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.
[1] Do not write Beyle.
[PART III.—BOOK I.]
CONCLUSION.
AFTER DEATH.—SHAKESPEARE.—ENGLAND.
CHAPTER I
In 1784, Bonaparte, then fifteen years old, arrived at the Military School of Paris from Brienne, being one among four under the escort of a minim priest. He mounted one hundred and seventy-three steps, carrying his small trunk, and reached, below the roof, the barrack chamber he was to inhabit. This chamber had two beds, and a small window opening on the great yard of the school. The wall was whitewashed; the youthful predecessors of Bonaparte had scrawled upon this with charcoal, and the new-comer read in this little cell these four inscriptions that we ourselves read thirty-five years ago:—
It takes rather long to win an epaulet.—De Montgivray.
The finest day in life is that of a battle.—Vicomte de Tinténiac.
Life is but a long falsehood.—Le Chevalier Adolphe Delmas.
All ends under six feet of earth.-Le Comte de la Villette.
By substituting for "an epaulet" "an empire,"—a very slight change,—the above four inscriptions were all the destiny of Bonaparte, and a kind of "Mene Tekel Upharsin" written beforehand upon that wall. Desmazis, junior, who accompanied Bonaparte, being his room-mate, and about to occupy one of the two beds, saw him take a pencil (it is Desmazis who has related the fact) and draw beneath the inscriptions that he had just read a rough sketch of his house at Ajaccio; then, by the side of that house, without suspecting that he was thus bringing near the island of Corsica another mysterious island then hid in the deep future, he wrote the last of the four sentences: "All ends under six feet of earth."