“Among these plays which were written for the fairies, and should be performed by the light of the moon, there is one piece which principally delights me-a piece so wondering, so vagrant, with so vaporous a plot and such singular characters, that the author himself, not knowing what title to give it, has called it 'As You Like It,' an elastic name which satisfies every requirement.
“When reading this strange piece, you feel that you are transported into an unknown world, of which, however, you have some vague recollection: you can no longer tell whether you are dead or alive, dreaming or awake; pleasant faces smile sweetly on you, and give as they pass you a kindly good-day; you feel moved and troubled at the sight of them, as though at the turn of a road you had suddenly met with your ideal, or the forgotten phantom of your first mistress had suddenly stood before you. Springs flow murmuring half-subdued complaints; the wind stirs the old trees of the ancient forest over the head of the aged exiled duke with compassionate sighs; and, when the melancholy Jacques gives his philosophic griefs to the stream with the leaves of the willow, it seems to you as though you were yourself the speaker, and the most obscure and secret thoughts of your heart were illumined and revealed.
“O young son of the brave knight Rowland des Bois, so ill-used by fate! I cannot but be jealous of thee; thou hast still a faithful servant, the good Adam, whose old age is so green beneath the snow of his hair. Thou art banished, but not at least until thou hast wrestled and triumphed; thy wicked brother robs thee of all thine estate, but Rosalind gives thee the chain from her neck; thou art poor, but thou art loved; thou lea vest thy country, but the daughter of thy persecutor follows thee beyond the seas.
“The dark Ardennes open their great arms of foliage to receive thee and conceal thee; the good forest, in the depths of its grottos, heaps its most silky moss to form thy couch; it stoops its arches above thy brow to protect thee from rain and sun; it pities thee with the tears of its springs and the sighs of its belling fawns and deer; it makes of its rocks kindly desks for thy amorous epistles; it lends thee thorns from its bushes wherewith to hang them, and commands the satin bark of its aspen trees to yield to the point of thy stiletto when thou wouldst grave thereon the character of Rosalind.
“If only it were possible, young Orlando, to have like thee a great and shady forest that one might retire and be alone in his pain, and, at the turning of a walk meet the sough t-f or she, recognizable though disguised! But alas! the world of the soul has no verdant Ardennes, and only in the garden of poetry bloom the wild, capricious little flowers whose perfume gives complete forgetfulness. In vain do we shed tears: they form not those fair silvery cascades; in vain do we sigh; no kindly echo troubles to return us our complaints graced with assonances and conceits. Vainly do we hang sonnets on the prickles of every bramble: Rosalind never gathers them, and it is for nothing that we gash the bark of the trees with amorous characters.
“Birds of the sky lend me each a feather, swallow no less than eagle, and humming bird than roc, that I may make me a pair of wings to fly high and fast through regions unknown, where I may find nothing to bring back to my recollection the city of the living, where I may forget that I am myself, and live a life strange and new, farther than America, than Africa, than Asia, than the last island of the world, through the ocean of ice, beyond the pole where trembles the aurora borealis, in the impalpable kingdom whither the divine creations of the poets and the types of supreme beauty take their flight.
“How is it possible to sustain ordinary conversations in clubs and drawing-rooms after hearing thee speak, sparkling Mercutio, whose every phrase bursts in gold and silver rain like a firework shell beneath a star-strewn sky? Pale Desdemona, what pleasure wouldst thou have us take in any terrestrial music after the romance of the Willow? What women seem not ugly beside your Venuses, ancient sculptors, poets in marble strophes?
“Ah! despite the furious embrace with which I wished to clasp the material world for lack of the other, I feel that I have an evil nature, that life was not made for me, and that it repulses me; I cannot concern myself with anything: whatever road I follow I go astray; the smooth alley and the stony path alike lead me to the abyss. If I wish to take my flight the air condenses about me, and I am caught with my wings spread and unable to close them. I can neither walk nor fly; the sky attracts me when I am on earth, and the earth when I am in the sky; above, the north wind tears away my plumes; below, the pebbles wound my feet. My soles are too tender to walk upon the broken glass of reality; my wings of too short a span to soar above things, and rise from circle to circle into the azure depths of mysticism, even to the inaccessible summits of eternal love; I am the most unfortunate hippogriff, the most wretched heap of heterogeneous pieces that ever existed, since ocean first loved the moon and man was deceived by woman: the monstrous Chimera slain by Bellerophon, with its maiden's head, lion's paws, goat's body, and dragon's tail, was an animal of simple composition in comparison with me.
