establishment of a great merchant was prepared for him; he replied that
he had written and intended to publish a poem of considerable length
against commerce, which was the corrupter of man; and he at once
inclosed his poem to Dr. Johnson, who, however, was in his last illness,
and was unable to read it. Coleridge, on being offered a half share in
the Morning Post and Courier, with a prospect of two thousand pounds a
year, announced that he would not give up country life, and the lazy
reading of old folios, for two thousand times that income. "In short,"
he added, "beyond three hundred and fifty pounds a year, I regard money
as a real evil." Professor Agassiz, when once invited to lecture,
replied to the munificent lecture association that he was very sorry,
but he was just then busy with some researches that left him no time to
make money. There is a familiar story told of Marvell, who is said to
have so greatly pleased Charles II. at a private interview, by his wit
and agreeable conversation, that the latter dispatched the lord
treasurer Danby to offer him a thousand pounds, with a promise of a
lucrative place at court, which Marvell refused, notwithstanding he was
immediately afterward compelled to borrow a guinea of a friend. Just at
the time when the English mind was agitated upon the subject of American
taxation, and Goldsmith was most needy, an effort was made to bring him
into the ministerial ranks. Dr. Scott was sent to negotiate with the
poet. "I found him," said Scott, "in a miserable suite of chambers in
the Temple. I told him my authority: I told him I was empowered to pay
most liberally for his exertions; and, would you believe it! he was so
absurd as to say, 'I can earn as much as will supply my wants without
writing for any party; the assistance you offer is therefore unnecessary
to me;' and so I left him in his garret!" Sir John Hawkins one day met
Goldsmith; his lordship told him he had read his poem, The Traveller,
and was much delighted with it; that he was going lord lieutenant to
Ireland, and that hearing that he was a native of that country, he
should be glad to do him any kindness. The honest poor man and sincere
lover of literature replied that he "had a brother there, a clergyman,
that stood in need of help. As for myself, I have no dependence upon the
promises of great men; I look to the booksellers for support; they are
my best friends, and I am not inclined to forsake them for others." For
this frank expression of magnanimity and manly self-dependence, the
pricked Hawkins, and the envious Boswell, speaking of the incident
afterward, called Goldsmith an "idiot." Some of Walter Scott's friends
offered him, or rather proposed to offer him, enough of money, as was
supposed, to enable him to arrange with his creditors. He paused for a
moment; and then recollecting his powers, said proudly, "No! this right
hand shall work it all off!" Lady Blessington said to Willis, Disraeli
and Dr. Beattie being present: "Moore went to Jamaica with a profitable
appointment. The climate disagreed with him, and he returned home,
leaving the business in the hands of a confidential clerk, who embezzled
eight thousand pounds in the course of a few months and absconded.
Moore's misfortunes awakened a great sympathy among his friends. Lord
Lansdowne was the first to offer his aid. He wrote to Moore, that for
many years he had been in the habit of laying aside from his income
eight thousand pounds, for the encouragement of the arts and literature,
and that he should feel that it was well disposed of for that year if
Moore would accept it, to free him from his difficulties. It was offered
in the most delicate and noble manner, but Moore declined it. The
members of 'White's' (mostly noblemen) called a meeting, and (not
knowing the amount of the deficit) subscribed in one morning twenty-five
thousand pounds, and wrote to the poet that they would cover the sum,
whatever it might be. This was declined. Longman and Murray then offered
to pay it, and wait for their remuneration from his works. He declined
even this, and went to Passy with his family, where he economized and
worked hard till it was canceled. At one time two different counties of
Ireland sent committees to him, to offer him a seat in Parliament; and
as he depended on his writings for a subsistence, offering him at the
same time twelve hundred pounds a year while he continued to represent
them. Moore was deeply touched with it, and said no circumstance of his
life had ever gratified him so much. He admitted that the honor they
proposed him had been his most cherished ambition, but the necessity of
receiving a pecuniary support at the same time was an insuperable
obstacle. He could never enter Parliament with his hands tied, and his
opinions and speech fettered, as they would be irresistibly in such
circumstances." Southey was offered by Walter the editorship of The
Times, but declined it, saying, "No emolument, however great, would
induce me to give up a country life, and those pursuits in literature to
which the studies of so many years have been directed." "Will you be
created a count? a title is sometimes useful," said Louis Philippe to M.
