Louis XIV. found it good to have Racine sleeping in his chamber when

he, the king, was ill, turning thus the poet into an assistant to his

apothecary,--wonderful patronage of letters; but he asked nothing

more from the _beaux esprits_, and the horizon of his alcove seemed

to him sufficient for them. One day, Racine, somewhat urged by Madame

de Maintenon, had the idea to leave the king's chamber and to visit

the garrets of the people. Thence a memoir on the public distress.

Louis XIV. cast at Racine a killing look. Poets fare ill when, being

courtiers, they do what royal mistresses ask of them. Racine, on the

suggestion of Madame de Maintenon, risks a remonstrance which causes

him to be driven from Court, and he dies of it. Voltaire at the

instigation of Madame de Pompadour, tries a madrigal (an awkward one it

appears), which causes him to be driven from France; and he does not

die of it Louis XV. on reading the madrigal,--"Et gardez tous deux vos

conquêtes,"--had exclaimed, "What a fool this Voltaire is!"

Some years ago, "a well-authorized pen," as they say in official and

academic _patois_, wrote this:--

"The greatest service that poets can render us is to be good

for nothing. We do not ask of them anything else."

Observe the extent and spread of this word, "the poets," which includes

Linus, Musæus, Orpheus, Homer, Job, Hesiod, Moses, Daniel, Amos,

Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Æsop, David, Solomon, Æschylus, Sophocles,

Euripides, Pindar, Archilochus, Tyrtæus, Stesichorus, Menander, Plato,

Asclepiades, Pythagoras, Anacreon, Theocritus, Lucretius, Plautus,

Terence, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Juvenal, Apuleius, Lucan, Persius,

Tibullus, Seneca, Petrarch, Ossian, Saädi, Ferdousi, Dante, Cervantes,

Calderon, Lope de Vega, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Camoëns, Marot, Ronsard,

Régnier, Agrippa d'Aubigné, Malherbe, Segrais, Racan, Milton, Pierre

Corneille, Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Fontenelle, Reguard,

Lesage, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Sedaine, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, André Chénier, Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland, Schiller, Goethe,

Hoffmann, Alfieri, Châteaubriand, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns,

Walter Scott, Balzac, Musset, Béranger, Pellico, Vigny, Dumas, George

Sand, Lamartine,--all declared by the oracle "good for nothing,"

and having uselessness for excellence. That sentence (a "success,"

it appears) has been very often repeated. We repeat it in our turn.

When the conceit of an idiot reaches such proportions it deserves

registering. The writer who has emitted that aphorism is, so they

assure us, one of the high personages of the day. We have no objection.

Dignities do not lessen the length of the ears.

Octavius Augustus, on the morning of the battle of Actium, met an ass

that the owner called Triumphus. This Triumphus, endowed with the

faculty of braying, appeared to him of good omen; Octavius Augustus

won the battle, remembered Triumphus, had the ass carved in bronze and

placed in the Capitol. That made a Capitoline ass, but still an ass.

One can understand kings saying to the poet, "Be useless;" but one

does not understand the people saying so to him. The poet is for the

people. "Pro populo poëta," wrote Agrippa d'Aubigné; "All things to

all men," exclaimed Saint Paul. What is a mind? A feeder of souls.

The poet is at the same time a menace and a promise. The anxiety

with which he inspires oppressors calms and consoles the oppressed.

It is the glory of the poet that he places a restless pillow on the

purple bed of the tormentors; and, thanks to him, it is often that

the tyrant awakes, saying, "I have slept badly." Every slavery,

every disheartening faintness, every sorrow, every misfortune, every

distress, every hunger, and every thirst have a claim on the poet; he

has one creditor,--the human race.

To be the great servant does not certainly derogate from the poet.

Because on certain occasions, and to do his duty, he has uttered the

cry of a people; because he has, when necessary, the sob of humanity

in his breast,--every voice of mystery sings not the less in him.

Speaking so loudly does not prevent him speaking low. He is not less

the confidant, and sometimes the confessor, of hearts. He is not less

intimately connected with those who love, with those who think, with

those who sigh, thrusting his head in the twilight between the heads

of two lovers. The love poems of André Chénier, without losing any

of their characteristics, border on the angry iambic: "Weep thou, O

Virtue, if I die!" The poet is the only living being to whom it is

granted both to thunder and to whisper, because he has in himself,

like Nature, the rumbling of the cloud and the rustling of the leaf.

He exists for a double function,--a function individual and a public

function: and it is for that that he requires, so to speak, two souls.

Ennius said: "I have three of them,--an Oscan soul, a Greek soul, and a

Latin soul." It is true that he made allusion only to the place of his

birth, to the place of his education, and to the place where he was a

citizen; and besides, Ennius was but a rough cast of a poet, vast, but

unformed.

No poet without that activity of soul which is the resultant of

conscience. The ancient moral laws require to be stated; the new moral

laws require to be revealed. These two series do not coincide without

some effort. That effort is incumbent on the poet He assumes constantly

the function of the philosopher. He must defend, according to the

side attacked, now the liberty of the human mind, now the liberty of

the human heart,--to love being no less holy than to think. There is

nothing of "Art for art" in all that.

The poet arrives in the midst of those goers and comers that we call

the living, in order to tame, like ancient Orpheus, the tiger in

man,--his evil instincts,--and, like the legendary Amphion, to remove

the stumbling-blocks of prejudice and superstition, to set up the new

blocks, to relay the corner-stones and the foundations, and to build up

again the city,--that is to say, society.

That this immense service--namely, to co-operate in the work of

civilization--should involve loss of beauty for poetry and of dignity

for the poet, is a proposition which one cannot enunciate without

smiling. Useful art preserves and augments all its graces, all its

charms, all its prestige. Indeed, because he has taken part with

Prometheus,--the man progress, crucified on the Caucasus by brutal

force, and gnawed at while alive by hatred,--Æschylus is not lowered.

Because he has loosened the ligatures of idolatry; because he has freed

human thought from the bands of religions tied over it (_arctis nodis

relligionum_), Lucretius is not diminished. The branding of tyrants

with the red-hot iron of prophecy does not lessen Isaiah; the defence

of his country does not taint Tyrtæus. The beautiful is not degraded

by having served liberty and the amelioration of human multitudes.

The phrase "a people enfranchised" is not a bad end to a strophe. No,

patriotic or revolutionary usefulness robs poetry of nothing. Because

the huge Grütli has screened under its cliffs that formidable oath of

three peasants from which sprang free Switzerland, it is all the same,

in the falling night, a lofty mass of serene shade alive with herds,

where are heard innumerable invisible bells tinkling gently under the

clear twilight sky.

[Footnote 1: Do not write _Beyle._]

PART III.--BOOK I.

CONCLUSION.

AFTER DEATH.--SHAKESPEARE.--ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I

In 1784, Bonaparte, then fifteen years old, arrived at the Military

School of Paris from Brienne, being one among four under the escort

of a minim priest. He mounted one hundred and seventy-three steps,

carrying his small trunk, and reached, below the roof, the barrack

chamber he was to inhabit. This chamber had two beds, and a small

window opening on the great yard of the school. The wall was

whitewashed; the youthful predecessors of Bonaparte had scrawled upon

this with charcoal, and the new-comer read in this little cell these

four inscriptions that we ourselves read thirty-five years ago:--

It takes rather long to win an epaulet.--_De Montgivray._

The finest day in life is that of a battle.--_Vicomte de

Tinténiac._

Life is but a long falsehood.--_Le Chevalier Adolphe Delmas._

All ends under six feet of earth.-_Le Comte de la Villette._

By substituting for "an epaulet" "an empire,"--a very slight

change,--the above four inscriptions were all the destiny of Bonaparte,

and a kind of "Mene Tekel Upharsin" written beforehand upon that wall.

Desmazis, junior, who accompanied Bonaparte, being his room-mate, and

about to occupy one of the two beds, saw him take a pencil (it is

Desmazis who has related the fact) and draw beneath the inscriptions

that he had just read a rough sketch of his house at Ajaccio; then, by

the side of that house, without suspecting that he was thus bringing

near the island of Corsica another mysterious island then hid in the

deep future, he wrote the last of the four sentences: "All ends under

six feet of earth."

Bonaparte was right. For the hero, for the soldier, for the man of the

material fact, all ends under six feet of earth; for the man of the

idea everything commences there.

Death is a power.

For him who has had no other action but that of the mind, the tomb is

the elimination of the obstacle. To be dead, is to be all-powerful.

The man of war is formidable while alive; he stands erect, the earth

is silent, _siluit_; he has extermination in his gesture; millions of

haggard men rush to follow him,--a fierce horde, sometimes a ruffianly

one; it is no longer a human head, it is a conqueror, it is a captain,

it is a king of kings, it is an emperor, it is a dazzling crown of

laurels which passes, throwing out lightning flashes, and allowing

to be seen in starlight beneath it a vague profile of Cæsar. All

this vision is splendid and impressive; but let only a gravel come

in the liver, or an excoriation to the pylorus,--six feet of ground,

and all is said. This solar spectrum vanishes. This tumultuous life

falls into a hole; the human race pursues its way, leaving behind

this nothingness. If this man hurricane has made some lucky rupture,

like Alexander in India, Charlemagne in Scandinavia, and Bonaparte

in ancient Europe, that is all that remains of him. But let some

passer-by, who has in him the ideal, let a poor wretch like Homer throw

out a word in the darkness, and die,--that word burns up in the gloom

and becomes a star.

This vanquished one, driven from one town to another, is called Dante

Alighieri,--take care! This exiled one is called Æschylus, this

prisoner is called Ezekiel,--beware! This one-handed man is winged,--it

is Michael Cervantes. Do you know whom you see wayfaring there before

you? It is a sick man, Tyrtæus; it is a slave, Plautus; it is a

labourer, Spinoza; it is a valet, Rousseau. Well, that degradation,

that labour, that servitude, that infirmity, is power,--the supreme

power, mind.

On the dunghill like Job, under the stick like Epictetus, under

contempt like Molière, mind remains mind. This it is that shall say

the last word. The Caliph Almanzor makes the people spit on Averroes

at the door of the mosque of Cordova; the Duke of York spits in

person on Milton; a Rohan, almost a prince,--"duc ne daigne, Rohan

suis,"--attempts to cudgel Voltaire to death; Descartes is driven from

France in the name of Aristotle; Tasso pays for a kiss given a princess

twenty years spent in a cell; Louis XV. sends Diderot to Vincennes;

these are mere incidents; must there not be some clouds? Those

appearances that were taken for realities, those princes, those kings

melt away; there remains only what should remain,--the human mind on

the one side, the divine minds on the other; the true work and the true

workers; society to be perfected and made fruitful; science seeking

the true; art creating the beautiful; the thirst of thought, torment

and happiness of man; inferior life aspiring to superior life. Men

have to deal with real questions,--with progress in intelligence and by

intelligence. Men call to their aid the poets, prophets, philosophers,

thinkers, the inspired. It is seen that philosophy is a nourishment and

poetry a want. There must be another bread besides bread. If you give

up poets, you must give up civilization. There comes an hour when the

human race is compelled to reckon with Shakespeare the actor and Isaiah

the beggar.

They are the more present that they are no longer seen. Once dead,

these beings live.

What life did they lead? What kind of men were they? What do we know

of them? Sometimes but little, as of Shakespeare; often nothing, as

of those of ancient days. Has Job existed? Is Homer one, or several?

Méziriac made Æsop straight, and Planudes made him a hunchback.

Is it true that the prophet Hosea, in order to show his love for

his country, even when fallen into opprobrium and become infamous,

espoused a prostitute, and called his children Mourning, Famine, Shame,

Pestilence, and Misery? Is it true that Hesiod ought to be divided

between Cumæ in Æolia, where he was born, and Ascra, in Bœotia,

where he had been brought up? Velleius Paterculus makes him live one

hundred and twenty years after Homer, of whom Quintilian makes him

contemporary. Which of the two is right? What matters it? The poets are

dead, their thought reigns. Having been, they are.

They do more work to-day among us than when they were alive. Others who

have departed this life rest from their labours; dead men of genius

work.

They work upon what? Upon minds. They make civilization.

"All ends under six feet of earth "? No; everything commences there.

No; everything germinates there. No; everything flowers in it, and

everything grows in it, and everything bursts forth from it, and

everything proceeds from it! Good for you, men of the sword, are these

maxims!

Lay yourselves down, disappear, lie in the grave, rot. So be it.

During life, gildings, caparisons, drums and trumpets, panoplies,

banners to the wind, tumults, make up an illusion. The crowd gazes with

admiration on these things. It imagines that it sees something grand.

Who has the casque! Who has the cuirass? Who has the sword-belt? Who

is spurred, morioned, plumed, armed? Hurrah for that one! At death the

difference becomes striking. Juvenal takes Hannibal in the hollow of

his hand.

