Literary Character of Men of Genius
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Title: Literary Character of Men of Genius
Author: Isaac Disraeli
Editor: Earl of Beaconsfield Benjamin Disraeli
Release date: May 31, 2005 [eBook #15960]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020
Language: English
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LITERARY CHARACTER OF MEN OF GENIUS
Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions
by
ISAAC DISRAELI
A New Edition
Edited by His Son
THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD.
London:
Frederick Warne and Co.,
Bedford Street, Strand.
London:
Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., Printers, Whitefriars.
1850
PREFACE.
The following Preface is of interest for the expression of the author's
own view of these works.
This volume comprises my writings on subjects chiefly of our vernacular
literature. Now collected together, they offer an unity of design, and
afford to the general reader and to the student of classical antiquity
some initiation into our national Literature. It is presumed also, that
they present materials for thinking not solely on literary topics; authors
and books are not alone here treated of,--a comprehensive view of human
nature necessarily enters into the subject from the diversity of the
characters portrayed, through the gradations of their faculties, the
influence of their tastes, and those incidents of their lives prompted by
their fortunes or their passions. This present volume, with its brother
"CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE," now constitute a body of reading which may
awaken knowledge in minds only seeking amusement, and refresh the deeper
studies of the learned by matters not unworthy of their curiosity.
The LITERARY CHARACTER has been an old favourite with many of my
contemporaries departed or now living, who have found it respond to their
own emotions.
THE MISCELLANIES are literary amenities, should they be found to deserve
the title, constructed on that principle early adopted by me, of
interspersing facts with speculation.
THE INQUIRY INTO THE LITERARY AND POLITICAL CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST
has surely corrected some general misconceptions, and thrown light on some
obscure points in the history of that anomalous personage. It is a
satisfaction to me to observe, since the publication of this tract, that
while some competent judges have considered the "evidence irresistible," a
material change has occurred in the tone of most writers. The subject
presented an occasion to exhibit a minute picture of that age of
transition in our national history.
The titles of CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS and QUARRELS OF AUTHORS do not wholly
designate the works, which include a considerable portion of literary
history.
Public favour has encouraged the republication of these various works,
which often referred to, have long been difficult to procure. It has been
deferred from time to time with the intention of giving the subjects a
more enlarged investigation; but I have delayed the task till it cannot be
performed. One of the Calamities of Authors falls to my lot, the delicate
organ of vision with me has suffered a singular disorder,[A]--a disorder
which no oculist by his touch can heal, and no physician by his experience
can expound; so much remains concerning the frame of man unrevealed to
man!
In the midst of my library I am as it were distant from it. My unfinished
labours, frustrated designs, remain paralysed. In a joyous heat I wander
no longer through the wide circuit before me. The "strucken deer" has the
sad privilege to weep when he lies down, perhaps no more to course amid
those far-distant woods where once he sought to range.
[Footnote A: I record my literary calamity as a warning to my sedentary
brothers. When my eyes dwell on any object, or whenever they are closed,
there appear on a bluish film a number of mathematical squares, which are
the reflection of the fine network of the retina, succeeded by blotches
which subside into printed characters, apparently forming distinct words,
arranged in straight lines as in a printed book; the monosyllables are
often legible. This is the process of a few seconds. It is remarkable that
the usual power of the eye is not injured or diminished for distant
objects, while those near are clouded over.]
Although thus compelled to refrain in a great measure from all mental
labour, and incapacitated from the use of the pen and the book, these
works, notwithstanding, have received many important corrections, having
been read over to me with critical precision.
Amid this partial darkness I am not left without a distant hope, nor a
present consolation; and to HER who has so often lent to me the light of
her eyes, the intelligence of her voice, and the careful work of her hand,
the author must ever owe "the debt immense" of paternal gratitude.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER I.
Of literary characters, and of the lovers of literature and art. 11
CHAPTER II.
Of the adversaries of literary men among themselves.--Matter-of-fact
men, and men of wit.--The political economists.--Of those who
abandon their studies.--Men in office.--The arbiters of public
opinion.--Those who treat the pursuits of literature with levity. 14
CHAPTER III.
Of artists, in the history of men of literary genius.--Their habits
and pursuits analogous.--The nature of their genius is similar in
their distinct works.--Shown by their parallel areas, and by a
common end pursued by both. 20
CHAPTER IV.
Of natural genius.--Minds constitutionally different cannot have an
equal aptitude.--Genius not the result of habit and education.--
Originates in peculiar qualities of the mind.--The predisposition
of genius.--A substitution for the white paper of Locke. 24
CHAPTER V.
Youth of genius.--Its first impulses may be illustrated by its
subsequent actions.--Parents have another association of the man
of genius than we.--Of genius, its first habits.--Its melancholy.
--Its reveries.--Its love of solitude.--Its disposition to repose.
--Of a youth distinguished by his equals.--Feebleness of its first
attempts.--Of genius not discoverable even in manhood.--The
education of the youth may not be that of his genius.--An unsettled
impulse, querulous till it finds its true occupation.--With some,
curiosity as intense a faculty as invention.--What the youth first
applies to is commonly his delight afterwards.--Facts of the
decisive character of genius. 31
CHAPTER VI.
The first studies.--The self-educated are marked by stubborn
peculiarities.--Their errors.--Their improvement from the neglect
or contempt they incur.--The history of self-education in Moses
Mendelssohn.--Friends usually prejudicial in the youth of genius.
--A remarkable interview between Petrarch in his first studies,
and his literary adviser.--Exhortation. 55
CHAPTER VII.
Of the irritability of genius.--Genius in society often in a state
of suffering.--Equality of temper more prevalent among men of
letters.--Of the occupation of making a great name.--Anxieties of
the most successful.--Of the inventors.--Writers of learning.--
Writers of taste. --Artists. 69
CHAPTER VIII.
The spirit of literature and the spirit of society.--The inventors.
--Society offers seduction and not reward to men of genius.--The
notions of persons of fashion of men of genius.--The habitudes of
the man of genius distinct from those of the man of society.--
Study, meditation, and enthusiasm, the progress of genius.--The
disagreement between the men of the world and the literary
character. 89
CHAPTER IX.
Conversations of men of genius.--Their deficient agreeableness may
result from qualities which conduce to their greatness.--Slow-minded
men not the dullest.--The conversationists not the ablest writers.
--Their true excellence in conversation consists of associations
with their pursuits. 99
CHAPTER X.
Literary solitude.--Its necessity.--Its pleasures.--Of visitors
by profession.--Its inconveniences. 109
CHAPTER XI.
The meditations of Genius.--A work on the Art of Meditation not yet
produced.--Predisposing the mind.--Imagination awakens imagination.
--Generating feelings by music.--Slight habits.--Darkness and
silence, by suspending the exercise of our senses, increase the
vivacity of our conceptions.--The arts of memory.--Memory the
foundation of genius.--Inventions by several to preserve their own
moral and literary character.--And to assist their studies.--The
meditations of genius depend on habit.--Of the night-time.--A
day of meditation should precede a day of composition.--Works of
magnitude from slight conceptions.--Of thoughts never written.--The
art of meditation exercised at all hours and places.--Continuity of
attention the source of philosophical discoveries. --Stillness of
meditation the first state of existence in genius. 116
CHAPTER XII.
The enthusiasm of genius.--A state of mind resembling a waking
dream distinct from reverie.--The ideal presence distinguished
from the real presence.--The senses are really affected in the
ideal world, proved by a variety of instances.--Of the rapture
or sensation of deep study in art, science, and literature.
--Of perturbed feelings, in delirium.--In extreme endurance
of attention.--And in visionary illusions.--Enthusiasts in
literature and art.--Of their self-immolations. 136
CHAPTER XIII.
Of the jealousy of genius.--Jealousy often proportioned to the
degree of genius.--A perpetual fever among authors and artists.
--Instances of its incredible excess among brothers and
benefactors.--Of a peculiar species, where the fever consumes
the sufferer without its malignancy. 154
CHAPTER XIV.
Want of mutual esteem among men of genius often originates in
a deficiency of analogous ideas.--It is not always envy or
jealousy which induces men of genius to undervalue each other. 159
CHAPTER XV.
Self-praise of genius.--The love of praise instinctive in the
nature of genius.--A high opinion of themselves necessary for
their great designs.--The ancients openly claimed their own
praise.--And several moderns.--An author knows more of his merits
than his readers.--And less of his defects.--Authors versatile
in their admiration and their malignity. 162
CHAPTER XVI.
The domestic life of genius.--Defects of great compositions
attributed to domestic infelicities.--The home of the literary
character should be the abode of repose and silence.--Of the
father.--Of the mother.--Of family genius.--Men of genius not
more respected than other men in their domestic circle.--The
cultivators of science and art do not meet on equal terms with
others, in domestic life.--Their neglect of those around them.
--Often accused of imaginary crimes. 173
CHAPTER XVII.
The poverty of literary men.--Poverty, a relative quality.--Of
the poverty of literary men in what degree desirable.--Extreme
poverty.--Task-work.--Of gratuitous works.--A project to provide
against the worst state of poverty among literary men. 186
CHAPTER XVIII.
The matrimonial state of literature.--Matrimony said not to be
well-suited to the domestic life of genius.--Celibacy a concealed
cause of the early querulousness of men of genius.--Of unhappy
unions.--Not absolutely necessary that the wife should be a
literary woman.--Of the docility and susceptibility of the higher
female character.--A picture of a literary wife. 198
CHAPTER XIX.
Literary friendships.--In early life.--Different from those of
men of the world.--They suffer in unrestrained communication of
their ideas, and bear reprimands and exhortations.--Unity of
feelings.--A sympathy not of manners but of feelings.--Admit of
dissimilar characters.--Their peculiar glory.--Their sorrow. 209
CHAPTER XX.
The literary and the personal character.--The personal
dispositions of an author may be the reverse of those which
appear in his writings.--Erroneous conceptions of the character
of distant authors.--Paradoxical appearances in the history of
genius.--Why the character of the man may be opposite to that
of his writings. 217
CHAPTER XXI.
The man of letters.--Occupies an intermediate station between
authors and readers.--His solitude described.--Often the father
of genius.--Atticus, a man of letters of antiquity.--The perfect
character of a modern man of letters exhibited in Peiresc.--
Their utility to authors and artists. 226
CHAPTER XXII.
Literary old age still learning.--Influence of late studies in
life.--Occupations in advanced age of the literary character.
--Of literary men who have died at their studies. 238
CHAPTER XXIII.
Universality of genius.--Limited notion of genius entertained
by the ancients.--Opposite faculties act with diminished force.
--Men of genius excel only in a single art. 244
CHAPTER XXIV.
Literature an avenue to glory.--An intellectual nobility not
chimerical, but created by public opinion.--Literary honours
of various nations.--Local associations with the memory of the
man of genius. 248
CHAPTER XXV.
Influence of authors on society, and of society on authors.
--National tastes a source of literary prejudices.--True
genius always the organ of its nation.--Master-writers preserve
the distinct national character.--Genius the organ of the state
of the age.--Causes of its suppression in a people.--Often
invented, but neglected.--The natural gradations of genius.--Men
of genius produce their usefulness in privacy--The public mind
is now the creation of the public writer.--Politicians affect to
deny this principle.--Authors stand between the governors and
the governed.--A view of the solitary author in his study.--They
create an epoch in history.--Influence of popular authors.--The
immortality of thought.--The family of genius illustrated by
their genealogy. 258
LITERARY MISCELLANIES.
Miscellanists 281
Prefaces 286
Style 291
Goldsmith and Johnson 294
Self-characters 295
On reading 298
On habituating ourselves to an individual pursuit 302
On novelty in literature 305
Vers de Société 308
The genius of Molière 310
The sensibility of Racine 325
Of Sterne 332
Hume, Robertson, and Birch 340
Of voluminous works incomplete by the deaths of the authors 350
Of domestic novelties at first condemned 355
Domesticity; or a dissertation on servants 364
Printed letters in the vernacular idiom 375
CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST.
Advertisement 383
Of the first modern assailants of the character of
James I., Burnet, Bolingbroke and Pope, Harris, Macaulay,
and Walpole 386
His pedantry 388
His polemical studies 389
--how these were political 392
The Hampton Court conference 393
Of some of his writings 398
Popular superstitions of the age 400
The King's habits of life those of a man of letters 402
Of the facility and copiousness of his composition 404
Of his eloquence 405
Of his wit 406
Specimens of his humour, and observations on human life 407
Some evidences of his sagacity in the discovery of truth 410
Of his "Basilicon Doron" 413
Of his idea of a tyrant and a king 414
Advice to Prince Henry in the choice of his servants
and associates 415
Describes the Revolutionists of his time 416
Of the nobility of Scotland 417
Of colonising _ib._
Of merchants 418
Regulations for the prince's manners and habits _ib._
Of his idea of the royal prerogative 421
The lawyers' idea of the same _ib._
Of his elevated conception of the kingly character 425
His design in issuing "The Book of Sports" for the Sabbath-day 426
The Sabbatarian controversy 428
The motives of his aversion to war 430
James acknowledges his dependence on the Commons; their conduct 431
Of certain scandalous chronicles 434
A picture of the age from a manuscript of the times 437
Anecdotes of the manners of the age 441
James I. discovers the disorders and discontents of a peace
of more than twenty years 449
The King's private life in his occasional retirements 450
A detection of the discrepancies of opinion among the
decriers of James I 451
Summary of his character 455
TO
ROBERT SOUTHEY, LL.D.,
&c. &c. &c.
In dedicating this Work to one of the most eminent literary characters of
the age, I am experiencing a peculiar gratification, in which few, perhaps
none, of my contemporaries can participate; for I am addressing him, whose
earliest effusions attracted my regard, near half a century past; and
during that awful interval of time--for fifty years is a trial of life of
whatever may be good in us--you have multiplied your talents, and have
never lost a virtue.
When I turn from the uninterrupted studies of your domestic solitude to
our metropolitan authors, the contrast, if not encouraging, is at least
extraordinary. You are not unaware that the revolutions of Society have
operated on our literature, and that new classes of readers have called
forth new classes of writers. The causes and the consequences of the
present state of this fugitive literature might form an inquiry which
would include some of the important topics which concern the PUBLIC MIND,
--but an inquiry which might be invidious shall not disturb a page
consecrated to the record of excellence. They who draw their inspiration
from the hour must not, however, complain if with that hour they pass
away.
I. DISRAELI.
INTRODUCTION.
For the fifth time I revise a subject which has occupied my inquiries from
early life, with feelings still delightful, and an enthusiasm not wholly
diminished.
Had not the principle upon which this work is constructed occurred to me
in my youth, the materials which illustrate the literary character could
never have been brought together. It was in early life that I conceived
the idea of pursuing the history of genius by the similar events which had
occurred to men of genius. Searching into literary history for the
literary character formed a course of experimental philosophy in which
every new essay verified a former trial, and confirmed a former truth. By
the great philosophical principle of induction, inferences were deduced
and results established, which, however vague and doubtful in speculation,
are irresistible when the appeal is made to facts as they relate to
others, and to feelings which must be decided on as they are passing in
our own breast.
It is not to be inferred from what I have here stated that I conceive that
any single man of genius will resemble every man of genius; for not only
man differs from man, but varies from himself in the different stages of
human life. All that I assert is, that every man of genius will discover,
sooner or later, that he belongs to the brotherhood of his class, and that
he cannot escape from certain habits, and feelings, and disorders, which
arise from the same temperament and sympathies, and are the necessary
consequence of occupying the same position, and passing through the same
moral existence. Whenever we compare men of genius with each other, the
history of those who are no more will serve as a perpetual commentary on
our contemporaries. There are, indeed, secret feelings which their
prudence conceals, or their fears obscure, or their modesty shrinks from,
or their pride rejects; but I have sometimes imagined that I have held
the clue as they have lost themselves in their own labyrinth. I know
that many, and some of great celebrity, have sympathised with the
feelings which inspired these volumes; nor, while I have elucidated the
idiosyncrasy of genius, have I less studied the habits and characteristics
of the lovers of literature.
It has been considered that the subject of this work might have been
treated with more depth of metaphysical disquisition; and there has since
appeared an attempt to combine with this investigation the medical
science. A work, however, should be judged by its design and its
execution, and not by any preconceived notion of what it ought to be
according to the critic, rather than the author. The nature of this work
is dramatic rather than metaphysical. It offers a narration or a
description; a conversation or a monologue; an incident or a scene.
Perhaps I have sometimes too warmly apologised for the infirmities of men
of genius. From others we may hourly learn to treat with levity the man of
genius because he is _only_ such. Perhaps also I may have been too fond of
the subject, which has been for me an old and a favourite one--I may have
exalted the literary character beyond the scale by which society is
willing to fix it. Yet what is this Society, so omnipotent, so all
judicial? The society of to-day was not the society of yesterday. Its
feelings, its thoughts, its manners, its rights, its wishes, and its
wants, are different and are changed: alike changed or alike created by
those very literary characters whom it rarely comprehends and often would
despise. Let us no longer look upon this retired and peculiar class as
useless members of our busy race. There are mental as well as material
labourers. The first are not less necessary; and as they are much rarer,
so are they more precious. These are they whose "published labours" have
benefited mankind--these are they whose thoughts can alone rear that
beautiful fabric of social life, which it is the object of all good men to
elevate or to support. To discover truth and to maintain it,--to develope
the powers, to regulate the passions, to ascertain the privileges of man,
--such have ever been, and such ever ought to be, the labours of AUTHORS!
Whatever we enjoy of political and private happiness, our most necessary
knowledge as well as our most refined pleasures, are alike owing to this
class of men; and of these, some for glory, and often from benevolence,
have shut themselves out from the very beings whom they love, and for whom
they labour.
Upwards of forty years have elapsed since, composed in a distant county,
and printed at a provincial press, I published "An Essay on the Manners
and Genius of the Literary Character." To my own habitual and inherent
defects were superadded those of my youth. The crude production was,
however, not ill received, for the edition disappeared, and the subject
was found more interesting than the writer.
During a long interval of twenty years, this little work was often
recalled to my recollection by several, and by some who have since
obtained celebrity. They imagined that their attachment to literary
pursuits had been strengthened even by so weak an effort. An extraordinary
circumstance concurred with these opinions. A copy accidentally fell into
my hands which had formerly belonged to the great poetical genius of our
times; and the singular fact, that it had been more than once read by him,
and twice in two subsequent years at Athens, in 1810 and 1811, instantly
convinced me that the volume deserved my renewed attention.
It was with these feelings that I was again strongly attracted to a
subject from which, indeed, during the course of a studious life, it
had never been long diverted. The consequence of my labours was the
publication, in 1818, of an octavo volume, under the title of "The
Literary Character, illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, drawn
from their own feelings and confessions."
In the preface to this edition, in mentioning the fact respecting Lord
Byron, which had been the immediate cause of its publication, I added
these words: "I tell this fact assuredly not from any little vanity which
it may appear to betray;--for the truth is, were I not as liberal and as
candid in respect to my own productions, as I hope I am to others, I could
not have been gratified by the present circumstance; for the marginal
notes of the noble author convey no flattery;--but amidst their pungency,
and sometimes their truth, the circumstance that a man of genius could
reperuse this slight effusion at two different periods of his life, was a
sufficient authority, at least for an author, to return it once more to
the anvil."
Some time after the publication of this edition of "The Literary
Character," which was in fact a new work, I was shown, through the
kindness of an English gentleman lately returned from Italy, a copy of it,
which had been given to him by Lord Byron, and which again contained
marginal notes by the noble author. These were peculiarly interesting, and
were chiefly occasioned by observations on his character, which appeared
in the work.