Guizot. The proffered honor was declined, and the king replied, "You are
right; your name alone is sufficient, and is a higher dignity."
D'Alembert, when in receipt of but a limited income,--more than half of
which he gave away in charity,--declined an invitation of Frederick the
Great to reside at the court of Berlin. The Empress Catherine offered
him the post of tutor or governor to the czarowitch, with an income of
one hundred thousand livres, and on his refusal wrote: "I know that your
refusal arises from your desire to cultivate your studies and your
friendships in quiet. But this is of no consequence; bring all your
friends with you, and I promise you, that both you and they shall have
every accommodation in my power." Still he refused; the "powers and
potentialities of the courts and royalty" being insufficient to seduce
his independence. Beranger, the "French Burns," the poet of the people,
from 1820 to the end of his life called "the real monarch of France,"
had the same proud spirit of independence. General Sebastiani, then
minister of war, and dangerously ill, received one day a visit from
Beranger. "Ah! my dear friend," said the old soldier to the poet, "I am
very ill. Come, my dear Beranger, we must do something for our friends.
I declare to you that I shall not die quietly if I leave you in poverty
behind me. Madame de Praslin has a fortune of her own; therefore it will
not be doing any injustice to my children. Listen; I have there in my
bureau a few small savings, about two hundred thousand francs; let us
divide them. It is an old friend, an old soldier, who offers you this;
and I swear, on my cross of honor, that no one shall know the pleasure
you will have done me in accepting the small present." The poet refused.
Spinoza, at one time, we are informed, did not spend six sous a day, on
an average, and did not drink more than a pint of wine in a month.
"Nature is satisfied with little," he used to say, "and when she is
content, I am so too." A good friend brought him one day a present of
two thousand florins. The philosopher, "in the presence of his host,
civilly excused himself from accepting the money, saying that he was in
need of nothing, and that the possession of so much money would only
serve to distract him from his studies and occupations."
Dr. Johnson contracted an inveterate dislike to sustained intellectual
exertion, and wondered how any one could write except for money, and
never, or very rarely, wrote from any more elevated impulse than the
stern pressure of want. "Who will say," says Richard Cumberland, "that
Johnson himself would have been such a champion in literature, such a
front-rank soldier in the fields of fame, if he had not been pressed
into the service, and driven on to glory with the bayonet of sharp
necessity pointed at his back? If fortune had turned him into a field of
clover, he would have lain down and rolled in it. The mere manual labor
of writing would not have allowed his lassitude and love of ease to have
taken the pen out of the inkhorn, unless the cravings of hunger had
reminded him that he must fill the sheet before he saw the
table-cloth.... He would have put up prayers for early rising, and lain
in bed all day, and with the most active resolutions possible, been the
most indolent mortal living.... I have heard that illustrious scholar
assert that he subsisted himself for a considerable space of time upon
the scanty pittance of four-pence half-penny per day. How melancholy to
reflect that his vast trunk and stimulating appetite were to be
supported by what will barely feed the weaned infant!" No wonder he so
often screened himself when he ate, or, later in life, lost his temper
with Mrs. Thrale when she made a jest of hunger!
It is related that soon after the publication of the Life of Savage,
which was anonymous, Mr. Walter Harte, dining with Mr. Cave, the
proprietor of The Gentleman's Magazine, at St. John's Gate, took
occasion to speak very handsomely of the work. The next time Cave met
Harte, he told him that he had made a man happy the other day at his
home, by the encomiums he bestowed on Savage's Life. "How could that
be?" said Harte; "none were present but you and I." Cave replied, "You
might observe I sent a plate of victuals behind the screen. There
skulked the biographer, one Johnson, whose dress was so shabby that he
durst not make his appearance. He overheard our conversation; and your
applauding his performance delighted him exceedingly."
