poisons Britannicus in the cup of reconciliation.  But can we demand of the bird that he fly under the receiver of an air-pump?  What a multitude of beautiful scenes the people of taste have cost us, from Scuderi to La Harpe!  A noble work might be composed of all that their scorching breath has withered in its germ.  However, our great poets have found a way none the less to cause their genius to blaze forth through all these obstacles.  Often the attempt to confine them behind walls of dogmas and rules is vain.  Like the Hebrew giant they carry their prison doors with them to the mountains.

But still the same refrain is repeated, and will be, no doubt, for a long while to come:  “Follow the rules!  Copy the models!  It was the rules that shaped the models.”  One moment!  In that case there are two sorts of models, those which are made according to the rules, and, prior to them, those according to which the rules were made.  Now, in which of these two categories should genius seek a place for itself?  Although it is always disagreeable to come in contact with pedants, is it not a thousand times better to give them lessons than to receive lessons from them?  And then—­copy!  Is the reflection equal to the light?  Is the satellite which travels unceasingly in the same circle equal to the central creative planet?  With all his poetry Virgil is no more than the moon of Homer.

And whom are we to copy, I pray to know?  The ancients?  We have just shown that their stage has nothing in common with ours.  Moreover, Voltaire, who will have none of Shakespeare, will have none of the Greeks, either.  Let him tell us why:  “The Greeks ventured to produce scenes no less revolting to us.  Hippolyte, crushed by his fall, counts his wounds and utters doleful cries.  Philoctetes falls in his paroxysms of pain; black blood flows from his wound.  Oedipus, covered with the blood that still drops from the sockets of the eyes he has torn out, complains bitterly of gods and men.  We hear the shrieks of Clytemnestra, murdered by her own son, and Electra, on the stage, cries:  ‘Strike! spare her not! she did not spare our father,’ Prometheus is fastened to a rock by nails driven through his stomach and his arms.  The Furies reply to Clytemnestra’s bleeding shade with inarticulate roars.  Art was in its infancy in the time of AEschylus as it was in London in Shakespeare’s time.”

Whom shall we copy, then?  The moderns?  What!  Copy copies!  God forbid!

“But,” someone else will object, “according to your conception of the art, you seem to look for none but great poets, to count always upon genius.”  Art certainly does not count upon mediocrity.  It prescribes no rules for it, it knows nothing of it; in fact, mediocrity has no existence so far as art is concerned; art supplies wings, not crutches.  Alas!  D’Aubignac followed rules, Campistron copied models.  What does it matter to art?  It does not build its palaces for ants.  It lets them make their ant-hill, without taking the trouble to find out whether they have built their burlesque imitation of its palace upon its foundation.