Literary Character of Men of Genius Part 23

A reader is too often a prisoner attached to the triumphal car of an author of great celebrity; and when he ventures not to judge for himself, conceives, while he is reading the indifferent works of great authors, that the languor which he experiences arises from his own defective taste.

But the best writers, when they are voluminous, have a great deal of mediocrity.

On the other side, readers must not imagine that all the pleasures of composition depend on the author, for there is something which a reader himself must bring to the book that the book may please. There is a literary appet.i.te, which the author can no more impart than the most skilful cook can give an appetency to the guests. When Cardinal Richelieu said to G.o.deau, that he did not understand his verses, the honest poet replied that it was not his fault. The temporary tone of the mind may be unfavourable to taste a work properly, and we have had many erroneous criticisms from great men, which may often be attributed to this circ.u.mstance. The mind communicates its infirm dispositions to the book, and an author has not only his own defects to account for, but also those of his reader. There is something in composition like the game of shuttlec.o.c.k, where if the reader do not quickly rebound the feathered c.o.c.k to the author, the game is destroyed, and the whole spirit of the work falls extinct.

A frequent impediment in reading is a disinclination in the mind to settle on the subject; agitated by incongruous and dissimilar ideas, it is with pain that we admit those of the author. But on applying ourselves with a gentle violence to the perusal of an interesting work, the mind soon a.s.similates to the subject; the ancient rabbins advised their young students to apply themselves to their readings, whether they felt an inclination or not, because, as they proceeded, they would find their disposition restored and their curiosity awakened.

Readers may be cla.s.sed into an infinite number of divisions; but an author is a solitary being, who, for the same reason he pleases one, must consequently displease another. To have too exalted a genius is more prejudicial to his celebrity than to have a moderate one; for we shall find that the most popular works are not the most profound, but such as instruct those who require instruction, and charm those who are not too learned to taste their novelty. Lucilius, the satirist, said, that he did not write for Persius, for Scipio, and for Rutilius, persons eminent for their science, but for the Tarentines, the Consentines, and the Sicilians.

Montaigne has complained that he found his readers too learned, or too ignorant, and that he could only please a middle cla.s.s, who have just learning enough to comprehend him. Congreve says, "there is in true beauty something which vulgar souls cannot admire." Balzac complains bitterly of readers,--"A period," he cries, "shall have cost us the labour of a day; we shall have distilled into an essay the essence of our mind; it may be a finished piece of art; and they think they are indulgent when they p.r.o.nounce it to contain some pretty things, and that the style is not bad!" There is something in exquisite composition which ordinary readers can never understand.

Authors are vain, but readers are capricious. Some will only read old books, as if there were no valuable truths to be discovered in modern publications; while others will only read new books, as if some valuable truths are not among the old. Some will not read a book, because they are acquainted with the author; by which the reader may be more injured than the author: others not only read the book, but would also read the man; by which the most ingenious author may be injured by the most impertinent reader.

ON HABITUATING OURSELVES TO AN INDIVIDUAL PURSUIT.

Two things in human life are at continual variance, and without escaping from the one we must be separated from the other; and these are _ennui_ and _pleasure_. Ennui is an afflicting sensation, if we may thus express it, from a want of sensation; and pleasure is greater pleasure according to the quant.i.ty of sensation. That sensation is received in proportion to the capacity of our organs; and that practice, or, as it has been sometimes called, "educated feeling," enlarges this capacity, is evident in such familiar instances as those of the blind, who have a finer tact, and the jeweller, who has a finer sight, than other men who are not so deeply interested in refining their vision and their touch. Intense attention is, therefore, a certain means of deriving more numerous pleasures from its object.

Hence it is that the poet, long employed on a poem, has received a quant.i.ty of pleasure which no reader can ever feel. In the progress of any particular pursuit, there are a hundred fugitive sensations which are too intellectual to be embodied into language. Every artist knows that between the thought that first gave rise to his design, and each one which appears in it, there are innumerable intermediate evanescences of sensation which no man felt but himself. These pleasures are in number according to the intenseness of his faculties and the quant.i.ty of his labour.

