long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes
that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men
serve but as single witnesses to his claims." "Shakespeare," said
Coleridge, "is of no age--nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or
profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the
unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation and reading
supplied him with the drapery of his figures." "The sand heaped by one
flood," says Dr. Johnson, "is scattered by another; but the rock always
continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing
the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the
adamant of Shakespeare." "Milton is not," says De Quincey, "an author
amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers;
and the Paradise Lost is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst
poems, but a central force amongst forces." Landor, in his Imaginary
Conversations, makes Marvell thus to address Marten: "Hast thou not sat
convivially with Oliver Cromwell? Hast thou not conversed familiarly
with the only man greater than he, John Milton? One was ambitious of
perishable power, the other of imperishable glory; both have attained
their aim." Hazlitt and Coleridge being together, some comparison was
introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. Coleridge said "he hardly
knew which to prefer. Shakespeare seemed to him a mere stripling in the
art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than
Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's estate; or if he
had, he would not have been a man, but a monster." "A rib of
Shakespeare," said Landor, "would have made a Milton; the same portion
of Milton, all poets born ever since." Said Goethe, "Would you see
Shakespeare's intellect unfettered, read Troilus and Cressida, and see
how he uses the materials of the Iliad in his fashion." Said Coleridge,
"Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, etc., in the Troilus and Cressida of
Shakespeare, with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all
to have been at school ever since." "It was really Voltaire," said
Goethe, "who excited such minds as Diderot, D'Alembert, and
Beaumarchais; for to be somewhat near him a man needed to be much, and
could take no holidays." "To have seen such a man as Dr. Johnson," said
Dr. Campbell, "was a thing to talk of a century hence." "Nature," said
Heine, "wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe." "Were
Byron now alive, and Burns," said Hawthorne, "the first would come from
his ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited
honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who
grew immortal while he stooped behind his plow."
Generally, thought Goethe, the personal character of the writer
influences the public, rather than his talents as an artist. Napoleon
said of Corneille, "If he were living now, I would make him a prince,"
yet he never read him. "I have often been amused at thinking," says
Landor, "in what estimation the greatest of mankind were holden by their
contemporaries. Not even the most sagacious and prudent one could
discover much of them, or could prognosticate their future course in the
infinity of space! Men like ourselves are permitted to stand near, and
indeed in the very presence of Milton: what do they see? dark clothes,
gray hair, and sightless eyes! Other men have better things: other men,
therefore, are nobler! The stars themselves are only bright by distance;
go close, and all is earthy." "There is," says Emerson, "somewhat
touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the object
on which all candles shine, and all eyes are turned; the care with which
it registers everything touching Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and
the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and lets pass
without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which
alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,--the man who
carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on
whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to
be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular
player,--nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the
secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from
courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the
human understanding for his times never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson,
though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no
suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting.
He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and
esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two." "The
people of Gascony, who knew Montaigne well," says the biographer of the
great essayist, "thought it very droll to see him in print. He had to
pay printers and publishers in Guienne; elsewhere they were eager to buy
him." Horace Walpole heard a sight-seer, on being shown the bows and
arrows in the armory at Strawberry Hill, ask the housekeeper, "Pray,
does Mr. Walpole shoot?" One of his titled neighbors told him, that,
having some company with her, one of them had been to see Strawberry.
"Pray," said another, "who is that Mr. Walpole?" "Lord!" cried a third,
"don't you know the great epicure, Mr. Walpole?" "Pho!" cried the first,
"great epicure! you mean the antiquarian." The only tradition a visitor
could gather in Pope's garden at Twickenham was that a fine cedar was
planted there by a famous man a long time ago. An elderly, well-to-do
inhabitant of Beaconsfield, of whom the same person inquired where Burke
had lived, made answer: "Pray, sir, was he a poet?" During a pilgrimage
which we are told Rogers and his friend Maltby made to Gerrard Street,
Soho, to discover the house once occupied by Dryden, they came upon a
house agent, who, scenting a job, eagerly responded: "Dryden--Mr.
Dryden--is he behindhand with his rent?" There is a story of an American
who lost his way in the vain attempt to discover the residence of
Wordsworth. Meeting an old woman in a scarlet cloak who was gathering
sticks, he asked her the way to Rydal Mount. She could not tell him.
