Part 9 (2/2)
Anna Laet.i.tia Barbauld, the English auth.o.r.ess, wrote with great poetic feeling and moral beauty. Her husband became a lunatic, and she suffered much. It was her beautiful self-sacrifice that gave the best charm to her character. She wrote, among many other works, a popular life of the novelist Richardson, and some political pamphlets of great force and excellence. Her series of books for children would alone have given her lasting reputation. There occurs to us in these closing pages the stanza which she wrote in her old age, probably in her eighty-second year, not long before her death,--lines which Rogers and Wordsworth so much and so justly admired. The former says in his ”Table Talk” that while sitting with Madame D'Arblay a few weeks before her death, he asked her if she remembered these lines of Mrs. Barbauld's. ”Remember them!” answered the famous auth.o.r.ess, ”I repeat them to myself every night before I go to sleep.”
”Life! we've been long together Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 'T is hard to part when friends are dear; Perhaps 't will cost a sigh, a tear; Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not 'Good-night,' but in some brighter clime Bid me 'Good morning.'”
CHAPTER XI.
Genius has its hours of suns.h.i.+ne as well as of shadow, and when it finds expression in wit and humor it is undoubtedly most popular. The Emperor t.i.tus thought he had lost a day if he had pa.s.sed it without laughing.
Coleridge tells us men of humor are in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, among other gifts, possess wit. As in pathos and tenderness ”one touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” so is it in true wit and humor with the appreciative.
Obtuseness will be unsympathetic under any circ.u.mstances. ”It is not in the power of every one to taste humor,” says Sterne, ”however much he may wish it; it is the gift of G.o.d! and a true feeler always brings half the entertainment with him.” Bruyere has somewhere said very finely that ”wit is the G.o.d of moments, but genius is the G.o.d of ages.” Some men of genius have found their most natural exponent to be the pen; others indulge in practical humor. Sheridan[190] belonged to this latter cla.s.s; he was full of fun and frolic, ever on the alert for an opportunity to exercise his humor. When on a certain occasion he had been driving about the town for three or four hours in a hackney-coach, he chanced to see his friend Richardson, whom he hailed, and invited into the vehicle. When they were seated together he at once introduced a subject upon which he and Richardson always differed, and a controversy naturally ensued. At last, affecting to be mortified at Richardson's argument, Sheridan said abruptly, ”You are really too bad; I cannot bear to listen to such things: I will not stay in the coach with you.” And accordingly he opened the door and sprang out, Richardson hallooing triumphantly, ”Ah, you're beat, you're beat!” Nor was it until the heat of the victory had a little cooled that he realized he was left in the lurch to pay for Sheridan's three hours' coaching.[191]
Sheridan, profligate and unprincipled as he was, still was capable of fine expression of sentiment and true poetic fire. In a poem called ”Clio's Protest; or, the Picture Varnished,” we find the following really beautiful lines:--
”Marked you her cheek of rosy hue?
Marked you her eye of sparkling blue?
That eye in liquid circles moving; That cheek abashed at man's approving; The one Love's arrows darting round; The other blus.h.i.+ng at the wound: Did she not speak, did she not move, Now Pallas, now the Queen of Love?”
The poets have frequently made satire an auxiliary of their wit; and when the proportions are properly adhered to, a favorable result is produced. Satire, like many subtle poisons used as a medicine, may be safely taken in small quant.i.ties, while an overdose is liable to be fatal. In Chaucer's[192] Canterbury Pilgrims he draws his portraits to the life. While he exposes the weakness of human nature, he does not do so in surliness; a pleasant smile wreathes his lips all the while. There is slyness, but no bitterness in his satire. He would not chastise, he would only reform his fellow-men. As ill.u.s.trating exactly the opposite spirit, we may instance Pope, Dryden, and Byron, who, descending from their high estate, often prost.i.tuted their genius to attacks upon personal enemies or rivals, with keenest weapons, while their opponents had no means of defence. The ”Dunciad” is a monument of satiric wit, or genius belittled.
Swift, who wrote ”cords” of worthless rhymes, squibs, songs, and verses, which live as much by their vulgar smartness as for the slight portion of true wit which tinctures them, says: ”Satire is a sort of gla.s.s wherein beholders generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets with in the world, and that so few are offended with it.” Hawthorne gave the Dean a merited thrust when he said, ”the person or thing on which his satire fell shrivelled up as if the Devil had spit on it.” The _double entendre_ to be found in nearly all of Swift's effusions, epigrams, and verses, comes with ill grace from a dignitary of the Church. He was always ready with an epigram on all occasions. One ”lives in our memory”
which he addressed to Mrs. Houghton of Bormount, who took occasion one day to praise her husband in Swift's presence:--
”You always are making a G.o.d of your spouse; But this neither reason nor conscience allows: Perhaps you will say 'tis in grat.i.tude due, And you adore him because he adores you.
Your argument's weak, and so you will find; For you, by this rule, must adore all mankind.”
The wit and humor of Shakespeare endear him to our hearts; and what a rich harvest does the gleaner obtain from his pages! Take ”Love's Labor's Lost,” for instance, a play produced in his youth, so full of quips and quiddity as to live in the memory by whole scenes. There is no lack of scathing sarcasm in the play, but it leaves no bitter taste in the mouth, like the ”doses” of Swift or the more unscrupulous productions of Pope in the same line. Ben Jonson,[193] who ranked so high as a dramatist, has been p.r.o.nounced to be, next to Shakespeare, the greatest wit and humorist of his time. His expression was through the pen, not by the tongue: no man was more taciturn in society. Much of Jonson's matter was better adapted to his time than to ours; words which seem to us so coa.r.s.e and vulgar pa.s.sed unchallenged in the period which gave them birth.
Here are five lines from Jonson, with which he closes a play directed against plagiarists and libellers generally. He sums up thus:--
”Blush, folly, blus.h.!.+ here's none that fears The wagging of an a.s.s's ears, Although a wolfish case he wears.
Detraction is but baseness' varlet, And apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet.”
It is said that Jonson was a ”sombre” man. We have seen that it is by no means always suns.h.i.+ne with those who brighten others' spirits by their pen. The great luminary is not always above the horizon.
A friend remarked to the wife of one of our wittiest poets, ”What an atmosphere of mirth you must live in, to share a home with one who writes always so sportively and wittily!” The answer was a most significant shake of the head.
We spoke of Dryden as a satirist; perhaps no writer ever went further in the line of bitterness and personality. His portrait of the Duke of Buckingham will occur to the reader in this connection:--
”A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.”
When a boy at school in Westminster, Dryden more than once showed the budding promise of the genius that was in him. When put with other cla.s.smates to write a composition on the miracle of the conversion of water into wine, he remained idle and truant, as usual, up to the last moment, when he had only time to produce one line in Latin and two in English; but they were of such excellence as to presage his future greatness as a poet, and elicit hearty praise from his tutor. They were as follows:--
_Videt et erubit lympha pudica Deum!_
”The modest water, awed by power divine, Beheld its G.o.d, and blushed itself to wine.”
Dryden's complete works form the largest amount of poetical composition from the pen of one writer, in the English language; and yet he published scarcely anything until he was nearly thirty years of age.
From that period he was actively engaged in authors.h.i.+p for forty years, and gave us some of the finest touches of his genius in his second spring of life. Addison wrote of Dryden at this period the following lines:--
<script>