Leonardo da Vinci, the inspired painter of the "Last Supper" upon the
walls of the time-worn Milan convent,[89] is said to have had a strange
inclination for dirt. One biographer tells us he grovelled in it. Da
Vinci was a great engineer and scientist, as well as artist. The face of
Judas in the group seated at the table carries with it a legend. The
artist entertained a bitter enmity towards a priest of the Cathedral who
had worked him some vital injury, either real or imaginary. His revenge
was clear to him; his enemy's hated features were impressed upon his
mind, and so, a little modified to suit the supposed treacherous
character of the disciple, were made to constitute those of Judas at the
moment when he contemplates the betrayal of his Master. The likeness was
too plain not to be recognized by those who knew of the ill feeling
existing between the artist and priest. The result was that the latter
was virtually banished from the city, as he asked to be, and was
transferred to Rome.
Raphael thought he could paint best under the inspiration of wine, and
therefore used it freely. Some modern critics pretend to discover the
vinous influence in certain exaggerations of style peculiar to his best
pictures. Notwithstanding the number and grandeur of the works which he
left behind him, he died prematurely at the age of thirty-seven. A book
might easily be written upon the peculiarities and habits of artists;
but we continue our desultory gossip.
How often we see the lives and fortunes of individuals contingent upon
seeming chance! Cromwell and Hampden, who were cousins, both took
passage in a vessel that lay in the Thames, bound for this country, in
1637. They were actually on board, when an order of council prohibited
the vessel from sailing. We recall two other instances of a similar
character in the career of Goethe and Robert Burns, each of whom was
once on the eve of sailing for America to seek a foreign home. Locke was
banished from England by force of public opinion, in company with his
friend Lord Ashley, and wrote his well-known "Essay on the Human
Understanding"[90] in a Dutch garret. He finally lived down all
detraction, and was himself a practical example of that self-teaching
which he so strongly advocates in his writings. He possessed a wonderful
memory; so also did Thomas Fuller, who could repeat five hundred
unconnected words after twice hearing them. Coleridge esteemed Fuller,
not only for his wit, originality, and liberality, but as being the most
sensible great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men.
Jeremy Taylor, whose birth is shrouded in mystery, though he is said to
be the son of a barber, was a singular compound, in character, of
simplicity and erudition. He was always a child among children, and it
is said that a child could at any time attract his attention. He
encountered many of the sterner vicissitudes of life, being more than
once cast into prison. In the civil war he was a decided adherent of
Charles I., and some have supposed him to have been a natural son of
that monarch. Emerson calls him the Shakespeare of divines. Gibbon, the
distinguished historian, composed while walking back and forth in his
room, completely arranging his ideas in his brain before taking his pen
in hand, which in a degree accounts for the correctness of his
manuscript.[91] Montaigne and Châteaubriand,[92] when disposed to
composition, sought the open fields and unfrequented paths, where,
somewhat like Gibbon, they arranged their matter with great precision
before sitting down to write. Bacon always wrote in a small room,
because, as he believed, it enabled him to concentrate his thoughts.
Franklin wrote and studied with a plate of bread and cheese by his side
to repair mental waste, as he said, and also to economize time. Is there
not a ceaseless interest hanging over the domestic and professional
habits of these famous men of the past?
Congreve, to whom Pope dedicated his Iliad and Dryden submitted his
poems for criticism before giving them to the public, was extremely
popular, witty, and original as a dramatist. Congreve was a slow writer,
and was the father, as it were, of that style of writing which died with
Sheridan. He wrote only a few dramas, but those were incomparable for
the brilliancy of the dialogue; yet the brilliancy was obtained by the
hardest intellectual _work_. According to Macaulay, no English author
except Byron had at so early an age stood so high in the estimation of
his contemporaries. But the licentiousness and general immorality of
the works of Congreve are without excuse.[93] He had not even the paltry
plea of necessity, which might lead him to pander to a vitiated taste in
seeking a market for his wares, as was evidently the case with Fielding.
