William Shakespeare

Yes, art is the azure; but the azure from above, from which falls the ray which swells the corn, makes the maize yellow and the apple round, gilds the orange, sweetens the grape. I repeat it, one service more is one more beauty. At all events, where is the diminution? To ripen the beet-root, to water the potatoes, to thicken the lucern, the clover, and the hay; to be a fellow-workman with the ploughman, the vine-dresser, and the gardener, – that does not deprive the heavens of one star. Ah, immensity does not despise utility, and what does it lose by it? Does the vast vital fluid that we call magnetic or electric lighten less splendidly the depth of the clouds because it consents to perform the office of pilot to a bark, and to keep always turned to the north the small needle that is trusted to it, the huge guide? Is the aurora less magnificent, has it less purple and emerald, does it undergo any decrease of majesty, of grace and radiancy, because, foreseeing the thirst of a fly, it carefully secretes in the flower the drop of dew which the bee requires?

Yet, people insist: To compose social poetry, human poetry, popular poetry; to grumble against the evil and for the good; to promote public passions; to insult despots; to make rascals despair; to emancipate man before he is of age; to push souls forward and darkness backward; to know that there are thieves and tyrants; to clean penal cells; to empty the pail of public filth, – what! Polyhymnia, sleeves tucked up to do such dirty work? Oh, for shame!

Why not?

Homer was the geographer and the historian of his time, Moses the legislator of his, Juvenal the judge of his, Dante the theologian of his, Shakespeare the moralist of his, Voltaire the philosopher of his. No region, in speculation or in real fact, is shut to the mind. Here a horizon, there wings; right for all to soar.

For certain sublime beings, to soar is to serve. In the desert not a drop of water, – a horrible thirst; the wretched file of pilgrims drag along overcome. All at once, in the horizon, above a wrinkle in the sands, a griffin is seen soaring, and all the caravan cry out, "There is water there!"

What thinks Æschylus of art as art? Certainly, if ever a poet was a poet, it is Æschylus. Listen to his reply. It is in the "Frogs" of Aristophanes, line 1039. Æschylus speaks: —

"Since the beginning of time, the illustrious poet has served men. Orpheus has taught the horror of murder, Musæus oracles and medicine, Hesiod agriculture, and that divine Homer, heroism. And I, after Homer, I have sung Patroclus, and Teucer the lion-hearted; so that every citizen should try to resemble the great men."

As all the sea is salt, so all the Bible is poetry. This poetry talks politics at its own hours. Open 1 Samuel, chapter VIII. The Jewish people demand a king:

"…And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee; for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them… And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots… And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take your men-servants, and your maid-servants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day."

Samuel, we see, denies the right divine; Deuteronomy shakes the altar, – the false altar, let us observe; but is not the next altar always the false altar? "You shall demolish the altars of the false gods. You shall seek God where he dwells." It is almost Pantheism. Because it takes part in human things, is democratic here, iconoclast there, is that book less magnificent and less supreme? If poetry is not in the Bible, where is it?

You say: The muse is made to sing, to love, to believe, to pray. Yes and no. Let us understand each other. To sing whom? The void. To love what? One's self. To believe in what? The dogma. To pray to what? The idol. No, here is the truth: To sing the ideal, to love humanity, to believe in progress, to pray to the infinite.

Take care, you who are tracing those circles round the poet, you put him beyond man. That the poet should be beyond humanity in one way, – by the wings, by the immense flight, by the sudden possible disappearance in the fathomless, – is well; it must be so, but on condition of reappearance. He may depart, but he must return. Let him have wings for the infinite, provided he has feet for the earth, and that, after having been seen flying, he is seen walking. Let him become man again, after he has gone out of humanity. After he has been seen an archangel, let him be once more a brother. Let the star which is in that eye weep a tear, and that tear be the human tear. Thus, human and superhuman, he shall be the poet. But to be altogether beyond man, is not to be. Show me thy foot, genius, and let us see if, like myself, thou hast earthly dust on thy heel.

