O BEATI INSIPIENTES!
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ says the Evangelist: he should have added, Blessed are the fools, the commonplace, the obscure, the mediocre; blessed those who have done nothing remarkable, thought nothing noteworthy, created nothing beautiful, and given nothing fair and fine to their generation! Unmolested may they dwell; unharassed may they live their lives at their own pleasure, unwatched may they take their daily walks abroad, ungrudged may they find happiness, unmolested may they indulge their grief. Their nursery days may rest forgotten; they will not be ransacked for reminiscences of childish petulance or babyish frowardness. Their school years may rest in the past, undisturbed by the grubbing of chroniclers and commentators, amongst the playground dust, and between the pages of the gradus. Their faults and follies will lie quiet in the grave, and no contemporary schoolfellow will recall their thefts of apples or their slips in parsings; or will write to the newspapers how they used a crib or smashed atradesman’s windows. Unworried, unenvied, unmisrepresented, they will pass through life inglorious, but at peace; and amongst the ashes of their buried years no curious hands will poke and rake in feverish zeal to find traces in their infancy of their bad passions, and drag out the broken pieces of the rattles or the ninepins they destroyed.
How ignorant is genius of what it does when it leaps up to the light of its sunrise! how little it recks of the hornet swarm which will circle round its head, of the viper brood which will coil round its ankles, of the horde of stinging, prying, buzzing, poisoning insects which will thicken the air as it passes, and hide in the heart of the roses it gathers!
It is not only the fierce light which beats upon a throne which genius has to bear, but the lurid glare of the sulphur fires of envy, making livid what is white, making hideous what is fair, making distorted and deformed what is straight and smooth and comely.
The world holds a concave mirror to the face of genius, and judges the face by the reflection.
The calm consciousness of power in the great writer, in the great artist, will always appear vanity to the majority, because the majority is incapable of seeing how entirely different to vanity it is, and how, if arrogant in the world, it is always humble in the closet; if it be conscious of its own superiority to its contemporaries, it will be none the less conscious of its inferiority to its own ideals. The intimate union of pride and of humility, which is characteristic of all genius, and pre-eminently sincere in it, can never be understood by the world at large.
Flaubert, as we know, corrected, effaced, reconstructed,erased and altered every line of his text a hundred times, in careless dissatisfaction with himself; but when an editor of a review asked him to make some corrections in the proof of St Julian Hospitador, he haughtily replied to the meddler:‘Des corrections?—j’en donne quelquefois, mais je n’en fais jamais!’Inexorable self-scourger in his study or his studio, the man of genius is high-mettled and arrogant as an hidalgo before interference. How should the fool understand this?—the fool who deems himself perfect when strutting before his mirror, but is downcast before the first mocking glance or ridiculing word which he encounters in the public street!
Humanity loves to scoff, and say that genius is human. No doubt it is; but its humanity is always of a different kind to that of ordinary men. The nightingale is classified by naturalists amongst the tribe of the Sparrows, in the class of the Finches; but this fact does not make the nightingale only a sparrow, or only a finch. The nightingale sees life and nature very differently to the sparrow, though his physical organisation may, in some respects, resemble his kinsman’s. It is one thing to sit on the housetops and drink rinsings from the gutter, and another to sit on a myrtle bough and drink dew from the heart of a rose. How shall those to whom the rinsings are sweet be able to judge those for whom the rose is chalice-bearer?
In a recent monograph upon his friend Meissonier, Alexandre Dumas has quoted some petulant and childish sayings of the great painter which would have been better left in oblivion. Dumas prefaces them by the phrase‘J’ai entendu Meissonier dire,mais peut-être, il est vrai, ne le disait-il qu’à moi:’in these last words,‘ne le disait-il qu’à moi,’lies the whole gist of the matter, in these few words are contained the confession of the consciousness which should have preserved Meissonier’s impetuous and unconsidered self-revelations from being, after his death, made public by his friend. It is just these things which are said only to us, which are said perhaps foolishly, perhaps hastily, perhaps stupidly, but in any way said in entire good faith, and in the conviction of the good faith of the confidant, which should never be repeated, above all when the ground is closed over the speakers of them. It will be said that there is nothing in this recollection of Meissonier which is in any way to his discredit. There is not. Yet it is none the less a violation of confidence; and in a sense it dwarfs the stature of him. One of the chief characteristics of genius is an extreme youthfulness of feeling and of impulse, often also of expression; the great artist is always in one side of his nature a child. But this fact, which is so lovable and engaging in him in his lifetime, makes him continually, in his careless and confidential utterances, say what is natural, and may even be beautiful in its spontaneity and suitability to the moment of its expression, but which loses its colour, its light, its charm, as a dried and pressed flower loses them when it is reproduced after death in the rigidity of type.
Taine set a fine example in his will when he enjoined on his heirs to burn all the documents in which he had written down all he had heard from his contemporaries. The rose should be always hung before the door wherever two or three are gatheredtogether in familiar intercourse, and the inquisitive, censorious, malignant world is listening cunningly at the keyhole. The world will not go away for the rose; but those within should enforce respect for its symbol, and should stuff up the keyhole.
