Everything can be written. Paper is patience itself. Last year a grave

review printed this: "Homer is now going out of fashion."

The judgment passed on the philosopher, on the artist, on the poet is

completed by the portrait of the man.

Byron has killed his tailor. Molière has married his own daughter.

Shakespeare has "loved" Lord Southampton.

"Et pour voir à la fin tous les vices ensemble,

Le parterre en tumulte a demandé l'auteur."[5]

That _ensemble_ of all vices is Beaumarchais.

As for Byron, we mention this name a second time; he is worth the

trouble. Read "Glenarvon," and listen, on the subject of Byron's

abominations, to Lady Bl---, whom he had loved, and who, of course,

resented it.

Phidias was a procurer; Socrates was an apostate and a thief,

_décrocheur de manteaux_; Spinosa was a renegade, and sought to

obtain legacies by undue influence; Dante was a peculator; Michael

Angelo was cudgelled by Julius II., and quietly put up with it for

the sake of five hundred crowns; D'Aubigné was a courtier sleeping in

the water-closet of the king, ill-tempered when he was not paid, and

for whom Henri IV. was too kind; Diderot was a libertine; Voltaire a

miser; Milton was venal,--he received a thousand pounds sterling for

his apology, in Latin, of regicide: "Defensio pro se," etc. Who says

these things? Who relates these histories? That good person, your old

fawning friend, O tyrants, your ancient comrade, O traitors, your old

auxiliary, O bigots, your ancient comforter, O imbeciles!--calumny.

[Footnote 1: This coarse flatterer of the vulgar herd.]

[Footnote 2: To me they dare to prefer Crébillon the barbarian.]

[Footnote 3: The passage in Saumaise is curious and worth the trouble

of being transcribed:--

Unus ejus Agamemnon obscuritate superat quantum est

librorum sacrorum cum suis hebraismis et syrianismis et

totâ hellenisticâ supellectile vel farragine.

--_De Re

Hellenisticâ_, p. 38, ep. dedic.]

[Footnote 4: Letter CV.]

[Footnote 5:

"And at last, in order to see all the vices together,

The riotous pit called for the author."

]

CHAPTER II.

Let us add a detail. Diatribe is, on certain occasions, a useful means

of government.

Thus the hand of the police was in the print of Diderot Flogged, and

the engraver of the Franciscan friar must have been kindred to the

turnkey of Vincennes. Governments, more passionate than necessary,

neglect to remain strangers to the animosities of the lower orders.

Political persecution of former days--it is of former days that we are

speaking--willingly availed itself of a dash of literary persecution.

Certainly, hatred hates without being paid for it. Envy, to do its

work, does not need a minister of State to encourage it and to give

it a pension; and there is such a thing as unofficial calumny. But

a money-bag does no harm. When Roy, the court-poet, rhymed against

Voltaire, "Tell me, daring stoic," etc., the position of treasurer of

the chamber of Clermont, and the cross of St. Michael, were not likely

to damp his enthusiasm for the Court, and his spirit against Voltaire.

A gratuity is pleasant to receive after a service rendered; the masters

upstairs smile; you receive the agreeable order to insult some one

you detest; you obey richly; you are free to bite like a glutton; you

take your fill; it is all profit; you hate and you give satisfaction.

Formerly authority had its scribes. It was a pack of hounds as good as

any other. Against the free rebel spirit, the despot would let loose

the scribbler. To torture was not sufficient; teasing was resorted to

likewise. Trissotin held a confabulation with Vidocq, and from their

_tête-à-tête_ would burst a complex inspiration. Pedagogism, thus

supported by the police, felt itself an integral part of authority,

and strengthened its æsthetics with legal means. It was arrogant. The

pedant raised to the dignity of policeman,--nothing can be so arrogant

as that vileness. See, after the struggle between the Arminians and

the Gomarists, with what a superb air Sparanus Buyter, his pocket full

of Maurice of Nassau's florins, denounces Josse Vondel, and proves,

Aristotle in hand, that the Palamède of Vondel's tragedy is no other

than Barneveldt,--useful rhetoric, by which Buyter obtains against

Vondel a fine of three hundred crowns, and for himself a fat prebend at

Dordrecht.

The author of the book "Querelles Littéraires," the Abbé Irail, canon

of Monistrol, asks of La Beaumelle: "Why do you insult M. de Voltaire

so much?" "It is because it sells well," replies La Beaumelle. And

Voltaire, informed of the question and of the reply, concludes: "It is

just; the booby buys the writing, and the minister buys the writer. It

sells well."

Françoise d'Issembourg de Happoncourt, wife of François Hugo,

chamberlain of Lorraine, and very celebrated under the name of Madame

de Graffigny, writes to M. Devaux, reader to King Stanislaus:--

My dear Pampam,--Atys being far off [read: Voltaire being

banished], the police cause to be published against him a

swarm of small writings and pamphlets, which are sold at

a sou in the cafés and theatres. That would displease the

marquise,[1] if it did not please the king.

Desfontaines, that other insulter of Voltaire, by whom he had been

taken out of Bicêtre, said to the Abbé Prévost, who advised him to make

his peace with the philosopher: "If Algiers did not make war, Algiers

would die of famine."

This Desfontaines, also an abbé, died of dropsy; and his well-known

tastes gained for him this epitaph: "Periit aqua qui meruit igne."

Among the publications suppressed in the last century by decree of

Parliament, can be observed a document printed by Quinet and Besogne,

and destroyed doubtless because of the revelations it contained, and of

which the title gave promise: "L'Arétinade, ou Tarif des Libellistes et

Gens de Lettres Injurieux."

Madame de Staël, sent in exile forty-five leagues from Paris, stops

exactly at the forty-five leagues,--at Beaumont-sur-Loire,--and thence

writes to her friends. Here is a fragment of a letter addressed to

Madame Gay, mother of the illustrious Madame de Girardin:--

"Ah, dear madame, what a persecution are these exiles!...

[We suppress some lines.] You write a book; it is forbidden

to speak of it. Your name in the journals displeases.

Permission is, however, fully given to speak ill of it."

[Footnote 1: Madame de Pompadour.]

CHAPTER III.

Sometimes the diatribe is sprinkled with quicklime. All those black

pen-nibs finish by digging ill-omened ditches.

Among the writers abhorred for having been useful, Voltaire and

Rousseau hold a conspicuous rank. They were reviled when alive, mangled

when dead. To have a bite at these renowned ones was a splendid deed,

and reckoned as such in favour of literary constables. A man who

insulted Voltaire was at once promoted to the dignity of pedant. Men in

power encouraged the men of libellous propensity. A swarm of mosquitoes

have rushed upon those two illustrious minds, and ate yet buzzing.

Voltaire is the most hated, being the greatest. Everything was good for

an attack on him, everything was a pretext: Mesdames de France, Newton,

Madame du Châtelet, the Princess of Prussia, Maupertuis, Frederic, the

Encyclopædia, the Academy, even Labarre, Sirven, and Calas,--never

a truce. His popularity suggested to Joseph de Maistre this: "Paris

crowned him; Sodom would have banished him." Arouet was translated into

_A rouer._[1] At the house of the Abbess of Nivelles, Princess of the

Holy Empire, half recluse and half worldling, and having recourse, it

is said, in order to make her cheeks rosy, to the method of the Abbess

of Montbazon, charades were played,--among others, this one: The first

syllable is his fortune; the second should be his duty. The word

was _Vol-taire._[2] A celebrated member of the Academy of Sciences,

Napoleon Bonaparte, seeing in 1803, in the library of the Institute,

in the centre of a crown of laurels, this inscription: "Au grand

Voltaire," scratched with his nail the last three letters, leaving

only, _Au grand Volta!_

There is round Voltaire particularly a _cordon sanitaire_ of priests,

the Abbé Desfontaines at the head, the Abbé Nicolardot at the tail.

Fréron, although a layman, is a critic after the priestly fashion, and

belongs to this band.

Voltaire made his first appearance at the Bastille. His cell was next

to the dungeon in which had died Bernard Palissy. Young, he tasted the

prison; old, exile. He was kept twenty-seven years away from Paris.

Jean-Jacques, wild and rather surly, was tormented in consequence of

those traits in his nature. Paris issued a writ against his person;

Geneva expelled him; Neufchâtel rejected him; Motiers-Travers damned

him; Bienne stoned him; Berne gave him the choice between prison and

expulsion; London, hospitable London, scoffed at him.

Both died, following closely on each other. Death caused no

interruption to the outrages. A man is dead; insult does not slacken

pursuit for such a trifle. Hatred can feast on a corpse. Libels

continued, falling furiously on these glories.

The Revolution came and sent them to the Pantheon.

At the beginning of this century, children were often brought to see

these two graves. They were told, "It is here." That made a strong

impression on their minds. They carried forever in their thoughts that

apparition of two sepulchres side by side,--the elliptical arch of the

vault; the antique form of the two monuments provisionally covered with

wood painted like marble; these two names, Rousseau, Voltaire, in the

twilight; and the arm carrying a flambeau which was thrust out of the

tomb of Jean-Jacques.

Louis XVIII. returned. The restoration of the Stuarts had torn Cromwell

from his grave; the restoration of the Bourbons could not do less for

Voltaire.

One night, in May, 1814, about two o'clock in the morning, a cab

stopped near the barrier of La Gare, which faces Bercy, at the door of

an enclosure of planks. This enclosure surrounded a large vacant piece

of ground, reserved for the projected _entrepôt_, and belonging to the

city of Paris. The cab was coming from the Pantheon, and the coachman

had been ordered to take the most deserted streets. The closed planking

opened. Some men alighted from the cab and entered the enclosure. Two

carried a sack between them. They were conducted, so tradition asserts,

by the Marquis of Puymaurin, afterward deputy to the Invisible Chamber,

and director of the mint, accompanied by his brother, the Comte de

Puymaurin. Other men, many in cassocks, were waiting for them. They

proceeded toward a hole dug in the middle of the field. This hole,

according to one of the witnesses, who since has been waiter at the

inn of the Marronniers at La Rapée, was round, and looked like a blind

well. At the bottom of the hole was quicklime. These men said nothing,

and had no light. The wan break of day gave a ghastly light. The sack

was opened. It was full of bones. These were, pell-mell, the bones

of Jean Jacques and of Voltaire, which had just been withdrawn from

the Pantheon. The mouth of the sack was brought close to the hole,

and the bones were thrown into that darkness. The two skulls struck

against each other; a spark, not likely to be seen by such men as those

present was doubtless exchanged between the head that had made the

"Dictionnaire Philosophique" and the head which had made the "Contrat

Social," and reconciled them. When that was done, when the sack had

been shaken, when Voltaire and Rousseau had been emptied into that

hole, a digger seized a spade, threw inside the opening all the earth

which was at the side, and filled tip the hole; the others stamped

with their feet on the ground, so as to remove from it the appearance

of having been freshly disturbed. One of the assistants took for his

trouble the sack, as the hangman takes the clothing of his victim;

they all left the enclosure, closed the door, got into the cab without

saying a word, and hastily, before the sun had risen, those men got

away.

[Footnote 1: Deserving of being broken on the wheel.]

[Footnote 2: _Vol_ meaning _theft_, _taire_ meaning to be silent.]

CHAPTER IV.

Saumaise, that worse Scaliger, does not comprehend Æschylus, and

rejects him. Who is to blame? Saumaise much, Æschylus little.

The attentive man who reads great works feels at times, in the middle

of reading, certain sudden fits of cold followed by a kind of excess

of heat ("I no longer understand!--I understand!"), shivering and

burning,--something which causes him to be a little upset, at the same

time that he is very much struck. Only minds of the first order, only

men of supreme genius, subject to heedless wanderings in the infinite,

give to the reader this singular sensation,--stupor for most, ecstasy

for a few. These few are the _élite._ As we have already observed, this

_élite_, gathered from century to century, and always adding to itself,

at last makes up a number, becomes in time a multitude, and composes

the supreme crowd,--the definitive public of men of genius, sovereign

like them.

It is with that public that at the end one must deal.

Nevertheless, there is another public, other appraisers, other judges,

to whom we have lately alluded. They are not content.