If thou hast not some of that dust, if thou hast never walked in my pathway, thou dost not know me and I do not know thee. Go away. Thou believest thyself an angel, thou art but a bird.

Help from the strong for the weak, help from the great for the small, help from the free for the slaves, help from the thinkers for the ignorant, help from the solitary for the multitudes, – such is the law, from Isaiah to Voltaire. He who does not follow that law may be a genius, but he is only a useless genius. By not handling the things of the earth, he thinks to purify himself; he annuls himself. He is the refined, the delicate, he may be the exquisite genius; he is not the great genius. Any one, roughly useful, but useful, has the right to ask on seeing that good-for-nothing genius: "Who is this idler?" The amphora which refuses to go to the fountain deserves the hooting of the pitchers.

Great is he who consecrates himself! Even when overcome, he remains serene, and his misery is happiness. No, it is not a bad thing for the poet to meet face to face with duty. Duty has a stern resemblance to the ideal. The act of doing one's duty is worth all the trial it costs. No, the jostling with Cato is not to be avoided. No, no, no; truth, honesty, teaching the crowds, human liberty, manly virtue, conscience, are not things to disdain. Indignation and emotion are but one faculty turned toward the two sides of mournful human slavery; and those who are capable of anger are capable of love. To level the tyrant and the slave, what a magnificent effort! Now, the whole of one side of actual society is tyrant, and all the other side is slave. To straighten this out will be a wonderful thing to accomplish; yet it will be done. All thinkers must work with that end in view. They will gain greatness in that work. To be the servant of God in the march of progress and the apostle of God with the people, – such is the law which regulates the growth of genius.

CHAPTER II

There are two poets, – the poet of caprice and the poet of logic; and there is a third poet, a component of both, amending them one by the other, completing them one by the other, and summing them up in a loftier entity, – the two statures in a single one. The third is the first. He has caprice, and he follows the wind. He has logic, and he follows duty. The first writes the Canticle of Canticles, the second writes Leviticus, the third writes the Psalms and the Prophecies. The first is Horace, the second is Lucan, the third is Juvenal. The first is Pindar, the second is Hesiod, the third is Homer.

No loss of beauty results from goodness. Is the lion less beautiful than the tiger, because it has the faculty of merciful emotion? Does that jaw which opens to let the infant fall into the hands of the mother deprive that mane of its majesty? Does the vast noise of the roaring vanish from that terrible mouth because it has licked Androcles? The genius which does not help, even if graceful, is deformed. A prodigy without love is a monster. Let us love! let us love!

To love has never hindered from pleasing. Where have you seen one form of the good excluding the other? On the contrary, all that is good is connected. Let us, however, understand each other. It does not follow that to have one quality implies necessarily the possession of the other; but it would be strange that one quality added to another should make less. To be useful, is but to be useful; to be beautiful is but to be beautiful; to be useful and beautiful is to be sublime. That is what Saint Paul is in the first century, Tacitus and Juvenal in the second, Dante in the thirteenth, Shakespeare in the sixteenth, Milton and Molière in the seventeenth.

We have just now recalled a saying become famous: "Art for art." Let us, once for all, explain ourselves in this question. If faith can be placed in an affirmation very general and very often repeated (we believe honestly), these words, "Art for art," would have been written by the author of this book himself. Written? Never! You may read, from the first to the last line, all that we have published; you will not find these words. It is the opposite which is written throughout our works, and, we insist on it, in our entire life. As for these words in themselves, how far are they real? Here is the fact, which several of our contemporaries remember as well as we do. One day, thirty-five years ago, in a discussion between critics and poets on Voltaire's tragedies, the author of this book threw out this suggestion: "This tragedy is not a tragedy. It is not men who live, it is sentences which speak in it! Rather a hundred times 'Art for art!'" This remark turned, doubtless involuntarily, from its true sense to serve the wants of discussion, has since taken, to the great surprise of him who had uttered it, the proportions of a formula. It is this opinion, limited to "Alzire" and to the "Orpheline de la Chine," and incontestable in that restricted application, which has been turned into a perfect declaration of principles, and an axiom to inscribe on the banner of art.

