Literary Character of Men of Genius Part 15

The dealers in enormous speculative purchases are only subservient to the spirit of the times. If they are the purveyors, they are also the panders of public taste; and their vaunted patronage only extends to popular subjects; while their urgent demands are sure to produce hasty manufactures. A precious work on a recondite subject, which may have consumed the life of its author, no bookseller can patronise; and whenever such a work is published, the author has rarely survived the long season of the public's neglect. While popular works, after some few years of celebrity, have at length been discovered not worth the repairs nor the renewal of their lease of fame, the neglected work of a n.o.bler design rises in value and rarity. The literary work which requires the greatest skill and difficulty, and the longest labour, is not commercially valued with that hasty, spurious novelty; for which the taste of the public is craving, from the strength of its disease rather than of its appet.i.te.

ROUSSEAU observed, that his musical opera, the work of five or six weeks, brought him as much money as he had received for his "Emile," which had cost him twenty years of meditation, and three years of composition. This single fact represents a hundred. So fallacious are public opinion and the patronage of booksellers!

Such, then, is the inadequate remuneration of a life devoted to literature; and notwithstanding the more general interest excited by its productions within the last century, it has not essentially altered their situation in society; for who is deceived by the trivial exultation of the gay sparkling scribbler who lately a.s.sured us that authors now dip their pens in silver ink-standishes, and have a valet for an amanuensis?

Fashionable writers must necessarily get out of fashion; it is the inevitable fate of the material and the manufacturer. An eleemosynary fund can provide no permanent relief for the age and sorrows of the unhappy men of science and literature; and an author may even have composed a work which shall be read by the next generation as well as the present, and still be left in a state even of pauperism. These victims perish in silence! No one has attempted to suggest even a palliative for this great evil; and when I asked the greatest genius of our age to propose some relief for this general suffering, a sad and convulsive nod, a shrug that sympathised with the misery of so many brothers, and an avowal that even he could not invent one, was all that genius had to alleviate the forlorn state of the literary character.[A]

[Footnote A: It was the late Sir WALTER SCOTT--if I could a.s.sign the _date_ of this conversation, it would throw some light on what might be then pa.s.sing in his own mind.]

The only man of genius who has thrown out a hint for improving the situation of the literary man is ADAM SMITH. In that pa.s.sage in his "Wealth of Nations" to which I have already referred, he says, that "Before the invention of the art of printing, the only employment by which a man of letters could make anything by his talents was that of a _public or a private teacher_, or by communicating to other people the various and useful knowledge which he had acquired himself; and this surely is a more honourable, a more useful, and in general even a more profitable employment than that other _of writing for a bookseller_, to which the art of printing has given occasion." We see the political economist, alike insensible to the dignity of the literary character, incapable of taking a just view of its glorious avocation. To obviate the personal wants attached to the occupations of an author, he would, more effectually than skilfully, get rid of authorship itself. This is not to restore the limb, but to amputate it. It is not the preservation of existence, but its annihilation. His friends Hume and Robertson must have turned from this page humiliated and indignant. They could have supplied Adam Smith with a truer conception of the literary character, of its independence, its influence, and its glory.

I have projected a plan for the alleviation of the state of these authors who are not blessed with a patrimony. The _trade_ connected with literature is carried on by men who are usually not literate, and the generality of the publishers of books, unlike all other tradesmen, are often the worst judges of their own wares. Were it practicable, as I believe it to be, that authors and men of letters could themselves be booksellers, the public would derive this immediate benefit from the scheme; a deluge of worthless or indifferent books would be turned away, and the name of the literary publisher would be a pledge for the value of every new book. Every literary man would choose his own favourite department, and we should learn from him as well as from his books.

Against this project it may be urged, that literary men are ill adapted to attend to the regular details of trade, and that the great capitalists in the book business have not been men of literature. But this plan is not suggested for acc.u.mulating a great fortune, or for the purpose of raising up a new cla.s.s of tradesmen. It is not designed to make authors wealthy, for that would inevitably extinguish great literary exertion, but only to make them independent, as the best means to preserve exertion. The details of trade are not even to reach him. The poet GESNER, a bookseller, left his _librairie_ to the care of his admirable wife. His own works, the elegant editions which issued from his press, and the value of ma.n.u.scripts, were the objects of his attention.

