Chapter 5

Besides, these men of genius disconcert.

One knows not on what to rely with them. Their lyric fever obeys them; they interrupt it when they like. They seem wild. All at once they stop. Their frenzy becomes melancholy. They are seen among the precipices, alighting ou a peak and folding their wings, and then they give way to meditation. Their meditation is not less surprising than their transport. Just now they were soaring above, now they sink below. But it is always the same boldness.

They are pensive giants. Their Titanic revery needs the absolute and the unfathomable in which to expand. They meditate, as the sun shines, with the abyss around them.

Their moving to and fro in the ideal gives the vertigo. Nothing is too lofty for them, and nothing too low. They pass from the pygmy to the Cyclops, from Polyphemus to the Myrmidons, from Queen Mab to Caliban, and from a love affair to a deluge, and from Saturn’s ring to the doll of a little child. Sinite parvulos venire. One of the pupils of their eye is a telescope, the other a microscope. They investigate familiarly these two frightful opposite depths, —the infinitely great and the infinitely small.

And one should not be angry with them; and one should not reproach them for all this! Indeed! Where should we go if such excesses were to be tolerated? What! No scruple in the choice of subjects, horrible or sad; and the idea, even if it be disquieting and formidable, always followed up to its extreme limits, without pity for their fellow-creatures! These poets only see their own aim; and in everything are immoderate in their way of doing things. What is Job?—a worm on an ulcer. What is the Divina Commedia?—a series of torments. What is the Iliad?—a collection of plagues and wounds; not an artery cut which is not complaisantly described. Go round for opinions on Homer: ask of Scaliger, Terrasson, Lamotte, what they think of him. The fourth of an ode to the shield of Achilles—what intemperance! He who does not know when to stop never knew how to write. These poets agitate, disturb, trouble, upset, overwhelm, make everything shiver, break things, occasionally, here and there. They can cause great misfortunes; it is terrible. Thus speak the Athenæa, the Sorbonnes, the sworn-in professors, the societies called learned, Saumaise, successor of Scaliger at the university of Leyden, and the bourgeoisie after them, —all who represent in literature and art the great party of order. What can be more logical? The cough quarrels with the hurricane.

Those who are poor in wit are joined by those who have too much wit. The septics lend assistance to the fools. Men of genius, with few exceptions, are proud and stem; that is in the very marrow of their bones. They have in company with them Juvenal, Agrippa d’Aubigné, and Milton; they are prone to harshness; they despise the panem et circenses; they seldom grow sociable, and they growl. People rail at them in a pleasant way. Well done.

Ah, poet! Ah, Milton! Ah, Juvenal!—ah, you keep up resistance! ah, you perpetuate disinterestedness! ah, you bring together these two firebrands, faith and will, in order to make the flame burst out from them! ah, there is something of the Vestal in you, old grumbler! ah, you have an altar, —your country! ah, you. have a tripod, —the ideal! ah, you believe in the rights of man, in emancipation, in the future, in progress, in the beautiful, in the just, in what is great! Take care; you are behindhand. All this virtue is infatuation. You emigrate with honour; but you emigrate. This heroism is no longer the fashion. It no longer suits our epoch. There comes a moment when the sacred fire is no longer fashionable. Poet, you believe in right and truth; you are behind your century. Your very eternity causes you to pass away.