It is not the Cæsar, it is the thinker, who can say when he expires,

"Deus fio." So long as he remains a man his flesh interposes between

other men and him. The flesh is a cloud upon genius. Death, that

immense light, comes and penetrates the man with its aurora. No more

flesh, no more matter, no more shade. The unknown which was within him

manifests itself and beams forth. In order that a mind may give all its

light, it requires death. The dazzling of the human race commences when

that which was a genius becomes a soul. A book within which there is

something of the ghost is irresistible.

He who is living does not appear disinterested. People mistrust him;

people dispute him because they jostle against him. To be alive, and

to be a genius is too much. It goes and comes as you do, it walks on

the earth, it has weight, it throws a shadow, it obstructs. It seems

as if there was importunity in too great a presence. Men do not find

that man sufficiently like themselves. As we have said already, they

owe him a grudge. Who is this privileged one? This functionary cannot

be dismissed. Persecution makes him greater; decapitation crowns him.

Nothing can be done against him, nothing for him, nothing with him.

He is responsible, but not to you. He has his instructions. What he

executes may be discussed, not modified. It seems as though he had a

commission to execute from some one who is not man. Such exception

displeases. Hence more hissing than applause.

Dead, he no longer obstructs. The hiss, now useless, dies out. Living,

he was a rival; dead, he is a benefactor. He becomes, according to the

beautiful expression of Lebrun "l'homme irréparable." Lebrun observes

this of Montesquieu; Boileau observes the same of Molière. "Avant

qu'un peu de terre" etc. This handful of earth has equally aggrandized

Voltaire. Voltaire, so great in the eighteenth century, is still

greater in the nineteenth. The grave is a crucible. Its earth, thrown

on a man, sifts his reputation, and allows it to pass forth purified.

Voltaire has lost his false glory and retained the true. To lose the

false is to gain. Voltaire is neither a lyric poet, nor a comic poet,

nor a tragic poet: he is the indignant yet tender critic of the old

world; he is the mild reformer of manners; he is the man who softens

men. Voltaire, who has lost ground as a poet, has risen as an apostle.

He has done what is good, rather than what is beautiful. The good being

included in the beautiful, those who, like Dante and Shakespeare,

have produced the beautiful, surpass Voltaire; but below the poet,

the place of the philosopher, is still very high, and Voltaire is the

philosopher. Voltaire is common-sense in a continual stream. Excepting

in literature, he is a good judge in everything. Voltaire was, in spite

of his insulters, almost adored during his lifetime; he is in our days

admired, now that the true facts of the case are known. The eighteenth

century saw his mind: we see his soul. Frederick II., who willingly

railed at him, wrote to D'Alembert, "Voltaire buffoons. This century

resembles the old courts. It has a fool, who is Arouet." This fool of

the century was its sage.

Such are the effects of the tomb for great minds. That mysterious

entrance into the unknown leaves light behind. Their disappearance is

resplendent. Their death evolves authority.

CHAPTER II.

Shakespeare is the great glory of England. England has in politics

Cromwell, in philosophy Bacon, in science Newton,--three lofty men of

genius. But Cromwell is tinged with cruelty and Bacon with meanness; as

to Newton, his edifice is now shaking on its base. Shakespeare is pure,

which Cromwell and Bacon are not, and immovable, which Newton is not.

Moreover, he is higher as a genius. Above Newton there is Copernicus

and Galileo; above Bacon there is Descartes and Kant; above Cromwell

there is Danton and Bonaparte; above Shakespeare there is no one.

Shakespeare has equals, but not a superior. It is a singular honour for

a land to have borne that man. One may say to that land, "Alma parens."

The native town of Shakespeare is an elect place; an eternal light is

on that cradle; Stratford-on-Avon has a certainty that Smyrna, Rhodes,

Colophon, Salamis, Ohio, Argos, and Athens--the seven towns which

disputed the birthplace of Homer--have not.

Shakespeare is a human mind; he is also an English mind. He is very

English,--too English. He is English so far as to weaken the horror

surrounding the horrible kings whom he places on the stage, when they

are kings of England; so far as to depreciate Philip Augustus in

comparison with John Lackland; so far as expressly to make a scapegoat,

Falstaff, in order to load him with the princely misdeeds of the young

Henry V.; so far as to partake in a certain measure of the hypocrisies

of a pretended national history. Lastly, he is English so far as to

attempt to attenuate Henry VIII.; it is true that the eye of Elizabeth

is fixed upon him. But at the same time, let us insist upon this,--for

it is by it that he is great,--yes, this English poet is a human

genius. Art, like religion, has its _Ecce Homo._ Shakespeare is one of

those of whom we may utter this grand saying: He is Man.

England is egotistical. Egotism is an island. That which perhaps is

needed by this Albion immersed in her own business, and at times looked

upon with little favour by other nations, is disinterested greatness;

of this Shakespeare gives her some portion. He throws that purple on

the shoulders of his country. He is cosmopolite and universal by his

fame. On every side he overflows island and egotism. Deprive England of

Shakespeare and see how much the luminous reverberation of that nation

would immediately decrease. Shakespeare modifies the English visage and

makes it beautiful With him, England is no longer so much like Carthage.

Strange meaning of the apparition of men of genius! There is no great

poet born in Sparta, no great poet born in Carthage. This condemns

those two cities. Dig, and you shall find this: Sparta is but the city

of logic; Carthage is but the city of matter; to one as to the other

love is wanting. Carthage immolates her children by the sword, and

Sparta sacrifices her virgins by nudity; here innocence is killed, and

there modesty. Carthage knows only her bales and her cases; Sparta

blends herself wholly with the law,--there is her true territory; it is

for the laws that her men die at Thermopylæ. Carthage is hard. Sparta

is cold. They are two republics based upon stone; therefore no books.

The eternal sower, who is never mistaken, has not opened for those

ungrateful lands his hand full of men of genius. Such wheat is not to

be confided to the rock.

Heroism, however, is not refused to them; they will have, if necessary,

either the martyr or the captain. Leonidas is possible for Sparta,

Hannibal for Carthage; but neither Sparta nor Carthage is capable of

Homer. Some indescribable tenderness in the sublime, which causes the

poet to gush from the very entrails of a people, is wanting in them.

That latent tenderness, that _flebile nescio quid_, England possesses;

as a proof, Shakespeare. We may add also as a proof, Wilberforce.

England, mercantile like Carthage, legal like Sparta, is worth more

than Sparta and Carthage. She is honoured by this august exception,--a

poet. To have given birth to Shakespeare makes England great.

Shakespeare's place is among the most sublime in that _élite_ of

absolute men of genius which, from time to time increased by some

splendid fresh arrival, crowns civilization and illumines with its

immense radiancy the human race. Shakespeare is legion. Alone, he forms

the counterpoise to our grand French seventeenth century, and almost to

the eighteenth.

When one arrives in England, the first thing that he looks for is the

statue of Shakespeare. He finds the statue of Wellington.

Wellington is a general who gained a battle, having chance for his

partner.

If you insist on seeing Shakespeare's statue you are taken to a place

called Westminster, where there are kings,--a crowd of kings: there is

also a comer called "Poets' Corner." There, in the shade of four or

five magnificent monuments where some royal nobodies shine in marble

and bronze, is shown to you on a small pedestal a little figure, and

under this little figure, the name, "WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE."

In addition to this, statues everywhere; if you wish for statues you

may find as many as you can wish. Statue for Charles, statue for

Edward, statue for William, statues for three or four Georges, of whom

one was an idiot. Statue of the Duke of Richmond at Huntley; statue

of Napier at Portsmouth; statue of Father Mathew at Cork; statue

of Herbert Ingram, I don't know where. A man has well drilled the

riflemen,--he gets a statue; a man has commanded a manœuvre of the

Horse Guards,--he gets a statue. Another has been a supporter of the

past, has squandered all the wealth of England in paying a coalition

of kings against 1789, against democracy, against light, against the

ascending movement of the human race,--quick! a pedestal for that; a

statue to Mr. Pitt. Another has knowingly fought against truth, in the

hope that it might be vanquished, and has found out one fine morning

that truth is hard-lived, that it is strong, that it might be intrusted

with forming a cabinet, and has then passed abruptly over to its

side,--one more pedestal; a statue for Mr. Peel. Everywhere, in every

street, in every square, at every step, gigantic notes of admiration

in the shape of columns,--a column to the Duke of York, which should

really take the form of points of interrogation; a column to Nelson,

pointed at by the ghost of Caracciolo; a column to Wellington, already

named: columns for everybody. It is sufficient to have played with a

sword somewhere. At Guernsey, by the seaside, on a promontory, there

is a high column, similar to a lighthouse,--almost a tower; this one

is struck by lightning; Æschylus would have contented himself with

it. For whom is this?--for General Doyle. Who is General Doyle?--a

general. What has this general done?--he has constructed roads. At his

own expense?--no, at the expense of the inhabitants. He has a column.

Nothing for Shakespeare, nothing for Milton, nothing for Newton; the

name of Byron is obscure. That is where England is,--an illustrious and

powerful nation.

It avails little that this nation has for scout and guide that generous

British press, which is more than free,--which is sovereign,--and

which through innumerable excellent journals throws light upon every

question,--that is where England is; and let not France laugh too

loudly, with her statue of Négrier; nor Belgium, with her statue

of Belliard; nor Prussia, with her statue of Blücher; nor Austria,

with the statue that she probably has of Schwartzenberg; nor Russia,

with the statue that she certainly has of Souwaroff. If it is not

Schwartzenberg, it is Windischgrätz; if it is not Souwaroff, it is

Kutusoff.

Be Paskiewitch or Jellachich,--they will give you a statue; be Augereau

or Bessières,--you get a statue; be an Arthur Wellesley, they will

make you a colossus, and the ladies will dedicate you to yourself,

quite naked, with this inscription: "Achilles." A young man, twenty

years of age, performs the heroic action of marrying a beautiful young

girl: they prepare for him triumphal arches; they come to see him out

of curiosity; the grand-cordon is sent to him as on the morrow of a

battle; the public squares are brilliant with fireworks; people who

might have gray beards put on perukes to come and make speeches to

him almost on their knees; they throw up in the air millions sterling

in squibs and rockets to the applause of a multitude in tatters,

who will have no bread to-morrow; starving Lancashire participates

in the wedding; people are in ecstasies; they fire guns, they ring

the bells,--"Rule Britannia!" "God save!" What! this young man has

the kindness to do this? What a glory for the nation! Universal

admiration,--a great people become frantic; a great city falls into

a swoon; a balcony looking upon the passage of the young man is let

for five hundred guineas; people heap themselves together, press upon

one another, thrust one another beneath the wheels of his carriage;

seven women are crushed to death in the enthusiasm, and their little

children are picked up dead under the trampling feet; a hundred

persons, partially stifled, are carried to the hospital: the joy is

inexpressible. While this is going on in London, the cutting of the

Isthmus of Panama is interrupted by a war; the cutting of the Isthmus

of Suez depends on one Ismail Pacha; a company undertakes the sale of

the water of Jordan at a guinea the bottle; walls are invented which

resist every cannon-ball, after which missiles are invented which

destroy every wall; an Armstrong cannon-shot costs fifty pounds;

Byzantium contemplates Abdul-Azis; Rome goes to confession; the frogs,

encouraged by the stork, demand a heron; Greece, after Otho, again

wants a king; Mexico, after Iturbide, again wants an emperor; China

wants two of them,--the king of the Centre, a Tartar, and the king of

Heaven (Tien Wang), a Chinese. O earth! throne of stupidity.

CHAPTER III.

The glory of Shakespeare reached England from abroad. There was almost

a day and an hour when one might have assisted at the landing of his

fame at Dover.

It required three hundred years for England to begin to hear those two

words that the whole world cries in her ear: "William Shakespeare."

What is England? She is Elizabeth. There is no incarnation more

complete. In admiring Elizabeth, England loves her own looking-glass.

Proud and magnanimous, yet full of strange hypocrisies; great, yet

pedantic; haughty, albeit able; prudish, yet audacious; having

favourites but no masters; her own mistress, even in her bed;

all-powerful queen, inaccessible woman,--Elizabeth is a virgin as

England is an island. Like England, she calls herself Empress of the

Sea, _Basilea maris._ A fearful depth, in which are let loose the angry

passions which behead Essex and the tempests which destroy the Armada,

defends this virgin and defends this island from every approach.

The ocean is the guardian of this modesty. A certain celibacy, in

fact, constitutes all the genius of England. Alliances, be it so; no

marriage. The universe always kept at some distance. To live alone,

to go alone, to reign alone, to be alone,--such is Elizabeth, such is

England.

On the whole, a remarkable queen and an admirable nation.

Shakespeare, on the contrary, is a sympathetic genius. Insularism is

his ligature, not his strength. He would break it willingly. A little

more and Shakespeare would be European. He loves and praises France; he

calls her "the soldier of God." Besides, in that prudish nation he is

the free poet.

England has two books: one which she has made, the other which has made

her,--Shakespeare and the Bible. These two books do not agree together.

The Bible opposes Shakespeare.