This point settled, let us go on.

Between two verses, the one by Pindar, deifying a coachman or glorifying the brass nails of the wheel of a chariot, the other by Archilochus, so powerful that, after having read it, Jeffreys would leave off his career of crimes and would hang himself on the gallows prepared by him for honest people, – between these two verses, of equal beauty, I prefer that of Archilochus.

In times anterior to history, when poetry is fabulous and legendary, it has a Promethean grandeur. What composes this grandeur? Utility. Orpheus tames wild animals; Amphion builds cities; the poet, tamer and architect, Linus aiding Hercules, Musæus assisting Dædalus, poetry a civilizing power, – such is the origin. Tradition agrees with reason. The common-sense of peoples is not deceived in that. It always invents fables in the sense of truth. Everything is great in those magnifying distances. Well, then, the wild-beast-taming poet that you admire in Orpheus, recognize him in Juvenal.

We insist on Juvenal. Few poets have been more insulted, more contested, more calumniated. Calumny against Juvenal has been drawn at such long date that it lasts yet. It passes from one literary clown to another. These grand haters of evil are hated by all the flatterers of power and success. The mob of fawning sophists, of writers who have around the neck the mark of their slavery, of bullying historiographers, of scholiasts kept and fed, of court and school followers, stand in the way of the glory of the punishers and avengers. They croak around those eagles. People do not willingly render justice to the dispensers of justice. They hinder the masters and rouse the indignation of the lackeys. There is such a thing as the indignation of baseness.

Moreover, the diminutives cannot do less than help one another, and Cæsarion must at least have Tyrannion as a support The pedant snaps the ferules for the benefit of the satrap. There is for this kind of work a literary sycophancy and an official pedagogism. These poor, dear-paying vices; these excellent indulgent crimes; his Highness Rufinus; his Majesty Claudius; that august Madame Messalina who gives such beautiful fêtes, and pensions out of her privy purse, and who lasts and who is perpetuated, always crowned, calling herself Theodora, then Fredegonde, then Agnes, then Margaret of Burgundy, then Isabel of Bavaria, then Catherine de Medici, then Catherine of Russia, then Caroline of Naples, etc., – all these great lords, crimes, all these fine ladies, turpitudes, shall they have the sorrow of witnessing the triumph of Juvenal! No. War with the scourge in the name of sceptres! War with the rod in the name of the shop! That is well! Go on, courtiers, clients, eunuchs, and scribes. Go on, publicans and pharisees. You will not hinder the republic from thanking Juvenal, or the temple from approving Jesus.

Isaiah, Juvenal, Dante, – they are virgins. Observe their eyes cast down. There is chastity in the anger of the just against the unjust. The Imprecation can be as holy as the Hosanna; and indignation, honest indignation, has the very purity of virtue. In point of whiteness, the foam has no reason to envy the snow.

CHAPTER III

History proves the working partnership of art and progress. Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres. Rhythm is a power, – a power that the Middle Ages recognize and submit to not less than antiquity. The second barbarism, feudal barbarism, dreads also this power, – poetry. The barons, not over-timid, are abashed before the poet. Who is this man? They fear lest a manly song be sung. The spirit of civilization is with this unknown. The old donjons full of carnage open their wild eyes, and suspect the darkness; anxiety seizes hold of them. Feudality trembles; the den is disturbed. The dragons and the hydras are ill at ease. Why? Because an invisible god is there.

It is curious to find this power of poetry in countries where unsociableness is deepest, particularly in England, in that extreme feudal darkness, penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. If we believe the legend, – a form of history as true and as false as any other, – it is owing to poetry that Colgrim, besieged by the Britons, is relieved in York by his brother Bardulph the Saxon; that King Awlof penetrates into the camp of Athelstan; that Werburgh, prince of Northumbria, is delivered by the Welsh, whence, it is said, that Celtic device of the Prince of Wales, Ich dien; that Alfred, King of England, triumphs over Gitro, King of the Danes; and that Richard the Lion-hearted escapes from the prison of Losenstein. Ranulph, Earl of Chester, attacked in his castle of Rothelan, is saved by the intervention of the minstrels, which was still authenticated under Elizabeth by the privilege accorded to the minstrels patronized by the Lords of Dalton.