In 1822 I published a new edition of this work, greatly enlarged, and in
two volumes. I took this opportunity of inserting the manuscript Notes of
Lord Byron, with the exception of one, which, however characteristic of
the amiable feelings of the noble poet, and however gratifying to my own,
I had no wish to obtrude on the notice of the public.[A]
[Footnote A: As everything connected with the reading of a mind like Lord
BYRON'S interesting to the philosophical inquirer, this note may now be
preserved. On that passage of the Preface of the second Edition which I
have already quoted, his Lordship was thus pleased to write:
"I was wrong, but I was young and petulant, and probably wrote down
anything, little thinking that those observations would be betrayed to the
author, whose abilities I have always respected, and whose works in
general I have read oftener than perhaps those of any English author
whatever, except such as treat of Turkey."]
Soon after the publication of this third edition, I received
the following letter from his lordship:--
_"Montenero, Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, June 10, 1822._
"DEAR SIR,--If you will permit me to call you so,--I had some time ago
taken up my pen at Pisa, to thank you for the present of your new edition
of the 'Literary Character,' which has often been to me a consolation, and
always a pleasure. I was interrupted, however, partly by business, and
partly by vexation of different kinds,--for I have not very long ago lost
a child by fever, and I have had a good deal of petty trouble with the
laws of this lawless country, on account of the prosecution of a servant
for an attack upon a cowardly scoundrel of a dragoon, who drew his sword
upon some unarmed Englishmen, and whom I had done the honour to mistake
for an officer, and to treat like a gentleman. He turned out to be
neither,--like many other with medals, and in uniform; but he paid for his
brutality with a severe and dangerous wound, inflicted by nobody knows
whom, for, of three suspected, and two arrested, they have been able to
identify neither; which is strange, since he was wounded in the presence
of thousands, in a public street, during a feast-day and full promenade.
--But to return to things more analogous to the 'Literary Character,' I
wish to say, that had I known that the book was to fall into your hands,
or that the MS. notes you have thought worthy of publication would have
attracted your attention, I would have made them more copious, and perhaps
not so careless.
"I really cannot know whether I am, or am not, the genius you are pleased
to call me,--but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be
one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it
endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never _can_ be,
till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, have
sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.
"Mr. Murray is in possession of a MS. memoir of mine (not to be published
till I am in my grave), which, strange as it may seem, I never read over
since it was written, and have no desire to read over again. In it I have
told what, as far as I know, is the _truth_--_not the whole_ truth--for if
I had done so, I must have involved much private, and some dissipated
history: but, nevertheless, nothing but truth, as far as regard for others
permitted it to appear.
"I do not know whether you have seen those MSS.; but, as you are curious
in such things as relate to the human mind, I should feel gratified if you
had. I also sent him (Murray), a few days since, a Common-place Book, by
my friend Lord Clare, containing a few things, which may perhaps aid his
publication in case of his surviving me. If there are any questions which
you would like to ask me, as connected with your philosophy of the
literary mind (_if_ mine be a literary mind), I will answer them fairly,
or give a reason for _not_, good--bad--or indifferent. At present, I am
paying the penalty of having helped to spoil the public taste; for, as
long as I wrote in the false exaggerated style of youth and the times in
which we live, they applauded me to the very echo; and within these few
years, when I have endeavoured at better things, and written what I
suspect to have the principle of duration in it: the Church, the
Chancellor, and all men, even to my grand patron, Francis Jeffrey, Esq.,
of the _Edinburgh Review_, have risen up against me, and my later
publications. Such is Truth! men dare not look her in the face, except by
degrees; they mistake her for a Gorgon, instead of knowing her to be
Minerva. I do not mean to apply this mythological simile to my own
endeavours, but I have only to turn over a few pages of your volumes to
find innumerable and far more illustrious instances. It is lucky that I am
of a temper not to be easily turned aside, though by no means difficult to
irritate. But I am making a dissertation, instead of writing a letter. I
write to you from the Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, with the islands of Elba
and Corsica visible from my balcony, and my old friend the Mediterranean
rolling blue at my feet. As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for
Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions, and resist or
endure those of others.
"I have the honour to be, truly,
"Your obliged and faithful servant,
"NOEL BYRON.
"To I. D'Israeli, Esq."
The ill-starred expedition to Greece followed this letter.
* * * * *
This work, conceived in youth, executed by the research of manhood, and
associated with the noblest feelings of our nature, is an humble but
fervent tribute, offered to the memory of those Master Spirits from whose
labours, as BURKE eloquently describes, "their country receives permanent
service: those who know how to make the silence of their closets more
beneficial to the world than all the noise and bustle of courts, senates,
and camps."
LITERARY CHARACTER.
CHAPTER I.
Of Literary Characters, and of the Lovers of Literature and Art.
Diffused over enlightened Europe, an order of men has arisen, who,
uninfluenced by the interests or the passions which give an impulse to the
other classes of society, are connected by the secret links of congenial
pursuits, and, insensibly to themselves, are combining in the same common
labours, and participating in the same divided glory. In the metropolitan
cities of Europe the same authors are now read, and the same opinions
become established: the Englishman is familiar with Machiavel and
Montesquieu; the Italian and the Frenchman with Bacon and Locke; and the
same smiles and tears are awakened on the banks of the Thames, of the
Seine, or of the Guadalquivir, by Shakspeare, Molière, and Cervantes--
Contemporains de tous les hommes,
Et citoyens de tous les lieux.
A khan of Tartary admired the wit of Molière, and discovered the Tartuffe
in the Crimea; and had this ingenious sovereign survived the translation
which he ordered, the immortal labour of the comic satirist of France
might have laid the foundation of good taste even among the Turks and the
Tartars. We see the Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an
English critic, Lord Bolingbroke, for decisive authority on the peculiar
characteristics of the historian Guicciardini: the German Schlegel writes
on our Shakspeare like a patriot; and while the Italians admire the noble
scenes which our Flaxman has drawn from their great poet, they have
rejected the feeble attempts of their native artists. Such is the wide and
the perpetual influence of this living intercourse of literary minds.
Scarcely have two centuries elapsed since the literature of every nation
was limited to its fatherland, and men of genius long could only hope for
the spread of their fame in the single language of ancient Rome; which for
them had ceased to be natural, and could never be popular. It was in the
intercourse of the wealth, the power, and the novel arts of the nations of
Europe, that they learned each other's languages; and they discovered
that, however their manners varied as they arose from their different
customs, they participated in the same intellectual faculties, suffered
from the same wants, and were alive to the same pleasures; they perceived
that there were no conventional fashions, nor national distinctions, in
abstract truths and fundamental knowledge. A new spirit seems to bring
them nearer to each other: and, as if literary Europe were intent to form
but one people out of the populace of mankind, they offer their reciprocal
labours; they pledge to each other the same opinions; and that knowledge
which, like a small river, takes its source from one spot, at length
mingles with the ocean-stream common to them all.
But those who stand connected with this literary community are not always
sensible of the kindred alliance; even a genius of the first order has not
always been aware that he is the founder of a society, and that there will
ever be a brotherhood where there is a father-genius.
These literary characters are partially, and with a melancholy colouring,
exhibited by JOHNSON. "To talk in private, to think in solitude, to
inquire or to answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders
about the world without pomp or terror; and is neither known nor valued
but by men like himself." Thus thought this great writer during those sad
probationary years of genius when
Slow rises worth, by _poverty_ depress'd;
not yet conscious that he himself was devoting his days to cast the minds
of his contemporaries and of the succeeding age in the mighty mould of his
own; JOHNSON was of that order of men whose individual genius becomes that
of a people. A prouder conception rose in the majestic mind of MILTON, of
"that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have
consented shall be the reward of those whose PUBLISHED LABOURS advanced
the good of mankind."
The LITERARY CHARACTER is a denomination which, however vague, defines the
pursuits of the individual, and separates him from other professions,
although it frequently occurs that he is himself a member of one.
Professional characters are modified by the change of manners, and are
usually national; while the literary character, from the objects in which
it concerns itself, retains a more permanent, and necessarily a more
independent nature.
Formed by the same habits, and influenced by the same motives,
notwithstanding the contrast of talents and tempers, and the remoteness of
times and places, the literary character has ever preserved among its
followers the most striking family resemblance. The passion for study, the
delight in books, the desire of solitude and celebrity, the obstructions
of human life, the character of their pursuits, the uniformity of their
habits, the triumphs and the disappointments of literary glory, were as
truly described by CICERO and the younger PLINY as by PETRARCH and
ERASMUS, and as they have been by HUME and GIBBON. And this similarity,
too, may equally be remarked with respect to that noble passion of the
lovers of literature and of art for collecting together their mingled
treasures; a thirst which was as insatiable in ATTICUS and PEIRESC as in
our CRACHERODE and TOWNLEY.[A] We trace the feelings of our literary
contemporaries in all ages, and among every people who have ranked with
nations far advanced in civilization; for among these may be equally
observed both the great artificers of knowledge and those who preserve
unbroken the vast chain of human acquisitions. The one have stamped the
images of their minds on their works, and the others have preserved the
circulation of this intellectual coinage, this
--Gold of the dead,
Which Time does still disperse, but not devour.
[Footnote A: The Rev. C.M. Cracherode bequeathed at his death, in 1799, to
the British Museum, the large collection of literature, art, and virtu he
had employed an industrious life in collecting. His books numbered nearly
4500 volumes, many of great rarity and value. His drawings, many by early
Italian masters, and all rare or curious, were deposited in the print-room
of the same establishment; his antiquities, &c. were in a similar way
added to the other departments. The "Townley Gallery" of classic sculpture
was purchased of his executors by Government for 28,200_l_. It had been
collected with singular taste and judgment, as well as some amount of good
fortune also; Townley resided at Rome during the researches on the site of
Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli; and he had for aids and advisers Sir William
Hamilton, Gavin Hamilton, and other active collectors; and was the friend
and correspondent of D'Haucarville and Winckelmann.--ED.]
CHAPTER II.
Of the Adversaries of Literary Men among themselves.--Matter-of-fact
Men, and Men of Wit.--The Political Economist.--Of those who abandon
their studies.--Men in office.--The arbiters of public opinion.--Those
who treat the pursuits of literature with levity.
The pursuits of literature have been openly or insidiously lowered by
those literary men who, from motives not always difficult to penetrate,
are eager to confound the ranks in the republic of letters, maliciously
conferring the honours of authorship on that "Ten Thousand" whose recent
list is not so much a muster-roll of heroes as a table of population.[A]
Matter-of-fact men, or men of knowledge, and men of wit and taste, were
long inimical to each other's pursuits.[B] The Royal Society in its origin
could hardly support itself against the ludicrous attacks of literary
men,[C] and the Antiquarian Society has afforded them amusement.[D] Such
partial views have ceased to contract the understanding. Science yields a
new substance to literature; literature combines new associations for the
votaries of knowledge. There is no subject in nature, and in the history
of man, which will not associate with our feelings and our curiosity,
whenever genius extends its awakening hand. The antiquary, the naturalist,
the architect, the chemist, and even writers on medical topics, have in
our days asserted their claims, and discovered their long-interrupted
relationship with the great family of genius and literature.
[Footnote A: We have a Dictionary of "Ten Thousand living Authors" of our
own nation. The alphabet is fatal by its juxtapositions. In France, before
the Revolution, they counted about twenty thousand writers. When David
would have his people numbered, Joab asked, "Why doth my lord delight in
this?" In political economy, the population returns may be useful,
provided they be correct; but in the literary republic, its numerical
force diminishes the strength of the empire. "There you are numbered, we
had rather you were weighed." Put aside the puling infants of literature,
of whom such a mortality occurs in its nurseries; such as the writers of
the single sermon, the single law-tract, the single medical dissertation,
&c.; all writers whose subject is single, without being singular; count
for nothing the inefficient mob of mediocrists; and strike out our
literary _charlatans_; and then our alphabet of men of genius will not
consist, as it now does, of the four-and-twenty letters.]
[Footnote B: The cause is developed in the chapter on "Want of Mutual
Esteem."]
[Footnote C: See BUTLER, in his "Elephant in the Moon." SOUTH, in his
oration at the opening of the theatre at Oxford, passed this bitter
sarcasm on the naturalists,--"_Mirantur nihil nisi pulices, pediculos--et
se ipsos_;"--nothing they admire but fleas, lice, and themselves! The
illustrious SLOANE endured a long persecution from the bantering humour of
Dr. KING. One of the most amusing declaimers against what he calls _les
Sciences des faux Sçavans_ is Father MALEBRANCHE; he is far more severe
than Cornelius Agrippa, and he long preceded ROUSSEAU, so famous for his
invective against the sciences. The seventh chapter of his fourth book is
an inimitable satire. "The principal excuse," says he, "which engages men
in _false studies_, is, that they have attached the _idea of learned_
where they should not." Astronomy, antiquarianism, history, ancient
poetry, and natural history, are all mowed down by his metaphysical
scythe. When we become acquainted with the _idea_ Father Malebranche
attaches to the term _learned_, we understand him--and we smile.]
[Footnote D: See the chapter on "Puck the Commentator," in the
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii.; also p. 304 of the same volume.]
A new race of jargonists, the barbarous metaphysicians of political
economy, have struck at the essential existence of the productions of
genius in literature and art; for, appreciating them by their own
standard, they have miserably degraded the professors. Absorbed in the
contemplation of material objects, and rejecting whatever does not enter
into their own restricted notion of "utility," these cold arithmetical
seers, with nothing but millions in their imagination; and whose choicest
works of art are spinning-jennies, have valued the intellectual tasks of
the library and the studio by "the demand and the supply." They have sunk
these pursuits into the class of what they term "unproductive labour;" and
by another result of their line and level system, men of letters, with
some other important characters, are forced down into the class "of
buffoons, singers, opera-dancers, &c." In a system of political economy it
has been discovered that "that _unprosperous race_ of men, called _men of
letters_, must _necessarily_ occupy their present _forlorn state_ in
society much as formerly, when a scholar and a beggar seem to have been
terms very nearly synonymous."[A] In their commercial, agricultural, and
manufacturing view of human nature, addressing society by its most
pressing wants and its coarsest feelings, these theorists limit the moral
and physical existence of man by speculative tables of population, planing
and levelling society down in their carpentry of human nature. They would
yoke and harness the loftier spirits to one common and vulgar destination.
Man is considered only as he wheels on the wharf, or as he spins in the
factory; but man, as a recluse being of meditation, or impelled to action
by more generous passions, has been struck out of the system of our
political economists. It is, however, only among their "unproductive
labourers" that we shall find those men of leisure, whose habitual
pursuits are consumed in the development of thought and the gradual
accessions of knowledge; those men of whom the sage of Judea declares,
that "It is he who hath little business who shall become wise: how can he
get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and whose talk is of bullocks? But
THEY,"--the men of leisure and study,--"WILL MAINTAIN THE STATE OF THE
WORLD!" The prosperity and the happiness of a people include something
more evident and more permanent than "the Wealth of a Nation."[B]
[Footnote A: "Wealth of Nations," i. 182.]
[Footnote B: Since this murmur has been uttered against the degrading
views of some of those theorists, it afforded me pleasure to observe that
Mr. Malthus has fully sanctioned its justness. On this head, at least, Mr.
Malthus has amply confuted his stubborn and tasteless brothers. Alluding
to the productions of genius, this writer observes, that, "to estimate the
value of NEWTON'S discoveries, or the delight communicated by SHAKSPEAKE
and MILTON, by the _price_ at which their works have sold, would be but a
poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their
country."--_Principles of Pol. Econ._ p. 48. And hence he acknowledges,
that "_some unproductive labour is of much more use and importance_ than
productive labour, but is incapable of being the subject of the gross
calculations which relate to national wealth; contributing to _other
sources of happiness_ besides those which are derived from matter."
Political economists would have smiled with contempt on the querulous
PORSON, who once observed, that "it seemed to him very hard, that with all
his critical knowledge of Greek, he could not get a hundred pounds." They
would have demonstrated to the learned Grecian, that this was just as it
ought to be; the same occurrence had even happened to HOMER in his own
country, where Greek ought to have fetched a higher price than in England;
but, that both might have obtained this hundred pounds, had the Grecian
bard and the Greek professor been employed at the same stocking-frame
together, instead of the "Iliad."]
There is a more formidable class of men of genius who are heartless to the
interests of literature. Like CORNELIUS AGRIPPA, who wrote on "the vanity
of the arts and sciences," many of these are only tracing in the arts
which they have abandoned their own inconstant tempers, their feeble
tastes, and their disordered judgments. But, with others of this class,
study has usually served as the instrument, not as the object, of their
ascent; it was the ladder which they once climbed, but it was not the
eastern star which guided and inspired. Such literary characters were
WARBURTON,[A] WATSON, and WILKES, who abandoned their studies when their
studies had served a purpose.
[Footnote A: For a full disquisition of the character and career of
Warburton, see the essay in "Quarrels of Authors."]
WATSON gave up his pursuits in chemistry the instant he obtained their
limited reward, and the laboratory closed when the professorship was
instituted. Such was the penurious love he bore for the science which he
had adopted, that the extraordinary discoveries of thirty years subsequent
to his own first essays could never excite even an idle inquiry. He tells
us that he preferred "his larches to his laurels:" the wretched jingle
expressed the mere worldliness that dictated it. In the same spirit of
calculation with which he had at first embraced science and literature, he
abandoned them; and his ingenuous confession is a memorable example of
that egotistic pride which betrayed in the literary character the creature
of selfism and political ambition.
We are accustomed to consider WILKES merely as a political adventurer, and
it may surprise to find this "city chamberlain" ranked among professed
literary characters: yet in his variable life there was a period when he
cherished the aspirations of a votary. Once he desired Lloyd to announce
the edition of Churchill, which he designed to enrich by a commentary; and
his correspondence on this subject, which has never appeared, would, as he
himself tells us, afford a variety of hints and communications. Wilkes was
then warmed by literary glory; for on his retirement into Italy, he
declared, "I mean to give myself entirely to our friend's work, and to my
History of England. I wish to equal the dignity of Livy: I am sure the
greatness and majesty of our nation demand an historian equal to him."
They who have only heard of the intriguing demagogue, and witnessed the
last days of the used voluptuary, may hardly imagine that Wilkes had ever
cherished such elevated projects; but mob-politics made this adventurer's
fortune, which fell to the lot of an epicurean: and the literary glory he
once sought he lived to ridicule, in the immortal diligence of Lord
Chatham and of Gibbon. Dissolving life away, and consuming all his
feelings on himself, Wilkes left his nearest relatives what he left the
world--the memory of an anti-social being! This wit, who has bequeathed to
us no wit; this man of genius, who has formed no work of genius; this
bold advocate for popular freedom, who sunk his patriotism in the
chamberlainship; was indeed desirous of leaving behind him some trace of
the life of an _escroc_ in a piece of autobiography, which, for the
benefit of the world, has been thrown to the flames.