Certainly, as a literary book, the Bible, a vast cup from the East,

more overflowing in poetry even than Shakespeare, might fraternize

with him; in a social and religious point of view, it abhors him.

Shakespeare thinks, Shakespeare dreams, Shakespeare doubts. There is in

him something of that Montaigne whom he loved. The "to be or not to be"

comes from the _que sais-je?_

Moreover, Shakespeare invents. A great objection. Faith excommunicates

imagination. In respect to fables, faith is a bad neighbour, and

fondles only its own. One recollects Solon's staff raised against

Thespis. One recollects the torch of Omar brandished over Alexandria.

The situation is always the same. Modern fanaticism has inherited

that staff and that torch. That is true in Spain, and is not false in

England. I have heard an Anglican bishop discuss the Iliad and condense

everything in this remark, with which he meant to annihilate Homer: "It

is not true." Now, Shakespeare is much more a "liar" than Homer.

Two or three years ago the journals announced that a French writer was

about to sell a novel for four hundred thousand francs. This made quite

a noise in England. A Conformist paper exclaimed, "How can a falsehood

be sold at such a price?"

Besides, two words, all-powerful in England, range themselves against

Shakespeare, and constitute an obstacle against him: "Improper,

shocking." Observe that, on a host of occasions, the Bible also is

"improper" and Holy Writ is "shocking." The Bible, even in French, and

through the rough lips of Calvin, does not hesitate to say, "Tu as

paillardé, Jerusalem." These crudities are part of poetry as well as of

anger; and the prophets, those angry poets, do not abstain from them.

Gross words are constantly on their lips. But England, where the Bible

is continually read, does not seem to realize it. Nothing equals the

power of voluntary deafness in fanatics. Would you have another example

of their deafness? At this hour Roman orthodoxy has not yet admitted

the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, although averred by the four

Evangelists. Matthew, may say, "Behold, thy mother and thy brethren

stand without.... And his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and

Judas. And his sisters, are they not all with us?" Mark may insist:

"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James,

and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with

us?" Luke may repeat: "Then came to him his mother and his brethren."

John may again take up the question: "He, and his mother, and his

brethren.... Neither did his brethren believe in him.... But when his

brethren were gone up." Catholicism does not hear.

To make up for it, in the case of Shakespeare, "somewhat of a Pagan,

like all poets"[1] Puritanism has a delicate hearing. Intolerance

and inconsequence are sisters. Besides, in the matter of proscribing

and damning, logic is superfluous. When Shakespeare, by the mouth

of Othello, calls Desdemona "whore," general indignation, unanimous

revolt, scandal from top to bottom. Who then is this Shakespeare?

All the biblical sects stop their ears, without thinking that Aaron

addresses exactly the same epithet to Sephora, wife of Moses. It is

true that this is in an Apocryphal work, "The Life of Moses." But the

Apocryphal books are quite as authentic as the canonical ones.

Thence in England, for Shakespeare, a depth of irreducible coldness.

What Elizabeth was for Shakespeare, England is still,--at least we fear

so. We should be happy to be contradicted. We are more ambitious for

the glory of England than England is herself. This cannot displease her.

England has a strange institution,--"the poet laureate,"--which attests

the official admiration and a little the national admiration. Under

Elizabeth, England's poet was named Drummond.

Of course, we are no longer in the days when they placarded "Macbeth,

opera of Shakespeare, altered by Sir William Davenant." But if

"Macbeth" is played, it is before a small audience. Kean and Macready

have tried and failed in the endeavour.

At this hour they would not play Shakespeare on any English stage

without erasing from the text the word _God_ wherever they find it. In

the full tide of the nineteenth century, the lord-chamberlain still

weighs heavily on Shakespeare. In England, outside the church, the

word God is not made use of. In conversation they replace "God" by

"Goodness." In the editions or in the representations of Shakespeare,

"God" is replaced by "Heaven." The sense suffers, the verse limps; no

matter. "Lord! Lord! Lord!" the last appeal of Desdemona expiring, was

suppressed by command in the edition of Blount and Jaggard in 1623.

They do not utter it on the stage. "Sweet Jesus!" would be a blasphemy;

a devout Spanish woman on the English stage is bound to exclaim, "Sweet

Jupiter!" Do we exaggerate? Would you have a proof? Let us open

"Measure for Measure." There is a nun, Isabella. Whom does she invoke?

Jupiter. Shakespeare had written "Jesus."[2]

The tone of a certain Puritanical criticism toward Shakespeare is, most

certainly, improved; yet the cure is not complete.

It is not many years since an English economist, a man of authority,

making, in the midst of social questions, a literary excursion,

affirmed in a lofty digression, and without exhibiting the slightest

diffidence, this:--

"Shakespeare cannot live because he has treated specially

foreign or ancient subjects--'Hamlet,' 'Othello,' 'Romeo and

Juliet,' 'Macbeth,' 'Lear,' 'Julius Cæsar,' 'Coriolanus,'

'Timon of Athens,' etc. Now, nothing is likely to live in

literature except matters of immediate observation and works

made on contemporary subjects."

What say you to the theory? We would not mention it if this system

had not met approvers in England and propagators in France. Besides

Shakespeare, it simply excludes from literary "life" Schiller,

Corneille, Milton, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus, and Homer.

It is true that it surrounds with a halo of glory Aulus-Gellius and

Restif of Bretonne. O critic, this Shakespeare is not likely to live,

he is only immortal!

About the same time, another--English also, but of the Scotch

school, a Puritan of that discontented variety of which Knox is the

head--declared poetry childishness; repudiated beauty of style as an

obstacle interposed between the idea and the reader; saw in Hamlet's

soliloquy only "a cold lyricism," and in Othello's adieu to standards

and camps only "a declamation;" likened the metaphors of poets to

illustrations in books,--good for amusing babies; and showed a

particular contempt for Shakespeare, as besmeared from one end to the

other with that "illuminating process."

Not later than last January, a witty London paper,[3] with indignant

irony, was asking which is the most celebrated, in England, Shakespeare

or "Mr. Calcraft, the hangman:"--

"There are localities in this enlightened country where,

if you pronounce the name of Shakespeare they will answer

you: 'I don't know what this Shakespeare may be about whom

you make all this fuss, but I will back Hammer Lane of

Birmingham to fight him for five pounds.' But no mistake is

made about Calcraft."

[Footnote 1: Rev. John Wheeler.]

[Footnote 2: On the other hand, however, in spite of all the

lords-chamberlain, it is difficult to beat the French censorship.

Religions are diverse, but bigotry is one, and is the same in all its

specimens. What we are about to write is an extract from the notes (on

"Richard II." and "Henry IV.") added to his translation by the new

translator of Shakespeare:--

"'Jesus! Jesus!' This exclamation of Shallow was expunged

in the edition of 1623, conformably to the statute which

forbade the uttering of the name of the Divinity on the

stage. It is worthy of remark that our modern theatre

has had to undergo, under the scissors of the censorship

of the Bourbons, the same stupid mutilations to which

the censorship of the Stuarts condemned the theatre of

Shakespeare. I read what follows in the first page of the

manuscript of 'Hernani,' which I have in my hands:--

'Received at the Théâtre-Français, Oct. 8, 1829.

'The Stage-manager,

'Albertin.'

"And lower down, in red ink:--

'On condition of expunging the name of "Jesus" wherever

found, and conforming to the alterations marked at pages 27,

28, 29, 62, 74, and 76.

'The Secretary of State for the Department of the Interior,

'La Bourdonnate.'"

We may add that in the scenery representing Saragossa (second act of

"Hernani") it was forbidden to put any belfry or any church, which made

resemblance rather difficult, Saragossa having in the sixteenth century

three hundred and nine churches and six hundred and seventeen convents.]

[Footnote 3: Daily Telegraph, 13 Jan., 1864.]

CHAPTER IV.

At all events, Shakespeare has not the monument that England owes to

Shakespeare.

France, let me admit, is not, in like cases, much more speedy. Another

glory, very different from Shakespeare, but not less grand,--Joan of

Arc,--waits also, and has waited longer for a national monument, a

monument worthy of her.

This land which has been Gaul, and where the Velledas reigned,

has, in a Catholic and historic sense, for patronesses two august

figures,--Mary and Joan. The one, holy, is the Virgin; the other,

heroic, is the Maid. Louis XIII. gave France to the one; the other has

given France to France. The monument of the second should not be less

high than the monument of the first Joan of Arc must have a trophy as

grand as Notre-Dame. When shall she have it?

England has failed utterly to pay its debt to Shakespeare; but so also

has France failed toward Joan of Arc.

These ingratitudes require to be sternly denounced. Doubtless the

governing aristocracies, which blind the eyes of the masses, deserve

the first accusation of guilt; but on the whole, conscience exists

for a people as for an individual. Ignorance is only an attenuating

circumstance; and when these denials of justice last for centuries,

they remain the fault of governments, but become the fault of nations.

Let us know, when necessary, how to tell nations of their shortcomings.

France and England, you are wrong.

To flatter peoples would be worse than to flatter kings. The one is

base, the other would be cowardly.

Let us go further, and since this thought has been presented to us,

let us generalize it usefully, even if we should leave our subject for

a while. No; the people have not the right to throw indefinitely the

fault upon governments. The acceptation of oppression by the oppressed

ends in becoming complicity. Cowardice is consent whenever the duration

of a bad thing, which presses on the people, and which the people could

prevent if they would, goes beyond the amount of patience endurable by

an honest man; there is an appreciable solidarity and a partnership in

shame between the government guilty of the evil and the people allowing

it to be done. To suffer is worthy of veneration; to submit is worthy

of contempt. Let us pass on.

A noteworthy coincidence: the man who denies Shakespeare, Voltaire,

is also the insulter of Joan of Arc. But then what is Voltaire?

Voltaire--we may say it with joy and sadness--is the French mind. Let

us understand: it is the French mind, up to the Revolution exclusively.

From the French Revolution, France increasing in greatness, the French

mind grows larger, and tends to become the European mind; it is less

local and more fraternal, less Gallic and more human. It represents

more and more Paris, the city heart of the world. As for Voltaire,

he remains as he is,--the man of the future, but also the man of the

past. He is one of those glories which make the thinker say yes and no;

he has against him two sarcasms, Joan of Arc and Shakespeare. He is

punished through what he sneered at.

CHAPTER V.

In truth, a monument to Shakespeare, _cui bono?_ The statue that he

has made for himself is worth more, with all England for a pedestal.

Shakespeare has no need of a pyramid; he has his work.

What do you suppose marble could do for him? What can bronze do where

there is glory? Malachite and alabaster are of no avail; jasper,

serpentine, basalt, red porphyry, such as that at the Invalides,

granite, Paros and Carrara, are of no use,--genius is genius without

them. Even if all the stones had a part in it, would they make that man

an inch greater? What vault shall be more indestructible than this;

"The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "The

Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Julius Cæsar," "Coriolanus?" What monument

more grandiose than "Lear," more wild than "The Merchant of Venice,"

more dazzling than "Romeo and Juliet," more amazing than "Richard

III."? What moon could throw on that building a light more mysterious

than "The Midsummer Night's Dream"? What capital, were it even London,

could produce around it a rumour so gigantic as the tumultuous soul

of "Macbeth"? What framework of cedar or of oak will last as long

as "Othello"? What bronze will be bronze as much as "Hamlet"? No

construction of lime, of rock, of iron and of cement, is worth the

breath,--the deep breath of genius, which is the breathing of God

through man. A head in which is an idea,--such is the summit; heaps

of stone and brick would be useless efforts. What edifice equals a

thought? Babel is below Isaiah; Cheops is less than Homer; the Coliseum

is inferior to Juvenal; the Giralda of Seville is dwarfish by the side

of Cervantes; St. Peter of Rome does not reach to the ankle of Dante.

How could you manage to build a tower as high as that name: Shakespeare.

Ah, add something, if you can, to a mind!

Suppose a monument. Suppose it splendid; suppose it sublime,--a

triumphal arch, an obelisk, a circus with a pedestal in the centre, a

cathedral. No people is more illustrious, more noble, more magnificent,

and more magnanimous than the English people. Couple these two ideas,

England and Shakespeare, and make an edifice arise therefrom. Such

a nation celebrating such a man, it will be superb. Imagine the

monument, imagine the inauguration. The Peers are there, the Commons

give their adherence, the bishops officiate, the princes join the

procession, the queen is present. The virtuous woman in whom the

English people, royalist as we know, see and venerate their actual

personification,--this worthy mother, this noble widow, comes, with the

deep respect which is called for, to incline material majesty before

ideal majesty; the Queen of England salutes Shakespeare. The homage of

Victoria repairs the disdain of Elizabeth. As for Elizabeth, she is

probably there also, sculptured somewhere on the surbase, with Henry

VIII., her father, and James I., her successor,--pygmies beneath the

poet. The cannon booms, the curtain falls, they uncover the statue,

which seems to say, "At length!" and which has grown in the shade

during three hundred years,--three centuries; the growth of a colossus;

an immensity. All the York, Cumberland, Pitt, and Peel bronzes have

been made use of, in order to produce this statue; the public places

have been disencumbered of a heap of uncalled-for metal-castings;

in this lofty figure have been amalgamated all kinds of Henrys and

Edwards; the various Williams and the numerous Georges have been

melted, the Achilles in Hyde Park has made the great-toe. This is fine;

behold Shakespeare almost as great as a Pharaoh or a Sesostris. Bells,

drums, trumpets, applause, hurrahs.

