Dramatists, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616; Stratford-upon-Avon (England) -- Biography
CHAPTER II.
There are two poets,--the poet of caprice and the poet of logic; and
there is a third poet, a component of both, amending them one by the
other, completing them one by the other, and summing them up in a
loftier entity,--the two statures in a single one. The third is the
first. He has caprice, and he follows the wind. He has logic, and he
follows duty. The first writes the Canticle of Canticles, the second
writes Leviticus, the third writes the Psalms and the Prophecies. The
first is Horace, the second is Lucan, the third is Juvenal. The first
is Pindar, the second is Hesiod, the third is Homer.
No loss of beauty results from goodness. Is the lion less beautiful
than the tiger, because it has the faculty of merciful emotion?
Does that jaw which opens to let the infant fall into the hands of
the mother deprive that mane of its majesty? Does the vast noise of
the roaring vanish from that terrible mouth because it has licked
Androcles? The genius which does not help, even if graceful, is
deformed. A prodigy without love is a monster. Let us love! let us love!
To love has never hindered from pleasing. Where have you seen one form
of the good excluding the other? On the contrary, all that is good is
connected. Let us, however, understand each other. It does not follow
that to have one quality implies necessarily the possession of the
other; but it would be strange that one quality added to another should
make less. To be useful, is but to be useful; to be beautiful is but
to be beautiful; to be useful and beautiful is to be sublime. That is
what Saint Paul is in the first century, Tacitus and Juvenal in the
second, Dante in the thirteenth, Shakespeare in the sixteenth, Milton
and Molière in the seventeenth.
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