CHAPTER II.AUTHORS.
SHAKSPEARE.—SPENSER.—-JOHNSON.—GIFFORD.—GIBBON.
Creative genius is popularly held to be dependent on faculties widely diverse from those required by the mere man of learning. The linguist is usually regarded as a traveller on a beaten track; the poet, as a discoverer of new regions. Success for the man of learning is considered to depend on diligence in the exercise of the memory and judgment; while obedience to impulse seems to be the mental law popularly allotted to poets. Let the young reader inquire for himself, whether there is not something of fallacy in this popular notion.
The most highly endowed of human intelligences, was under as great necessity of learning the vocabulary of the English tongue as the very commonest mind. He, like all other men, however inferior to him in understanding or imagination, was born without any innate knowledge of things, or their natures, words, or the rules for fashioning them in order, or combining them with grace and harmony, eloquence and strength. Every author of the first class was in the same predicament mentally at birth; they had everything to learn, andthe perfection of their learning depended on their own effort. It may be equally affirmed, then, of the highest poet and the greatest linguist, of Shakspeare and Sir William Jones, that neither had any “royal road” for gaining his peculiar eminence.
Shakspeare
The little we know of the personal history of Shakspeare renders it necessary for us to attribute a very ample measure of his unrivalled excellence to that quality of the mind which we are insisting upon as requisite for the performance of great and exalted labours. If it be true that schoolmasters taught him little, how indefatigable must have been that perseverance which enabled him, not simply to equal, but so immeasurably to transcend his more learned contemporaries and fellow-workers, in the wealth of his language, and in the beauty and fitness of its application! If his helps were few, so much the more astonishing is the energy and continuity of effort which issued in securing for him who exerted itthe highest name in the world’s literature. Nor can minds of primal order be satisfied with a passing ovation that may be forgotten; they thirst to render their triumphs monumental. Our grand dramatist piled effort upon effort, until he left to the world the priceless legacy of his thirty-seven plays. His mind had none of the sickly quality which views a settled form of composition as irksome, and indulges its unhealthy fantasies in irregular and useless essays. He wrought out his magnificent and self-appointed task to the end; he made his own monument worthy of himself.
Birthplace of Shakspeare.
Birthplace of Shakspeare.
Birthplace of Shakspeare.
Spenser
Was not less an exemplar of diligence than of skill in the architecture of verse. The mere task-work of constructing three thousand eight hundred and fifty-four stanzas, comprising forty-four thousand six hundred and sixty-eight lines, would have wearied out the industry of any mind whose powers were not indefatigable. He died, too, before his magnificent design was complete, or the elaborate monument of his fame might have been still more colossal. Superiority to mental indolence, so manifest in the lives of Shakspeare and Spenser, is equally noticeable in the cases of Chaucer and Milton, of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, of Dryden and Pope, of Byron and Wordsworth, our other great poets; and, indeed, in the histories of the great poets of all nations. When the quantity of their composition is considered, and it is remembered how much thought must have beenexpended in the bringing together of choice materials, how much care in the polishing and adorning of each part, and of the whole, of their seemly fabrics, the degree of perseverance exercised in the erection of so many immortal superstructures of the mind is presented to reflection with commanding self-evidence. But let us track, more circumstantially, the life-path, so proverbial for vicissitude, of some of the children of genius, that we may see how the energy of true men is neither quelled by difficulty nor enervated by success.
Afterwards so famous as the great arbiter of literary criticism, is found leaving college without a degree, and, from sheer poverty, at the age of twenty-two. The sale of his deceased father’s effects, a few months after, affords him but twenty pounds, and he is constrained to become an usher in a grammar school in Leicestershire. In the next year he performs a translation of “Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia” for a Birmingham bookseller, returns to Lichfield, his birth-place, and publishes proposals for printing, by subscription, the Latin poems of Politian, the life of that author, and a history of Latin poetry from the era of Petrarch to the time of Politian. His project failed to attract patrons, and he next offered his services to Cave, the original projector of the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” Cave accepted his offer, but on conditions which compelled Johnson to make applicationelsewhere for earning the means of living. He again offered to become assistant to the master of a grammar school; but, in spite of the great learning he had even then acquired, he was rejected, from the fear that his peculiar nervous and involuntary gestures would render him an object of ridicule with his pupils. Such was one of the disabilities of constitution under which this humbly-born and strong-minded man laboured through life.