What then?

It is honourable for England, indifferent to Shakespeare.

What is the salutation of royalty, of aristocracy, of the army, and

even of the English populace, ignorant yet to this moment, like

nearly all other nations,--what is the salutation of all these groups

variously enlightened to him who has the eternal acclamation, with its

reverberation, of all ages and all men? What orison of the Bishop of

London or of the Archbishop of Canterbury is worth the cry of a woman

before Desdemona, of a mother before Arthur, of a soul before Hamlet?

And thus, when universal outcry demands from England a monument to

Shakespeare, it is not for the sake of Shakespeare, it is for the sake

of England.

There are cases in which the repayment of a debt is of greater import

to the debtor than to the creditor.

A monument is an example. The lofty head of a great man is a light.

Crowds, like the waves, require beacons above them. It is good that

the passer-by should know that there are great men. People may not

have time to read; they are forced to see. People pass by that way,

and stumble against the pedestal; they are almost obliged to raise the

head and to glance a little at the inscription. Men escape a book; they

cannot escape the statue. One day on the bridge of Rouen, before the

beautiful statue due to David d'Angers, a peasant mounted on an ass

said to me: "Do you know Pierre Corneille?" "Yes," I replied. "So do

I," he rejoined. "And do you know 'The Cid'?" I resumed. "No," said he.

To him, Corneille was the statue.

This beginning in the knowledge of great men is necessary to the

people. The monument incites them to know more of the man. They desire

to learn to read in order to know what this bronze means. A statue is

an elbow-thrust to ignorance.

There is then, in the execution of such monuments, popular utility as

well as national justice.

To perform what is useful at the same time as what is just, that will

at the end certainly tempt England. She is the debtor of Shakespeare.

To leave such a debt in abeyance is not a good attitude for the pride

of a people. It is a point of morality that nations should be good

payers in matters of gratitude. Enthusiasm is probity. When a man is a

glory in the face of his nation, that nation which does not perceive

the fact astounds the human race around.

CHAPTER VI.

England, as it is easy to foresee, will build a monument to her poet.

At the very moment we finished writing the pages you have just read,

was announced in London the formation of a committee for the solemn

celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of

Shakespeare. This committee will dedicate to Shakespeare, on the 23d

April, 1864, a monument and a festival which will surpass, we doubt

not, the incomplete programme we have just sketched out. They will

spare nothing. The act of admiration will be a striking one. One may

expect everything, in point of magnificence, from the nation which

has created the prodigious palace at Sydenham, that Versailles of a

people. The initiative taken by the committee will doubtless secure

the co-operation of the powers that be. We discard, for our part, and

the committee will discard, we think, all idea of a manifestation by

subscription. A subscription, unless of one penny,--that is to say,

open to all the people,--is necessarily fractional. What is due to

Shakespeare is a national manifestation;--a holiday, a public _fête_,

a popular monument, voted by the Chambers and entered in the Budget

England would do it for her king. Now, what is the King of England

beside the man of England? Every confidence is due to the Jubilee

Committee of Shakespeare,--a committee composed of persons highly

distinguished in the press, the peerage, literature, the stage, and

the church. Eminent men from all countries, representing intellect

in France, in Germany, in Belgium, in Spain, in Italy, complete this

committee, in all points of view excellent and competent. Another

committee, formed at Stratford-on-Avon, seconds the London committee.

We congratulate England.

Nations have a dull ear and a long life,--which latter makes their

deafness by no means irreparable: they have time to change their mind.

The English are awake at last to their glory. England begins to spell

that name, Shakespeare, upon which the universe has laid her finger.

In April, 1664, a hundred years after Shakespeare was born, England was

occupied in cheering loudly Charles II., who had sold Dunkirk to France

for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling, and in looking at

something that was a skeleton and had been Cromwell, whitening under

the north-east wind and rain on the gallows at Tyburn. In April, 1764,

two hundred years after Shakespeare was born, England was contemplating

the dawn of George III.,--a king destined to imbecility,--who at that

epoch, in secret councils, and in somewhat unconstitutional asides

with the Tory chiefs and the German Landgraves, was sketching out that

policy of resistance to progress which was to strive, first against

liberty in America, then against democracy in France, and which, during

the single ministry of the first Pitt, had, in 1778, raised the debt of

England to the sum of eighty millions sterling. In April, 1864, three

hundred years since Shakespeare's birth, England raises a statue to

Shakespeare. It is late, but it is well.

BOOK II.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

CHAPTER I.

The nineteenth century springs from itself only; it does not receive

its impulse from any ancestor; it is the offspring of an idea.

Doubtless, Isaiah, Homer, Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, have been or

could be great starting-points for important philosophical or poetical

formations; but the nineteenth century has an august mother,--the

French Revolution. It has that powerful blood in its veins. It honours

men of genius. When denied it salutes them, when ignored it proclaims

them, when persecuted it avenges them, when insulted it crowns them,

when dethroned it replaces them upon their pedestal; it venerates

them, but it does not proceed from them. The nineteenth century has

for family itself, and itself alone. It is the characteristic of its

revolutionary nature to dispense with ancestors.

Itself a genius, it fraternizes with men of genius. As for its source,

it is where theirs is,--beyond man. The mysterious gestations of

progress succeed each other according to a providential law. The

nineteenth century is born of civilization. It has a continent to bring

into the world. France has borne this century; and this century bears

Europe.

The Greek stock bore civilization, narrow and circumscribed at first by

the mulberry leaf, confined to the Morea; then civilization, gaining

step by step, grew broader, and formed the Roman stock. It is to-day

the French stock,--that is to say, all Europe,--with young shoots in

America, Africa, and Asia.

The greatest of these young shoots is a democracy,--the United States,

the sprouting of which was aided by France in the last century. France,

sublime essayist in progress, has founded a republic in America before

making one in Europe. _Et vidit quod esset bonum._ After having lent

to Washington an auxiliary, Lafayette, France, returning home, gave to

Voltaire, dismayed within his tomb, that formidable successor, Danton.

In presence of the monstrous past, hurling every thunder, exhaling

every miasma, breathing every darkness, protruding every talon,

horrible and terrible, progress, constrained to use the same weapons,

has had suddenly a hundred arms, a hundred heads, a hundred tongues of

fire, a hundred roarings. The good has transformed itself into a hydra.

It is this that is termed the Revolution.

Nothing can be more august.

The Revolution ended one century and began another.

An intellectual awakening prepares the way for an overthrow of

facts,--and this is the eighteenth century. After which the political

revolution, once accomplished, seeks expression, and the literary and

social revolution completes it: this is the nineteenth century. With

ill-will, but not unjustly, has it been said that romanticism and

socialism are identical: hatred, in its desire to injure, very often

establishes, and, so far as is in its power, consolidates.

A parenthesis. This word, romanticism, has, like all war-cries, the

advantage of readily summing up a group of ideas. It is brief,--which

pleases in the contest; but it has, to our idea, through its militant

signification, the objection of appearing to limit the movement that

it represents to a warlike action. Now, this movement is a matter of

intellect, a matter of civilization, a matter of soul; and this is why

the writer of these lines has never used the words _romanticism_ or

_romantic._ They will not be found in any of the pages of criticism

that he has had occasion to write. If to-day he derogates from his

usual prudence in polemics, it is for the sake of greater rapidity

and with all reservation. The same observation may be made on the

subject of the word _socialism_, which admits of so many different

interpretations.

The triple movement--literary, philosophical, and social--of the

nineteenth century, which is one single movement, is nothing but the

current of the revolution in ideas. This current, after having swept

away facts, is perpetuated in minds with all its immensity.

This term, "literary '93," so often quoted in 1830 against

contemporaneous literature, was not so much an insult as it

was intended to be. It was certainly as unjust to employ it as

characterizing the whole literary movement as it is iniquitous to

employ it to describe all the political revolutions; there is in these

two phenomena something besides '93. But this term, "literary '93," was

relatively exact, insomuch as it indicated, confusedly but truthfully,

the origin of the literary movement which belongs to our epoch, while

endeavouring to dishonour that movement. Here again the clairvoyance

of hatred was blind. Its daubings of mud upon the face of truth are

gilding, light, and glory.

The Revolution, turning climacteric of humanity, is made up of several

years. Each of these years expresses a period, represents an aspect, or

realizes a phase of the phenomenon. Tragic '93 is one of those colossal

years. Good news must sometimes have a mouth of bronze. Such a mouth is

'93.

Listen to the immense proclamation proceeding from it. Give attention,

remain speechless, and be impressed. God himself said the first time

_Fiat lux_, the second time he has caused it to be said.

By whom?

By '93.

Therefore, we men of the nineteenth century hold in honour that

reproach, "You are '93."

But do not stop there. We are '89 as well as '93. The Revolution,

the whole Revolution,--such is the source of the literature of the

nineteenth century.

On these grounds put it on its trial, this literature, or seek its

triumph; hate it or love it. According to the amount of the future that

you have in you, outrage it or salute it; little do animosities and

fury affect it. It is the logical deduction from the great chaotic and

genesiacal fact that our fathers have witnessed, and which has given a

new starting-point to the world. He who is against that fact is against

that literature; he who is for that fact is on its side. What the fact

is worth the literature is worth. The reactionary writers are not

mistaken; wherever there is revolution, patent or latent, the Catholic

and royalist scent is unfailing. Those men of letters of the past award

to contemporaneous literature an honourable amount of diatribe; their

aversion is convulsive. One of their journalists, who is, I believe a

bishop, pronounces this word _poet_ with the same accent as the word

_Septembrist_; another, less of a bishop, but quite as angry, writes,

"I feel in all this literature Marat and Robespierre." This last writer

is rather mistaken; there is in "this literature" Danton rather than

Marat.

But the fact is true: democracy is in this literature.

The Revolution has forged the clarion; the nineteenth century sounds it.

Ah, this affirmation suits us, and, in truth, we do not recoil before

it; we avow our glory,--we are revolutionists. The thinkers of the

present time,--poets, writers, historians, orators, philosophers,--all

are derived from the French Revolution. They come from it, and it

alone. It was '89 that demolished the Bastille; it was '93 that took

the crown from the Louvre. From '89 sprung Deliverance, and from

'93 Victory. From '89 and '93 the men of the nineteenth century

proceed: these are their father and their mother. Do not seek for

them another affiliation, another inspiration, another insufflation,

another origin. They are the democrats of the idea, successors to the

democrats of action. They are the emancipators. Liberty bent over their

cradles,--they all have sucked her vast breast; they all have her milk

in their entrails, her marrow in their bones, her sap in their will,

her spirit of revolt in their reason, her flame in their intellect.

Even those among them (there are some) who were born aristocrats, who

came to the world banished in some degree among families of the past,

who have fatally received one of those primary educations whose stupid

effort is to contradict progress, and who have commenced the words

that they had to say to our century with an indescribable royalist

stuttering,--these, from that period, from their infancy (they will

not contradict me), felt the sublime monster within them. They had

the inner ebullition of the immense fact. They had in the depth of

their conscience a whispering of mysterious ideas; the inward shock of

false certainties troubled their mind; they felt their sombre surface

of monarchism, Catholicism, and aristocracy tremble, shudder, and by

degrees split up. One day, suddenly and powerfully, the swelling of

truth within them prevailed, the hatching was completed, the eruption

took place; the light flamed in them, causing them to burst open,--not

falling on them, but (more beautiful mystery!) gushing out of these

amazed men, enlightening them, while it burned within them. They were

craters unknown to themselves.

This phenomenon has been interpreted to their reproach as a treason.

They passed over, in fact, from right divine to human right. They

turned their back on false history, on false tradition, on false

dogmas, on false philosophy, on false daylight, on false truth. The

free spirit which soars up,--bird called by Aurora,--offends intellects

saturated with ignorance and the fœtus preserved in spirits of wine.

He who sees offends the blind; he who hears makes the deaf indignant;

he who walks offers an abominable insult to cripples. In the eyes of

dwarfs, abortions, Aztecs, myrmidons, and pygmies, forever subject to

rickets, growth is apostasy.