The men of genius, the great minds,--this Æschylus, this Isaiah,

this Juvenal, this Dante, this Shakespeare,--are beings, imperious,

tumultuous, violent, passionate, extreme riders of winged steeds,

"overleaping all boundaries," having their own goal, which "goes beyond

the goal," "exaggerated," taking scandalous strides, flying abruptly

from one idea to another, and from the north pole to the south pole,

crossing the heavens in three steps, making little allowance for short

breaths, tossed about by all the winds, and at the same time full of

some unaccountable equestrian confidence amidst their bounds across the

abyss, untractable to the "aristarchs," refractory to state rhetoric,

not amiable to asthmatical _literati_, unsubdued to academic hygiene,

preferring the foam of Pegasus to asses' milk.

The worthy pedants are kind enough to be afraid for them. The ascent

gives rise to the calculation of the fall. The compassionate cripples

lament for Shakespeare. He is mad; he mounts too high! The crowd of

college fags (they are a crowd) look on in wonder, and get angry.

Æschylus and Dante make their connoisseurs blink their eyes every

moment. This Æschylus is lost! This Dante is near falling! A god is

soaring above; the worthy bourgeois cry out to him: "Look out for

yourself!"

CHAPTER V.

Besides, these men of genius disconcert.

One knows not on what to rely with them. Their lyric fever obeys

them; they interrupt it when they like. They seem wild. All at once

they stop. Their frenzy becomes melancholy. They are seen among the

precipices, alighting ou a peak and folding their wings, and then they

give way to meditation. Their meditation is not less surprising than

their transport. Just now they were soaring above, now they sink below.

But it is always the same boldness.

They are pensive giants. Their Titanic revery needs the absolute and

the unfathomable in which to expand. They meditate, as the sun shines,

with the abyss around them.

Their moving to and fro in the ideal gives the vertigo. Nothing is too

lofty for them, and nothing too low. They pass from the pygmy to the

Cyclops, from Polyphemus to the Myrmidons, from Queen Mab to Caliban,

and from a love affair to a deluge, and from Saturn's ring to the doll

of a little child. _Sinite parvulos venire._ One of the pupils of their

eye is a telescope, the other a microscope. They investigate familiarly

these two frightful opposite depths,--the infinitely great and the

infinitely small.

And one should not be angry with them; and one should not reproach

them for all this! Indeed! Where should we go if such excesses were

to be tolerated? What! No scruple in the choice of subjects, horrible

or sad; and the idea, even if it be disquieting and formidable,

always followed up to its extreme limits, without pity for their

fellow-creatures! These poets only see their own aim; and in everything

are immoderate in their way of doing things. What is Job?--a worm on

an ulcer. What is the Divina Commedia?--a series of torments. What

is the Iliad?--a collection of plagues and wounds; not an artery

cut which is not complaisantly described. Go round for opinions on

Homer: ask of Scaliger, Terrasson, Lamotte, what they think of him.

The fourth of an ode to the shield of Achilles--what intemperance! He

who does not know when to stop never knew how to write. These poets

agitate, disturb, trouble, upset, overwhelm, make everything shiver,

break things, occasionally, here and there. They can cause great

misfortunes; it is terrible. Thus speak the Athenæa, the Sorbonnes, the

sworn-in professors, the societies called learned, Saumaise, successor

of Scaliger at the university of Leyden, and the _bourgeoisie_ after

them,--all who represent in literature and art the great party of

order. What can be more logical? The cough quarrels with the hurricane.

Those who are poor in wit are joined by those who have too much wit.

The septics lend assistance to the fools. Men of genius, with few

exceptions, are proud and stem; that is in the very marrow of their

bones. They have in company with them Juvenal, Agrippa d'Aubigné,

and Milton; they are prone to harshness; they despise the _panem et

circenses_; they seldom grow sociable, and they growl. People rail at

them in a pleasant way. Well done.

Ah, poet! Ah, Milton! Ah, Juvenal!--ah, you keep up resistance! ah,

you perpetuate disinterestedness! ah, you bring together these two

firebrands, faith and will, in order to make the flame burst out from

them! ah, there is something of the Vestal in you, old grumbler! ah,

you have an altar,--your country! ah, you. have a tripod,--the ideal!

ah, you believe in the rights of man, in emancipation, in the future,

in progress, in the beautiful, in the just, in what is great! Take

care; you are behindhand. All this virtue is infatuation. You emigrate

with honour; but you emigrate. This heroism is no longer the fashion.

It no longer suits our epoch. There comes a moment when the sacred fire

is no longer fashionable. Poet, you believe in right and truth; you are

behind your century. Your very eternity causes you to pass away.

So much the worse, without doubt, for those grumbling geniuses

accustomed to greatness, and scornful of what is no longer so. They

are slow in movement when shame is at stake; their back is struck with

anchylosis for anything like bowing and cringing. When success passes

along, deserved or not, but saluted, they have an iron bar keeping

their vertebral column stiff. That is their affair. So much the worse

for those people of old-fashioned Rome. They belong to antiquity and

to antique manners. To bristle up at every turn may have been all very

well in former days. Those long bristling manes are no longer worn;

the lions are out of fashion now. The French Revolution is nearly

seventy-five years old. At that age dotage comes. The people of the

present time mean to belong to their day, and even to their minute.

Certainly, we find no fault with it. Whatever is, must be. It is quite

right that what exists should exist The forms of public prosperity

are various. One generation is not obliged to imitate another. Cato

copied Phocion; Trimalcion is less like,--it is independence. You

bad-tempered old fellows, you wish us to emancipate ourselves? Let it

be so. We disencumber ourselves of the imitation of Timoleon, Thraseas

Artevelde, Thomas More, Hampden. It is our fashion to free ourselves.

You wish for a revolt; there it is. You wish for no insurrection; we

rise up against our rights. We affranchise ourselves from the care

of being free. To be citizens is a heavy load. Eights entangled with

obligations are restraints to whoever desires to enjoy life quietly.

To be guided by conscience and truth in all the steps that we take

is fatiguing. We mean to walk without leading-strings and without

principles. Duty is a chain; we break our irons. What do you mean by

speaking to us of Franklin? Franklin is a rather too servile copy of

Aristides. We carry our horror of servility so far as to prefer Grimod

de la Reynière. To eat and drink well, there is purpose in that. Each

epoch has its peculiar manner of being free. Orgy is a liberty. This

way of reasoning is triumphant; to adhere to it is wise. There have

been, it is true, epochs when people thought otherwise. In those times

the things which were trodden on would sometimes resent it, and would

rebel,--but that was the ancient system, ridiculous now; and those who

regret and grumble must be left to talk and to affirm that there was

a better notion of right, justice, and honour in the stones of olden

times than in the men of to-day.

The rhetoricians, official and officious,--we have pointed out already

their wonderful sagacity,--take strong precautions against men of

genius. Men of genius are not great followers of the university; what

is more, they are wanting in insipidity. They are lyrists, colourists,

enthusiasts, enchanters, possessed, exalted, "rabid" (we have read the

word) beings who, when everybody is small, have a mania for creating

great things; in fact, they have every vice. A doctor has recently

discovered that genius is a variety of madness. They are Michael Angelo

handling giants; Rembrandt painting with a palette all bedaubed with

the sun's rays; they are Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, exaggerated.

They bring a wild art, roaring, flaming, dishevelled like the lion and

the comet. Oh, shocking! There is coalition against them, and it is

right. We have, luckily, the "teetotallers" of eloquence and poetry.

"I like paleness," said one day a literary _bourgeois._ The literary

_bourgeois_ exists. Rhetoricians, anxious on account of the contagions

and fevers which are spread by genius, recommend with a lofty reason,

which we have commended, temperance, moderation, "common-sense," the

art of keeping within bounds, writers expurgated, trimmed, pruned,

regulated, the worship of the qualities that the malignant call

negative, continence, abstinence, Joseph, Scipio, the water-drinkers.

It is all excellent,--only, young students must be warned that by

following these sage precepts too closely they run the risk of

glorifying the chastity of the eunuch. Maybe, I admire Bayard; I admire

Origen less.

CHAPTER VI.

Résumé: Great minds are importunate; to deny them a little is judicious.

After all, let us admit it at last, and complete our statement; there

is some truth in the reproaches that are hurled at them. This anger

is natural. The powerful, the grand, the luminous, are in a certain

point of view things calculated to offend. To be surpassed is never

agreeable; to feel one's own inferiority leads surely to feel offence.

The beautiful exists so truly by itself that it certainly has no

need of pride; nevertheless, given human mediocrity, the beautiful

humiliates at the same time that it enchants. It seems natural that

beauty should be a vase for pride,--it is supposed to be full of it;

one seeks to avenge one's self for the pleasure it gives, and this word

superb ends by having two senses,--one of which causes suspicion of

the other. It is the fault of the beautiful, as we have already said.

It wearies: a sketch by Piranesi bewilders you; a grasp of the hand

of Hercules bruises you. Greatness is sometimes in the wrong. It is

ingenuous, but obstructive. The tempest thinks to sprinkle you,--it

drowns you; the star thinks to give light,--it dazzles, sometimes

blinds. The Nile fertilizes, but overflows. The "too much" is not

convenient; the habitation of the fathomless is rude; the infinite

is little suitable for a lodging. A cottage is badly situated on the

cataract of Niagara or in the circus of Gavarnie. It is awkward to keep

house with these fierce wonders; to frequent them regularly without

being overwhelmed, one must be a cretin or a genius.

The dawn itself at times seems to us immoderate: he who looks at it

straight suffers. The eye at certain moments thinks very ill of the

sun. Let us not then be astonished at the complaints made, at the

incessant objections, at the fits of passion and prudence, at the

cataplasms applied by a certain criticism, at the ophthalmies habitual

to academies and teaching bodies, at the warnings given to the reader,

at all the curtains let down, and at all the shades used against

genius. Genius is intolerant without knowing it, because it is itself.

How can people be familiar with Æschylus, with Ezekiel, with Dante?

The _I_ is the right to egotism. Now, the first thing that those

beings do, is to use roughly the _I_ of each one. Exorbitant in

everything,--in thoughts, in images, in convictions, in emotions, in

passions, in faith,--whatever may be the side of your _I_ to which they

address themselves, they inconvenience it. Your intellect, they surpass

it; your imagination, they dazzle it; your conscience, they question

and search it; your bowels, they twist them; your heart, they break it;

your soul, they carry it off.

The infinite that is in them passes from them and multiplies them, and

transfigures them before your eyes every moment,--formidable fatigue

for your gaze. With them you never know where you are. At every turn

the unforeseen. You expected only men: they cannot enter your room, for

they are giants. You expected only an idea: cast your eyes down, they

are the ideal. You expected only eagles: they have six wings,--they are

seraphs. Are they then beyond Nature? Is it that humanity fails them?

Certainly not, and far from that, and quite the reverse. We have

already said it, and we insist on it, Nature and humanity are in them

more than in any other beings. They are superhuman men, but men. _Homo

sum._ This word of a poet sums up all poetry. Saint Paul strikes his

breast and says, "Peccamus!" Job tells you who he is: "I am the son of

woman." They are men. That which troubles you is that they are men more

than you; they are too much men, so to speak. There where you have but

the part, they have the whole; they carry in their vast heart entire

humanity, and they are you more than yourself. You recognize yourself

too much in their work,--hence your outcry. To that total of Nature,

to that complete humanity, to that potter's clay, which is all your

flesh, and which is at the same time the whole earth, they add, and it

completes your terror, the wonderful reverberation of the unknown. They

have vistas of revelation; and suddenly, and without crying "Beware!"

at the moment when you least expect it, they burst the cloud, make in

the zenith a gap whence falls a ray, and they light up the terrestrial

with the celestial It is very natural that people should not greatly

fancy familiar intercourse with them, and should have no taste for

keeping neighbourly intimacy with them.

Whoever has not a soul well-tempered by vigorous education avoids

them willingly. For great books there must be great readers. It is

necessary to be strong and healthy to open Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job,

Pindar, Lucretius, and that Alighieri, and that Shakespeare. Homely

habits, prosy life, the dead calm of consciences, "good taste" and

"common-sense,"--all the small, placid egotism is deranged, let us own

it, by these monsters of the sublime.

Yet, when one dives in and reads them, nothing is more hospitable for

the mind at certain hours than these stem spirits. They have all at

once a lofty gentleness, as unexpected as the rest. They say to you,

"Come in!" They receive you at home with a fraternity of archangels.

