Literary Character of Men of Genius Part 3

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 fort.i.tude, 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 amus.e.m.e.nts; 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 ill.u.s.tration may open our inquiry. "This trivial pa.s.sage," 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 pa.s.sed in domestic solitude fed the interior feelings of his impa.s.sioned character; and in noticing some incidents of a childish nature, this man of genius observes, "Whoever will reflect on these inept circ.u.mstances, and explore into the seeds of the pa.s.sions 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., ent.i.tled _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 a.n.a.logy 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 Crebillon, _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, una.s.sisted 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sociation 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 mult.i.tude, 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 h.o.m.ogeneous 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 pa.s.sions, and his uncertain thoughts. The t.i.tles 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 circ.u.mstance 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, his lonely spirit only haunted the theatre and the seash.o.r.e: 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 embellis.h.i.+ng these two immensities; there would I pa.s.s 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 a.s.surance, "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 n.o.ble 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 Ta.s.sO:--

--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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 Mecaenas 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 const.i.tutional delicacy which is too often the accompaniment of a fine intellect.

The inconveniences attached to the inferior sedentary labourers are partic.i.p.ated in by men of genius; the a.n.a.logy 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 const.i.tution, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sage which may be quoted here: "Though by nature of an athletic form, Burns had in his const.i.tution 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 pa.s.sion, 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 Abbe DE ST. PIERRE, in his political annals, tells us, "I remember to have heard old SEGRAIS remark, that most young people of both s.e.xes 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 subst.i.tute 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 amus.e.m.e.nts of such an idler have often been a.n.a.logous 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 pa.s.sed 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 courtiers.h.i.+p, 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 st.u.r.dy, 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 l.u.s.tre.

Among the inauspicious circ.u.mstances 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 pere!"--"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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 pa.s.s un.o.bserved by his companions, and, like. aeneas, he may be hidden in a cloud amidst his a.s.sociates. 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 amus.e.m.e.nts, 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 a.s.siduous 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 Pa.s.seri, 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 a.s.sert, 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 pa.s.sing away."

A parallel case we find in GOLDSMITH, who pa.s.sed 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 a.s.siduity, 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 circ.u.mstance 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 G.o.d to take from him any of his children, he hoped it might be Isaac, as the least promising; and during the three years Barrow pa.s.sed 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, p.r.o.nounced early that he was the dullest and most hopeless of her sons. BODMER, at the head of the literary cla.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 const.i.tuted all his happiness. Those arts of imitation were already possessing the soul of the boy Gesner, to which afterwards it became so entirely devoted.