I once knew and liked for several years a diplomatist who was very popular in society. He was often with me, and one day he unfortunately told me that it was his habit to write down every night, no matter how late it might be when he went home, the record of everything witty, or interesting, or singular, that he had heard during the day, and the names of all the persons whom he had met and with whom he had conversed. ‘I have done this,’ he added, ‘ever since I was an unpaidattaché, and these volumes, which are many, as you may imagine, will not be published until the time designated to my executors in my will.’ Ever after this confession from him I saw him with much less pleasure; these bulky volumes, though unseen, cast their grim shadow over the present and the future; I never again laughed and talked with him without the recollection that he was treasuring up the nonsense I spoke or repeated to write it down in black and white before he allowed himself to sleep. The thought was a ghost at every intellectual banquet at which he and I met. I wanted to call out to our companions,
‘There’s a chiel amang you takin’ notes.’
‘There’s a chiel amang you takin’ notes.’
‘There’s a chiel amang you takin’ notes.’
‘There’s a chiel amang you takin’ notes.’
As he was a man who had hispetite entréeinto the arcana of politics, and was personally acquainted with the most distinguished people of Europe, he must have burned a good deal of post-midnight oil overhis nightly chronicle, and I wonder he could keep awake to make it.
He died some years since, and of those voluminous records there is nothing said in the press as yet. No doubt, however, they will see the light some day; and some heir or heirs will make a round sum of money out of them. There is a kind of treason in this habit of committing to paper for ultimate publication what is said by those around us. If the matter be emended and emasculated when printed, it loses all interest; if published verbatim, the publication constitutes a betrayal. Social intercourse is surely based on the tacit assumption that what is said in it is said under cover of the white flag of mutual trust. I do not think that we have any right whatever to make any kind of private conversation public. The motive for doing so can never be a very high one. There is, no doubt, a great temptation in the wish to tell what we know about a friend whose character we see was unknown or misunderstood by the world in general, even probably by his intimate associates; but I doubt if we have the right to do so. If he revealed his natural inner self more completely to us than to others, it was no doubt because we inspired him with a more complete confidence or sympathy than did others. Shall that confidence or that sympathy be abused or betrayed by any man or woman of common honour?
It is a fact which is to be regretted that the faculty of inspiring confidence is, unfortunately, often allied to an utter faithlessness in keeping it. Those who most attract it are often those who most betray it. The sympathy which draws out our secrets isfrequently united to considerable treachery in using them. Even those who are in many ways faithful and sincere betray after death those who trusted them in life, by revelations of their correspondence, either intentional or careless.
‘Cachez votre vie: étalez votre esprit,’is a wise counsel; but it is this which the world will not permit if it can by any torment prevent it. He who has once allowed his wit to shine, and dazzle the eyes of his contemporaries, is expected to live his life for ever afterwards with open doors.
People who are famous are invariably accused of being self-conscious, reserved, monosyllabic, lacking in candour, in expansiveness, in inclination to converse. What more natural than that they should be so, since they know that their most intimate companion may not be able to resist the temptation of recording and retailing everything they say? If they speak as they feel, they are accused of ‘giving themselves away,’ as the English slang phrases it; if they be as reserved and as silent as it is possible to be without offence to society, they are accused ofmorgue, of vanity, of arrogance. In either case, whatever they do say, whether it be much or be little, will be certainly exaggerated, misrepresented, and disliked. Meissonier may, in a weak moment, wish he were Fortuny; Tennyson may, in an irritable hour, prefer money to fame; and each may say so to a trusted companion. But it is hard that the evanescent, unwise desire should be soberly published many years after in each case by a hearer who was deemed a friend.
We are none of us, perhaps, as loyal as we oughtto be in speech. We are too thoughtless in what we repeat; and many, for sake of an epigram or ajeu de mot, sacrifice the higher duties of respect for confidence and silence on it. But speech may have the excuse of unpremeditation, haste, the contagion of conversation going on around. The indiscretions of written and of printed words share none of these excuses. Even if written in hurry or in carelessness, there is leisure enough when a proof sheet is received, between its reception and its publication, for all such revelations to be effaced. Have we a right to make public private conversations? I do not consider that we have. Intercourse, at all events the pleasure of intercourse, reposes on the tacit condition that its privacy is intangible. Intimate correspondence does the same. In letters we give hostages to our friends. It should be understood that such hostages are not to be led, like captives, into the public market-place and sold.
In the many memories of intimacy with Alfred Tennyson which have been published since his death, few would, I think, have pleased a man so reluctant to be observed and commented on as was he. The fulsome adulation would scarcely have sufficed to reconcile him to the cruel dissection.
Famous people, like obscure ones, do not weigh every syllable they speak; and the former pay heavily for imprudent utterance, whilst the latter sin scot-free because nobody cares a straw what they say or do not say. Tennyson, in an imprudent moment, said once to Henry Irving that Shelley had no sense of humour. It is quite true that Shelley had not: his life would have been brighter and happier if he hadbeen able to laugh oftener; and it is exceedingly unfair to Tennyson to twist this statement of an actual fact into a depreciation of Shelley to his own self-praise. Even if he implied that he were the greater poet of the two, should a friend deride this, should a trusted companion record it?
