Part 4 (2/2)

We might cover pages in enumerating the resorts of notable people in their instinctive search after necessary recreation from sterner duties.

Man must be doing something in order to be happy; action being quite as necessary to the health of body and brain as thought. Schiller declared that he found the greatest happiness of life to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty. ”Cheerfulness,” says the shrewd and practical Dr. Horne, is ”the daughter of employment; and I have known a man come home from a funeral in high spirits, merely because he had the management of it.” It is in our unoccupied moments that discontent creeps into the mind; busy people have no time to be very miserable.

Amus.e.m.e.nts are not without a double purpose, and it is only a mistaken zeal which argues against those that are innocent. ”Let the world,” says that wise old philosopher Robert Burton, ”have their May-games, wakes, whatsunales, their dancings and concerts; their puppet-shows, hobby horses, tabors, bagpipes, b.a.l.l.s, barley-breaks, and whatever sports and recreations please them best, provided they be followed with discretion.”

Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a scholar as well as a statesman, found delight in a variety of intellectual work. He s.h.i.+rked as well as he could all invitations to parties, b.a.l.l.s, and dinners, and once despairingly exclaimed, when he was called from his studies to enter into some form of amus.e.m.e.nt, ”that life was tolerable were it not for its pleasures.”

CHAPTER V.

Leonardo da Vinci, the inspired painter of the ”Last Supper” upon the walls of the time-worn Milan convent,[89] is said to have had a strange inclination for dirt. One biographer tells us he grovelled in it. Da Vinci was a great engineer and scientist, as well as artist. The face of Judas in the group seated at the table carries with it a legend. The artist entertained a bitter enmity towards a priest of the Cathedral who had worked him some vital injury, either real or imaginary. His revenge was clear to him; his enemy's hated features were impressed upon his mind, and so, a little modified to suit the supposed treacherous character of the disciple, were made to const.i.tute those of Judas at the moment when he contemplates the betrayal of his Master. The likeness was too plain not to be recognized by those who knew of the ill feeling existing between the artist and priest. The result was that the latter was virtually banished from the city, as he asked to be, and was transferred to Rome.

Raphael thought he could paint best under the inspiration of wine, and therefore used it freely. Some modern critics pretend to discover the vinous influence in certain exaggerations of style peculiar to his best pictures. Notwithstanding the number and grandeur of the works which he left behind him, he died prematurely at the age of thirty-seven. A book might easily be written upon the peculiarities and habits of artists; but we continue our desultory gossip.

How often we see the lives and fortunes of individuals contingent upon seeming chance! Cromwell and Hampden, who were cousins, both took pa.s.sage in a vessel that lay in the Thames, bound for this country, in 1637. They were actually on board, when an order of council prohibited the vessel from sailing. We recall two other instances of a similar character in the career of Goethe and Robert Burns, each of whom was once on the eve of sailing for America to seek a foreign home. Locke was banished from England by force of public opinion, in company with his friend Lord Ashley, and wrote his well-known ”Essay on the Human Understanding”[90] in a Dutch garret. He finally lived down all detraction, and was himself a practical example of that self-teaching which he so strongly advocates in his writings. He possessed a wonderful memory; so also did Thomas Fuller, who could repeat five hundred unconnected words after twice hearing them. Coleridge esteemed Fuller, not only for his wit, originality, and liberality, but as being the most sensible great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men.

Jeremy Taylor, whose birth is shrouded in mystery, though he is said to be the son of a barber, was a singular compound, in character, of simplicity and erudition. He was always a child among children, and it is said that a child could at any time attract his attention. He encountered many of the sterner vicissitudes of life, being more than once cast into prison. In the civil war he was a decided adherent of Charles I., and some have supposed him to have been a natural son of that monarch. Emerson calls him the Shakespeare of divines. Gibbon, the distinguished historian, composed while walking back and forth in his room, completely arranging his ideas in his brain before taking his pen in hand, which in a degree accounts for the correctness of his ma.n.u.script.[91] Montaigne and Chateaubriand,[92] when disposed to composition, sought the open fields and unfrequented paths, where, somewhat like Gibbon, they arranged their matter with great precision before sitting down to write. Bacon always wrote in a small room, because, as he believed, it enabled him to concentrate his thoughts.

Franklin wrote and studied with a plate of bread and cheese by his side to repair mental waste, as he said, and also to economize time. Is there not a ceaseless interest hanging over the domestic and professional habits of these famous men of the past?

Congreve, to whom Pope dedicated his Iliad and Dryden submitted his poems for criticism before giving them to the public, was extremely popular, witty, and original as a dramatist. Congreve was a slow writer, and was the father, as it were, of that style of writing which died with Sheridan. He wrote only a few dramas, but those were incomparable for the brilliancy of the dialogue; yet the brilliancy was obtained by the hardest intellectual _work_. According to Macaulay, no English author except Byron had at so early an age stood so high in the estimation of his contemporaries. But the licentiousness and general immorality of the works of Congreve are without excuse.[93] He had not even the paltry plea of necessity, which might lead him to pander to a vitiated taste in seeking a market for his wares, as was evidently the case with Fielding.

