The characteristic of men of genius of the first order is to produce each a peculiar model of man. All bestow on humanity its portrait,—some laughing, some weeping, others pensive. These last are the greatest. Plautus laughs, and gives to man Amphitryon; Rabelais laughs, and gives to man Gargantua; Cervantes laughs, and gives to man Don Quixote; Beaumarchais laughs, and gives to man Figaro; Molière weeps, and gives to man Alceste; Shakespeare dreams, and gives to man Hamlet; Æschylus meditates, and gives to man Prometheus. The others are great; Æschylus and Shakespeare are immense.
These portraits of humanity, left to humanity as a last farewell by those passers-by, the poets, are rarely flattered, always exact, striking likenesses. Vice, or folly, or virtue, is extracted from the soul and stamped on the visage. The tear congealed becomes a pearl; the smile petrified ends by looking like a menace; wrinkles are the furrows of wisdom; some frowns are tragic. This series of models of man is the permanent lesson for generations; each century adds in some figures,—sometimes done in full light and strong relief, like Macette, Célimène, Tartuffe, Turcaret, and the Nephew of Rameau; sometimes simple profiles, like Gil Bias, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa Harlowe, and Candide.
God creates by intuition; man creates by inspiration, strengthened by observation. This second creation, which is nothing else but divine action carried out by man, is what is called genius.
The poet stepping into the place of destiny; an invention of men and events so strange, so true to nature, and so masterly that certain religious sects hold it in horror as an encroachment upon Providence, and call the poet "the liar;" the conscience of man, taken in the act and placed in a medium which it combats, governs or transforms,—such is the drama. And there is in this something superior. This handling of the human soul seems a kind of equality with God,—equality, the mystery of which is explained when we reflect that God is within man. This equality is identity. Who is our conscience? He. And He counsels good acts. Who is our intelligence? He. And He inspires the chef-d'œuvre.
God may be there, but it removes nothing, as we have proved, from the sourness of critics; the greatest minds are those which are most brought into question. It even sometimes happens that true intellects attack genius; the inspired, strangely enough, do not recognize inspiration. Erasmus, Bayle, Scaliger, St. Evremond, Voltaire, many of the Fathers of the Church, whole families of philosophers, the whole School of Alexandria, Cicero, Horace, Lucian, Plutarch, Josephus, Dion Chrysostom, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Philostratus, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, Plato, Pythagoras, have severally criticised Homer. In this enumeration we omit Zoïlus. Men who deny are not critics. Hatred is not intelligence. To insult is not to discuss. Zoïlus, Mævius, Cecchi, Green, Avellaneda, William Lauder, Visé, Fréron,—no cleansing of these names is possible. These men have wounded the human race through her men of genius; these wretched hands forever retain the colour of the mud that they have thrown.
And these men have not even either the sad renown that they seem to have acquired by right, or the whole quantity of shame that they have hoped for. One scarcely knows that they have existed. They are half forgotten,—a greater humiliation than to be wholly forgotten. With the exception of two or three among them who have become by-words of contempt, despicable owls, nailed up for an example, all these wretched names are unknown. An obscure notoriety follows their equivocal existence. Look at this Clement, who had called himself the "hypercritic," and whose profession it was to bite and denounce Diderot; he disappears, and is confounded, although born at Geneva, with Clement of Dijon, confessor to Mesdames; with David Clement, author of the "Bibliothèque Curieuse;" with Clement of Baize, Benedictine of St. Maur; and with Clement d'Ascain, Capuchin, definator and provincial of Béarn. What avails it him to have declared that the work of Diderot is but an "obscure verbiage," and to have died mad at Charenton, to be afterward submerged in four or five unknown Clements? In vain did Famien Strada rabidly attack Tacitus; one scarcely knows him now from Fabien Spada, called L'Epée de Bois, the jester of Sigismond Augustus. In vain did Cecchi vilify Dante; we are not certain whether his name was not Cecco. In vain did Green fasten on Shakespeare; he is now confounded with Greene. Avellaneda, the "enemy" of Cervantes, is perhaps Avellanedo. Lauder, the slanderer of Milton, is perhaps Leuder. The unknown De Visé, who tormented Molière, turns out to be a certain Donneau; he had surnamed himself De Visé, through a taste for nobility. Those men relied, in order to create for themselves a little éclat, on the greatness of those whom they outraged. But no, they have remained obscure. These poor insulters did not get their salary. Contempt has failed them. Let us pity them.
CHAPTER II.
Let us add that calumny loses its labour. Then what purpose can it serve? Not even an evil one. Do you know anything more useless than the sting which does not sting?
Better still. This sting is beneficial. In a given time it is found that calumny, envy, and hatred, thinking to labour against, have worked in aid of truth. Their insults bring fame, their blackening makes illustrious. They succeed only in mingling with glory an outcry which increases it.