On the Continent many of the dealers in books have been literary men. At the memorable expulsion of the French Protestants on the edict of Nantes, their expatriated literary men flew to the sh.o.r.es of England, and the free provinces of Holland; and it was in Holland that this colony of _litterateurs_ established magnificent printing-houses, and furnished Europe with editions of the native writers of France, often preferable to the originals, and even wrote the best works of that time. At that memorable period in our own history, when two thousand nonconformists were ejected on St. Bartholomew's day from the national establishment, the greater part were men of learning, who, deprived of their livings, were dest.i.tute of any means of existence. These scholars were compelled to look to some profitable occupation, and for the greater part they fixed on trades connected with literature; some became eminent booksellers, and continued to be voluminous writers, without finding their studies interrupted by; their commercial arrangements. The details of trade must be left to others; the hand of a child can turn a vast machine, and the object here proposed would be lost, if authors sought to become merely booksellers.

Whenever the public of Europe shall witness such a new order of men among their booksellers, they will have less to read, but more to remember.

Their opinions will be less fluctuating, and their knowledge will come to them with more maturity. Men of letters will fly to the house of the bookseller who in that cla.s.s of literature in which he deals, will himself be not the least eminent member.

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.

Matrimony has often been considered as a condition not well suited to the domestic life of genius, accompanied as it must be by many embarra.s.sments for the head and the heart. It was an axiom with Fuessli, the Swiss artist, that the marriage state is incompatible with a high cultivation of the fine arts; and such appears to have been the feeling of most artists.

When MICHAEL ANGELO was asked why he did not marry, he replied, "I have espoused my art; and it occasions me sufficient domestic cares, for my works shall be my children. What would Bartholomeo Ghiberti have been, had he not made the gates of St. John? His children consumed his fortune, but his gates, worthy to be the gates of Paradise, remain." The three Caraccis refused the conjugal bond on the same principle, dreading the interruptions of domestic life. Their crayons and paper were always on their dining-table. Careless of fortune, they determined never to hurry over their works in order that they might supply the ceaseless demands of a family. We discover the same principle operating in our own times. When a young painter, who had just married, told Sir Joshua that he was preparing to pursue his studies in Italy, that great painter exclaimed, "Married! then you are ruined as an artist!"

The same principle has influenced literary men. Sir THOMAS BODLEY had a smart altercation with his first librarian, insisting that he should not marry, maintaining its absurdity in the man who had the perpetual care of a public library; and Woodward left as one of the express conditions of his lecturer, that he was not to be a married man. They imagined that their private affairs would interfere with their public duties. PEIRESC, the great French collector, refused marriage, convinced that the cares of a family were too absorbing for the freedom necessary to literary pursuits, and claimed likewise a sacrifice of fortune incompatible with his great designs. BOYLE, who would not suffer his studies to be interrupted by "household affairs," lived as a boarder with his sister, Lady Ranelagh. Newton, Locke, Leibnitz, Bayle, and Hobbes, and Hume, and Gibbon, and Adam Smith, decided for celibacy. These great authors placed their happiness in their celebrity.

This debate, for the present topic has sometimes warmed into one, is in truth ill adapted for controversy. The heart is more concerned in its issue than any espoused doctrine terminating in partial views. Look into the domestic annals of genius--observe the variety of positions into which the literary character is thrown in the nuptial state. Cynicism will not always obtain a sullen triumph, nor prudence always be allowed to calculate away some of the richer feelings of our nature. It is not an axiom that literary characters must necessarily inst.i.tute a new order of celibacy. The sentence of the apostle p.r.o.nounces that "the forbidding to marry is a doctrine of devils." WESLEY, who published "Thoughts on a Single Life," advised some "to remain single for the kingdom of heaven's sake; but the precept," he adds, "is not for the many." So indecisive have been the opinions of the most curious inquirers concerning the matrimonial state, whenever a great destination has engaged their consideration.

One position we may a.s.sume, that the studies, and even the happiness of the pursuits of men of genius, are powerfully influenced by the domestic a.s.sociate of their lives.