They are affectionate, sad, melancholy, consoling. You are suddenly at

your ease. You feel yourself loved by them; you almost imagine yourself

personally known to them. Their sternness and their pride cover a

profound sympathy. If granite had a heart, how deep would its goodness

be! Well, genius is granite with goodness. Extreme power possesses

great love. They join you in your prayers. They know well, those men,

that God exists. Apply your ear to these giants, you will hear them

palpitate. Do you want to believe, to love, to weep, to strike your

breast, to fall on your knees, to raise your hands to heaven with

confidence and serenity, listen to these poets. They will aid you

to rise toward the healthy and fruitful sorrow; they will make you

feel the celestial use of emotion. Oh, goodness of the strong! Their

emotion, which, if they will, can be an earthquake, is at moments so

cordial and so gentle that it seems like the rocking of a cradle. They

have just given birth within you to something of which they take care.

There is maternity in genius. Take a step, advance farther,--a new

surprise awaits you: they are graceful. As for their grace, it is light

itself.

The high mountains have on their sides all climates, and the great

poets all styles. It is sufficient to change the zone. Go up, it is the

tempest; descend, the flowers are there. The inner fire accommodates

itself to the winter without; the glacier has no objection to be the

crater, and the lava never looks more beautiful than when it rashes out

through the snow. A sudden blaze of flame is not strange on a polar

summit. This contact of the extremes is a law in Nature, in which

the unforeseen wonders of the sublime burst forth at every moment.

A mountain, a genius,--both are austere majesty. These masses evolve

a sort of religious intimidation. Dante is not less perpendicular

than Etna. The depths of Shakespeare equal the gulfs of Chimborazo.

The peaks of poets are not less cloudy than the summits of mountains.

Thunders are rolling there, and at the same time, in the valleys, in

the passes, in the sheltered spots, in places between escarpments,

are streams, birds, nests, boughs, enchantments, wonderful floræ.

Above the frightful arch of the Aveyron, in the middle of the frozen

sea, there is that paradise called The Garden. Have you seen it? What

an episode! A hot sun, a shade tepid and fresh, a vague exudation of

perfumes on the grass-plots, an indescribable month of May perpetually

reigning among precipices,--nothing is more tender and more exquisite.

Such are poets: such are the Alps. These huge old gloomy mountains

are marvellous growers of roses and violets; they avail themselves of

the dawn and of the dew better than all your prairies and all your

hillocks can do it, although it is their natural business. The April

of the plain is flat and vulgar compared with their April; and they

have, those immense old mountains, in their wildest ravine, their own

charming spring, well known to the bees.

BOOK IV.

CRITICISM.

CHAPTER I.

Every play of Shakespeare's, two excepted, "Macbeth" and "Romeo

and Juliet" (thirty-four plays out of thirty-six), offers to our

observation one peculiarity which seems to have escaped, up to this

day, the most eminent commentators and critics,--one that the Schlegels

and M. Villemain himself, in his remarkable labours, do not notice,

and on which it is impossible not to give an opinion. It is a double

action which traverses the drama, and reflects it on a small scale.

By the side of the storm in the Atlantic, the storm in the tea-cup.

Thus, Hamlet makes beneath himself a Hamlet: he kills Polonius,

father of Laërtes,--and there is Laërtes opposite him exactly in the

same situation as he is toward Claudius. There are two fathers to

avenge. There might be two ghosts. So, in King Lear: side by side and

simultaneously, Lear, driven to despair by his daughters Goneril and

Regan, and consoled by his daughter Cordelia, is reflected by Gloster,

betrayed by his son Edmond, and loved by his son Edgar. The bifurcated

idea, the idea echoing itself, a lesser drama copying and elbowing the

principal drama, the action trailing its own shadow (a smaller action

but its parallel), the unity cut asunder,--surely it is a strange fact.

These twin actions have been strongly blamed by the few commentators

who have pointed them out. We do not participate in their blame. Do

we then approve and accept as good these twin actions? By no means.

We recognize them, and that is all. The drama of Shakespeare (we said

so with all our might as far back as 1827,[1] in order to discourage

all imitation),--the drama of Shakespeare is peculiar to Shakespeare.

It is a drama inherent to this poet; it is his own essence; it is

himself,--thence his originalities absolutely personal; thence his

idiosyncrasies which exist without establishing a law.

These twin actions are purely Shakespearian. Neither Æschylus nor

Molière would admit them; and we certainly would agree with Æschylus

and Molière.

These twin actions are, moreover, the sign of the sixteenth century.

Each epoch has its own mysterious stamp. The centuries have a seal that

they affix to _chefs-d'œuvre_, and which it is necessary to know how

to decipher and recognize. The seal of the sixteenth century is not

the seal of the eighteenth. The Renaissance was a subtle time,--a time

of reflection. The spirit of the sixteenth century was reflected in a

mirror. Every idea of the Renaissance has a double compartment. Look

at the jubes in the churches. The Renaissance, with an exquisite and

fantastical art, always makes the Old Testament repercussive on the

New. The twin action is there in everything. The symbol explains the

personage in repeating his gesture. If, in a basso-rilievo, Jehovah

sacrifices his son, he has close by, in the next low relief, Abraham

sacrificing his son. Jonas passes three days in the whale, and Jesus

passes three days in the sepulchre; and the jaws of the monster

swallowing Jonas answer to the mouth of hell engulfing Jesus.

The carver of the jube of Fécamp, so stupidly demolished, goes so far

as to give for counterpart to Saint Joseph--whom? Amphitryon.

These singular results constitute one of the habits of that profound

and searching high art of the sixteenth century. Nothing can be more

curious in that style than the part ascribed to Saint Christopher.

In the Middle Ages, and in the sixteenth century, in paintings and

sculptures, Saint Christopher, the good giant martyred by Decius in

250, recorded by the Bollandists and acknowledged without a question

by Baillet, is always triple,--an opportunity for the triptych. There

is foremost a first Christ-bearer, a first Christophorus; that is

Christopher, with the infant Jesus on his shoulders. Afterward the

Virgin enceinte is a Christopher, since she carries Christ Last,

the cross is a Christopher; it also carries Christ. This treble

illustration of the idea is immortalized by Rubens in the cathedral

of Antwerp. The twin idea, the triple idea,--such is the seal of the

sixteenth century.

Shakespeare, faithful to the spirit of his time, must needs add Laërtes

avenging his father to Hamlet avenging his father, and cause Hamlet

to be persecuted by Laërtes at the same time that Claudius is pursued

by Hamlet; he must needs make the filial piety of Edgar a comment on

the filial piety of Cordelia, and bring out in contrast, weighed down

by the ingratitude of unnatural children, two wretched fathers, each

bereaved of a kind light,--Lear mad, and Gloster blind.

[Footnote 1: Preface to "Cromwell."]

CHAPTER II.

What then? No criticising? No.--No blame? No.--You explain everything?

Yes.--Genius is an entity like Nature, and requires, like Nature, to

be accepted purely and simply. A mountain must be accepted as such or

left alone. There are men who would make a criticism on the Himalayas,

pebble by pebble. Mount Etna blazes and slavers, throws out its glare,

its wrath, its lava, and its ashes; these men take scales and weigh

those ashes, pinch by pinch. _Quot libras in monte summo?_ Meanwhile

genius continues its eruption. Everything in it has its reason for

existing. It is because it is. Its shadow is the inverse of its light.

Its smoke comes from its flame. Its depth is the result of its height.

We love this more and that less; but we remain silent wherever we feel

God. We are in the forest; the tortuosity of the tree is its secret.

The sap knows what it is doing. The root knows its own business. We

take things as they are; we are indulgent for that which is excellent,

tender, or magnificent; we acquiesce in _chefs-d'œuvre_; we do not

make use of one to find fault with the other; we do not insist upon

Phidias sculpturing cathedrals, or upon Pinaigrier glazing temples

(the temple is the harmony, the cathedral is the mystery; they are two

different forms of the sublime); we do not claim for the Münster the

perfection of the Parthenon, or for the Parthenon the grandeur of the

Münster. We are so far whimsical as to be satisfied with both being

beautiful. We do not reproach for its sting the insect that gives us

honey. We renounce our right to criticise the feet of the peacock, the

cry of the swan, the plumage of the nightingale, the butterfly for

having been caterpillar, the thorn of the rose, the smell of the lion,

the skin of the elephant, the prattle of the cascade, the pips of the

orange, the immobility of the Milky Way, the saltness of the ocean, the

spots on the sun, the nakedness of Noah.

The _quandoque bonus dormitat_ is permitted to Horace. We raise

no objection. What is certain is, that Homer would not say it of

Horace,--he would not take the trouble. Himself the eagle, Homer would

indeed find Horace, the chattering humming-bird, charming. I grant

it is pleasant to a man to feel himself superior, and say, "Homer is

puerile; Dante is childish." It is indulging in a pretty smile. To

crush these poor geniuses a little, why not? To be the Abbé Trublet,

and say, "Milton is a schoolboy," it is pleasing. How witty is the man

who finds that Shakespeare has no wit! That man is La Harpe, Delandine,

Auger; he is, was, or shall be, an Academician. "All these great men

are made up of extravagance, bad taste, and childishness." What a fine

decree to issue! These fashions tickle voluptuously those who have

them; and in reality, when they have said, "This giant is small,"

they can fancy that they are great. Every man has his own way. As for

myself, the writer of these lines, I admire everything like a fool.

That is why I have written this book.

To admire, to be an enthusiast,--it has struck me that it was right to

give in our century this example of folly.

CHAPTER III.

Do not look, then, for any criticism. I admire Æschylus, I admire

Juvenal, I admire Dante, in the mass, in a lump, all. I do not cavil

at those great benefactors. What you characterize as a fault, I call

accent. I accept and give thanks. I do not inherit the marvels of

human wit conditionally. Pegasus being given to me, I do not look

the gift-horse in the mouth. A masterpiece offers its hospitality:

I approach it with my hat off, and think the visage of mine host

handsome. Gilles Shakespeare, it may be: I admire Shakespeare and I

admire Gilles. Falstaff is proposed to me: I accept him, and I admire

the "Empty the jorden." I admire the senseless cry, "A rat!" I admire

the jests of Hamlet; I admire the wholesale murders of Macbeth; I

admire the witches, "that ridiculous spectacle;" I admire "the buttock

of the night;" I admire the eye plucked from Gloster. I am simple

enough to admire all.

Having recently had the honour to be called "silly" by several

distinguished writers and critics, and even by my illustrious friend M.

de Lamartine,[1] I am determined to justify the epithet.

We close with one last observation which we have specially to make

regarding Shakespeare.

Orestes, that fatal senior of Hamlet, is not, as we have said, the

sole link between Æschylus and Shakespeare; we have noted a relation,

less easily perceptible, between Prometheus and Hamlet. The mysterious

close connection between the two poets is, in reference to this same

Prometheus, more strangely striking yet, and in a particular which, up

to this time, has escaped the observers and critics. Prometheus is the

grandsire of Mab.

Let us prove it.

Prometheus, like all personages become legendary,--like Solomon, like

Cæsar, like Mahomet, like Charlemagne, like the Cid, like Joan of Arc,

like Napoleon,--has a double prolongation, the one in history, the

other in fable. Now, the prolongation of Prometheus is this:

Prometheus, creator of men, is also creator of spirits. He is father

of a dynasty of Divs, whose filiation the old metrical tales have

preserved: Elf, that is to say, the Rapid, son of Prometheus; then

Elfin, King of India; then Elfinan, founder of Cleopolis, town of the

fairies; then Elfilin, builder of the golden wall; then Elfinell,

winner of the battle of the demons; then Elfant, who made Panthea

entirely in crystal; then Elfar, who killed Bicephalus and Tricephalus;

then Elfinor, the magian, a kind of Salmoneus, who built over the sea

a bridge of copper, sounding like thunder, "non imitabile fulmen aere

et cornipedum pulsu simularat equorum;" then seven hundred princes;

then Elficleos the Sage; then Elferon the Beautiful; then Oberon; then

Mab,--wonderful fable, which, with a profound meaning, unites the

sidereal and the microscopic, the infinitely great and the infinitely

small.

And it is thus that the infusoria of Shakespeare is connected with the

giant of Æschylus.

The fairy, drawn over the nose of sleeping men in her carriage, covered

with the wing of a locust, by eight flies harnessed with the rays of

the moon, and whipped with a gossamer,--the fairy atom has for ancestor

the huge Titan, robber of stars, nailed on the Caucasus, one hand on

the Caspian gates, the other on the portals of Ararat, one heel on

the source of the Phasis, the other on the Validus-Murus, closing the

passage between the mountain and the sea,--a colossus, whose immense

shadow was, according as the rise or setting of light, projected by the

sun, now on Europe as far as Corinth, now on Asia as far as Bangalore.

