That Racine is a better poet than Tristan l'Hermite, and that Iphigénie is superior to Marianne, are two propositions unequally true; for we might quite as well be asked to compare this, which is by Racine:
Que c'est une chose charmante
De voir cet étang gracieux
Où, comme en un lit précieux,
L'onde est toujours calme et dormante!
Quelles richesses admirables
N'ont point ces nageurs marquetés,
Ces poissons aux dos argentés,
Sur leurs écailles agréables![10]
with this, which is by Tristan:
Auprès de cette grotte sombre
Où l'on respire un air si doux,
L'onde lutte avec les cailloux,
Et la lumière avec que l'ombre.
Ces flots, las de l'exercice
Qu'ils ont fait dessus ce gravier,
Se reposent dans ce vivier,
Où mourut autrefois Narcisse.
L'ombre de cette fleur vermeille
Et celle de ces jons pendans
Paraissent estre la-dedans
Les songes de l'eau qui someille.[11]
I am well aware that I am here comparing the best of Tristan with the worst of Racine; but all the same, if Racine had his park, Tristan had his garden, and it is often agreeable there. Let us then tear up the list of awards in order to remain ignorant of the fact that Tristan l'Hermite is a poet "whose versification is ridiculous,"[12] so that our pleasure in meeting him may not thus be spoiled in advance, and so that, with him, we may dare address his muse:
Fay moy boire au creux de tes mains,
Si l'eau n'en dissout point la neige.
This is the drawback to comparative methods. Having set up the great poet of the century as a standard, the critics thereafter value the others merely as precursors or as disciples.[13] Authors are often judged according to what they are not, through failure to understand their particular genius, and often also through failure to question them themselves. Pratinas, truly, is better treated. He enjoys silence.
But he is dead, and we are discussing the living. Living what life, and in the memory of what men? Life is a physical fact. A book which exists as a volume in a library is not dead, and is it not perhaps a glory more enviable to remain unknown, like Théophile, than to be famous, like Jean-Baptiste Rousseau? When glory is merely classic, it is perhaps one of the harshest forms of humiliation. To have dreamed of thrilling men and women with passion, and to become but the dull task which keeps the careless schoolboy a captive! Are there, however, any universal reputations that are not classic? Very few, and in that case, they have another blemish. It is for their smut that Restif's[14] ridiculous novels are still read—also Voltaire's syphilitic tales, and that tedious Manon Lescaut, so clumsily adapted from the English. The books of yesterday no longer have a public, if by public be understood disinterested men who read simply for their pleasure, enjoying the art and the thought contained in a book; but they still have readers, and all have some.
The only dead book is the book which is lost. All the rest live, almost with the same life, and the older they grow, the more intense this life becomes, becoming more precious. Literary glory is nominal. Literary life is personal. There is not a poet of the prodigious seventeenth century who does not come to life again each day in the pious hands of a lover. Bossuet has not been more thumbed than this Recueil by Pierre du Marteu;[15] and, all things considered, the Plainte du cheval Pégase aux chevaux de la petite Écurie, by Monsieur de Benserade, is more agreeable and less dangerous reading than the Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle. Is pompous moralizing after all so superior to sprightly burlesque? Every mountain plant offers an equal interest to the artless botanist. For him the euphorbia is not celebrated or the borage ridiculous (besides which it has the most beautiful eyes in the world), and he fills his bag till it can hold not another blade of grass. Literary glory was invented for the use of children preparing their examinations. It matters little to the explorer of the mind of the past that this agreeable verse is by an unknown poet, or that profound thought by a despised thinker. A man and his work are so different in interest! The man is a physiological entity of value only in the environment that developed it. The work, whatever it may be, can keep an abstract power for centuries. This power should not be exaggerated or erected into a tyranny. A thought is very little more than a dry flower; but the man has perished and the flower still lies in the herbal. It is the witness to a life that has disappeared, the sign of an annihilated sensibility.
When, in the Gallery of Apollo, we gaze at those onyxes and those corundums in the form of conches and cups, those gold plaques engraved with flowers, and those flaming enamels, do we, before daring to rejoice, demand the name of the artist who created such objects? If we did, the question would be vain. The work lives and the name is dead. What matters the name?