They rarely pa.s.s through the age of love without its pa.s.sion. Even their Delias and their Amandas are often the shadows of some real object; for as Shakspeare's experience told him,

"Never durst poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs."

Their imagination is perpetually colouring those pictures of domestic happiness on which they delight to dwell. He who is no husband sighs for that tenderness which is at once bestowed and received; and tears will start in the eyes of him who, in becoming a child among children, yet feels that he is no father! These deprivations have usually been the concealed cause of the querulous melancholy of the literary character.

Such was the real occasion of SHENSTONE'S unhappiness. In early life he had been captivated by a young lady adapted to be both the muse and the wife of the poet, and their mutual sensibility lasted for some years. It lasted until she died. It was in parting from her that he first sketched his "Pastoral Ballad." SHENSTONE had the fort.i.tude to refuse marriage.

His spirit could not endure that she should partic.i.p.ate in that life of self-privations to which he was doomed; but his heart was not locked up in the ice of celibacy, and his plaintive love songs and elegies flowed from no fict.i.tious source. "It is long since," said he, "I have considered myself as _undone_. The world will not perhaps consider me in that light entirely till I have married my maid."[A]

[Footnote A: The melancholy tale of Shenstone's life is narrated in the third volume "Curiosities of Literature,"--ED.]

THOMSON met a reciprocal pa.s.sion in his Amanda, while the full tenderness of his heart was ever wasting itself like waters in a desert. As we have been made little acquainted with this part of the history of the poet of the "Seasons," I shall give his own description of those deep feelings from a ma.n.u.script letter written to Mallet. "To turn my eyes a softer way, to you know who--absence sighs it to me. What is my heart made of? a soft system of low nerves, too sensible for my quiet--capable of being very happy or very unhappy, I am afraid the last will prevail. Lay your hand upon a kindred heart, and despise me not. I know not what it is, but she dwells upon my thought in a mingled sentiment, which is the sweetest, the most intimately pleasing the soul can receive, and which I would wish never to want towards some dear object or another. To have always some secret darling idea to which one can still have recourse amidst the noise and nonsense of the world, and which never fails to touch us in the most exquisite manner, is an art of happiness that fortune cannot deprive us of. This may be called romantic; but whatever the cause is, the effect is really felt. Pray, when you write, tell me when you saw her, and with the pure eye of a friend, when you see her again, whisper that I am her most humble servant."

Even POPE was enamoured of a "scornful lady;" and, as Johnson observed, "polluted his will with female resentment." JOHNSON himself, we are told by one who knew him, "had always a metaphysical pa.s.sion for one princess or other,--the rustic Lucy Porter, or the haughty Molly Aston, or the sublimated methodistic Hill Boothby; and, lastly, the more charming Mrs.

Thrale." Even in his advanced age, at the height of his celebrity, we hear his cries of lonely wretchedness. "I want every comfort; my life is very solitary and very cheerless. Let me know that I have yet a friend--let us be kind to one another." But the "kindness" of distant friends is like the polar sun--too far removed to warm us. Those who have eluded the individual tenderness of the female, are tortured by an aching void in their feelings. The stoic AKENSIDE, in his "Odes," has preserved the history of a life of genius in a series of his own feelings. One ent.i.tled, "At Study," closes with these memorable lines:--

Me though no peculiar fair Touches with a lover's care; Though the pride of my desire Asks immortal friendship's name, Asks the palm of honest fame And the old heroic lyre; Though the day have smoothly gone, Or to letter'd leisure known, Or in social duty spent; Yet at the eve my lonely breast _Seeks in vain for perfect rest, Languishes for true content._

If ever a man of letters lived in a state of energy and excitement which might raise him above the atmosphere of social love, it was a.s.suredly the enthusiast, THOMAS HOLLIS, who, solely devoted to literature and to republicanism, was occupied in furnishing Europe and America with editions of his favourite authors. He would not marry, lest marriage should interrupt the labours of his platonic politics. But his extraordinary memoirs, while they show an intrepid mind in a robust frame, bear witness to the self-tormentor who had trodden down the natural bonds of domestic life. Hence the deep "dejection of his spirits;" those incessant cries, that he has "no one to advise, a.s.sist, or cherish those magnanimous pursuits in him." At length he retreated into the country, in utter hopelessness. "I go not into the country for attentions to agriculture as such, nor attentions of interest of any kind, which I have ever despised as such; but as a _used man_, to pa.s.s the remainder of a life in tolerable sanity and quiet, after having given up the flower of it, voluntarily, day, week, month, year after year, successive to each other, to public service, and being no longer able to sustain, in _body or mind_, the labours that I have chosen to go through without falling speedily into _the greatest disorders_, and it might be _imbecility itself_. This is not colouring, but the exact plain truth."

