Part 5 (1/2)
His offence was a libel on the Prince Regent, afterwards George the Fourth. Madame Guyon wrote the most of her beautiful poems--so greatly admired by Cowper--while a captive for four years in the Bastile. The great public library of Paris contains forty octavo volumes of her writings. Why does not some popular author give us a book upon this theme, and ent.i.tle it ”Behind the Prison Bars”? The suggestion is freely offered, and is perhaps worth considering. Disraeli tells us: ”The gate of the prison has sometimes been the porch of fame.”
The reference to Lovelace reminds us that sometimes the female favorites of poets are selected from rather questionable positions, and certainly with very questionable taste. Prior poured out his admiration in verses addressed to Chloe, a fat barmaid; and Bousard addressed poems to Ca.s.sandra, who followed the same refining occupation. Colletet, a French bard, addressed his lines to his servant-girl, whom he afterwards married. No doubt that oftenest the poet's mistress has no actual existence, but, like the sculptor's ideal, is the combined result drawn from several choice models.
Gilbert Wakefield, the erudite scholar, theologian, and author, suffered two years' imprisonment for publis.h.i.+ng his ”Enquiry into the Expediency of Public and Social Wors.h.i.+p.” ”The sentence pa.s.sed upon him was most infamous,” says Rogers, who, in company with his sister, visited the prisoner in Dorchester jail. While incarcerated here, Wakefield wrote his ”Noctes Carcerariae” (”Prison Nights”). Matthew Prior, the poet, diplomatist, courtier, and versatile author, was the son of a joiner, though it is not known exactly where he was born. Chancing to interest the Earl of Dorset, he was educated at the cost of that liberal n.o.bleman. He[105] was one of those, as Dr. Johnson said, ”that have burst out from an obscure original to great eminence.” Thackeray says of him, ”He loved, he drank, he sang; and he was certainly deemed one of the brightest lights of Queen Anne's reign.” His contempt for pedigree was very natural, and was wittily expressed in the epitaph which he wrote for himself:--
”n.o.bles and heralds, by your leave, Here lies what once was Matthew Prior; The son of Adam and of Eve: Can Bourbon or Na.s.sau claim higher?”
Schumann, the German musical composer, author of ”Paradise and the Peri,” in a fit of mental depression threw himself into the Rhine, but was rescued. Goethe, Alfieri, Raphael, and George Sand all struggled against a nearly fatal temptation to end their earthly careers. The last named declared that at the sight of a body of water or a precipice she could hardly restrain herself from committing suicide! ”Genius bears within itself a principle of destruction, of death, and of madness,”
says Lamartine. De Quincey, who was never quite sane, was given to queer habits in connection with his literary work. He was wont to keep his ma.n.u.scripts stored in his bath-tub, and carried his money in his hat.[106] Cowper, after a fruitless attempt to hang himself, became a religious monomaniac, ”hovering in the twilight of reason and the dawn of insanity.”[107] Moore, the gay, vivacious, witty, diner-out, sank finally into childish imbecility. John Clare, the English peasant poet, was born in poverty; his early productions accidentally attracted attention and gained him patrons, but after a brief, irregular, unhappy career he died in an insane asylum. So also died Charles Fenno Hoffman, our own popular poet, editor, and novelist, who wrote ”Sparkling and Bright.” Cruden, the industrious author and compiler of the Biblical Concordance, suffered from long fits of insanity; and so did Jeremy Bentham,[108] though he lived to extreme old age, and died so late as 1832. Congreve said it was the prerogative of great souls to be wretched; and Jean Paul, that great souls attract sorrows as lofty mountains do storms. Lenau, the Hungarian lyric poet, died in a mad-house; in the height of his fame he refused, when invited, to visit an asylum, saying, ”I shall be there soon enough as it is.” It would seem but charitable to attribute fits of insanity to Carlyle, who p.r.o.nounced most of his contemporaries ”fools and lunatics.” His wife confessed that she felt as if she were keeping a mad-house. Vaugelas died in such poverty that he bequeathed his body to the surgeons at Paris for a given sum with which to pay his last board-bill. In his will he wrote: ”As there may still remain creditors unpaid after all that I have shall be disposed of, it is my last wish that my body should be sold to the surgeons to the best advantage, and that the purchase-money should go to discharge those debts which I owe to society, so that if I could not while living, at least when dead I may be useful.” Vaugelas was called the owl, because he ventured forth only at night, through fear of his creditors.
