CHAPTER I.

Ah, minds, be useful! Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when it is necessary to be efficient and good. Art for art may be beautiful, but art for progress is more beautiful yet. To dream revery is well, to dream Utopia is better. Ah, you must think? Then think of making man better. You must dream? Here is the dream for you,--the ideal. The prophet seeks solitude, but not isolation. He unravels and untwists the threads of humanity, tied and rolled in a skein in his soul; he does not break them. He goes into the desert to think--of whom? Of the multitude. It is not to the forests that he speaks; it is to the cities, It is not at the grass bending to the wind that he looks; it is at man. It is not against lions that he wars; it is against tyrants. Woe to thee, Ahab! woe to thee, Hosea! woe to you, kings! woe to you, Pharaohs! is the cry of the great solitary one. Then he weeps.

For what? For that eternal captivity of Babylon, undergone by Israel formerly, undergone by Poland, by Roumania, by Hungary, by Venice to-day. He grows old, the good and dark thinker; he watches, he lies in wait, he listens, he looks,--ear in the silence, eye in the night, claw half stretched toward the wicked. Go and speak to him, then, of art for art, to that cenobite of the ideal. He has his aim, and he walks straight toward it; and his aim is this: improvement. He devotes himself to it.

He does not belong to himself; he belongs to his apostleship. He is intrusted with that immense care,--the progress of the human race. Genius is not made for genius, it is made for man. Genius on earth is God giving himself. Each time that a masterpiece appears, it is a distribution of God that takes place. The masterpiece is a variety of the miracle. Thence, in all religions, and among all peoples, comes faith in divine men. They deceive themselves, those who think that we deny the divinity of Christs.

At the point now reached by the social question, everything should be action in common. Forces isolated frustrate one another; the ideal and the real strengthen each other. Art necessarily aids science. These two wheels of progress should turn together.

Generation of new talents, noble group of writers and poets, legion of young men, O living posterity of my country, your elders love and salute you! Courage! let us consecrate ourselves. Let us devote ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just. In that there is goodness.

Some pure lovers of art, affected by a preoccupation which in its way has its dignity and nobleness, discard this formula, "Art for progress," the Beautiful Useful, fearing lest the useful should deform the beautiful. They tremble lest they should see attached to the fine arms of the Muse the coarse hands of the drudge. According to them, the ideal may become perverted by too much contact with reality. They are solicitous for the sublime if it is lowered as far as humanity. Ah, they are mistaken.

The useful, far from circumscribing the sublime, increases it. The application of the sublime to human things produces unexpected _chefs-d'œuvre._ The useful, considered in itself and as an element combining with the sublime, is of several kinds; there is the useful which is tender, and there is the useful which is indignant. Tender, it refreshes the unfortunate and creates the social epopee; indignant, it flagellates the wicked, and creates the divine satire. Moses hands the rod to Jesus; and after having caused the water to gush from the rock, that august rod, the very same, drives the vendors from the sanctuary.

What! art should grow less because it has expanded? No. One service more is one more beauty.

But people cry out: To undertake the cure of social evils; to amend the codes; to denounce the law to the right; to pronounce those hideous words, "bagne," "galley-slave," "convict," "girl of the town;" to control the police-registers; to contract the dispensaries; to investigate wages and the want of work; to taste the black bread of the poor; to seek labour for the work-girl; to confront fashionable idleness with ragged sloth; to throw down the partition of ignorance; to open schools; to teach little children how to read; to attack shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience; to preach the multiplication of spelling-books; to proclaim the equality of the sun; to ameliorate the food of intellects and of hearts; to give meat and drink; to claim solutions for problems and shoes for naked feet,--that is not the business of the azure. Art is the azure.

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

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

Why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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