Mr Knowles relates how Tennyson, speaking of his habit of composing verses which he never wrote down as he sat over the winter’s fire, added, ‘How many hundreds of fine lines went up the chimney and vanished!’ The world cries out, ‘What! did he call his own verses fine?’ Why should he not? He must have known that he enriched the English language with scores of fine lines, as I suppose he must have known that he made many with false quantities, which halt painfully. But are these careless, natural phrases, utterances which should be produced in print? Nothing can divest suchpost-mortemrevelations of a suspicion of treachery. They suggest the note-book of the diplomatist, in which at nightfall were recorded all the witty sayings and careless confidences heard during the daytime.
Mr Knowles, who admired Tennyson extremely, and lived for many years in his close intimacy, puts into print the saying of Tennyson that he wished he could have had the money which his books had brought without the nuisance of the fame which accompanied it. This was not an heroic speech, though it might be a natural one. It was probably a wrathful ebullition excited by the irritation of public comment and the prying impertinence of public curiosity. But it is the kind of speech which is never intended for reproduction in print. We allhave these moments of ungrateful impatience with our lot. The king wishes himself in the hovel, the hind wishes himself on the throne. Whoso gathers the laurel longs for the cowslip, he who has the field flowers sighs for the myrtle and the bays. But it is not the place of a bosom friend to stereotype for all time the reproach of Fortune’s favourites to the magnificent caprices of Fortune. Certainly Tennyson, having been compelled to choose, would have chosen the poverty and fame of Homer or of Cervantes rather than a life of inglorious ease and obscure eating of good dinners. The imperishable record in print, of a passing mood of irritability in which he said otherwise, is therefore a cruel injustice done to him.
It is impossible for the ordinary mind, which is usually dense of perception and greedy of observation, to attempt to measure or conceive in any degree the unsupportable torment to a sensitive temper and an exalted intelligence of the mosquito swarm of inquisitive interrogators and commentators; of the exaggeration, the misrepresentation, the offensive calumnies, and the still more offensive admiration, which are the daily penalty of all greatness. The adoring American, perched staring in the pear tree outside the dining-room window, may well have embittered to Tennyson the meats and wines of his dinner-table within. If he had got up from his table and shot the spy, such a pardonable impulse should certainly have been considered justifiable homicide. That because a man has done something higher, better, more beautiful than his fellows, he is therefore to be subjected without resistance to their curiosity and comment, is a premiss so intolerable that it shouldnot be permitted to be advanced in any decent society. The interviewer is the vilest spawn of the most ill-bred age which the world has yet seen. If he be received, when he intrudes, with the toe of the boot, he has but his fitting reception.
There has been lately published the following personal description of a great writer whom I will not especially designate. It runs as follows: ‘The first impression one gets is of a small man with large feet, walking as if for a wager, arms swinging hither and thither, and fingers briskly playing imaginary tunes in the air as he goes. Then, as the eccentric shape comes nearer, one is aware of a stubby beard and peeping eyes expressive of mingled distrust and aversion; a hideous hat is clapped down on the broad brow, which hat, when lifted, displays a bald expanse of skull bearing no sort of resemblance whatever to the counterfeit (sic) presentiments of Apollo; and yet, incongruous though it seems, this little vacuous, impatient, querulous being is no other than—’ And then there is named one of the greatest masters of language whom the world has ever owned.
Yet who, having read this infamous portrait of physical defects, whether it be truth or libel, can ever again entirely divest his memory of it, can ever wholly prevent its arising in odious ridicule between him and his rapturous sense of the perfect music of a great style? Shakespeare cursed those who would not let his bones alone; the living genius may with equal justice curse those who will not let alone his living form and features. There are only two classes of persons who may be certain of seeing every physical fault or deformity or affliction in face orform brutally written down in print: they are the man of genius in the reports of his contemporaries, and the escaped criminal on the handbills and search-warrants of the police. Renan and Arton receive exactly the same measure.
The vulgar, the Herr Omnes of Luther, cannot comprehend the hatred, the loathing of observation and comment, which are of the very essence of the poetic temperament. Yet it is strange to think that being mobbed can be agreeable to anyone. The sense of being pursued by incessant curiosity, as often as not a merely malignant curiosity, must poison the hours of life to the proud and sensitive nature. Such curiosity existed, no doubt, in the days of Ovid, in the days of Alkibiades; but modern inquisitiveness is far worse, being armed with all the modern powers to torture. The intolerable Kodak, the intolerable interviewer, the artifices of the press, the typewriter, the telegraph, the telephone, the greedy, indelicate, omnivorous mind of the modern public—all contribute to make of celebrity a Gehenna.
Creation is the paradise of the artist or poet; sympathy, if it be also true, is balm to him; for the opinion of others he will never greatly care if his lips have been truly touched with the coal from the altar, yet the sense of his influence over them will be welcome to him; but the espionage of the multitude will be always to him irritating as mosquito bites, pestilent as a swarm of termites, darkening like a locust flight the face of the sun.
It is hard to think that one who has an illustrious name cannot idly gossip with an intimate friend without every careless word being stereotyped. Oneis grateful to Mr Knowles for telling us that Tennyson declared he would shake his fists in the face of Almighty God if He, etc., etc. One rejoices to know of this outburst of honest indignation at the unpitied sufferings of the helpless and the harmless, this grand flinging of the phylacteries in the face of a hypocritical and egotistic world. At the same time it is surely impossible to admit that such a spontaneous and impassioned expression of emotion ought, by any hearer of it, to have been, in cold blood, put on record and produced in print?
