第29章
Especially does the ingenious Dom Calmet demonstrate that the palm-tree to which the well-beloved goes is the cross to which our Lord Jesus Christ was condemned.But it must be avowed that a pure and healthy moral philosophy is still preferable to these allegories.
One sees in this people's books a crowd of typical emblems which revolt us to-day and which exercise our incredulity and our mockery, but which appeared ordinary and simple to the Asiatic peoples.
In Ezekiel are images which appear to us as licentious and revolting:
in those times they were merely natural.There are thirty examples in the " Song of Songs," model of the most chaste union.Remark carefully that these expressions, these images are always quite serious, and that in no book of this distant antiquity will you find the least mockery on the great subject of generation.When lust is condemned it is in definite terms;but never to excite to passion, nor to make the smallest pleasantry.This far-distant antiquity did not have its Martial, its Catullus, or its Petronius.
It results from all the Jewish prophets and from all the Jewish books, as from all the books which instruct us in the usages of the Chaldeans, the Persians, the Phoenicians, the Syrians, the Indians, the Egyptians;it results, I say, that their customs were not ours, that this ancient world in no way resembled our world.Go from Gibraltar to Mequinez merely, the manners are no longer the same; no longer does one find the same ideas;two leagues of sea have changed everything.Philosophical Dictionary: On the English Theatre ON THE ENGLISH THEATRE I HAVE cast my eyes on an edition of Shakespeare issued by Master Samuel Johnson.I saw there that foreigners who are astonished that in the plays of the great Shakespeare a Roman senator plays the buffoon, and that a king appears on the stage drunk, are treated as little-minded.I do not desire to suspect Master Johnson of being a sorry jester, and of being too fond of wine; but I find it somewhat extraordinary that he counts buffoonery and drunkenness among the beauties of the tragic stage: and no less singular is the reason he gives, that the poet disdains accidental distinctions of circumstance and country, like a painter who, content with having painted the figure, neglects the drapery.The comparison would be more just if he were speaking of a painter who in a noble subject should introduce ridiculous grotesques, should paint Alexander the Great mounted on an ass in the battle of Arbela, and Darius' wife drinking at an inn with rapscallions.
But there is one thing more extraordinary than all, that is that Shakespeare is a genius.The Italians, the French, the men of letters of all other countries, who have not spent some time in England, take him only for a clown, for a joker far inferior to Harlequin, for the most contemptible buffoon who has ever amused the populace.Nevertheless, it is in this same man that one finds pieces which exalt the imagination and which stir the heart to its depths.It is Truth, it is Nature herself who speaks her own language with no admixture of artifice.It is of the sublime, and the author has in no wise sought it.
What can one conclude from this contrast of grandeur and sordidness, of sublime reason and uncouth folly, in short from all the contrasts that we see in Shakespeare? That he would have been a perfect poet had he lived in the time of Addison.
The famous Addison, who flourished under Queen Anne, is perhaps of all English writers the one who best knew how to guide genius with taste.He had a correct style, an imagination discreet in expression, elegance, strength and simplicity in his verse and in his prose.A friend of propriety and orderliness, he wanted tragedy to be written with dignity, and it is thus that his "Cato" is composed.