Men who have ascended into office through its gradations, or have been
thrown upwards by accident, are apt to view others in a cloud of passions
and politics. They who once commanded us by their eloquence, come at
length to suspect the eloquent; and in their "pride of office" would now
drive us by that single force of despotism which is the corruption of
political power. Our late great Minister, Pitt, has been reproached even
by his friends for the contemptuous indifference with which he treated
literary men. Perhaps BURKE himself, long a literary character, might
incur some portion of this censure, by involving the character itself in
the odium of a monstrous political sect. These political characters
resemble Adrian VI., who, obtaining the tiara as the reward of his
studies, afterwards persecuted literary men, and, say the Italians,
dreaded lest his brothers might shake the Pontificate itself.[A]
Worst fares it with authors when minds of this cast become the arbiters of
public opinion; for the greatest of writers may unquestionably be forced
into ridiculous attitudes by the well-known artifices practised by modern
criticism. The elephant, no longer in his forest struggling with his
hunters, but falling entrapped by a paltry snare, comes at length, in the
height of ill-fortune, to dance on heated iron at the bidding of the
pantaloon of a fair. Whatever such critics may plead to mortify the
vanity of authors, at least it requires as much vanity to give effect to
their own polished effrontery.[B] Scorn, sarcasm, and invective, the
egotism of the vain, and the irascibility of the petulant, where they
succeed in debilitating genius of the consciousness of its powers, are
practising the witchery of that ancient superstition of "tying the knot,"
which threw the youthful bridegroom into utter despair by its ideal
forcefulness.[C]
[Footnote A: It has been suspected that Adrian VI. has been calumniated,
for that this pontiff was only too sudden to begin the reform he
meditated. But Adrian VI. was a scholastic whose austerity turned away
with contempt from all ancient art, and was no brother to contemporary
genius. He was one of the _cui bono_ race, a branch of our political
economists. When they showed him the Laocoön, Adrian silenced their
raptures by the frigid observation, that all such things were _idola
antiquorum_: and ridiculed the _amena letteratura_ till every man of
genius retreated from his court. Had Adrian's reign extended beyond its
brief period, men of taste in their panic imagined that in his zeal the
Pontiff would have calcined the fine statues of ancient art, to expedite
the edifice of St. Peter.]
[Footnote B: Listen to a confession and a recantation of an illustrious
sinner; the Coryphæus of the amusing and new-found art, or artifice, of
modern criticism. In the character of BURNS, the Edinburgh Reviewer, with
his peculiar felicity of manner, attacked the character of the man of
genius; but when Mr. Campbell vindicated his immortal brother with all the
inspiration of the family feeling, our critic, who is one of those great
artists who acquire at length the utmost indifference even for their own
works, generously avowed that, "a certain tone of exaggeration is
incidental _we fear to the sort of writing in which we are engaged_.
Reckoning a little too much on the dulness of our readers, we are often
led to _overstate our sentiments_: when a little _controversial warmth_ is
added to a little _love of effect_, an excess of colouring steals over the
canvas, which ultimately offends no eye so much as our own." But what if
this _love of effect_ in the critic has been too often obtained at the
entire cost of the literary characters, the fruits of whose studious days
at this moment lie withering in oblivion, or whose genius the critic has
deterred from pursuing the career it had opened for itself! To have
silenced the learned, and to have terrified the modest, is the barbarous
triumph of a Hun or a Vandal; and the vaunted freedom of the literary
republic departed from us when the vacillating public blindly consecrated
the edicts of the demagogues of literature, whoever they may be.
A reaction appears in the burlesque or bantering spirit. While one faction
drives out another, the abuse of extraordinary powers is equally fatal.
Thus we are consoled while we are afflicted, and we are protected while we
are degraded.]
[Footnote C: _Nouer l'aiguillette_, of which the extraordinary effect is
described by Montaigne, is an Oriental custom still practised.--_Mr.
Hobhouse's Journey through Albania_, p. 528.]
That spirit of levity which would shake the columns of society, by
detracting from or burlesquing the elevating principles which have
produced so many illustrious men, has recently attempted to reduce the
labours of literature to a mere curious amusement: a finished composition
is likened to a skilful game of billiards, or a piece of music finely
executed; and curious researches, to charades and other insignificant
puzzles. With such, an author is an idler who will not be idle, amusing or
fatiguing others who are completely so. The result of a work of genius
is contracted to the art of writing; but this art is only its last
perfection. Inspiration is drawn from a deeper source; enthusiasm is
diffused through contagious pages; and without these movements of the
soul, how poor and artificial a thing is that sparkling composition which
flashes with the cold vibrations of mere art or artifice! We have been
recently told, on critical authority, that "a great genius should never
allow himself to be sensible to his own celebrity, nor deem his pursuits
of much consequence, however important or successful." A sort of catholic
doctrine, to mortify an author into a saint, extinguishing the glorious
appetite of fame by one Lent all the year, and self-flagellation every
day! BUFFON and GIBBON, VOLTAIRE and POPE,[A] who gave to literature
all the cares, the industry, and the glory of their lives, assuredly
were too "sensible to their celebrity, and deemed their pursuits of
much consequence," particularly when "important and successful." The
self-possession of great authors sustains their own genius by a sense of
their own glory.
Such, then, are some of the domestic treasons of the literary character
against literature--"Et tu, Brute!" But the hero of literature outlives
his assassins, and might address them in that language of poetry
and affection with which a Mexican king reproached his traitorous
counsellors:--"You were the feathers of my wings, and the eyelids of my
eyes."
[Footnote A: The claims of Pope to the title of a great poet were denied
in the days of Byron; and occasioned a warm and noble defence of him by
that poet. It has since been found necessary to do the same for Byron,
whom some transcendentalists have attacked.--ED.]
CHAPTER III.
Of artists, in the history of men of literary genius.--Their habits and
pursuits analogous.--The nature of their genius is similar in their
distinct works.--Shown by their parallel eras, and by a common end pursued
by both.
Artists and literary men, alike insulated in their studies, pass through
the same permanent discipline; and thus it has happened that the same
habits and feelings, and the same fortunes, have accompanied men who have
sometimes unhappily imagined their pursuits not to be analogous.
Let the artist share
The palm; he shares the peril, and dejected
Faints o'er the labour unapproved--alas!
Despair and genius!--
The congenial histories of literature and art describe the same periodical
revolutions and parallel eras. After the golden age of Latinity, we
gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into
the iron. In the history of painting, after the splendid epoch of Raphael,
Titian, and Correggio, we meet with pleasure the Oarraccis, Domenichino,
Guido, and Albano; as we read Paterculus, Quintilian, Seneca, Juvenal, and
Silius Italicus, after their immortal masters, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, and
Horace.
It is evident that MILTON, MICHAEL ANGELO, and HANDEL, belong to the same
order of minds; the same imaginative powers, and the same sensibility, are
only operating with different materials. LANZI, the delightful historian
of the _Storia Pittorica_, is prodigal of his comparisons of the painters
with the poets; his delicacy of perception discerned the refined analogies
which for ever unite the two sisters, and he fondly dwelt on the
transplanted flowers of the two arts: "_Chi sente che sia Tibullo nel
poetare sente chi sia Andrea (del Sarto) nel dipingere_;" he who feels
what TIBULLUS is in poetry, feels what ANDREA is in painting. MICHAEL
ANGELO, from his profound conception of the terrible and the difficult in
art, was called its DANTE; from the Italian poet the Italian sculptor
derived the grandeur of his ideas; and indeed the visions of the bard had
deeply nourished the artist's imagination; for once he had poured about
the margins of his own copy their ethereal inventions, in the rapid
designs of his pen. And so Bellori informs us of a very curious volume in
manuscript, composed by RUBENS, which contained, among other topics
concerning art, descriptions of the passions and actions of men, drawn
from the poets, and demonstrated to the eye by the painters. Here were
battles, shipwrecks, sports, groups, and other incidents, which were
transcribed from Virgil and other poets, and by their side RUBENS had
copied what he had met with on those subjects from Raphael and the
antique.[A]
The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of
their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle
contest. This old family-quarrel for precedence was renewed by our
estimable President, in his brilliant "Rhymes on Art;" where he maintains
that "the narrative of an action is not comparable to the action itself
before the eyes;" while the enthusiast BARRY considers painting "as poetry
realised."[B] This error of genius, perhaps first caught from Richardson's
bewildering pages, was strengthened by the extravagant principle adopted
by Darwin, who, to exalt his solitary talent of descriptive poetry,
asserted that "the essence of poetry was picture." The philosophical
critic will find no difficulty in assigning to each, sister-art her
distinct province; and it is only a pleasing delirium, in the enthusiasm
of artists, which has confused the boundaries of these arts. The dread
pathetic story of Dante's "Ugolino," under the plastic hand of Michael
Angelo, formed the subject of a basso-relievo; and Reynolds, with his
highest effort, embodied the terrific conception of the poet as much as
his art permitted: but assuredly both these great artists would never have
claimed the precedence of the Dantesc genius, and might have hesitated at
the rivalry.
[Footnote A: Rubens was an ardent collector of works of antique art; and
in the "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 398, will be found an
interesting account of his museum at Antwerp.--ED.]
[Footnote B: The late Sir Martin Archer Shee, P.R.A. This accomplished
artist, who possessed a large amount of poetical and literary power, asks,
"What is there of _intellectual_ in the operations of the poet which the
painter does not equal? What is there of _mechanical_ which he does not
surpass? The advantage which poetry possesses over painting in continued
narration and successive impression, cannot be advanced as a peculiar
merit of the poet, since it results from the nature of language, and is
common to prose." Poetry he values as the earliest of arts, painting as
the latest and most refined.--ED.]
Who has not heard of that one common principle which unites the
intellectual arts, and who has not felt that the nature of their genius is
similar in their distinct works? Hence curious inquiries could never
decide whether the group of the Laocoön in sculpture preceded or was
borrowed from that in poetry. Lessing conjectures that the sculptor copied
the poet. It is evident that the agony of Laocoön was the common end where
the sculptor and the poet were to meet; and we may observe that the
artists in marble and in verse skilfully adapted their variations to their
respective art: the one having to prefer the _nude_, rejected the veiling
fillet from the forehead, that he might not conceal its deep expression,
and the drapery of the sacrificial robe, that he might display the human
form in visible agony; but the other, by the charm of verse, could invest
the priest with the pomp of the pontifical robe without hiding from us the
interior sufferings of the human victim. We see they obtained by different
means, adapted to their respective arts, that common end which each
designed; but who will decide which invention preceded the other, or who
was the greater artist?
This approximation of men apparently of opposite pursuits is so natural,
that when Gesner, in his inspiring letter on landscape-painting,[A]
recommends to the young painter a constant study of poetry and literature,
the impatient artist is made to exclaim, "Must we combine with so many
other studies those which belong to literary men? Must we read as well as
paint?" "It is useless to reply to this question; for some important
truths must be instinctively felt, perhaps the fundamental ones in the
arts." A truly imaginative artist, whose enthusiasm was never absent when
he meditated on the art he loved, BARRY, thus vehemently broke forth: "Go
home from the academy, light up your lamps, and exercise yourselves in the
creative part of your art, with Homer, with Livy, and all the great
characters, ancient and modern, for your companions and counsellors." This
genial intercourse of literature with art may be proved by painters who
have suggested subjects to poets, and poets who have selected them for
painters. GOLDSMITH suggested the subject of the tragic and pathetic
picture of Ugolino to the pencil of REYNOLDS.
All the classes of men in society have their peculiar sorrows and
enjoyments, as they have their peculiar habits and characteristics. In
the history of men of genius we may often open the secret story of their
minds, for they have above others the privilege of communicating their
own feelings; and every life of a man of genius, composed by himself,
presents us with the experimental philosophy of the mind. By living with
their brothers, and contemplating their masters, they will judge from
consciousness less erroneously than from discussion; and in forming
comparative views and parallel situations, they will discover certain
habits and feelings, and find these reflected in themselves.
SYDENHAM has beautifully said, "Whoever describes a violet exactly as to
its colour, taste, smell, form, and other properties, will find the
description agree in most particulars with all the violets in the
universe."
[Footnote A: Few writers were so competent to instruct in art as Gesner,
who was not only an author and a poet, but an artist who decorated his
poems by designs as graceful as their subject.--ED.]
CHAPTER IV.
Of natural genius.--Minds constitutionally different cannot have an equal
aptitude.--Genius not the result of habit and education.--Originates in
peculiar qualities of the mind.--The predisposition of genius.--A
substitution for the white paper of Locke.[A]
[Footnote A: In the second edition of this work in 1818, I touched on some
points of this inquiry in the second chapter: I almost despaired to find
any philosopher sympathise with the subject, so invulnerable, they
imagine, are the entrenchments of their theories. I was agreeably
surprised to find these ideas taken up in the _Edinburgh Review_ for
August, 1820, in an entertaining article on Reynolds. I have, no doubt,
profited by the perusal, though this chapter was prepared before I met
with that spirited vindication of "an inherent difference in the organs or
faculties to receive impressions of any kind."]
That faculty in art which individualises the artist, belonging to him and
to no other, and which in a work forms that creative part whose likeness
is not found in any other work--is it inherent in the constitutional
dispositions of the Creator, or can it be formed by patient acquisition?
Astonished at their own silent and obscure progress, some have imagined
that they have formed their genius solely by their own studies; when they
generated, they conceived that they had acquired; and, losing the
distinction between nature and habit, with fatal temerity the idolatry of
philosophy substituted something visible and palpable, yet shaped by the
most opposite fancies, called a Theory, for Nature herself! Men of genius,
whose great occupation is to be conversant with the inspirations of
Nature, made up a factitious one among themselves, and assumed that they
could operate without the intervention of the occult original. But Nature
would not be mocked; and whenever this race of idolaters have worked
without her agency, she has afflicted them with the most stubborn
sterility.
Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of our own philosophical
times; ages of genius had passed away, and they left no other record than
their works; no preconcerted theory described the workings of the
imagination to be without imagination, nor did they venture to teach how
to invent invention.
The character of genius, viewed as the effect of habit and education, on
the principle of the equality of the human mind, infers that men have an
equal aptitude for the work of genius: a paradox which, with a more fatal
one, came from the French school, and arose probably from an equivocal
expression.
Locke employed the well-known comparison of the mind with "white paper
void of all characters," to free his famous "Inquiry" from that powerful
obstacle to his system, the absurd belief of "innate ideas," of notions of
objects before objects were presented to observation. Our philosopher
considered that this simple analogy sufficiently described the manner in
which he conceived the impressions of the senses write themselves on the
mind. His French pupils, the amusing Helvetius, or Diderot, for they
were equally concerned in the paradoxical "L'Esprit," inferred that this
blank paper served also as an evidence that men had _an equal aptitude for
genius_, just as the blank paper reflects to us whatever characters we
trace on it. This _equality of minds_ gave rise to the same monstrous
doctrine in the science of metaphysics which that of another verbal
misconception, _the equality of men_, did in that of politics. The
Scottish metaphysicians powerfully combined to illustrate the mechanism of
the mind,--an important and a curious truth; for as rules and principles
exist in the nature of things, and when discovered are only thence drawn
out, genius unconsciously conducts itself by a uniform process; and
when this process had been traced, they inferred that what was done by
some men, under the influence of fundamental laws which regulate the
march of the intellect, must also be in the reach of others, who, in the
same circumstances, apply themselves to the same study. But these
metaphysicians resemble anatomists, under whose knife all men are alike.
They know the structure of the bones, the movement of the muscles, and
where the connecting ligaments lie! but the invisible principle of life
flies from their touch. It is the practitioner on the living body who
studies in every individual that peculiarity of constitution which forms
the idiosyncrasy.
Under the influence of such novel theories of genius, JOHNSON defined it
as "A Mind of large general powers ACCIDENTALLY determined by some
_particular direction_." On this principle we must infer that the
reasoning LOCKE, or the arithmetical DE MOIVRE, could have been the
musical and fairy SPENSER.[A] This conception of the nature of genius
became prevalent. It induced the philosophical BECCARIA to assert that
every individual had an equal degree of genius for poetry and eloquence;
it runs through the philosophy of the elegant Dugald Stewart; and
REYNOLDS, the pupil of Johnson in literature, adopting the paradox,
constructed his automatic system on this principle of _equal aptitude_. He
says, "this excellence, however expressed by genius, taste, or the gift of
Heaven, I am confident may be _acquired_." Reynolds had the modesty to
fancy that so many rivals, unendowed by nature, might have equalled the
magic of his own pencil: but his theory of industry, so essential to
genius, yet so useless without it, too long stimulated the drudges of art,
and left us without a Correggio or a Raphael! Another man of genius caught
the fever of the new system. CURRIE, in his eloquent "Life of Burns,"
swells out the scene of genius to a startling magnificence; for he asserts
that, "the talents necessary to the construction of an 'Iliad,' under
different discipline and application, might have led armies to victory or
kingdoms to prosperity; might have wielded the thunder of eloquence, or
discovered and enlarged the sciences." All this we find in the _text_; but
in the clear intellect of this man of genius a vast number of intervening
difficulties started up, and in a copious _note_ the numerous exceptions
show that the assumed theory requires no other refutation than what the
theorist has himself so abundantly and so judiciously supplied. There is
something ludicrous in the result of a theory of genius which would
place HOBBES and ERASMUS, those timid and learned recluses, to open a
campaign with the military invention and physical intrepidity of a
Marlborough; or conclude that the romantic bard of the "Fairy Queen,"
amidst the quickly-shifting scenes of his visionary reveries, could have
deduced, by slow and patient watchings of the mind, the system and the
demonstrations of Newton.
[Footnote A: It is more dangerous to define than to describe: a dry
definition excludes so much, an ardent description at once appeals to our
sympathies. How much more comprehensible our great critic becomes when he
nobly describes genius, "as the power of mind that collects, combines,
amplifies, and animates; the energy without which judgment is cold, and
knowledge is inert!" And it is this POWER OF MIND, this primary faculty
and native aptitude, which we deem may exist separately from education and
habit, since these are often found unaccompanied by genius.]
Such theorists deduce the faculty called genius from a variety of exterior
or secondary causes: zealously rejecting the notion that genius may
originate in constitutional dispositions, and be only a mode of the
individual's existence, they deny that minds are differently constituted.
Habit and education, being more palpable and visible in their operations,
and progressive in the development of the intellectual faculties, have
been imagined fully sufficient to make the creative faculty a subject of
acquirement.
But when these theorists had discovered the curious fact, that we have
owed to _accident_ several men of genius, and when they laid open some
sources which influenced genius in its progress, they did not go one step
further, they did not inquire whether such sources and such accidents had
ever supplied the _want of genius_ in the individual. Effects were here
again mistaken for causes. Could Spenser have kindled a poet in Cowley,
Richardson a painter in Reynolds, and Descartes a metaphysician in
Malebranche, if those master-minds, pointed out as having been such from
_accident_, had not first received the indelible mint-stamp struck by the
hand of Nature, and which, to give it a name, we may be allowed to call
the _predisposition_ of genius? The _accidents_ so triumphantly held
forth, which are imagined to have created the genius of these men, have
occurred to a thousand who have run the same career; but how does it
happen that the multitude remain a multitude, and the man of genius
arrives alone at the goal?
This theory, which long dazzled its beholders, was in time found to stand
in contradiction with itself, and perpetually with their own experience.
Reynolds pared down his decision in the progress of his lectures, often
wavered, often altered, and grew more confused as he lived longer to look
about him.[A] The infirm votaries of the new philosophy, with all their
sources of genius open before them, went on multiplying mediocrity, while
inherent genius, true to nature, still continued rare in its solitary
independence.
