Chapter 5

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.