"Not know," said the American, "the house of the great Wordsworth?" "No;
but what was he great in? Was he a preacher or a doctor?" "Greater than
any preacher or doctor--he is a poet." "Oh, the poet!" she replied; "and
why did you not tell me that before? I know who you mean now. I often
meet him in the woods, jabbering his pottery (poetry) to hisself. But
I'm not afraid of him. He's quite harmless, and almost as sensible as
you or me." A Prussian staff-officer was quartered in Goethe's house
after Jena. This officer, being afterward much interrogated by the
curious as to his impressions of the great man, replied "that he had
thoroughly tested the fellow and found that he had nothing but nonsense
in his head!" Rogers told Leslie that when the Pleasures of Memory was
first published, one of those busy gentlemen, who are vain of knowing
everybody, came up to him at a party, and said, "Lady ---- is dying to
be introduced to the author of the Pleasures of Memory." "Pray, let her
live," said Rogers, and with difficulty they made their way through the
crowd to the lady. "Mr. Rogers, madam, author of the Pleasures of
Memory." "Pleasures of what?" "I felt for my friend," said Rogers.
No doubt the most genuine and grateful rewards which authors have
received were those which came to them as surprises, or in overheard
responses, unbidden and natural, from the common heart of humanity. Mrs.
Broderip reports of her father's pleasure in the immense popularity of
his Song of the Shirt, that "what delighted and yet touched him most
deeply was, that the poor creatures to whose sorrows and sufferings he
had given such eloquent voice, seemed to adopt its words as their own,
by singing them about the streets to a rude air of their own
adaptation." Bernard Barton ends a letter descriptive of an endearing
girl's village funeral, with telling how "the clergyman, at the close of
the service, stated that, by her wish, a little hymn, which was a great
favorite with her, would be sung beside her open grave, by the
school-children--some five-and-twenty little things--whose eyes and
cheeks were red with crying. 'I thought they could never have found
tongues, poor things; but once set off, they sang like a little band of
cherubs. What added to the effect of it, to me, was that it was a little
almost forgotten hymn of my own, written years ago, which no one
present, but myself, was at all aware of.'" Goldsmith, in his college
career, wrote street ballads, to save himself from starving, sold them
for five shillings apiece, and stole out of college at night to hear
them sung. "Happy night to him, worth all the dreary days!" exclaims his
biographer, Forster. "Hidden by some dusky wall, or creeping within
darkling shadows of the ill-lighted streets, this poor, neglected sizer
watched, waited, lingered there, for the only effort of his life which
had not wholly failed. Few and dull, perhaps, the beggar's audience at
first, but more thronging, eager, and delighted, as he shouted forth his
newly-gotten ware. Cracked enough, I doubt not, were those
ballad-singing tones; very harsh, extremely discordant, and passing from
loud to low without meaning or melody; but not the less did the sweetest
music which this earth affords fall with them on the ear of Goldsmith."
VI.
LIMITS.
Minds, like some seed-plants, delight in sporting; there is great
variety in thinking, but the few great ideas remain the same. They are
constantly reappearing in all ages and in all literatures, modified by
new circumstances and new uses; though in new dresses, they are still
the old originals. Like the virtues, they have great and endless
services to perform in this world. Now they appear in philosophy, now in
fiction; the moralist uses them, and the buffoon; dissociate them,
analyze them, strip them of their innumerable dresses, and they are
recognized and identified--the same from the foundation and forever. If
a discriminating general reader for forty years had noted their
continual reappearance in the tons of books he has perused upon all
subjects, he would be astonished at their varied and multiplied uses.
Thinkers he would perhaps find more numerous than thoughts; yet of the
former how few. The original thought of one age diffuses itself through
the next, and expires in commonplace--to be born again when occasion
necessitates and God wills. At each birth it is a new creation--to the
brain it springs from and to the creatures it is to enlighten and serve.
If the writer or speaker could know how often it has done even
hack-service in the ages before him, he would repentantly blot it out,
or choke in its utterance. In the unpleasant discovery, that
indispensable and inspiring quality, self-conceit, would suffer a wound
beyond healing.
"The number of those writers who can, with any justness of expression,"
says Melmoth, "be termed thinking authors, would not form a very copious
library, though one were to take in all of that kind which both ancient
and modern times have produced. Epicurus, we are told, left behind him
three hundred volumes of his own works, wherein he had not inserted a
single quotation; and we have it upon the authority of Varro's own
works, that he himself composed four hundred and ninety books. Seneca
assures us that Didymus, the grammarian, wrote no less than four
thousand; but Origen, it seems, was yet more prolific, and extended his
performances even to six thousand treatises. It is obvious to imagine
with what sort of materials the productions of such expeditious workmen
were wrought up: sound thought and well-matured reflections could have
no share, we may be sure, in these hasty performances. Thus are books
multiplied, whilst authors are scarce; and so much easier is it to write
than to think." "The same man," said Publius Syrus, "can rarely say a
great deal and say it to the purpose."
To ridicule the pervading absence of thought in common conversation, the
author of Lothair makes Pinto exclaim, "English is an expressive
language, but not difficult to master. Its range is limited. It
consists, as far as I observe, of four words: 'nice,' 'jolly,'
'charming,' and 'bore;' and some grammarians add, 'fond.'"