It is so in any particular pursuit, from the manufacturing of pins to the construction of philosophical systems. Every individual can exert that quant.i.ty of mind necessary to his wants and adapted to his situation; the quality of pleasure is nothing in the present question: for I think that we are mistaken concerning the gradations of human felicity. It does at first appear, that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel a more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team; or a poet experience a higher gratification in modulating verses than a trader in arranging sums. But the happiness of the ploughman and the trader may be as satisfactory as that of the astronomer and the poet.

Our mind can only he conversant with those sensations which surround us, and possessing the skill of managing them, we can form an artificial felicity; it is certain that what the soul does not feel, no more affects it than what the eye does not see. It is thus that the trader, habituated to humble pursuits, can never be unhappy because he is not the general of an army; for this idea of felicity he has never received. The philosopher who gives his entire years to the elevated pursuits of mind, is never unhappy because he is not in possession of an Indian opulence, for the idea of acc.u.mulating this exotic splendour has never entered the range of his combinations. Nature, an impartial mother, renders felicity as perfect in the school-boy who scourges his top, as in the astronomer who regulates his star. The thing contained can only be equal to the container; a full gla.s.s is as full as a full bottle; and a human soul may be as much satisfied in the lowest of human beings as in the highest.

In the progress of an individual pursuit, what philosophers call the a.s.sociating or suggesting idea is ever busied, and in its beautiful effects genius is most deeply concerned; for besides those trains of thought the great artist falls into during his actual composition, a distinct habit accompanies real genius through life in the activity of his a.s.sociating idea, when not at his work; it is at all times pressing and conducting his spontaneous thoughts, and every object which suggests them, however apparently trivial or unconnected towards itself, making what it wills its own, while instinctively it seems inattentive to whatever has no tendency to its own purposes.

Many peculiar advantages attend the cultivation of one master pa.s.sion or occupation. In superior minds it is a sovereign that exiles others, and in inferior minds it enfeebles pernicious propensities. It may render us useful to our fellow-citizens, and it imparts the most perfect independence to ourselves. It is observed by a great mathematician, that a geometrician would not be unhappy in a desert.

This unity of design, with a centripetal force, draws all the rays of our existence; and often, when accident has turned the mind firmly to one object, it has been discovered that its occupation is another name for happiness; for it is a mean of escaping from incongruous sensations. It secures us from the dark vacuity of soul, as well as from the whirlwind of ideas; reason itself is a pa.s.sion, but a pa.s.sion full of serenity.

It is, however, observable of those who have devoted themselves to an individual object, that its importance is incredibly enlarged to their sensations. Intense attention magnifies like a microscope; but it is possible to apologise for their apparent extravagance from the consideration, that they really observe combinations not perceived by others of inferior application. That this pa.s.sion has been carried to a curious violence of affection, literary history affords numerous instances. In reading Dr. Burney's "Musical Travels," it would seem that music was the prime object of human life; Richardson, the painter, in his treatise on his beloved art, closes all by affirming, that "_Raphael_ is not only _equal_, but _superior_ to a _Virgil_, or a _Livy_, or a _Thucydides_, or a _Homer_!" and that painting can reform our manners, increase our opulence, honour, and power. Denina, in his "Revolutions of Literature," tells us that to excel in historical composition requires more ability than is exercised by the excelling masters of any other art; because it requires not only the same erudition, genius, imagination, and taste, necessary for a poet, a painter, or a philosopher, but the historian must also have some peculiar qualifications; this served as a prelude to his own history.[A] Helvetius, an enthusiast in the fine arts and polite literature, has composed a poem on Happiness; and imagines that it consists in an exclusive love of the cultivation of letters and the arts. All this shows that the more intensely we attach ourselves to an individual object, the more numerous and the more perfect are our sensations; if we yield to the distracting variety of opposite pursuits with an equal pa.s.sion, our soul is placed amid a continual shock of ideas, and happiness is lost by mistakes.

