Genius in Sunshine and Shadow

At complete antipodes to this portrait is that of Richard Steele, the popular dramatist, essayist, and editor; the friend of Addison, and one of the wittiest and most popular men of his day. His also was an erratic career, alternating between vice and virtue; or, as he says of himself, always sinning and repenting, until he finally outlived his relish for society, his income, and his health. "He was the best-natured creature in the world," says Young; "even in his worst state of health he seemed to desire nothing but to please and be pleased." Worn out and forgotten by his contemporaries, Steele retired into the country and left posterity to appreciate his genius. With a warm heart overflowing with love of wife and children, his checkered life was yet full of faults and careless blunders, many of which were directly traceable to strong drink. Little learned in books, but with a large knowledge of men and the world, he wrote with captivating simplicity and in the most colloquial style. Social and kindly in the extreme, his whole character is in strong contrast with the harshness of Swift and the dignified loneliness of Addison.125 Somehow we forget about the sword of Damocles, and ignore Nemesis altogether in connection with the name of Steele; and while we do not forget his weaknesses, we recollect more readily his loving nature, his appreciation of beauty and goodness, and his warm sympathy and kindness of heart. It was Steele who said of a noble lady of his time, that to love her was a liberal education.

Dr. Johnson spent much of his early life in penury, wandering in the streets, sometimes all night, without the means to pay for a lodging. A garret was a luxury to him in those days.126 Alas! what a satire upon learning and authorship! Notwithstanding his powerful intellect, he was subject to such a singular and even superstitious dread of death, that he could hardly be persuaded to execute his will in later years. When Garrick showed Johnson his fine house and grounds at Hampton Court, the mind of the great lexicographer reverted to his special weakness, saying, "Ah! David, David, these are the things which make a death-bed terrible." When he and Garrick both became famous, they used to chaff each other about who came to London with two shillings, and who had two-and-sixpence. Johnson was a confirmed hypochondriac; hence the gloom and morbid irritability of his disposition. His disorder entailed upon him perpetual fretfulness and mental despondency. Had it not been for the wonderful vigor of his mind, – as in the case of Cowper, who was similarly affected, – he would have been the inmate of a mad-house. Macaulay says of Johnson grown old: "In the fulness of his fame, and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, he is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his indolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levitt and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, – are all as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood."

The greatest talents are usually coupled with the most acute sensibility. Rousseau imagined a phantom ever by his side; Luther had his demon, who frequented his study at all hours. So realistic was the great reformer's imagination, that he was accustomed to throw at the intruder any article nearest at hand. The confusion thus caused may easily be conceived when on one such occasion he cast his inkstand, with its contents, at the supposed demon. Cowper's weird and fatal messenger will also be remembered. Tasso's spirits glided in the air,127 and Mozart's "man in black" induced him to write his own requiem. But Johnson saw omens in the most trifling circumstances. If he chanced, in passing out of the house, to place his left foot foremost, he would return and start with the right, as promising immunity from accident and a safe return. Strange as it may seem, this eminent and profound man put faith in a long list of equally ridiculous omens in every-day life. He was a most voluminous and versatile writer, and excelled in delineating female characters; though Burke did say "all the ladies of his dramatis personæ were Johnsons in petticoats." Few persons with means so limited as his ever spent more for charitable purposes; and if his disposition was irritable, his heart was kind. "He loved the poor," says Mrs. Thrale, "as I never yet saw any one else love them. He nursed whole nests of people in his house, where the lame, the blind, the sick, and the sorrowful found a sure retreat." Now and then, throughout Johnson's life, we get a glimpse that shows us the man, not as the world at large knew him, but as his unmasked heart appeared. Does the reader recall the incident of his kneeling by the dying bed of an aged woman, and giving her a pious kiss, afterwards recording, "We parted firmly, hoping to meet again"?