Johnson
Won, not by his ungainly person, but by the high qualities of his mind, a widow, with a little fortune of eight hundred pounds, yielded him her hand, in this season of his poverty; and he immediately opened a classical school in his native town. The celebratedGarrick, then about eighteen years old, became his pupil. His scheme, however, did not succeed; his newly acquired property was exhausted; and he and Garrick, then eight years his junior, set out together for London, with the resolve to seek their fortunes in the larger world. Garrick in a short time was acknowledged as the first genius on the stage, and made his way to wealth almost without difficulty. A longer and more toilful period of trial fell to the lot of the scholar and author. He first offered to the booksellers a manuscript tragedy, supposed to be his “Irene,” but could find no one willing to accept it. Cave gave him an engagement to translate the “History of the Council of Trent.” He received forty-nine pounds for part of the translation, but it was never completed for lack of sale. His pecuniary condition was so low, soon after this, that he and Savage, having walked, conversing, round Grosvenor Square, till four in the morning, and beginning to feel the want of refreshment, could not muster between them more than fourpence-halfpenny! He received ten guineas for his celebrated poem of “London;” but though Pope said, “The author, whoever he was, could not be long concealed,” no further advantage was derived by Johnson from its publication. Hearing of a vacancy in the mastership of another grammar school in Leicestershire, he, once more, proceeds thither as a candidate. The consequences of the poverty which had prevented him from remaining at the university till he could take a degree were now grievously felt. The statutes of the place required that the person chosen should be a Master of Arts. Some interestwas made to obtain him that degree from the Dublin University; but it failed, and he was again thrown back on London.
In spite of his melancholic constitution, these repeated disappointments, so far from filling him with despair, seem only to have quickened his invention, and strengthened his resolution to continue the struggle for fame. He formed numerous projects on his return to the metropolis; but none succeeded except his contributions to the “Gentleman’s Magazine;” these were, chiefly, the “Parliamentary Debates,” which the world read with the belief that they were thus becoming acquainted with the eloquence of Chatham, Walpole, and their compeers, and little dreaming that those speeches were “written in a garret in Exeter Street,” by a poverty-stricken author. The talent displayed in this anonymous labour did not serve, as yet, to free him from difficulties. He next undertook to collect and arrange the tracts forming the miscellany, entitled “Harleian.” Osborne, the bookseller, was his employer in this work; and, having purchased Lord Oxford’s library, the bookseller also employed Johnson to form a catalogue. To relieve his drudgery, Johnson occasionally paused to peruse the book that came to hand; Osborne complained of this; a dispute arose; and the bookseller, with great roughness, gave the author the lie. The incident so characteristic of Johnson, and so often related, now took place—Johnson seized a folio, and knocked the bookseller down. The act was far from justifiable; but his indignation under the offence must have been great, as hisrigid adherence to speaking the truth was so observable, that one of his most intimate friends declared “he always talked as if he were speaking on oath.”