The writers and poets of the nineteenth century have the admirable

good fortune of proceeding from a genesis, of arriving after an end

of the world, of accompanying a reappearance of light, of being the

organs of a new beginning. This imposes on them duties unknown to

their predecessors--the duties of intentional reformers and direct

civilizers. They continue nothing; they remake everything. For new

times, new duties. The function of thinkers in our days is complex; to

think is no longer sufficient,--they must love; to think and love is

no longer sufficient,--they must act; to think, to love, and to act,

no longer suffices,--they must suffer. Lay down the pen, and go where

you hear the grapeshot. Here is a barricade; be one on it. Here is

exile; accept it. Here is the scaffold; be it so. Let John Brown be

in Montesquieu, if needful. The Lucretius required by this century in

labour should contain Cato. Æschylus, who wrote the "Orestias" had for

a brother Cynegyrus, who fastened with his teeth on the ships of the

enemies: that was sufficient for Greece at the time of Salamis, but

it no longer suffices for France after the Revolution. That Æschylus

and Cynegyrus are brothers is not enough; they must be the same

man. Such are the actual requirements of progress. Those who devote

themselves to great and pressing things can never be too great. To

set ideas in motion, to heap up evidence, to pile up principles, that

is the redoubtable movement. To heap Pelion on Ossa is the labour of

infants beside that work of giants, the placing of right upon truth.

To scale that afterward, and to dethrone usurpations in the midst of

thunders,--such is the work.

The future presses. To-morrow cannot wait. Humanity has not a minute to

lose. Quick! quick! let us hasten; the wretched ones have their feet

on red-hot iron. They hunger, they thirst, they suffer. Ah, terrible

emaciation of the poor human body! Parasitism laughs, the ivy grows

green and thrives, the mistletoe is flourishing, the tapeworm is happy.

What a frightful object the prosperity of the tapeworm! To destroy that

which devours,--in that is safety. Your life has within itself death,

which is in good health. There is too much misery, too much desolation,

too much immodesty, too much nakedness, too many brothels, too many

prisons, too many rags, too many crimes, too much weakness, too much

darkness, not enough schools, too many little innocents growing up

for evil! The truckle-beds of poor girls are suddenly covered with

silk and lace,--and in that is worse misery; by the side of misfortune

there is vice, the one urging the other. Such a society requires prompt

succour. Let us seek for the best. Go all of you in this search. Where

are the promised lands? Civilization would go forward; let us try

theories, systems, ameliorations, inventions, progress, until the shoe

for that foot shall be found. The attempt costs nothing, or costs but

little,--to attempt is not to adopt,--but before all, above all, let

us be lavish of light. All sanitary purification begins in opening

windows wide. Let us open wide all intellects. Let us supply souls with

air.

Quick, quick, O thinkers! Let the human race breathe; give hope, give

the ideal, do good. Let one step succeed another, horizon expand

into horizon, conquest follow conquest. Because you have given what

you promised do not think you have performed all that is required of

you. To possess is to promise; the dawn of to-day imposes on the sun

obligations for to-morrow.

Let nothing be lost. Let not one strength be isolated. Every one to

work! there is vast urgency for it. No more idle art. Poetry the worker

of civilization, what more admirable? The dreamer should be a pioneer;

the strophe should mean something. The beautiful should be at the

service of honesty. I am the valet of my conscience; it rings for me: I

come. "Go!" I go. What do you require of me, O truth, sole majesty of

this world? Let each one feel in haste to do well. A book is sometimes

a source of hoped-for succour. An idea is a balm, a word may be a

dressing for wounds; poetry is a physician. Let no one tarry. Suffering

is losing its strength while you are idling. Let men leave this dreamy

laziness. Leave the kief to the Turks. Let men labour for the safety of

all, and let them rush into it and be out of breath. Do not be sparing

of your strides. Nothing useless; no inertia. What do you call dead

nature? Everything lives. The duty of all is to live; to walk, to run,

to fly, to soar, is the universal law. What do you wait for? Who stops

you? Ah, there are times when one might wish to hear the stones murmur

at the slowness of man!

Sometimes one goes into the woods. To whom does it not happen at times

to be overwhelmed?--one sees so many sad things. The stage is a long

one to go over, the consequences are long in coming, a generation is

behindhand, the work of the age languishes. What! so many sufferings

yet? One might think he has gone backward. There is everywhere

increase of superstition, of cowardice, of deafness, of blindness, of

imbecility. Penal laws weigh upon brutishness. This wretched problem

has been set,--to augment comfort by putting off right; to sacrifice

the superior side of man to the inferior side; to yield up principle

to appetite. Cæsar takes charge for the belly, I make over to him the

brains,--it is the old sale of at birth-right for the dish of porridge.

A little more, and this fatal anomaly would cause a wrong road to be

taken toward civilization. The fattening pig would no longer be the

king, but the people. Alas! this ugly expedient does not even succeed.

No diminution whatever of the malady. In the last ten years--for the

last twenty years--the low water-mark of prostitution, of mendicity, of

crime, has been stationary, below which evil has not fallen one degree.

Of true education, of gratuitous education, there is none. The infant

nevertheless requires to know that he is man, and the father that he is

citizen. Where are the promises? Where is the hope? Oh, poor wretched

humanity! one is tempted to shout for help in the forest; one is

tempted to claim support, assistance, and a strong arm from that grand

mournful Nature. Can this mysterious ensemble of forces be indifferent

to progress? We supplicate, appeal, raise our hands toward the shadow.

We listen, wondering if the rustlings will become voices. The duty of

the springs and streams should be to babble forth the word "Forward!"

One could wish to hear nightingales sing new Marseillaises.

Notwithstanding all this, these times of halting are nothing beyond

what is normal. Discouragement would be puerile. There are halts,

repose, breathing spaces in the march of peoples, as there are winters

in the progress of the seasons. The gigantic step, '89, is all the same

a fact. To despair would be absurd, but to stimulate is necessary.

To stimulate, to press, to chide, to awaken, to suggest to inspire,--it

is this function, fulfilled everywhere by writers, which impresses

on the literature of this century so high a character of power and

originality. To remain faithful to all the laws of art, while combining

them with the law of progress,--such is the problem, victoriously

solved by so many noble and proud minds.

Thence this word _deliverance_, which appears above everything in the

light, as if it were written on the very forehead of the ideal.

The Revolution is France sublimed. There was a day when France was

in the furnace,--the furnace causes wings to grow on certain warlike

martyrs,--and from amid the flames this giant came forth archangel.

At this day, by all the world, France is called Revolution; and

henceforth this word _revolution_ will be the name of civilization,

until it can be replaced by the word _harmony._ I repeat it: do not

seek elsewhere the starting-point and the birth-place of the literature

of the nineteenth century. Yes, as many as there be of us, great and

small, powerful and unknown, illustrious and obscure, in all our works

good or bad, whatever they may be,--poems, dramas, romances, history,

philosophy,--at the tribune of assemblies as before the crowds of the

theatre, as in the meditation of solitudes; yes, everywhere; yes,

always; yes, to combat violence and imposture; yes, to rehabilitate

those who are stoned and run down; yes, to sum up logically and to

march straight onward; yes, to console, to succour, to relieve, to

encourage, to teach; yes, to dress wounds in hope of curing them;

yes, to transform charity into fraternity, alms into assistance,

sluggishness into work, idleness into utility, centralization into a

family, iniquity into justice, the _bourgeois_ into the citizen, the

populace into the people, the rabble into the nation, nations, into

humanity, war into love, prejudice into free examination, frontiers

into solderings, limits into openings, ruts into rails, vestry-rooms

into temples, the instinct of evil into the desire of good, life into

right, kings into men; yes, to deprive religions of hell and societies

of the galley; yes, to be brothers to the wretched, the serf, the

fellah, the _prolétaire_, the disinherited, the banished, the betrayed,

the conquered, the sold, the enchained, the sacrificed, the prostitute,

the convict, the ignorant, the savage, the slave, the negro, the

condemned, and the damned,--yes, we are thy sons, Revolution!

Yes, men of genius; yes, poets, philosophers, historians; yes,

giants of that great art of previous ages which is all the light of

the past,--O men eternal, the minds of this day salute you, but do

not follow you; in respect to you they hold to this law,--to admire

everything, to imitate nothing. Their function is no longer yours.

They have business with the virility of the human race. The hour which

makes mankind of age has struck. We assist, under the full light of

the ideal, at that majestic junction of the beautiful with the useful.

No actual or possible genius can surpass you, ye men of genius of old;

to equal you is all the ambition allowed: but, to equal you, one must

conform to the necessities of our time, as you supplied the necessities

of yours. Writers who are sons of the Revolution have a holy task.

O Homer, their epic poem must weep; O Herodotus, their history must

protest; O Juvenal, their satire must dethrone; O Shakespeare, their

"thou shalt be king," must be said to the people; O Æschylus, their

Prometheus must strike Jupiter with thunderbolts; O Job, their

dunghill must be fruitful; O Dante, their hell must be extinguished;

O Isaiah, thy Babylon crumbles, theirs must blaze forth with light!

They do what you have done; they contemplate creation directly, they

observe humanity directly; they do not accept as a guiding light any

refracted ray,--not even yours. Like you, they have for their sole

starting-point, outside them, universal being: in them, their soul.

They have for the source of their work the one source whence flows

Nature and whence flows art, the infinite. As the writer of these lines

said forty years ago: "The poets and the writers of the nineteenth

century have neither masters nor models."[1] No; in all that vast

and sublime art of all peoples, in all those grand creations of all

epochs,--no, not even thee, Æschylus, not even thee, Dante, not even

thee, Shakespeare,--no, they have neither models nor masters. And why

have they neither masters nor models? It is because they have one

model, Man, and because they have one master, God.

[Footnote 1: Preface to "Cromwell."]

BOOK III.

TRUE HISTORY.--EVERY ONE PUT IN HIS RIGHT PLACE.

CHAPTER I.

Here is the advent of the new constellation. It is certain that at the

present hour that which has been till now the light of the human race

grows pale, and that the old flame is about to disappear from the world.

The men of brutal force have, since human tradition existed, shone

alone in the empyrean of history; theirs was the only supremacy.

Under the various names of kings, emperors, captains, chiefs,

princes,--summed up in the word heroes,--this group of an apocalypse

was resplendent. They were all dripping with victories. Terror

transformed itself into acclamation to salute them. They dragged after

them an indescribable tumultuous flame. They appeared to man in a

disorder of horrible light. They did not light up the heavens,--they

set them on fire. They looked as if they meant to take possession of

the Infinite. Rumbling crashes were heard in their glory. A red glare

mingled with it. Was it purple? Was it blood? Was it shame? Their light

made one think of the face of Cain. They hated one another. Flashing

shocks passed from one to the other; at times these enormous planets

came into collision, striking out lightnings. Their look was furious.

Their radiance stretched out into swords. All that hung terrible above

us.

That tragic glare fills the past. To-day it is in full process of

waning.

There is decline in war, decline in despotism, decline in theocracy,

decline in slavery, decline in the scaffold. The blade becomes shorter,

the tiara is fading away, the crown is simplified; war is raging, the

plume bends lower, usurpation is circumscribed, the chain is lightened,

the rack is out of countenance. The antique violence of the few against

all, called right divine, is coming to an end. Legitimacy, the grace of

God, the monarchy of Pharamond, nations branded on the shoulder with

the _fleur-de-lis_, the possession of peoples by the right of birth,

the long series of ancestors giving right over the living,--these

things are yet striving in some places; at Naples, in Prussia, etc; but

they are struggling rather than striving,--it is death that strains for

life. A stammering which to-morrow will be utterance, and the day after

to-morrow a full declaration, proceeds from the bruised lips of the

serf, of the vassal, of the _prolétaire_, of the pariah. The gag breaks

up between the teeth of the human race. The human race has had enough

of the sorrowful path, and the patient refuses to go farther.

From this very time certain forms of despotism are no longer possible.

The Pharaoh is a mummy, the sultan a phantom, the Cæsar a counterfeit.

This stylite of the Trajan columns is anchylosed on its pedestal; it

has on its head the excrement of free eagles; it is nihility rather

than glory; the bands of the sepulchre fasten this crown of laurels.

The period of the men of brutal force is gone. They have been glorious,

certainly, but with a glory that melts away. That species of great men

is soluble in progress. Civilization rapidly oxidizes these bronzes.

At the point of maturity to which the French Revolution has already

brought the universal conscience, the hero is no longer a hero without

a good reason; the captain is discussed, the conqueror is inadmissible.

In our days Louis XIV. invading the Palatinate would look like a

robber. From the last century these realities began to dawn. Frederick

II., in the presence of Voltaire, felt and owned himself somewhat of

a brigand. To be a great man of matter, to be pompously violent, to

govern by the sword-knot and the cockade, to forge right upon force, to

hammer out justice and truth by blows of accomplished facts, to make

brutalities of genius,--is to be grand, if you like; but it is a coarse

manner of being grand,--glories announced with drums which are met with

a shrug of the shoulders. Sonorous heroes have deafened human reason

until to-day; that pompous noise begins now to weary it. It shuts

its eyes and ears before those authorized slaughters that they call

battles. The sublime murderers of men have had their time; it is in a

certain relative forgetfulness that henceforth they will be illustrious

and august; humanity, become greater, requires to dispense with them.

The food for guns thinks; it reflects, and is actually losing its

admiration for being shot down by a cannon-ball.

A few figures by the way may not be useless.

