ough his stomach
and his arms. The Furies reply to Clytemnestra's bleeding shade with
inarticulate roars. Art was in its infancy in the time of AEschylus as
it was in London in Shakespeare's time."

Whom shall we copy, then? The moderns? What! Copy copies! God forbid!

"But," someone else will object, "according to your conception of the
art, you seem to look for none but great poets, to count always upon
genius." Art certainly does not count upon mediocrity. It prescribes
no rules for it, it knows nothing of it; in fact, mediocrity has
no existence so far as art is concerned; art supplies wings, not
crutches. Alas! D'Aubignac followed rules, Campistron copied models.
What does it matter to art? It does not build its palaces for ants. It
lets them make their ant-hill, without taking the trouble to find out
whether they have built their burlesque imitation of its palace upon
its foundation.

The critics of the scholastic school place their poets in a strange
position. On the one hand they cry incessantly: "Copy the models!"
On the other hand they have a habit of declaring that "the models are
inimitable"! Now, if their craftsman, by dint of hard work, succeeds
in forcing through this dangerous defile some colourless tracing
of the masters, these ungrateful wretches, after examining the new
_refaccimiento_, exclaim sometimes: "This doesn't resemble anything!"
and sometimes: "This resembles everything!" And by virtue of a logic
made for the occasion each of these formulae is a criticism.

Let us then speak boldly. The time for it has come, and it would be
strange if, in this age, liberty, like the light, should penetrate
everywhere except to the one place where freedom is most natural--the
domain of thought. Let us take the hammer to theories and poetic
systems. Let us throw down the old plastering that conceals the facade
of art. There are neither rules nor models; or, rather, there are
no other rules than the general laws of nature, which soar above
the whole field of art, and the special rules which result from the
conditions appropriate to the subject of each composition. The
former are of the essence, eternal, and do not change; the latter
are variable, external, and are used but once. The former are the
framework that supports the house; the latter the scaffolding which
is used in building it, and which is made anew for each building. In a
word, the former are the flesh and bones, the latter the clothing, of
the