[Footnote A: I transcribe the last opinions of Mr. Edgeworth. "As to
original genius, and the effect of education in forming taste or directing
talent, the last revisal of his opinions was given by himself, in the
introduction to the second edition of 'Professional Education.' He was
strengthened in his belief, that many of the great differences of
intellect which appear in men, depend more upon the early cultivating the
habit of attention than upon any disparity between the powers of one
individual and another. Perhaps, he latterly allowed that there is more
difference than he had formerly admitted between the _natural powers_ of
different persons; but not so great as is generally supposed."--
_Edgeworth's Memoirs_, ii. 388.]
Others have strenuously denied that we are born with any peculiar species
of mind, and resolve the mysterious problem into _capacity_, of which men
only differ in the degree. They can perceive no distinction between the
poetical and the mathematical genius; and they conclude that a man of
genius, possessing a general capacity, may become whatever he chooses, but
is determined by his first acquired habit to be what he is.[A]
In substituting the term _capacity_ for that of _genius_, the origin or
nature remains equally occult. How is it acquired, or how is it inherent?
To assert that any man of genius may become what he wills, those most
fervently protest against who feel that the character of genius is such
that it cannot be other than it is; that there is an identity of minds,
and that there exists an interior conformity as marked and as perfect as
the exterior physiognomy. A Scotch metaphysician has recently declared
that "Locke or Newton might have been as eminent poets as Homer or Milton,
had they given themselves early to the study of poetry." It is well to
know how far this taste will go. We believe that had these philosophers
obstinately, against nature, persisted in the attempt, as some have
unluckily for themselves, we should have lost two great philosophers, and
have obtained two supernumerary poets.[B]
It would be more useful to discover another source of genius for
philosophers and poets, less fallible than the gratuitous assumptions of
these theorists. An adequate origin for peculiar qualities in the mind may
be found in that constitutional or secret propensity which adapts some for
particular pursuits, and forms the _predisposition_ of genius.
[Footnote A: Johnson once asserted, that "the supposition of one man
having more imagination, another more judgment, is not true; it is only
one man has _more mind_ than another. He who has vigour may walk to the
east as well as the west, if he happens to turn his head that way." Godwin
was persuaded that all genius is a mere _acquisition_, for he hints at
"infusing it," and making it a thing "heritable." A reversion which has
been missed by the many respectable dunces who have been sons of men of
genius.]
[Footnote B: This very Scotch metaphysician, at the instant he lays down
this postulate, acknowledges that "Dr. Beattie had talents for a _poet_,
but apparently not for a _philosopher_." It is amusing to learn another
result of his ungenial metaphysics. This sage demonstrates and concludes
in these words, "It will therefore be found, with little exception, that
_a great poet is but an ordinary genius_." Let this sturdy Scotch
metaphysician never approach Pegasus--he has to fear, not his wings, but
his heels. If some have written on genius with a great deal too much,
others have written without any.]
Not that we are bound to demonstrate what our adversaries have failed
in proving; we may still remain ignorant of the nature of genius, and
yet be convinced that they have not revealed it. The phenomena of
_predisposition_ in the mind are not more obscure and ambiguous than
those which have been assigned as the sources of genius in certain
individuals. For is it more difficult to conceive that a person bears in
his constitutional disposition a germ of native aptitude which is
developing itself to a predominant character of genius, which breaks forth
in the temperament and moulds the habits, than to conjecture that these
men of genius could not have been such but from _accident_, or that they
differ only in their _capacity_?
Every class of men of genius has distinct habits; all poets resemble one
another, as all painters and all mathematicians. There is a conformity in
the cast of their minds, and the quality of each is distinct from the
other, and the very faculty which fits them for one particular pursuit, is
just the reverse required for another. If these are truisms, as they may
appear, we need not demonstrate that from which we only wish to draw our
conclusion. Why does this remarkable similarity prevail through the
classes of genius? Because each, in their favourite production, is working
with the same appropriate organ. The poetical eye is early busied with
imagery; as early will the reveries of the poetical mind be busied with
the passions; as early will the painter's hand be copying forms and
colours; as early will the young musician's ear wander in the creation of
sounds, and the philosopher's head mature its meditations. It is then the
aptitude of the appropriate organ, however it varies in its character, in
which genius seems most concerned, and which is connatural and connate
with the individual, and, as it was expressed in old days, is _born_ with
him. There seems no other source of genius; for whenever this has been
refused by nature, as it is so often, no theory of genius, neither habit
nor education, have ever supplied its want. To discriminate between the
_habit_ and the _predisposition_ is quite impossible; because whenever
great genius discovers itself, as it can only do by continuity, it has
become a habit with the individual; it is the fatal notion of habit having
the power of generating genius, which has so long served to delude the
numerous votaries of mediocrity. Natural or native power is enlarged by
art; but the most perfect art has but narrow limits, deprived of natural
disposition.
A curious decision on this obscure subject may be drawn from an admirable
judge of the nature of genius. AKENSIDE, in that fine poem which forms its
history, tracing its source, sang,
From Heaven my strains begin, from Heaven descends
The flame of genius to _the human breast_.
But in the final revision of that poem, which he left many years after,
the bard has vindicated the solitary and independent origin of genius, by
the mysterious epithet,
THE CHOSEN BREAST.
The veteran poet was, perhaps, schooled by the vicissitudes of his own
poetical life, and those of some of his brothers.
Metaphors are but imperfect illustrations in metaphysical inquiries:
usually they include too little or take in too much. Yet fanciful
analogies are not willingly abandoned. The iconologists describe Genius as
a winged child with a flame above its head; the wings and the flame
express more than some metaphysical conclusions. Let me substitute
for "the white paper" of Locke, which served the philosopher in his
description of the operations of the senses on the mind, a less artificial
substance. In the soils of the earth we may discover that variety of
primary qualities which we believe to exist in human minds. The botanist
and the geologist always find the nature of the strata indicative of its
productions; the meagre light herbage announces the poverty of the soil it
covers, while the luxuriant growth of plants betrays the richness of the
matrix in which the roots are fixed. It is scarcely reasoning by analogy
to apply this operating principle of nature to the faculties of men.
But while the origin and nature of that faculty which we understand by the
term Genius remain still wrapt up in its mysterious bud, may we not trace
its history in its votaries? If Nature overshadow with her wings her first
causes, still the effects lie open before us, and experience and
observation will often deduce from consciousness what we cannot from
demonstration. If Nature, in some of her great operations, has kept back
her last secrets; if Newton, even in the result of his reasonings, has
religiously abstained from penetrating into her occult connexions, is it
nothing to be her historian, although we cannot be her legislator?
CHAPTER V.
Youth of genius.--Its first impulses may be illustrated by its subsequent
actions.--Parents have another association of the man of genius than
we.--Of genius, its first habits.--Its melancholy.--Its reveries.--Its
love of solitude.--Its disposition to repose.--Of a youth distinguished
by his equals.--Feebleness of its first attempts.--Of genius not
discoverable even in manhood.--The education of the youth may not be
that of his genius.--An unsettled impulse, querulous till it finds its
true occupation.--With some, curiosity as intense a faculty as invention.
--What the youth first applies to is commonly his delight afterwards.
--Facts of the decisive character of genius.
We are entering into a fairy land, touching only shadows, and chasing the
most changeable lights; many stories we shall hear, and many scenes will
open on us; yet though realities are but dimly to be traced in this
twilight of imagination and tradition, we think that the first impulses of
genius may be often illustrated by the subsequent actions of the
individual; and whenever we find these in perfect harmony, it will be
difficult to convince us that there does not exist a secret connexion
between those first impulses and these last actions.
Can we then trace in the faint lines of his youth an unsteady outline of
the man? In the temperament of genius may we not reasonably look for
certain indications or predispositions, announcing the permanent
character? Is not great sensibility born with its irritable fibres? Will
not the deep retired character cling to its musings? And the unalterable
being of intrepidity and fortitude, will he not, commanding even amidst
his sports, lead on his equals? The boyhood of Cato was marked by the
sternness of the man, observable in his speech, his countenance, and his
puerile amusements; and BACON, DESCARTES, HOBBES, GRAY, and others,
betrayed the same early appearance of their intellectual vigour and
precocity of character.
The virtuous and contemplative BOYLE imagined that he had discovered in
childhood that disposition of mind which indicated an instinctive
ingenuousness. An incident which he relates, evinced, as he thought, that
even then he preferred to aggravate his fault rather than consent to
suppress any part of the truth, an effort which had been unnatural to his
mind. His fanciful, yet striking illustration may open our inquiry. "This
trivial passage," the little story alluded to, "I have mentioned now, not
that I think that in itself it deserves a relation, but because as the sun
is seen best at his rising and his setting, so men's native dispositions
are clearliest perceived whilst they are children, and when they are
dying. These little sudden actions are the greatest discoverers of men's
true humours."
ALFIERI, that historian of the literary mind, was conscious that even in
his childhood the peculiarity and the melancholy of his character
prevailed: a boyhood passed in domestic solitude fed the interior feelings
of his impassioned character; and in noticing some incidents of a childish
nature, this man of genius observes, "Whoever will reflect on these inept
circumstances, and explore into the seeds of the passions of man, possibly
may find these neither so laughable nor so puerile as they may appear."
His native genius, or by whatever other term we may describe it, betrayed
the wayward predispositions of some of his poetical brothers: "Taciturn
and placid for the most part, but at times loquacious and most vivacious,
and usually in the most opposite extremes; stubborn and impatient against
force, but most open to kindness, more restrained by the dread of
reprimand than by anything else, susceptible of shame to excess, but
inflexible if violently opposed." Such is the portrait of a child of seven
years old, a portrait which induced the great tragic bard to deduce this
result from his own self-experience, that "_man_ is a continuation of the
_child_."[A]
[Footnote A: See in his Life, chap. iv., entitled _Sviluppo dell' indole
indicato da vari fattarelli_. "Development of genius, or natural
inclination, indicated by various little matters."]
That the dispositions of genius in early life presage its future
character, was long the feeling of antiquity. CICERO, in his "Dialogue on
Old Age," employs a beautiful analogy drawn from Nature, marking her
secret conformity in all things which have life and come from her hands;
and the human mind is one of her plants. "Youth is the vernal season of
life, and the blossoms it then puts forth are indications of those future
fruits which are to be gathered in the succeeding periods." One of the
masters of the human mind, after much previous observation of those who
attended his lectures, would advise one to engage in political studies,
then exhorted another to compose history, elected these to be poets, and
those to be orators; for ISOCRATES believed that Nature had some concern
in forming a man of genius, and endeavoured to guess at her secret by
detecting the first energetic inclination of the mind. This also was the
principle which guided the Jesuits, those other great masters in the art
of education. They studied the characteristics of their pupils with such
singular care, as to keep a secret register in their colleges, descriptive
of their talents, and the natural turn of their dispositions. In some
cases they guessed with remarkable felicity. They described Fontenelle,
_adolescens omnibus numeris absolutus et inter discipulos princeps_, "a
youth accomplished in every respect, and the model for his companions;"
but when they describe the elder Crébillon, _puer ingeniosus sed insignis
nebulo_, "a shrewd boy, but a great rascal," they might not have erred so
much as they appear to have done; for an impetuous boyhood showed the
decision of a character which might not have merely and misanthropically
settled in imaginary scenes of horror, and the invention of characters of
unparalleled atrocity.
In the old romance of King Arthur, when a cowherd comes to the king to
request he would make his son a knight--"It is a great thing thou askest,"
said Arthur, who inquired whether this entreaty proceeded from him or his
son. The old man's answer is remarkable--"Of my son, not of me; for I have
thirteen sons, and all these will fall to that labour I put them; but this
child will not labour for me, for anything that I and my wife will do; but
always he will be shooting and casting darts, and glad for to see battles,
and to behold knights, and always day and night he desireth of me to be
made a knight." The king commanded the cowherd to fetch all his sons;
"they were all shapen much like the poor man; but Tor was not like none of
them in shape and in countenance, for he was much more than any of them.
And so Arthur knighted him." This simple tale is the history of genius--
the cowherd's twelve sons were like himself, but the unhappy genius in the
family, who perplexed and plagued the cowherd and his wife and his twelve
brothers, was the youth averse to the common labour, and dreaming of
chivalry amidst a herd of cows.
A man of genius is thus dropped among the people, and has first to
encounter the difficulties of ordinary men, unassisted by that feeble
ductility which adapts itself to the common destination. Parents are too
often the victims of the decided propensity of a son to a Virgil or a
Euclid; and the first step into life of a man of genius is disobedience
and grief. LILLY, our famous astrologer, has described the frequent
situation of such a youth, like the cowherd's son who would be a knight.
Lilly proposed to his father that he should try his fortune in the
metropolis, where he expected that his learning and his talents would
prove serviceable to him; the father, quite incapable of discovering the
latent genius of his son in his studious disposition, very willingly
consented to get rid of him, for, as Lilly proceeds, "I could not work,
drive the plough, or endure any country labour; my father oft would say I
was _good for nothing_,"--words which the fathers of so many men of genius
have repeated.[A]
[Footnote A: The father of Sir Joshua Reynolds reproached him frequently
in his boyish days for his constant attention to drawing, and wrote on the
back of one of his sketches the condemnatory words, "Done by Joshua out of
pure idleness." Mignard distressed his father the surgeon, by sketching
the expressive faces of his patients instead of attending to their
diseases; and our own Opie, when a boy, and working with his father at his
business as a carpenter, used frequently to excite his anger by drawing
with red chalk on the deal boards he had carefully planed for his trade.
--ED.]
In reading the memoirs of a man of genius, we often reprobate the domestic
persecutions of those who opposed his inclinations. No poet but is moved
with indignation at the recollection of the tutor at the Port Royal thrice
burning the romance which RACINE at length got by heart; no geometrician
but bitterly inveighs against the father of PASCAL for not suffering him
to study Euclid, which he at length understood without studying. The
father of PETRARCH cast to the flames the poetical library of his son,
amidst the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the youth. Yet this
burnt-offering neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, nor
deprived him of the Roman laurel. The uncle of ALFIERI for more than
twenty years suppressed the poetical character of this noble bard; he was
a poet without knowing how to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard
creditor, exacted, with redoubled interest, all the genius which the uncle
had so long kept from her. These are the men whose inherent impulse no
human opposition, and even no adverse education, can deter from proving
them to be great men.
Let us, however, be just to the parents of a man of genius; they have
another association of ideas respecting him than ourselves. We see a great
man, they a disobedient child; we track him through his glory, they are
wearied by the sullen resistance of one who is obscure and seems useless.
The career of genius is rarely that of fortune or happiness; and the
father, who himself may not be insensible to glory, dreads lest his
son be found among that obscure multitude, that populace of mean artists,
self-deluded yet self-dissatisfied, who must expire at the barriers of
mediocrity.
If the youth of genius be struggling with a concealed impulse, he will
often be thrown into a train of secret instruction which no master can
impart. Hippocrates profoundly observed, that "our _natures_ have not been
taught us by any master." The faculty which the youth of genius displays
in after-life may exist long ere it is perceived; and it will only make
its own what is homogeneous with itself. We may often observe how the mind
of this youth stubbornly rejects whatever is contrary to its habits, and
alien to its affections. Of a solitary character, for solitariness is the
wild nurse of his contemplations, he is fancifully described by one of the
race--and here fancies are facts:
He is retired as noon-tide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove.
The romantic SIDNEY exclaimed, "Eagles fly alone, and they are but sheep
which always herd together."
As yet this being, in the first rudiments of his sensations, is touched by
rapid emotions, and disturbed by a vague restlessness; for him the images
of nature are yet dim, and he feels before he thinks; for imagination
precedes reflection. One truly inspired unfolds the secret story--
Endow'd with all that Nature can bestow,
The child of fancy oft in silence bends
O'er the mixt treasures of his pregnant breast
With conscious pride. From thence he oft resolves
To frame he knows not what excelling things;
And win he knows not what sublime reward
Of praise and wonder!
But the solitude of the youth of genius has a local influence; it is full
of his own creations, of his unmarked passions, and his uncertain
thoughts. The titles which he gives his favourite haunts often intimate
the bent of his mind--its employment, or its purpose; as PETRARCH called
his retreat _Linternum_, after that of his hero Scipio; and a young poet,
from some favourite description in Cowley, called a spot he loved to muse
in, "Cowley's Walk."
A temperament of this kind has been often mistaken for melancholy.[A]
"When the intermission of my studies allowed me leisure for recreation,"
says BOYLE of his early life, "I would very often steal away from all
company, and spend four or five hours alone in the fields, and think at
random; making my delighted imagination the busy scene where some romance
or other was daily acted." This circumstance alarmed his friends, who
concluded that he was overcome with a growing melancholy. ALFIERI found
himself in this precise situation, and experienced these undefinable
emotions, when, in his first travels at Marseilles, his lonely spirit only
haunted the theatre and the seashore: the tragic drama was then casting
its influences over his unconscious genius. Almost every evening, after
bathing in the sea, it delighted him to retreat to a little recess where
the land jutted out; there would he sit, leaning his hack against a high
rock, which he tells us, "concealed from my sight every part of the land
behind me, while before and around me I beheld nothing but the sea and the
heavens: the sun, sinking into the waves, was lighting up and embellishing
these two immensities; there would I pass a delicious hour of fantastic
ruminations, and there I should have composed many a poem, had I then
known to write either in verse or prose in any language whatever."
[Footnote A: This solemnity of manner was aped in the days of Elizabeth
and James I. by such as affected scholar-like habits, and is frequently
alluded to by the satirists of the time. BEN JONSON, in his "Every Man in
his Humour," delineates the "country gull," Master Stephen, as affecting
"to be mightily given to melancholy," and receiving the assurance, "It's
your only fine humour, sir; your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine
wit, sir."--ED.]
An incident of this nature is revealed to us by the other noble and mighty
spirit of our times, who could most truly exhibit the history of the youth
of genius, and he has painted forth the enthusiasm of the boy TASSO:--
--From my very birth
My soul was drunk with love, which did pervade
And mingle with whate'er I saw on earth;
Of objects all inanimate I made
Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers
And rocks whereby they grew, a paradise,
Where I did lay me down within the shade
Of waving trees, and dream'd uncounted hours,
Though I was chid for wandering.
The youth of genius will be apt to retire from the active sports of his
mates. BEATTIE paints himself in his own Minstrel:
Concourse, and noise, and toil he ever fled,
Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray
Of squabbling imps; but to the forest sped.
BOSSUET would not join his young companions, and flew to his solitary
task, while the classical boys avenged themselves by a schoolboy's
villanous pun: stigmatising the studious application of Bossuet by the
_bos suetus aratro_ which frequent flogging had made them classical enough
to quote.
The learned HUET has given an amusing detail of the inventive persecutions
of his schoolmates, to divert him from his obstinate love of study. "At
length, in order to indulge my own taste, I would rise with the sun, while
they were buried in sleep, and hide myself in the woods, that I might read
and study in quiet;" but they beat the bushes, and started in his burrow
the future man of erudition. Sir WILLIAM JONES was rarely a partaker in
the active sports of Harrow; it was said of GRAY that he was never a boy;
the unhappy CHATTERTON and BURNS were singularly serious in youth;[A] as
were HOBBES and BACON. MILTON has preserved for us, in solemn numbers, his
school-life--
When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing: all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do
What might be public good: myself I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth,
All righteous things.
[Footnote A: Dr. Gregory says of Chatterton, "Instead of the thoughtless
levity of childhood, he possessed the pensiveness, gravity, and melancholy
of maturer life. He was frequently so lost in contemplation, that for many
days together he would say but very little, and that apparently by
constraint. His intimates in the school were few, and those of the most
serious cast." Of Burns, his schoolmaster, Mr. Murdoch, says--"Robert's
countenance was generally grave, and expressive of a serious,
contemplative, and thoughtful mind:"--Ed.]