He was very desirous to pa.s.s for a man of fas.h.i.+on, and affectedly sneered at his own literary productions, declaring them to be produced simply to while away his idle hours. Vanity seems to have completely overshadowed any spirit of ambition which may have originally inspired him. Flattery and royal patronage were the ruin of Congreve so far as his after fame is concerned. Had he known the wholesome spur of necessity, his grand powers would have shone with surpa.s.sing l.u.s.tre. He had the genius, but not the incentive, wherewith to make a great name.

Pope is said, on a certain occasion, to have hinted as much to Congreve, whom he really reverenced for his ability, and to have incurred his partial enmity thereby. ”Oh that men's ears should be to counsel deaf,”

says Shakespeare, ”but not to flattery.” The broad inconsistency of Congreve's dramas is the fact that all his characters are equally endowed with wit, culture, and genius. Collier, in his review of the profaneness of the English stage, administered to Congreve a merited castigation, to which the dramatist attempted to reply, but without success.

The remarkable vicissitudes which have waited upon the career of men of genius, and especially of authors, are very noticeable. The earliest authentic history shows us the same fatality besetting the paths of such characters as has pursued them to the present day. The student of the past will recall as examples Seneca and his friend Lucan, who were honored and famous in the days of Nero. Both of these renowned authors, when condemned to death, lanced their veins and sung a dying requiem while the tide of their lives ebbed slowly away. So Socrates drank of the fatal hemlock, like Sappho and Lucretius, voluntarily seeking death.

”That which is a necessity to him that struggles, is little more than a choice to him who is willing,” says Seneca. Sophocles, the Greek tragic poet and rival of aeschylus, was brought to trial by his own children as a lunatic. He composed more than a hundred tragedies, of which seven are still extant. He also excelled as a musician. Plautus, poet and dramatist, was at one time a baker's a.s.sistant, earning his bread by grinding corn in a hand-mill. Ta.s.so, Italy's favorite epic poet, became broken-hearted from unrequited love, and was confined in a mad-house for years, and, ill.u.s.trative of the mutability of fortune, was afterwards brought to Rome to be crowned, like Petrarch, with laurels, but died before the day of coronation. Euripides, one of the three tragic poets of Greece, was torn to pieces by dogs; and Hesiod, a still more ancient poet, fell by the a.s.sa.s.sin's dagger. In later times there looms up the name of Galileo, the discoverer and natural philosopher, imprisoned by the Inquisition for teaching men that the world moved.[94] ”Poor Galileo,” said a modern wit, ”was too honest; he should have treated these inquisitors to a champagne supper, and they would have risen from it with the conviction that the world surely _did_ turn round.”

Galileo's greatest affliction, however, was that of becoming totally blind. Milton, who visited him in prison, tells us he was poor and old.

In a letter which he dictated to a correspondent, Galileo says: ”Alas!

your dear friend has become irreparably blind. The heavens, the earth, this universe, which by wonderful observation I have enlarged a thousand times past the belief of former ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow s.p.a.ce which I myself occupy.” Handel also pa.s.sed the last of his life in the gloom of blindness; and Beethoven was afflicted with incurable deafness, which nearly drove him to suicide.[95] It was perhaps the most trying misfortune possible to one with his special endowments. Have not these historic characters tested the familiar axiom that calamity is man's true touchstone?

Dante, the greatest poet between the Augustan and Elizabethan ages, was expatriated and exiled from wife and children, becoming a poverty-stricken wanderer. Thus broken in heart and fortune he was hurried by persecution to his grave. Spenser, who endowed English verse with the soul of harmony while eking out a life of misery, finally died in abject poverty. Milton sold ”Paradise Lost”[96] for ten pounds. ”When Milton composed that grand poem,” says Carlyle, ”he was not only poor but impoverished; he was in darkness, and with dangers compa.s.sed round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though few.” At one time Milton borrowed fifty pounds of Jonathan Hartop, of Aldborough, who lived to the remarkable age of one hundred and thirty-eight years, dying in 1791. He returned the loan at the time agreed upon, but Mr. Hartop, knowing his straitened circ.u.mstances, refused to take the money; the pride of the poet, however, was equal to his genius, and he sent the money back a second time with an angry letter, which was found years afterwards among the papers of the remarkable old man. Corneille, the French dramatist; Vaugelas, a noted author of the same nationality; Crabbe, the English poet; Chatterton, the precocious and versatile genius; Holzmann, the profound Oriental scholar; Cervantes; Camoens,[97]