Nevertheless, Mab, who is also called Tanaquil, has all the wavering

inconsistency of the dream. Under the name of Tanaquil she is the

wife of Tarquin the Ancient; and she spins for young Servius Tullius

the first tunic worn by a young Roman after leaving off the pretexta.

Oberon, who turns out to be Numa, is her uncle. In "Huon de Bordeaux"

she is called Gloriande, and has for lover Julius Cæsar, and Oberon is

her son; in Spenser, she is called Gloriana, and Oberon is her father;

in Shakespeare she is called Titania, and Oberon is her husband.

Titania: this name unites Mab to the Titan, and Shakespeare to Æschylus.

[Footnote 1: All the biography, sometimes rather puerile, even rather

silly, of Bishop Myriel.--Lamartine: _Cours de Littérature_ (Entretien

LXXXIV. p. 385).]

CHAPTER IV.

An eminent man of our day, a celebrated historian a powerful orator,

one of the former translators of Shakespeare, is mistaken, according to

our views, when he regrets, or appears to regret, the slight influence

of Shakespeare on the theatre of the nineteenth century. We cannot

share that regret An influence of any sort, even that of Shakespeare,

could but mar the originality of the literary movement of our epoch.

"The system of Shakespeare," says the honourable and grave writer,

with reference to that movement, "can furnish, it seems to me, the

plans after which genius must henceforth work." We have never been of

that opinion, and we have said so as far back as forty years ago.[1]

For us, Shakespeare is a genius, and not a system. On this point we

have already explained our views, and we mean soon to explain them at

greater length; but let us state now that what Shakespeare has done,

is done once for all,--it is impossible to do it over again. Admire or

criticise, but do not recast. It is finished.

A distinguished critic who lately died,--M. Chaudesaigues,--lays a

stress on this reproach: "Shakespeare," says he, "has been revived

without being followed. The romantic school has not imitated

Shakespeare. In that it is wrong." In that it is right. It is blamed

for it; we praise it. The contemporary theatre is what it is, but it is

itself. The contemporary theatre has for device, _Sum non sequor._ It

belongs to no "system" It has its own law, and it accomplishes it. It

has its own life, and it lives it.

The drama of Shakespeare expresses man at a given moment. Man passes

away; that drama remains, having for eternal foundation, life, the

heart, the world, and for surface the sixteenth century. That drama can

neither be continued nor recomposed. Another age, another art.

The theatre of our day has not followed Shakespeare any more than it

has followed Æschylus. And without reckoning all the other reasons

that we shall note farther on, how perplexed would he be who wished to

imitate and copy, in making a choice between these two poets! Æschylus

and Shakespeare seem made to prove that contraries may be admirable.

The point of departure of the one is absolutely opposite to the point

of departure of the other. Æschylus is concentration; Shakespeare is

diffusion. One must be much applauded because he is condensed, and

the other because he is diffuse; to Æschylus unity, to Shakespeare

ubiquity. Between them they divide God. And as such intellects are

always complete, one feels in the condensed drama of Æschylus the free

agitation of passion, and in the diffuse drama of Shakespeare the

convergence of all the rays of life. The one starts from unity and

reaches a multiple; the other starts from the multiple and arrives at

unity.

This appears strikingly evident, particularly when we compare "Hamlet"

with "Orestes,"--extraordinary double page, obverse and reverse of the

same idea, and which seems written expressly to prove to what an extent

two different geniuses, making the same thing, will make two different

things.

It is easy to see that the theatre of our day has, rightly or wrongly,

traced out its own way between Greek unity and Shakespearian ubiquity.

[Footnote 1: Preface to "Cromwell."]

CHAPTER V.

Let us set aside for the present the question of contemporary art, and

take up again the general question.

Imitation is always barren and bad.

As for Shakespeare,--since Shakespeare is the poet who claims our

attention now,--he is, in the highest degree, a genius human and

general; but like every true genius, he is at the same time an

idiosyncratic and personal mind. Axiom: the poet starts from his own

inner self to come to us. It is that which makes the poet inimitable.

Examine Shakespeare, dive into him, and see how determined he is to

be himself. Do not expect any concession from him. It is not egotism,

but it is stubbornness. He wills it. He gives to art his orders,--of

course in the limits of his work; for neither the art of Æschylus,

nor the art of Aristophanes, nor the art of Plautus, nor the art of

Macchiavelli, nor the art of Calderon, nor the art of Molière, nor the

art of Beaumarchais, nor any of the forms of art, deriving life each

of them from the special life of a genius, would obey the orders given

by Shakespeare. Art, thus understood, is vast equality and profound

liberty; the region of the equals is also the region of the free.

One of the grandeurs of Shakespeare consists in his impossibility

to be a model. In order to realize his idiosyncrasy, open one of

his plays,--no matter which; it is always foremost and above all

Shakespeare.

What more personal than "Troilus and Cressida"? A comic Troy! Here

is "Much Ado about Nothing,"--a tragedy which ends with a burst of

laughter. Here is the "Winter's Tale,"--a pastoral drama. Shakespeare

is at home in his work. Do you wish to see true despotism: look at his

fancy. What arbitrary determination to dream! What despotic resolution

in his vertiginous flight! What absoluteness in his indecision and

wavering! The dream fills some of his plays to that degree that man

changes his nature, and is the cloud more than the man. Angelo in

"Measure for Measure" is a misty tyrant. He becomes disintegrated,

and wears away. Leontes in the "Winter's Tale" is an Othello who

is blown away. In "Cymbeline" one thinks that Iachimo will become

an Iago, but he melts down. The dream is there,--everywhere. Watch

Manilius, Posthumus, Hermione, Perdita, passing by. In the "Tempest,"

the Duke of Milan has "a brave son," who is like a dream in a dream.

Ferdinand alone speaks of him, and no one but Ferdinand seems to have

seen him. A brute becomes reasonable: witness the constable Elbow in

"Measure for Measure." An idiot is all at once witty: witness Cloten in

"Cymbeline." A King of Sicily is jealous of a King of Bohemia. Bohemia

has a seashore. The shepherds pick up children there. Theseus, a duke,

espouses Hippolyta, the Amazon. Oberon comes in also. For here it is

Shakespeare's will to dream; elsewhere he thinks.

We say more: where he dreams he still thinks,--with a different but

equal depth.

Let men of genius remain in peace in their originality. There is

something wild in these mysterious civilizers. Even in their comedy,

even in their buffoonery, even in their laughter, even in their smile,

there is the unknown. In them is felt the sacred dread that belongs to

art, and the all-powerful terror of the imaginary mixed with the real.

Each of them is in his cavern, alone. They hear one another from afar,

but never copy one another. We are not aware that the hippopotamus

imitates the roar of the elephant, neither do lions imitate one another.

Diderot does not recast Bayle; Beaumarchais does not copy Plautus, and

has no need of Davus to create Figaro. Piranesi is not inspired by

Dædalus. Isaiah does not begin Moses over again.

One day, at St. Helena, M. De Las Cases said, "Sire, when you were

master of Prussia, I would in your place have taken the sword of

Frederick the Great, which is deposited in the tomb at Potsdam; and I

would have worn it." "Fool!" replied Napoleon, "I had my own."

Shakespeare's work is absolute, sovereign, imperious, eminently

solitary, unneighbourly, sublime in radiance, absurd in reflection, and

must remain without a copy.

To imitate Shakespeare would be as insane as to imitate Racine would be

stupid.

CHAPTER VI.

Let us agree, by the way, respecting a qualificative much used

everywhere: _Profanum vulgus_,--the saying of a poet on which pedants

lay great stress. This _profanum vulgus_ is rather the weapon of

everybody. Let us fix the meaning of this word. What is the _profanum

vulgus?_ The school says, "It is the people." And we, we say, "It is

the school."

But let us first define this expression, "the school." When we say,

"the school," what must be understood? Let us explain it. The school

is the resultant of pedantry; the school is the literary excrescence

of the budget; the school is intellectual mandarinship governing in

the various authorized and official teachings, either of the press

or of the State, from the theatrical _feuilleton_ of the prefecture

to the biographies and encyclopædias duly examined, stamped, and

hawked about, and sometimes, as a refinement, made by republicans

agreeable to the police; the school is the circumvallating classic and

scholastic orthodoxy, the Homeric and Virgilian antiquity made use of

by _literati_ licensed by government,--a kind of China self-called

Greece; the school is--summed up in one concretion which forms part

of public order--all the knowledge of pedagogues, all the history of

historiographers, all the poetry of laureates, all the philosophy

of sophists, all the criticism of pedants, all the ferule of the

"ignorantins," all the religion of bigots, all the modesty of prudes,

all the metaphysics of those who change sides, all the justice of

placemen, all the old age of the small young men who have undergone

the operation, all the flattery of courtiers, all the diatribes of

censer-bearers, all the independence of valets, all the certainty

of short sights and of base souls. The school hates Shakespeare. It

detects him in the very act of mingling with the people, going to and

fro in public thoroughfares, "trivial," speaking the language of the

people, uttering the human cry like any other man, welcome to those

that he welcomes, applauded by hands black with tar, cheered by all

the hoarse throats that proceed from labour and weariness. The drama

of Shakespeare is the people; the school is indignant and says, "Odi

profanum vulgus." There is demagogy in this poetry roaming at large;

the author of "Hamlet" "panders to the mob."

Let it be so. The poet "panders to the mob."

If anything is great, it is that.

There in the foreground, everywhere, in full light, amidst the flourish

of trumpets, are the powerful men followed by the gilded men. The poet

does not see them, or, if he does, he disdains them. He lifts his eyes

and looks at God; then he lowers his eyes and looks at the people.

There in the depth of the shadow, nearly invisible, so much submerged

that it is the night, is that fatal crowd, that vast and mournful

heap of suffering, that venerable populace of the tattered and of the

ignorant,--chaos of souls. That crowd of heads undulates obscurely

like the waves of a nocturnal sea. From time to time there pass on

that surface, like squalls over the water, catastrophes,--a war, a

pestilence, a royal favourite, a famine. That causes a disturbance

which lasts a short time, the depth of sorrow being immovable as the

depth of the ocean. Despair deposits in us some weight as of lead.

The last word of the abyss is stupor; therefore it is the night. It

is, under the thick blackness, behind which all is indistinct, the

mournful sea of the needy.

These overloaded beings are silent; they know nothing; they submit

_Plectuntur Achivi._ They are hungry and cold. Their indecent flesh is

seen through the holes in their tatters. Who makes those tatters? The

purple. The nakedness of virgins comes from the nudity of odalisques.

From the twisted rags of the daughters of the people fall pearls for

the Fontanges and the Châteauroux. It is famine which gilds Versailles.

The whole of that living and dying shadow moves; these larvæ are in the

pangs of death; the mother's breast is dry; the father has no work;

the brains have no light. If there is a book in that destitution, it

resembles the pitcher, so insipid or corrupt is what it offers to the

thirst of intellects. Mournful families!

The group of the little ones is wan. All die away and creep along, not

having even the power to love; and unknown to them perhaps, while they

crouch down and resign themselves, from all that vast unconsciousness

in which Right dwells, from the rumbling murmur of those wretched

breaths mingled together, proceeds an indescribable confused voice,

mysterious mist of language, succeeding, syllable by syllable in the

darkness, in uttering extraordinary words,--Future, Humanity, Liberty,

Equality, Progress. And the poet listens, and he hears; and he looks,

and he sees; and he bends lower and lower, and he weeps; and all at

once, growing with a strange growth, drawing from all that darkness his

own transfiguration, he stands erect, terrible and tender, above all

those wretched ones,--those above as well as those below,--with flaming

eyes.

And he demands a reckoning with a loud voice. And he says, Here is

the effect! And he says, Here is the cause! Light is the remedy.

_Erudimini._ And he looks like a great vase full of humanity shaken

by the hand which is in the cloud, and from whence fall on the earth

large drops,--fire for the oppressors, dew for the oppressed. Ah, you

find fault with that, you fellows! Well, then, we approve of it, we

do! We find it just that some one speaks when all suffer. The ignorant

who enjoy and the ignorant who suffer have an equal want of teaching.