[Footnote A: One of the most amusing modern instances occurs in the Preface to the late Peter Buchan's annotated edition of "Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland" (2 vols. 8vo, Edin. 1828), in which he declares--"no one has yet conceived, nor has it entered the mind of man, what patience, perseverance, and general knowledge are necessary for an editor of a Collection of Ancient Ballads."--ED.]

ON NOVELTY IN LITERATURE.

"All is said," exclaims the lively La Bruyere; but at the same moment, by his own admirable Reflections, confutes the dreary system he would establish. An opinion of the exhausted state of literature has been a popular prejudice of remote existence; and an unhappy idea of a wise ancient, who, even in his day, lamented that "of books there is no end,"

has been transcribed in many books. He who has critically examined any branch of literature has discovered how little of original invention is to be found even in the most excellent works. To add a little to his predecessors satisfies the ambition of the first geniuses. The popular notion of literary novelty is an idea more fanciful than exact. Many are yet to learn that our admired originals are not such as they mistake them to be; that the plans of the most original performances have been borrowed; and that the thoughts of the most admired compositions are not wonderful discoveries, but only truths, which the ingenuity of the author, by arranging the intermediate and accessary ideas, has unfolded from that confused sentiment, which those experience who are not accustomed to think with depth, or to discriminate with accuracy. This Novelty in Literature is, as Pope defines it,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Novelty, in its rigid acceptation, will not be found in any judicious production.

Voltaire looked on everything as imitation. He observes that the most original writers borrowed one from another, and says that the instruction we gather from books is like fire--we fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, and communicate it to others, till it becomes the property of all. He traces some of the finest compositions to the fountainhead; and the reader smiles when he perceives that they have travelled in regular succession through China, India, Arabia, and Greece, to France and to England.

To the obscurity of time are the ancients indebted for that originality in which they are imagined to excel, but we know how frequently they accuse each other; and to have borrowed copiously from preceding writers was not considered criminal by such ill.u.s.trious authors as Plato and Cicero. The aeneid of Virgil displays little invention in the incidents, for it unites the plan of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

Our own early writers have not more originality than modern genius may aspire to reach. To imitate and to rival the Italians and the French formed their devotion. Chaucer, Gower, and Gawin Douglas, were all spirited imitators, and frequently only masterly translators. Spenser, the father of so many poets, is himself the child of the Ausonian Muse. Milton is incessantly borrowing from the poetry of his day. In the beautiful Masque of Comus he preserved all the circ.u.mstances of the work he imitated. Ta.s.so opened for him the Tartarean Gulf; the sublime description of the bridge may be found in Sadi, who borrowed it from the Turkish theology; the paradise of fools is a wild flower, transplanted from the wilderness of Ariosto. The rich poetry of Gray is a wonderful tissue, woven on the frames, and composed with the gold threads, of others. To Cervantes we owe Butler; and the united abilities of three great wits, in their _Martinus Scriblerus_, could find no other mode of conveying their powers but by imitating at once Don Quixote and Monsieur Oufle.

Pope, like Boileau, had all the ancients and moderns in his pay; the contributions he levied were not the pillages of a bandit, but the taxes of a monarch. Swift is much indebted for the plans of his two very original performances: he owes the "Travels of Gulliver" to the "Voyages of Cyrano de Bergerac to the Sun and Moon;" a writer, who, without the acuteness of Swift, has wilder flashes of fancy; Joseph Warton has observed many of Swift's strokes in Bishop G.o.dwin's "Man in the Moon,"

who, in his turn, must have borrowed his work from Cyrano. "The Tale of a Tub" is an imitation of such various originals, that they are too numerous here to mention. Wotton observed, justly, that in many places the author's wit is not his own. Dr. Ferriar's "Essay on the Imitations of Sterne"

might be considerably augmented. Such are the writers, however, who imitate, but remain inimitable!

Montaigne, with honest navete, compares his writings to a thread that binds the flowers of others; and that, by incessantly pouring the waters of a few good old authors into his sieve, some drops fall upon his paper.

