Part 7 (1/2)
We have spoken several times of the remuneration realized by authors for their literary productions, and perhaps a few more words upon this subject may be of interest to the general reader.
In the reigns of William III., Anne, and George I., literature, however excellent, could not find a sufficient market to fairly requite its authors. Intelligent, cultured men could not realize remunerative incomes by their pen; so the political chiefs of those days came forward and extended official patronage to them in a manner which was often princely and munificent. Thus Congreve, scarcely yet twenty-one years of age, was given a place under Government which made him independent for life. Rowe, poet and dramatist, author of ”Tamerlane,” was made under-secretary of state, and finally became poet-laureate, in 1714.
Hughes, the poet and dramatist, also held a lucrative Government office; he was the author of the ”Siege of Damascus,” a drama, singular to say, which was played for the first time on the evening of his death. Ambrose Phillips, an author of similar character, was made judge of the prerogative court of Ireland. Locke, the English philosopher, philanthropist, and voluminous writer, was the recipient of liberal Government patronage. Newton, it will be remembered, was made Master of the Royal Mint. Stepney, the poet, of whom Dr. Johnson said, ”He is a very licentious translator, and does not recompense the neglect of his author by beauties of his own,” was honored by various appointments, as also was Matthew Prior, of whom the same critic heartily approved. Gay was made Secretary of Legation at five-and-twenty,--he whom we have seen come up to London and begin life as a mercer's clerk. Montague is another ill.u.s.trious example of those geniuses who may be said to have enjoyed at least a degree of suns.h.i.+ne as well as of shadow. His poem on the death of Charles II. led to his various appointments and his earldom. Steele was made Commissioner of Stamps, and Swift came very near being made a bishop.[157] Addison was appointed Secretary of State, and Dr. Johnson was the recipient of a pension. The reader can easily add instances to such as we have enumerated as those most readily presenting themselves. In our own day excellence in literature is much more remunerative, and in a legitimate business way. Good books sell, and authors receive fair royalties thereon; but even among us instances of official recognition for literary merit are not wanting. We recall in this connection Bancroft the historian, as Minister to Germany; Lowell the scholar and poet, Minister to the Court of St. James. Hawthorne, Irving, Everett, Motley, Bayard Taylor, Howells, and others, have all been officially recognized in a similar manner.
CHAPTER VIII.
Egotism in eminent characters is often amusing to us, but extremely undignified in them. It is almost always the betrayal of weakness,--the tongue of vanity. He who talks of himself, however humble the words, exposes a proud heart. Still, as Emerson says, ”there are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coa.r.s.e and fine egotists.” Carlyle was an egotist of the first water, and so were many other famous authors.
Demosthenes expressed his pleasure when even a fishwoman pointed him out in the streets of Athens. Margaret Fuller once wrote: ”I have now met all the minds of this country worth meeting, and find none comparable to my own ”! The admiration point is ours; the words evince most insufferable vanity. No wonder Emerson complained of her ”mountainous me,” or that Lowell called the whole of her being a ”capital I.” Even the gentle, undemonstrative Hawthorne was obliged to denounce her vanity; and yet Margaret was a woman full of kindly human instinct and of remarkable culture. d.i.c.kens was vain,[158] egotistical, and selfish,--traits which grew upon him as he advanced in years.
Thackeray, in his frank, open way, acknowledged his delight at being recognized by street gamins as the author of ”Vanity Fair.” Hans Andersen, like Dante, confidently predicted his own future greatness.
Kepler declared that ”G.o.d has not sent in six thousand years an observer like myself.” Buffon's vanity was proverbial and ridiculous; and yet the man was not ridiculous according to Pope's idea, that ”every man has just so much vanity as he lacks understanding,” for we all know that Buffon was a profound naturalist and scholar. ”I am the greatest historian that ever lived,” wrote Gibbon in his private diary; and Goethe said, ”All I have had to do, I have done in kingly fas.h.i.+on.”
Albert Durer, in reviewing his own work, wrote, ”It cannot be better done.” Though he had in his day many admirers, and has even some at the present time, we confess that his pictures have no attraction for us.
