and Milton, had the windows of their souls closed. Galileo, in his
seventy-third year, wrote to one of his correspondents, "Alas! your dear
friend has become irreparably blind. These heavens, this earth, this
universe, which by wonderful observation I had enlarged a thousand times
past the belief of past ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow
space which I myself occupy. So it pleases God; it shall, therefore,
please me also." Haendel passed the last seven years of his life in total
blindness, in the gloom of the porch of death. How he and the spectators
must have felt when the great composer, in 1753, stood pale and
tremulous, with his sightless eyeballs turned toward a tearful concourse
of people, while his sad song from Samson, "Total eclipse, no sun, no
moon," was delivered! Leigh Hunt said of Haendel: He was the grandest
composer that is known to have existed, wielding, as it were, the choirs
of heaven and earth together. Mozart said of him, that he struck you,
whenever he pleased, with a thunderbolt. His hallelujahs open the
heavens. He utters the word "wonderful," as if all their trumpets spoke
together.
Beethoven was afflicted with "dense and incurable deafness" long before
he had composed his greatest works. He said, "I was nigh taking my life
with my own hands. But art held me back. I could not leave the world
until I had revealed what lay within me." He occupied for a long time a
room in a remote house on a hill, and was called the Solitary of the
Mountain, where he heard, no doubt, more distinctly "the voices," than
if he had been blest with the best of ears. "When he produced his mighty
opera, Fidelio, it failed. In vain he again modeled and remodeled it. He
went himself into the orchestra and attempted to lead it; and the
pitiless public of Vienna laughed." His work so far surpassed the
appreciation of many of his contemporaries as to be condemned as the
vagaries of a madman. Haydn and Mozart, as was said, had perfected
instrumental music in form; it remained for deaf Beethoven to touch it,
so that it became a living soul.
It does seem that God in his mystery has sometimes put out the eyes of
poets and stopped the ears of musicians to admit them to glimpses of his
own glories and whisper to them his own harmonies. Homer and Milton had
inward poetic visions which light and sight alone never gave to man.
Beethoven, unable from defective hearing to conduct an orchestra,
produced celestial harmonies out of the silence of divine meditation.
The philanthropy of John Howard was so prodigious that it rendered him
incapable of ordinary enjoyments. His faculties were so absorbed by his
great humanity that he was voted a bore by the liveliest and cleverest
of his contemporaries. "But the mere men of taste," says John Foster,
"ought to be silent respecting such a man as Howard; he is above their
sphere of judgment. The invisible spirits, who fulfill their
commissions of philanthropy among mortals, do not care about pictures,
statues, and public buildings; and no more did he, when the time in
which he must have inspected and admired them would have been taken from
the work to which he had consecrated his life. The curiosity which he
might feel was reduced to wait till the hour should arrive when its
gratification should be presented by conscience, which kept a scrupulous
charge of all his time, as the most sacred duty of that hour. If he was
still at every hour, when it came, fated to feel the attractions of the
fine arts but the second claim, they might be sure of their revenge; for
no other man will ever visit Rome under such a despotic consciousness of
duty as to refuse himself time for surveying the magnificence of its
ruins. Such a sin against taste is far beyond the reach of common
saintship to commit. It implied an inconceivable severity of conviction,
that he had one thing to do, and that he who would do some great thing
in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a
concentration of his forces as to idle spectators, who live only to
amuse themselves, looks like insanity." Look a little over his wonderful
life, by the aid of a few facts set down by the encyclopedist: At about
the age of twenty-five he experienced a severe attack of illness, and
upon his recovery testified his gratitude to the woman who had nursed
him, and who was nearly thirty years his senior, by marrying her. Moved
by the accounts of the horrors of the earthquake at Lisbon, he embarked
for that place with a view of doing something to alleviate the calamity.
