Let us add that calumny loses its labour. Then what purpose can it serve? Not even an evil one. Do you know anything more useless than the sting which does not sting? Better still. This sting is beneficial. In a given time it is found that calumny, envy, and hatred, thinking to labour against, have worked in aid of truth. Their insults bring fame, their blackening makes illustrious. They succeed only in mingling with glory an outcry which increases it. Let us continue. So, each of the men of genius tries on in his turn this immense human mask; and such is the strength of the soul which they cause to pass through the mysterious aperture of the eyes, that this look changes the mask, and, from terrible, makes it comic, then pensive, then grieved, then young and smiling, then decrepit, then sensual and gluttonous, then religious, then outrageous; and it is Cain, Job, Atreus, Ajax, Priam, Hecuba, Niobe, Clytemnestra, Nausicaa, Pistoclerus, Grumio, Davus, Pasicompsa, Chimène, Don Arias, Don Diego, Mudarra, Richard III., Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, Juliet, Romeo, Lear, Sancho Panza, Pantagruel, Panurge, Arnolphe, Dandin Sganarelle, Agnes, Rosine, Victorine, Basile, Almaviva, Cherubin, Manfred. From the direct divine creation proceeds Adam, the prototype. From the indirect divine creation,--that is to say, from the human creation,--proceed other Adams, the types. A type does not produce any man in particular; it cannot be exactly superposed upon any individual; it sums up and concentrates under one human form a whole family of characters and minds. A type is no abridgment; it is a condensation. It is not one, it is all Alcibiades is but Alcibiades, Petronius is but Petronius, Bassompierre is but Bassompierre, Buckingham is but Buckingham, Fronsac is but Fronsac, Lauzun is but Lauzun; but take Lauzun, Fronsac, Buckingham, Bassompierre, Petronius, and Alcibiades, and pound them in the mortar of imagination, and from that process you have a phantom more real than them all,--Don Juan. Take the usurers one by one; no one of them is that fierce merchant of Venice, crying, "Go, Tubal, fee me an officer, bespeak him a fortnight before; I will have the heart of him if he forfeit." Take all the usurers together; from the crowd of them comes a total,--Shylock. Sum up usury, you have Shylock. The metaphor of the people, who are never mistaken, confirms, without knowing it, the inventions of the poet; and while Shakespeare makes Shylock, it creates the _gripe-all._ Shylock is the Jewish bargaining. He is also Judaism; that is to say, his whole nation,--the high as well as the low, faith as well as fraud; and it is because he sums up a whole race, such as oppression has made it, that Shylock is great. Jews, even those of the Middle Ages, might with reason say that not one of them is Shylock. Men of pleasure may with reason say that not one of them is Don Juan. No leaf of the orange-tree when chewed gives the flavour