the pride of Portugal; and Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, who rose to the leaders.h.i.+p of the literature of his day,--all lived more or less continuously on the verge of starvation. Camoens had a black servant who had grown old with him. This man, a native of Java, is said to have saved his master's life in the s.h.i.+pwreck whereby he lost all his fortune except his poems. In after years, when Camoens became so much reduced as to be able no longer to support his servant, the faithful retainer begged in the streets of Lisbon for bread to sustain the one great poet of Portugal. Le Sage, author of ”Gil Blas,” was endowed with exquisite literary taste, but the victim of extreme poverty. De Quincey, the eminent English author, tells us that he pa.s.sed much time in London in the most abject want, living upon precarious charity. Nowhere else can so vivid a picture of misused genius be found as in the ”Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.” De Quincey was noted for his rare conversational powers, supplemented by a vast and varied stock of information. He was finally successful in a business point of view, and was possessed of a n.o.ble generosity, as he relieved at a critical moment the necessities of Coleridge at a cost of five hundred pounds. This was at a comparatively early period of De Quincey's life. Afterwards he was himself often in want of a tenth part of the sum. He was a voluminous writer, though not always publis.h.i.+ng under his own name; his collection of works as issued in this country, edited by J. T. Fields, forms some twenty volumes. Let us not forget to mention Sydenham, the English scholar who gave us, among other profound works, the best version of Plato, and who breathed his last in a London sponging-house. ”Genius,”

says Whipple, ”may almost be defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.”

Some writers have contended, and not without reason, that such adversity was often providential; that without the spur of necessity genius would rarely accomplish its best, and that distress has often elicited talents which would otherwise have remained dormant. In speaking of Burns, Carlyle says: ”We question whether for his culture as a poet, poverty and much suffering were not absolutely advantageous. Great men in looking back over their lives have testified to that effect. 'I would not for much,' says Jean Paul, 'that I had been born rich.' And yet Jean Paul's birth was poor enough, for in another place he adds: 'The prisoner's allowance is bread and water, and I have often only the latter.' But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, 'the canary-bird sings sweetest the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage.'” Horace emphatically declares, that adversity has the effect of developing talents which prosperous circ.u.mstances would not have elicited. The hards.h.i.+ps endured by many historic persons crowd upon the mind in this connection. We remember John Bunyan in Bedford jail,[98] writing that immortal work, ”Pilgrim's Progress;” Ben Jonson,[99] the comrade of Shakespeare; John Seldon, the profound scholar and author; and Jeremy Taylor, whose ”Holy Living and Dying” is only second to ”Pilgrim's Progress,”--all of whom endured the suffering of imprisonment.[100] Nor must we forget Sir Walter Raleigh, who during his thirteen years of prison-life produced his incomparable ”History of the World.”[101]

Lydiat, the subtle scholar to whom Dr. Johnson refers, wrote his ”Annotations on the Parian Chronicles,” while confined for debt in the King's Bench; and Wicquefort's curious work on Amba.s.sadors is dated from the prison to which he was condemned for life. Voltaire wrote his ”Henriad” while confined in the Bastile; De Foe produced his best works within the walls of Newgate; and Cervantes gave the world ”Don Quixote”

from a prison.[102]

Some of the sweetest love-lyrics extant were written by Charles, Duke of Orleans, during his captivity of twenty-five years. Baron Trenck wrote his wonderful book of personal experience during a ten years'

captivity in a subterranean dungeon at Magdeburg,--a book which has been translated into every modern language. He was released from prison, but died by the guillotine at Paris in 1794. Silvio Pellico, the Italian poet and dramatist, who wrote the well-known story of his prison life, was ten years confined in the fortress of Spielberg, in Moravia. Ponce de Leon, among the foremost of Spanish poets, as well as the poet Alonzo de Ereilla, were victims of long and severe incarceration because they dared to translate the Biblical Songs of Solomon into Spanish.

James Howell, the English author, wrote his ”Familiar Letters” in the Fleet Prison. So popular were they, that he had the pleasure of seeing ten editions of them published in rapid succession; this was about the year 1646. William Penn and Roger Williams, both founders of States in this country, suffered imprisonment. The former wrote his well-known ”No Cross, No Crown” in the Tower of London. Oakley, the great Oriental scholar, whose remarkable Asiatic researches have rendered his name famous, wrote his work on the Saracens in jail. Cobbett, the political satirist, was no stranger to the inside of a prison; and we all remember Cooper, the English chartist, who made himself famous by his ”Prison Rhymes,” written behind the frowning bars. Montgomery suffered the same chilling influences for daring to make a public plea for freedom of speech. Theodore Hook, the novelist, delightful miscellaneous writer, and unrivalled wit, was for a long period imprisoned.[103]

Richard Lovelace, the English poet, was a gallant soldier who spilled his blood for his king in the civil war and impoverished himself in the same cause, was imprisoned for political reasons, and died poor and neglected at the age of forty. He wrote to ”Lucasta,”[104] when going to the wars, that fine and often-quoted couplet:--

”I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more.”

Lucasta (_Lux casta_, ”pure light”), to whom his verses were dedicated, was Lady Sacheverell, whom he devotedly loved, but who married another after having been deceived by the false report that Lovelace had been killed. He was liberated from prison under Cromwell, but lived a wretched life thereafter. Leigh Hunt, the most genial of essayists, was imprisoned for two years, when he was visited by Lamb, Byron, and Moore.

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