On the voyage he was taken prisoner by a French privateer and carried
into Brest, where he became a witness of the inhuman treatment to which
prisoners of war were subjected. Designing to visit the new lazaretto of
Marseilles, he endeavored in vain to procure a passport from the French
government, which was incensed against him for having published a
translation of a suppressed French account of the interior of the
Bastile. He therefore traveled through the country in various disguises,
and after a series of romantic adventures and several narrow escapes
from the police, who were constantly on his track, succeeded in his
purpose. He proceeded thence to Malta, Zante, Smyrna, and
Constantinople, visiting prisons, pest-houses, and hospitals, and in the
two latter cities gratuitously dispensing his medical services, often
with great benefit to the poor. The freedom with which he exposed his
person in infected places, whither his attendants refused to follow him,
was characteristic of his fearless and self-sacrificing character; but
as if by a miracle he escaped all contagion. His most daring act,
however, has yet to be recorded. Feeling that he could not speak with
authority on the subject of pest-houses until he had experienced the
discipline of one, he went to Smyrna, sought out a foul ship, and sailed
in her for Venice. After a voyage of sixty days, during which by his
energy and bravery he assisted the crew in beating off an attack of
pirates, he arrived at his destination, and was subjected to a rigorous
confinement in the Venetian lazaretto, under which his health suffered
severely. In the preface to one of his numerous works, he announced his
intention to pursue his work, observing, "Should it please God to cut
off my life in the prosecution of this design, let not my conduct be
imputed to rashness or enthusiasm, but to a serious conviction that I am
pursuing the path of duty." He died of camp-fever, which he contracted
from a patient at Kherson, Russia, on the Black Sea, having expended
nearly the whole of his large fortune in various benefactions. In a
speech to the electors of Bristol, Edmund Burke thus eloquently sums up
the public services of Howard: "He has visited all Europe, not to survey
the sumptuousness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples; not to make
accurate measurement of the remains of ancient grandeur, nor to form a
scale of the curiosity of modern art; not to collect medals or collect
manuscripts; but to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the
infections of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to
take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to
remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the
forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all
countries."
In persons of genius, defects sometimes appear to take the place of
merits, and weaknesses to act the part of auxiliaries. The "plastic
nature of the versatile faculty" is such that common laws do not govern
it, nor common standards judge it. "Men of genius," says an acute
historian and critic of literature and literary men, "have often
resisted the indulgence of one talent to exercise another with equal
power; some, who have solely composed sermons, could have touched on the
foibles of society with the spirit of Horace or Juvenal; Blackstone and
Sir William Jones directed that genius to the austere studies of law and
philology which might have excelled in the poetical and historical
character. So versatile is this faculty of genius, that its possessors
are sometimes uncertain of the manner in which they shall treat their
subject, whether to be grave or ludicrous. When Brebeuf, the French
translator of the Pharsalia of Lucan, had completed the first book as it
now appears, he at the same time composed a burlesque version, and sent
both to the great arbiter of taste in that day, to decide which the poet
should continue. The decision proved to be difficult." Hence it is that
men of genius and their productions are often enigmas to the world. "The
hero," says Carlyle, "can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you
will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I
confess I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all
sorts of men. The poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose
stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the
heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a heroic warrior too. I
fancy there is in him the politician, the thinker, legislator,
philosopher; in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is, all
these.... Shakespeare,--one knows not what he could not have made in the
supreme degree."
"It is notorious," says Macaulay, "that Niccolo Machiavelli, out of
whose surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his
Christian name a synonym for the devil, was through life a zealous
republican. In the same year in which he composed his manual of
kingcraft, he suffered imprisonment and torture in the cause of public
liberty. It seems inconceivable that the martyr of freedom should have
designedly acted as the apostle of tyranny." The real object and meaning
of his celebrated book, The Prince, have been subjects of dispute for
centuries. One old critic says, "Machiavel is a strenuous defender of
democracy; he was born, educated, and respected under that form of
government, and was a great enemy to tyranny. Hence it is that he does
not favor a tyrant: it is not his design to instruct a tyrant, but to
detect his secret attempts, and expose him naked and conspicuous to the
poor people. Do we not know there have been many princes such as he
describes? Why are such princes angry at being immortalized by his
means? This excellent author's design was, under the show of instructing
the prince, to inform the people." Another says, "I must say that
Machiavel, who passed everywhere for a teacher of tyranny, detested it
more than any man of his time; as may easily appear by the tenth chapter
of the first book of his Discourses, in which he expresses himself very
strongly against tyrants." Nardi, his contemporary, calls his works
"panegyrics upon liberty." Bayle says, "The Jesuit Porsevin, who had not
read The Prince, was nevertheless the cause of its being condemned by
the Inquisition. He charges Machiavel with such things as are not in The
Prince. His charges were made upon passages from a work, published
anonymously, entitled Anti-Machiavel, and not from The Prince. The
Prince was published about the year 1515, and dedicated to Lorenzo de'
Medici, nephew to Leo X. It did not prejudice the author with this pope,
who nevertheless was the first who threatened those with excommunication
that read a prohibited book!"
