‘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 a tradesman’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 gathered together 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 unpaid _attaché_, 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.’
As he was a man who had his _petite entrée_ into 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 over his
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 is frequently 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 of
_morgue_, 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 ought to be in speech. We are
too thoughtless in what we repeat; and many, for sake of an epigram or a
_jeu 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 had been 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 such _post-mortem_ revelations 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 all have 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 should not 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 or
form 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. One is 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 him and 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, or _dénigremené_. 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 the _Art
Journal_ of 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 it as 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 of avarice 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 the fragrant 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 the
_bourgeois_ breast 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 manner tell 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 actually non-existent, but as counting for
nothing beside the superior creation of their works.
Amongst the sterile _célibataires_ Lombroso 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 whose treatise 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 most keen
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 physical development 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 is
_caused_ by 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?’
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; he has 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 a _névrosé_, 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 a _Rachitique_, on account of
his deformed foot; but when we remember Byron’s splendid swimming
powers, 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 this _Rachitique_, 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 was _Rachitique_! The puling
versifiers who spend their lifetime in elaborating artificial 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, the second-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 the _Damnation de Faust_ to
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 street lamp 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 alike celebrity 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 the
storming-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-twenty pounds! _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 descended to 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!