He escaped, at length, from some degree of the humiliation which attaches to poverty. He projected his great work—the English Dictionary; several of the wealthiest booksellers entered into the scheme, and Johnson now left lodging in the courts and alleys about the Strand, and took a house in Gough Square, Fleet Street. This did not occur till he was eight-and-thirty; so great a portion of life had he passed in almost perpetual contest with pecuniary difficulties; nor was he entirely freed from them for some years to come. During the years spent in the exhausting labour of his Dictionary, the fifteen hundred guineas he received for the copyright were consumed on amanuenses, and the provision necessary for himself and his wife. The “Rambler” was written during these years in which his Dictionary was in course of publication, and the circumstances of its composition are most note-worthy among the “Triumphs of Perseverance.” With the exception of five numbers, every essay was written by Johnson himself; and it was regularly issued every Tuesday and Friday, for two years. The perseverance which enabled him so punctually to execute a stated task, even while continuously labouring in the greater work in which he was engaged, is remarkable: but the young reader’s thought ought to be more deeply fixed on the consideration that a life of unremitting devotion to study—unconquered by difficulty, and straitness of circumstances—had rendered him ableeasily to pour forth the treasures of a full mind. Although apparently the product of great care, and stored with the richest moral reflections, these essays were usually written in haste, frequently while the printer’s boy was waiting, and not even read over before given to him. This was not recklessness in Johnson, though it would have been folly in one whose mind was not most opulently stored with matured thought, and who had not attained such a habit of modulating sentences, as to render it almost mechanical. Such attainments can only be reached by the most determined disciple of perseverance. “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it,” was Johnson’s own saying; but he could not have verified it, unless his mind, by assiduous application, had been filled with the materials of writing. He was, likewise, held in high celebrity as the best converser of his age; but he acknowledged that he had attained his extraordinary accuracy and flow of language by having early laid it down as a fixed rule to arrange his thoughts before expressing them, and never to suffer a careless or unmeaning expression to escape from him.
The profits of a second periodical, “The Idler,” and the subscriptions for his edition of Shakspeare, were the means by which he supported himself for the four or five years immediately preceding the age of fifty. His wife had already died, and his aged mother being near her dissolution, in order to reach Lichfield, and pay her the last offices of filial piety, he devoted one fortnight to the composition of his beautiful and immortal tale of “Rasselas,”for which he received one hundred pounds. He did not arrive in time to close her eyes, but saw her decently interred, and then hastened back to London, to go, once more, into lodgings and retrench expenses. The next three years of his life appear to have been passed in even more than his early poverty; but the end of his difficulties was approaching.
The last twenty-two years of his existence—from the age of fifty-three to seventy-five—were spent in the receipt of a royal pension of three hundred pounds per annum; in the society of persons of fortune, who considered themselves honoured by the company of the once poverty-stricken and unknown scholar; in the companionship of Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Joseph Warton, and others whose names are durably written on the roll of genius, and in the receipt of the highest honours of learning—for the Universities, both of Dublin and Oxford, conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws, and the Oxford University had previously sent him the degree of Master of Arts. Regarded as the great umpire of literary taste, receiving deference and respect wherever he went, and no longer driven to his pen by necessity, this honoured exemplar of perseverance did not pass through his remaining course in unproductive indolence. In addition to less important works, his “Lives of the Poets” was produced in this closing period of his life, and is well known as the most valuable and useful of his labours, with the exception of his great Dictionary.
William Gifford
In the early circumstances of his life, is a still more striking exemplar of the virtue of perseverance. He was left an orphan at thirteen years of age, was sent to sea for a twelvemonth, and was then taken home by his godfather, who had seized upon whatever his mother had left, as a means of repaying himself for money lent to her, and was now constrained to pay some attention to the boy, by the keen remonstrances of his neighbours. He was sent to school, and made such rapid progress in arithmetic that, in a few months, he was at the head of the school, and frequently assisted his master. The receipt of a trifle for these services raised in him the thought of one day becoming a schoolmaster, in the room of a teacher in the town of Ashburton, who was growing old and infirm. He mentioned his scheme to his godfather,who treated it with contempt, and forthwith apprenticed him to a shoemaker. His new master subjected him to the greatest degradation, made him the common drudge of his household, and took from him the means of pursuing his favourite study of arithmetic.