Poor moralist, and what art thou?

A solitary fly!

Thy joys no glittering female meets, No hive hast thou of h.o.a.rded sweets.

a.s.suredly it would not have been a question whether these literary characters should have married, had not MONTAIGNE, when a widower, declared that "he would not marry a second time, though it were Wisdom itself;" but the airy Gascon has not disclosed how far _Madame_ was concerned in this anathema.

If the literary man unite himself to a woman whose taste and whose temper are adverse to his pursuits, he must courageously prepare for a martyrdom.

Should a female mathematician be united to a poet, it is probable that she would be left amidst her abstractions, to demonstrate to herself how many a specious diagram fails when brought into its mechanical operation; or discovering the infinite varieties of a curve, she might take occasion to deduce her husband's versatility. If she become as jealous of his books as other wives might be of his mistresses, she may act the virago even over his innocent papers. The wife of Bishop COOPER, while her husband was employed on his Lexicon, one day consigned the volume of many years to the flames, and obliged that scholar to begin a second siege of Troy in a second Lexicon. The wife of WHITELOCKE often destroyed his MSS., and the marks of her nails have come down to posterity in the numerous _lacerations_ still gaping in his "Memorials." The learned Sir HENRY SAVILLE, who devoted more than half his life and nearly ten thousand pounds to his magnificent edition of St. Chrysostom, led a very uneasy life between the saint and her ladyship. What with her tenderness for him, and her own want of amus.e.m.e.nt, Saint Chrysostom, it appears, incurred more than one danger.

Genius has not preserved itself from the errors and infirmities of matrimonial connexions. The energetic character of DANTE could neither soften nor control the asperity of his lady; and when that great poet lived in exile, she never cared to see him more, though he was the father of her six children. The internal state of the house of DOMENICHINO afflicted that great artist with many sorrows. He had married a beauty of high birth and extreme haughtiness, and of the most avaricious disposition. When at Naples he himself dreaded lest the avaricious pa.s.sion of his wife should not be able to resist the offers she received to poison him, and he was compelled to provide and dress his own food. It is believed that he died of poison. What a picture has Pa.s.seri left of the domestic interior of this great artist! _Cos fra mille crepacuori mori uno de' piu eccellenti artefici del mundo; che oltre al suo valore pittorco avrebbe piu d'ogni altri maritato di viver sempre per l'onesta personale._ "So perished, amidst a thousand heart-breakings, the most excellent of artists; who besides his worth as a painter, deserved as much as any one to have lived for his excellence as a man."

MILTON carried nothing of the greatness of his mind in the choice of his wives. His first wife was the object of sudden fancy. He left the metropolis, and unexpectedly returned a married man, and united to a woman of such uncongenial dispositions, that the romp was frightened at the literary habits of the great poet, found his house solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away after a single month's residence! To this circ.u.mstance we owe his famous treatise on Divorce; and a party (by no means extinct), who having made as ill choices in their wives, were for divorcing as fast as they had been for marrying, calling themselves _Miltonists_.

When we find that MOLIeRE, so skilful in human life, married a girl from his own troop, who made him experience all those bitter disgusts and ridiculous embarra.s.sments which he himself played off at the theatre; that ADDISON'S fine taste in morals and in life could suffer the ambition of a courtier to prevail with himself to seek a countess, whom he describes under the stormy character of Oceana, and who drove him contemptuously into solitude, and shortened his days; and that STEELE, warm and thoughtless, was united to a cold precise "Miss Prue," as he himself calls her, and from whom he never parted without bickerings; in all these cases we censure the great men, not their wives.[A] ROUSSEAU has honestly confessed his error. He had united himself to a low, illiterate woman; and when he retreated into solitude, he felt the weight which he carried with him. He laments that he had not educated his wife: "In a docile age, I could have adorned her mind with talents and knowledge, which would have more closely united us in retirement. We should not then have felt the intolerable tedium of a tete-a-tete; it is in solitude one feels the advantage of living with another who can think." Thus Rousseau confesses the fatal error, and indicates the right principle.