The poet had the right of reprimand and menace. In 1316, on Pentecost Day, Edward II. being at table in the grand hall of Westminster with the peers of England, a female minstrel entered the hall on horseback, rode all round, saluted Edward II., predicted in a loud voice to the minion Spencer the gibbet and castration by the hand of the executioner, and to the king the hoof by means of which a red-hot iron should be buried in his intestines, placed on the table before the king a letter, and departed; and no one said anything to her.

At the festivals the minstrels passed before the priests, and were more honourably treated. At Abingdon, at a festival of the Holy Cross, each of the twelve priests received fourpence, and each of the twelve minstrels two shillings. At the priory of Maxtoke, the custom was to give supper to the minstrels in the Painted Chamber, lighted by eight huge wax-candles.

The more we advance North, it seems as if the increased thickness of the fog increases the greatness of the poet. In Scotland he is enormous. If anything surpasses the legend of the Rhapsodists, it is the legend of the Scalds. At the approach of Edward of England, the bards defend Stirling as the three hundred had defended Sparta; and they have their Thermopylæ, as great as that of Leonidas. Ossian, perfectly certain and real, has had a plagiary; that is nothing; but this plagiarist has done more than rob him, – he has made him insipid. To know Fingal only by Macpherson is as if one knew Amadis only by Tressan. They show at Staffa the stone of the poet, Clachan an Bairdh, – so named, according to many antiquaries, long before the visit of Walter Scott to the Hebrides. This chair of the Bard – a great hollow rock ready for a giant wishing to sit down – is at the entrance of the grotto. Around it are the waves and the clouds. Behind the Clachan an Bairdh is heaped up and raised the superhuman geometry of basaltic prisms, the pell-mell of colonnades and waves, and all the mystery of the fearful edifice. The gallery of Fingal runs next to the poet's chair; the sea beats on it before entering under that terrible ceiling. When evening comes, one imagines that he sees in that chair a form leaning on its elbow. "It is the ghost!" say the fishermen of Mackinnon's clan; and no one would dare, even in full day, to go up as far as that formidable seat; for to the idea of the stone is allied the idea of the sepulchre, and on the chair of granite no one can be seated but the man of shade.

CHAPTER IV

Thought is power.

All power is duty. Should this power enter into repose in our age? Should duty shut its eyes? and is the moment come for art to disarm? Less than ever. The human caravan is, thanks to 1789, arrived on a high plateau; and the horizon being more vast, art has more to do. This is all. To every widening of horizon corresponds an enlargement of conscience.

We have not reached the goal. Concord condensed in happiness, civilization summed up in harmony, – that is far off yet. In the eighteenth century that dream was so distant that it seemed a guilty thought. The Abbé de St. Pierre was expelled from the Academy for having dreamed that dream, – an expulsion which seems rather severe at a period when pastorals carried the day, even with Fontenelle, and when St. Lambert invented the idyll for the use of the nobility. The Abbé de St. Pierre has left behind him a word and a dream: the word is his own, – "Benevolence;" the dream belongs to all of us, – "Fraternity." This dream, which made Cardinal de Polignac foam and Voltaire smile, is not now so much lost as it was once in the mist of the improbable. It is a little nearer; but we do not touch it. The people, those orphans who seek their mother, do not yet hold in their hand the hem of the robe of peace.

There remains around us a sufficient quantity of slavery, of sophistry, of war and death, to prevent the spirit of civilization from giving up any of its forces. The idea of the right divine is not yet entirely done away with. That which has been Ferdinand VII. in Spain, Ferdinand II. in Naples, George IV. in England, Nicholas in Russia, still floats about; a remnant of these spectres is still hovering in the air. Inspirations descend from that fatal cloud on some crown-bearers who, leaning on their elbows, meditate with a sinister aspect.