“I could not guess the motives for this at first,” he says—for his narrative is too remarkable at this period of his struggles, to be told in any other than his own language—“but at length discovered that my master destined his youngest son for the situation to which I aspired. I possessed, at this time, but one book in the world, it was a treatise on algebra, given to me by a young woman, who had found it in a lodging-house. I considered it as a treasure, but it was a treasure locked up, for it supposed the reader to be well acquainted with simple equations, and I knew nothing of the matter. My master’s son had purchased ‘Fenning’s Introduction;’ this was precisely what I wanted; but he carefully concealed it from me, and I was indebted to chance alone for stumbling upon his hiding-place. I sat up for the greatest part of several nights, successively; and, before he suspected that his treatise was discovered, had completely mastered it. I could now enter upon my own, and that carried me pretty far into the science. This was not done without difficulty. I had not a farthing on earth, nor a friend to give me one; pen, ink, and paper, therefore, were, for the most part, as completely out of my reach as a crown and sceptre. There was, indeed, a resource, but the utmost caution and secrecy were necessary in applying to it. I beat outpieces of leather as smooth as possible, and wrought my problems on them with a blunted awl; for the rest, my memory was tenacious, and I could multiply and divide by it to a great extent.”
He essayed the composition of rhyme, and the rehearsal of his verses secured him a few pence from his acquaintances. He now furnished himself with pens, ink, and paper, and even bought some books of geometry and of the higher branches of algebra; but was obliged to conceal them, and to pursue his studies by continued caution. Some of his verses, however, were shown to his master, and were understood to contain satirical reflections upon his oppressor. His books and papers were seized upon, by way of punishment; and he was reduced to the deepest despair. “I look back,” he says, in his own admirable narrative, “on that part of my life which immediately followed this event with little satisfaction: it was a period of gloom, and savage unsociability: by degrees I sunk into a kind of corporeal torpor; or, if roused into activity by the spirit of youth, wasted the exertion in splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated the few acquaintances compassion had left me.”
The heart revolts at the brutal injustice which drove Gifford’s young nature thus to harden itself into gloomy endurance of his lot, by “savage unsociability;” but a mind like his could not take that stamp for life. His disposition grew again buoyant, and his aspirations began to rekindle, as the term of his bondage grew shorter. Had he found no deliverance till it had legally expired, it may be safely affirmed that he would then haveforced his way into eminence by self-assisted efforts; but an accidental circumstance emancipated him a year before the legal expiry of his apprenticeship. Mr. Cookesley, a philanthropic surgeon, having learnt from Gifford himself the facts of his hard history, through mere curiosity awakened by hearing some of his rhymes repeated, started ‘A subscription for purchasing the remainder of the time of William Gifford, and for enabling him to improve himself in writing and English grammar.’ Enough was collected to satisfy his master’s demand, he was placed at school with a clergyman, made his way into the classics, displayed such diligence that more money was raised to continue him in his promising course; and in two years and two months from the day of his liberation, he was considered by his instructor to be fit for the University, and was sent to Exeter College, Oxford.
Perseverance! what can it not effect? It enabled Gifford to surmount difficulties arising from the most vulgar and brutifying influences, and to make his way triumphantly into an intellectual region of delectable enjoyment. From a boy neglected and degraded—from a youth baffled and thwarted in his aims at a higher state of existence than that of merely living to labour in order to eat, drink, and be clothed—from one fastening his desire upon knowledge, only to be scorned and mocked, and treated as a criminal where he was meriting applause—from a poor pitiable straggler longing for mental breathing-room, amid the coarse conversation he would undoubtedly hear from his master, and those who werehis associates, and sinking for some period into sullen despair with his hardship, that like an untoward sky seemed to promise no break of relieving light—he becomes a glad and easier student; is enabled not merely ‘to improve himself in writing and English grammar,’ but, in six-and-twenty months, becomes a converser, in their own noble language, with the great spirits of Rome and Greece: and enters the most venerable arena of learning in Britain, to become a rival in elegant scholarship with the young heirs to coronets and titles, and to England’s widest wealth and influence. What a change did those ancient halls of architectural grandeur, with all their associations of great intellectual names, present for the young and ardent toiler who, but six-and-twenty months before, had bent over thelastfrom morning to night, shut out from all that could cheer or elevate the mind, and surrounded with nought but that which tended to disgust and degrade it!
