Literary Character of Men of Genius Part 13

[Footnote A: See "Calamities of Authors," pp. 131--139.]

A living Italian poet, of great celebrity, when at the court of Rome, presented a magnificent edition of his poetry to Pius VI. The bard, Mr.

Hobhouse informs us, lived not in the good graces of his holiness, and although the pontiff accepted the volume, he did not forbear a severity of remark which could not fall unheeded by the modern poet; for on this occasion, repeating some verses of Metastasio, his holiness drily added, "No one now-a-days writes like that great poet." Never was this to be erased from memory: the stifled resentment of MONTI vehemently broke forth at the moment the French carried off Pius VI. from Rome. Then the long indignant secretary poured forth an invective more severe "against the great harlot," than was ever traced by a Protestant pen--MONTI now invoked the rock of Sardinia: the poet bade it fly from its base, that _the last of monsters_ might not find even a tomb to shelter him. Such was the curse of a poet on his former patron, now an object of misery--a return for "placing him below Metastasio!"

The French Revolution affords ill.u.s.trations of the worst human pa.s.sions.

When the wretched COLLOT D'HERBOIS was tossed up in the storm to the summit of power, a monstrous imagination seized him; he projected razing the city of Lyons and ma.s.sacring its inhabitants. He had even the heart to commence, and to continue this conspiracy against human nature; the ostensible crime was royalism, but the secret motive is said to have been literary vengeance! As wretched a poet and actor as a man, D'Herbois had been hissed off the theatre at Lyons, and to avenge that ignominy, he had meditated over this vast and remorseless crime. Is there but one Collot D'Herbois in the universe? Long since this was written, a fact has been recorded of CHENIER, the French dramatic poet, which parallels the horrid tale of Collot D'Herbois, which some have been willing to doubt from its enormity. It is said, that this monster, in the revolutionary period, when he had the power to save the life of his brother Andre, while his father, prostrate before a wretched son, was imploring for the life of an innocent brother, remained silent; it is further said that he appropriated to himself a tragedy which he found among his brother's ma.n.u.scripts.

"Fratricide from literary jealousy," observes the relator of this anecdote, "was a crime reserved for a modern French revolutionist."[A]

There are some pathethic stanzas which Andre was composing in his last moments, when awaiting his fate; the most pathetic of all stanzas is that one which he left unfinished--

Peut-etre, avant que l'heure en cercle promenee Ait pose, sur l'email brillant, Dans les soixante pas ou sa route est bornee, Son pied sonore et vigilant, Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupiere--

At this unfinished stanza was the pensive poet summoned to the guillotine!

[Footnote A: _Edinburgh Review_, x.x.xv. 159]

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.

When the temper and the leisure of the literary character are alike broken, even his best works, the too faithful mirrors of his state of mind, will partic.i.p.ate in its inequalities; and surely the incubations of genius, in its delicate and shadowy combinations, are not less sensible in their operation than the composition of sonorous bodies, where, while the warm metal is settling in the mould, even an unusual vibration of the air during the moment of fusion will injure the tone.

Some of the conspicuous blemishes of several great compositions may be attributed to the domestic infelicities of their authors. The desultory life of CAMOENS is imagined to be perceptible in the deficient connexion of his epic; and MILTON'S blindness and divided family prevented that castigating criticism, which otherwise had erased pa.s.sages which have escaped from his revising hand. He felt himself in the situation of his Samson Agonistes, whom he so pathetically describes--

His foes' derision, captive, poor, and blind.