The good old man elsewhere acquaints us with a certain stratagem of his own invention, consisting of his inserting whole sentences from the ancients, without acknowledgment, that the critics might blunder, by giving _nazardes_ to Seneca and Plutarch, while they imagined they tweaked his nose. Petrarch, who is not the inventor of that tender poetry of which he is the model, and Boccaccio, called the father of Italian novelists, have alike profited by a studious perusal of writers, who are now only read by those who have more curiosity than taste. Boiardo has imitated Pulci, and Ariosto, Boiardo. The madness of Orlando Furioso, though it wears, by its extravagance, a very original air, is only imitated from Sir Launcelot in the old romance of "Morte Arthur," with which, Warton observes, it agrees in every leading circ.u.mstance; and what is the Cardenio of Cervantes but the Orlando of Ariosto? Ta.s.so has imitated the _Iliad_, and enriched his poem with episodes from the _aeneid_. It is curious to observe that even Dante, wild and original as he appears, when he meets Virgil in the Inferno, warmly expresses his grat.i.tude for the many fine pa.s.sages for which he was indebted to his works, and on which he says he had "long meditated." Moliere and La Fontaine are considered to possess as much originality as any of the French writers; yet the learned Menage calls Moliere "un grand et habile picoreur;" and Boileau tells us that La Fontaine borrowed his style and matter from Marot and Rabelais, and took his subjects from Boccaccio, Poggius, and Ariosto. Nor was the eccentric Rabelais the inventor of most of his burlesque narratives; and he is a very close imitator of Folengo, the inventor of the macaronic poetry, and not a little indebted to the old _Facezie_ of the Italians.

Indeed Marot, Villon, as well as those we have noticed, profited by the authors anterior to the age of Francis I. La Bruyere incorporates whole pa.s.sages of Publius Syrus in his work, as the translator of the latter abundantly shows. To the "Turkish Spy" was Montesquieu beholden for his "Persian Letters," and a numerous crowd are indebted to Montesquieu.

Corneille made a liberal use of Spanish literature; and the pure waters of Racine flowed from the fountains of Sophocles and Euripides.

This vein of imitation runs through the productions of our greatest authors. Vigneul de Marville compares some of the first writers to bankers who are rich with the a.s.sembled fortunes of individuals, and would be often ruined were they too hardly drawn on.

VERS DE SOCIeTe

Pliny, in an epistle to Tuscus, advises him to intermix among his severer studies the softening charms of poetry; and notices a species of poetical composition which merits critical animadversion. I shall quote Pliny in the language of his elegant translator. He says, "These pieces commonly go under the t.i.tle of poetical amus.e.m.e.nts; but these amus.e.m.e.nts have sometimes gained as much reputation to their authors as works of a more serious nature. It is surprising how much the mind is entertained and enlivened by these little poetical compositions, as they turn upon subjects of gallantry, satire, tenderness, politeness, and everything, in short, that concerns life, and the affairs of the world."

This species of poetry has been carried to its utmost perfection by the French. It has been discriminated by them, from the ma.s.s of poetry, under the apt t.i.tle of "_Poesies legeres,"_ and sometimes it has been significantly called "_Vers de Societe_." The French writers have formed a body of this fugitive poetry which no European nation can rival; and to which both the language and genius appear to be greatly favourable.

The "_Poesies legeres_" are not merely compositions of a light and gay turn, but are equally employed as a vehicle for tender and pathetic sentiment. They are never long, for they are consecrated to the amus.e.m.e.nt of society. The author appears to have composed them for his pleasure, not for his glory; and he charms his readers, because he seems careless of their approbation.

Every delicacy of sentiment must find its delicacy of expression, and every tenderness of thought must be softened by the tenderest tones.

Nothing trite or trivial must enfeeble and chill the imagination; nor must the ear be denied its gratification by a rough or careless verse. In these works nothing is pardoned; a word may disturb, a line may destroy the charm.