Nor did the career of the young disciple of perseverance, when arrived at his new and loftier stage of struggle, discredit the foresight of those who had assisted him. His first benefactor died before Gifford took his degree, but he was enabled by the generosity of Lord Grosvenor to pursue his studies at the University to a successful issue. After some absence on the continent, as travelling tutor to the nobleman just mentioned, he entered on his course as an author, and gained some distinction; but won his chief celebrity, as well as most substantial rewards, while Editor of the “Quarterly Review”—an office he held from the commencement of that periodical,1809, till his death, on the last day of 1826, when he had reached the age of seventy-one. In the performance of this critical service he had a salary of one thousand a year; and it is a noble conclusion to the history of this successful scholar of Perseverance, that true-hearted gratitude led him to bequeath the bulk of his fortune to Mr. Cookesley, the son of his early benefactor.
The superiority of genius to difficulties, and the certainty with which it achieves high triumphs through longer or shorter paths of vicissitude, might be shown from the memoirs of Erasmus, and Mendelsohn, and Goldsmith, and Holcroft, and Kirke White, and others, almost a countless host. Early poverty may be said, however, to stimulate the children of Genius to exertion; and its influence may be judged to weaken the merit of their perseverance, since their triumphs may be dated from deep desire to escape from its disadvantages. That such a feeling has been participated by many, or all, of the illustrious climbers after literary distinction, it may not be denied; though the world usually attributes more to its workings in the minds of men of genius than the interior truth, if known, would warrant: the strong necessity to create—the restless power to embody their thinkings—these deep-seated springs of exertion in intellectual men, if understood, would afford a truer solution of their motives for beginning, and the determination to excel for continuing their course, than any mere sordid impulses with which they are often charged. Let us turn to a celebrated name, around which no irksome influences of poverty gathered, either at the outset ofhis life, or in his progress to literary distinction. His systematic direction of the knowledge acquired by inquiries as profound as they were diversified, and his application of the experience of life, alike to the same great end, afford an admirable spectacle of the noblest perseverance, and of memorable victory over the seductions of ease and competence.
Gibbon
The author of the unrivalled “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” was born to considerable fortune. He left the University at eighteen, after great loss of time, as he tells us in his instructive autobiography, and with what was worse, habits of expense and dissipation. His father being under distressing anxiety on account of his son’s irregularities, and, afterwards, from what he deemed of greater moment, young Gibbon’s sudden avowal ofconversion to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church, placed him abroad, under the strict care of a Protestant minister. Gibbon began to awake to reflection; and, without prescription from his new guardian, voluntarily entered on severe study. He diligently translated the best Roman writers, turned them into French, and then again into Latin, comparing Cicero and Livy, and Seneca and Horace, with the best orators and historians, philosophers and poets, of the moderns. He next advanced to the Greek, and pursued a similar course with the treasures of that noble literature. He afterwards commenced an inquiry into the Law of Nations, and sedulously perused the treatises of Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Bayle, and Montesquieu, the acknowledged authorities on that great subject. He mentions three books which absorbed more than the usual interest he felt in whatever he read: “Pascal’s Provincial Letters,” the “Abbe de la Bléterie’s Life of the Emperor Julian,” and “Giannone’s Civil History of Naples:” the character of these works shadows forth the grand design which was gradually forming in his mind.
Yet without method, without taking care to store up this various knowledge in such a mode that it might not be mere lumber in the memory, he speedily discerned that even years spent in industrious reading would be, comparatively, of little worth. He, therefore, began to digest his various reading in a common-place book, according to the method recommended by Locke. The eager and enthusiastic student—for such he had now become—by this systematic arrangement of his knowledgeunder heads, perceived his wants more distinctly, and entered into correspondence for the solution of historic difficulties, with some of the most illustrious scholars of his time, among whom were Professors Crevier of Paris, Breittinger of Zurich, and Matth. Gesner of Göttingen. From each of these learned men he received such flattering notice of the acuteness of his inquiries, as proved how well he had employed the time and means at his command. His first work, written in French, the “Essay on the Study of Literature,” was produced at three-and-twenty, after his laborious reading of the best English and French, as well as Latin and Greek authors.