It is remarkable that this love of repose and musing is retained
throughout life. A man of fine genius is rarely enamoured of common
amusements or of robust exercises; and he is usually unadroit where
dexterity of hand or eye, or trivial elegances, are required. This
characteristic of genius was discovered by HORACE in that Ode which
schoolboys often versify. BEATTIE has expressly told us of his Minstrel,
The exploit of strength, dexterity or speed
To him nor vanity nor joy could bring.
ALFIERI said he could never be taught by a French dancing-master, whose
art made him at once shudder and laugh. HORACE, by his own confession, was
a very awkward rider, and the poet could not always secure a seat on his
mule: METASTASIO humorously complains of his gun; the poetical sportsman
could only frighten the hares and partridges; the, truth was, as an elder
poet sings,
Instead of hounds that make the wooded hills
Talk in a hundred voices to the rills,
I, like the pleasing cadence of a line,
Struck by the concert of the sacred Nine.
And we discover the true "humour" of the indolent contemplative race in
their great representatives VIRGIL and HORACE. When they accompanied
Mecænas into the country, while the minister amused himself at tennis,
the two bards reposed on a vernal bank amidst the freshness of the shade.
The younger Pliny, who was so perfect a literary character, was charmed by
the Roman mode of hunting, or rather fowling by nets, which admitted him
to sit a whole day with his tablets and stylus; so, says he, "should I
return with empty nets, my tablets may at least be full." THOMSON was the
hero of his own "Castle of Indolence;" and the elegant WALLER infuses into
his luxurious verses the true feeling:
Oh, low I long my careless limbs to lay
Under the plantane shade, and all the day
Invoke the Muses and improve my vein.
The youth of genius, whom Beattie has drawn after himself, and I after
observation, a poet of great genius, as I understand, has declared to be
"too effeminate and timid, and too much troubled with delicate nerves. The
_greatest poets_ of all countries," he continues, "have been men eminently
endowed with _bodily powers_, and rejoiced and excelled in all _manly
exercises_." May not our critic of northern habits have often mistaken
the art of the great poets in _describing_ such "manly exercises or bodily
powers," for the proof of their "rejoicing and excelling in them?" Poets
and artists, from their habits, are not usually muscular and robust.[A]
Continuity of thought, absorbing reverie, and sedentary habits, will not
combine with corporeal skill and activity. There is also a constitutional
delicacy which is too often the accompaniment of a fine intellect.
The inconveniences attached to the inferior sedentary labourers are
participated in by men of genius; the analogy is obvious, and their fate
is common. Literary men may be included in Ramazzini's "Treatise on the
Diseases of Artizans." ROSSEAU has described the labours of the closet as
enervating men, and weakening the constitution, while study wears the
whole machinery of man, exhausts the spirits, destroys his strength, and
renders him pusillanimous.[B] But there is a higher principle which guides
us to declare, that men of genius should not _excel_ in "all manly
exercises." SENECA, whose habits were completely literary, admonishes the
man of letters that "Whatever amusement he chooses, he should not slowly
return from those of the body to the mind, while he should be exercising
the latter night and day." Seneca was aware that "to rejoice and excel in
all manly exercises," would in some cases intrude into the habits of a
literary man, and sometimes be even ridiculous. MORTIMER, once a
celebrated artist, was tempted by his athletic frame to indulge in
frequent violent exercises; and it is not without reason suspected, that
habits so unfavourable to thought and study precluded that promising
genius from attaining to the maturity of his talents, however he might
have succeeded in invigorating his physical powers.
[Footnote A: Dr. Currie, in his "Life of Burns," has a passage which may
be quoted here: "Though by nature of an athletic form, Burns had in his
constitution the peculiarities and the delicacies that belong to the
temperament of genius. He was liable, from a very early period of life, to
that interruption in the process of digestion which arises from deep and
anxious thought, and which is sometimes the effect, and sometimes the
cause, of depression of spirits."--ED.]
[Footnote B: In the Preface to the "Narcisse."]
But to our solitude. So true is it that this love of loneliness is an
early passion, that two men of genius of very opposite characters, the one
a French wit and the other a French philosopher, have acknowledged that
they have felt its influence, and even imagined that they had discovered
its cause. The Abbé DE ST. PIERRE, in his political annals, tells us, "I
remember to have heard old SEGRAIS remark, that most young people of both
sexes had at one time of their lives, generally about seventeen or
eighteen years of age, an inclination to retire from the world. He
maintained this to be a species of melancholy, and humorously called it
the small-pox of the mind, because scarce one in a thousand escaped the
attack. I myself have had this distemper, but am not much marked with it."
But if the youth of genius be apt to retire from the ordinary sports of
his mates, he will often substitute for them others, which are the
reflections of those favourite studies which are haunting his young
imagination, as men in their dreams repeat the conceptions which have
habitually interested them. The amusements of such an idler have often
been analogous to his later pursuits. ARIOSTO, while yet a schoolboy,
seems to have been very susceptible of poetry, for he composed a sort of
tragedy from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, to be represented by his
brothers and sisters, and at this time also delighted himself in
translating the old French and Spanish romances. Sir WILLIAM JONES, at
Harrow, divided the fields according to a map of Greece, and to each
schoolfellow portioned out a dominion; and when wanting a copy of the
_Tempest_ to act from, he supplied it from his memory; we must confess
that the boy Jones was reflecting in his amusements the cast of mind he
displayed in his after-life, and evincing that felicity of memory and
taste so prevalent in his literary character. FLORIAN'S earliest years
were passed in shooting birds all day, and reading every evening an old
translation of the Iliad: whenever he got a bird remarkable for its size
or its plumage, he personified it by one of the names of his heroes, and
raising a funeral pyre, consumed the body: collecting the ashes in an
urn, he presented them to his grandfather, with a narrative of his
Patroclus or Sarpedon. We seem here to detect, reflected in his boyish
sports, the pleasing genius of the author of Numa Pompilius, Gonsalvo of
Cordova, and William Tell. BACON, when a child, was so remarkable for
thoughtful observation, that Queen Elizabeth used to call him "the young
lord-keeper." The boy made a remarkable reply, when her Majesty,
inquiring of him his age, he said, that "He was two years younger than
her Majesty's happy reign." The boy may have been tutored; but this
mixture of gravity, and ingenuity, and political courtiership,
undoubtedly caught from his father's habits, afterwards characterised
Lord Bacon's manhood. I once read the letter of a contemporary of HOBBES,
where I found that this great philosopher, when a lad, used to ride on
packs of skins to market, to sell them for his father, who was a
fellmonger; and that in the market-place he thus early began to vent his
private opinions, which long afterwards so fully appeared in his
writings.
For a youth to be distinguished by his equals is perhaps a criterion of
talent. At that moment of life, with no flattery on the one side, and no
artifice on the other, all emotion and no reflection, the boy who has
obtained a predominance has acquired this merely by native powers. The
boyhood of NELSON was characterised by events congenial with those of his
after-days; and his father understood his character when he declared that,
"in whatever station he might be placed, he would climb, if possible, to
the top of the tree." Some puerile anecdotes which FRANKLIN remembered of
himself, betray the invention and the firm intrepidity of his character,
and even perhaps his carelessness of means to obtain a purpose. In boyhood
he felt a desire for adventure; but as his father would not consent to a
sea life, he made the river near him represent the ocean: he lived on the
water, and was the daring Columbus of a schoolboy's boat. A part where he
and his mates stood to angle, in time became a quagmire: in the course of
one day, the infant projector thought of a wharf for them to stand on, and
raised it with a heap of stones deposited there for the building of a
house. With that sort of practical wisdom, or Ulyssean cunning, which
marked his mature character, Franklin raised his wharf at the expense of
another's house. His contrivances to aid his puny labourers, with his
resolution not to quit the great work till it was effected, seem to strike
out to us the invention and decision of his future character. But the
qualities which would attract the companions of a schoolboy may not be
those which are essential to fine genius. The captain or leader of his
schoolmates is not to be disregarded; but it is the sequestered boy who
may chance to be the artist or the literary character. Some facts which
have been recorded of men of genius at this period are remarkable. We are
told by Miss Stewart that JOHNSON, when a boy at the free-school, appeared
"a huge overgrown, misshapen stripling;" but was considered as a
stupendous stripling: "for even at that early period of life, Johnson
maintained his opinions with the same sturdy, dogmatical, and arrogant
fierceness." The puerile characters of Lord BOLINGBROKE and Sir ROBERT
WALPOLE, schoolfellows and rivals, were observed to prevail through their
after-life; the liveliness and brilliancy of Bolingbroke appeared in his
attacks on Walpole, whose solid and industrious qualities triumphed by
resistance. A parallel instance might be pointed out in two great
statesmen of our own days; in the wisdom of the one, and the wit of the
other--men whom nature made rivals, and time made friends or enemies, as
it happened. A curious observer, in looking over a collection of the
Cambridge poems, which were formerly composed by its students, has
remarked that "Cowley from the first was quaint, Milton sublime, and
Barrow copious." If then the characteristic disposition may reveal itself
thus early, it affords a principle which ought not to be neglected at this
obscure period of youth.
Is there then a period in youth which yields decisive marks of the
character of genius? The natures of men are as various as their fortunes.
Some, like diamonds, must wait to receive their splendour from the slow
touches of the polisher, while others, resembling pearls, appear at once
born with their beauteous lustre.
Among the inauspicious circumstances is the feebleness of the first
attempts; and we must not decide on the talents of a young man by his
first works. DRYDEN and SWIFT might have been deterred from authorship had
their earliest pieces decided their fate. SMOLLETT, before he knew which
way his genius would conduct him, had early conceived a high notion of his
talents for dramatic poetry: his tragedy of the _Regicide_ was refused by
Garrick, whom for a long time he could not forgive, but continued to abuse
our Roscius, through his works of genius, for having discountenanced his
first work, which had none. RACINE'S earliest composition, as we may judge
by some fragments his son has preserved, remarkably contrasts with his
writings; for these fragments abound with those points and conceits which
he afterwards abhorred. The tender author of "Andromache" could not have
been discovered while exhausting himself in running after _concetti_ as
surprising as the worst parts of Cowley, in whose spirit alone he could
have hit on this perplexing _concetto_, descriptive of Aurora: "Fille du
Jour, qui nais devant ton père!"--"Daughter of Day, but born before thy
father!" GIBBON betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in
his "Essay on Literature," or his attempted "History of Switzerland,"
JOHNSON'S cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler simplicity of
his earliest years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they
afterwards excelled in. RAPHAEL, when he first drew his meagre forms under
Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal beauty which one
day he of all men could alone execute. Who could have imagined, in
examining the _Dream_ of Raphael, that the same pencil could hereafter
have poured out the miraculous _Transfiguration?_ Or that, in the
imitative pupil of Hudson, our country was at length to pride herself on
another Raphael?[A]
[Footnote A: Hudson was the fashionable portrait-painter who succeeded
Kneller, and made a great reputation and fortune; but he was a very mean
artist, who merely copied the peculiarities of his predecessor without his
genius. His stiff hard style was formality itself; but was approved in an
age of formalism; the earlier half of the last century.--ED.]
Even the manhood of genius may pass unobserved by his companions, and,
like. Æneas, he may be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates. The
celebrated FABIUS MAXIMUS in his boyhood was called in derision "the
little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his disposition. His
sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his
slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his
equals, induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid. The
greatness of mind, unalterable courage, and invincible character, which
Fabius afterwards displayed, they then imagined had lain concealed under
the apparent contrary qualities. The boy of genius may indeed seem slow
and dull even to the phlegmatic; for thoughtful and observing dispositions
conceal themselves in timorous silent characters, who have not yet
experienced their strength; and that assiduous love, which cannot tear
itself away from the secret instruction it is perpetually imbibing, cannot
be easily distinguished from the pertinacity of the mere plodder. We often
hear, from the early companions of a man of genius, that at school he
appeared heavy and unpromising. Rousseau imagined that the childhood of
some men is accompanied by this seeming and deceitful dulness, which is
the sign of a profound genius; and Roger Ascham has placed among "the best
natures for learning, the sad-natured and hard-witted child;" that is, the
thoughtful, or the melancholic, and the slow. The young painters, to
ridicule the persevering labours of DOMENICHINO, which were at first heavy
and unpromising, called him "the great ox;" and Passeri, while he has
happily expressed the still labours of his concealed genius, _sua
taciturna lentezza_, his silent slowness, expresses his surprise at the
accounts he received of the early life of this great artist. "It is
difficult to believe, what many assert, that, from the beginning, this
great painter had a ruggedness about him which entirely incapacitated him
from learning his profession; and they have heard from himself that he
quite despaired of success. Yet I cannot comprehend how such vivacious
talents, with a mind so finely organised, and accompanied with such
favourable dispositions for the art, would show such signs of utter
incapacity; I rather think that it is a mistake in the proper knowledge of
genius, which some imagine indicates itself most decisively by its sudden
vehemence, showing itself like lightning, and like lightning passing
away."
A parallel case we find in GOLDSMITH, who passed through an unpromising
youth; he declared that he was never attached to literature till he
was thirty; that poetry had no peculiar charms for him till that age;[A]
and, indeed, to his latest hour he was surprising his friends by
productions which they had imagined he was incapable of composing. HUME
was considered, for his sobriety and assiduity, as competent to become a
steady merchant; and it was said of BOILEAU that he had no great
understanding, but would speak ill of no one. This circumstance of the
character in youth being entirely mistaken, or entirely opposite to the
subsequent one of maturer life, has been noticed of many. Even a
discerning parent or master has entirely failed to develope the genius of
the youth, who has afterwards ranked among eminent men; we ought as little
to decide from early unfavourable appearances, as from inequality of
talent. The great ISAAC BARROW'S father used to say, that if it pleased
God to take from him any of his children, he hoped it might be Isaac, as
the least promising; and during the three years Barrow passed at the
Charter-house, he was remarkable only for the utter negligence of his
studies and of his person. The mother of SHERIDAN, herself a literary
female, pronounced early that he was the dullest and most hopeless of her
sons. BODMER, at the head of the literary class in Switzerland, who had so
frequently discovered and animated the literary youths of his country,
could never detect the latent genius of GESNER: after a repeated
examination of the young man, he put his parents in despair with the
hopeless award that a mind of so ordinary a cast must confine itself to
mere writing and accompts. One fact, however, Bodmer had overlooked when
he pronounced the fate of our poet and artist--the dull youth, who could
not retain barren words, discovered an active fancy in the image of
things. While at his grammar lessons, as it happened to Lucian, he was
employing tedious hours in modelling in wax, groups of men, animals, and
other figures, the rod of the pedagogue often interrupted the fingers of
our infant moulder, who never ceased working to amuse his little sisters
with his waxen creatures, which constituted all his happiness. Those arts
of imitation were already possessing the soul of the boy Gesner, to which
afterwards it became so entirely devoted.
[Footnote A: This is a remarkable expression from Goldsmith: but it is
much more so when we hear it from Lord Byron. See a note in the following
chapter, on "The First Studies," p. 56.]
Thus it happens that in the first years of life the education of the youth
may not be the education of his genius; he lives unknown to himself and
others. In all these cases nature had dropped the seeds in the soil: but
even a happy disposition must be concealed amidst adverse circumstances: I
repeat, that genius can only make that its own which is homogeneous with
its nature. It has happened to some men of genius during a long period of
their lives, that an unsettled impulse, unable to discover the object of
its aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament of too sentient a
being, which cannot find the occupation to which only it can attach
itself, has sunk into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary with the
burthen of existence; but the instant the latent talent had declared
itself, his first work, the eager offspring of desire and love, has
astonished the world at once with the birth and the maturity of genius.
We are told that PELEGRINO TIBALDI, who afterwards obtained the glorious
title of "the reformed Michael Angelo," long felt the strongest internal
dissatisfaction at his own proficiency, and that one day, in melancholy
and despair, he had retired from the city, resolved to starve himself to
death: his friend discovered him, and having persuaded him to change his
pursuits from painting to architecture, he soon rose to eminence. This
story D'Argenville throws some doubt over; but as Tibaldi during twenty
years abstained from his pencil, a singular circumstance seems explained
by an extraordinary occurrence. TASSO, with feverish anxiety pondered on
five different subjects before he could decide in the choice of his epic;
the same embarrassment was long the fate of GIBBON on the subject of his
history. Some have sunk into a deplorable state of utter languishment,
from the circumstance of being deprived of the means of pursuing their
beloved study, as in the case of the chemist BERGMAN. His friends, to gain
him over to the more lucrative professions, deprived him of his books of
natural history; a plan which nearly proved fatal to the youth, who with
declining health quitted the university. At length ceasing to struggle
with the conflicting desire within him, his renewed enthusiasm for his
favourite science restored the health he had lost in abandoning it.
It was the view of the tomb of Virgil which so powerfully influenced the
innate genius of BOCCACCIO, and fixed his instant decision. As yet young,
and in the neighbourhood of Naples, wandering for recreation, he reached
the tomb of the Mantuan. Pausing before it, his youthful mind began to
meditate. Struck by the universal glory of that great name, he lamented
his own fortune to be occupied by the obscure details of merchandise;
already he sighed to emulate the fame of the Roman, and as Villani tells
us, from that day he abandoned for ever the occupations of commerce,
dedicating himself to literature. PROCTOR, the lost Phidias of our
country, would often say, that he should never have quitted his mercantile
situation, but for the accidental sight of Barry's picture of "Venus
rising from the Sea;" a picture which produced so immediate an effect on
his mind, that it determined him to quit a lucrative occupation. Surely we
cannot account for such sudden effusions of the mind, and such instant
decisions, but by the principle of that predisposition which only waits
for an occasion to declare itself.
Abundant facts exhibit genius unequivocally discovering itself in youth.
In general, perhaps, a master-mind exhibits precocity. "Whatever a young
man at first applies himself to, is commonly his delight afterwards." This
remark was made by HARTLEY, who has related an anecdote of the infancy of
his genius, which indicated the manhood. He declared to his daughter that
the intention of writing a book upon the nature of man, was conceived in
his mind when he was a very little boy--when swinging backwards and
forwards upon a gate, not more than nine or ten years old; he was then
meditating upon the nature of his own mind, how man was made, and for what
future end. Such was the true origin, in a boy of ten years old, of his
celebrated book on "The Frame, the Duty, and the Expectation of Man." JOHN
HUNTER conceived his notion of the principle of life, which to his last
day formed the subject of his inquiries and experiments, when he was very
young; for at that period of life, Mr. Abernethy tells us, he began his
observations on the incubated egg, which suggested or corroborated his
opinions.