Poor dead singer of Ida and Œnone! The ruthless inquisitors who poisoned his life still pursue him even beyond the cold waters of the Styx! There is something infinitely pathetic in the knowledge of how, all his life long, Tennyson endeavoured to avoid the intrusion of the crowd, and of how utterly useless all his wishes and endeavours were, and how those whom he trusted and confided in, bring out the dead children of his spoken thoughts naked in the sight of the multitude whom he shunned.
The confidential utterances of great men and women should no more be desecrated by being told to the public than tears and kisses should be profaned by the publicity of a railway station.
The general reader can no more understand why Tennyson suffered so intensely at seeing a chestnut tree felled in full flower than they can understand the course in the heavens of Argol or Altair. To spread out before them these delicate, intricate, bleeding fibres of the soul is to slay Pegasus and Philomel to make a workhouse meal.
Mr Knowles alleges that it is necessary for himand other intimate friends of Tennyson to say all they thought of him, and repeat all he said, because a similar record of Shakespeare’s conversations would be so precious a treasure to the world. This, also, is a questionable premiss. Shakespeare, happy in so much, was happiest of all in the obscurity in which his personality is sheltered; and the world is to be congratulated that it knows too little of the man to squabble and dwarf and disfigure him to the detriment of his works, as it does Byron and Shelley. What the man is matters so little. Psychology is but another name for curiosity, envy, ordénigremené. Whether the orchid grow on a rotten tree, or the lily on a dunghill, affects not the beauty of the orchid or the fragrance of the lily. What Horace was, or was not, at the Augustan Court cannot touch the exquisite grace of his style, the lovely lines of his pictures in words. The more we look at any writer the less we are likely to do justice to his creations, because his personality will exercise upon us either a great attraction or a great repulsion. It would be better for all works if, like Cologne Cathedral, they were without known progenitors.
Could Dante Rossetti ever have dreamed that Mr Leyland would preserve the poor, pathetic little note asking for the gift of more wine in his last illness, which Mr Val. Prinsep saw fit to publish in theArt Journalof September 1892? If we may not trust our most intimate friends with our necessities, in whom can we confide? The whole of this aforesaid correspondence of Rossetti was never intended for, nor is it fitted for, publication. The general world has a right to see any artist’s completed work, and judge itas they may choose to do, but they have no right to be made acquainted with the hesitations, the self-torment, the fluctations, the depression, the exultation, which preceded its birth. These are the ecstasies and the agonies which precede all gestation and parturition, and are not for public exhibition. Mr Leyland, loving Rossetti well, should have burned all these letters before, or immediately after, the artist’s death. Mr Leyland was a man who knew his generation, and must have known the use which would be made of them. If a friend grant me a favour, and afterwards blab of that favour to our common acquaintances, I should prefer that such a favour had never been accorded. I think that most people will agree with this feeling. Yet reticence concerning favours done is not common in our times. Such reticence ought to be held the simplest obligation of honour; but the majority of persons do not so regard it. There is hardly a letter of any length ever written in which there are not some sentences liable to misconstruction, or open to various readings. It is grossly unfair to place any letter before those who are not in the possession of its key; that key which can alone lie in an intimate knowledge of its writer’s circumstances and temperament. If Rossetti were not rich enough to buy the wine he wanted in his weakness, the shame is not his, but that of the world which left him poor. To think that he was too poor even to ever see Italy is an intolerable disgrace to his contemporaries. He would have been wiser to have left his patrons and to have lived in Italy on a black crust and a plate of bean soup.
If the man of genius amass wealth, he is accused ofavarice or of mercenary sale of his own talent. If he remain poor, or be in trouble, no language can sufficiently condemn his extravagance, his improvidence, his immorality. If he live with any kind of splendour, it is display and profligacy; if he endeavour to avoid remark, it is meanness, hauteur or poverty.
Men and women of genius when they have money are too generous with it, and when they have it not are too careless about the lack of it. Shakespeare, we are told, had the prudence to put his money together and to buy houses and lands, with shrewd eye to the main chance; but this is, after all, mere supposition on the part of posterity. We know so little of the circumstances of his life that, for aught we can tell, he may have had some sharp-eyed, true-hearted friend or factor, who thus transmuted the poet’s loose coins into solid fields and freeholds, as George Eliot had behind her George Lewis. I cannot believe that Titania’s laureate ever quarrelled over deeds of copyhold and questions of fees and betterments with the burgesses and notaries of Stratford-upon-Avon. More likely, far, that he was lying in the sun, dreaming, deep cradled in cowslips and ladysmocks, as his winged verses flew up with the bees into the budding lime boughs overhead, whilst some trusty friend or brother did battle in his name with the chafferers and the scriveners in the little town. And when all was settled, and the deeds of transfer only wanted signature and seal, that trusty go-between would shout across the meadows to waken Will from his day-dream, and Will would lazily arise and come across the grass, with the pollen of the bees and thefragrant yellow dust of the cowslips on his clothes, and, with his sweet, serene smile, would scrawl his name to parchments which he scarcely even read. That is, I would take my oath, how the stores of Shakespeare increased, and how New Place became his. Pembroke’s friend and Rosalind’s creator never cared much for lucre, I am sure; for land he might care, because he loved England: he loved her fields, her woods, her streams, and he saw them as her sons can never see them now, uninjured and undimmed, the Lenten lilies growing tall beneath the untrimmed hedges of hazel and hawthorn, the water meadows spreading broad and fair, without a curl of smoke in sight, save that which rose from the cottage hearths. Elizabethan England was meadow where it was not coppice, park where it was not forest, heathery moorland where it was not reedy mere. It was natural that Shakespeare should care to call his own some portion of that beautiful leafy kingdom of his birth.