Even LOCKE complains of his "discontinued way of writing," and "writing by incoherent parcels," from the avocations of a busy and unsettled life, which undoubtedly produced a deficiency of method in the disposition of the materials of his great work. The careless rapid lines of DRYDEN are justly attributed to his distress, and indeed he pleads for his inequalities from his domestic circ.u.mstances. JOHNSON often silently, but eagerly, corrected the "Ramblers" in their successive editions, of which so many had been despatched in haste. The learned GREAVES offered some excuses for his errors in his edition of "Abulfeda," from "his being five years enc.u.mbered with lawsuits, and diverted from his studies." When at length he returned to them, he expresses his surprise "at the pains he had formerly undergone," but of which he now felt himself "unwilling, he knew not how, of again undergoing." GOLDONI, when at the bar, abandoned his comic talent for several years; and having resumed it, his first comedy totally failed: "My head," says he, "was occupied with my professional employment; I was uneasy in mind and in bad humour." A lawsuit, a bankruptcy, a domestic feud, or an indulgence in criminal or in foolish pursuits, have chilled the fervour of imagination, scattered into fragments many a n.o.ble design, and paralysed the finest genius. The distractions of GUIDO'S studies from his pa.s.sion for gaming, and of PARMEGIANO'S for alchemy, have been traced in their works, which are often hurried over and unequal. It is curious to observe, that c.u.mBERLAND attributes the excellence of his comedy, _The West Indian_, to the peculiarly happy situation in which he found himself at the time of its composition, free from the incessant avocations which had crossed him in the writing of _The Brothers._ "I was master of my time, my mind was free, and I was happy in the society of the dearest friends I had on earth. The calls of office, the cavillings of angry rivals, and the gibings of newspaper critics, could not reach me on the banks of the Shannon, where all within-doors was love and affection. In no other period of my life have the same happy circ.u.mstances combined to cheer me in any of my literary labours."

The best years of MENGS' life were embittered by his father, a poor artist, and who, with poorer feelings, converted his home into a prison-house, forced his son into the slavery of stipulated task-work, while bread and water were the only fruits of the fine arts. In this domestic persecution, the son contracted those morose and saturnine habits which in after-life marked the character of the ungenial MENGS.

ALONSO CANO, a celebrated Spanish painter, would have carried his art to perfection, had not the unceasing persecution of the Inquisitors entirely deprived him of that tranquillity so necessary to the very existence of art. OVID, in exile on the barren sh.o.r.es of Tomos, deserted by his genius, in his copious _Tristia_ loses much of the luxuriance of his fancy.

We have a remarkable evidence of domestic unhappiness annihilating the very faculty of genius itself, in the case of Dr. BROOK TAYLOR, the celebrated author of the "Linear Perspective." This great mathematician in early life distinguished himself as an inventor in science, and the most sanguine hopes of his future discoveries were raised both at home and abroad. Two unexpected events in domestic life extinguished his inventive faculties. After the loss of two wives, whom he regarded with no common affection, he became unfitted for profound studies; he carried his own personal despair into his favourite objects of pursuit, and abandoned them. The inventor of the most original work suffered the last fifteen years of his life to drop away, without hope, and without exertion; nor is this a solitary instance, where a man of genius, deprived of the idolised partner of his existence, has no longer been able to find an object in his studies, and where even fame itself has ceased to interest. The reason which ROUSSEAU alleges for the cynical spleen which so frequently breathes forth in his works, shows how the domestic character of the man of genius leaves itself in his productions. After describing the infelicity of his domestic affairs, occasioned by the mother of Theresa, and Theresa herself, both women of the lowest cla.s.s and the worst dispositions, he adds, on this wretched marriage, "These unexpected disagreeable events, in a state of my own choice, plunged me into literature, to give a new direction and diversion to my mind; and in all my first works I scattered that bilious humour which had occasioned this very occupation." Our author's character in his works was the very opposite to the one in which he appeared to these low people. Feeling his degradation among them, for they treated his simplicity as utter silliness, his personal timidity a.s.sumed a tone of boldness and originality in his writings, while a strong personal sense of shame heightened his causticity, and he delighted to contemn that urbanity in which he had never shared, and which he knew not how to practise. His miserable subservience to these people was the real cause of his oppressed spirit calling out for some undefined freedom in society; and thus the real Rousseau, with all his disordered feelings, only appeared in his writings. The secrets of his heart were confided to his pen.

"The painting-room must be like Eden before the Fall; no joyless turbulent pa.s.sions must enter there"--exclaims the enthusiast RICHARDSON.

The home of the literary character should be the abode of repose and of silence. There must he look for the feasts of study, in progressive and alternate labours; a taste "which," says GIBBON, "I would not exchange for the treasures of India." ROUSSEAU had always a work going on, for rainy days and spare hours, such as his "Dictionary of Music:" a variety of works never tired; it was the single one which exhausted. METASTASIO looks with delight on his variety, which resembled the fruits in the garden of Armida--

E mentre spunta l'un, l'altro mature.

While one matures, the other buds and blows.