Proverbs, old as they are, seem always new, and are always smartly
uttered. Sancho Panza is but one of an immortal type, and the proverbs
and maxims he was always using are older than the pyramids--as old as
spoken language. "The language of Spain," says Bulwer, in Caxtoniana,
"is essentially a language of proverbs. In proverbs, lovers woo; in
proverbs, politicians argue; in proverbs, you make your bargain with
your landlady or hold a conference with your muleteer. The language of
Spain is built upon those diminutive relics of a wisdom that may have
existed before the Deluge, as the town of Berlin is built upon strata
amassed, in the process of ages, by the animalcules that dwell in their
pores." Aristotle was so struck by the condensed wisdom of proverbial
sayings, that he supposed them to be the wrecks of an ancient philosophy
saved from the ruin in which the rest of the system had been lost by
their eloquence and shortness. Pascal conceived that every possible
maxim of conduct existed in the world, though no individual can be
conversant with the entire series. "There is a certain list of vices
committed in all ages, and declaimed against by all authors, which,"
says Sir Thomas Browne, "will last as long as human nature; which,
digested into commonplaces, may serve for any theme, and never be out of
date until doomsday." A proverb Lord John Russell has defined to be "the
wisdom of the many in the wit of one." "The various humors of mankind,"
says the elder Disraeli, "in the mutability of human affairs, has given
birth to every species; and men were wise, or merry, or satirical, and
mourned or rejoiced in proverbs. Nations held an universal intercourse
of proverbs, from the eastern to the western world; for we discover
among those which appear strictly national many which are common to them
all. Of our own familiar ones several may be tracked among the snows of
the Latins and the Greeks, and have sometimes been drawn from The Mines
of the East; like decayed families which remain in obscurity, they may
boast of a high lineal descent whenever they recover their lost
title-deeds. The vulgar proverb, 'To carry coals to Newcastle,' local
and idiomatic as it appears, however, has been borrowed and applied by
ourselves; it may be found among the Persians; in the Bustan of Saadi,
we have 'To carry pepper to Hindostan;' among the Hebrews, 'To carry oil
to a city of olives;' a similar proverb occurs in Greek; and in
Galland's Maxims of the East we may discover how many of the most
common proverbs among us, as well as some of Joe Miller's jests, are of
Oriental origin. The resemblance of certain proverbs in different
nations must, however, be often ascribed to the identity of human
nature; similar situations and similar objects have unquestionably made
men think and act and express themselves alike. All nations are
parallels of each other. Hence all collectors of proverbs complain of
the difficulty of separating their own national proverbs from those
which had crept into the language from others, particularly when nations
have held much intercourse together. We have a copious collection of
Scottish proverbs by Kelly; but this learned man was mortified at
discovering that many, which he had long believed to have been genuine
Scottish, were not only English, but French, Italian, Spanish, Latin,
and Greek ones; many of his Scottish proverbs are almost literally
expressed among the fragments of remote antiquity. It would have
surprised him further had he been aware that his Greek originals were
themselves but copies, and might have been found in D'Herbelot,
Erpenius, and Golius, and in many Asiatic works, which have been more
recently introduced to the enlarged knowledge of the European student,
who formerly found his most extended researches limited by Hellenistic
lore."
Perhaps the proverb from the apostolical writings in most frequent
circulation, is the one which St. Paul has adopted from Menander, and
which, as Dean Alford suggests, may have become, in the days of the
apostle, a current commonplace: "Evil communications corrupt good
manners."
"What stories are new?" asks Thackeray. "All types of all characters
march through all fables." "Will it be believed," says Max Mueller, in
his essay On the Migration of Fables, "that we, in this Christian
country, and in the nineteenth century, teach our children the first,
the most important lessons of worldly wisdom, nay, of a more than
worldly wisdom, from books borrowed from Buddhists and Brahmans, from
heretics and idolaters, and that wise words, spoken a thousand, nay, two
thousand years ago, in a lonely village of India, like precious seed
scattered broadcast all over the world, still bear fruit a hundred and a
thousand fold in that soil which is the most precious before God and
man, the soul of a child? No lawgiver, no philosopher has made his
influence felt so widely, so deeply, and so permanently as the author of
these children's fables. But who was he? We do not know. His name, like
the name of many a benefactor of the human race, is forgotten."
"Our obligations to genius are the greater," says a British essayist,
"because we are seldom able to trace them. We cannot mount up to the
sources from which we derive the ideas that make us what we are. Few of
my readers may have ever read Chaucer; fewer still the Principia of
Newton. Yet how much poorer the minds of all my readers would be if
Chaucer and Newton had never written! All the genius of the past is in
the atmosphere we breathe at present."