Melancholy has been the very demon of genius, the skeleton in the closet of poets and philosophers. Burton composed his "Anatomy of Melancholy" to divert his own depressed spirits.128 Cowper is another example. He says of himself, "I was struck with such a dejection of spirits as none but they who have felt the same can have the least conception of." He was tenderly attached, it will be remembered, to his cousin Theodora, who returned his love; but disappointment was the lot of both, as her parents, doubtless for good reasons, forbade the union. While the vastly humorous and popular ballad of "John Gilpin" was delighting the Londoners, and was being read to crowded audiences at high prices, the poor unhappy author was confined as a lunatic, and, to use his own words, was "encompassed by the midnight of absolute despair."129 The poet, like the clown in the ring, when he appears before the public must be all smiles and jests, though concealing perhaps an agony of physical or mental suffering. We know little of the real aspect which the face of Harlequin presents beneath his mask. Be sure he has his sorrows, deep and dark, in spite of the grinning features which he wears. Who does not recall the words which Thackeray makes his old and faithful gold pen utter: —

"I've help'd him to pen many a line for bread;To joke, with sorrow aching in his head;And make your laughter when his own heart bled."

Was there ever pleasanter or more genial reading than "Cowper's Familiar Letters," full to the brim with sparkling humor? Yet these were coined from his brain while in a state of hopeless dejection. "I wonder," he writes to Mr. Newton, "that a sportive thought should ever knock at the door of my intellect, and still more that it should gain admittance. It is as if Harlequin should introduce himself into the gloomy chamber where a corpse is deposited in state." He was one of the most amiable and gifted, but also one of the unhappiest, of the children of genius.

Christopher Smart, poet, scholar, and prose writer, was an eccentric individual, but of such undoubted ability as to challenge the admiration and win the friendship of Dr. Johnson, who wrote his biography. His habits finally became very bad, so that, delirium setting in, it was found necessary to confine him in an asylum. While there he wrote a very remarkable religious poem entitled the "Song of David," produced in his rational moments, which exhibited sublimity and power, and is still considered one of the curiosities of English literature. Smart improved in health and was discharged with his full reason restored, but was soon after committed to the King's Bench prison for debt; and there he died, poverty-stricken and neglected, in 1770. Samuel Boyle was a contemporary of Smart, and was possessed of equal genius whether with the pen or the bottle. Poor fellow! he got an indifferent living as a fag author, though he was capable of fine literary work. His poem entitled the "Deity" fully proved this. Ogle, the London publisher, used to employ Boyle to translate some of Chaucer's tales into modern English, which he did with much excellence and spirit, and for which he received threepence per printed line. The poor genius sank lower and lower, lived in a miserable garret, wearing a blanket about his shoulders, having no vest or coat, and was at last found famished to death with a pen in his hand. "Hunger and nakedness," says Carlyle, "perils and revilings, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice, have in most times and countries been the market price the world has offered for wisdom, the welcome with which it has greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates and the Christian apostles belong to old days; but the world's Martyrology was not completed with them."

Richard Payne Knight, the Greek scholar and antiquary, was a remarkable genius in his way. His gift of ancient coins, bronzes, and works of art presented to the British Museum was valued at fifty thousand pounds. He was a poet of more than ordinary ability, and wrote, among other prose works, "An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste." He was for a number of consecutive years a member of Parliament. He had singular attacks of melancholy, and finally developed such a loathing of life that he destroyed himself with poison.

Poverty has nearly always been the patrimony of the Muses. "An author who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination," says Whipple, "is constantly coquetting with starvation." A glance at the brief life of Chatterton is evidence enough of the truth of this remark. He began to write poems of extraordinary merit at an immature age, and when a mere boy came up to London to seek for literary employment as a means of support. He wrote sermons, poems, essays, and political articles with an ability far beyond his years. He was indeed a prodigy of genius, and probably would have stood in the front rank of English poets had he lived to maturer years. No one ever equalled him at the same age, and Tasso alone, says Campbell, can be compared to him as a youthful prodigy. His life in the metropolis was one of great hardship and deprivation, as he often suffered for want of the simplest necessities of life, and grew so emaciated in appearance from the lack of food that strangers, sometimes meeting him in the street, forced him to accept a dinner which he was too proud to ask for. All this while, with much more consideration for the feelings of the family at home than thought for himself, he wrote cheerful letters to his mother, and even sent small and acceptable presents to his sister, in order to content them for his absence. Seeking only expression for the divine afflatus within him, he had no thought of self, no care for the morrow. By degrees, young as he was, he sank into utter despondency, and was reduced to actual starvation. He was found at last upon his bed of straw, having taken his own life in a fit of desperation. At the time he swallowed the fatal poison he was not quite nineteen years of age.