[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," for anecdotes of "Literary Wives."]

Yet it seems not absolutely necessary for the domestic happiness of the literary character, that his wife should be a literary woman. TYCHO BRAHE, n.o.ble by birth as well as genius, married the daughter of a peasant. By which means that great man obtained two points essential for his abstract pursuits; he acquired an obedient wife, and freed himself of his n.o.ble relatives, who would no longer hold an intercourse with the man who was spreading their family honours into more ages than perhaps they could have traced them backwards. The lady of WIELAND was a pleasing domestic person, who, without reading her husband's works, knew he was a great poet.

Wieland was apt to exercise his imagination in declamatory invectives and bitter amplifications; and the writer of this account, in perfect German taste, a.s.sures us, "that many of his felicities of diction were thus struck out at a heat." During this frequent operation of his genius, the placable temper of Mrs. Wieland overcame the o.r.g.a.s.m of the German bard, merely by persisting in her admiration and her patience. When the burst was over, Wieland himself was so charmed by her docility, that he usually closed with giving up all his opinions.

There is another sort of homely happiness, aptly described in the plain words of Bishop NEWTON. He found "the study of sacred and cla.s.sic authors ill agreed with butchers' and bakers' bills;" and when the prospect of a bishopric opened on him, "more servants, more entertainments, a better table, &c.," it became necessary to look out for "some clever, sensible woman to be his wife, who would lay out his money to the best advantage, and be careful and tender of his health; a friend and companion at all hours, and who would be happier in staying at home than be perpetually gadding abroad." Such are the wives not adapted to be the votaries, but who may be the faithful companions through life, even of a man of genius.

But in the character of the higher female we may discover a const.i.tutional faculty of docility and enthusiasm which has varied with the genius of different ages. It is the opinion of an elegant metaphysician, that the mind of the female adopts and familiarises itself with ideas more easily than that of man, and hence the facility with which the s.e.x contract or lose habits, and accommodate their minds to new situations. Politics, war, and learning, are equally objects of attainment to their delightful susceptibility. Love has the fancied transparency of the cameleon. When the art of government directed the feelings of a woman, we behold Aspasia, eloquent with the genius of Pericles, instructing the Archons; Portia, the wife of the republican Brutus, devouring burning coals; and the wife of Lucan, transcribing and correcting the Pharsalia, before the bust of the poet, which she had placed on her bed, that his very figure might never be absent. When universities were opened to the s.e.x, they acquired academic glory. The wives of military men have shared in the perils of the field; or like Anna Comnena and our Mrs. Hutchinson, have become even their historians. In the age of love and sympathy, the female often receives an indelible pliancy from her literary a.s.sociate. His pursuits become the objects of her thoughts, and he observes his own taste reflected in his family; much less through his own influence, for his solitary labours often preclude him from forming them, than by that image of his own genius--the mother of his children! The subjects, the very books which enter into his literary occupation, are cherished by her imagination; a feeling finely opened by the lady of the author of "Sandford and Merton:"

"My ideas of my husband," she said, "are so much a.s.sociated with his _books_, that to part with them would be as it were breaking some of the last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object. The being in the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his _marks_ and _notes_, will still give him _a sort of existence_ with _me_.

Unintelligible as such fond chimeras may appear to many people, I am persuaded they are not so to you."

With what simplicity Meta Hollers, the wife of Klopstock, in her German-English, describes to Richardson, the novelist, the manner in which she pa.s.ses her day with her poet! she tells him that "she is always present at the birth of the young verses, which begin by fragments, here and there, of a subject with which his soul is just then filled. Persons who live as we do have no need of two chambers; we are always in the same: I with my little work, still! still! only regarding sometimes my husband's face, which is so venerable at that time with tears of devotion, and all the sublimity of the subject--my husband reading me his young verses, and suffering my criticisms."