The author of The Eclipse of Faith, in one of his intellectual visions,
saw suddenly expunged--"remorselessly expunged"--from literature "every
text, every phrase, which had been quoted from the Bible, not only in
the books of devotion and theology, but in those of poetry and fiction."
"Never before," he says, "had I any adequate idea of the extent to which
the Bible had moulded the intellectual and moral life of the last
eighteen centuries, nor how intimately it had interfused itself with the
habits of thought and modes of expression; nor how naturally and
extensively its comprehensive imagery and language had been introduced
into human writings, and most of all where there had been most of
genius. A vast portion of literature became instantly worthless, and
was transformed into so much waste paper. It was almost impossible to
look into any book of merit, and read ten pages together, without coming
to some provoking erasures and mutilations, which made whole passages
perfectly unintelligible. Many of the sweetest passages of Shakespeare
were converted into unmeaning nonsense, from the absence of those words
which his own all but divine genius had appropriated from a still
diviner source. As to Milton, he was nearly ruined, as might naturally
be supposed. Walter Scott's novels were filled with lacunae. I hoped it
might be otherwise with the philosophers, and so it was; but even here
it was curious to see what strange ravages the visitation had wrought.
Some of the most beautiful and comprehensive of Bacon's Aphorisms were
reduced to enigmatical nonsense."
A scholarly article upon Homeric Characters in and out of Homer,
published in The London Quarterly, 1857, opens with this passage: "To
one only among the countless millions of human beings has it been given
to draw characters, by the strength of his own individual hand, in lines
of such force and vigor that they have become from his day to our own
the common inheritance of civilized man. That one is Homer. Ever since
his time, besides finding his way even into the impenetrable East, he
has found literary capital and available stock in trade for reciters and
hearers, for authors and readers of all times and of all places within
the limits of the western world. Like the sun, which furnishes with its
light the courts and alleys of London, while himself unseen by their
inhabitants, he has supplied with the illumination of his ideas millions
of minds never brought into direct contact with his works, and even
millions hardly aware of his existence."
One of the most eminent platform orators of the time has treated the
habit of borrowing, in literature, in a most interesting manner.
"Take," he said, "the stories of Shakespeare, who has, perhaps, written
his forty-odd plays. Some are historical. The rest, two thirds of them,
he did not stop to invent, but he found them. These he clutched,
ready-made to his hand, from the Italian novelists, who had taken them
before from the East. Cinderella and her Slipper is older than all
history, like half a dozen other baby legends. The annals of the world
do not go back far enough to tell us from where they first came. Bulwer
borrowed the incidents of his Roman stories from legends of a thousand
years before. Indeed, Dunloch, who has grouped the history of the novels
of all Europe into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe
there have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred distinct stories.
He says at least two hundred of these may be traced, before
Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. Even our newspaper
jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take Maria Edgeworth's
essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mistakes of the Irish. The tale
which Maria Edgeworth or her father thought the best is that famous
story of a man writing a letter as follows: 'My dear friend, I would
write you more in detail, more minutely, if there was not an impudent
fellow looking over my shoulder reading every word.' ('No, you lie; I've
not read a word you have written!') This is an Irish bull, still it is a
very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years older than the New
Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and
thought the other Irish bull was the best--of the man who said, 'I would
have been a very handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle.' That
comes from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it from
the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greeks stole it from the
Egyptians hundreds of years back. There is one story which it is said
Washington has related of a man who went into an inn and asked for a
glass of drink from the landlord, who pushed forward a wine-glass about
half the usual size. The landlord said, 'That glass out of which you are
drinking is forty years old.' 'Well,' said the thirsty traveler,
contemplating its minute proportions, 'I think it is the smallest thing
of its age I ever saw.' [The same story is told of Foote. Dining while
in Paris with Lord Stormont, that thrifty Scotch peer, then ambassador,
as usual produced his wine in the smallest of decanters, and dispensed
it in the smallest of glasses, enlarging all the time on its exquisite
growth and enormous age. "It is very little of its age," said Foote,
holding up his diminutive glass.] That story as told is given as a story
of Athens three hundred and seventy-five years before Christ was born.
Why, all these Irish bulls are Greek--every one of them. Take the
Irishman who carried around a brick as a specimen of the house he had to
sell; take the Irishman who shut his eyes and looked into the glass to
see how he would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought a
crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred years, and
he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman that met a friend who
said to him, 'Why, sir, I heard you were dead.' 'Well,' says the man, 'I
suppose you see I am not.' 'Oh, no,' says he, 'I would believe the man
who told me a great deal quicker than I would you.' Well, these are all
Greek. A score or more of them, of the parallel character, come from
Athens."