However, he has unquestionable merit as an engraver, and was court painter to Charles V. Ruskin's conceit peeps out everywhere in his writings. Nothing could be more egotistical than Disraeli's (Beaconsfield) novels. George Sand boastfully betrays her own liaison with De Musset in her popular story of ”Elle et Lui.” ”I shall be read,”
says Southey, ”by posterity, if I am not read now,--read with Milton, and Virgil, and Dante, when poets whose works are now famous will only be known through a biographical dictionary.”[159] Most of the eminent men among the ancients were superlatively conceited and vain. Plato quoted the oracle which p.r.o.nounced him great; Caesar frequently commends himself, and so does Cicero. Pliny puts himself on record as one of this cla.s.s when he wrote to Venator: ”The longer your letter was, so much the more agreeable I thought it, especially as it turned entirely upon my works. I am not surprised you should find a pleasure in them, since I know you have the same affection for every composition of mine as you have for the author.” ”A modern instance” occurs to us here. When a certain distinguished lady asked Lord Brougham, the great English orator and author, who was the _best_ debater in the House of Lords, his lords.h.i.+p modestly replied, ”Lord Stanley is the _second_ best, madam.”
That some people who despise flatterers do not hesitate to flatter themselves, is an axiom to the truth of which we must all subscribe.
In contradistinction to these, Whittier, the Quaker poet, wrote recently to a correspondent in that gentle, modest manner which is so characteristic of everything relating to him: ”I have never thought of myself as a poet in the sense in which we use the word when we speak of the great poets. I have just said from time to time the things I had to say, and it has been a series of surprises to me that people should pay so much attention to them, and remember them so long.” Voltaire betrayed his conceit when he attempted to criticise Shakespeare. Balzac and Victor Hugo were two egotists. ”There are only three writers of the French language,” said Balzac,--”Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and myself.” Southey, Young, Pope, Dryden, and Wordsworth betrayed their vanity in an egregious manner. Goldsmith was conspicuously vain at times. Landor had a supreme estimate of his own productions, and wrote to Wordsworth, concerning his ”Imaginary Conversations,” as follows: ”In two thousand years there have not been five volumes in prose equal in their contents to these.”[160] Voltaire's remark upon Dante served only to ill.u.s.trate his own spleen and jealousy. ”His reputation,” said the sarcastic Frenchman, ”will continually be growing greater, because there is now n.o.body who reads him.” As for Voltaire's tragedies, De Tocqueville said he could not even read them through, and he doubted if anybody else could. Scott said he read the ”Henriade” through, and _lived_, but it was when he was a young man, and then he read everything. Dr. Johnson once acknowledged that he never read Milton through until he was obliged to do so in compiling his dictionary.
Southey said he had read Spenser through about _thirty_ times, and that he could not read Pope once. It was perhaps singular, but Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth all failed to appreciate Virgil.
Hannah More tells us that on a certain occasion when she was visiting the Garricks in 1776, David read aloud to herself and Mrs. Garrick her (Hannah's) last poem. ”After dinner Garrick read 'Sir Eldred' with all his pathos and all his graces. I think I was never so ashamed in my life; but he read it so superbly that I cried like a child. Only think what a ridiculous thing to cry at the reading of one's own poetry.” In another place she says: ”Whether my writings have promoted the spiritual welfare of my readers, I know not; but they have enabled me to do good by private charity and public beneficence. I am almost ashamed to say that they have brought me thirty thousand pounds.” Burns was affected almost to tears when he heard for the first time George Lockhart, of Glasgow, sing his verses. ”I'll be hanged if I knew half their merit until now!” he said. James Hogg, the ”Ettrick Shepherd,” wrote, ”I cannot express what my feelings were at first hearing a song of mine sung by a beautiful young lady in Ettrick to her harpsichord.” One recalls in this connection the legend told in Rome of Canova's disguising himself and mingling with the crowd of citizens that he might hear their comments upon a newly unveiled statue just completed by his own hands, and of the great satisfaction he bore away with him at their commendations. Thomas Hood could not suppress his pleasure at listening to the ”Song of the s.h.i.+rt”[161] as sung by the poor sorrowing work-people in the London streets, adapted to rude airs of their own composition. Beranger, the song-writer of France, acknowledged a similar delight in hearing his verses sung upon the Parisian boulevards by the common people. Francis Jac.o.x speaks of the first visit of the old poet Ducis to his beloved master, Louis XVIII., when that monarch graciously recited to him some of his own verses. In an ecstasy of delight Ducis exclaimed: ”I am more fortunate than Boileau or Racine; they recited their verses to Louis XIV., but my king recites my verses to me!”