“In my frail breast dwell together the violet-strewn dreamings of the chaste young girl and the mad burnings of revelling courtesans: my desires go, like lions, sharpening their claws in the shade and seeking for something to devour; my thoughts, more feverish and restless than goats, cling to the most menacing crests; my hatred, poison-puffed, twists its scaly folds in inextricable knots, and drags itself at length through ruts and ravines.
“A strange land is my soul, a land flourishing and splendid in appearance, but more saturated with putrid and deleterious nuisances than the land of Batavia: the least ray of sunshine on the slime causes reptiles to hatch and mosquitoes to swarm; the large yellow tulips, the nagassaris and the angsoka flowers pompously veil unclean carrion. The amorous rose opens her scarlet lips, and smiling shows her little dewdrop teeth to the wooing nightingales who repeat madrigals and sonnets to her: nothing could be more charming; but the odds are a hundred to one that there is a dropsical toad in the grass beneath the bushes, crawling on limping feet and silvering his path with his slime.
“There are springs more limpid and clear than the purest diamond; but it would be better for you to draw the stagnant water of the marsh beneath its cloak of rotten rushes and drowned dogs than to dip your cup in such a wave. A serpent is hidden at the bottom, and wheels round with frightful quickness as he discharges his venom.
“You planted wheat, and there springs up asphodel, henbane, darnel, and pale hemlock with verdigris branches. Instead of the root which you had buried, you are astonished to see emerging from the earth the hairy twisted limbs of the dark mandragora.
“If you leave a souvenir, and should come to take it again some time afterwards, you will find it greener with moss and more abounding with woodlice and disgusting insects than a stone placed on the dank floor of a cave.
“Seek not to cross its dark forests; they are more impracticable than the virgin forests of America or the jungles of Java. Creepers, strong as cables, run from one tree to another; plants bristling and pointed like spearheads obstruct every passage; the grass itself is covered with a scorching down like that of the nettle. To the arches of foliage gigantic bate of the vampire kind cling by their claws; scarabees of enormous size shake their threatening horns and lash the air with their quadruple wings; monstrous and fantastic animals, such as are seen passing in nightmares, advance painfully breaking the reeds before them. There are troops of elephants crushing the flies between the wrinkles of their dried skin or rubbing their flanks along the stones and trees, rhinoceroses with rugose carapace, hippopotami with swollen muzzle and bristling hair, which, as they go, knead the mud and detritus of the forest with their broad feet
“In the glades, yonder where the sun thrusts in a luminous ray like a wedge of gold, across the dank humidity, at the place where you would have wished to seat yourself, you will always find some family of tigers carelessly couched, breathing the air through their nostrils, winking their sea-green eyes and glossing their velvety fur with their blood-red, papillae-covered tongues; or, it may be, a knot of boa serpents half asleep and digesting the bull they swallowed last.
“Dread everything-grass, fruit, water, air, shadow, sun, everything is mortal.
“Close your ear to the chatter of the little paroquets, with golden beak and emerald neck, which descend from the trees and come and perch on your finger with throbbing wings; for the little emerald-necked paroquets will finish by prettily putting out your eyes with their golden beaks at the moment that you are bending down to kiss them. So it is!
“The world will have none of me; it repulses me as a spectre escaped from the tombs, and I am nearly as pale as one. My blood refuses to believe that I am alive, and will not color my skin; it creeps slowly through my veins like stagnant water in obstructed canals. My heart beats for nothing which causes the heart of man to beat. My griefs and joys are not those of my fellow-creatures. I have vehemently desired what nobody desires; I have scorned things which are madly longed for. I have loved women when they did not love me, and I have been loved when I would fain have been hated. Always too soon or too late, more or less, on this side or on that; never what ought to have been; either I have not arrived, or I have been too far. I have flung my life through the windows, or
