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harmony.—From Greece to the romantic movement,—middle ages—there are pedants, versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, all is thymed prose, a game, stupefaction and glorification of innumerable generations of idiots: Racine is the pure, the strong, the great.—Had some one blasted his rhymes, shuffled his hemistiches, the Divine Fool would to-day be as unknown as the first author of Origins.—After Racine the game grew mouldy. It has lasted two thousand years!

Neither pleasantry nor paradox. Reason inspires me to more certitudes on this subject than a Jeune-France ever had indignations. For that matter the moderns are free to curse their ancestors: one is at home and one has the leisure.

No one has ever made a good estimate of romanticism. Who would have judged it? The Critics!! The Romantics? Who prove so well that the song is so seldom the work, I mean the well sung and understood thought of the singer.

For the I is somebody else. If the brass wakes to find itself a trumpet, that is no fault of the brass! This seems plain to me: I attend the hatching of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I make a stroke with the bow : the symphony stirs in the depths, or comes on the scene with a bound. . . .

The first subject for a man to study who wants to be a poet is his own consciousness, all of it. He searches his soul, inspects it, tries it, learns it. When he knows it he should work on it; isn't that evident; in every brain a natural development goes on; so many egoists call themselves authors; there are surely others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves!—But it is a question of making one's soul monstrous; in the manner of the comprachicos, eh! Imagine a man planting warts on his face and cultivating them.

I say it is necessary to be a seer, to make oneself a SEER!

The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All the forms of love, suffering, folly, he searches in himself, he boils down in himself so as to keep nothing of them but the quintessences. Unspeakable torture, wherein he needs all constancy, all superhuman strength, wherein he becomes among all the great invalid, the great malefactor, the great outcast,—and the supreme Savant!—For he reaches the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, richer than any! He reaches the unknown; and when, gone mad, he ends by losing the