Even so Scott loved his Scottish soil, and Tennyson cared to own Farringford and Hazelmere. Even so George Sand’s last dying words were of the trees of Nohant. Passion and pleasure and fame and love were in those last moments naught to her, but the green, fresh, dewy leafage of dead summers was still dear.
The psychologist Lombroso, in a recent essay, which must fill thebourgeoisbreast with exultation, finding that it is not possible for him to deny the mental fecundity of genius, denies its physical fertility, and endeavours to prove his assertion, after the customary method of scientists, by avoiding and omitting every fact which would in any mannertell against his theory. Evidence when manipulated by the scientist is like the colt when it issues, docked and clipped, from its training stable. Laying down the proposition that precocity is atavistic, founded on the declaration of the biologist, Dr Delaunay, that it is a sign of inferiority, he cites the marvellous precocity of Raffaelle, Pascal, Mozart, Victor Hugo, Mirabeau, Dante, Handel, Calderon, Tasso, and many others, who prove, on the contrary, that precocity is the sign of splendour, strength and durability of genius. He remarks that precocity is a mark of insignificance, and that the small and low organism develops with much greater rapidity than the higher order! Were we not used to the pompous self-contradictions of Science, we should be surprised to see a characteristic of so many great minds pronounced to be a defect and a deformity; it is certainly only a scientist who would dream of classing Raffaelle, Dante, Mozart, Hugo, amongst the lesser organisms.
The whole argument is built on the same quagmire of illogical assertion and false deduction. He first lays down as an axiom that men of genius are physically sterile, and supports it by the strange and curiously incorrect assertion that Shakespeare and Milton had no posterity! He proceeds to quote the saying of La Bruyère:‘Ces hommes n’ont ni ancêtres ni postérités; ils forment eux-seuls toute une descendance.’Now, as regards ancestry, it is clear that La Bruyère spoke figuratively: he did not and could not mean that men of genius have no progenitors: he meant that who their progenitors were did not matter to the world which cared only for themselves; in a similar way he spoke of their descendants, not as actuallynon-existent, but as counting for nothing beside the superior creation of their works.
Amongst the sterilecélibatairesLombroso oddly enough includes Voltaire and Alfieri, whose loves and liaisons were famous and numerous. He entirely ignores Victor Hugo, whose philoprogenitiveness was so excessive as to be absurd; the extreme affection for their offspring of Tennyson and Renan, of George Sand and of Juliette Adam, of Millias and of Meissonier, of Mario and of Grisi, and of countless others whose names are famous and whose affections were or are most ardent. The offspring publicly recognised by man or woman is by no means necessarily the sole offspring of either. Allegra is not mentioned beside Ada in Burke’s Peerage. Natural children frequently are not allowed to know even their own parentage; a woman may have children whom she does not openly acknowledge; a man may have children of whose birth even he knows nothing. It is not every celebrated woman who has the maternal courage of George Sand, nor every celebrated man who has the paternal tenderness of Shelley.
Lombroso confuses in a most unscientific manner the passion of love and the bond of marriage. Because Michael Angelo says that art is wife enough for him, Lombroso supposes that no passion, good or evil, ever moved him. The fact that a man or woman has not married does not prove that they have had no amours: the probability is that their ardour and caprice in love have withheld them from the captivity of a legal union, which is usually the tomb of love. Everything which disturbs the odd conclusion to which it has pleased him to come is put aside and left out by a writer whosetreatise pretends to be based on an inexorable accuracy. He carefully omits all reference to the men of old who would, almost without exception, disprove his theory. The three greatest of these are surely Mahomet, Alexander and Julius Cæsar: all this triad were famous for sensual indulgence almost without limit. So far as the fact may be considered to honour genius, its alliance with the joys of voluptuous passions is fully established, and no ingenuity in paradox of a perverse hater of it can contravene the fact. As for the poets, from Catullus to Burns, they rise in their graves and laugh in the face of the biologist. Sterile? They? As well call sterile the red clover which yields its fecundating pollen to the bee in the glad sunlight of a summer day.