The law of fraternity is derived from the law of labour. To kill one

another has had its day. The hour has come to love one another. It is

to promulgate these truths that the poet is good. For that, he must

be of the people; for that he must be of the populace,--that is to

say, that, bringing progress, he should not recoil before the pressure

of facts, however ugly the facts may be. The distance between the

real and the ideal cannot be measured otherwise. Besides, to drag the

cannon-ball a little completes Vincent de Paul. Hurrah, then, for the

trivial promiscuousness, for the popular metaphor, for the great life

in common with those exiles from joy who are catted the poor!--this is

the first duty of poets. It is useful; it is necessary, that the breath

of the people should fill those all-powerful souls. The people have

something to say to them. It is good that there should be in Euripides

a flavour of the herb-dealers at Athens, and in Shakespeare of the

sailors of London.

Sacrifice to "the mob," O poet! Sacrifice to that unfortunate,

disinherited, vanquished, vagabond, shoeless, famished, repudiated,

despairing mob; sacrifice to it, if it must be and when it must be, thy

repose, thy fortune, thy joy, thy country, thy liberty, thy life. The

mob is the human race in misery. The mob is the mournful commencement

of the people. The mob is the great victim of darkness. Sacrifice to

it! Sacrifice thyself! Let thyself be hunted, let thyself be exiled as

Voltaire to Ferney, as D'Aubigné to Geneva, as Dante to Verona, as

Juvenal to Syene, as Tacitus to Methymna, as Æschylus to Gela, as John

to Patmos, as Elias to Horeb, as Thucydides to Thrace, as Isaiah to

Esiongeber! Sacrifice to the mob. Sacrifice to it thy gold, and thy

blood which is more than thy gold, and thy thought which is more than

thy blood, and thy love which is more than thy thought; sacrifice to it

everything except justice. Receive its complaint; listen to its faults,

and to the faults of others. Listen to what it has to confess and to

denounce to thee. Stretch forth to it the ear, the hand, the arm, the

heart. Do everything for it, excepting evil. Alas! it suffers so much,

and it knows nothing. Correct it, warm it, instruct it, guide it, bring

it up. Put it to the school of honesty. Make it spell truth; show it

that alphabet, reason; teach it to read virtue, probity, generosity,

mercy. Hold thy book wide open. Be there, attentive, vigilant, kind,

faithful, humble. Light up the brain, inflame the mind, extinguish

egotism, show good example. The poor are privation: be abnegation.

Teach! irradiate! They need thee; thou art their great thirst To learn

is the first step; to live is but the second. Be at their order, dost

thou hear? Be ever there, light! For it is beautiful, on this sombre

earth, during this dark life, short passage to something else, it is

beautiful that Force should have Right for a master, that Progress

should have Courage as a chief, that Intelligence should have Honour

as a sovereign, that Conscience should have Duty as a despot, that

Civilization should have Liberty as a queen, that Ignorance should have

a servant,--Light.

BOOK V.

THE MINDS AND THE MASSES,

CHAPTER I.

For the last eighty years memorable things have been done. A wonderful

heap of demolished materials covers the pavement.

What is done is but little by the side of what remains to be done.

To destroy is the task: to build is the work. Progress demolishes with

the left hand; it is with the right hand that it builds.

The left hand of Progress is called Force; the right hand is called

Mind.

There is at this hour a great deal of useful destruction accomplished;

all the old cumbersome civilization is, thanks to our fathers, cleared

away. It is well, it is finished, it is thrown down, it is on the

ground. Now, up with you all, intellects! to work, to labour, to

fatigue, to duty; it is necessary to construct.

Here three questions: To construct what? To construct where? To

construct how?

We reply: To construct the people. To construct the people according to

the laws of progress. To construct the people according to the laws of

light.

CHAPTER II.

To work for the people,--that is the great and urgent necessity.

The human mind--an important thing to say at this minute--has a greater

need of the ideal even than of the real.

It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. Now,

do you wish to realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives.

To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at the present, to look

toward posterity over the wall. To live, is to have in one's self a

balance, and to weigh in it the good and the evil. To live, is to have

justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity, common-sense,

right, and duty nailed to the heart. To live, is to know what one is

worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience. Cato would

not rise before Ptolemy. Cato lived.

Literature is the secretion of civilization, poetry of the ideal. That

is why literature is one of the wants of societies. That is why poetry

is a hunger of the soul. That is why poets are the first instructors

of the people. That is why Shakespeare must be translated in France.

That is why Molière must be translated in England. That is why comments

must be made on them. That is why there must be a vast public literary

domain. That is why all poets, all philosophers, all thinkers, all the

producers of the greatness of the mind must be translated, commented

on, published, printed, reprinted, stereotyped, distributed, explained,

recited, spread abroad, given to all, given cheaply, given at cost

price, given for nothing.

Poetry evolves heroism. M. Royer-Collard, that original and ironical

friend of routine, was, taken all in all, a wise and noble spirit Some

one we know heard him say one day, "Spartacus is a poet."

That wonderful and consoling Ezekiel--the tragic revealer of

progress--has all kinds of singular passages full of a profound

meaning: "The voice said to me: Fill the palm of thy hand with red-hot

coals, and spread them on the city." And elsewhere: "The spirit having

gone into them, everywhere where the spirit went, they went" And again:

"A hand was stretched towards me. It held a roll which was a book. The

voice said to me: Eat this roll. I opened the lips and I ate the book.

And it was sweet in my mouth as honey." To eat the book is a strange

and striking image,--the whole formula of perfectibility, which above

is knowledge, and below, teaching.

We have just said, "Literature is the secretion of civilization." Do

you doubt it? Open the first statistics you come across.

Here is one which we find under our hand: Bagne de Toulon, 1862. Three

thousand and ten prisoners. Of these three thousand and ten convicts,

forty know a little more than to read and write, two hundred and

eighty-seven know how to read and write, nine hundred and four read

badly and write badly, seventeen hundred and seventy-nine know neither

how to read nor write. In this wretched crowd all the merely mechanical

trades are represented by numbers decreasing according as they rise

toward the enlightened pursuits, and you arrive at this final result:

goldsmiths and jewellers, four; ecclesiastics, three; lawyers, two;

comedians, one; artist musicians, one; men of letters, not one.

The transformation of the crowd into the people,--profound labour!

It is to this labour that the men called socialists have devoted

themselves during the last forty years. The author of this book,

however insignificant he may be, is one of the oldest in this labour;

"Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné" dates from 1828, and "Claude Gueux"

from 1834. He claims his place among these philosophers because it is

a place of persecution. A certain hatred of socialism, very blind, but

very general, has been at work for fifteen or sixteen years, and is

still at work most bitterly among the influential classes. (Classes,

then, are still in existence?) Let it not be forgotten, socialism, true

socialism, has for its end the elevation of the masses to the civic

dignity, and therefore its principal care is for moral and intellectual

cultivation. The first hunger is ignorance; socialism wishes then,

above all, to instruct. That does not hinder socialism from being

calumniated, and socialists from being denounced. To most of the

infuriated, trembling cowards who have their say at the present moment,

these reformers are public enemies. They are guilty of everything

that has gone wrong. "O Romans!" said Tertullian, "we are just, kind,

thinking, lettered, honest men. We meet to pray, and we love you

because you are our brethren. We are gentle and peaceable like little

children, and we wish for concord among men. Nevertheless, O Romans! if

the Tiber overflows, or if the Nile does not, you cry, 'To the lions

with the Christians!'"

CHAPTER III.

The democratic idea, the new bridge of civilization, undergoes at this

moment the formidable trial of overweight. Every other idea would

certainly give way under the load that it is made to bear. Democracy

proves its solidity by the absurdities that are heaped on, without

shaking it. It must resist everything that people choose to place on

it. At this moment they try to make it carry despotism.

The people have no need of liberty,--such was the pass-word of a

certain innocent and duped school, the head of which has been dead some

years. That poor honest dreamer believed in good faith that men can

keep progress with them when they turn out liberty. We have heard him

put forth, probably without meaning it, this aphorism: Liberty is good

for the rich. These kinds of maxims have the disadvantage of not being

prejudicial to the establishment of empires.

No, no, no! Nothing out of liberty.

Servitude is the blind soul. Can you figure to yourself a man blind

voluntarily? This terrible thing exists. There are willing slaves. A

smile in irons! Can anything be more hideous? He who is not free is not

a man; he who is not free has no sight, no knowledge, no discernment,

no growth, no comprehension, no will, no faith, no love; he has no

wife, he has no children: he has a female and young ones; he lives

not,--_ab luce principium._ Liberty is the apple of the eye. Liberty is

the visual organ of progress.

Because liberty has inconveniences, and even perils, to wish to create

civilization without it is just the same as to try cultivation without

the sun; the sun is also a censurable heavenly body. One day, in the

too beautiful summer of 1829, a critic, now forgotten,--and wrongly,

for he was not without some talent,--M. P., suffering from the heat,

sharpened his pen, saying, "I am going to excoriate the sun."

Certain social theories, very distinct from socialism such as we

understand and want it, have gone astray. Let us discard all that

resembles the convent, the barrack, the cell and the straight-line

system. Paraguay, minus the Jesuits, is Paraguay just the same. To

give a new fashion to evil is not a useful task. To recommence the old

slavery is idiotic. Let the nations of Europe beware of a despotism

made anew from materials they have to some extent themselves supplied.

Such a thing, cemented with a special philosophy, might well last.

We have just mentioned the theorists, some of whom otherwise right

and sincere, who, by dint of fearing the dispersion of activities

and energies, and of what they call "anarchy," have arrived at an

almost Chinese acceptation of absolute social concentration. They turn

their resignation into a doctrine. Provided man eats and drinks, all

is right. The happiness of the beast is the solution. But this is a

happiness which some other men would call by a different name.

We dream for nations something else besides a felicity solely made

up of obedience. The bastinado procures that sort of felicity

for the Turkish fellah, the knout for the Russian serf, and the

cat-o'-nine-tails for the English soldier. These socialists by the

side of socialism come from Joseph de Maistre, and from Ancillon,

without suspecting it perhaps; for the ingenuousness of these theorists

rallied to the _fait accompli_ has--or fancies it has--democratic

intentions, and speaks energetically of the "principles of '89." Let

these involuntary philosophers of a possible despotism think a moment.

To teach the masses a doctrine against liberty; to cram intellects with

appetites and fatalism, a certain situation being given; to saturate it

with materialism; and to run the risk of the construction which might

proceed from it,--that would be to understand progress in the fashion

of the worthy man who applauded a new gibbet, and who exclaimed, "This

is all right! We have had till now but the old wooden gallows. To-day

the age advances; and here we are with a good stone gibbet, which will

do for our children and grandchildren!"

CHAPTER IV.

To enjoy a full stomach, a satisfied intestine, a satiated belly, is

doubtless something, for it is the enjoyment of the brute. However, one

may place one's ambition higher.

Certainly, a good salary is a fine thing. To tread on this firm ground,

high wages, is pleasant. The wise man likes to want nothing. To insure

his own position is the characteristic of an intelligent man. An

official chair, with ten thousand sesterces a year, is a graceful and

convenient seat. Great emoluments give a fresh complexion and good

health. One lives to an old age in pleasant, well-paid sinecures. The

high financial world, rich in plentiful profits, is a place agreeable

to live in. To be well at Court settles a family well and brings a

fortune. As for myself, I prefer to all these solid comforts the old

leaky vessel in which Bishop Quodvultdeus embarks with a smile.

There is something beyond gorging one's self. The goal of man is not

the goal of the animal.

A moral enhancement is necessary. The life of nations, like the life

of individuals, has its minutes of depression; these minutes pass,

certainly, but no trace of them ought to remain. Man, at this hour,

tends to fall into the stomach. Man must be replaced in the heart; man

must be replaced in the brain. The brain,--behold the sovereign that

must be restored! The social question requires to-day, more than ever,

to be examined on the side of human dignity.

To show man the human end, to ameliorate intelligence first, the animal

afterward, to disdain the flesh as long as the thought is despised, and

to give the example on their own flesh,--such is the actual, immediate,

urgent duty of writers.

It is what men of genius have done at all times.

You ask in what poets can be useful? In imbuing civilization with

light,-only that.

CHAPTER V.

Up to this day there has been a literature of _literati._ In France,

particularly, as we have said, literature had a disposition to form

a caste. To be a poet was something like being a mandarin. Words did

not all belong by right to the language. The dictionary granted or

did not grant the registration. The dictionary had a will of its own.

Imagine the botanist declaring to a vegetable that it does not exist,

and Nature timidly offering an insect to entomology, which refuses it

as incorrect. Imagine astronomy cavilling at the stars. We recollect

having heard an Academician, now dead, say in full academy that French

had been spoken in France only in the seventeenth century, and then

for only twelve years,--we do not remember which twelve. Let us give

up, for it is time, this order of ideas; democracy requires it. The

actual enlarging of thoughts needs something else. Let us leave the

college, the conclave, the cell, the weak taste, weak art, the small

chapel. Poetry is not a coterie. There is at this hour an effort

made to galvanize dead things. Let us strive against this tendency.

