It is envy that crawls and wriggles through all these paternal homilies; however careful it may be to hide itself, you can see its flat little viper's head from time to time gleaming above the metaphors and rhetorical figures; you surprise it licking with its forked tongue its lips blue with venom, you hear it hissing softly in the shadow of an insidious epithet.
I am well aware that it is insufferably conceited to say that any one envies you, and that a dandy who boasts of a conquest is almost as nauseating.—I am not so boastful as to believe that I have enemies or envious detractors; that is a piece of good fortune that is not given to everybody, and I probably shall not enjoy it for a long time; so I will speak freely and without reservation as one who is perfectly disinterested in the matter.
An unquestionable fact, and easy of demonstration to those who may doubt it, is the natural antipathy of the critic to the poet—of him who does nothing to him who does something—of the drone to the bee—of the gelding to the stallion.
You do not become a critic until the fact is established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet. Before descending to the pitiful rôle of watching cloaks and counting strokes like a billiard-marker or a tennis-court attendant, you have long courted the Muse, you have tried to seduce her; but you have not sufficient vigor for that; your breath has failed you and you have fallen back, pale and broken-winded, to the foot of the sacred mountain.
I can conceive that antipathy. It is painful to see another take his seat at the banquet to which you are not invited and lie with the woman who would have none of you. I pity with all my heart the poor eunuch who is compelled to assist at the delights of the Great Turk.
He is admitted to the most secret recesses of the Oda; he escorts the sultanas to the bath; he sees their lovely bodies gleaming in the silvery water of the great reservoirs, shedding streams of pearls and smoother than agate; the most hidden charms are disclosed to him unveiled. No one is embarrassed by his presence.—He is a eunuch.—The sultan caresses his favorite before him and kisses her on her pomegranate mouth.—In very truth his is a terribly false position and he must be sadly embarrassed to keep himself in countenance.
It is the same with the critic who sees the poet walking in the garden of poesy with its nine fair odalisques, and disporting himself indolently in the shade of tall green laurels. It is very hard for him not to pick up stones in the road to throw at him and wound him over the wall, if he is skilful enough to do it.
The critic who has produced nothing of his own is a coward; he is like an abbé paying court to a layman's wife: the layman cannot pay him back in his own coin or fight with him.
I think that an account of the different methods of depreciating any sort of work, resorted to during the last month, would be at least as interesting as the story of Tiglath-Pileser, or of Gemmagog, who invented peaked shoes.
There would be enough matter to fill fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but we will have pity on the reader and confine ourselves to a few lines—a favor for which we demand more than everlasting gratitude.—In a very remote age, lost in the darkness of time—it was fully three weeks ago—the romance of the Middle Ages flourished principally in Paris and the suburbs. The coat of arms was held in high esteem; coiffures à la Hennin were not despised and party-colored trousers were thought well of; the dagger was priceless; the peaked shoe was adored as a fetich.—There was nothing but ogive windows, turrets, colonnettes, stained glass, cathedrals, and fortified châteaux;—the characters were all damoiselles and damoiseaux, pages and varlets, beggars and swash-bucklers, gallant knights and ferocious castellans;—all of which were more innocent certainly than innocent games, and did absolutely no harm to anybody.