The pa.s.sions of the poet may form the subjects of his verse. It is in these writings he delineates himself; he reflects his tastes, his desires, his humours, his amours, and even his defects. In other poems the poet disappears under the feigned character he a.s.sumes; here alone he speaks, here he acts. He makes a confidant of the reader, interests him in his hopes and his sorrows; we admire the poet, and conclude with esteeming the man. The poem is the complaint of a lover, or a compliment to a patron, a vow of friendship, or a hymn of grat.i.tude.

These poems have often, with great success, displayed pictures of manners; for here the poet colours the objects with all the hues of social life.

Reflection must not be amplified, for these are pieces devoted to the fancy; a scene may be painted throughout the poem; a sentiment must be conveyed in a verse. In the "Grongar Hill" of Dyer we discover some strokes which may serve to exemplify this criticism. The poet, contemplating the distant landscape, observes--

A step methinks may pa.s.s the stream, So little distant dangers seem; So we mistake the future's face, Eyed through Hope's deluding gla.s.s.

It must not be supposed that, because these poems are concise, they are of easy production; a poet's genius may not be diminutive because his pieces are so; nor must we call them, as a fine sonnet has been called, a difficult trifle. A circle may be very small, yet it may be as mathematically beautiful and perfect as a larger one. To such compositions we may apply the observation of an ancient critic, that though a little thing gives perfection, yet perfection is not a little thing.

The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.

Genius will not always be sufficient to impart that grace of amenity. Many of the French n.o.bility, who cultivated poetry, have therefore oftener excelled in these poetical amus.e.m.e.nts than more professed poets. France once delighted in the amiable and enn.o.bled names of Nivernois, Boufflers, and St. Aignan; they have not been considered as unworthy rivals of Chaulieu and Bernard, of Voltaire and Gresset.

All the minor odes of Horace, and the entire Anacreon, are compositions of this kind; effusions of the heart, and pictures of the imagination, which were produced in the convivial, the amatory, and the pensive hour. Our nation has not always been successful in these performances; they have not been kindred to its genius. With Charles II. something of a gayer and more airy taste was communicated to our poetry, but it was desultory and incorrect. Waller, both by his habits and his genius, was well adapted to excel in this lighter poetry; and he has often attained the perfection which the state of the language then permitted. Prior has a variety of sallies; but his humour is sometimes gross, and his versification is sometimes embarra.s.sed. He knew the value of these charming pieces, and he had drunk of this Burgundy in the vineyard itself. He has some translations, and some plagiarisms; but some of his verses to Chloe are eminently airy and pleasing. A diligent selection from our fugitive poetry might perhaps present us with many of these minor poems; but the "_Vers de Societe_" form a species of poetical composition which may still be employed with great success.

THE GENIUS OF MOLIeRE.

The genius of comedy not only changes with the age, but appears different among different people. Manners and customs not only vary among European nations, but are alike mutable from one age to another, even in the same people. These vicissitudes are often fatal to comic writers; our old school of comedy has been swept off the stage: and our present uniformity of manners has deprived our modern writers of those rich sources of invention when persons living more isolated, society was less monotonous; and Jonson and Shadwell gave us what they called "_the humours_,"--that is, the individual or particular characteristics of men.[A]

[Footnote A: Aubrey has noted this habit of our two greatest dramatists, when speaking of Shakspeare he says--"The humour of the constable in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, he happened to take at Grendon in Bucks; which is the roade from London to Stratford; and there was living that constable in 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Ben Jonson and he did gather humours of men dayly, wherever they came." Shadwell, whose best plays were produced in the reign of Charles II., was a professed imitator of the style of Jonson; and so closely described the manners of his day that he was frequently accused of direct personalities, and obliged to alter one of his plays, _The Humorists_, to avoid an outcry raised against him. Sir Walter Scott has recorded, in the Preface to his "Fortunes of Nigel," the obligation he was under to Shadwell's comedy, _The Squire of Alsatia_, for the vivid description it enabled him to give of the lawless denizens of the old Sanctuary of Whitefriars.--ED.]