The great singer called Mario was a man of genius in every way, apart from the art in which he was unsurpassed: yet, he was a singularly handsome man, and possessed of magical seduction for women. Of the Spanish poet Zorilla, for whose recent death all Spanish women wept, the same may be said. Longfellow was very handsome, and his life was lovely, noble, and harmonious, from his youth to his grave. The physical beauty of Washington is well known, yet his genius cannot be contested. Vandyke had extreme physical beauty; Raffaelle also; the painters have nearly always been conspicuous for personal beauty, from Leonardo to Millais and Leighton. Gladstone has very fine features and a magnificent constitution; his physical strength is wonderful, yet his intellect has always been at full stretch, like a racing greyhound. The personal beauty and fine stature of Tennyson were accompanied by the mostkeen intellectual ardour, extant until the very latest day of his life. The beauty of Milton and of Goethe has become traditional in their respective countries. Wellington and Marlborough were singularly handsome men. Napoleon was a man of short stature, but his face had a classic beauty which resisted even death, as may be seen in the mask taken from his dead features at St Helena. Take Lamartine; place his verse where you will, it is impossible to deny his genius, the genius of intense poetic sympathy and insight, of eloquence, of magical music of utterance, of comprehension of all creatures which live and suffer; he himself was his finest poem, and as to his wonderful physical beauty there can be no dispute. Of three typical men of genius of modern times take Shakespeare, Goethe and Henri Quatre; all were of much beauty of person, and masculine vigour was not lacking in any; in the two latter it was even excessive. The hero of Arques and Ivry was the lover of more fair women than peopled the harem of Sardanapalus. Yet he had supreme genius; the genius of command, of wit, of intuition, of magnetic charm over the minds and wills and hearts of men; a charm which has been stronger than death, and has kept the fascination of his memory green throughout the length and breadth of France. Many more similar examples might be quoted. These, however, suffice to prove the inexactitude of the envious calumnies cast upon genius by Lombroso, who actually asserts that genius is never separated from physical degeneracy, and that the splendour of the brain is always paid for by atrophy of other organs! Were this true, the wretched, deformed, stunted creatures, the arrest of whose physicaldevelopment is artificially obtained by the most cruel torture, and constitutes a trade in the Cevennes and the Pyrenees, would all of them become Napoleons, Goethes, Byrons, Mussets, Racines and Bismarcks. The manufacture of cripples would be the manufacture of heroes and poets! The favourite theory of scientists that genius iscausedby physical imperfection is manifestly untrue, and grossly calumnious. It means, if it means anything, that the physically imperfect creature is the intellectually perfect; that the scrofulous and hunchbacked dwarf is the light-giver of the world, the Apollo Citharædus of the arts. What facts bear out such a theory?
Equally calumnious and false is the conclusion by Lombroso, that the man of genius (like the madman) is born, lives and dies,cold,solitary,invisible. A more abominable libel was never penned by mediocrity on greatness. The sweet, bright humour of Scott, buoyant even beneath woe and bodily pain; the gay, delightful kindliness of Molière, the cheerful, serene philosophies of Montaigne, the superb resistance to calamity of Cervantes, the playful, indulgent, affectionate temper of Thackeray, the noble tranquillity in adversity of Milton, the happy whimsical humour of Horace, the calm and fruitful leisure of Suetonius, the adoration of Nature of all the poets, from Theocritus to Lecomte de Lisle—all these and a thousand others arise to memory in refutation of this ignoble libel. Who held that the saddest things on earth were—
‘Un cage sans oiseaux, une ruche sans abeilles,Une maison sans enfans?’
‘Un cage sans oiseaux, une ruche sans abeilles,Une maison sans enfans?’
‘Un cage sans oiseaux, une ruche sans abeilles,Une maison sans enfans?’
‘Un cage sans oiseaux, une ruche sans abeilles,
Une maison sans enfans?’
Victor Hugo: the master of one of the most fertile,puissant and imaginative minds ever known on earth. That genius seeks solitude is natural: it is only the fool who is afraid of his own company; the meditations and intellectual memories of genius must always be more delightful to it than the babble of society.
The commerce and conversation of the majority of persons is wearisome, trivial, dull; it is not wonderful that one who can commune in full harmony of thought with Nature, and with the wisdom of old, turns from the common babble of the common herd, and seeks the shelter of the library, or the silence of the forest and the moor. But such an one will always give more human sympathy than he can ever receive. None can see into his soul; but the souls of others are laid bare to him. To others he is a mystery which they fear; but others are to him as children whom he pities. If their folly and deadness of heart arouse his scorn, he yet weeps for them, because they know not what they do. They cannot hear, as he hears, the sigh in the leaves of the fallen tree, the woe in the cry of the widowed bird, the voices of the buried nations calling from the unseen tombs: no, in that sense he is alone, as the seer is alone and the prophet; but this loneliness comes not from the coldness of his own heart, but from the poverty of the hearts of other men. Who dares to say that those who alone can put into speech the emotions of a humanity, in itself dumb and helpless, are incapable of feeling those emotions which without them would find neither utterance nor interpreter.
Lombroso speaks exultingly of the cruelty to women of Musset, Byron, Carlyle and others; hehas evidently no conception of the intense irritation roused in sensitive natures by uncongenial and enforced companionship. Jane Carlyle was a woman of fine wit and character, but she had no tact and little patience, and her sharp retorts must have been as thorns in the flesh of her bilious and melancholy Saul, as his uncouthness and ill-breeding must have been cruel trials to her. But this was no fault of either of them: it was the fault of that sad mistake, so common in the world, of an ill-assorted marriage, in which the prisoners suffered only the more because they were, in their different ways, of fine character, with a sense of duty so acute in each that it was a torture to both alike. What Lombroso calls the brutality of Carlyle was probably little else than the morbid gloom caused by a diseased liver, this disease in turn caused by the constraint and asphyxiation of a town life in a small house to a man born of hardy, outdoor, rustic stock, and farmed to breathe the strong, keen air of solitary Scottish moors and hills, to be braced by storm and sunshine, to battle with snow and wind and rain. The terrible folly which drives men of talent into cities, and leave them only the vitiated air of close and crowded streets, of feverish gatherings, and of unhealthy club-houses, is the origin of that alliance, so often seen in the present age, between the gifted mind and the suffering body, or the restless nerves, of anévrosé, of a hypochondriac, or of a bilious diabetic.