Nor is it always fame, or any lower motive, which may induce the literary character to hold an unwearied pen. Another equally powerful exists, which must remain inexplicable to him who knows not to escape from the listlessness of life--it is the pa.s.sion for literary occupation. He whose eye can only measure the s.p.a.ce occupied by the voluminous labours of the elder Pliny, of a Mazzuch.e.l.li, a Muratori, a Montfaucon, and a Gough, all men who laboured from the love of labour, and can see nothing in that s.p.a.ce but the industry which filled it, is like him who only views a city at a distance--the streets and the edifices, and all the life and population within, he can never know. These literary characters projected their works as so many schemes to escape from uninteresting pursuits; and, in these folios, how many evils of life did they bury, while their happiness expanded with their volume! Aulus Gellius desired to live no longer than he was able to retain the faculty of writing and observing.

The literary character must grow as impa.s.sioned with his subject as aelian-with his "History of Animals;" "wealth and honour I might have obtained at the courts of princes; but I preferred the delight of multiplying my knowledge. I am aware that the avaricious and the ambitious will accuse me of folly; but I have always found most pleasure in observing the nature of animals, studying their character, and writing their history."

Even with those who have acquired their celebrity, the love of literary labour is not diminished--a circ.u.mstance recorded by the younger Pliny of Livy. In a preface to one of his lost books, that historian had said that he had obtained sufficient glory by his former writings on the Roman history, and might now repose in silence; but his mind was so restless and so abhorrent of indolence, that it only felt its existence in literary exertion. In a similar situation the feeling was fully experienced by HUME. Our philosopher completed his history neither for money nor for fame, having then more than a sufficiency of both; but chiefly to indulge a habit as a resource against indolence.[A] These are the minds which are without hope if they are without occupation.

[Footnote A: This appears in one of his interesting letters first published in the _Literary Gazette_, Oct. 20, 1821.--[It is addressed to Adam Smith, dated July 28, 1759, and he says, "I signed an agreement with Mr. Millar, where I mention that I proposed to write the History of England from the beginning till the accession of Henry VII.,; and he engages to give me 1400_l_. for the copy. This is the first previous agreement ever I made with a bookseller. I shall execute the work at leisure, without fatiguing myself by such ardent application as I have hitherto employed. It is chiefly as a resource against idleness that I shall undertake the work, for as to money I have enough: and as to reputation what I have wrote already will be sufficient, if it be good; if not, it is not likely I shall now write better."]]

Amidst the repose and silence of study, delightful to the literary character, are the soothing interruptions of the voices of those whom he loves, recalling him from his abstractions into social existence. These re-animate his languor, and moments of inspiration are caught in the emotions of affection, when a father or a friend, a wife, a daughter, or a sister, become the partic.i.p.ators of his own tastes, the companions of his studies, and identify their happiness with his fame. A beautiful incident in the domestic life of literature is one which Morellet has revealed of MARMONTEL. In presenting his collected works to his wife, she discovered that the author had dedicated his volumes to herself; but the dedication was not made painful to her modesty, for it was not a public one. Nor was it so concise as to be mistaken for a compliment. The theme was copious, for the heart overflowed in the pages consecrated to her domestic virtues; and MARMONTEL left it as a record, that their children might learn the grat.i.tude of their father, and know the character of their mother, when the writer should be no more. Many readers were perhaps surprised to find in NECKER's _Comte rendu au Roi_, a political and financial work, a great and lovely character of domestic excellence in his wife. This was more obtrusive than Marmontel's private dedication; yet it was not the less sincere. If NECKER failed in the cautious reserve of private feelings, who will censure? Nothing seems misplaced which the heart dictates.

If HORACE were dear to his friends, he declares they owed him to his father:--

--purus et insons (Ut me collaudem) si vivo et carus amicis, Causa fuit Pater his.

If pure and innocent, if dear (forgive These little praises) to my friends I live, My father was the cause.

This intelligent father, an obscure tax-gatherer, discovered the propensity of Horace's mind; for he removed the boy of genius from a rural seclusion to the metropolis, anxiously attending on him to his various masters. GROTIUS, like Horace, celebrated in verse his grat.i.tude to his excellent father, who had formed him not only to be a man of learning, but a great character. VITRUVIUS pours forth a grateful prayer to the memory of his parents, who had instilled into his soul a love for literary and philosophical subjects; and it is an amiable trait in PLUTARCH to have introduced his father in the Symposiacs, as an elegant critic and moralist, and his brother Lamprias, whose sweetness of disposition, inclining to cheerful raillery, the Sage of Cheronaea has immortalised.