Next to the ”Newgate Calendar,” it has been said, the biography of authors is the most sickening chapter in the history of man. ”Woe be to the youthful poet who sets out upon his pilgrimage to the temple of fame with nothing but hope for his viatic.u.m!” wrote Southey, in 1813, to a young man who had consulted him. ”There is the Slough of Despond, and the Hill of Difficulty, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death upon the way.” Coleridge's exhortation to youthful literati may be summed up in one sentence: ”Never pursue literature as a trade.” Beranger's advice was by no means to be despised. He spoke as one having authority, and he certainly had experience.[109] ”Write if you will,” he says, ”versify if you must, sing away if the singing mood is an imperative mood, but on no account give up your other occupation; let your authors.h.i.+p be a pastime, not a trade; let it be your avocation, not your vocation.” Even the successful Was.h.i.+ngton Irving speaks of ”the seductive but treacherous paths of literature.” He adds: ”There is no life more precarious in its profits and more fallacious in its enjoyments than that of an author.”
But these lines were addressed to his nephew, and must be taken _c.u.m grano salis_. He had genius, his nephew had not; he never could have acquired so much money had he, like Halleck, become a clerk,--even the clerk of Mr. Astor. The truth is, most writers have failed in authors.h.i.+p because they have not had talent enough to write books that an intelligent public would buy and read, and because their vagabond habits deterred them from being employed by merchants and tradesmen as salesmen and clerks. Real genius now obtains a remuneration always higher than that of clerks and tradesmen. It is mediocre writers who mourn in our days; but they should never have taken as a profession a role they were incompetent to fill. They are like doctors who cannot obtain patients, and lawyers who cannot attract clients.
But we were considering the past, not the present. Robert Heron, author, scholar, teacher, who wrote much that will live in literature, died in hopeless poverty. His ”History of Scotland” and his ”Universal Geography” are still among our best books of reference. He says of himself in a paper written just before he died: ”The tenor of my life has been temperate, laborious, humble, and quiet, and, to the utmost of my power, beneficent. For these last three months I have been brought to the very extremity of bodily and pecuniary distress, and I shudder at the thought of peris.h.i.+ng in jail.” Yet such was his fate; he died in Newgate. Thomas Decker, the English author, and collaborator with Ford and Rowley in the production of popular dramas, died in a debtor's prison. Christopher Smart, the personal friend of Dr. Johnson, produced his princ.i.p.al poem while confined in a mad-house. Richard Savage, the English poet, experienced a life which reads like fiction.[110] The natural son of an English earl and countess, he was abandoned by his mother to the care of a nurse who brought him up in ignorance of his parentage. Before he was thirty years of age he was tried and condemned for murder; and, though finally pardoned, he died in jail. During a considerable portion of the time that Savage was engaged upon his tragedy of ”Sir Thomas Overbury,” he was without lodgings and often without meat; nor had he any other convenience for study and composition than the open fields or the public streets. Having formed his sentences and speeches in his mind, he would step into a shop, ask for pen and ink, and write down what he had composed upon such sc.r.a.ps of paper as he had picked up by chance, often from the street gutters.
Thomas Hood, the famous English humorist, began at first as a clerk in a store, then became apprentice to an engraver; but his genius soon led him to seek literary occupation as a regular means of support. He was endowed with an unlimited fund of wit and comic power. His ”Song of the s.h.i.+rt” showed that he had also great tenderness and pathos in his nature. He edited various magazines and weekly papers, and published two or three humorous books; but his career was far from a success in any light. His life was occupied in incessant brain-work, aggravated by ill-health and the many uncertainties of authors.h.i.+p. He finally died poor in his forty-seventh year, leaving a dependent family.
William Thom was an English poet of genius, but very humbly born. He was at first a weaver and afterwards a strolling pedler, often only too glad to obtain a lodging in a country barn. The poor fellow said, ”There's much good sleeping to be had in a hayloft.” In one of these deplorable shelters his only child, who followed him, perished from hunger and exposure. Thom published so late as 1844 a collection of his poems ent.i.tled, ”Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Weaver.” The volume was well received, and the author was given a dinner by his London admirers. He died at the age of fifty-nine in extreme poverty. We find two admirable poems by him in Sargent's ”British and American Poets.”
The reader who has perused these pages thus far will doubtless have come to the conclusion that even talent is not developed as a rule in calm and suns.h.i.+ne, but that it must encounter the tempest in some form before the fruit can ripen. Byron, in the third canto of ”Childe Harold,” thus gloomily declares the penalties of becoming famous:--
”He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow; He who surpa.s.ses or subdues mankind Must look down on the hate of those below.
