CHAPTER V.
There are in literature and philosophy men who have tears and laughter at command,--Heraclituses wearing the mask of a Democritus; men often very great, like Voltaire. They are irony keeping a serious, sometimes tragic countenance.
These men, under the pressure of the influences and prejudices of their time, speak with a double meaning. One of the most profound is Bayle,[1] the man of Rotterdam, the powerful thinker. When Bayle coolly utters this maxim, "It is better worth our while to weaken the grace of a thought than to anger a tyrant," I smile; I know the man. I think of the persecuted, almost proscribed one, and I know well that he has given way to the temptation of affirming merely to give me the longing to contest. But when it is a poet who speaks,--a poet wholly free, rich, happy, prosperous almost to inviolability,--one expects a clear, open, and healthy teaching, one cannot believe that from such a man can emanate anything like a desertion of his own conscience; and it is with a blush that one reads this:--
"Here below, in time of peace, let every man sweep his own street-door. In war, if conquered, let every man fraternize with the soldiery.... Let every enthusiast be put on the cross when he reaches his thirtieth year. If he has once experienced the world as it is, from the dupe he becomes the rogue.... What utility, what result, what advantage does the holy liberty of the press offer you? The complete demonstration of it is this: a profound contempt of public opinion.... There are people who have a mania for railing at everything that is great,--they are the men who have attacked the Holy Alliance; and yet nothing has been invented more august and more salutary for humanity."
These things, which lower the man who has written them, are signed _Goethe._ Goethe, when he wrote them, was sixty years old. Indifference to good and evil excites the brain,--one may get intoxicated with it; and that is what comes of it. The lesson is a sad one. Mournful sight! Here the helot is a mind.
A quotation may be a pillory. We nail on the public highway these lugubrious sentences; it is our duty. Goethe has written that. Let it be remembered; and let no one among the poets fall again into the same error.
To go into a passion for the good, for the true, for the just; to suffer with the sufferers; to feel in our inner soul all the blows struck by every executioner on human flesh; to be scourged with Christ and flogged with the negro; to be strengthened and to lament; to climb, a Titan, that wild peak where Peter and Cæsar make their swords fraternize, _gladium cum gladio copulemus_; to heap up for that escalade the Ossa of the ideal on the Pelion of the real; to make a vast repartition of hope; to avail one's self of the ubiquity of the book in order to be everywhere at the same time with a comforting thought; to push pell-mell men, women, children, whites, blacks, peoples, hangmen, tyrants, victims, impostors, the ignorant, proletaries, serfs, slaves, masters, toward the future (a precipice to some, deliverance to others); to go forth, to wake up, to hasten, to march, to run, to think, to wish,--ah, indeed, that is well! It is worth while being a poet. Beware! you lose your temper. Of course I do; but I gain anger. Come and breathe into my wings, hurricane!
There has been, of late years, an instant when impassibility was recommended to poets as a condition of divinity. To be indifferent, that was called being Olympian. Where had they seen that? That is an Olympus very unlike the real one. Read Homer. The Olympians are passion, and nothing else. Boundless humanity,--such is their divinity. They fight unceasingly. One has a bow, another a lance, another a sword, another a club, another thunder. There is one of them who compels the leopards to draw him along. Another, Wisdom, has cut off the head of Night, twisted with serpents, and has nailed it to his shield. Such is the calm of the Olympians. Their angers cause the thunders to roll from one end to the other of the Iliad and of the Odyssey.
These angers, when they are just, are good. The poet who has them is the true Olympian. Juvenal, Dante, Agrippa d'Aubigné, and Milton had these angers; Molière also. From the soul of Alcestes flashes constantly the lightning of "vigorous hatreds." Jesus meant that hatred of evil when he said, "I am come to bring war."
I like Stesichorus indignant, preventing the alliance of Greece with Phalaris, and fighting the brazen bull with strokes of the lyre.
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._]