He was very desirous to pass for a man of fashion, and affectedly
sneered at his own literary productions, declaring them to be produced
simply to while away his idle hours. Vanity seems to have completely
overshadowed any spirit of ambition which may have originally inspired
him. Flattery and royal patronage were the ruin of Congreve so far as
his after fame is concerned. Had he known the wholesome spur of
necessity, his grand powers would have shone with surpassing lustre. He
had the genius, but not the incentive, wherewith to make a great name.
Pope is said, on a certain occasion, to have hinted as much to Congreve,
whom he really reverenced for his ability, and to have incurred his
partial enmity thereby. "Oh that men's ears should be to counsel deaf,"
says Shakespeare, "but not to flattery." The broad inconsistency of
Congreve's dramas is the fact that all his characters are equally
endowed with wit, culture, and genius. Collier, in his review of the
profaneness of the English stage, administered to Congreve a merited
castigation, to which the dramatist attempted to reply, but without
success.
The remarkable vicissitudes which have waited upon the career of men of
genius, and especially of authors, are very noticeable. The earliest
authentic history shows us the same fatality besetting the paths of such
characters as has pursued them to the present day. The student of the
past will recall as examples Seneca and his friend Lucan, who were
honored and famous in the days of Nero. Both of these renowned authors,
when condemned to death, lanced their veins and sung a dying requiem
while the tide of their lives ebbed slowly away. So Socrates drank of
the fatal hemlock, like Sappho and Lucretius, voluntarily seeking death.
"That which is a necessity to him that struggles, is little more than a
choice to him who is willing," says Seneca. Sophocles, the Greek tragic
poet and rival of Æschylus, was brought to trial by his own children as
a lunatic. He composed more than a hundred tragedies, of which seven are
still extant. He also excelled as a musician. Plautus, poet and
dramatist, was at one time a baker's assistant, earning his bread by
grinding corn in a hand-mill. Tasso, Italy's favorite epic poet, became
broken-hearted from unrequited love, and was confined in a mad-house for
years, and, illustrative of the mutability of fortune, was afterwards
brought to Rome to be crowned, like Petrarch, with laurels, but died
before the day of coronation. Euripides, one of the three tragic poets
of Greece, was torn to pieces by dogs; and Hesiod, a still more ancient
poet, fell by the assassin's dagger. In later times there looms up the
name of Galileo, the discoverer and natural philosopher, imprisoned by
the Inquisition for teaching men that the world moved.[94] "Poor
Galileo," said a modern wit, "was too honest; he should have treated
these inquisitors to a champagne supper, and they would have risen from
it with the conviction that the world surely _did_ turn round."
Galileo's greatest affliction, however, was that of becoming totally
blind. Milton, who visited him in prison, tells us he was poor and old.
In a letter which he dictated to a correspondent, Galileo says: "Alas!
your dear friend has become irreparably blind. The heavens, the earth,
this universe, which by wonderful observation I have enlarged a thousand
times past the belief of former ages, are henceforth shrunk into the
narrow space which I myself occupy." Handel also passed the last of his
life in the gloom of blindness; and Beethoven was afflicted with
incurable deafness, which nearly drove him to suicide.[95] It was
perhaps the most trying misfortune possible to one with his special
endowments. Have not these historic characters tested the familiar axiom
that calamity is man's true touchstone?