A transition was now made by him, from retired leisure to active life. His father was made major of the Hampshire Militia, himself captain of grenadiers, and the regiment was called out on duty. He had to devote two years and a half to this employ, and expresses considerable discontent with his “wandering life of military servitude;” but thus judiciously tempers his observations: “In every state there exists, however, a balance of good and evil. The habits of a sedentary life were usefully broken by the duties of an active profession.”... “After my foreign education, with my reserved temper, I should long have continued a stranger to my native country, had I not been shaken in this various scene of new faces and new friends; had not experience forced me to feel the characters of our leading men, the state of parties, the forms of office, and the operation of our civil and military system. In this peaceful service I imbibed the rudiments and the language and science oftactics, which opened a new field of study and observation.... The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire.”
Let the young reader observe how, even when a purpose is not as yet distinctly formed, the leading events of life, as well as study, may be made by the regal mind to bend and contribute to the realising of one. Our great paramount duty is to husband time well, to let not an hour glide uselessly, to go on extending our range of knowledge, and resolving to act our part well, even while we are in uncertainty as to what our part may be. The seed well sown, the germs well watered, and a useful harvest must result, though neither we, nor any who look on, for a while, may be able to prophesy of the quality or abundance of the grain, seeing it is but yet in its growth. “From my early youth I aspired to the character of an historian,” says Gibbon; “while I served in the militia, before and after the publication of my ‘Essay,’ this idea ripened in my mind.”
Yet, he was for a time undecided as to a subject: the Expedition of Charles the Eighth of France into Italy; the Crusade of Cœur de Lion; the Barons’ Wars against John and Henry the Third; the History of Edward the Black Prince; Lives and comparisons of Henry the Fifth and the Emperor Titus; the Life of Sir Philip Sidney, of the Marquis of Montrose, of Raleigh—and other subjects of high interest, but each and all inferior to theone he at length undertook, and for which his studies had all along peculiarly fitted him, successively attracted his attention. Amidst the colossal ruins of the amphitheatre of Titus, the idea at length was formed in his mind of tracing the vicissitudes of Rome; and this idea swelled until his conception extended to such a history as should depicture the thousand years of change which fill up the period between the reign of the Antonines and the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. Years of laborious study and research were necessary to accomplish this gigantic labour; but it was perfected, and remains the grandest historic monument ever raised by an Englishman. The recent investigations of Guizot have more fully confirmed the fact of the minute and careful inquiries of Gibbon, in bringing together the vast and multifarious materials necessary for the accurate completion of his design. His great work is, emphatically, for strictness of statement, combined with such comprehensiveness of subjects, for depth and clearness of disquisition, and for splendour of style, one of the most magnificent “Triumphs of Perseverance.”
And is the roll of these triumphs complete? Have the labours of the past pretermitted the possibility of equal victories in the future? Never, while the human mind exists, can the catalogue of its successes be deemed to have found a limit or an end. Immense fields of history remain yet untrodden and uncultivated; innumerable facts throughout the ages which are gone remain to be collected by industry and arranged by judgment; the ever-varying phases of human affairsoffer perpetual material for new chronicle: let none who meditates to devote his youth to historical inquiry, with the meritorious resolve to distinguish his manhood by some useful monument of solid thought, imagine that his ground has been narrowed, but rather understand that it has been cleared and enlarged by the noble workmen who have gone before.
Neither let the young and gifted, in whom the kindlings of creative genius are felt, listen to the dull voices who say, “The last epic has been written—no more great dramas shall be produced—the lyrics of the past will never be equalled!” If such vaticinations were true, it would show that the human mind was dwarfed. Shakspere did not believe that, or he would not have excelled Sophocles. None but intellectual cravens will affright themselves with the belief that they cannot equal the doings of those who have gone before. True courage says, “The laurel is never sere: its leaves are evergreen. The laurels have not all been won: they flourish still, in abundance. The bright examples of the past shall not deter, but cheer me. I will go on to equal them. My life, like the lives of the earth’s truly great, shall be devoted to thought, to research—to deep converse with the mighty spirits who still live in their works, though their clay is dissolved; I will prepare to build, and build carefully and wisely, as they built; I also will rear my lasting memorial among “The Triumphs of Perseverance!”