George Combe, the English author, encountered a full share of the vicissitudes of genius. He was capable of much theoretical goodness, but was not practical in that respect. He wrote in his old age, "Few men have enjoyed more of the pleasures and brilliance of life than myself;" yet he died in the King's Bench, where he had taken refuge from his creditors, not leaving enough to pay the expenses of his funeral.

Many a child of genius has been compelled to prostitute godlike powers to repel the gnawings of hunger; as for instance Holzman, the sagacious Oriental scholar and professor of Greek, who sold his notes on Dion Cassius for a dinner. The record of this learned man's struggles with dire want form a pathetic chapter in literary history. He tells us himself that at the age of eighteen he studied to acquire glory, but at twenty-five he studied to get bread.

While these pages are preparing for the press, Dr. Moshlech, a scientist, and the master of ten languages, has died in the county almshouse of Erie, Pennsylvania. He was a Prussian by birth, and graduated with high honors from the University of Bonn; made medicine a specialty, and practised the profession for several years in Paris, but finally turned his attention to science, and afterwards to the languages. He numbered among his friends many illustrious men, chief of whom were Darwin and Victor Hugo. At the beginning of our late war he visited this country, and accepted a position as Professor of Greek and Hebrew in Bethany College, West Virginia, which he held but a short time, owing to the war excitement. He subsequently practised medicine in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and wrote for scientific publications. He was so much interested in his work that he neglected to make provision for his old age; and when he could no longer pursue his profession, this man, who had associated with the most learned men of Europe, was compelled to apply to a poorhouse for shelter and bread. Even after he entered the almshouse he prepared a number of young men for college, and lectured occasionally before the Erie Historical Society.

Few authors are so calm of spirit, or so assured of their position, as not to shrink from well-expressed criticism, and especially when it comes in the form of ridicule, – forgetting that although an ass may bray at a classic statue, an ass cannot create one.130 So sensitive was even Newton to critical attacks, that Whiston, another English philosopher, and a personal friend of Sir Isaac, said he was quite unmanned when any declaration of his was called in question by the reviewers; and further, that he (Whiston) lost Newton's favor, which he had enjoyed for twenty years, by contradicting him on some point of his printed works; "for," he adds, "no man was of a more fearful temper." Some critics use the pen as the surgeon does the scalpel: they do not analyze, but they dissect. The flowers of the imagination, like the life of the body, vanish if too closely pressed. "Criticism," says Richter, "often takes from the tree caterpillar and blossoms together."131 Thus was the heart of poor Keats crushed and broken by the malignant severity of Gifford in the "Quarterly Review." One would have thought that this captious critic, who by his own talent alone had worked his way from the cobbler's bench to the editorial chair of the "Quarterly," would have been more considerate towards a man132 who, like himself, rose from humble associations. It only proved that the man who had successfully cast the slough of vulgar life, had still the heart of a clown. Gifford was indignant and sensitive beyond measure at a published criticism on his translation of Juvenal, which appeared in the "Critical Review;" and he put forth a sharp, angry answer, in the form of a large quarto pamphlet. No poet ever exhibited a more vivid perception of the beautiful, or greater powers of fancy, than Keats; but the bitterness of the criticism referred to was too much for his delicate health and sensitive nature, hastening, if it did not actually develop, the seeds of consumption, of which he died. Keats's father was a livery-stable keeper, and it is said that the future poet was born in the most humble quarters; but the irresistible fire of genius lighted his path, and had he lived past the noon of life, he would have carved his way to the highest fame. He finally went to Rome, in the hope of recuperating his failing health; but that was not to be. In the last day of his illness a companion who had called in, asked him how he was. "Better, my friend," he answered in a low voice. "I feel the daisies growing over me!" He died at Rome in his twenty-sixth year, Feb. 23, 1821. His body lies in the English burial-ground outside the gates of the ancient city, by the Appian Way, and near to the pyramid of Cestius. The simple slab that marks the spot interests one quite as much as many of the grand historical monuments of the Via Appia.133 We all remember the touching epitaph from his own pen: —