Let us insist on the truths which are urgent. The _chefs-d'œuvre_

recommended by the manual of bachelorship, compliments in verse and in

prose, tragedies soaring over the head of some king, inspiration in

full official dress, the brilliant nonentities fixing laws on poetry,

the _Arts poétiques_ which forget La Fontaine, and for which Molière

is doubtful, the Planats castrating the Corneilles, prudish tongues,

the thoughts enclosed between four walls, and limited by Quintilian,

Longinus, Boileau, and La Harpe,--all that, although official and

public teaching is filled and saturated with it, all that belongs to

the past. Some particular epoch, which is called the grand century,

and for a certainty the fine century, is nothing else in reality but a

literary monologue. Is it possible to realize such a strange thing,--a

literature which is an aside? It seems as if one read on the frontal

of art "No admittance." As for ourselves, we understand poetry only

with the door wide open. The hour has struck for hoisting the "All for

All." What is needed by civilization, henceforth a grown-up woman, is a

popular literature.

1830 has opened a debate, literary on the surface, at the bottom social

and human. The moment is come to close the debate. We close it by

asking a literature having in view this purpose: "The People."

The author of these pages wrote, thirty-one years ago, in the preface

to "Lucrèce Borgia," a few words often repeated since: "Le poète a

charge d'âmes." He would add here, if it were worth saying, that,

allowing for possible error, the words, uttered by his conscience, have

been his rule throughout life.

CHAPTER VI.

Macchiavelli had a strange idea of the people. To heap the measure,

to overflow the cup, to exaggerate horror in the case of the prince,

to increase the crushing in order to stir up the oppressed to revolt,

to cause idolatry to change into a curse, to push the masses to

extremities,--such seems to be his policy. His "yes" signifies "no." He

loads the despot with despotism in order to make him burst. The tyrant

becomes in his hands a hideous projectile, which will break to pieces.

Macchiavelli conspires. For whom? Against whom? Guess. His apotheosis

of kings is just the thing to make regicides. On the head of his prince

he places a diadem of crimes, a tiara of vices, a halo of baseness; and

he invites you to adore his monster, with the air of a man expecting

an avenger. He glorifies evil with a squint toward the darkness,--the

darkness wherein is Harmodius. Macchiavelli, the getter-up of princely

outrages, the valet of the Medici and of the Borgias, had in his youth

been put to the rack for having admired Brutus and Cassius. He had

perhaps plotted with the Soderini the deliverance of Florence. Does

he recollect it? Does he continue? His advice is followed, like the

lightning, by a low rumbling in the cloud,--alarming reverberation.

What did he mean to say? On whom has he a design? Is the advice for or

against him to whom he gives it? One day, at Florence, in the garden

of Cosmo Ruccelaï, there being present the Duke of Mantua and John de

Medici, who afterward commanded the Black Bands of Tuscany, Varchi,

the enemy of Macchiavelli, heard him say to the two princes: "Let the

people read no book,--not even mine." It is curious to compare with

this remark the advice given by Voltaire to the Duke de Choiseul,--at

the same time advice to the minister, and insinuation for the king:

"Let the boobies read our nonsense. There is no danger in reading, my

lord. What can a great king like the King of France fear? The people

are but rabble, and the books are but trash." Let them read nothing,

let them read everything: these two pieces of contrary advice coincide

more than one would think. Voltaire, with hidden claws, is purring at

the feet of the king, Voltaire and Macchiavelli are two formidable

indirect revolutionists, dissimilar in everything, and yet identical

in reality by their profound hatred, disguised in flattery, of the

master. The one is malignant, the other is sinister. The princes of the

sixteenth century had as theorist on their infamies, and as enigmatical

courtier, Macchiavelli, an enthusiast dark at heart. The flattery of a

sphinx,--terrible thing! Better yet be flattered, like Louis XV., by a

cat.

Conclusion: Make the people read Macchiavelli, and make them read

Voltaire.

Macchiavelli will inspire them with horror of, and Voltaire with

contempt for, crowned guilt.

But the hearts should turn, above all, toward the grand pure poets,

whether they be sweet like Virgil or bitter like Juvenal.

CHAPTER VII.

The progress of man by the education of minds,--there is no safety but

in that. Teach! learn! All the revolutions of the future are enclosed

and imbedded in this phrase: Gratuitous and obligatory instruction.

It is by the unfolding of works of the highest order that this vast

intellectual teaching should be crowned. At the top the men of genius.

Wherever there is a gathering of men, there ought to be in a special

place, a public expositor of the great thinkers.

By a great thinker we mean a beneficent thinker.

The perpetual presence of the beautiful in their works maintains poets

at the summit of teaching.

No one can foresee the quantity of light which will be brought forth

by letting the people be in communication with men of genius. This

combination of the hearts of the people with the heart of the poet will

be the Voltaic pile of civilization.

Will the people understand this magnificent teaching? Certainly. We

know of nothing too lofty for the people. The people are a great soul.

Have you ever gone on a fête-day to a theatre open gratuitously to

all? What do you think of that auditory? Do you know of any other

more spontaneous and intelligent? Do you know, even in the forest,

of a vibration more profound? The court of Versailles admires like a

well-drilled regiment; the people throw themselves passionately into

the beautiful. They pack together, crowd, amalgamate, combine, and

knead themselves in the theatre,--a living paste that the poet is about

to mould. The powerful thumb of Molière will presently make its mark

on it; the nail of Corneille will scratch this ill-shaped heap. Whence

does that heap come? Whence does it proceed? From the Courtille, from

the Porcherons, from the Cunette; it is shoeless, it is bare-armed, it

is ragged. Silence! This is the human block.

The house is crowded, the vast multitude looks, listens, loves; all

consciences, deeply moved, throw off their inner fire; all eyes

glisten; the huge beast with a thousand heads is there,--the Mob of

Burke, the _Plebs_ of Titus Livius, the _Fex urbis_ of Cicero. It

caresses the beautiful; smiling at it with the grace of a woman. It

is literary in the most refined sense of the word; nothing equals the

delicacy of this monster. The tumultuous crowd trembles, blushes,

palpitates. Its modesty is surprising; the crowd is a virgin. No

prudery however; this brute is not brutal. Not a sympathy escapes

it; it has in itself the whole keyboard, from passion to irony, from

sarcasm to sobbing. Its compassion is more than compassion; it is real

mercy. God is felt in it. All at once the sublime passes, and the

sombre electricity of the abyss heaves up suddenly all this pile of

hearts and entrails; enthusiasm effects a transfiguration. And now,

is the enemy at the gates, is the country in danger? Appeal to that

populace, and it would enact the sublime drama of Thermopylæ. Who has

called forth such a metamorphosis? Poetry.

The multitude (and in this lies their grandeur) are profoundly open to

the ideal. When they come in contact with lofty art they are pleased,

they shudder. Not a detail escapes them. The crowd is one liquid and

living expanse capable of vibration. A mass is a sensitive-plant.

Contact with the beautiful agitates ecstatically the surface of

multitudes,--sure sign that the depth is sounded. A rustling of leaves,

a mysterious breath, passes, the crowd trembles under the sacred

insufflation of the abyss.

And even where the man of the people is not in a crowd, he is yet a

good hearer of great things. His ingenuousness is honest, his curiosity

healthy. Ignorance is a longing. His near connection with Nature

renders him subject to the holy emotion of the true. He has, toward

poetry, secret natural desires which he does not suspect himself. All

the teachings are due to the people. The more divine the light, the

more is it made for this simple soul. We would have in the villages a

pulpit from which Homer should be explained to the peasants.

CHAPTER VIII.

Too much matter is the evil of our day. Hence a certain dulness.

It is necessary to restore some ideal in the human mind. Whence shall

you take your ideal? Where is it? The poets, the philosophers, the

thinkers are the urns. The ideal is in Æschylus, in Isaiah, in Juvenal,

in Alighieri, in Shakespeare. Throw Æschylus, throw Isaiah, throw

Juvenal, throw Dante, throw Shakespeare into the deep soul of the human

race.

Pour Job, Solomon, Pindar, Ezekiel, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus,

Theocritus, Plautus, Lucretius, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Catullus,

Tacitus, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, Petrarch, Pascal,

Milton, Descartes, Corneille, La Fontaine, Montesquieu, Diderot,

Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, André Chenier, Kant, Byron,

Schiller,--pour all these souls into man. And with them pour all the

wits from Æsop up to Molière, all the intellects from Plato up to

Newton, all the encyclopædists from Aristotle up to Voltaire.

By that means, while curing the illness for the moment, you will

establish forever the health of the human mind.

You will cure the middle class and found the people.

As we have said just now, after the destruction which has delivered the

world, you will construct the edifice which shall make it prosper.

What an aim,--to make the people! Principles combined with science;

every possible quantity of the absolute introduced by degrees into the

fact; Utopia treated successively by every mode of realization,--by

political economy, by philosophy, by physics, by chemistry, by

dynamics, by logic, by art; union replacing little by little

antagonism, and unity replacing union; for religion God, for priest the

father, for prayer virtue, for field the whole earth, for language the

verb, for law the right, for motive-power duty, for hygiene labour,

for economy universal peace, for canvas the very life, for the goal

progress, for authority liberty, for people the man,--such is the

simplification.

And at the summit the ideal.

The ideal!--inflexible type of perpetual progress.

To whom belong men of genius, if not to thee, people? They do belong to

thee; they are thy sons and thy fathers. Thou givest birth to them, and

they teach thee. They open in thy chaos vistas of light. Children, they

have drunk thy sap. They have leaped in the universal matrix, humanity.

Each of thy phases, people, is an avatar. The deep essence of life,

it is in thee that it must be looked for. Thou art the great bosom.

Geniuses are begotten from thee, mysterious crowd.

Let them therefore return to thee.

People, the author, God, dedicates them to thee.

BOOK VI.

THE BEAUTIFUL THE SERVANT OF THE TRUE.

CHAPTER I.

Ah, minds, be useful! Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when it

is necessary to be efficient and good. Art for art may be beautiful,

but art for progress is more beautiful yet. To dream revery is well,

to dream Utopia is better. Ah, you must think? Then think of making

man better. You must dream? Here is the dream for you,--the ideal. The

prophet seeks solitude, but not isolation. He unravels and untwists

the threads of humanity, tied and rolled in a skein in his soul; he

does not break them. He goes into the desert to think--of whom? Of

the multitude. It is not to the forests that he speaks; it is to the

cities, It is not at the grass bending to the wind that he looks; it is

at man. It is not against lions that he wars; it is against tyrants.

Woe to thee, Ahab! woe to thee, Hosea! woe to you, kings! woe to you,

Pharaohs! is the cry of the great solitary one. Then he weeps.

For what? For that eternal captivity of Babylon, undergone by Israel

formerly, undergone by Poland, by Roumania, by Hungary, by Venice

to-day. He grows old, the good and dark thinker; he watches, he lies

in wait, he listens, he looks,--ear in the silence, eye in the night,

claw half stretched toward the wicked. Go and speak to him, then, of

art for art, to that cenobite of the ideal. He has his aim, and he

walks straight toward it; and his aim is this: improvement. He devotes

himself to it.

He does not belong to himself; he belongs to his apostleship. He is

intrusted with that immense care,--the progress of the human race.

Genius is not made for genius, it is made for man. Genius on earth

is God giving himself. Each time that a masterpiece appears, it is a

distribution of God that takes place. The masterpiece is a variety of

the miracle. Thence, in all religions, and among all peoples, comes

faith in divine men. They deceive themselves, those who think that we

deny the divinity of Christs.

At the point now reached by the social question, everything should be

action in common. Forces isolated frustrate one another; the ideal and

the real strengthen each other. Art necessarily aids science. These two

wheels of progress should turn together.

Generation of new talents, noble group of writers and poets, legion

of young men, O living posterity of my country, your elders love

and salute you! Courage! let us consecrate ourselves. Let us devote

ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just. In that there is

goodness.

Some pure lovers of art, affected by a preoccupation which in its

way has its dignity and nobleness, discard this formula, "Art for

progress," the Beautiful Useful, fearing lest the useful should deform

the beautiful. They tremble lest they should see attached to the fine

arms of the Muse the coarse hands of the drudge. According to them, the

ideal may become perverted by too much contact with reality. They are

solicitous for the sublime if it is lowered as far as humanity. Ah,

they are mistaken.

