The critics of the scholastic school place their poets in a strange position.  On the one hand they cry incessantly:  “Copy the models!” On the other hand they have a habit of declaring that “the models are inimitable”!  Now, if their craftsman, by dint of hard work, succeeds in forcing through this dangerous defile some colourless tracing of the masters, these ungrateful wretches, after examining the new refaccimiento, exclaim sometimes:  “This doesn’t resemble anything!” and sometimes:  “This resembles everything!” And by virtue of a logic made for the occasion each of these formulae is a criticism.

Let us then speak boldly.  The time for it has come, and it would be strange if, in this age, liberty, like the light, should penetrate everywhere except to the one place where freedom is most natural—­the domain of thought.  Let us take the hammer to theories and poetic systems.  Let us throw down the old plastering that conceals the facade of art.  There are neither rules nor models; or, rather, there are no other rules than the general laws of nature, which soar above the whole field of art, and the special rules which result from the conditions appropriate to the subject of each composition.  The former are of the essence, eternal, and do not change; the latter are variable, external, and are used but once.  The former are the framework that supports the house; the latter the scaffolding which is used in building it, and which is made anew for each building.  In a word, the former are the flesh and bones, the latter the clothing, of the drama.  But these rules are not written in the treatises on poetry.  Richelet has no idea of their existence.  Genius, which divines rather than learns, devises for each work the general rules from the general plan of things, the special rules from the separate ensemble of the subject treated; not after the manner of the chemist, who lights the fire under his furnace, heats his crucible, analyzes and destroys; but after the manner of the bee, which flies on its golden wings, lights on each flower and extracts its honey, leaving it as brilliant and fragrant as before.

The poet—­let us insist on this point—­should take counsel therefore only of nature, truth, and inspiration which is itself both truth and nature.  “Quando he,” says Lope de Vega,

  “Quando he de escrivir una comedia,
  Encierro los preceptos con seis llaves.”

To secure these precepts “six keys” are none too many, in very truth.  Let the poet beware especially of copying anything whatsoever—­Shakespeare no more than Moliere, Schiller no more than Corneille.  If genuine talent could abdicate its own nature in this matter, and thus lay aside its original personality, to transform itself into another, it would lose everything by playing this role of its own double.  It is as if a god should turn valet.  We must draw our inspiration from the original sources.  It is the same sap, distributed through the soil, that produces