Lombroso, in the malignant spitefulness with which the scientists throw mud and stones at all genius, calls Byron aRachitique, on account of his deformed foot; but when we remember Byron’s splendid swimmingpowers, his endurance in the saddle, his passion for the mountains and the sea, his heroic calmness on his lonely deathbed, we must, if we are sincere, admit that thisRachitique, even apart from all his superb genius, was a man of no common courage and no common force, and that, whatever might be at birth the physical weakness accompanying his great physical beauty, he had known how to make himself the equal of the strongest even in outdoor sports. When we think of that great beauty before which women went down as corn before the flash of the reaping-hook, of the incomparable romance of that life, passing from the crowds of St James’s to the pine solitudes of Ravenna, from the adulation of Courts to the silence of Alp and ocean, from the darksome glens and braes of Scotland to the azure light on the Hellespont and the Adrian Sea—when we think of its marvellous compass brought within the short span of thirty-six years, of its god-like powers, of its surpassing gifts, of its splendour of song, of wit, of melody, of passion, and of inspiration, of its tragic close, which broke off the laurel bough in its green prime, as Apollo would have it broken—when we think of this life, I say, it is easy to understand why its effulgence has been the mark for every petty malignity and jealous mediocrity ever since the light of the sun died down at Missolonghi.
Byron’s must ever remain the most ideal, the most splendid, the most varied life which ever incarnated in itself the genius of man and the gifts of the gods: what joy, then, to the petty and the envious to point to his club foot, and to assure us he wasRachitique! The puling versifiers who spend their lifetime in elaboratingartificial sonnets based on early Italian methods, straining, refining, paring, altering, transforming, trying to replace by effort all which is lacking to them in inspiration, may well be unable to comprehend aught of that fiery fury of scorn and invective, of that Niagara-like rush of thought and word and imagery, which made verse as natural an utterance to Byron as the torrent of its song is natural to the nightingale in the months of spring. To the grand verse of Byron there may be rivals, there may be superiors; but to the poetry of his life there is no equal in any other life. What greater, more unpardonable sin can he have in the sight of mediocrity?
I lately saw a tourist of small stature, mean appearance, and awkward gesture, criticising unfavourably the attitude of the beautiful Mercury in the Vatican Rotonda. I was irresistibly reminded of certain versifiers and newspaper essayists of the present moment criticising Byron!
Lombroso asserts that ‘the man of genius has only contempt for other men of genius; he is offended by all praise not given to himself; the dominant feeling of a man of genius, or even of erudition, is hatred and scorn for all other men who possess, or approach the possession of genius or talent.’ A greater libel was never penned. It is natural that those who are masters of their art should be less easy to please, less ignorant of its demands and beauties, than the crowd can be. The great writer, the great artist, the great composer, can scarcely fail to feel some disdain for the facility with which the public is satisfied, the fatuity with which it accepts the commonplace, thesecond-rate, the imitation, the mere catch-penny, as true and original creation. But this scorn for the mediocre, which is inseparable from all originality and is its right and privilege, does not for a moment preclude the ardent sympathy, the joyous recognition with which genius will salute the presence of kindred genius. What of the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth, of Byron and Shelley, of Flaubert and George Sand, of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson? Scarce a year ago two illustrious men conversed with sympathy and friendship under the green leaves by the waters of Annecy. Philippe Berthelet narrates how‘sous les vieux noyers de Talloires ils discutèrent pour la première fois de leur vie, Renan défendant son cher Lamartine, et Taine son poëte préféré Musset; je garde un pieux souvenir des nobles paroles de ces deux grands hommes qu’il m’a été donné d’entendre ce soir de Septembre sur le bord du lac limpide, au pied de la Tournette couronnée de neiges.’
The public likes inferior production; as a rule prefers it, because it understands it more easily; and this preference may irritate the supreme artist into a burst of wrath. Berlioz gave theDamnation de Faustto empty benches, and his Titanic disdain of his contemporaries for their preference of weaker men has been justified by the verdict of the present generation. But this sentiment of scorn is as far removed from the petty malignity of envy and injustice as the fury of the tempest amongst the Alps or Andes is unlike the sputtering of a candle guttering in a tin sconce. To the poet to see the poetaster crowned; to the great man to see his miserable imitator accepted as his equal; to the planet on high to know that the streetlamp below is thought his rival, must ever be offensive. But this offence is just, and has grandeur in it; it is no more meanness and jealousy than the planet is the gaspipe or the Alpine storm the candle.
To the great artist it is a great affront to see the imitator of himself, the thief, the dauber, the mimic, the mediocre, accepted as an artist by the world. He is entitled to resent the affront and to scourge the offender. The intolerance of genius for mediocrity is called unkindness: it is no more unkind than the sentence of the judge on the criminal. In our time the material facilities given to production have multiplied mediocrity as heat multiplies carrion flies; it should have no quarter shown to it; it is a ravaging pest.