A learned friend, and an observer of men of science, has supplied me with
a remark highly deserving notice. It is an observation that will generally
hold good, that the most important systems of theory, however late they
may be published, have been formed at a very early period of life. This
important observation may be verified by some striking facts. A most
curious one will be found in Lord BACON'S letter to Father Fulgentio,
where he gives an account of his projecting his philosophy thirty years
before, during his youth. MILTON from early youth mused on the composition
of an epic. DE THOU has himself told us, that from his tender youth his
mind was full of the idea of composing a history of his own times; and his
whole life was passed in preparation, and in a continued accession of
materials for a future period. From the age of twenty, MONTESQUIEU was
preparing the materials of _L'Esprit des Loix_, by extracts from the
immense volumes of civil law. TILLEMONT'S vast labours were traced out in
his mind at the early age of nineteen, on reading Baronius; and some of
the finest passages in RACINE'S tragedies were composed while a pupil,
wandering in the woods of the Port-Royal. So true is it that the seeds of
many of our great literary and scientific works were lying, for many years
antecedent to their being given to the world, in a latent state of
germination.[A]
[Footnote A: I need not to be reminded, that I am not worth mentioning
among the illustrious men who have long formed the familiar subjects of my
delightful researches. But with the middling as well as with the great,
the same habits must operate. Early in life, I was struck by the inductive
philosophy of Bacon, and sought after a Moral Experimental Philosophy; and
I had then in my mind an observation of Lord Bolingbroke's, for I see I
quoted it thirty years ago, that "Abstract or general propositions, though
never so true, appear obscure or doubtful to us very often till they are
explained by examples." So far back as in 1793 I published "A Dissertation
on Anecdotes," with the simplicity of a young votary; there I deduced
results, and threw out a magnificent project not very practicable. From
that time to the hour I am now writing, my metal has been running in this
mould, and I still keep casting philosophy into anecdotes, and anecdotes
into philosophy. As I began I fear I shall end.]
The predisposition of genius has declared itself in painters and poets,
who were such before they understood the nature of colours and the arts of
verse; and this vehement propensity, so mysteriously constitutional, may
be traced in other intellectual characters besides those which belong to
the class of imagination. It was said that PITT was _born_ a minister; the
late Dr. SHAW I always considered as one _born_ a naturalist, and I know a
great literary antiquary who seems to me to have been also _born_ such;
for the passion of _curiosity_ is as intense a faculty, or instinct, with
some casts of mind, as is that of _invention_ with poets and painters: I
confess that to me it is _genius_ in a form in which genius has not yet
been suspected to appear. One of the biographers of Sir HANS SLOANE
expresses himself in this manner:--"Our author's _thirst_ for knowledge
seems to have been _born_ with him, so that his _Cabinet of Rarities_ may
be said to have commenced with _his being_." This strange metaphorical
style has only confused an obscure truth. SLOANE, early in life, felt an
irresistible impulse which inspired him with the most enlarged views of
the productions of nature, and he exulted in their accomplishment; for in
his will he has solemnly recorded, that his collections were the fruits of
his early devotion, _having had from my youth a strong inclination to the
study of plants and all other productions of nature_. The vehement passion
of PEIRESC for knowledge, according to accounts which Gassendi received
from old men who had known him as a child, broke out as soon as he had
been taught his alphabet; for then his delight was to be handling books
and papers, and his perpetual inquiries after their contents obliged
them to invent something to quiet the child's insatiable curiosity,
who was hurt when told that he had not the capacity to understand them. He
did not study as an ordinary scholar, for he never read but with
perpetual researches. At ten years of age, his passion for the studies of
antiquity was kindled at the sight of some ancient coins dug up in his
neighbourhood; then that vehement passion for knowledge "began to burn
like fire in a forest," as Gassendi happily describes the fervour and
amplitude of the mind of this man of vast learning. Bayle, who was an
experienced judge in the history of genius, observes on two friars, one of
whom was haunted by a strong disposition to _genealogical_, and the other
to _geographical_ pursuits, that, "let a man do what he will, if nature
incline us to certain things, there is no preventing the gratification of
our desire, though it lies hid under a monk's frock." It is not,
therefore, as the world is apt to imagine, only poets and painters for
whom is reserved this restless and impetuous propensity for their
particular pursuits; I claim it for the man of science as well as for the
man of imagination. And I confess that I consider this strong bent of the
mind in men eminent in pursuits in which imagination is little concerned,
and whom men of genius have chosen to remove so far from their class, as
another gifted aptitude. They, too, share in the glorious fever of genius,
and we feel how just was the expression formerly used, of "their _thirst_
for knowledge."
But to return to the men of genius who answer more strictly to the popular
notion of inventors. We have BOCCACCIO'S own words for a proof of his
early natural tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of his genealogy of
the gods:--"Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no
stories, was without a master, and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural
talent for fiction, and produced some little tales." Thus the "Decamerone"
was appearing much earlier than we suppose. DESCARTES, while yet a boy,
indulged such habits of deep meditation, that he was nicknamed by his
companions "The Philosopher," always questioning, and ever settling the
cause and the effect. He was twenty-five years of age before he left the
army, but the propensity for meditation had been early formed; and he has
himself given an account of the pursuits which occupied his youth, and of
the progress of his genius; of the secret struggle which he so long
maintained with his own mind, wandering in concealment over the world for
more than twenty years, and, as he says of himself, like the statuary
labouring to draw out a Minerva from the marble block. MICHAEL ANGELO, as
yet a child, wherever he went, busied himself in drawing; and when his
noble parents, hurt that a man of genius was disturbing the line of their
ancestry, forced him to relinquish the pencil, the infant artist flew to
the chisel: the art which was in his soul would not allow of idle hands.
LOPE DE VEGA, VELASQUEZ, ARIOSTO, and TASSO, are all said to have betrayed
at their school-tasks the most marked indications of their subsequent
characteristics.
This decision of the impulse of genius is apparent in MURILLO. This young
artist was undistinguished at the place of his birth. A brother artist
returning home from London, where he had studied under Van Dyk, surprised
MURILLO by a chaste, and to him hitherto unknown, manner. Instantly he
conceived the project of quitting his native Seville and flying to Italy
--the fever of genius broke forth with all its restlessness. But he was
destitute of the most ordinary means to pursue a journey, and forced to an
expedient, he purchased a piece of canvas, which dividing into parts, he
painted on each figures of saints, landscapes, and flowers--an humble
merchandise of art adapted to the taste and devout feelings of the times,
and which were readily sold to the adventurers to the Indies. With these
small means he departed, having communicated his project to no one except
to a beloved sister, whose tears could not prevail to keep the lad at
home; the impetuous impulse had blinded him to the perils and the
impracticability of his wild project. He reached Madrid, where the great
VELASQUEZ, his countryman, was struck by the ingenuous simplicity of the
youth, who urgently requested letters for Rome; but when that noble genius
understood the purport of this romantic journey, VELASQUEZ assured him
that he need not proceed to Italy to learn the art he loved. The great
master opened the royal galleries to the youth, and cherished his studies.
MURILLO returned to his native city, where, from his obscurity, he had
never been missed, having ever lived a retired life of silent labour; but
this painter of nature returned to make the city which had not noticed his
absence the theatre of his glory.
The same imperious impulse drove CALLOT, at the age of twelve years, from
his father's roof. His parents, from prejudices of birth, had conceived
that the art of engraving was one beneath the studies of their son; but
the boy had listened to stories of the miracles of Italian art, and with a
curiosity predominant over any self-consideration, one morning the genius
flew away. Many days had not elapsed, when finding himself in the utmost
distress, with a gang of gipsies he arrived at Florence. A merchant of
Nancy discovered him, and returned the reluctant boy of genius to his
home. Again he flies to Italy, and again his brother discovers him, and
reconducts him to his parents. The father, whose patience and forgiveness
were now exhausted, permitted his son to become the most original genius
of French art--one who, in his vivacious groups, the touch of his graver,
and the natural expression of his figures, anticipated the creations of
Hogarth.
Facts of this decisive character are abundant. See the boy NANTEUIL biding
himself in a tree to pursue the delightful exercise of his pencil, while
his parents are averse to their son practising his young art! See
HANDEL, intended for a doctor of the civil laws, and whom no parental
discouragement could deprive of his enthusiasm, for ever touching
harpsichords, and having secretly conveyed a musical instrument to a
retired apartment, listen to him when, sitting through the night, he
awakens his harmonious spirit! Observe FERGUSON, the child of a peasant,
acquiring the art of reading without any one suspecting it, by listening
to his father teaching his brother; observe him making a wooden watch
without the slightest knowledge of mechanism; and while a shepherd,
studying, like an ancient Chaldean, the phenomena of the heavens, on a
celestial globe formed by his own hand. That great mechanic, SMEATON, when
a child, disdained the ordinary playthings of his age; he collected the
tools of workmen, observed them at their work, and asked questions till he
could work himself. One day, having watched some millwrights, the child
was shortly after, to the distress of the family, discovered in a
situation of extreme danger, fixing up at the top of a barn a rude
windmill. Many circumstances of this nature occurred before his sixth
year. His father, an attorney, sent him up to London to be brought up to
the same profession; but he declared that "the study of the law did not
suit the _bent of his genius_"--a term he frequently used. He addressed a
strong memorial to his father, to show his utter incompetency to study
law; and the good sense of the father abandoned Smeaton "to the bent of
his genius in his own way." Such is the history of the man who raised the
Eddystone Lighthouse, in the midst of the waves, like the rock on which it
stands.
Can we hesitate to believe that in such minds there was a resistless and
mysterious propensity, "growing with the growth" of these youths, who seem
to have been placed out of the influence of that casual excitement, or any
other of those sources of genius, so frequently assigned for its
production?
Yet these cases are not more striking than one related of the Abbé LA
CAILLE, who ranked among the first astronomers of the age. La Caille was
the son of the parish clerk of a village. At the age of ten years his
father sent him every evening to ring the church bell, but the boy always
returned home late: his father was angry, and beat him, and still the boy
returned an hour after he had rung the bell. The father, suspecting
something mysterious in his conduct, one evening watched him. He saw his
son ascend the steeple, ring the bell as usual, and remain there during an
hour. When the unlucky boy descended, he trembled like one caught in the
fact, and on his knees confessed that the pleasure he took in watching the
stars from the steeple was the real cause which detained him from home. As
the father was not born to be an astronomer, he flogged his son severely.
The youth was found weeping in the streets by a man of science, who, when
he discovered in a boy of ten years of age a passion for contemplating
the stars at night, and one, too, who had discovered an observatory
in a steeple, decided that the seal of Nature had impressed itself
on the genius of that boy. Relieving the parent from the son, and the son
from the parent, he assisted the young LA CAILLE in his passionate
pursuit, and the event completely justified the prediction. How children
feel a predisposition for the studies of astronomy, or mechanics, or
architecture, or natural history, is that secret in nature we have not
guessed. There may be a virgin thought as well as a virgin habit--nature
before education--which first opens the mind, and ever afterwards is
shaping its tender folds. Accidents may occur to call it forth, but
thousands of youths have found themselves in parallel situations with
SMEATON, FERGUSON, and LA CAILLE, without experiencing their energies.
The case of CLAIRON, the great French tragic actress, who seems to have
been an actress before she saw a theatre, deserves attention. This female,
destined to be a sublime tragedian, was of the lowest extraction; the
daughter of a violent and illiterate woman, who, with blows and menaces,
was driving about the child all day to manual labour. "I know not," says
Clairon, "whence I derive my disgust, but I could not bear the idea to be
a mere workwoman, or to remain inactive in a corner." In her eleventh
year, being locked up in a room as a punishment, with the windows
fastened, she climbed upon a chair to look about her. A new object
instantly absorbed her attention. In the house opposite she observed a
celebrated actress amidst her family; her daughter was performing her
dancing lesson: the girl Clairon, the future Melpomene, was struck by the
influence of this graceful and affectionate scene. "All my little being
collected itself into my eyes; I lost not a single motion; as soon as the
lesson ended, all the family applauded, and the mother embraced the
daughter. The difference of her fate and mine filled me with profound
grief; my tears hindered me from seeing any longer, and when the
palpitations of my heart allowed me to re-ascend the chair, all had
disappeared." This scene was a discovery; from that moment Clairon knew no
rest, and rejoiced when she could get her mother to confine her in that
room. The happy girl was a divinity to the unhappy one, whose susceptible
genius imitated her in every gesture and every motion; and Clairon soon
showed the effect of her ardent studies. She betrayed in the common
intercourse of life, all the graces she had taught herself; she charmed
her friends, and even softened her barbarous mother; in a word, the
enthusiastic girl was an actress without knowing what an actress was.
In this case of the youth of genius, are we to conclude that the
accidental view of a young actress practising her studies imparted the
character of Clairon? Could a mere chance occurrence have given birth to
those faculties which produced a sublime tragedian? In all arts there are
talents which may be acquired by imitation and reflection,--and thus far
may genius be educated; but there are others which are entirely the result
of native sensibility, which often secretly torment the possessor, and
which may even be lost from the want of development, dissolved into a
state of languor from which many have not recovered. Clairon, before she
saw the young actress, and having yet no conception of a theatre--for she
had never entered one--had in her soul that latent faculty which creates a
dramatic genius. "Had I not felt like Dido," she once exclaimed, "I could
not have thus personified her!"
The force of impressions received in the warm susceptibility of the
childhood of genius, is probably little known to us; but we may perceive
them also working in the _moral character_, which frequently discovers
itself in childhood, and which manhood cannot always conceal, however it
may alter. The intellectual and the moral character are unquestionably
closely allied. ERASMUS acquaints us, that Sir THOMAS MORE had something
ludicrous in his aspect, tending to a smile,--a feature which his
portraits preserve; and that he was more inclined to pleasantry and
jesting, than to the gravity of the chancellor. This circumstance he
imputes to Sir Thomas More "being from a child so delighted with humour,
that he seemed to be even born for it." And we know that he died as he had
lived, with a jest on his lips. The hero, who came at length to regret
that he had but one world to conquer, betrayed the majesty of his restless
genius when but a youth. Had Aristotle been nigh when, solicited to join
in the course, the princely boy replied, that "He would run in no career
where kings were not the competitors," the prescient tutor might have
recognised in his pupil the future and successful rival of Darius and
Porus.
A narrative of the earliest years of Prince Henry, by one of his
attendants, forms an authentic collection of juvenile anecdotes, which
made me feel very forcibly that there are some children who deserve to
have a biographer at their side; but anecdotes of children are the rarest
of biographies, and I deemed it a singular piece of good fortune to have
recovered such a remarkable evidence of the precocity of character.[A]
Professor Dugald Stewart has noticed a fact in ARNAULD'S infancy, which,
considered in connexion with his subsequent life, affords a good
illustration of the force of impressions received in the first dawn of
reason. ARNAULD, who, to his eightieth year, passed through a life of
theological controversy, when a child, amusing himself in the library of
the Cardinal Du Perron, requested to have a pen given to him. "For what
purpose?" inquired the cardinal. "To write books, like you, against the
Huguenots." The cardinal, then aged and infirm, could not conceal his joy
at the prospect of so hopeful a successor; and placing the pen in his
hand, said, "I give it you as the dying shepherd, Damcetas, bequeathed his
pipe to the little Corydon." Other children might have asked for a pen--
but to write against the Huguenots evinced a deeper feeling and a wider
association of ideas, indicating the future polemic.
[Footnote A: I have preserved this manuscript narrative in "Curiosities of
Literature," vol. ii.]
Some of these facts, we conceive, afford decisive evidence of that
instinct in genius, that primary quality of mind, sometimes called
organization, which has inflamed a war of words by an equivocal term. We
repeat that this faculty of genius can exist independent of education, and
where it is wanting, education can never confer it: it is an impulse, an
instinct always working in the character of "the chosen mind;"
One with our feelings and our powers,
And rather part of us, than ours.
In the history of genius there are unquestionably many secondary causes of
considerable influence in developing, or even crushing the germ--these
have been of late often detected, and sometimes carried to a ridiculous
extreme; but among them none seem more remarkable than the first studies
and the first habits.
CHAPTER VI.
The first studies.--The self-educated are marked by stubborn
peculiarities.--Their errors.--Their improvement from the neglect or
contempt they incur.--The history of self-education in Moses Mendelssohn.
--Friends usually prejudicial in the youth of genius.--A remarkable
interview between Petrarch in his first studies, and his literary
adviser.--Exhortation.
The first studies form an epoch in the history of genius, and
unquestionably have sensibly influenced its productions. Often have the
first impressions stamped a character on the mind adapted to receive one,
as the first step into life has often determined its walk. But this, for
ourselves, is a far distant period in our existence, which is lost in the
horizon of our own recollections, and is usually unobserved by others.
Many of those peculiarities of men of genius which are not fortunate, and
some which have hardened the character in its mould, may, however, be
traced to this period. Physicians tell us that there is a certain point in
youth at which the constitution is formed, and on which the sanity of life
revolves; the character of genius experiences a similar dangerous period.
Early bad tastes, early peculiar habits, early defective instructions, all
the egotistical pride of an untamed intellect, are those evil spirits
which will dog genius to its grave. An early attachment to the works of
Sir Thomas Browne produced in JOHNSON an excessive admiration of that
Latinised English, which violated the native graces of the language; and
the peculiar style of Gibbon is traced by himself "to the constant habit
of speaking one language, and writing another." The first studies of
REMBRANDT affected his after-labours. The peculiarity of shadow which
marks all his pictures, originated in the circumstance of his father's
mill receiving light from an aperture at the top, which habituated the
artist afterwards to view all objects as if seen in that magical light.
The intellectual POUSSIN, as Nicholas has been called, could never, from
an early devotion to the fine statues of antiquity, extricate his genius
on the canvas from the hard forms of marble: he sculptured with his
pencil; and that cold austerity of tone, still more remarkable in his last
pictures, as it became mannered, chills the spectator on a first glance.
When POPE was a child, he found in his mother's closet a small library of
mystical devotion; but it was not suspected, till the fact was discovered,
that the effusions of love and religion poured forth in his "Eloisa" were
caught from the seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the last
retained a place in his library among the classical bards of antiquity.
The accidental perusal of Quintus Curtius first made BOYLE, to use his own
words, "in love with other than pedantic books, and conjured up in him an
unsatisfied appetite of knowledge; so that he thought he owed more to
Quintus Curtius than did Alexander." From the perusal of Rycaut's folio of
Turkish history in childhood, the noble and impassioned bard of our times
retained those indelible impressions which gave life and motion to the
"Giaour," "the Corsair," and "Alp." A voyage to the country produced the
scenery. Rycaut only communicated the impulse to a mind susceptible of the
poetical character; and without this Turkish history we should still have
had the poet.[A]
[Footnote A: The following manuscript note by Lord Byron on this passage,
cannot fail to interest the lovers of poetry, as well as the inquirers
into the history of the human mind. His lordship's recollections of his
first readings will not alter the tendency of my conjecture; it only
proves that he had read much more of Eastern history and manners than
Rycaut's folio, which probably led to this class of books:
"Knolles--Cantemir--De Tott--Lady M.W. Montagu--Hawkins's translation from
Mignot's History of the Turks--the Arabian Nights--all travels or
histories or books upon the East I could meet with, I had read, as well as
Rycaut, before I was _ten years old_. I think the Arabian Nights first.
After these I preferred the history of naval actions, Don Quixote, and
Smollett's novels, particularly Roderick Random, and I was passionate for
the Roman History.
"When a boy I could never bear to read any poetry whatever without
disgust and reluctance."--_MS. note by Lord Byron._ Latterly Lord Byron
acknowledged in a conversation held in Greece with Count Gamba, not long
before he died, "The Turkish History was one of the first books that gave
me pleasure when a child; and I believe it had much influence on my
subsequent wishes to visit the Levant; and gave perhaps the Oriental
colouring which is observed in my poetry."
I omitted the following note in my last edition, but I shall now preserve
it, as it may enter into the history of his lordship's character:
"When I was in Turkey I was oftener tempted to turn Mussulman than poet,
and have often regretted since that I did not. 1818."]
The influence of first studies in the formation of the character of genius
is a moral phenomenon which has not sufficiently attracted our notice.