Civilization has not done yet with those who grant constitutions, with the owners of peoples, and with the legitimate and hereditary madmen, who assert themselves majesties by the grace of God, and think that they have the right of manumission over the human race. It is necessary to raise some obstacle, to show bad will to the past, and to bring to bear on these men, on these dogmas, on these chimeras which stand in the way, some hindrance. Intellect, thought, science, true art, philosophy, ought to watch and beware of misunderstandings. False rights contrive very easily to put in movement true armies. There are murdered Polands looming in the future. "All my anxiety," said a contemporary poet recently dead, "is the smoke of my cigar." My anxiety is also a smoke, – the smoke of the cities which are burning in the distance. Therefore, let us bring the masters to grief, if we can.

Let us go again in the loudest possible voice over the lesson of the just and the unjust, of right and usurpation, of oath and perjury, of good and evil, of fas et nefas; let us come forth with all our old antitheses, as they say. Let us contrast what ought to be with what actually is. Let us put clearness into everything. Bring light, you that have it. Let us oppose dogma to dogma, principle to principle, energy to obstinacy, truth to imposture, dream to dream, – the dream of the future to the dream of the past, – liberty to despotism. People will be able to sit down, to stretch themselves at full length, and to go on smoking the cigar of fancy poetry, and to enjoy Boccaccio's "Decameron" with the sweet blue sky over their heads, whenever the sovereignty of a king shall be exactly of the same dimension as the liberty of a man. Until then, little sleep. I am distrustful.

Put sentinels everywhere. Do not expect from despots a large share of liberty. Break your own shackles, all of you Polands that may be! Make sure of the future by your own exertions. Do not hope that your chain will forge itself into the key of freedom. Up, children of the fatherland! O mowers of the steppes, arise! Trust to the good intentions of orthodox czars just enough to take up arms. Hypocrisies and apologies, being traps, are one more danger.

We live in a time when orations are heard praising the magnanimity of white bears and the tender feelings of panthers. Amnesty, clemency, grandeur of soul; an era of felicity opens; fatherly love is the order of the day; see all that is already done; it must not be thought that the march of the age is not understood; august arms are open; rally still closer round the emperor; Muscovy is kind-hearted. See how happy the serfs are! The streams are to flow with milk, with prosperity and liberty for all. Your princes groan like you over the past; they are excellent. Come, fear nothing, little ones! so far as we are concerned, we confess candidly that we are of those who put no reliance in the lachrymal gland of crocodiles.

The actual public monstrosities impose stem obligations on the conscience of the thinker, philosopher, or poet. Incorruptibility must resist corruption. It is more than ever necessary to show men the ideal, – that mirror in which is seen the face of God.

CHAPTER V

There are in literature and philosophy men who have tears and laughter at command, – Heraclituses wearing the mask of a Democritus; men often very great, like Voltaire. They are irony keeping a serious, sometimes tragic countenance.

These men, under the pressure of the influences and prejudices of their time, speak with a double meaning. One of the most profound is Bayle,31 the man of Rotterdam, the powerful thinker. When Bayle coolly utters this maxim, "It is better worth our while to weaken the grace of a thought than to anger a tyrant," I smile; I know the man. I think of the persecuted, almost proscribed one, and I know well that he has given way to the temptation of affirming merely to give me the longing to contest. But when it is a poet who speaks, – a poet wholly free, rich, happy, prosperous almost to inviolability, – one expects a clear, open, and healthy teaching, one cannot believe that from such a man can emanate anything like a desertion of his own conscience; and it is with a blush that one reads this: —

"Here below, in time of peace, let every man sweep his own street-door. In war, if conquered, let every man fraternize with the soldiery… Let every enthusiast be put on the cross when he reaches his thirtieth year. If he has once experienced the world as it is, from the dupe he becomes the rogue… What utility, what result, what advantage does the holy liberty of the press offer you? The complete demonstration of it is this: a profound contempt of public opinion… There are people who have a mania for railing at everything that is great, – they are the men who have attacked the Holy Alliance; and yet nothing has been invented more august and more salutary for humanity."