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

As to the effect of criticism in general, we are told that Pope was observed to writhe in his chair on hearing the letter of Cibber mentioned, with other severe criticism on the product of his hand and brain. The strictures, deserved and undeserved, which were publicly made on Montesquieu are said to have hastened his death. Ritson's extreme sensitiveness to criticism ended in lunacy, and Racine is thought by many to have died from the same cause.

Surely disappointment tracks the path of genius. Thus Collins, the eminent lyric poet, whose "Ode to the Passions" has made his name famous and familiar in our day, did not live to enjoy his literary success; indeed, his death is known to have been hastened by long neglect. The last half of his brief life was darkened by melancholy,134 and his home was a lunatic asylum. The money received from his publishers as copyright on his poems he voluntarily refunded, also paying the entire expense of the edition, after which he made a bonfire of the sheets. As we have seen in so many other instances, it was left for posterity to do Collins justice. In the course of a single generation, without any adventitious aid to bring them into notice, his poems have come to rank among the best of their kind in the language. Poor Collins! unfortunate in love, threatened with blindness, and harassed by bailiffs half his life, his career was one of unrest, unhappiness, and despair; death, the comforter of him whom time cannot console, gave the poet an early grave.135

Small was the portion of happiness that fell to the share of these men of genius; the lonely places they occupied were too lofty for companionship. "The wild summits of the mountains are inaccessible," says Madame Necker; "only eagles and reptiles can get there." We have seen how hard appears the fate of genius as a rule, and that its possession is often at the cost of great deprivation and unhappiness. Is it not difficult to recall an instance where a pronounced genius has also enjoyed the quiet beauty of domestic life? Wordsworth's remark, however, is applicable: namely, that men do not make their homes unhappy because they have genius, but because they have not enough genius. The conclusion would seem to be that we may envy talent, but must oftenest pity genius.

About half a century since, the well-known indiscretions of Shelley caused his name to be tabooed in London society, though in moral attributes he stood immeasurably above his friend Byron. Still, he was amenable enough to censure. His poetry is strikingly brilliant; each line is a complete thought, and the whole sparkles like sunlight upon the sea. After being expelled from college he made a "Gretna Green" marriage with Harriet Westbrook, but eventually abandoned her with his two children, – the woman who had given up all for him, and who in her dark hour of sorrow and despair drowned herself.136 We can describe Shelley's character no better than by comparing it to his longest poem, the "Revolt of Islam," which abounds in passages of surpassing beauty, but which as a whole is deficient in connection and human interest. It is as erratic as his own life.137 There is so much of bad in the best, and of good in the worst, that few of us are willing to sit in judgment upon poor humanity. Time has softened the asperity of our feelings, and the productions of Shelley's genius are now justly admired. When, after his fatal accident, his body was washed on shore, a copy of Keats's poems was found in his pocket. His ashes now rest near those of his brother poet outside the gates of Rome. As a striking example of his remarkable sensibility, we may mention the effect upon him when he first listened to the reading of Coleridge's "Christabel"138 in a small social circle. Says one who was present, "Shelley was so affected that he fainted dead away." He was consistent, and lived up to his convictions. While listening to the organ in an Italian cathedral, he sighed that charity instead of faith was not regarded as the substance of religion. The maintenance of his opinion cost him a fine estate, so constant and profuse were his charities towards impoverished men of letters and the poor generally.