A critic says of La Rochefoucauld: "The author of the Maxims was
apparently the least selfish public man of his land and age. Saith one
of his biographers, not untruly, 'He gave the example of all the virtues
of which he would appear to contest the existence.' He ridicules bravery
as a madness; and as Madame de Maintenon, who could have had no
predilection for his system, curtly observes, 'he was, however, very
brave.' The proofs of his bravery do not rest on Madame de Maintenon's
assertion. A scorn of danger, preeminently French, as it became the
inheritor of so great a French name to exhibit, was sufficiently shown
at the siege of Bordeaux and the battle of St. Antoine. Madame de
Sevigne speaks of La Rochefoucauld with an admiration which she rarely
bestows except on her daughter; and says that in his last agonizing
illness he thought more of his neighbor than himself. Cardinal de Retz,
in the portrait he has left of the brilliant duke,--a portrait certainly
not flattered,--tells us that this philosopher, who reduced all human
motives to self-interest, did not feel the little interests which were
never his weak point, and did not understand the great interests which
were never his strong point; and, finally, this acute critic of
contemporaneous celebrities, after assuring us that La Rochefoucauld
'had never been a good party-man,' tells us that in the relations of
common life La Rochefoucauld was the honestest man of the age."
Sir John Denham, according to Count Grammont, was "one of the brightest
geniuses England ever produced for wit and humor, and for brilliancy of
composition; satirical and free in his poems, he spared neither frigid
writers nor jealous husbands, nor even their wives; every part abounded
with the most poignant wit, and the most entertaining stories; but his
most delicate and spirited raillery turned generally against matrimony;
and as if he wished to confirm, by his own example, the truth of what he
had written in his youth," he married, at the age of seventy-nine, Miss
Brook, aged eighteen, a favorite of King Charles II., and mistress of
his brother, the Duke of York, afterward King James II. "As no person
entertained any doubt of his having poisoned her (on account of
jealousy), the populace of his neighborhood had a design of tearing him
in pieces as soon as he should come abroad; but he shut himself up to
bewail her death, until their fury was appeased by a magnificent
funeral, at which he distributed four times more burnt wine than had
ever been drank at any burial in England."
(You remember the plea Denham urged in behalf of old George Wither, the
Puritan poet, when he was taken prisoner by the Cavaliers, and a general
disposition was displayed to hang him at once. Sir John saved his life
by saying to Charles, "I hope your majesty will not hang poor George
Wither, for as long as he lives it can't be said that I am the worst
poet in England.")
Literature is full of such facts as at first blush appear incredible.
Consider, that "although the soil of Sweden is not rich in either plants
or insects, and many of its feathered tribes are but temporary
visitants, leaving it at stated periods in quest of milder climes,
nevertheless it was amidst this physical barrenness that the taste of
Linnaeus for his favorite pursuit broke out almost from his earliest
infancy, and found the means, not only of its gratification, but of
laying a basis of a system which soon spread its dominion over the
whole world of science. Almost within the Arctic circle, this enthusiast
of nature felt all those inspirations which are generally supposed to be
the peculiar offspring of warmer regions. He traveled over the greater
part of Lapland, skirting the boundaries of Norway, and returning to
Upsala by the Gulf of Bothnia, having passed over an extent of about
four thousand miles. Nothing but the enthusiasm of genius would have
made him, night and day, wade the cold creeks and treacherous bogs, and
climb the bleak mountains of Lapland--eating little but fish, unsalted,
and crawling with vermin. He considered his labor amply remunerated by
the information he had gained, and the discovery of new plants in the
higher mountains, with the payment of his expenses, amounting to about
ten pounds!"
And reflect, that "on a bulk, in a cellar, or in a glass-house, among
thieves and beggars, was to be found the author of The Wanderer, the man
of exalted sentiments, extensive views, and curious observations; the
man whose remarks on life might have assisted the statesman, whose ideas
of virtue might have enlightened the moralist, whose eloquence might
have influenced senates, and whose delicacy might have polished courts."
And see what Bishop Burnet, in his History of his Own Times, says of the
vile Lord Rochester: "In the last year of his life I was much with him,
and have writ a book of what passed between him and me: I do verily
believe he was then so changed that if he had recovered he would have
made good all his resolutions." Of this book, mentioned by the bishop,
Dr. Johnson said, It is one "which the critic ought to read for its
eloquence, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its
piety."