"Man," said Goethe, "recognizes and praises only that which he himself
is capable of doing; and those who by nature are mediocre have the trick
of depreciating productions which, if they have faults, have also good
points, so as to elevate the mediocre productions which they are fitted
to praise." "While it is so undesirable that any man should receive what
he has not examined, a far more frequent danger is that of flippant
irreverence. Not all the heavens contain is obvious to the unassisted
eye of the careless spectator. Few men are great, almost as few able to
appreciate greatness. The critics have written little upon the Iliad in
all these ages which Alexander would have thought worth keeping with it
in his golden box. Nor Shakespeare, nor Dante, nor Calderon, have as yet
found a sufficient critic, though Coleridge and the Schlegels have lived
since they did. Meantime," continues Margaret Fuller, "it is safer to
take off the hat and shout vivat! to the conqueror, who may become a
permanent sovereign, than to throw stones and mud from the gutter. The
star shines, and that it is with no borrowed light, his foes are his
voucher. And every planet is a portent to the world; but whether for
good or ill, only he can know who has science for many calculations. Not
he who runs can read these books, or any books of any worth."
Homer was called a plagiarist by some of the earlier critics, and was
accused of having stolen from older poets all that was remarkable in the
Iliad and Odyssey. Sophocles was brought to trial by his children as a
lunatic. Socrates, considered as the wisest and the most moral of men,
Cicero treated as an usurer, and Athenaeus as illiterate. Plato was
accused of envy, lying, avarice, robbery, incontinence, and impiety.
Some of the old writers wrote to prove Aristotle vain, ambitious, and
ignorant. Plato is said to have preferred the burning of all of the
works of Democritus. Pliny and Seneca thought Virgil destitute of
invention, and Quintilian was alike severe upon Seneca. It was a long
time, says Seneca, that Democritus was taken for a madman, and before
Socrates had any esteem in the world. How long was it before Cato could
be understood? Nay, he was affronted, contemned, and rejected; and
people never knew the value of him until they had lost him. "The
Northern Highlanders," said Wilson, "do not admire Waverley, so I
presume the Southern Highlanders despise Guy Mannering. The Westmoreland
peasants think Wordsworth a fool. In Borrowdale, Southey is not known
to exist. I met ten men at Hawick who did not think Hogg a poet, and the
whole city of Glasgow think me a madman. So much for the voice of the
people being the voice of God."
Goldsmith tells us, speaking of Waller's Ode on the Death of Cromwell,
that English poetry was not then "quite harmonized: so that this, which
would now be looked upon as a slovenly sort of versification, was in the
times in which it was written almost a prodigy of harmony." At the same
time, after praising the harmony of the Rape of the Lock, he observes
that the irregular measure at the opening of the Allegro and Penseroso
"hurts our English ear." Gray "loved intellectual ease and luxury, and
wished as a sort of Mahometan paradise to 'lie on a sofa, and read
eternal new romances of Mirivaux and Crebillon.' Yet all he could say of
Thomson's Castle of Indolence, when it was first published, was, that
there were some good verses in it. Akenside, too, whom he was so well
fitted to appreciate, he thought 'often obscure, and even
unintelligible.'" Horace Walpole marveled at the dullness of people who
can admire anything so stupidly extravagant and barbarous as the Divina
Commedia. "The long-continued contempt for Bunyan and De Foe was merely
an expression of the ordinary feeling of the cultivated classes toward
anything which was identified with Grub Street; but it is curious to
observe the incapacity of such a man as Johnson to understand Gray or
Sterne, and the contempt which Walpole expressed for Johnson and
Goldsmith, while he sincerely believed that the poems of Mason were
destined to immortality." The poet Rogers tells us that Henry Mackenzie
advised Burns to take for his model in song-writing Mrs. John Hunter!
