarchais. Grangousier is

Silenus, after the effigy of Rabelais.

Everything re-begins with the new poet, and at the same time nothing

is interrupted. Each new genius is abyss, yet there is tradition.

Tradition from abyss to abyss,--such is, in art as in the firmament,

the mystery; and men of genius communicate by their effluvia, like the

stars. What have they in common? Nothing,--everything.

From that pit that is called Ezekiel to that precipice that is called

Juvenal, there is no solution of continuity for the thinker. Lean over

this anathema, or over that satire, and the same vertigo is whirling

around both.

The Apocalypse reverberates on the polar sea of ice, and you have that

aurora borealis, the Niebelungen. The Edda replies to the Vedas.

Hence this, our starting-point, to which we are returning: art is not

perfectible.

No possible decline for poetry, no possible improvement. We lose our

time when we say, "Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade." Art is subject

neither to diminution nor enlarging. Art has its seasons, its clouds,

its eclipses, even its stains, which are splendours, perhaps its

interpositions of sudden opacity for which it is not responsible; but

at the end it is always with the same intensity that it brings light

into the human soul. It remains the same furnace giving the same

brilliancy. Homer does not grow cold.

Let us insist, moreover, on this, inasmuch as the emulation of minds is

the life of the beautiful, O poets, the first rank is ever free. Let

us remove everything which may disconcert daring minds and break their

wings: art is a species of valour. To deny that men of genius yet to

come may be peers with men of genius of the past would be to deny the

ever-working power of God.

Yes, and often do we return, and shall return again, to this necessary

encouragement. Emulation is almost creation. Yes, those men of genius

that cannot be surpassed may be equalled.

How?

By being different.

BOOK IV.

THE ANCIENT SHAKESPEARE.

CHAPTER I.

Æschylus is the ancient Shakespeare. Let us return to Æschylus. He is

the grandsire of the stage.

This book would be incomplete if Æschylus had not his separate place in

it.

A man whom we do not know how to class in his own century, so little

does he belong to it, being at the same time so much behind it and so

much in advance of it, the Marquis de Mirabeau, that queer customer as

a philanthropist, but a very rare thinker after all, had a library,

in the two comers of which he had had carved a dog and a she-goat, in

remembrance of Socrates, who swore by the dog, and of Zeno, who swore

by the goat. His library presented this peculiarity: on one side he had

Hesiod, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Pindar,

Theocritus, Anacreon, Theophrastus, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Cicero Titus

Livius, Seneca, Persius, Lucan, Terence, Horace, Ovid, Propertius,

Tibullus, Virgil, and underneath could be read, engraved in letters of

gold, "Amo;" on the other side, he had Æschylus alone, and underneath,

this word, "Timeo."

Æschylus, in reality, is formidable. He cannot be approached without

trembling. He has magnitude and mystery. Barbarous, extravagant,

emphatic, antithetical, bombastic, absurd,--such is the judgment passed

on him by the official rhetoric of the present day. This rhetoric will

be changed. Æschylus is one of those men whom superficial criticism

scoffs at or disdains, but whom the true critic approaches with a sort

of sacred fear. The dread of genius is the first step toward taste.

In the true critic there is always a poet, even when in a latent state.

Whoever does not comprehend Æschylus is irremediably an ordinary mind.

Intellects may be tried on Æschylus.

The Drama is a strange form of art. Its diameter measures from the

"Seven against Thebes" to the "Philosopher Without Knowing it," and

from Brid'oison to Œdipus. Thyestes forms part of it, Turcaret also.

If you wish to define it, put into your definition Electra and Marton.

The drama is disconcerting. It baffles the weak. This comes from

its ubiquity. The drama has every horizon. You may then imagine its

capacity. The epic poem has been blended in the drama, and the result

is this marvellous literary novelty, which is at the same time a social

power,--the romance.

Bronze, amalgamation of the epic, lyric, and dramatic,--such is the

romance. "Don Quixote" is iliad, ode, and comedy.

Such is the expansion possible to the drama.

The drama is the largest recipient of art. God and Satan are there;

witness Job.

To look at art in the absolute point of view, the characteristic of the

epic poem is grandeur; the characteristic of the drama is immensity.

The immense differs from the great in this, that it excludes, if

it chooses, dimension; that "it is beyond measure," as the common

saying is; and that it can, without losing beauty, lose proportion.

It is harmonious as is the Milky Way. It is by this characteristic of

immensity that the drama commences, four thousand years ago, in Job,

whom we have just named again, and two thousand two hundred years

ago, in Æschylus; it is by this characteristic that it continues in

Shakespeare. What personages does Æschylus take? Volcanoes,--one of

his lost tragedies is called "Etna;" then the mountains,--Caucasus,

with Prometheus; then the sea,--the Ocean on its dragon, and the waves,

the Oceanides; then the vast East,--the Persians; then the bottomless

darkness,--the Eumenides. Æschylus proves the man by the giant. In

Shakespeare the drama approaches nearer to humanity, but remains

colossal. Macbeth seems a polar Atrides. You see that the drama opens

Nature, then opens the soul; there is no limit to this horizon. The

drama is life; and life is everything. The epic poem can be only great;

the drama must necessarily be immense.

This immensity, it is Æschylus throughout, and Shakespeare throughout.

The immense, in Æschylus, is a will. It is also a temperament. Æschylus

invents the buskin which makes the man taller, and the mask which

enlarges the voice. His metaphors are enormous. He calls Xerxes "the

man with the dragon eyes." The sea, which is a plain for so many

poets, is for Æschylus "a forest,"--ἄλσος. These magnifying figures,

peculiar to the highest poets, and to them only, are true; they ace

the true emanations of revery. Æschylus excites you to the very brink

of convulsion. His tragical effects are like blows struck at the

spectators. When the furies of Æschylus make their appearance, pregnant

women miscarry. Pollux, the lexicographer, affirms that there were

children taken with epilepsy and who died, on looking at those faces of

serpents and at those torches violently tossed about. That is evidently

"going beyond the aim." Even the grace of Æschylus, that strange and

sovereign grace of which we have spoken, has a Cyclopean look. It is

Polyphemus smiling. At times the smile is formidable, and seems to hide

an obscure rage. Put, by way of example, in the presence of Helen,

those two poets, Homer and Æschylus. Homer is at once conquered and

admires. His admiration is forgiveness. Æschylus is moved, but remains

grave. He calls Helen "fatal flower;" then he adds, "soul as calm as

the tranquil sea." One day Shakespeare will say, "False as the wave."