Though high _above_ the sun of glory glow, And far _beneath_ the earth and ocean spread, _Round_ him are icy rocks, and loudly blow Contending tempests on his naked head, And thus reward the toils which to those summits led.”
Longfellow's idea is true and forcible: ”Time has a doomsday book, in which he is continually recording ill.u.s.trious names. But as soon as a new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in illumined characters never to be effaced.”
Thackeray's tender and beautiful thoughts upon this subject occur to us here: ”To be rich, to be famous? do these profit a year hence, when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under ground, along with the idle t.i.tles engraven on your coffin? Only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessings, or pervades you and intercedes for you. _Non omnis moriar_, if, dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am lost and hopeless, living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.”
CHAPTER VI.
Our familiar gossip thus far concerning those whose lives by universal consent, ”rising above the deluge of years,” bear the impress of genius, has led us to speak of the hards.h.i.+ps and vicissitudes to which they have so often been subjected. At this sad yet interesting aspect of genius we will continue to glance, observing, as. .h.i.therto, no chronological order, but discussing the personalities of each character as they are unrolled before us on the panorama of memory.
Handel, most original of composers, after losing his entire fortune in a legitimate effort to further the interests of the art he loved so well, pa.s.sed the last of his life in the gloom of blindness. His glorious oratorios were most of them produced under the stress of keen adversity, loss of fortune, and failing health, quite sufficient to have discouraged any one not truly inspired.[111] Mozart also labored under the ban of poverty. He was glad to accept even the position of chapel-master. It is well known that during the composition of some of his masterpieces he and his family suffered for bread. The great composer was so absorbed in music that he was but a child in matters of business.[112] Whatever may be the true definition of genius, perseverance and application form no inconsiderable part of it. ”It is a very great error,” said Mozart, ”to suppose that my art has been easily acquired. I a.s.sure you that there is scarcely any one that has so worked at the study of composition as I have. You could hardly mention any famous composer whose writings I have not diligently and repeatedly studied throughout.” A boy came to Mozart wis.h.i.+ng to compose something, and inquiring the way to begin. Mozart told him to wait. ”You composed much earlier,” said the youth. ”But asked nothing about it,” replied the musician.[113] Willmott says very truly that genius finds its own road and carries its own lamp.
We have seen that Goldsmith produced some of his finest literary work under stress of circ.u.mstances. ”Oh, G.o.ds! G.o.ds!” he exclaimed to his friend Bryanton, ”here in a garret, writing for bread and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score!” Like so many other children of genius, he was careless, extravagant, irregular, always in debt and difficulty, all which hurried him to his grave. He died at the age of forty-five. When, on his death-bed, the physician asked him if his mind was at ease, he answered, ”No, it is not!” and these were his last words. In that exquisite story, the ”Vicar of Wakefield,”[114] we have the explanation of how he supported himself while on his travels. ”I had some knowledge of music,” he says, ”and now turned what was once my amus.e.m.e.nt into a present means of subsistence. Whenever I approached a peasant's house towards nightfall, I played one of my most merry tunes; and that procured me not only a lodging, but subsistence for the next day.”
Goldsmith's many faults were all on the amiable side, though he was perhaps a little inclined to find fault with his ill-fortune in good set phrases. Sometimes we are forced to remember that the misery which can so readily find relief in words of complaint is not dissimilar to that love which Thackeray thought quite a bearable malady when finding an outlet in rhyme and prose. Real suffering and profound sorrow are nearly always silent in proportion to their depth. It is evanescent afflictions which most readily find tongue. ”To write well,” says Madame de Stael, ”we should feel truly; but not, as Corinne did, heartbreakingly.” If Goldsmith did grumble, he had bitter cause. At one time having p.a.w.ned everything that would bring money, he resorted to writing ballads at five s.h.i.+llings apiece, going out secretly in the evening to hear them sung in the streets. His five s.h.i.+llings were often shared with some importunate beggar. One day he gave away his bed-clothes to a poor woman who had none; and then, feeling cold at night, he ripped open his bed and was found lying up to his chin in the feathers! The very name of Goldsmith seems to us to ring with a generous tone of unselfishness and human sympathy. The story is true of his leaving the card-table to relieve a poor woman whose voice as she sang some ditty in pa.s.sing on the street came to his sensitive ear indicating distress. Not a line can be found in all his productions where he has written severely against any one, though he was himself the subject of bitter criticism and literary abuse. He was not a very thorough reader of books, but owed his ability as a writer more to the keenness of his observation. Nature and life were the books he studied; which was simply going to the fountain-head for his information.