Cheap printing makes writers of thousands who would be more fittingly employed in stitching shoes or digging ditches; and the assistance of photography makes painters or draughtsmen of thousands who would be more harmlessly occupied whitewashing sheds or carding wool. Genius is as rare as ever it was in all the arts; but the impudent pretensions of nullity to replace and represent it increase with every year, because it finds readier acceptance from the ever-increasing ignorance of a universally educated public. The men of genius who do exist do not say this loudly enough or often enough: they are afraid to look unkind and to create enemies. It is not excellence which is malignant, envious, slanderous, mean: it is inferiority; inferiority dressed in the cheap garment of ill-fitting success.
There is a draughtsman who is very eminent in our time, and whose drawings have brought him in alikecelebrity and wealth. He is esteemed one of the first artists in black-and-white of the century. Yet he never draws a line of any figure without resorting to his immense collection of photographs of all kinds and conditions of persons, in all attitudes and in all costumes, whence he selects whatever he may want to reproduce. This habit may perhaps not impair his skill as a draughtsman; but it certainly makes him a mere imitator, a mere copyist, and robs his works of all spontaneity, originality and sincerity. To draw from a photograph is mere copying, mere cheating; it is not art at all. Yet this popular draughtsman has not the least shame or hesitation in avowing his methods; nor do his public or his critics appear to see anything to censure or regret in them. If the true artist, who is sincere and original in all his creations, who draws from life, and would no more employ a camera than he would pick a pocket, feels, and expresses the contempt which he feels, for the draughtsman who is dependent on photographs, he is not moved either by hostility or jealousy, but by a wholesome and most just disdain. It is a disdain with which the general public can have little sympathy, because they cannot estimate the quality of the offence which excites it.
To the creator, whether of prose, of poem, of melody, picture, or statue, who is sincere in all he creates, to whom conscious imitation would have all the baseness of a forgery, and to whom sincerity and originality are the essence of creative talent, the fraud of imitation disgusts and offends as it cannot do the mere outsider. Such disgust, such offence, are no more envy or jealousy than the sublime fury of thestorming-party is the secret stabbing of the hired bravo.
Oh, the obscure! the vile obscure! what shafts dipped in gall will they not let fly from the dusky parlour in which they sit and look with envious scowl out on the distant splendour of great lives!
The sweetest singer who ever sang on the classic Tyrrhene shore—Shelley, who soared with the skylark and suffered with the demi-god—Shelley leaves unhappily behind him a piteous little letter telling his friend Williams, in Dublin, of his poverty, and asking for the loan of five-and-twenty pounds; and this poor little letter is basely preserved and is sold by auction in London in the month of March of last year for the sum of eleven sovereigns!O beati insipientes!who cares whether you borrow five-and-twenty pounds, or five-and-twenty pence, or five-and-twenty thousand? Who cares to keep your humble request, your timid confession? Who cares whether you got what you craved, or were left to die of hunger? You, the mediocre, the commonplace, the incapable, are left in peace; but the sorry, carking, humiliating need of the beautiful boy-singer, whose name is blessed for all time, is dragged into the auction-mart and bid for rabidly by the curious! What joy for you, you well-fed, broad-bellied, full-pursed hordes of the commonplace, to think that this sensitive plant shivered and sickened under the vulgar hand of dun and bailiff, and withered in the sandy waste of want! He could write down the music of the lark, and hear the laughter of the fairies, and paint the changing glories of the sea, and suffer with the fallen Titan as with the trodden flower—but he was once in sore need of five-and-twentypounds!O beati insipientes!Here lie your triumphs and your revenge. Clasp your fat palms above your ample paunch, and grin as you embrace your banker’s pass-book. Take heed to keep that little letter of the poet of the ‘Prometheus’ safe under glass for all time, to comfort the jealous pains of the millions of nonentities whom you will continue to procreate until the end of time! Such are the consolations of inferiority.
Genius offends by its unlikeness to the general; it scorns their delights, their views, their creeds, their aspirations; it is at once much simpler and much more profound than they; it suffices to itself in a manner which, to the multitude, seems arrogance; the impersonal is always much more absorbing to it than the personal; there are qualities in it at once childlike and godlike, which offend the crowd at once by their ignorance and by their wisdom. In a word, it is apart from them; and they know that, they feel that, and they cannot forgive its unlikeness.
O Beati Insipientes!Unwatched, you eat and drink and work and play; unchronicled are your errors and your follies; would you weep, you may weep in peace; would you take a country walk, no spy, notebook in hand, will lurk in the hedges; when you pour out your trivial nonsense in the ear of a friend, he will not treasure it up to turn it into printer’s copy as soon as you shall be cold in your coffin.
O Beati Insipientes!You know not what safety, what peace, what comfort are gained for you by your mantle of obscurity. You know not, and you would not believe though angels and archangels descendedto tell it you, that the splendour of the sunlight of fame is darkened for ever to those whose path lies through it by the shadow which follows, mimicking, prying, listening, grinning, girding, slobbering, eagerly watching for a false step, cruelly counting the thorns trodden amidst the flowers—that shadow which dogs without mercy the whole of a life, and thrusts its prying fingers through the cere-clothes of death, that shadow of merciless and malign curiosity which follows genius as the assassin followed the fair youth Crichton through the streets of Mantua: the crime of Crichton being to excel!