The author of an "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard"139 was absolutely a slave to diffidence and painful shyness, – a characteristic which led to bitter persecution while he was a young student; nor could he ever quite divest himself of this nervous timidity. Hazlitt says of Gray that "he was terrified out of his wits at the bare idea of having his portrait prefixed to his works, and probably died from nervous agitation at the publicity into which his name had been forced by his learning, taste, and genius." On the death of Cibber, the vacant laureateship was offered to Gray, but his sensitiveness led him to decline it.140

CHAPTER VII

In these desultory chapters we have more than once seen that fame appeals to posterity; but in the instance of Byron it was contemporary, for he tells us he "awoke one morning and found himself famous." No man's errors were ever more closely observed and recorded than his; and we are still too near the period of his life to forget his foibles and remember only the productions of his genius. Byron, like Pope, was a sufferer from physical deformity, and much of the morbid sensibility of both arose from their common misfortune. Macaulay, speaking of Byron, says: "He had naturally a generous and feeling heart, but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggar in the street mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord and a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the finest and most judicious training. But capriciously as Nature had dealt with him, the parent to whom the office of forming his character was intrusted was more capricious still. She passed from paroxysms of rage to paroxysms of tenderness. At one time she stiffled him with her caresses; at another time she insulted his deformity. He came into the world; and the world treated him as his mother had treated him, – sometimes with fondness, sometimes with cruelty, never with justice. It indulged him without discrimination, and punished him without discrimination. He was truly a spoiled child, – the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child of fame, the spoiled child of society." The author of "Don Juan" was actuated at times by a strange recklessness, and a desire to seem worse than he really was. He aped the misanthrope, assumed unfelt remorse, and affected singularity, in order to court notoriety. However capricious may have been his temper, he came rightly enough by it, since his mother was noted for the frenzied violence of her passion, being wholly without judgment or self-control, and in nearly every respect disqualified for performing a parent's duty.141 Byron was also a victim of hypochondria only in a less degree than Johnson and Cowley; and this is his one genuine excuse for the excesses into which he sometimes rushed headlong. No matter in what light we consider him, all must concede the fervor of his passionate genius; and therein lay his remarkable power, for man is at his greatest when stimulated by the passions. Enthusiasm is contagious, and infuses a spirit of emulation; while reason, calm and forcible, only wins us by the slow process of conviction.

The truest grandeur of our nature is often born of sorrow. Those who have suffered most have developed the profoundest sympathies and have sung for us the sweetest notes. It is the heart which is seamed with scars that compels other hearts. Charles Lamb, at one time himself confined in an insane asylum, lived to the end of his days with, and in charge of, an unfortunate sister, who in a fit of madness murdered her mother, – an experience sufficient to cast, as it did, an awful blight over his whole life; but it was the occasion in him of an instance of holy human love and pure self-denial seldom equalled. Poor Mary Lamb142 knew when these mental attacks were coming on, and then her brother and herself, hand in hand, sought the asylum, to the matron of which he would say, "I have brought Mary again;" and presently, when the attack had passed, he was at the door of the asylum to receive her once more and take her kindly home. The domestic tragedy and his sister's condition caused Lamb to give up all idea of marriage, though at the time of the sad occurrence he was sincerely attached to a lovely woman. The court, after Mary's trial, consigned her to her brother's care. He wrote to his friend Coleridge, "I am wedded to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father." The father died not long subsequent, but Mary survived Charles thirteen years, dying in 1847. With considerable ability as a versifier, Lamb will not be remembered as a poet; his fame will rest on his essays and his sagacious criticisms. The "Essays of Elia" are inimitable, full of the author's personality, exquisitely delicate, poetical, whimsical, witty, and odd. The only fault to be reasonably found with them is their brevity. We wish there were a dozen volumes in place of one. They are the pedestal upon which the fame of this gentle, charitable, and quaint genius will ever rest. Lamb's character was amiably eccentric, but always full of loving-kindness. The pseudonym of "Elia" has become famous, and was first assumed in the author's contributions to the "London Magazine." While his lovable disposition and pensive cast of thought tinge all his productions, there is ever a playfulness lurking just below the surface which is sure to captivate the most casual reader. During his life Lamb was looked upon by the world as possessing more oddity than genius; but now all join in admitting him to be one of the fixed stars of literature.143 What a significant fact it is that Lamb was so tenderly regarded by the galaxy of notable men with whom he associated! He was a schoolmate of Coleridge and intimate with him for fifty years. Southey, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Godwin, De Quincey, Edward Irving, Thomas Hood, Leigh Hunt, and other men of literary fame were the warm and loving friends of Charles Lamb.