were, to intellectual regions and causes it to draw from its source the very essence of this science.
How they delude themselves, those who, habitually deceived, foolishly imagine that the lofty fame of Orpheus, Homer, Pindar, Æschylus, or Sophocles and the immortality which they enjoy, belongs only to the plan of their works, to the harmony of their verse, and to the happy use of their talent! These flattering appearances which constitute the form of their poetry would have disappeared long ago, they would have become broken, like fragile vases, upon the torrent of centuries, if the intelligence which animated them had not eternalized their duration. But this secret intelligence does not reside, as certain other superficial readers persuade themselves, being still deceived, in the simple interest that the characters mise en scène inspire; this interest, which results from their contrast and from the shock of the passions, is another sort of form, more hidden, and less frail, than the former, it is true, but as variable generally and subject to the great revolution of customs, laws, and usages. True poetry does not depend upon that; it depends upon the primordial ideas which the genius of the poet in his exaltation has seized in the intellectual nature, and which his talent has shown afterwards in the elementary nature, thus adapting the simulacra of physical things to the movement inspired by the soul, instead of adapting this movement to those same simulacra, as those who write history. This is what Bacon, the modern philosopher whom I have already cited, has felt so perfectly.[1] He says:
As the sentient world is inferior to the human soul, it is for
poetry to give to this nature what reality has refused it, lending
to it the faculties of the intellectual world; and as the acts and
events which make the subject of true history have not that
grandeur and that sublimity for which the human soul seeks,
it is necessary that poetry create acts and events greater and
- ↑ De Dignit. et Increment. Scient., 1. ii., c. 13.
