This ground is not the ground of Corneille and Racine, nor is it that of Shakespeare; it is our own; but Shakespeare's system, as it appears to me, may furnish the plans according to which genius ought now to work. This system alone includes all those social conditions and all those general or diverse feelings, the simultaneous conjunction and activity of which constitute for us at the present day the spectacle of human things. Witnesses during thirty years of the greatest revolutions of society, we shall no longer willingly confine the movement of our mind within the narrow space of some family event, or the agitations of a purely individual passion. The nature and destiny of man have appeared to us under their most striking and their simplest aspect, in all their extent and in all their variableness. We require pictures in which this spectacle is reproduced, in which man is displayed in his completeness and excites our entire sympathy.
Born in 1790, died in 1869; famous chiefly as a poet, being one of the greatest in modern France, but successful as an orator and prominent in political life during the troubled period of 1848, when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs; author of several historical works, among them the "History of the Girondists."
OF MIRABEAU'S ORIGIN AND PLACE IN HISTORY[51]
He was born a gentleman and of ancient lineage, refugees established in Provence, but of Italian origin. The progenitors were Tuscan. The family was one of those whom Florence had cast from her bosom in the stormy excesses of her liberty, and for which Dante reproaches his country in such bitter strains for her exiles and prosecutions. The blood of Machiavelli and the earthquake genius of the Italian republics were characteristics of all the individuals of this race. The proportions of their souls exceed the height of their destiny: vices, passions, virtues are all in excess. The women are all angelic or perverse, the men sublime or depraved, and their language even is as emphatic and lofty as their aspirations. There is in their most familiar correspondence the color and tone of the heroic tongues of Italy.
[Footnote 51: From Book I of the "History of the Girondists"--the translation of R. T. Ryde in Bonn's Library, as revised for this collection.]