He will confine himself, however, to general considerations concerning the art, without the slightest attempt to smooth the path of his own work, without pretending to write an indictment or a plea, against or for any person whomsoever.  An attack upon or defence of his book is of less importance to him than to anybody else.  Nor is personal controversy agreeable to him.  It is always a pitiful spectacle to see two hostile self-esteems crossing swords.  He protests, therefore, beforehand against every interpretation of his ideas, every personal application of his words, saying with the Spanish fablist:—­

  Quien haga aplicaciones
  Con su pan se lo coma.

In truth, several of the leading champions of “sound literary doctrines” have done him the honour to throw the gauntlet to him, even in his profound obscurity—­to him, a simple, imperceptible spectator of this curious contest He will not have the presumption to pick it up.  In the following pages will be found the observations with which he might oppose them—­there will be found his sling and his stone; but others, if they choose, may hurl them at the head of the classical Goliaths.

This said, let us pass on.

Let us set out from a fact.  The same type of civilization, or to use a more exact, although more extended expression, the same society, has not always inhabited the earth.  The human race as a whole has grown, has developed, has matured, like one of ourselves.  It was once a child, it was once a man; we are now looking on at its impressive old age.  Before the epoch which modern society has dubbed “ancient,” there was another epoch which the ancients called “fabulous,” but which it would be more accurate to call “primitive.”  Behold then three great successive orders of things in civilization, from its origin down to our days.  Now, as poetry is always superposed upon society, we propose to try to demonstrate, from the form of its society, what the character of the poetry must have been in those three great ages of the world—­primitive times, ancient times, modern times.

In primitive times, when man awakes in a world that is newly created, poetry awakes with him.  In the face of the marvellous things that dazzle and intoxicate him, his first speech is a hymn simply.  He is still so close to God that all his meditations are ecstatic, all his dreams are visions.  His bosom swells, he sings as he breathes.  His lyre has but three strings—­God, the soul, creation; but this threefold mystery envelopes everything, this threefold idea embraces everything.  The earth is still almost deserted.  There are families, but no nations; patriarchs, but no kings.  Each race exists at its own pleasure; no property, no laws, no contentions, no wars.  Everything belongs to each and to all.  Society is a community.  Man is restrained in nought.  He leads that nomadic pastoral life with which all civilizations begin, and which is so well adapted to solitary contemplation, to fanciful reverie.  He follows every suggestion, he goes hither and thither, at random.  His thought, like his life, resembles a cloud that changes its shape and its direction according to the wind that drives it.  Such is the first man, such is the first poet.  He is young, he is cynical.  Prayer is his sole religion, the ode is his only form of poetry.