The student or the artist who may shine a luminary of learning and of
genius, in his works, is found, not rarely, to lie obscured beneath a
heavy cloud in colloquial discourse.
If you love the man of letters, seek him in the privacies of his study.
It is in the hour of confidence and tranquillity that his genius shall
elicit a ray of intelligence more fervid than the labours of polished
composition.
The great Peter Corneille, whose genius resembled that of our
Shakspeare, and who has so forcibly expressed the sublime sentiments of
the hero, had nothing in his exterior that indicated his genius; his
conversation was so insipid that it never failed of wearying. Nature,
who had lavished on him the gifts of genius, had forgotten to blend with
them her more ordinary ones. He did not even _speak_ correctly that
language of which he was such a master. When his friends represented to
him how much more he might please by not disdaining to correct these
trivial errors, he would smile, and say--"_I am not the less Peter
Corneille!_"
Descartes, whose habits were formed in solitude and meditation, was
silent in mixed company; it was said that he had received his
intellectual wealth from nature in solid bars, but not in current coin;
or as Addison expressed the same idea, by comparing himself to a banker
who possessed the wealth of his friends at home, though he carried none
of it in his pocket; or as that judicious moralist Nicolle, of the
Port-Royal Society, said of a scintillant wit--"He conquers me in the
drawing-room, but he surrenders to me at discretion on the staircase."
Such may say with Themistocles, when asked to play on a lute--"I cannot
fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city."
The deficiencies of Addison in conversation are well known. He preserved
a rigid silence amongst strangers; but if he was silent, it was the
silence of meditation. How often, at that moment, he laboured at some
future Spectator!
Mediocrity can _talk_; but it is for genius to _observe_.
The cynical Mandeville compared Addison, after having passed an evening
in his company, to "a silent parson in a tie-wig."
Virgil was heavy in conversation, and resembled more an ordinary man
than an enchanting poet.
La Fontaine, says La Bruyère, appeared coarse, heavy, and stupid; he
could not speak or describe what he had just seen; but when he wrote he
was a model of poetry.
It is very easy, said a humorous observer on La Fontaine, to be a man of
wit, or a fool; but to be both, and that too in the extreme degree, is
indeed admirable, and only to be found in him. This observation applies
to that fine natural genius Goldsmith. Chaucer was more facetious in his
tales than in his conversation, and the Countess of Pembroke used to
rally him by saying, that his silence was more agreeable to her than his
conversation.
Isocrates, celebrated for his beautiful oratorical compositions, was of
so timid a disposition, that he never ventured to speak in public. He
compared himself to the whetstone which will not cut, but enables other
things to do so; for his productions served as models to other orators.
Vaucanson was said to be as much a machine as any he had made.
Dryden says of himself--"My conversation is slow and dull, my humour
saturnine and reserved. In short, I am none of those who endeavour to
break jests in company, or make repartees."[41]