FRANKLIN acquaints us that, when young and wanting books, he accidentally
found De Foe's "Essay on Projects," from which work impressions were
derived which afterwards influenced some of the principal events of his
life. The lectures of REYNOLDS probably originated in the essays of
Richardson. It is acknowledged that these first made him a painter, and
not long afterwards an author; and it is said that many of the principles
in his lectures may be traced in those first studies. Many were the
indelible and glowing impressions caught by the ardent Reynolds from those
bewildering pages of enthusiasm! Sir WALTER RAWLEIGH, according to a
family tradition, when a young man, was perpetually reading and conversing
on the discoveries of Columbus, and the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro.
His character, as well as the great events of his life, seem to have been
inspired by his favourite histories; to pass beyond the discoveries of the
Spaniards became a passion, and the vision of his life. It is formally
testified that, from a copy of Vegetius _de Re Militari_, in the school
library of St. Paul's, MARLBOROUGH imbibed his passion for a military
life. If he could not understand the text, the prints were, in such a
mind, sufficient to awaken the passion for military glory. ROUSSEAU in
early youth, full of his Plutarch, while he was also devouring the trash
of romances, could only conceive human nature in the colossal forms, or be
affected by the infirm sensibility of an imagination mastering all his
faculties; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like a Sybarite. The same
circumstance happened to CATHERINE MACAULEY, who herself has told us how
she owed the bent of her character to the early reading of the Roman
historians; but combining Roman admiration with English faction, she
violated truth in English characters, and exaggerated romance in her
Roman. But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genius,
impelling the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in
the remarkable character of Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, the author of the
famous "Confessional," and the curious "Memoirs of Hollis," written with
such a republican fierceness.
I had long considered the character of our archdeacon as a _lusus
politicus et theologicus_. Having subscribed to the Articles, and enjoying
the archdeaconry, he was writing against subscription and the whole
hierarchy, with a spirit so irascible and caustic, that one would have
suspected that, like Prynne and Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost
both his ears; while his antipathy to monarchy might have done honour to a
Roundhead of the Rota Club. The secret of these volcanic explosions was
only revealed in a letter accidentally preserved. In the youth of our
spirited archdeacon, when fox-hunting was his deepest study, it happened
at the house of a relation, that on a rainy day he fell, among other
garret lumber, on some worm-eaten volumes which had once been the careful
collections of his great-grandfather, an Oliverian justice. "These," says
he, "I conveyed to my lodging-room, and there became acquainted with the
manners and principles of many excellent old Puritans, and then laid the
foundation of my own." The enigma is now solved! Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, in
his seclusion in Yorkshire amidst the Oliverian justice's library, shows
that we are in want of a Cervantes but not of a Quixote, and Yorkshire
might yet be as renowned a country as La Mancha; for political romances,
it is presumed, may be as fertile of ridicule as any of the folios of
chivalry.
We may thus mark the influence through life of those first unobserved
impressions on the character of genius, which every author has not
recorded.
Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on
the side of genius. Where education ends, genius often begins. GRAY was
asked if he recollected when he first felt the strong predilection to
poetry; he replied that, "he believed it was when he began to read Virgil
for his own amusement, and not in school hours as a task." Such is the
force of self-education in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, JOHN
HUNTER, who was entirely self-educated, evinced such penetration in his
anatomical discoveries, that he has brought into notice passages from
writers he was unable to read, and which had been overlooked by profound
scholars.[A]
[Footnote A: Life of John Hunter, by Dr. Adams, p. 59, where the case is
curiously illustrated. [The writer therein defends Hunter from a charge of
plagiarism from the Greek writers, who had studied accurately certain
phases of disease, which had afterwards been "overlooked by the most
profound scholars for nearly two thousand years," until John Hunter by his
own close observation had assumed similar conclusions.]]
That the education of genius must be its own work, we may appeal to every
one of the family. It is not always fortunate, for many die amidst a waste
of talents and the wreck of mind.
Many a soul sublime
Has felt the influence of malignant star.
An unfavourable position in society is a usual obstruction in the
course of this self-education; and a man of genius, through half his
life, has held a contest with a bad, or with no education. There is a race
of the late-taught, who, with a capacity of leading in the first
rank, are mortified to discover themselves only on a level with their
contemporaries. WINCKELMANN, who passed his youth in obscure misery as a
village schoolmaster, paints feelings which strikingly contrast with his
avocations. "I formerly filled the office of a schoolmaster with the
greatest punctuality; and I taught the A, B, C, to children with filthy
heads, at the moment I was aspiring after the knowledge of the beautiful,
and meditating, low to myself, on the similes of Homer; then I said to
myself, as I still say, 'Peace, my soul, thy strength shall surmount thy
cares.'" The obstructions of so unhappy a self-education essentially
injured his ardent genius, and long he secretly sorrowed at this want of
early patronage, and these habits of life so discordant with the habits of
his mind. "I am unfortunately one of those whom the Greeks named [Greek:
opsimatheis], _sero sapientes_, the late-learned, for I have appeared too
late in the world and in Italy. To have done something, it was necessary
that I should have had an education analogous to my pursuits, and at your
age." This class of the _late-learned_ is a useful distinction. It is so
with a sister-art; one of the greatest musicians of our country assures
me that the ear is as latent with many; there are the late-learned even
in the musical world. BUDÆUS declared that he was both "self-taught and
late-taught."
The SELF-EDUCATED are marked by stubborn peculiarities. Often abounding
with talent, but rarely with talent in its place, their native prodigality
has to dread a plethora of genius and a delirium of wit: or else, hard but
irregular students rich in acquisition, they find how their huddled
knowledge, like corn heaped in a granary, for want of ventilation and
stirring, perishes in its own masses. Not having attended to the process
of their own minds, and little acquainted with that of other men, they
cannot throw out their intractable knowledge, nor with sympathy awaken by
its softening touches the thoughts of others. To conduct their native
impulse, which had all along driven them, is a secret not always
discovered, or else discovered late in life. Hence it has happened with
some of this race, that their first work has not announced genius, and
their last is stamped with it. Some are often judged by their first
work, and when they have surpassed themselves, it is long ere it is
acknowledged. They have improved themselves by the very neglect or even
contempt which their unfortunate efforts were doomed to meet; and when
once they have learned what is beautiful, they discover a living but
unsuspected source in their own wild but unregarded originality. Glorying
in their strength at the time that they are betraying their weakness, yet
are they still mighty in that enthusiasm which is only disciplined by its
own fierce habits. Never can the native faculty of genius with its
creative warmth be crushed out of the human soul; it will work itself out
beneath the encumbrance of the most uncultivated minds, even amidst the
deep perplexed feelings and the tumultuous thoughts of the most visionary
enthusiast, who is often only a man of genius misplaced.[A] We may find a
whole race of these self-taught among the unknown writers of the old
romances, and the ancient ballads of European nations; there sleep many a
Homer and Virgil--legitimate heirs of their genius, though possessors of
decayed estates. BUNYAN is the Spenser of the people. The fire burned
towards Heaven, although the altar was rude and rustic.
[Footnote A: "One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own
experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding and the
nature of man which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and
celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much
fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of
George Fox and Jacob Behmen."--_Mr. Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria_, i.
143.]
BARRY, the painter, has left behind him works not to be turned over by
the connoisseur by rote, nor the artist who dares not be just. That
enthusiast, with a temper of mind resembling Rousseau's, but with coarser
feelings, was the same creature of untamed imagination consumed by
the same passions, with the same fine intellect disordered, and the
same fortitude of soul; but he found his self-taught pen, like his
pencil, betray his genius.[B] A vehement enthusiasm breaks through his
ill-composed works, throwing the sparks of his bold conceptions into the
soul of the youth of genius. When, in his character of professor, he
delivered his lectures at the academy, at every pause his auditors rose in
a tumult, and at every close their hands returned to him the proud
feelings he adored. This gifted but self-educated man, once listening to
the children of genius whom he had created about him, exclaimed, "Go it,
go it, my boys! they did so at Athens." This self-formed genius could
throw up his native mud into the very heaven of his invention!
[Footnote B: Like Hogarth, when he attempted to engrave his own works, his
originality of style made them differ from the tamer and more mechanical
labours of the professional engraver. They have consequently less beauty,
but greater vigour.--ED.]
But even such pages as those of BARRY'S are the aliment of young genius.
Before we can discern the beautiful, must we not be endowed with the
susceptibility of love? Must not the disposition be formed before even the
object appears? I have witnessed the young artist of genius glow and start
over the reveries of the uneducated BARRY, but pause and meditate, and
inquire over the mature elegance of REYNOLDS; in the one he caught the
passion for beauty, and in the other he discovered the beautiful; with the
one he was warm and restless, and with the other calm and satisfied.
Of the difficulties overcome in the self-education of genius, we have a
remarkable instance in the character of MOSES MENDELSSOHN, on whom
literary Germany has bestowed the honourable title of "the Jewish
Socrates."[A] So great apparently were the invincible obstructions which
barred out Mendelssohn from the world of literature and philosophy, that,
in the history of men of genius, it is something like taking in the
history of man the savage of Aveyron from his woods--who, destitute of a
human language, should at length create a model of eloquence; who, without
the faculty of conceiving a figure, should at length be capable of adding
to the demonstrations of Euclid; and who, without a complex idea and with
few sensations, should at length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics,
open to the world a new view of the immortality of the soul!
[Footnote A: I composed the life of MENDELSSOHN so far back as in 1798, in
a periodical publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their
notices; a juvenile production, which happened to excite the attention of
the late BARRY, then not personally known to me; and he gave all the
immortality his poetical pencil could bestow on this man of genius, by
immediately placing in his Elysium of Genius MENDELSSOHN shaking hands
with ADDISON, who wrote on the truth of the Christian religion, and near
LOCKE, the English master of MENDELSSOHN'S mind.]
Mendelssohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a village in Germany, received
an education completely rabbinical, and its nature must be comprehended,
or the term of _education_ would be misunderstood. The Israelites in
Poland and Germany live with all the restrictions of their ceremonial law
in an insulated state, and are not always instructed in the language of
the country of their birth. They employ for their common intercourse a
barbarous or _patois_ Hebrew; while the sole studies of the young rabbins
are strictly confined to the Talmud, of which the fundamental principle,
like the Sonna of the Turks, is a pious rejection of every species of
profane learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls in the
understanding and the faith of man, was to shut out what the imitative
Catholics afterwards called heresy. It is, then, these numerous folios of
the Talmud which the true Hebraic student contemplates through all the
seasons of life, as the Patuecos in their low valley imagine their
surrounding mountains to be the confines of the universe.
Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelssohn's first studies; but even in
his boyhood this conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his spirits,
which affected his life ever after. Rejecting the Talmudical dreamers, he
caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated Maimonides; and his native
sagacity was already clearing up the surrounding darkness. An enemy not
less hostile to the enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, presented
itself in the indigence of his father, who was compelled to send away the
youth on foot to Berlin, to find labour and bread.
At Berlin, Mendelssohn becomes an amanuensis to another poor rabbin, who
could only still initiate him into the theology, the jurisprudence, and
the scholastic philosophy of his people. Thus, he was as yet no farther
advanced in that philosophy of the mind in which he was one day to be the
rival of Plato and Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature which was
finally to place him among the first polished critics of Germany.
Some unexpected event occurs which gives the first great impulse to the
mind of genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery
and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish
Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated
student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this
vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician.
Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown
together into the same situation, they approached each other by the same
sympathies, and communicating in the only language which Mendelssohn could
speak, the Polander voluntarily undertook his literary education.
Then was seen one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the history of
modern literature. Two houseless Hebrew youths might be discovered, in the
moonlit streets of Berlin, sitting in retired corners, or on the steps of
some porch, the one instructing the other, with a Euclid in his hand; but
what is more extraordinary, it was a Hebrew version, composed by the
master for a pupil who knew no other language. Who could then have
imagined that the future Plato of Germany was sitting on those steps!
The Polander, whose deep melancholy had settled on his heart, died--yet he
had not lived in vain, since the electric spark that lighted up the soul
of Mendelssohn had fallen from his own.
Mendelssohn was now left alone; his mind teeming with its chaos, and still
master of no other language than that barren idiom which was incapable of
expressing the ideas he was meditating on. He had scarcely made a step
into the philosophy of his age, and the genius of Mendelssohn had probably
been lost to Germany, had not the singularity of his studies and the cast
of his mind been detected by the sagacity of Dr. Kisch. The aid of this
physician was momentous; for he devoted several hours every day to the
instruction of a poor youth, whose strong capacity he had the discernment
to perceive, and the generous temper to aid. Mendelssohn was soon enabled
to read Locke in a Latin version; but with such extreme pain, that,
compelled to search for every word, and to arrange their Latin order, and
at the same time to combine metaphysical ideas, it was observed that he
did not so much translate, as guess by the force of meditation.
This prodigious effort of his intellect retarded his progress, but
invigorated his habit, as the racer, by running against the hill, at
length courses with facility.
A succeeding effort was to master the living languages, and chiefly the
English, that he might read his favourite Locke in his own idiom. Thus a
great genius for metaphysics and languages was forming itself alone,
without aid.
It is curious to detect, in the character of genius, the effects of local
and moral influences. There resulted from Mendelssohn's early situation
certain defects in his Jewish education, and numerous impediments in his
studies. Inheriting but one language, too obsolete and naked to serve the
purposes of modern philosophy, he perhaps overvalued his new acquisitions,
and in his delight of knowing many languages, he with difficulty escaped
from remaining a mere philologist; while in his philosophy, having adopted
the prevailing principles of Wolf and Baumgarten, his genius was long
without the courage or the skill to emancipate itself from their rusty
chains. It was more than a step which had brought him into their circle,
but a step was yet wanting to escape from it.
At length the mind of Mendelssohn enlarged in literary intercourse: he
became a great and original thinker in many beautiful speculations in
moral and critical philosophy; while he had gradually been creating a
style which the critics of Germany have declared to be their first
luminous model of precision and elegance. Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first
perplexed in the voluminous labyrinth of Judaical learning, in his middle
age oppressed by indigence and malady, and in his mature life wrestling
with that commercial station whence he derived his humble independence,
became one of the master-writers in the literature of his country. The
history of the mind of Mendelssohn is one of the noblest pictures of the
self-education of genius.
Friends, whose prudential counsels in the business of life are valuable in
our youth, are usually prejudicial in the youth of genius. The multitude
of authors and artists originates in the ignorant admiration of their
early friends; while the real genius has often been disconcerted and
thrown into despair by the false judgments of his domestic circle. The
productions of taste are more unfortunate than those which depend on a
chain of reasoning, or the detail of facts; these are more palpable to the
common judgments of men; but taste is of such rarity, that a long life may
be passed by some without once obtaining a familiar acquaintance with a
mind so cultivated by knowledge, so tried by experience, and so practised
by converse with the literary world, that its prophetic feeling can
anticipate the public opinion. When a young writer's first essay is shown,
some, through mere inability of censure, see nothing but beauties; others,
from mere imbecility, can see none; and others, out of pure malice, see
nothing but faults. "I was soon disgusted," says Gibbon, "with the modest
practice of reading the manuscript to my friends. Of such friends some
will praise for politeness, and some will criticise for vanity." Had
several of our first writers set their fortunes on the cast of their
friends' opinions, we might have lost some precious compositions.
The friends of Thompson discovered nothing but faults in his early
productions, one of which happened to be his noblest, the "Winter;" they
just could discern that these abounded with luxuriances, without being
aware that, they were the luxuriances of a poet. He had created a new
school in art--and appealed from his circle to the public. From a
manuscript letter of our poet's, written when employed on his "Summer," I
transcribe his sentiments on his former literary friends in Scotland--he
is writing to Mallet: "Far from defending these two lines, I damn them to
the lowest depth of the poetical Tophet, prepared of old for Mitchell,
Morrice, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Wherever I have evidence,
or think I have evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as
all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections felt so irritably
the perverse criticisms of his learned friends, that they were to share
alike a poetic Hell--probably a sort of _Dunciad_, or lampoons. One of
these "blasts" broke out in a vindictive epigram on Mitchell, whom he
describes with a "blasted eye;" but this critic literally having one, the
poet, to avoid a personal reflection, could only consent to make the
blemish more active--
Why all not faults, injurious Mitchell! why
Appears one beauty to thy _blasting_ eye?
He again calls him "the planet-blasted Mitchell." Of another of these
critical friends he speaks with more sedateness, but with a strong
conviction that the critic, a very sensible man, had no sympathy with the
poet. "Aikman's reflections on my writings are very good, but he does not
in them regard the turn of my genius enough; should I alter my way, I
would write poorly. I must choose what appears to me the most significant
epithet, or I cannot with any heart proceed." The "Mirror,"[A] when
periodically published in Edinburgh, was "fastidiously" received, as all
"home-productions" are: but London avenged the cause of the author. When
SWIFT introduced PARNELL to Lord Bolingbroke, and to the world, he
observes, in his Journal, "it is pleasant to see one who hardly passed for
anything in Ireland, make his way here with a little friendly forwarding."
MONTAIGNE has honestly told us that in his own province they considered
that for him to attempt to become an author was perfectly ludicrous: at
home, says he, "I am compelled to purchase printers; while at a distance,
printers purchase me." There is nothing more trying to the judgment of the
friends of a young man of genius than the invention of a new manner:
without a standard to appeal to, without bladders to swim, the ordinary
critic sinks into irretrievable distress; but usually pronounces against
novelty. When REYNOLDS returned from Italy, warm with all the excellence
of his art, and painted a portrait, his old master, Hudson, viewing it,
and perceiving no trace of his own manner, exclaimed that he did not paint
so well as when he left England; while another, who conceived no higher
excellence than Kneller, treated with signal contempt the future Raphael
of England.
[Footnote A: This weekly journal was chiefly supported by the abilities of
the rising young men of the Scottish Bar. Henry Mackenzie, the author of
the "Man of Feeling," was the principal contributor. The publication was
commenced in January, 1779, and concluded May, 1790.--ED.]
If it be dangerous for a young writer to resign himself to the opinions of
his friends, he also incurs some peril in passing them with inattention.
He wants a Quintilian. One mode to obtain such an invaluable critic is the
cultivation of his own judgment in a round of reading and meditation. Let
him at once supply the marble and be himself the sculptor: let the
great authors of the world be his gospels, and the best critics their
expounders; from the one he will draw inspiration, and from the others he
will supply those tardy discoveries in art which he who solely depends on
his own experience may obtain too late. Those who do not read criticism
will rarely merit to be criticised; their progress is like those who
travel without a map of the country. The more extensive an author's
knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his powers in knowing
what to do. To obtain originality, and effect discovery, sometimes
requires but a single step, if we only know from what point to set
forwards. This important event in the life of genius has too often
depended on chance and good fortune, and many have gone down to their
graves without having discovered their unsuspected talent. CURRAN'S
predominant faculty was an exuberance of imagination when excited by
passion; but when young he gave no evidence of this peculiar faculty, nor
for several years, while a candidate for public distinction, was he aware
of his particular powers, so slowly his imagination had developed itself.
It was when assured of the secret of his strength that his confidence, his
ambition, and his industry were excited.
