Octavius Augustus, on the morning of the battle of Actium, met an ass that the owner called Triumphus. This Triumphus, endowed with the faculty of braying, appeared to him of good omen; Octavius Augustus won the battle, remembered Triumphus, had the ass carved in bronze and placed in the Capitol. That made a Capitoline ass, but still an ass. One can understand kings saying to the poet, "Be useless;" but one does not understand the people saying so to him. The poet is for the people. "Pro populo poëta," wrote Agrippa d'Aubigné; "All things to all men," exclaimed Saint Paul. What is a mind? A feeder of souls. The poet is at the same time a menace and a promise. The anxiety with which he inspires oppressors calms and consoles the oppressed. It is the glory of the poet that he places a restless pillow on the purple bed of the tormentors; and, thanks to him, it is often that the tyrant awakes, saying, "I have slept badly." Every slavery, every disheartening faintness, every sorrow, every misfortune, every distress, every hunger, and every thirst have a claim on the poet; he has one creditor,--the human race. To be the great servant does not certainly derogate from the poet. Because on certain occasions, and to do his duty, he has uttered the cry of a people; because he has, when necessary, the sob of humanity in his breast,--every voice of mystery sings not the less in him. Speaking so loudly does not prevent him speaking low. He is not less the confidant, and sometimes the confessor, of hearts. He is not less intimately connected with those who love, with those who think, with those who sigh, thrusting his head in the twilight between the heads of two lovers. The love poems of André Chénier, without losing any of their characteristics, border on the angry iambic: "Weep thou, O Virtue, if I die!" The poet is the only living being to whom it is granted both to thunder and to whisper, because he has in himself, like Nature, the rumbling of the cloud and the rustling of the leaf. He exists for a double function,--a function individual and a public function: and it is for that that he requires, so to speak, two souls. Ennius said: "I have three of them,--an Oscan soul, a Greek soul, and a Latin soul." It is true that he made allusion only to the place of his birth, to the place of his education, and to the place where he was a citizen; and besides, Ennius was but a rough cast of a poet, vast, but unformed. No poet without that activity of soul which is the resultant of conscience. The ancient moral laws require to be stated; the new moral laws require to be revealed. These two series do not coincide without some effort. That effort is incumbent on the poet He assumes constantly the function of the philosopher. He must defend, according to the side attacked, now the liberty of the human mind, now the liberty of the human heart,--to love being no less holy than to think. There is nothing of "Art for art" in all that.