Byron believed that Rogers and Moore were the truest poets among his
contemporaries; that Pope was the first of all English, if not of all
existing poets, and that Wordsworth was nothing but a namby-pamby
driveler. De Quincey speaks of "Mr. Goethe" as an immoral and
second-rate author, who owes his reputation chiefly to the fact of his
long life and his position at the court of Weimar, and Charles Lamb
expressed a decided preference of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus to Goethe's
immortal Faust. Dr. Johnson's opinion of Milton's sonnets is pretty well
known--"those soul-animating strains, alas! too few," as Wordsworth
estimated them. Hannah More wondered that Milton could write "such poor
sonnets." Johnson said, "Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a
Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones." He
attacked Swift on all occasions. He said, speaking of Gulliver's
Travels, "When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is
very easy to do all the rest." He called Gray "a dull fellow." "Sir, he
was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in
a new way, and that made many people call him great." Talking of Sterne,
he said, "Nothing odd will last long. Tristram Shandy did not last." See
how Horace Walpole disposes of some of the gods of literature. "Tiresome
Tristram Shandy, of which I could never get through three volumes." "I
have read Sheridan's Critic; it appeared wondrously flat and old, and a
poor imitation." He speaks of wading through Spenser's "allegories and
drawling stanzas." Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, he said, are "a lump of
mineral from which Dryden extracted all the gold, and converted it into
beautiful medals." "Dante was extravagant, absurd, disgusting: in short,
a Methodist parson in Bedlam." "Montaigne's Travels I have been reading;
if I was tired of the Essays, what must one be of these? What signifies
what a man thought who never thought of anything but himself? and what
signifies what a man did who never did anything?" "Boswell's book," he
said, "is the story of a mountebank and his zany." Pepys, in his Diary,
speaks of having bought "Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest
fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the
wit lies." Scaliger called Montaigne "a bold ignoramus." Paley used to
say that to read Tristram Shandy was the summum bonum of life. Goldsmith
said its author was a "block-head." Goethe told a young Italian who
asked him his opinion of Dante's great poem, that he thought the Inferno
abominable, the Purgatorio dubious, and the Paradiso tiresome.
Coleridge, talking of Goethe's Faust, said, "There is no whole in the
poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of
the work is to me very flat. Moreover, much of it is vulgar, licentious,
and blasphemous." "Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, is, I think," says
Southey, "the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw." Johnson
told Anna Seward that "he would hang a dog that read the Lycidas of
Milton twice." Waller wrote of Paradise Lost on its first appearance,
"The old blind school-master, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem
on the fall of man; if its length be not considered a merit, it has no
other." Curran declared Paradise Lost to be the "worst poem in the
language." When Harvey's book on the circulation of the blood came out,
"he fell mightily in his practice. It was believed by the vulgar that he
was crack-brained, and all the physicians were against him." Who has
forgotten the fierce attack of the Quarterly Review on Jane Eyre, in
which the unknown author, who was a clergyman's daughter, is pronounced
"a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of
society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of
religion"? "If we ascribe the book to a woman at all," continues the
keen-sighted critic, "we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one
who has, for some sufficient reason, forfeited the society of her own
sex." Schiller's intimate friends decided against the Indian Death
Song, which Goethe afterward pronounced one of his best poems. When
Andersen published his Wonder Stories told for Children, which fixed his
place in literature and in popular affection, the reviewers advised him
to waste no more time over such work; and he said, "I would willingly
have discontinued writing them, but they forced themselves from me."
Warren says that the first chapter of the Diary of a Late Physician--the
Early Struggles,--was offered by him successively to the conductors of
three leading London magazines, and rejected, as "unsuitable for their
pages," and "not likely to interest the public." Scott tells us that one
of his nearest friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder, one of
the most comprehensive thinkers and versatile authors of Germany,
adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume tried
to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles V.
Montesquieu, upon the completion of The Spirit of Laws, which had cost
him twenty years of labor, and which ran through twenty-two editions in
less than as many months after its publication, submitted the manuscript
to Helvetius and Saurin, who returned it with the advice not to spoil a
great reputation by publishing it. Wordsworth told Robinson that before
his ballads were published, Tobin implored him to leave out We are
Seven, as a poem that would damn the book. It turned out to be one of
the most popular. That charming and once popular Scottish story, The
Annals of the Parish, by John Galt, was written ten or twelve years
before the date of its publication, and anterior to the appearance of
Waverley and Guy Mannering, and was rejected by the publishers of those
works, with the assurance that a novel or work of fiction entirely
Scottish would not take with the public. St. Pierre submitted his
delightful tale, Paul and Virginia, to the criticisms of a circle of his
learned friends. They told him that it was a failure; that to publish it
would be a piece of foolishness; that nobody would read it. St. Pierre
appealed from his learned critics to his unlearned but sympathetic and
sensible housekeeper. He read--she listened, admired, and wept. He
accepted her verdict, and will be remembered by one little story longer
than his contemporaries by their weary tomes. Moliere made use of a
person of the same class to criticise his plays. "I remember," says
Boileau, "his pointing out to me several times an old servant that he
had, to whom he told me he sometimes read his comedies, and he assured
me that when the humorous passages did not strike her, he altered them,
because he had frequently proved that such passages did not take upon
the stage."
