more heroic. All must be increased and embellished by its voice and receive from it a new existence; it is necessary even that virtue shine with an éclat more pure; that the veil which covers truth be lifted from its eyes and that the course of Providence, better discerned, be allowed to penetrate into the most secret causes of events.
The philosopher who expressed thus his thought regarding
the essence of poetry, was far from believing, as the vulgar
have always believed, and as certain modern writers
have wished to convince the savants,[1] that, of the two parts
of poetry, the positive form might be the only genuine;
that is to say, that they do not by any means consider that
the human characters put upon the stage by the poets
whom I have just named, were historic characters. Bacon
understood well that Achilles, Agamemnon, Ulysses, Castor
and Pollux, Helen, Iphigenia, Œdipus, Phædra, etc., are
somewhat more than they appear to be, and that their
virtues or their vices, their heroic actions, even their crimes,
celebrated by poetry, contain a profound meaning wherein
lie buried the mysteries of religion and the secrets of
philosophy.[2]
It belongs only to the men to whom poetry is known by its exterior forms alone and who have never penetrated as far as its essence, to imagine that a small city of Asia, unknown to all Asia, around which the King of kings of Greece waited in vain for ten years to avenge the honour of his brother betrayed by his wife, should be able during three thousand years to occupy the greatest minds of Europe, on account of a quarrel which was raised in the tenth year of the siege, between this King of kings and a petty prince of his army, angry and sulky, named Achilles. It is only permitted to the phlegmatic chronologists, whom the muses