Let the youth preserve his juvenile compositions, whatever these may be;
they are the spontaneous growth, and like the plants of the Alps, not
always found in other soils; they are his virgin fancies. By contemplating
them, he may detect some of his predominant habits, resume a former manner
more happily, invent novelty from an old subject he had rudely designed,
and often may steal from himself some inventive touches, which, thrown
into his most finished compositions, may seem a happiness rather than an
art. It was in contemplating on some of their earliest and unfinished
productions, that more than one artist discovered with WEST that "there
were inventive touches of art in his first and juvenile essay, which, with
all his subsequent knowledge and experience, he had not been able to
surpass." A young writer, in the progress of his studies, should often
recollect a fanciful simile of Dryden--
As those who unripe veins in mines explore
On the rich bed again the warm turf lay,
Till time digests the yet imperfect ore;
And know it will be gold another day.
The youth of genius is that "age of admiration" as sings the poet of
"Human Life," when the spell breathed into our ear by our genius,
fortunate or unfortunate, is--"Aspire!" Then we adore art and the artists.
It was RICHARDSON'S enthusiasm which gave REYNOLDS the raptures he caught
in meditating on the description of a great painter; and REYNOLDS thought
RAPHAEL the most extraordinary man the world had ever produced. WEST, when
a youth, exclaimed that "A painter is a companion for kings and emperors!"
This was the feeling which rendered the thoughts of obscurity painful and
insupportable to their young minds.
But this sunshine of rapture is not always spread over the spring of the
youthful year. There is a season of self-contest, a period of tremors, and
doubts, and darkness. These frequent returns of melancholy, sometimes of
despondence, which is the lot of inexperienced genius, is a secret history
of the heart, which has been finely conveyed to us by Petrarch, in a
conversation with John of Florence, to whom the young poet often resorted
when dejected, to reanimate his failing powers, to confess his faults, and
to confide to him his dark and wavering resolves. It was a question with
Petrarch, whether he should not turn away from the pursuit of literary
fame, by giving another direction to his life.
"I went one day to John of Florence in one of those ague-fits of
faint-heartedness which often happened to me; he received me with his
accustomed kindness. 'What ails you?' said he, 'you seem oppressed with
thought: if I am not deceived, something has happened to you.' 'You do not
deceive yourself, my father (for thus I used to call him), and yet nothing
newly has happened to me; but I come to confide to you that my old
melancholy torments me more than usual. You know its nature, for my heart
has always been opened to you; you know all which I have done to draw
myself out of the crowd, and to acquire a name; and surely not without
some success, since I have your testimony in my favour. Are you not the
truest man, and the best of critics, who have never ceased to bestow on me
your praise--and what need I more? Have you not often told me that I am
answerable to God for the talents he has endowed me with, if I neglected
to cultivate them? Your praises were to me as a sharp spur: I applied
myself to study with more ardour, insatiable even of my moments.
Disdaining the beaten paths, I opened a new road; and I flattered myself
that assiduous labour would lead to something great; but I know not how,
when I thought myself highest, I feel myself fallen; the spring of my mind
has dried up; what seemed easy once, now appears to me above my strength;
I stumble at every step, and am ready to sink for ever into despair. I
return to you to teach me, or at least advise me. Shall I for ever quit my
studies? Shall I strike into some new course of life? My father, have pity
on me! draw me out of the frightful state in which I am lost.' I could
proceed no farther without shedding tears. 'Cease to afflict yourself, my
son,' said that good man; 'your condition is not so bad as you think: the
truth is, you knew little at the time you imagined you knew much. The
discovery of your ignorance is the first great step you have made towards
true knowledge. The veil is lifted up, and you now view those deep shades
of the soul which were concealed from you by excessive presumption. In
ascending an elevated spot, we gradually discover many things whose
existence before was not suspected by us. Persevere in the career which
you entered with my advice; feel confident that God will not abandon you:
there are maladies which the patient does not perceive; but to be aware of
the disease, is the first step towards the cure.'"
This remarkable literary interview is here given, that it may perchance
meet the eye of some kindred youth at one of those lonely moments when a
Shakspeare may have thought himself no poet, and a Raphael believed
himself no painter. Then may the tender wisdom of a John of Florence, in
the cloudy despondency of art, lighten up the vision of its glory!
INGENUOUS YOUTH! if, in a constant perusal of the master-writers, you see
your own sentiments anticipated--if, in the tumult of your mind, as it
comes in contact with theirs, new sentiments arise--if, sometimes, looking
on the public favourite of the hour, you feel that within which prompts
you to imagine that you could rival or surpass him--if, in meditating
on the confessions of every man of genius, for they all have their
confessions, you find you have experienced the same sensations from the
same circumstances, encountered the same difficulties and overcome them by
the same means; then let not your courage be lost in your admiration, but
listen to that "still small voice" in your heart which cries with
CORREGGIO and with MONTESQUIEU, "Ed io anche son pittore!"
CHAPTER VII.
Of the irritability of genius.--Genius in society often in a state of
suffering.--Equality of temper more prevalent among men of letters.--Of
the occupation of making a great name.--Anxieties of the most successful.
--Of the inventors.--Writers of learning.--Writers of taste.--Artists.
The modes of life of a man of genius, often tinctured by eccentricity and
enthusiasm, maintain an eternal conflict with the monotonous and imitative
habits of society, as society is carried on in a great metropolis, where
men are necessarily alike, and where, in perpetual intercourse, they shape
themselves to one another.
The occupations, the amusements, and the ardour of the man of genius are
at discord with the artificial habits of life: in the vortexes of
business, or the world of pleasure, crowds of human beings are only
treading in one another's steps. The pleasures and the sorrows of this
active multitude are not his, while his are not obvious to them; and his
favourite occupations strengthen his peculiarities, and increase his
sensibility. Genius in society is often in a state of suffering.
Professional characters, who are themselves so often literary, yielding to
their predominant interests, conform to that assumed urbanity which levels
them with ordinary minds; but the man of genius cannot leave himself
behind in the cabinet he quits; the train of his thoughts is not stopped
at will, and in the range of conversation the habits of his mind will
prevail: the poet will sometimes muse till he modulates a verse; the
artist is sketching what a moment presents, and a moment changes; the
philosophical historian is suddenly absorbed by a new combination of
thought, and, placing his hands over his eyes, is thrown back into the
Middle Ages. Thus it happens that an excited imagination, a high-toned
feeling, a wandering reverie, a restlessness of temper, are perpetually
carrying the man of genius out of the processional line of the mere
conversationists. Like all solitary beings, he is much too sentient, and
prepares for defence even at a random touch or a chance hit. His
generalising views take things only in masses, while in his rapid emotions
he interrogates, and doubts, and is caustic; in a word, he thinks he
converses while he is at his studies. Sometimes, apparently a complacent
listener, we are mortified by detecting the absent man: now he appears
humbled and spiritless, ruminating over some failure which probably may be
only known to himself; and now haughty and hardy for a triumph he has
obtained, which yet remains a secret to the world. No man is so apt to
indulge the extremes of the most opposite feelings: he is sometimes
insolent, and sometimes querulous; now the soul of tenderness and
tranquillity,--then stung by jealousy, or writhing in aversion! A fever
shakes his spirit; a fever which has sometimes generated a disease, and
has even produced a slight perturbation of the faculties.[A] In one of
those manuscript notes by Lord BYRON on this work, which I have wished to
preserve, I find his lordship observing on the feelings of genius, that
"the depreciation of the lowest of mankind is more painful than the
applause of the highest is pleasing." Such is the confession of genius,
and such its liability to hourly pain.
[Footnote A: I have given a history of _literary quarrels from personal
motives_, in "Quarrels of Authors," p. 529. There we find how many
controversies, in which the public get involved, have sprung from some
sudden squabbles, some neglect of petty civility, some unlucky epithet, or
some casual observation dropped without much consideration, which
mortified or enraged the _genus irritabile_; a title which from ancient
days has been assigned to every description of authors. The late Dr.
WELLS, who had some experience in his intercourse with many literary
characters, observed, that "in whatever regards the fruits of their mental
labours, this is universally acknowledged to be true. Some of the
malevolent passions indeed frequently become in learned men more than
ordinarily strong, from want of that restraint upon their excitement which
society imposes." A puerile critic has reproached me for having drawn my
description entirely from my own fancy:--I have taken it from life!
See further symptoms of this disease at the close of the chapter on
_Self-praise_ in the present work.]
Once we were nearly receiving from the hand of genius the most curious
sketches of the temper, the irascible humours, the delicacy of soul, even
to its shadowiness, from the warm _sbozzos_ of BURNS, when he began a
diary of the heart,--a narrative of characters and events, and a
chronology of his emotions. It was natural for such a creature of
sensation and passion to project such a regular task, but quite impossible
for him to get through it. The paper-book that he conceived would have
recorded all these things turns out, therefore, but a very imperfect
document. Imperfect as it was, it has been thought proper not to give it
entire. Yet there we view a warm original mind, when he first stepped
into the polished circles of society, discovering that he could no
longer "pour out his bosom, his every thought and floating fancy, his very
inmost soul, with unreserved confidence to another, without hazard of
losing part of that respect which man deserves from man; or, from the
unavoidable imperfections attending human nature, of one day repenting his
confidence." This was the first lesson he learned at Edinburgh, and it was
as a substitute for such a human being that he bought a paper-book to keep
under lock and key: "a security at least equal," says he, "to the bosom of
any friend whatever." Let the man of genius pause over the fragments of
this "paper-book;"--it will instruct as much as any open confession of a
criminal at the moment he is about to suffer. No man was more afflicted
with that miserable pride, the infirmity of men of imagination, which is
so jealously alive, even among their best friends, as to exact a perpetual
acknowledgment of their powers. Our poet, with all his gratitude and
veneration for "the noble Glencairn," was "wounded to the soul" because
his lordship showed "so much attention, engrossing attention, to the only
blockhead at table; the whole company consisted of his lordship,
Dunderpate, and myself." This Dunderpate, who dined with Lord Glencairn,
might have been a useful citizen, who in some points is of more value than
an irritable bard. Burns was equally offended with another patron, who was
also a literary brother, Dr. Blair. At the moment, he too appeared to be
neglecting the irritable poet "for the mere carcass of greatness, or when
his eye measured the difference of their point of elevation; I say to
myself, with scarcely any emotion," (he might have added, except a good
deal of painful contempt,) "what do I care for him or his pomp either?"
--"Dr. Blair's vanity is proverbially known among his acquaintance," adds
Burns, at the moment that the solitary haughtiness of his own genius had
entirely escaped his self-observation.
This character of genius is not singular. Grimm tells of MARIVAUX, that
though a good man, there was something dark and suspicious in his
character, which made it difficult to keep on terms with him; the most
innocent word would wound him, and he was always inclined to think that
there was an intention to mortify him; this disposition made him unhappy,
and rendered his acquaintance too painful to endure.
What a moral paradox, but what an unquestionable fact, is the wayward
irritability of some of the finest geniuses, which is often weak to
effeminacy, and capricious to childishness! while minds of a less delicate
texture are not frayed and fretted by casual frictions; and plain sense
with a coarser grain, is sufficient to keep down these aberrations of
their feelings. How mortifying is the list of--
Fears of the brave and follies of the wise!
Many have been sore and implacable on an allusion to some personal defect
--on the obscurity of their birth--on some peculiarity of habit; and have
suffered themselves to be governed in life by nervous whims and chimeras,
equally fantastic and trivial. This morbid sensibility lurks in the
temperament of genius, and the infection is often discovered where it is
not always suspected. Cumberland declared that the sensibility of some men
of genius is so quick and captious, that you must first consider whom they
can be happy with, before you can promise yourself any happiness with
them: if you bring uncongenial humours into contact with each other, all
the objects of society will be frustrated by inattention to the proper
grouping of the guests. Look round on our contemporaries; every day
furnishes facts which confirm our principle. Among the vexations of POPE
was the libel of "the pictured shape;"[A] and even the robust mind of
JOHNSON could not suffer to be exhibited as "blinking Sam."[B] MILTON must
have delighted in contemplating his own person; and the engraver not
having reached our sublime bard's ideal grace, he has pointed his
indignation in four iambics. The praise of a skipping ape raised the
feeling of envy in that child of nature and genius, GOLDSMITH. VOITURE,
the son of a vintner, like our PRIOR, was so mortified whenever reminded
of his original occupation, that it was bitterly said, that wine, which
cheered the hearts of all men, sickened the heart of Voiture. AKENSIDE
ever considered his lameness as an unsupportable misfortune, for it
continually reminded him of the fall of the cleaver from one of his
father's blocks. BECCARIA, invited to Paris by the literati, arrived
melancholy and silent, and abruptly returned home. At that moment this
great man was most miserable from a fit of jealousy: a young female had
extinguished all his philosophy. The poet ROUSSEAU was the son of a
cobbler; and when his honest parent waited at the door of the theatre to
embrace his son on the success of his first piece, genius, whose
sensibility is not always virtuous, repulsed the venerable father with
insult and contempt. But I will no longer proceed from folly to crime.
[Footnote A: He was represented as an ill-made monkey in the frontispiece
to a satire noted in "Quarrels of Authors," p. 286 (last edition).--ED.]
[Footnote B: Johnson was displeased at the portrait Reynolds painted of
him which dwelt on his nearsightedness; declaring that "a man's defects
should never be painted." The same defect was made the subject of a
caricature particularly allusive to critical prejudices in his "Lives of
the Poets," in which he is pictured as an owl "blinking at the stars."
--ED.]
Those who give so many sensations to others must themselves possess an
excess and a variety of feelings. We find, indeed, that they are censured
for their extreme irritability; and that happy equality of temper so
prevalent among MEN OF LETTERS, and which is conveniently acquired by men
of the world, has been usually refused to great mental powers, or to
fervid dispositions--authors and artists. The man of wit becomes petulant,
the profound thinker morose, and the vivacious ridiculously thoughtless.
When ROUSSEAU once retired to a village, he had to learn to endure its
conversation; for this purpose he was compelled to invent an expedient to
get rid of his uneasy sensations. "Alone, I have never known ennui,
even when perfectly unoccupied: my imagination, filling the void, was
sufficient to busy me. It is only the inactive chit-chat of the room, when
every one is seated face to face, and only moving their tongues, which I
never could support. There to be a fixture, nailed with one hand on the
other, to settle the state of the weather, or watch the flies about
one, or, what is worse, to be bandying compliments, this to me is not
bearable." He hit on the expedient of making lace-strings, carrying his
working cushion in his visits, to keep the peace with the country gossips.
Is the occupation of making a great name less anxious and precarious than
that of making a great fortune? the progress of a man's capital is
unequivocal to him, but that of the fame of authors and artists is for the
greater part of their lives of an ambiguous nature. They become whatever
the minds or knowledge of others make them; they are the creatures of the
prejudices and the predispositions of others, and must suffer from those
precipitate judgments which are the result of such prejudices and such
predispositions. Time only is the certain friend of literary worth, for
time makes the world disagree among themselves; and when those who condemn
discover that there are others who approve, the weaker party loses itself
in the stronger, and at length they learn that the author was far more
reasonable than their prejudices had allowed them to conceive. It is thus,
however, that the regard which men of genius find in one place they lose
in another. We may often smile at the local gradations of genius; the
fervid esteem in which an author is held here, and the cold indifference,
if not contempt, he encounters in another place; here the man of learning
is condemned as a heavy drone, and there the man of wit annoys the unwitty
listener.
And are not the anxieties of even the most successful men of genius
renewed at every work--often quitted in despair, often returned to with
rapture? the same agitation of the spirits, the same poignant delight, the
same weariness, the same dissatisfaction, the same querulous languishment
after excellence? Is the man of genius an INVENTOR? the discovery is
contested, or it is not comprehended for ten years after, perhaps not
during his whole life; even men of science are as children before him. Sir
Thomas Bodley wrote to Lord Bacon, remonstrating with him on his _new mode
of philosophising_. It seems the fate of all originality of thinking to be
immediately opposed; a contemporary is not prepared for its comprehension,
and too often cautiously avoids it, from the prudential motive which turns
away from a new and solitary path. BACON was not at all understood at home
in his own day; his reputation--for it was not celebrity--was confined to
his history of Henry VII., and his Essays; it was long after his death
before English writers ventured to quote Bacon as an authority; and with
equal simplicity and grandeur, BACON called himself "the servant of
posterity." MONTESQUIEU gave his _Esprit des Loix_ to be read by that man
in France, whom he conceived to be the best judge, and in return received
the most mortifying remarks. The great philosopher exclaimed in despair,
"I see my own age is not ripe enough to understand my work; however, it
shall be published!" When KEPLER published the first rational work on
comets, it was condemned, even by the learned, as a wild dream. COPERNICUS
so much dreaded the prejudice of mankind against his treatise on "The
Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies," that, by a species of continence of
all others most difficult to a philosopher, says Adam Smith, he detained
it in his closet for thirty years together. LINNÆUS once in despair
abandoned his beloved studies, from a too irritable feeling of the
ridicule in which, as it appeared to him, a professor Siegesbeck had
involved his famous system. Penury, neglect, and labour LINNÆUS could
endure, but that his botany should become the object of ridicule for all
Stockholm, shook the nerves of this great inventor in his science. Let him
speak for himself. "No one cared how many sleepless nights and toilsome
hours I had passed, while all with one voice declared, that Siegesbeck had
annihilated me. I took my leave of Flora, who bestows on me nothing but
Siegesbecks; and condemned my too numerous observations a thousand times
over to eternal oblivion. What a fool have I been to waste so much time,
to spend my days in a study which yields no better fruit, and makes me the
laughing stock of the world." Such are the cries of the irritability of
genius, and such are often the causes. The world was in danger of losing a
new science, had not LINNÆUS returned to the discoveries which he had
forsaken in the madness of the mind! The great SYDENHAM, who, like our
HARVEY and our HUNTER, effected a revolution in the science of medicine,
and led on alone by the independence of his genius, attacked the most
prevailing prejudices, so highly provoked the malignant emulation of his
rivals, that a conspiracy was raised against the father of our modern
practice to banish him out of the college, as "guilty of medical heresy."
JOHN HUNTER was a great discoverer in his own science; but one who well
knew him has told us, that few of his contemporaries perceived the
ultimate object of his pursuits; and his strong and solitary genius
laboured to perfect his designs without the solace of sympathy, without
one cheering approbation. "We bees do not provide honey for ourselves,"
exclaimed VAN HELMONT, when worn out by the toils of chemistry, and still
contemplating, amidst tribulation and persecution, and approaching death,
his "Tree of Life," which he imagined he had discovered in the cedar. But
with a sublime melancholy his spirit breaks out; "My mind breathes some
unheard-of thing within; though I, as unprofitable for this life, shall be
buried!" Such were the mighty but indistinct anticipations of this
visionary inventor, the father of modern chemistry!
I cannot quit this short record of the fates of the inventors in science,
without adverting to another cause of that irritability of genius which is
so closely connected with their pursuits. If we look into the history of
theories, we shall be surprised at the vast number which have "not left a
rack behind." And do we suppose that the inventors themselves were not at
times alarmed by secret doubts of their soundness and stability? They
felt, too often for their repose, that the noble architecture which they
had raised might be built on moveable sands, and be found only in the dust
of libraries; a cloudy day, or a fit of indigestion, would deprive an
inventor of his theory all at once; and as one of them said, "after
dinner, all that I have written in the morning appears to me dark,
incongruous, nonsensical." At such moments we should find this man of
genius in no pleasant mood. The true cause of this nervous state cannot,
nay, must not, be confided to the world: the honour of his darling theory
will always be dearer to his pride than the confession of even slight
doubts which may shake its truth. It is a curious fact which we have
but recently discovered, that ROUSSEAU was disturbed by a terror he
experienced, and which we well know was not unfounded, that his theories
of education were false and absurd. He could not endure to read a page in
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