The father of GIBBON urged him to literary distinction, and the dedication of the "Essay on Literature" to that father, connected with his subsequent labour, shows the force of the excitement. The father of POPE lived long enough to witness his son's celebrity.

Tears such as tender fathers shed, Warm from my eyes descend, For joy, to think when I am dead, My son shall have mankind his Friend.[A]

The son of BUFFON one day surprised his father by the sight of a column, which he had raised to the memory of his father's eloquent genius. "It will do you honour," observed the Gallic sage.[B] And when that son in the revolution was led to the guillotine, he ascended in silence, so impressed with his father's fame, that he only told the people, "I am the son of Buffon!"

[Footnote A: These lines have been happily applied by Mr. BOWLES to the father of POPE.--The poet's domestic affections were as permanent as they were strong.]

[Footnote B: It still exists in the gardens of the old chateau at Montbard. It is a pillar of marble bearing this inscription:--"Excelsae turris humilia columna, Parenti suo filius Buffon. 1785."--ED.]

Fathers absorbed in their occupations can but rarely attract their offspring. The first durable impressions of our moral existence come from the mother. The first prudential wisdom to which Genius listens falls from her lips, and only her caresses can create the moments of tenderness. The earnest discernment of a mother's love survives in the imagination of manhood. The mother of Sir WILLIAM JONES, having formed a plan for the education of her son, withdrew from great connexions that she might live only for that son. Her great principle of education, was to excite by curiosity; the result could not fail to be knowledge. "Read, and you will know," she constantly replied to her filial pupil. And we have his own acknowledgment, that to this maxim, which produced the habit of study, he was indebted for his future attainments. KANT, the German metaphysician, was always fond of declaring that he owed to the ascendancy of his mother's character the severe inflexibility of his moral principles. The mother of BURNS kindled his genius by reciting the old Scottish ballads, while to his father he attributed his less pleasing cast of character.

Bishop WATSON traced to the affectionate influence of his mother, the religious feelings which he confesses he inherited from her. The mother of EDGEWORTH, confined through life to her apartment, was the only person who studied his const.i.tutional volatility. When he hastened to her death-bed, the last imperfect accents of that beloved voice reminded him of the past and warned him of the future, and he declares that voice "had a happy influence on his habits,"--as happy, at least, as his own volatile nature would allow. "To the manner in which my mother formed me at an early age,"

said Napoleon, "I princ.i.p.ally owe my subsequent elevation. My opinion is, that the future good or bad conduct of a child entirely depends upon the mother."

There is this remarkable in the strong affections of the mother in the formation of the literary character, that, without even partaking of, or sympathising with the pleasures the child is fond of, the mother will often cherish those first decided tastes merely from the delight of promoting the happiness of her son; so that that genius, which some would produce on a preconceived system, or implant by stratagem, or enforce by application, with her may be only the watchful labour of love.[A] One of our most eminent antiquaries has often a.s.sured me that his great pa.s.sion, and I may say his genius, for his curious knowledge and his vast researches, he attributes to maternal affection. When his early taste for these studies was thwarted by the very different one of his father, the mother silently supplied her son with the sort of treasures he languished for, blessing the knowledge, which indeed she could not share with him, but which she beheld imparting happiness to her youthful antiquary.

[Footnote A: Kotzebue has noted the delicate attention of his mother in not only fostering his genius, but in watching its too rapid development.

He says:--"If at any time my imagination was overheated, my mother always contrived to select something for my evening reading which might moderate this ardour, and make a gentler impression on my too irritable fancy."-- ED.]