The useful, far from circumscribing the sublime, increases it. The

application of the sublime to human things produces unexpected

_chefs-d'œuvre._ The useful, considered in itself and as an element

combining with the sublime, is of several kinds; there is the useful

which is tender, and there is the useful which is indignant. Tender, it

refreshes the unfortunate and creates the social epopee; indignant, it

flagellates the wicked, and creates the divine satire. Moses hands the

rod to Jesus; and after having caused the water to gush from the rock,

that august rod, the very same, drives the vendors from the sanctuary.

What! art should grow less because it has expanded? No. One service

more is one more beauty.

But people cry out: To undertake the cure of social evils; to amend

the codes; to denounce the law to the right; to pronounce those

hideous words, "bagne," "galley-slave," "convict," "girl of the town;"

to control the police-registers; to contract the dispensaries; to

investigate wages and the want of work; to taste the black bread of

the poor; to seek labour for the work-girl; to confront fashionable

idleness with ragged sloth; to throw down the partition of ignorance;

to open schools; to teach little children how to read; to attack

shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience; to preach the

multiplication of spelling-books; to proclaim the equality of the sun;

to ameliorate the food of intellects and of hearts; to give meat and

drink; to claim solutions for problems and shoes for naked feet,--that

is not the business of the azure. Art is the azure.

Yes, art is the azure; but the azure from above, from which falls

the ray which swells the corn, makes the maize yellow and the apple

round, gilds the orange, sweetens the grape. I repeat it, one service

more is one more beauty. At all events, where is the diminution? To

ripen the beet-root, to water the potatoes, to thicken the lucern, the

clover, and the hay; to be a fellow-workman with the ploughman, the

vine-dresser, and the gardener,--that does not deprive the heavens of

one star. Ah, immensity does not despise utility, and what does it lose

by it? Does the vast vital fluid that we call magnetic or electric

lighten less splendidly the depth of the clouds because it consents

to perform the office of pilot to a bark, and to keep always turned

to the north the small needle that is trusted to it, the huge guide?

Is the aurora less magnificent, has it less purple and emerald, does

it undergo any decrease of majesty, of grace and radiancy, because,

foreseeing the thirst of a fly, it carefully secretes in the flower the

drop of dew which the bee requires?

Yet, people insist: To compose social poetry, human poetry, popular

poetry; to grumble against the evil and for the good; to promote public

passions; to insult despots; to make rascals despair; to emancipate man

before he is of age; to push souls forward and darkness backward; to

know that there are thieves and tyrants; to clean penal cells; to empty

the pail of public filth,--what! Polyhymnia, sleeves tucked up to do

such dirty work? Oh, for shame!

Why not?

Homer was the geographer and the historian of his time, Moses the

legislator of his, Juvenal the judge of his, Dante the theologian of

his, Shakespeare the moralist of his, Voltaire the philosopher of his.

No region, in speculation or in real fact, is shut to the mind. Here a

horizon, there wings; right for all to soar.

For certain sublime beings, to soar is to serve. In the desert not a

drop of water,--a horrible thirst; the wretched file of pilgrims drag

along overcome. All at once, in the horizon, above a wrinkle in the

sands, a griffin is seen soaring, and all the caravan cry out, "There

is water there!"

What thinks Æschylus of art as art? Certainly, if ever a poet was a

poet, it is Æschylus. Listen to his reply. It is in the "Frogs" of

Aristophanes, line 1039. Æschylus speaks:--

"Since the beginning of time, the illustrious poet has

served men. Orpheus has taught the horror of murder, Musæus

oracles and medicine, Hesiod agriculture, and that divine

Homer, heroism. And I, after Homer, I have sung Patroclus,

and Teucer the lion-hearted; so that every citizen should

try to resemble the great men."

As all the sea is salt, so all the Bible is poetry. This poetry talks

politics at its own hours. Open 1 Samuel, chapter VIII. The Jewish

people demand a king:

"...And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice

of the people in all that they say unto thee; for they have

not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should

not reign over them.... And Samuel told all the words of the

Lord unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said,

This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over

you: He will take your sons and appoint them for himself,

for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall

run before his chariots.... And he will take your daughters

to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your

oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his

servants. And he will take your men-servants, and your

maid-servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses,

and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your

sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out

in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen

you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day."

Samuel, we see, denies the right divine; Deuteronomy shakes the

altar,--the false altar, let us observe; but is not the next altar

always the false altar? "You shall demolish the altars of the false

gods. You shall seek God where he dwells." It is almost Pantheism.

Because it takes part in human things, is democratic here, iconoclast

there, is that book less magnificent and less supreme? If poetry is not

in the Bible, where is it?

You say: The muse is made to sing, to love, to believe, to pray. Yes

and no. Let us understand each other. To sing whom? The void. To love

what? One's self. To believe in what? The dogma. To pray to what? The

idol. No, here is the truth: To sing the ideal, to love humanity, to

believe in progress, to pray to the infinite.

Take care, you who are tracing those circles round the poet, you put

him beyond man. That the poet should be beyond humanity in one way,--by

the wings, by the immense flight, by the sudden possible disappearance

in the fathomless,--is well; it must be so, but on condition of

reappearance. He may depart, but he must return. Let him have wings

for the infinite, provided he has feet for the earth, and that, after

having been seen flying, he is seen walking. Let him become man again,

after he has gone out of humanity. After he has been seen an archangel,

let him be once more a brother. Let the star which is in that eye weep

a tear, and that tear be the human tear. Thus, human and superhuman, he

shall be the poet. But to be altogether beyond man, is not to be. Show

me thy foot, genius, and let us see if, like myself, thou hast earthly

dust on thy heel.

If thou hast not some of that dust, if thou hast never walked in my

pathway, thou dost not know me and I do not know thee. Go away. Thou

believest thyself an angel, thou art but a bird.

Help from the strong for the weak, help from the great for the small,

help from the free for the slaves, help from the thinkers for the

ignorant, help from the solitary for the multitudes,--such is the law,

from Isaiah to Voltaire. He who does not follow that law may be a

genius, but he is only a useless genius. By not handling the things of

the earth, he thinks to purify himself; he annuls himself. He is the

refined, the delicate, he may be the exquisite genius; he is not the

great genius. Any one, roughly useful, but useful, has the right to

ask on seeing that good-for-nothing genius: "Who is this idler?" The

amphora which refuses to go to the fountain deserves the hooting of the

pitchers.

Great is he who consecrates himself! Even when overcome, he remains

serene, and his misery is happiness. No, it is not a bad thing for the

poet to meet face to face with duty. Duty has a stern resemblance to

the ideal. The act of doing one's duty is worth all the trial it costs.

No, the jostling with Cato is not to be avoided. No, no, no; truth,

honesty, teaching the crowds, human liberty, manly virtue, conscience,

are not things to disdain. Indignation and emotion are but one faculty

turned toward the two sides of mournful human slavery; and those who

are capable of anger are capable of love. To level the tyrant and the

slave, what a magnificent effort! Now, the whole of one side of actual

society is tyrant, and all the other side is slave. To straighten this

out will be a wonderful thing to accomplish; yet it will be done. All

thinkers must work with that end in view. They will gain greatness in

that work. To be the servant of God in the march of progress and the

apostle of God with the people,--such is the law which regulates the

growth of genius.

[Illustration: _Portrait of Shakespeare._

Photogravure. From Mr. Ozias Humphry's Drawing of the Chandos. Picture

made for the late Mr. Malene in 1783.

Drawing of Mr. Malene]

CHAPTER II.

There are two poets,--the poet of caprice and the poet of logic; and

there is a third poet, a component of both, amending them one by the

other, completing them one by the other, and summing them up in a

loftier entity,--the two statures in a single one. The third is the

first. He has caprice, and he follows the wind. He has logic, and he

follows duty. The first writes the Canticle of Canticles, the second

writes Leviticus, the third writes the Psalms and the Prophecies. The

first is Horace, the second is Lucan, the third is Juvenal. The first

is Pindar, the second is Hesiod, the third is Homer.

No loss of beauty results from goodness. Is the lion less beautiful

than the tiger, because it has the faculty of merciful emotion?

Does that jaw which opens to let the infant fall into the hands of

the mother deprive that mane of its majesty? Does the vast noise of

the roaring vanish from that terrible mouth because it has licked

Androcles? The genius which does not help, even if graceful, is

deformed. A prodigy without love is a monster. Let us love! let us love!

To love has never hindered from pleasing. Where have you seen one form

of the good excluding the other? On the contrary, all that is good is

connected. Let us, however, understand each other. It does not follow

that to have one quality implies necessarily the possession of the

other; but it would be strange that one quality added to another should

make less. To be useful, is but to be useful; to be beautiful is but

to be beautiful; to be useful and beautiful is to be sublime. That is

what Saint Paul is in the first century, Tacitus and Juvenal in the

second, Dante in the thirteenth, Shakespeare in the sixteenth, Milton

and Molière in the seventeenth.

We have just now recalled a saying become famous: "Art for art." Let

us, once for all, explain ourselves in this question. If faith can

be placed in an affirmation very general and very often repeated (we

believe honestly), these words, "Art for art," would have been written

by the author of this book himself. Written? Never! You may read, from

the first to the last line, all that we have published; you will not

find these words. It is the opposite which is written throughout our

works, and, we insist on it, in our entire life. As for these words

in themselves, how far are they real? Here is the fact, which several

of our contemporaries remember as well as we do. One day, thirty-five

years ago, in a discussion between critics and poets on Voltaire's

tragedies, the author of this book threw out this suggestion: "This

tragedy is not a tragedy. It is not men who live, it is sentences

which speak in it! Rather a hundred times 'Art for art!'" This remark

turned, doubtless involuntarily, from its true sense to serve the wants

of discussion, has since taken, to the great surprise of him who had

uttered it, the proportions of a formula. It is this opinion, limited

to "Alzire" and to the "Orpheline de la Chine," and incontestable in

that restricted application, which has been turned into a perfect

declaration of principles, and an axiom to inscribe on the banner of

art.

This point settled, let us go on.

Between two verses, the one by Pindar, deifying a coachman or

glorifying the brass nails of the wheel of a chariot, the other by

Archilochus, so powerful that, after having read it, Jeffreys would

leave off his career of crimes and would hang himself on the gallows

prepared by him for honest people,--between these two verses, of equal

beauty, I prefer that of Archilochus.

In times anterior to history, when poetry is fabulous and legendary,

it has a Promethean grandeur. What composes this grandeur? Utility.

Orpheus tames wild animals; Amphion builds cities; the poet, tamer and

architect, Linus aiding Hercules, Musæus assisting Dædalus, poetry a

civilizing power,--such is the origin. Tradition agrees with reason.

The common-sense of peoples is not deceived in that. It always invents

fables in the sense of truth. Everything is great in those magnifying

distances. Well, then, the wild-beast-taming poet that you admire in

Orpheus, recognize him in Juvenal.

We insist on Juvenal. Few poets have been more insulted, more

contested, more calumniated. Calumny against Juvenal has been drawn

at such long date that it lasts yet. It passes from one literary

clown to another. These grand haters of evil are hated by all the

flatterers of power and success. The mob of fawning sophists, of

writers who have around the neck the mark of their slavery, of bullying

historiographers, of scholiasts kept and fed, of court and school

followers, stand in the way of the glory of the punishers and avengers.

They croak around those eagles. People do not willingly render justice

to the dispensers of justice. They hinder the masters and rouse the

indignation of the lackeys. There is such a thing as the indignation of

baseness.

Moreover, the diminutives cannot do less than help one another, and

Cæsarion must at least have Tyrannion as a support The pedant snaps

the ferules for the benefit of the satrap. There is for this kind of

work a literary sycophancy and an official pedagogism. These poor,

dear-paying vices; these excellent indulgent crimes; his Highness

Rufinus; his Majesty Claudius; that august Madame Messalina who gives

such beautiful _fêtes_, and pensions out of her privy purse, and who

lasts and who is perpetuated, always crowned, calling herself Theodora,

then Fredegonde, then Agnes, then Margaret of Burgundy, then Isabel

of Bavaria, then Catherine de Medici, then Catherine of Russia, then

Caroline of Naples, etc.,--all these great lords, crimes, all these

fine ladies, turpitudes, shall they have the sorrow of witnessing

the triumph of Juvenal! No. War with the scourge in the name of

sceptres! War with the rod in the name of the shop! That is well! Go

on, courtiers, clients, eunuchs, and scribes. Go on, publicans and

pharisees. You will not hinder the republic from thanking Juvenal, or

the temple from approving Jesus.