All tragedy is part of our subject. The tragedy of poets is not the

only one; there is the tragedy of politicians and statesmen. Would you

like to know how much that tragedy costs?

Heroes have an enemy; that enemy is called finance. For a long time

the amount of money paid for that kind of glory was ignored. In order

to disguise the total, there were convenient little fireplaces like

that in which Louis XIV. burned the accounts of Versailles. That day

the smoke of one thousand millions of francs passed out the chimney of

the royal stove. The nation did not even take notice. At the present

day nations have one great virtue,--they are miserly. They know that

prodigality is the mother of abasement. They reckon up; they learn

book-keeping by double entry. Warlike glory henceforth has its debit

and credit account: that renders it impossible.

The greatest warrior of modern times is not Napoleon, it is Pitt

Napoleon carried on warfare; Pitt created it. It is Pitt who willed all

the wars of the Revolution and of the empire; they proceeded from him.

Take away Pitt and put Fox in his place, there would then be no reason

for that exorbitant battle of twenty-three years, there would be no

longer any coalition. Pitt was the soul of the coalition, and he dead,

his soul remained amidst the universal war. What Pitt cost England and

the world, here it is. We add this bas-relief to his pedestal.

In the first place, the expenditure in men. From 1791 to 1814 France

alone, striving against Europe, coalesced by England,--France

constrained and compelled, expended in butcheries for military glory

(and also, let us add, for the defence of territory) five millions of

men; that is to say, six hundred men per day. Europe, including the

total of France, has expended sixteen millions six hundred thousand

men; that is to say, two thousand deaths per day during twenty-three

years.

Secondly, the expenditure of money. We have, unfortunately, no

authentic total, save the total of England. From 1791 to 1814 England,

in order to make France succumb to Europe, became indebted to the

extent of eighty-one millions, two hundred and sixty five thousand,

eight hundred and forty-two pounds sterling. Divide this total by

the total of men killed, at the rate of two thousand per day for

twenty-three years, and you arrive at this result,--that each corpse

stretched on the field of battle has cost England alone fifty pounds

sterling.

Add the total of Europe,--total unknown, but enormous.

With these seventeen millions of dead men, they might have peopled

Australia with Europeans. With the eighty millions expended by England

in cannon-shots, they might have changed the face of the earth, begun

the work of civilization everywhere, and suppressed throughout the

entire world ignorance and misery.

England pays eighty millions for the two statues of Pitt and Wellington.

It is a fine thing to have heroes, but it is an expensive luxury. Poets

cost less.

CHAPTER II.

The discharge of the warrior is signed: it is splendour in the

distance. The great Nimrod, the great Cyrus, the great Sennacherib,

the great Sesostris, the great Alexander, the great Pyrrhus, the great

Hannibal, the great Cæsar, the great Timour, the great Louis, the great

Frederic, and more great ones,--all are going away.

It would be a mistake to think that we reject these men purely and

simply. In our eyes five or six of those that we have named are

legitimately illustrious; they have even mingled something good in

their ravages; their definitive total embarrasses the absolute equity

of the thinker, and they weigh nearly even weights in the balance of

the injurious and the useful.

Others have been only injurious. They are numerous, innumerable even;

for the masters of the world are a crowd.

The thinker is the weigher. Clemency suits him. Let us therefore

say. Those others who have done only evil have one attenuating

circumstance,--imbecility.

They have another excuse yet,--the mental condition of the human race

itself at the moment they appeared; the medium surrounding facts,

modifiable, but encumbering.

It is not men that are tyrants, but things. The real tyrants are called

frontier, track, routine; blindness under the form of fanaticism,

deafness and dumbness under the form of diversity of languages; quarrel

under the form of diversity of weights, measures, and moneys; hatred

resulting from quarrel, war resulting from hatred. All these tyrants

may be called by one name,--separation. Division, whence proceeds

irresponsible government,--this is despotism in the abstract.

Even the tyrants of flesh are mere things. Caligula is much more a

fact than a man; he is a result more than an existence. The Roman

proscriber, dictator, or Cæsar, refuses the vanquished fire and

water,--that is to say, puts his life out. One day of Gela represents

twenty thousand proscribed, one day of Tiberius thirty thousand, one

day of Sylla seventy thousand. One evening Vitellius, being ill, sees

a house lighted up, where people were rejoicing. "Do they think me

dead?" says Vitellius. It is Junius Blesus who sups with Tuscus Cæcina;

the emperor sends to these drinkers a cup of poison, that they may

realize by this sinister end of too joyous a night that Vitellius is

living. (Reddendam pro intempestiva licentia mœstam et funebrem

noctem qua sentient vivere Vitellius et impresser.) Otho and this same

Vitellius forward assassins to each other. Under the Cæsars, it is a

marvel to die in one's bed; Pison, to Whom this happened, is noted for

that strange incident. The garden of Valerius Asiaticus pleases the

emperor; the face of Stateless displeases the empress,--state crimes:

Valerius is strangled because he has a garden, And Statilius because

he has a face. Basil II., Emperor of the East, makes fifteen thousand

Bulgarians prisoners; they are divided into bands of a hundred, and

their eyes are put out, with the exception of one, who is charged

to conduct his ninety-nine blind comrades. He afterward sends into

Bulgaria the whole of this army without eyes. History thus describes

Basil II.: "He was too fond of glory."[1] Paul of Russia gave out this

axiom: "There is no man powerful save him to whom the emperor speaks;

and his power endures as long as the word that he hears." Philip V.

of Spain, so ferociously calm at the _auto-da-fés_, is frightened at

the idea of changing his shirt, and remains six months in bed without

washing and without trimming his nails, for fear of being poisoned, by

means of scissors, or by the water in the basin, or by his shirt, or by

his shoes. Ivan, grandfather of Paul, had a woman put to the torture

before making her lie in his bed; had a newly married bride hanged,

and placed the husband as sentinel by her side, to prevent the rope

from being cut; had a father killed by his son; invented the process of

sawing men in two with a cord; burns Bariatinski himself by slow fire,

and, while the patient howls, brings the embers together with the end

of his stick. Peter, in point of excellence, aspires to that of the

executioner; he exercises himself in cutting off heads. At first he

cuts off but five per day,--little enough; but, with application, he

succeeds in cutting off twenty-five. It is a talent for a czar to tear

away a woman's breast with one blow of the knout.

What are all those monsters? Symptoms,--running sores, pus which oozes

from a sickly body. They are scarcely more responsible than the sum of

a column is responsible for the figures in that column. Basil, Ivan,

Philip, Paul, etc., are the products of vast surrounding stupidity. The

clergy of the Greek Church, for example, having this maxim, "Who can

make us judges of those who are our masters?" what more natural than

that a czar,--Ivan himself,--should cause an archbishop to be sewn in

a bear's skin and devoured by dogs? The czar is amused,--it is quite

right. Under Nero, the man whose brother was killed goes to the temple

to return thanks to the gods; under Ivan, a Boyard empaled employs

his agony, which lasts for twenty-four hours, in repeating, "O God!

protect the czar." The Princess Sanguzko is in tears; she presents,

upon her knees, a supplication to Nicholas: she implores grace for

her husband, conjuring the master to spare Sanguzko (a Pole guilty of

loving Poland) the frightful journey to Siberia. Nicholas listens in

silence, takes the supplication, and writes beneath it, "On foot." Then

Nicholas goes into the streets, and the crowd throw themselves on his

boot to kiss it What have you to say? Nicholas is a madman, the crowd

is a brute. From "khan" comes "knez;" from "knez" comes "tzar;" from

"tzar" the "czar,"--a series of phenomena rather than an affiliation

of men. That after this Ivan you should have this Peter, after this

Peter this Nicholas, after this Nicholas this Alexander, what more

logical? You all rather contribute to this result. The tortured accept

the torture. "This czar, half putrid, half frozen," as Madame de Staël

says,--you made him yourselves. To be a people, to be a force, and to

look upon these things, is to find them good. To be present, is to

give one's consent. He who assists at the crime, assists the crime.

Unresisting presence is an encouraging submission.

Let us add that a preliminary corruption began the complicity even

before the crime was committed. A certain putrid fermentation of

pre-existing baseness engenders the oppressor.

The wolf is the fact of the forest; it is the savage fruit of solitude

without defence. Combine and group together silence, obscurity, easy

victory, monstrous infatuation, prey offered from all parts, murder in

security, the connivance of those who are around, weakness, want of

weapons, abandonment, isolation,--from the point of intersection of

these things breaks forth the ferocious beast. A dark forest, whence

cries cannot be heard, produces the tiger. A tiger is a blindness

hungered and armed. Is it a being? Scarcely. The claw of the animal

knows no more than does the thorn of a plant. The fatal fact engenders

the unconscious organism. In so far as personality is concerned, and

apart from killing for a living, the tiger does not exist. Mouravieff

is mistaken if he thinks that he is a being.

Wicked men spring from bad things. Therefore let us correct the things.

And here we return to our starting-point: An attenuating circumstance

for despotism is--idiocy. That attenuating circumstance we have just

pleaded.

Idiotic despots, a multitude, are the mob of the purple; but above

them, beyond them, by the immeasurable distance which separates that

which radiates from that which stagnates,--there are the despots of

genius; there are the captains, the conquerors, the mighty men of war,

the civilizers of force, the ploughmen of the sword.

These we have just named. The truly great among them are called Cyrus,

Sesostris, Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon; and, with

the qualifications we have laid down, we admire them.

But we admire them on the condition of their disappearance. Make room

for better ones! Make room for greater ones!

Those greater, those better ones, are they new? No. Their series is as

ancient as the other; more ancient, perhaps, for the idea has preceded

the act, and the thinker is anterior to the warrior. But their place

was taken, taken violently. This usurpation is about to cease; their

hour comes at last; their predominance gleams forth. Civilization,

returned to the true light, recognizes them as its only founders; their

series becomes clothed in light, and eclipses the rest; like the past,

the future belongs to them; and henceforth it is they whom God will

perpetuate.

[Footnote 1: Delandine.]

CHAPTER III.

That history has to be re-made is evident. Up to the present time, it

has been nearly always written from the miserable point of view of

accomplished fact; it is time to write it from the point of view of

principle,--and that, under penalty of nullity.

Royal gestures, warlike uproars, princely coronations; marriages,

baptisms, and funerals, executions and fêtes; the finery of one

crushing all; the triumph of being born king, the prowess of sword

and axe; great empires, heavy taxes; the tricks played by chance upon

chance; the universe having for a law the adventures of any being,

provided he be crowned; the destiny of a century changed by a blow from

the lance of a fool through the skull of an imbecile; the majestic

_fistula in ano_ of Louis XIV.; the grave words of the dying Emperor

Mathias to his doctor, trying for the last time to feel his pulse

beneath his coverlet and making a mistake,--"Erras, amice hoc est

membrum nostrum imperiale sacrocæsareum;" the dance, with castanets of

Cardinal Richelieu, disguised as a shepherd before the Queen of France,

in the private villa of the Rue de Gaillon; Hildebrand completed by

Cisneros; the little dogs of Henri III.; the various Potemkins of

Catherine II.,--Orloff here, Godoy there, etc.; a great tragedy with a

petty intrigue,--such was history up to our days, alternating between

the throne and the altar, lending one ear to Dangeau and another to

Dom Calmet, sanctimonious and not stern, not comprehending the true

transitions from one age to the other, incapable of distinguishing the

climacteric crises of civilization, making the human race mount upward

by ladders of silly dates, well versed in puerilities while ignorant of

right, of justice, and of truth, and modelled far more upon Le Ragois

than upon Tacitus.

So true is this, that in our days Tacitus has been the object of strong

attack.

Tacitus on the other hand,--we do not weary of insisting upon it,--is,

like Juvenal, like Suetonius and Lampridius, the object of a special

and merited hatred. The day when in the colleges professors of rhetoric

shall put Juvenal above Virgil, and Tacitus above Bossuet, will be the

eve of the day in which the human race shall have been delivered; when

all forms of oppression shall have disappeared,--from the slave-owner

up to the pharisee, from the cottage where the slave weeps to the

chapel where the eunuch sings. Cardinal Du Perron, who received for

Henri IV. blows from the Pope's stick, had the goodness to say, "I

despise Tacitus."

Up to the epoch in which we live, history has been a courtier. The

double identification of the king with the nation and of the king with

God, is the work of courtier history. The grace of God begets the right

divine. Louis XIV. says, "I am the State!" Madame du Barry, plagiarist

of Louis XIV., calls Louis XV. "France;" and the pompously haughty

saying of the great Asiatic king of Versailles ends with "France, your

coffin taints the camp!"

Bossuet writes without hesitation, though palliating facts here

and there, the frightful legend of those old thrones of antiquity

covered with crimes, and, applying to the surface of things his vague

theocratic declamation, satisfies himself by this formula: "God holds

in his hand the hearts of kings." That is not the case, for two

reasons,--God has no hand, and kings have no heart.

We are only speaking, of course, of the kings of Assyria.