There is, what may be called, FAMILY GENIUS. In the home of a man of genius is diffused an electrical atmosphere, and his own pre-eminence strikes out talents in all. "The active pursuits of my father," says the daughter of EDGEWORTH, "spread an animation through the house by connecting children with all that was going on, and allowing them to join in thought and conversation; sympathy and emulation excited mental exertion in the most agreeable manner." EVELYN, in his beautiful retreat at Saye's Court, had inspired his family with that variety of taste which he himself was spreading throughout the nation. His son translated Rapin's "Gardens," which poem the father proudly preserved in his "Sylva;" his lady, ever busied in his study, excelled in the arts her husband loved, and designed the frontispiece to his "Lucretius:" she was the cultivator of their celebrated garden, which served as "an example" of his great work on "forest trees." Cowley, who has commemorated Evelyn's love of books and gardens, has delightfully applied them to his lady, in whom, says the bard, Evelyn meets both pleasures:--

The fairest garden in her looks, And in her mind the wisest books.

The house of HALLER resembled a temple consecrated to science and the arts, and the votaries were his own family. The universal acquirements of Haller were possessed in some degree by every one under his roof; and their studious delight in transcribing ma.n.u.scripts, in consulting authors, in botanising, drawing and colouring the plants under his eye, formed occupations which made the daughters happy and the sons eminent.[A] The painter STELLA inspired his family to copy his fanciful inventions, and the playful graver of Claudine Stella, his niece, animated his "Sports of Children." I have seen a print of COYPEL in his _studio_, and by his side his little daughter, who is intensely watching the progress of her father's pencil. The artist has represented himself in the act of suspending his labour to look on his child. At that moment, his thoughts were divided between two objects of his love. The character and the works of the late ELIZABETH HAMILTON were formed entirely by her brother.

Admiring the man she loved, she imitated what she admired; and while the brother was arduously completing the version of the Persian Hedaya, the sister, who had a.s.sociated with his morning tasks and his evening conversations, was recalling all the ideas, and pourtraying her fraternal master in her "Hindoo Rajah."

[Footnote A: Haller's death (A.D. 1777) was as remarkable for its calm philosophy, as his life for its happiness. He was a professional surgeon, and continued to the last an attentive and rational observer of the symptoms of the disease which was bringing him to the grave. He transmitted to the University of Gottingen a scientific a.n.a.lysis of his case; and died feeling his own pulse.--ED.]

Nor are there wanting instances where this FAMILY GENIUS has been carried down through successive generations: the volume of the father has been continued by a son, or a relative. The history of the family of the ZWINGERS is a combination of studies and inherited tastes. Theodore published, in 1697, a folio herbal, of which his son Frederic gave an enlarged edition in 1744; and the family was honoured by their name having been given to a genus of plants dedicated to their memory, and known in botany by the name of the _Zwingera_. In history and in literature, the family name was equally eminent; the same Theodore continued a great work, "The Theatre of Human Life," which had been begun by his father-in-law, and which for the third time was enlarged by another son. Among the historians of Italy, it is delightful to contemplate this family genius transmitting itself with unsullied probity among the three VILLANIS, and the MALASPINIS, and the two PORTAS. The history of the learned family of the STEPHENS presents a dynasty of literature; and to distinguish the numerous members, they have been designated as Henry I. and Henry II.,--as Robert I., the II., and the III.[A] Our country may exult in having possessed many literary families--the WARTONS, the father and two sons: the BURNEYS, more in number; and the nephews of Milton, whose humble torch at least was lighted at the altar of the great bard.[B]

[Footnote A: For an account of them and their works, see "Curiosities of Literature," vol, i. p. 76.]

[Footnote B: The Phillips.]

No event in literary history is more impressive than the fate of QUINTILIAN; it was in the midst of his elaborate work, which was composed to form the literary character of a son, that he experienced the most terrible affliction in the domestic life of genius--the successive deaths of his wife and his only child. It was a moral earthquake with a single survivor amidst the ruins. An awful burst of parental and literary affliction breaks forth in Quintilian's lamentation,--"My wealth, and my writings, the fruits of a long and painful life, must now be reserved only for strangers; all I possess is for aliens, and no longer mine!" We feel the united agony of the husband, the father, and the man of genius!

Deprived of these social consolations, we see JOHNSON call about him those whose calamities exiled them from society, and his roof lodges the blind, the lame, and the poor; for the heart must possess something it can call its own, to be kind to.

In domestic life, the Abbe DE ST. PIERRE enlarged its moral vocabulary, by fixing in his language two significant words. One served to explain the virtue most familiar to him--_bienfaisance_; and that irritable vanity which magnifies its ephemeral fame, the sage reduced to a mortifying diminutive--_la gloriole!_