Machiavelli, the renowned Italian statesman, philosopher, and dramatist, whose picturesque history of Florence alone would have ent.i.tled him to fame, was entirely misconstrued by the times in which he lived, suffering imprisonment, torture, and banishment in the cause of public liberty. Macaulay says of him: ”The name of a man whose genius has illumined all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people owed their last chance of emanc.i.p.ation, pa.s.sed into a proverb of infamy.” The victim of one age often becomes the idol of the next. Dante,[115] expatriated, and exiled from wife and children, is not forgotten. The greatest genius between the Augustan and Elizabethan ages, an accomplished musician, a painter of no mean repute, and a brilliant scholar, he yet enjoyed no contemporary fame. ”The inventor of the spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day,” says Carlyle; ”but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary.” Dante poured out the deep devotion of his youthful heart at the feet of that Beatrice whose name he has rendered cla.s.sic by the genius of his pen, though she did not live to bless him. His later marriage was ill-a.s.sorted and unhappy. The sublime and unique ”Divine Comedy” was not even published until after its author's death. Now the pilgrim bends with reverence over the grave whither he was hurried by persecution. How absurd are the transitions of which human appreciation is capable! Even the cool, philosophical Carlyle was struck with admiration of the poet's devotion.
He says: ”I know not in the world an affection equal to that of Dante.
It is a tenderness, a trembling, longing, pitying love, like the wail of aeolian harps,--soft, soft, like a child's young heart; one likens it to the song of angels; it is among the purest utterances of affection, perhaps the very purest that ever came out of a human soul.”
Hard indeed seems to have been the fate of the Italian dramatist and poet, Bentivoglio, who, after impoveris.h.i.+ng himself in acts of charity, literally selling all and giving the proceeds to the poor, when old and miserable was refused admission into a hospital which he had himself founded in his days of prosperity. Kotzebue, the German author and dramatist, who wrote that remarkable play ”The Stranger,” was a man beset with morbid melancholy, causing him to pray for death, which came at last by a murderous hand.[116] Philip Ma.s.singer, the creator of ”Sir Giles Overreach,” a dramatic conception almost worthy of Shakespeare, despite his rare and wondrous powers, was the child of adversity.
Ma.s.singer wrote in conjunction with Beaumont and Fletcher, they getting whatever of credit was earned by the three. In those days, an established writer for the stage would frequently utilize the brains of others of less note, calling them to aid in productions which bore only the employer's name. There seemed to be no suns.h.i.+ne in Ma.s.singer's life; it was all in shadow.[117] Could anything be more pathetic than this brief entry in the death chronicle of a London parish, under date of March 20, 1639: ”Buried--Philip Ma.s.singer--a stranger.”
Erasmus, the Dutch scholar and philosopher, defrauded of his patrimony while an orphan of tender years, devoted himself to learning, and cheerfully submitted to every deprivation to secure it. While pursuing his studies in Paris he was clothed in rags, and his form was cadaverous from want of food. It was at this time that he wrote to a friend, ”As soon as I get any money, I will buy first Greek books and then clothes.”
Thus nurtured in the school of adversity, he rose to a proud distinction; and to him, more than to any other writer, was attributed the success of the Reformation,--it being expressively remarked that he laid the egg which Luther hatched. If it be true that an atmosphere of hards.h.i.+p is necessary to the nurture of genius, then certainly Erasmus encountered the requisite discipline; but as Dr. Johnson says in his epigrammatic way, ”there is a frightful interval between the seed and the timber.” Death is the dropping of the flower that the fruit may ripen. Thus fame may follow, but seldom is contemporary; nor does true genius fail to recognize this. Milton's ambition, to use his own words, was, ”to leave something, so written, to after ages that they should not willingly let it die;” and Cato said he had rather posterity should inquire why no statues were erected to him, than why they were.
Motherwell calls fame ”a flower upon a dead man's heart.” Were it otherwise, were fame contemporary, it would be but the breath of popular applause, the shallowest phase of reputation. ”I always distrust the accounts of eminent men by their contemporaries,” says Samuel Rogers.
”None of us has any reason to slander Homer or Julius Caesar; but we find it difficult to divest ourselves of prejudices when we are writing about persons with whom we have been acquainted.”