Soame Jenyns, a friend of Johnson and Goldsmith and Reynolds, is thus
spoken of by Cumberland: "He came into your house at the very moment you
had put upon your card; he dressed himself to do your party honor in
all the colors of the jay; his lace indeed had long since lost its
lustre, but his coat had faithfully retained its cut since the days when
gentlemen wore embroidered figured velvet, with short sleeves,
boot-cuffs, and buckram skirts; as nature had cast him in the exact
mould of an ill-made pair of stiff stays, he followed her so close in
the fashion of his coat that it was doubted if he did not wear them:
because he had a protuberant wen just under his poll, he wore a wig,
that did not cover above half his head. His eyes were protruded like the
eyes of the lobster, who wears them at the end of his feelers, and yet
there was room between one of these and his nose for another wen that
added nothing to his beauty; yet I heard this good man very innocently
remark, when Gibbon published his history, that he wondered anybody so
ugly could write a book!"
It has been remarked as an interesting fact, that Wilberforce at the age
of twenty-five, and Wendell Phillips at the same age, were the two
persons who seemed the least likely of all their respective
contemporaries to become world-renowned as advocates of the cause of
antislavery. Wilberforce was returned to parliament at twenty-one, when,
according to his biographer, "he became the idol of the fashionable
world, dancing at Almack's, and singing before the Prince of Wales." At
twenty-five, he abandoned his gayeties, entered upon a new life, and
took up the great cause which he advocated during the remainder of his
long career. Wendell Phillips, at the age of twenty-two, was a Boston
lawyer, aristocratic, wealthy, handsome, polished, and sought after;
colonel of a city militia company, and a lover of blooded horses, of
fencing and boxing. He was born on Beacon Street, and his father was one
of the most popular mayors Boston ever had. At Harvard University, where
he graduated, he was president of the "exclusive society" known as the
Gentleman's Club, and in fact he was the leader of the aristocratic
party among the students. At twenty-five he abandoned his practice of
law, gave up the fashionable world, and espoused the cause of the slave.
Robespierre, anarchist and philanthropist, and Frederick of Prussia,
despot and philosopher, were both bitter and vitriolic natures; yet
both, in their youth, exceeded Exeter Hall itself in their professions
of universal beneficence. Frederick indeed wrote early in life a
treatise called the Anti-Machiavel, which was, says his biographer, "an
edifying homily against rapacity, perfidy, arbitrary government, unjust
war; in short, against almost everything for which its author is now
remembered among men."
The grand Descartes, modestest of men, who, observes Bulwer, wished to
live in a town where he should not be known by sight, felt so keen an
anguish at the snubbings and censures his writings procured him, that he
meditated the abandonment of philosophy and the abjuration of his own
injured identity by a change of name. Happily for mankind, some
encouraging praises came to his ears, and restored the equilibrium of
his self-esteem, vanity (if all pleasure in approbation is to be so
called) reconciling him once more to the pursuit of wisdom.
Gray's diffidence, or fastidiousness, according to Hazlitt, was such as
to prevent his associating with his fellow-collegians, or mingling with
the herd, till at length, like the owl, shutting himself up from society
and daylight, he was hunted and hooted at like the owl whenever he
chanced to appear, and was even assailed and disturbed in the haunts in
which "he held his solitary reign." He was driven from college to
college, and was subjected to a persecution the more harassing to a
person of his indolent and retired habits. But he only shrunk the more
within himself in consequence, read over his favorite authors,
corresponded with his distant friends, was terrified out of his wits at
the bare idea of having his portrait prefixed to his works, and probably
died from nervous agitation at the publicity into which his name had
been forced by his learning, taste, and genius. Such was the author of
the immortal Elegy, which Daniel Webster died repeating, and of which
Wolfe said he would rather be the author than be conqueror of Quebec.
Washington Irving's modesty and diffidence did not make him shut
"himself up from society and daylight," but it made him a stranger to
many of his neighbors, and even to the boys about Sunnyside. It will be
a surprise to many to know that one morning he was ordered out of a
field he was crossing--belonging to a neighbor of his, a liquor dealer,
who threatened, if he found the "old vagabond" on his premises again, he
would set his dogs on him! It will also be a surprise to know that the
distinguished author of The Sketch Book was a confessed orchard thief.
Once, when picking up an apple under a tree in his own orchard, he was
accosted by an urchin of the neighborhood, who, not recognizing him as
the proprietor, offered to show him a tree where he could "get better
apples than those." "But," urged the boy, "we must take care that the
old man don't see us." "I went with him," said Irving, "and we stole a
dozen of my own apples!"
IX.
PARADOXES.