History, that old history of which we have spoken, is a kind person for

princes. It shuts its eyes when a highness says, "History, do not look

this way." It has, imperturbably, with the face of a harlot, denied

the horrible skull-breaking casque with an inner spike, destined by

the Archduke of Austria for the Swiss magistrate Gundoldingen. At the

present time this machine is hung on a nail in the Hôtel de Ville of

Lucerne; anybody can go and see it: yet history repeats its denial.

Moréri calls St. Bartholomew's day "a disturbance." Chaudon, another

biographer, thus characterizes the author of the saying to Louis XV.,

cited above: "A lady of the court, Madame du Barry." History accepts

for an attack of apoplexy the mattress under which John II. of England

stifled the Duke of Gloucester at Calais.[1] Why is the head of the

Infant Don Carlos separated from the trunk in his bier at the Escurial?

Philip II., the father, answers: "It is because the Infant having died

a natural death, the coffin prepared for him was not found long enough,

and they were obliged to cut off the head." History blindly believes in

the coffin being too short. What! the father to have his son beheaded!

Oh, fie! Only demagogues would say such things.

The ingenuousness with which history glorifies the fact, whatever it

may be, and however impious it may be, shines nowhere better than

in Cantemir and Karamsin,--the one a Turkish historian, the other a

Russian historian. The Ottoman fact and the Muscovite fact evidence,

when confronted and compared with each other, the Tartar identity.

Moscow is not less sinisterly Asiatic than Stamboul. Ivan is in

the one as Mustapha is in the other. The gradation is imperceptible

between that Christianity and that Mahometanism. The Pope is brother

of the Ulema, the Boyard of the Pacha, the knout of the bowstring, and

the moujik of the mute. There is to men passing through the streets

little difference between Selim who pierces them with arrows, and

Basil who lets bears loose on them. Cantemir, a man of the South, an

ancient Moldavian hospodar, long a Turkish subject, feels, although he

has passed over to the Russians, that he does not displease the Czar

Peter by deifying despotism, and he prostrates his metaphors before

the sultans: this crouching upon the belly is Oriental, and somewhat

Western also. The sultans are divine; their scimitar is sacred,

their dagger is sublime, their exterminations are magnanimous, their

parricides are good. They call themselves merciful, as the furies are

called Eumenides. The blood that they spill smokes in Cantemir with

an odour of incense, and the vast slaughtering which is their reign

blooms into glory. They massacre the people in the public interest.

When some padischah (I know not which)--Tiger IV. or Tiger VI.--causes

to be strangled one after the other his nineteen little brothers

running frightened round the chamber, the Turkish native historian

declares that "it was executing wisely the law of the empire." The

Russian historian, Karamsin, is not less tender to the Tzar than was

Cantemir to the Sultan; nevertheless, let us say it, in comparison

with Cantemir's, the fervency of Karamsin is lukewarmness. Thus Peter,

killing his son Alexis, is glorified by Karamsin, but in the same tone

in which we excuse a fault. It is not the acceptation pure and simple

of Cantemir, who is more upon his knees. The Russian historian only

admires, while the Turkish historian adores. No fire in Karamsin, no

nerve,--a dull enthusiasm, grayish apotheoses, good-will struck into

an icicle, caresses benumbed with cold. It is poor flattery. Evidently

the climate has something to do with it. Karamsin is a chilled Cantemir.

Thus is the greater part of history made up to the present day; it

goes from Bossuet to Karamsin, passing by the Abbé Pluche. That

history has for its principle obedience. To what is obedience due? To

success. Heroes are well treated, but kings are preferred. To reign is

to succeed every morning. A king has to-morrow: he is solvent. A hero

may be unsuccessful,--such things happen,--in which case he is but a

usurper. Before this history, genius itself, even should it be the

highest expression of force served by intelligence, is compelled to

continual success. If it fails, ridicule; if it falls, insult. After

Marengo, you are Europe's hero, the man of Providence, anointed by the

Lord; after Austerlitz, Napoleon the Great; after Waterloo, the ogre

from Corsica. The Pope anointed an ogre.

Nevertheless, impartial Loriquet, in consideration of services

rendered, makes you a marquis. The man of our day who has best executed

that surprising gamut from Hero of Europe to Ogre of Corsica, is

Fontanes, chosen during so many years to cultivate, develop, and direct

the moral sense of youth.

Legitimacy, right divine, negation of universal suffrage, the throne a

fief, the nation an entailed estate, all proceed from that history. The

executioner is also part of it; Joseph de Maistre adds him, divinely,

to the king. In England such history is called "loyal" history. The

English aristocracy, to whom similar excellent ideas sometimes occur,

have imagined a method of giving to a political opinion the name of

a virtue,--_Instrumentum regni._ In England, to be a royalist, is to

be loyal. A democrat is disloyal; he is a variety of the dishonest

man. This man believes in the people,--shame! He would have universal

suffrage,--he is a chartist! are you sure of his probity? Here is a

republican passing,--take care of your pockets! That is clever. All the

world is more witty than Voltaire: the English aristocracy has more wit

than Macchiavelli.

The king pays, the people do not pay,--this is about all the secret of

that kind of history. It has also its own tariff of indulgences. Honour

and profit are divided,--honour to the master, profit to the historian.

Procopius is prefect, and, what is more. Illustrious by special decree

(which does not prevent him from being a traitor); Bossuet is bishop,

Fleury is prelate prior of Argenteuil, Karamsin is senator, Cantemir is

prince. But the finest thing is to be paid successively by For and by

Against, and, like Fontanes, to be made senator through idolatry of,

and peer of France through spitting upon, the same idol.

What is going on at the Louvre? What is going on at the Vatican, in

the Seraglio, Buen Retiro, at Windsor, at Schoenbrünn, at Potsdam, at

the Kremlin, at Oranienbaum? Further questions are needless; for there

is nothing interesting for the human race beyond those ten or twelve

houses, of which history is the door-keeper.

Nothing can be insignificant that relates to war, the warrior, the

prince, the throne, the court. He who is not endowed with grave

puerility cannot be a historian. A question of etiquette, a hunt, a

gala, a grand levee, a procession, the triumph of Maximilian, the

number of carriages the ladies have following the king to the camp

before Mons, the necessity of having vices congenial with the faults

of his majesty, the clocks of Charles V., the locks of Louis XVI.; how

the broth refused by Louis XV. at his coronation, showed him to be a

good king; how the Prince of Wales sits in the Chamber of the House

of Lords, not in the capacity of Prince of Wales, but as Duke of

Cornwall; how the drunken Augustus has appointed Prince Lubormirsky,

who is starost of Kasimirow, under-cupbearer to the crown; how Charles

of Spain gave the command of the army of Catalonia to Pimentel because

the Pimentels have the title of Benavente since 1308; how Frederic of

Brandenburg granted a fief of forty thousand crowns to a huntsman who

enabled him to kill a fine stag; how Louis Antoine, grand-master of

the Teutonic Order and Prince Palatine, died at Liége from displeasure

at not being able to make the inhabitants choose him bishop; how the

Princess Borghèse, dowager of Mirandole and of the Papal House, married

the Prince of Cellamare, son of the Duke of Giovenazzo; how my Lord

Seaton, who is a Montgomery, followed James II. into France; how the

Emperor ordered the Duke of Mantua, who is vassal of the empire, to

drive from his court the Marquis Amorati; how there are always two

Cardinal Barberins living, and so on,--all that is the important

business. A turned-up nose becomes an historical fact. Two small fields

contiguous to the old Mark and to the duchy of Zell, having almost

embroiled England and Prussia, are memorable. In fact the cleverness of

the governing and the apathy of the governed have arranged and mixed

things in such a manner that all those forms of princely nothingness

have their place in human destiny; and peace and war, the movement of

armies and fleets, the recoil or the progress of civilization, depend

on the cup of tea of Queen Anne or the fly-flap of the Dey of Algiers.

History walks behind those fooleries, registering them.

Knowing so many things, it is quite natural that it should be ignorant

of others. If you are so curious as to ask the name of the English

merchant who in 1612 first entered China by the north; of the worker

in glass who in 1663 first established in France a manufactory of

crystal; of the citizen who carried out in the States General at Tours,

under Charles VIII.: the sound principle of elective magistracy (a

principle which has since been adroitly obliterated); of the pilot

who in 1405 discovered the Canary Islands; of the Byzantine lutemaker

who in the eighth century invented the organ and gave to music its

grandest voice; of the Campanian mason who invented the clock by

establishing at Rome on the temple of Quirinus the first sundial;

of the Roman lighterman who invented the paving of towns by the

construction of the Appian Way in the year 312 B.C.; of the Egyptian

carpenter who devised the dove-tail, one of the keys of architecture,

which may be found under the obelisk of Luxor; of the Chaldean keeper

of flocks who founded astronomy by his observation of the signs of

the zodiac, the starting-point taken by Anaximenes; of the Corinthian

calker who, nine years before the first Olympiad, calculated the power

of the triple lever, devised the trireme, and created a tow-boat

anterior by two thousand six hundred years to the steamboat; of the

Macedonian ploughman who discovered the first gold mine in Mount

Pangæus,--history, does not know what to say to you: those fellows are

unknown to history. Who is that,--a ploughman, a calker, a shepherd,

a carpenter, a lighterman, a mason, a lutemaker, a sailor, and a

merchant? History does not lower itself to such rabble.

There is at Nüremberg, near the Egydienplatz, in a chamber on the

second floor of a house which faces the church of St Giles, on an

iron tripod, a little ball of wood twenty inches in diameter, covered

with darkish vellum, marked with lines which were once red, yellow,

and green. It is a globe on which is sketched out an outline of the

divisions of the earth in the fifteenth century. On this globe is

vaguely indicated, in the twenty-fourth degree of latitude, under

the sign of the Crab, a kind of island named Antilia, which one day

attracted the attention of two men. The one who had constructed the

globe and draw Antilia showed this island to the other, placed his

finger upon it, and said, "It is there." The man who looked on was

called Christopher Columbus; the man who said, "It is there," was

called Martin Behaim. Antilia is America. History speaks of Fernando

Cortez, who ravaged America, but not of Martin Behaim, who divined it.

Let a man have "cut to pieces" other men; let him have "put them to the

sword;" let him have made them "bite the dust,"--horrible expressions,

which have become hideously familiar,--and if you search history for

the name of that man, whoever he may be, you will find it. But search

for the name of the man who invented the compass, and you will not find

it.

In 1747, in the eighteenth century, under the gaze even of

philosophers, the battles of Raucoux and Lawfield, the siege of

Sas-de-Gand and the taking of Berg-op-Zoom, eclipse and efface

that sublime discovery which to-day is in course of modifying the

world,--electricity. Voltaire himself, about that year, celebrated

passionately some exploit of Trajan.[2]

A certain public stupidity is the result of that history which is

superimposed upon education almost everywhere. If you doubt it, see,

among others, the publications of Périsse Brothers, intended by the

editors, says a parenthesis, for primary schools.

A prince who gives himself an animal's name makes us laugh. We rail

at the Emperor of China, who makes people call him "His Majesty the

Dragon," and we placidly say "Monseigneur le Dauphin."

History is the record of domesticity. The historian is no more than the

master of ceremonies of centuries. In the model court of Louis the

Great there are four historians, as there are four chamber violinists.

Lulli leads the one, Boileau the others.

In this old method of history,--the only authorized method up to

1789, and classic in every acceptation of the word,--the best

narrators, even the honest ones (there are few of them), even those

who think themselves free, place themselves mechanically in drill,

stitch tradition to tradition, submit to accepted custom, receive the

pass-word from the antechamber, accept, pell-mell with the crowd,

the stupid divinity of coarse personages in the foreground,--kings,

"potentates," "pontiffs," soldiers,--and, all the time thinking

themselves historians, end by donning the livery of historiographers,

and are lackeys without knowing it.

This kind of history is taught, is compulsory, is commended and

recommended; all young intellects are more or less saturated with

it, its mark remains upon them, their thought suffers through it and

releases itself only with difficulty,--we make schoolboys learn it by

heart, and I who speak, when a child, was its victim.

In such history there is everything except history. Shows of princes,

of "monarchs," and of captains, indeed; but of the people, of laws,

of manners, very little; and of letters, of arts, of sciences, of

philosophy, of the universal movement of thought,--in one word, of

man,--nothing. Civilization dates by dynasties, and not by progress;

some king or other is one of the stages along the historical road;

the true stages, the stages of great men, are nowhere indicated. It

explains how Francis II. succeeds to Henri II., Charles IX. to Francis

II., and Henri III. to Charles IX.; but it does not tell us how Watt

succeeds to Papin, and Fulton to Watt; behind the heavy scenery of the

hereditary rights of kings a glimpse of the mysterious sovereignty

of men of genius is scarcely obtained. The lamp which smokes on the

opaque facades of royal accessions hides the starry light which the

creators of civilization throw over the ages. Not one of this series

of historians points out the divine relation of human affairs,--the

applied logic of Providence; not one makes us see how progress

engenders progress. That Philip IV. comes after Philip III., and

Charles II. after Philip IV., it would indeed be shameful not to know;

but that Descartes continues Bacon, and that Kant continues Descartes;

that Las Casas continues Columbus, that Washington continues Las Casas,

and that John Brown continues and rectifies Washington; that John Huss

continues Pelagius, that Luther continues John Huss, and that Voltaire

continues Luther,--it is almost a scandal to be aware of this!