Isaiah, Juvenal, Dante,--they are virgins. Observe their eyes cast

down. There is chastity in the anger of the just against the unjust.

The Imprecation can be as holy as the Hosanna; and indignation, honest

indignation, has the very purity of virtue. In point of whiteness, the

foam has no reason to envy the snow.

CHAPTER III.

History proves the working partnership of art and progress. _Dictus ob

hoc lenire tigres._ Rhythm is a power,--a power that the Middle Ages

recognize and submit to not less than antiquity. The second barbarism,

feudal barbarism, dreads also this power,--poetry. The barons, not

over-timid, are abashed before the poet. Who is this man? They fear

lest a manly song be sung. The spirit of civilization is with this

unknown. The old donjons full of carnage open their wild eyes, and

suspect the darkness; anxiety seizes hold of them. Feudality trembles;

the den is disturbed. The dragons and the hydras are ill at ease. Why?

Because an invisible god is there.

It is curious to find this power of poetry in countries where

unsociableness is deepest, particularly in England, in that extreme

feudal darkness, _penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos._ If we believe

the legend,--a form of history as true and as false as any other,--it

is owing to poetry that Colgrim, besieged by the Britons, is relieved

in York by his brother Bardulph the Saxon; that King Awlof penetrates

into the camp of Athelstan; that Werburgh, prince of Northumbria, is

delivered by the Welsh, whence, it is said, that Celtic device of the

Prince of Wales, _Ich dien_; that Alfred, King of England, triumphs

over Gitro, King of the Danes; and that Richard the Lion-hearted

escapes from the prison of Losenstein. Ranulph, Earl of Chester,

attacked in his castle of Rothelan, is saved by the intervention of

the minstrels, which was still authenticated under Elizabeth by the

privilege accorded to the minstrels patronized by the Lords of Dalton.

The poet had the right of reprimand and menace. In 1316, on Pentecost

Day, Edward II. being at table in the grand hall of Westminster with

the peers of England, a female minstrel entered the hall on horseback,

rode all round, saluted Edward II., predicted in a loud voice to

the minion Spencer the gibbet and castration by the hand of the

executioner, and to the king the hoof by means of which a red-hot iron

should be buried in his intestines, placed on the table before the king

a letter, and departed; and no one said anything to her.

At the festivals the minstrels passed before the priests, and were

more honourably treated. At Abingdon, at a festival of the Holy Cross,

each of the twelve priests received fourpence, and each of the twelve

minstrels two shillings. At the priory of Maxtoke, the custom was to

give supper to the minstrels in the Painted Chamber, lighted by eight

huge wax-candles.

The more we advance North, it seems as if the increased thickness

of the fog increases the greatness of the poet. In Scotland he is

enormous. If anything surpasses the legend of the Rhapsodists, it is

the legend of the Scalds. At the approach of Edward of England, the

bards defend Stirling as the three hundred had defended Sparta; and

they have their Thermopylæ, as great as that of Leonidas. Ossian,

perfectly certain and real, has had a plagiary; that is nothing; but

this plagiarist has done more than rob him,--he has made him insipid.

To know Fingal only by Macpherson is as if one knew Amadis only by

Tressan. They show at Staffa the stone of the poet, _Clachan an

Bairdh_,--so named, according to many antiquaries, long before the

visit of Walter Scott to the Hebrides. This chair of the Bard--a great

hollow rock ready for a giant wishing to sit down--is at the entrance

of the grotto. Around it are the waves and the clouds. Behind the

Clachan an Bairdh is heaped up and raised the superhuman geometry of

basaltic prisms, the pell-mell of colonnades and waves, and all the

mystery of the fearful edifice. The gallery of Fingal runs next to the

poet's chair; the sea beats on it before entering under that terrible

ceiling. When evening comes, one imagines that he sees in that chair

a form leaning on its elbow. "It is the ghost!" say the fishermen of

Mackinnon's clan; and no one would dare, even in full day, to go up as

far as that formidable seat; for to the idea of the stone is allied the

idea of the sepulchre, and on the chair of granite no one can be seated

but the man of shade.

CHAPTER IV.

Thought is power.

All power is duty. Should this power enter into repose in our age?

Should duty shut its eyes? and is the moment come for art to disarm?

Less than ever. The human caravan is, thanks to 1789, arrived on a high

plateau; and the horizon being more vast, art has more to do. This

is all. To every widening of horizon corresponds an enlargement of

conscience.

We have not reached the goal. Concord condensed in happiness,

civilization summed up in harmony,--that is far off yet. In the

eighteenth century that dream was so distant that it seemed a guilty

thought. The Abbé de St. Pierre was expelled from the Academy for

having dreamed that dream,--an expulsion which seems rather severe at a

period when pastorals carried the day, even with Fontenelle, and when

St. Lambert invented the idyll for the use of the nobility. The Abbé

de St. Pierre has left behind him a word and a dream: the word is his

own,--"Benevolence;" the dream belongs to all of us,--"Fraternity."

This dream, which made Cardinal de Polignac foam and Voltaire smile, is

not now so much lost as it was once in the mist of the improbable. It

is a little nearer; but we do not touch it. The people, those orphans

who seek their mother, do not yet hold in their hand the hem of the

robe of peace.

There remains around us a sufficient quantity of slavery, of sophistry,

of war and death, to prevent the spirit of civilization from giving up

any of its forces. The idea of the right divine is not yet entirely

done away with. That which has been Ferdinand VII. in Spain, Ferdinand

II. in Naples, George IV. in England, Nicholas in Russia, still floats

about; a remnant of these spectres is still hovering in the air.

Inspirations descend from that fatal cloud on some crown-bearers who,

leaning on their elbows, meditate with a sinister aspect.

Civilization has not done yet with those who grant constitutions,

with the owners of peoples, and with the legitimate and hereditary

madmen, who assert themselves majesties by the grace of God, and think

that they have the right of manumission over the human race. It is

necessary to raise some obstacle, to show bad will to the past, and to

bring to bear on these men, on these dogmas, on these chimeras which

stand in the way, some hindrance. Intellect, thought, science, true

art, philosophy, ought to watch and beware of misunderstandings. False

rights contrive very easily to put in movement true armies. There

are murdered Polands looming in the future. "All my anxiety," said a

contemporary poet recently dead, "is the smoke of my cigar." My anxiety

is also a smoke,--the smoke of the cities which are burning in the

distance. Therefore, let us bring the masters to grief, if we can.

Let us go again in the loudest possible voice over the lesson of the

just and the unjust, of right and usurpation, of oath and perjury, of

good and evil, of _fas et nefas_; let us come forth with all our old

antitheses, as they say. Let us contrast what ought to be with what

actually is. Let us put clearness into everything. Bring light, you

that have it. Let us oppose dogma to dogma, principle to principle,

energy to obstinacy, truth to imposture, dream to dream,--the dream

of the future to the dream of the past,--liberty to despotism. People

will be able to sit down, to stretch themselves at full length, and

to go on smoking the cigar of fancy poetry, and to enjoy Boccaccio's

"Decameron" with the sweet blue sky over their heads, whenever the

sovereignty of a king shall be exactly of the same dimension as the

liberty of a man. Until then, little sleep. I am distrustful.

Put sentinels everywhere. Do not expect from despots a large share

of liberty. Break your own shackles, all of you Polands that may

be! Make sure of the future by your own exertions. Do not hope that

your chain will forge itself into the key of freedom. Up, children

of the fatherland! O mowers of the steppes, arise! Trust to the good

intentions of orthodox czars just enough to take up arms. Hypocrisies

and apologies, being traps, are one more danger.

We live in a time when orations are heard praising the magnanimity of

white bears and the tender feelings of panthers. Amnesty, clemency,

grandeur of soul; an era of felicity opens; fatherly love is the order

of the day; see all that is already done; it must not be thought that

the march of the age is not understood; august arms are open; rally

still closer round the emperor; Muscovy is kind-hearted. See how happy

the serfs are! The streams are to flow with milk, with prosperity and

liberty for all. Your princes groan like you over the past; they are

excellent. Come, fear nothing, little ones! so far as we are concerned,

we confess candidly that we are of those who put no reliance in the

lachrymal gland of crocodiles.

The actual public monstrosities impose stem obligations on the

conscience of the thinker, philosopher, or poet. Incorruptibility must

resist corruption. It is more than ever necessary to show men the

ideal,--that mirror in which is seen the face of God.

CHAPTER V.

There are in literature and philosophy men who have tears and laughter

at command,--Heraclituses wearing the mask of a Democritus; men often

very great, like Voltaire. They are irony keeping a serious, sometimes

tragic countenance.

These men, under the pressure of the influences and prejudices of

their time, speak with a double meaning. One of the most profound is

Bayle,[1] the man of Rotterdam, the powerful thinker. When Bayle coolly

utters this maxim, "It is better worth our while to weaken the grace

of a thought than to anger a tyrant," I smile; I know the man. I think

of the persecuted, almost proscribed one, and I know well that he has

given way to the temptation of affirming merely to give me the longing

to contest. But when it is a poet who speaks,--a poet wholly free,

rich, happy, prosperous almost to inviolability,--one expects a clear,

open, and healthy teaching, one cannot believe that from such a man can

emanate anything like a desertion of his own conscience; and it is with

a blush that one reads this:--

"Here below, in time of peace, let every man sweep his own

street-door. In war, if conquered, let every man fraternize

with the soldiery.... Let every enthusiast be put on the

cross when he reaches his thirtieth year. If he has once

experienced the world as it is, from the dupe he becomes

the rogue.... What utility, what result, what advantage

does the holy liberty of the press offer you? The complete

demonstration of it is this: a profound contempt of

public opinion.... There are people who have a mania for

railing at everything that is great,--they are the men who

have attacked the Holy Alliance; and yet nothing has been

invented more august and more salutary for humanity."

These things, which lower the man who has written them, are signed

_Goethe._ Goethe, when he wrote them, was sixty years old. Indifference

to good and evil excites the brain,--one may get intoxicated with it;

and that is what comes of it. The lesson is a sad one. Mournful sight!

Here the helot is a mind.

A quotation may be a pillory. We nail on the public highway these

lugubrious sentences; it is our duty. Goethe has written that. Let it

be remembered; and let no one among the poets fall again into the same

error.

To go into a passion for the good, for the true, for the just; to

suffer with the sufferers; to feel in our inner soul all the blows

struck by every executioner on human flesh; to be scourged with

Christ and flogged with the negro; to be strengthened and to lament;

to climb, a Titan, that wild peak where Peter and Cæsar make their

swords fraternize, _gladium cum gladio copulemus_; to heap up for

that escalade the Ossa of the ideal on the Pelion of the real; to

make a vast repartition of hope; to avail one's self of the ubiquity

of the book in order to be everywhere at the same time with a

comforting thought; to push pell-mell men, women, children, whites,

blacks, peoples, hangmen, tyrants, victims, impostors, the ignorant,

proletaries, serfs, slaves, masters, toward the future (a precipice

to some, deliverance to others); to go forth, to wake up, to hasten,

to march, to run, to think, to wish,--ah, indeed, that is well! It is

worth while being a poet. Beware! you lose your temper. Of course I

do; but I gain anger. Come and breathe into my wings, hurricane!

There has been, of late years, an instant when impassibility was

recommended to poets as a condition of divinity. To be indifferent,

that was called being Olympian. Where had they seen that? That is

an Olympus very unlike the real one. Read Homer. The Olympians are

passion, and nothing else. Boundless humanity,--such is their divinity.

They fight unceasingly. One has a bow, another a lance, another a

sword, another a club, another thunder. There is one of them who

compels the leopards to draw him along. Another, Wisdom, has cut off

the head of Night, twisted with serpents, and has nailed it to his

shield. Such is the calm of the Olympians. Their angers cause the

thunders to roll from one end to the other of the Iliad and of the

Odyssey.

These angers, when they are just, are good. The poet who has them

is the true Olympian. Juvenal, Dante, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and Milton

had these angers; Molière also. From the soul of Alcestes flashes

constantly the lightning of "vigorous hatreds." Jesus meant that hatred

of evil when he said, "I am come to bring war."

I like Stesichorus indignant, preventing the alliance of Greece with

Phalaris, and fighting the brazen bull with strokes of the lyre.