It would be curious to know how much chance or accident has had to do
with even the best of the productions of literature. Wordsworth, in a
conversation with one of his friends, gave an account of the origin of
the Ancient Mariner. It was written in Devonshire, where he and
Coleridge were together. It was intended for the Monthly Magazine, and
was to pay the expenses of a journey. It was to have been a joint work,
but Wordsworth left the execution to Coleridge, after suggesting much of
the plan. The idea of the crime was suggested by a book of travels, in
which the superstition of the sailors with regard to the albatross is
mentioned. Mark Lemon, it is said, loved to tell an anecdote which
related to the period when Hood became a contributor to Punch. Looking
over his letters one morning, he opened an envelope inclosing a poem
which the writer said had been rejected by three contemporaries. If not
thought available for Punch, he begged the editor, whom he knew but
slightly, to consign it to the waste-paper basket, as the writer was
"sick at the sight of it." The poem was signed "Tom Hood," and the lines
were entitled "The Song of the Shirt." The work was altogether different
from anything that had ever appeared in Punch, and was considered so
much out of keeping with the spirit of the periodical that at the weekly
meeting its publication was opposed by several members of the staff.
Lemon was so firmly impressed, not only with the beauty of the work, but
with its suitableness, that he stood by his first decision and published
it. The Song of the Shirt trebled the sale of the paper, and created a
profound sensation throughout Great Britain. Scott told Ticknor that he
once traveled with Campbell in a stage-coach alone, and that, to beguile
the time, they talked of poetry and began to repeat some. At last Scott
asked Campbell for something of his own, and he said there was one thing
he had written but never printed that was full of "drums and trumpets
and blunderbusses and thunder," and he didn't know if there was anything
good in it. And then he repeated Hohenlinden. Scott listened with the
greatest interest, and when he had finished, broke out, "But do you know
that's devilish fine; why it's the finest thing you ever wrote, and it
must be printed!" Scott told Leslie that he had known a laboring man who
was with Burns when he turned up the mouse with his plow. Burns' first
impulse was to kill it, but checking himself, as his eye followed the
little creature, he said, "I'll make that mouse immortal!"
"One meets now and then with polished men," says Emerson, "who know
everything, have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite
superior to letters and science. What could they not, if only they
would?" Wrote Byron:--
"Many are poets who have never penned
Their inspiration, and perchance the best;
They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend
Their thoughts to meaner things; they compressed
The god within them, and rejoined the stars
Unlaureled upon earth."
"On my walk with Lamb," notes Robinson, "he spoke with enthusiasm of
Manning, declaring that he is the most wonderful man he ever knew, more
extraordinary than Wordsworth or Coleridge. Yet he does nothing. He has
traveled even in China, and has been by land from India through Thibet,
yet, as far as is known, he has written nothing." "My father," said
Charles Kingsley, "was a magnificent man in body and mind, and was said
to possess every talent except that of using his talents." Dr. Johnson
lamented that "those who are most capable of improving mankind very
frequently neglect to communicate their knowledge; either because it is
more pleasing to gather ideas than to impart them, or because to minds
naturally great, few things appear of so much importance as to deserve
the notice of the public." "Great constitutions," says Sir Thomas
Browne, "and such as are constellated unto knowledge, do nothing till
they outdo all; they come short of themselves, if they go not beyond
others, and must not sit down under the degree of worthies. God expects
no lustre from the minor stars; but if the sun should not illuminate
all, it were a sin in nature." Rogers said of Sydney Smith (of whose
death he had just heard), in answer to the question, "How came it that
he did not publicly show his powers?" "He had too fastidious a taste,
and too high an idea of what ought to be." Disappointment is often felt
and sometimes expressed concerning Coleridge, by those who hear so much
of his extraordinary intellect. How could he have done more? His was one
of those great, homeless souls which fly between heaven and earth; his
language was only partly understood in this world, if wholly in another.
His best utterances were but incoherencies to the human ears that heard
them. Stupid John Chester understood them as well as any.