[Footnote 1: There was but one John of England, who put to death (as

is supposed) his nephew Arthur, Duke of Bretagne. Perhaps this is what

Hugo had in mind.]

[Footnote 2: For Trajan, read Louis XV.]

CHAPTER IV.

It is time that all this should be altered. It is time that the men of

action should take their place behind, and the men of ideas come to the

front. The summit is the head. Where thought is, there is power. It is

time that men of genius should precede heroes. It is time to render to

Cæsar what is Cæsar's, and to the book what is the book's: such or such

a poem, such a drama, such a novel, does more work than all the Courts

of Europe together. It is time that history should proportion itself to

the reality, that it should allow to each influence its true measure,

and that it should cease to place the masks of kings on epochs made in

the image of poets and philosophers. To whom belongs the eighteenth

century,--to Louis XV. or to Voltaire? Confront Versailles with Ferney,

and see from which of these two points civilization flows.

A century is a formula; an epoch is a thought expressed,--after which,

civilization passes to another. Civilization has phrases: these phrases

are the centuries. It does not repeat here what it says there; but its

mysterious phrases are bound together by a chain,--logic (_logos_) is

within,--and their series constitutes progress. All these phrases,

expressive of a single idea,--the divine idea,--write slowly the word

Fraternity.

All light is at some point condensed into a flame; in the same way

every epoch is condensed into a man. The man having expired, the epoch

is closed,--God turns the page. Dante dead, is the full-stop put at

the end of the thirteenth century: John Huss can come. Shakespeare

dead, is the full-stop put at the end of the sixteenth century; after

this poet, who contains and sums up every philosophy, the philosophers

Pascal, Descartes, Molière, Le Sage, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot,

Beaumarchais can come. Voltaire dead, is the full-stop put at the end

of the eighteenth century: the French Revolution, liquidation of the

first social form of Christianity, can come.

These different periods, which we name epochs, have all their dominant

points. What is that dominant point? Is it a head that wears a crown,

or is it a head that bears a thought? Is it an aristocracy, or is it

an idea? Answer yourself. Do you see where the power is? Weigh Francis

I. in the scales with Gargantua: put all chivalry in the scale against

"Don Quixote."

Therefore, every one to his right place. Right about face! and let us

now regard the centuries in their true light. In the first rank, minds;

in the second, in the third, in the twentieth, soldiers and princes.

To the warrior the darkness, to the thinker the pedestal. Take away

Alexander, and put in his place Aristotle. Strange thing, that up to

this day humanity should have read the Iliad in such a manner as to

annihilate Homer under Achilles!

I repeat it, it is time that all this should be changed. Moreover,

the first impulse is given. Already, noble minds are at work; future

history begins to appear, some specimens of the new and magnificent

though partial treatments of the subject being already in existence; a

general recasting is imminent,--_ad usum populi._ Compulsory education

demands true history; and true history will be given: it is begun.

Effigies must be stamped afresh. That which was the reverse will become

the face, and that which was the face will become the reverse. Urban

VIII. will be the reverse of Galileo.

The true profile of the human race will re-appear on the different

proofs of civilization that the successive ages will offer.

The historical effigy will no longer be the man-king; it will be the

man-people.

Doubtless,--and we shall not be reproached for not insisting on

it,--real and veracious history, in indicating the sources of

civilization wherever they may be, will not lose sight of the

appreciable utility of the sceptre-bearers and sword-bearers at given

periods and in special states of humanity. Certain wrestling matches

necessitate some resemblance between the two combatants; barbarity must

sometimes be pitted against savageness. There are cases of progress by

violence. Cæsar is good in Cimmeria, and Alexander in Asia; but for

Alexander and Cæsar the second rank suffices.

Veracious history, real history, definitive history henceforth charged

with the education of the royal infant,--namely, the people,--will

reject all fiction, will fail in complaisance, will logically classify

phenomena, will unravel profound causes, will study philosophically

and scientifically the successive commotions of humanity, and will

take less account of the great strokes of the sword than of the grand

strokes of the idea. The deeds of light will pass first; Pythagoras

will be a much greater event than Sesostris. We have just said

it,--heroes, men of the twilight, are relatively luminous in the

darkness; but what is a conqueror beside a sage? What is the invasion

of kingdoms compared with the opening up of intellects? The winners of

minds efface the gainers of provinces. He through whom we think, he is

the true conqueror. In future history, the slave Æsop and the slave

Plautus will have precedence over kings; and there are vagabonds who

will weigh more than certain victors, and comedians who will weigh more

than certain emperors.

Without doubt, to illustrate what we are saying by means of facts, it

is useful that a powerful man should have marked the halting-place

between the ruin of the Latin world and the growth of the Gothic world;

it is also useful that another powerful man, coming after the first,

like cunning on the footsteps of daring, should have sketched out

under the form of a catholic monarchy the future universal group of

nations, and the beneficial encroachments of Europe upon Africa, Asia,

and America. But it is more useful yet to have written the "Divina

Commedia" and "Hamlet." No bad action is mixed up with these great

works; nor is here to be charged to the account of the civilizer a debt

of nations ruined. The improvement of the human mind being given as the

result to be obtained, Dante is of greater importance than Charlemagne,

and Shakespeare of greater importance than Charles the Fifth.

In history, as it will be written on the pattern of absolute truth,

that intelligence of no account, that unconscious and trivial

being,--the _Non pluribus impar_, the Sultan-sun of Marly,--will appear

as nothing more than the almost mechanical preparer of the shelter

needed by the thinker disguised as a buffoon, and of the environment of

ideas and men required for the philosophy of Alceste. Thus Louis XIV.

makes Molière's bed.

These exchanges of parts will put people in their true light; the

historical optic, renewed, will re-adjust the ensemble of civilization,

at present a chaos; for perspective, that justice of geometry, will

size the past,--making such a plan to advance, placing another in the

background. Every one will assume his real stature; the head-dresses

of tiaras and of crowns will only make dwarfs more ridiculous; stupid

genuflexions will vanish. From these alterations will proceed right.

That great judge We ourselves,--We all,--having henceforth for measure

the clear idea of what is absolute and what is relative, deductions

and restitutions will of themselves take place. The innate moral sense

within man will know its power; it will no longer be obliged to ask

itself questions like this,--Why, at the same minute, do people revere

in Louis XV. and all the rest of royalty the act for which they bum

Deschauffours on the Place de Grève? The quality of kingship will

no longer be a false moral weight. Facts fairly placed will place

conscience fairly. A good light will come, sweet to the human race,

serene, equitable, with no interposition of clouds henceforth between

truth and the brain of man, but a definitive ascent of the good, the

just, and the beautiful toward the zenith of civilization.

Nothing can escape the law which simplifies. By the mere force of

things, the material side of facts and of men disintegrates and

disappears. There is no shadowy solidity; whatever may be the mass,

whatever may be the block, every combination of ashes (and matter is

nothing else) returns to ashes. The idea of the atom of dust is in

the word "granite,"--inevitable pulverizations. All those granites of

oligarchy, aristocracy, and theocracy are doomed to be scattered to the

four winds. The ideal alone is indestructible. Nothing lasts save the

mind.

In this indefinite increase of light which is called civilization, the

processes of reduction and levelling are accomplished. The imperious

morning light penetrates everywhere,--enters as master, and makes

itself obeyed. The light is at work; under the great eye of posterity,

before the blaze of the nineteenth century, simplifications take place,

excrescences fall away, glories drop like leaves, reputations are riven

in pieces. Do you wish for an example,--take Moses. There is in Moses

three glories,--the captain, the legislator, the poet. Of these three

men contained in Moses, where is the captain to-day? In the shadow,

with brigands and murderers. Where is the legislator? Amidst the waste

of dead religions. Where is the poet? By the side of Æschylus.

Daylight has an irresistible corroding power on the things of night.

Hence appears a new historic sky above our heads, a new philosophy of

causes and results, a new aspect of facts.

Certain minds, however, whose honest and stern anxiety pleases us,

object: "You have said that men of genius form a dynasty; now, we will

not have that dynasty any more than another." This is to misapprehend,

and to fear the word where the thing is reassuring. The same law which

wills that the human race should have no owners, wills that it should

have guides. To be enlightened is quite different from being enslaved.

Kings possess; men of genius conduct,--there is the difference. Between

"I am a Man" and "I am the State" there is all the distance from

fraternity to tyranny. The forward-march must have a guide-post. To

revolt against the pilot can scarcely improve the ship's course; we do

not see what would have been gained by throwing Christopher Columbus

into the sea. The direction "this way" has never humiliated the man who

seeks his road. I accept in the night the guiding authority of torches.

Moreover, a dynasty of little encumbrance is that of men of genius,

having for a kingdom the exile of Dante, for a palace the dungeon of

Cervantes, for a civil list the wallet of Isaiah, for a throne the

dunghill of Job, and for a sceptre the staff of Homer.

Let us resume.

CHAPTER V.

Humanity, no longer owned but guided,--such is the new aspect of facts.

This new aspect of facts history henceforth is compelled to reproduce.

To change the past, that is strange; yet it is what history is about

to do. By falsehood? No, by speaking the truth. History has been a

picture; she is about to become a mirror. This new reflection of the

past will modify the future.

The former king of Westphalia, who was a witty man, was looking one day

at an inkstand on the table of some one we know. The writer, with whom

Jerome Bonaparte was at that moment, had brought home from an excursion

among the Alps, made some years before in company with Charles Nodier,

a piece of steatitic serpentine carved and hollowed in the form of an

inkstand, and purchased of the chamois-hunters of the Mer de Glace. It

was this that Jerome Bonaparte was looking at "What is this?" he asked.

"It is my inkstand," said the writer; and he added, "it is steatite.

Admire how Nature with a little dirt and oxide has made this charming

green stone." Jerome Bonaparte replied, "I admire much more the men

who out of this stone made an inkstand." That was not badly said for

a brother of Napoleon, and due credit should be given for it; for

the inkstand is to destroy the sword. The decrease of warriors,--men

of brutal force and of prey; the undefined and superb growth of men

of thought and of peace; the re-appearance on the scene of the true

colossals,--in this is one of the greatest facts of our great epoch.

There is no spectacle more pathetic and sublime,--humanity delivered

from on high, the powerful ones put to flight by the thinkers, the

prophet overwhelming the hero, force routed by ideas, the sky cleaned,

a majestic expulsion.

Look! raise your eyes! the supreme epic is accomplished. The legions of

light drive backward the hordes of flame.

The masters are departing; the liberators are arriving! Those who hunt

down nations, who drag armies behind them,--Nimrod, Sennacherib, Cyrus,

Rameses, Xerxes, Cambyses Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alexander,

Cæsar, Bonaparte,--all these immense wild men are disappearing. They

die away slowly,--behold them touch the horizon; they are mysteriously

attracted by the darkness; they claim kindred with the shade,--thence

their fatal descent. Their resemblance to other phenomena of the night

restores them to that terrible unity of blind immensity, a submersion

of all light; forgetfulness, shadow of the shadow, awaits them.

But though they are thrown down, they remain formidable. Let us not

insult what has been great. Hooting would be unbecoming before the

burying of heroes; the thinker should remain grave in presence of this

donning of shrouds. The old glory abdicates, the strong lie down: mercy

for those vanquished conquerors! peace to those warlike spirits now

extinguished! The darkness of the grave interposes between their glare

and ourselves. It is not without a kind of religious terror that one

sees planets become spectres.

While in the engulfing process the flaming pleiad of the men of brutal

force descends deeper and deeper into the abyss with the sinister

pallor of approaching disappearance, at the other extremity of space,

where the last cloud is about to fade away, in the deep heaven of

the future, henceforth to be azure, rises in radiancy the sacred

group of true stars,--Orpheus, Hermes, Job, Homer, Æschylus, Isaiah,

Ezekiel, Hippocrates, Phidias. Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle,

Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, Lucretius, Plautus, Juvenal, Tacitus,

Saint Paul, John of Patmos, Tertullian, Pelagius, Dante, Gutenberg,

Joan of Arc, Christopher Columbus, Luther, Michael, Angelo, Copernicus,

Galileo, Rabelais, Calderon, Cervantes Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Kepler,

Milton, Molière, Newton, Descartes, Kant, Piranesi, Beccaria, Diderot,

Voltaire, Beethoven, Fulton, Montgolfier, Washington. And this

marvellous constellation, at each instant more luminous, dazzling as a

glory of celestial diamonds, shines in the clear horizon, and ascending

mingles with the vast dawn of Jesus Christ.

THE END.