The picture of a literary wife of antiquity has descended to us, touched by the domestic pencil of genius, in the susceptible CALPHUENIA, the lady of the younger PLINY. "Her affection for me," he says, "has given her a turn to books: her pa.s.sion will increase with our days, for it is not my youth or my person, which time gradually impairs, but my reputation and my glory, of which she is enamoured."

I have been told that BUFFON, notwithstanding his favourite seclusion of his old tower in his garden, acknowledged to a friend that his lady had a considerable influence over his compositions: "Often," said he, "when I cannot please myself, and am impatient at the disappointment, Madame de Buffon reanimates my exertion, or withdraws me to repose for a short interval; I return to my pen refreshed, and aided by her advice."

GESNER declared that whatever were his talents, the person who had most contributed to develope them was his wife. She is unknown to the public; but the history of the mind of such a woman is discovered in the "Letters of Gesner and his Family." While GESNER gave himself up entirely to his favourite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and poetry, his wife would often reanimate a genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, and often exciting him to new productions, her sure and delicate taste was attentively consulted by the poet-painter--but she combined the most practical good sense with the most feeling imagination. This forms the rareness of the character; for this same woman, who united with her husband in the education of their children, to relieve him from the interruptions of common business, carried on alone the concerns of his house in _la librairie_.[A] Her correspondence with her son, a young artist travelling for his studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively terms "a gathered mind." Imagine a woman attending to the domestic economy, and to the commercial details, yet withdrawing out of this business of life into the more elevated pursuits of her husband, and at the same time combining with all this the cares and counsels which she bestowed on her son to form the artist and the man.

[Footnote A: Gesner's father was a bookseller of Zurich; descended from a family of men learned in the exact sciences, he was apprenticed to a bookseller at Berlin, and afterwards entered into his father's business.

The best edition of his "Idylls" is that published by himself, in two volumes, 4to, ill.u.s.trated by his own engravings.--ED.]

To know this incomparable woman we must hear her. "Consider your father's precepts as oracles of wisdom; they are the result of the experience he has collected, not only of life, but of that art which he has acquired simply by his own industry." She would not have her son suffer his strong affection to herself to absorb all other sentiments. "Had you remained at home, and been habituated under your mother's auspices to employments merely domestic, what advantage would you have acquired? I own we should have pa.s.sed some delightful winter evenings together; but your love for the arts, and my ambition to see my sons as much distinguished for their talents as their virtues, would have been a constant source of regret at your pa.s.sing your time in a manner so little worthy of you."

How profound is her observation on the strong but confined attachments of a youth of genius! "I have frequently remarked, with some regret, the excessive attachment you indulge towards those who see and feel as you do yourself, and the total neglect with which you seem to treat every one else. I should reproach a man with such a fault who was destined to pa.s.s his life in a small and unvarying circle; but in an artist, who has a great object in view, and whose country is the whole world, this disposition seems to be likely to produce a great number of inconveniences. Alas! my son, the life you have hitherto led in your father's house has been in fact a pastoral life, and not such a one as was necessary for the education of a man whose destiny summons him to the world."

And when her son, after meditating on some of the most glorious productions of art, felt himself, as he says, "disheartened and cast down at the unattainable superiority of the artist, and that it was only by reflecting on the immense labour and continued efforts which such masterpieces must have required, that I regained my courage and my ardour," she observes, "This pa.s.sage, my dear son, is to me as precious as gold, and I send it to you again, because I wish you to impress it strongly on your mind. The remembrance of this may also be a useful preservative from too great confidence in your abilities, to which a warm imagination may sometimes be liable, or from the despondence you might occasionally feel from the contemplation of grand originals. Continue, therefore, my dear son, to form a sound judgment and a pure taste from your own observations: your mind, while yet young and flexible, may receive whatever impressions you wish. Be careful that your abilities do not inspire in you too much confidence, lest it should happen to you as it has to many others, that they have never possessed any greater merit than that of having good abilities."

One more extract, to preserve an incident which may touch the heart of genius. This extraordinary woman, whose characteristic is that of strong sense combined with delicacy of feeling, would check her German sentimentality at the moment she was betraying those emotions in which the imagination is so powerfully mixed up with the a.s.sociated feelings.