Though people are said to be vainer of qualities which they fondly believe they have than of those which they do really possess, still we must allow to genius some lat.i.tude in the matter of conceit, since common people exhibit so much of that spirit on no capital at all. Dr.
Holmes says of conceit, that ”it is to character what salt is to the ocean,--it keeps it sweet and renders it endurable.” Perhaps the acme of conceit is reached when Cicero says, ”For all my toils and pains I have no recompense here; but hereafter, in heaven, among the immortal G.o.ds, I shall look back on my beloved city, and find my reward in seeing her made glorious by my career.” Horace, referring to his future fame, says, ”I shall not wholly die.”
Vanity, says Shakespeare, keeps persons in favor with themselves who are out of favor with all others. He was not himself without a portion of that conceit which he says ”in weakest bodies strongest works;” but there is this difference in his share of vanity,--he had, indeed, a genius the G.o.ds themselves might envy. He begins one of his sonnets,--
”Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”
And again he says:--
”Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehea.r.s.e When all the breathers of this world are dead; You still shall live--such virtue hath my pen-- Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.”
Sydney Smith's definition occurs to us here, wherein he defines vanity as ”proceeding from the supposition of possessing something better than the rest of the world possesses. n.o.body is vain of possessing two legs and two arms, because that is the precise quant.i.ty of either sort of limb which everybody possesses.” Fielding bluntly tells the truth when he says, ”There is scarcely any man, however much he may despise the character of a flatterer, but will condescend, in the meanest manner, to flatter himself.” We have seen that even Diogenes was gratified by popular praise, not to say flattered thereby; while the fact of his occupying so notable and peculiar an abode argued a degree of pride and vanity. Did not Th.o.r.eau also affect humility in his rudely built cabin on the borders of Walden Pond? Certainly the idea of Diogenes and his tub must have occurred to so cla.s.sic a scholar as the Concord hermit.
Southey's appeal to posterity to do him justice, in his letter to his publisher, will be remembered: ”My day and popularity will come when I shall have said good-night to the world.” De Quincey remarks that posterity is very hard to get at; and Swift thought the present age altogether too free in laying taxes on the next. ”Future ages shall talk of this; they shall be famous to all posterity;” whereas their time and thoughts, he believed, would be taken up with present things, as ours are now. Carlyle thought Dr. Johnson's carelessness as to future fame a very remarkable trait in his character.
The vanity of authors is their shame, and ought to be their secret.
While it does not necessarily detract from the merit of their excellent productions, it prejudices all by belittling them in our estimation.
Oftentimes the career of these notables, as we have seen, has been one of surmounted difficulties and hards.h.i.+ps endured for the sake of their chosen calling, embittering their nature, perhaps, yet at the same time tincturing them with an exultant spirit of success.
There are examples in abundance, however, of an opposite character--examples of true modesty and self-forgetfulness--among poets and authors generally. The poet Rogers, as well as Whittier, is a happy example of an equable life with a full share of reasonable blessings.
Referring to his irreproachable career, Sheridan told Rogers it was easy for happy people to be good.
”How noiseless falls the foot of time That only treads on flowers!”
says William Robert Spencer. A modest estimate of self sits gracefully upon genius. Listen to Newton: ”I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-sh.o.r.e, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier sh.e.l.l than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Scott was very little tainted with vanity; indeed, he wrote in his diary that no one disliked or despised the ”pap” of praise so heartily as he did. He said there was nothing he scorned more, except those persons who seem to praise one in order to be puffed in return. As a rule, he did not entertain a very high opinion of literary people, or, as we have seen, desire to a.s.sociate with them. He said: ”If I encounter men of the world, men of business, odd or striking characters of professional excellence in any department, I am in my element, for they cannot lionize me without my returning the compliment and learning something of them.”