Dante, the greatest poet between the Augustan and Elizabethan ages, was
expatriated and exiled from wife and children, becoming a
poverty-stricken wanderer. Thus broken in heart and fortune he was
hurried by persecution to his grave. Spenser, who endowed English verse
with the soul of harmony while eking out a life of misery, finally died
in abject poverty. Milton sold "Paradise Lost"[96] for ten pounds. "When
Milton composed that grand poem," says Carlyle, "he was not only poor
but impoverished; he was in darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though few." At one
time Milton borrowed fifty pounds of Jonathan Hartop, of Aldborough, who
lived to the remarkable age of one hundred and thirty-eight years, dying
in 1791. He returned the loan at the time agreed upon, but Mr. Hartop,
knowing his straitened circumstances, refused to take the money; the
pride of the poet, however, was equal to his genius, and he sent the
money back a second time with an angry letter, which was found years
afterwards among the papers of the remarkable old man. Corneille, the
French dramatist; Vaugelas, a noted author of the same nationality;
Crabbe, the English poet; Chatterton, the precocious and versatile
genius; Holzmann, the profound Oriental scholar; Cervantes; Camoens,[97]
the pride of Portugal; and Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, who rose to the
leadership of the literature of his day,--all lived more or less
continuously on the verge of starvation. Camoens had a black servant who
had grown old with him. This man, a native of Java, is said to have
saved his master's life in the shipwreck whereby he lost all his fortune
except his poems. In after years, when Camoens became so much reduced as
to be able no longer to support his servant, the faithful retainer
begged in the streets of Lisbon for bread to sustain the one great poet
of Portugal. Le Sage, author of "Gil Blas," was endowed with exquisite
literary taste, but the victim of extreme poverty. De Quincey, the
eminent English author, tells us that he passed much time in London in
the most abject want, living upon precarious charity. Nowhere else can
so vivid a picture of misused genius be found as in the "Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater." De Quincey was noted for his rare
conversational powers, supplemented by a vast and varied stock of
information. He was finally successful in a business point of view, and
was possessed of a noble generosity, as he relieved at a critical moment
the necessities of Coleridge at a cost of five hundred pounds. This was
at a comparatively early period of De Quincey's life. Afterwards he was
himself often in want of a tenth part of the sum. He was a voluminous
writer, though not always publishing under his own name; his collection
of works as issued in this country, edited by J. T. Fields, forms some
twenty volumes. Let us not forget to mention Sydenham, the English
scholar who gave us, among other profound works, the best version of
Plato, and who breathed his last in a London sponging-house. "Genius,"
says Whipple, "may almost be defined as the faculty of acquiring
poverty."
Some writers have contended, and not without reason, that such adversity
was often providential; that without the spur of necessity genius would
rarely accomplish its best, and that distress has often elicited talents
which would otherwise have remained dormant. In speaking of Burns,
Carlyle says: "We question whether for his culture as a poet, poverty
and much suffering were not absolutely advantageous. Great men in
looking back over their lives have testified to that effect. 'I would
not for much,' says Jean Paul, 'that I had been born rich.' And yet Jean
Paul's birth was poor enough, for in another place he adds: 'The
prisoner's allowance is bread and water, and I have often only the
latter.' But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out
the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, 'the canary-bird sings
sweetest the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage.'" Horace
emphatically declares, that adversity has the effect of developing
talents which prosperous circumstances would not have elicited. The
hardships endured by many historic persons crowd upon the mind in this
connection. We remember John Bunyan in Bedford jail,[98] writing that
immortal work, "Pilgrim's Progress;" Ben Jonson,[99] the comrade of
Shakespeare; John Seldon, the profound scholar and author; and Jeremy
Taylor, whose "Holy Living and Dying" is only second to "Pilgrim's
Progress,"--all of whom endured the suffering of imprisonment.[100] Nor
must we forget Sir Walter Raleigh, who during his thirteen years of
prison-life produced his incomparable "History of the World."[101]
Lydiat, the subtle scholar to whom Dr. Johnson refers, wrote his
"Annotations on the Parian Chronicles," while confined for debt in the
King's Bench; and Wicquefort's curious work on Ambassadors is dated from
the prison to which he was condemned for life. Voltaire wrote his
"Henriad" while confined in the Bastile; De Foe produced his best works
within the walls of Newgate; and Cervantes gave the world "Don Quixote"
from a prison.[102]
Some of the sweetest love-lyrics extant were written by Charles, Duke
of Orleans, during his captivity of twenty-five years. Baron Trenck
wrote his wonderful book of personal experience during a ten years'
captivity in a subterranean dungeon at Magdeburg,--a book which has been
translated into every modern language. He was released from prison, but
died by the guillotine at Paris in 1794. Silvio Pellico, the Italian
poet and dramatist, who wrote the well-known story of his prison life,
was ten years confined in the fortress of Spielberg, in Moravia. Ponce
de Leon, among the foremost of Spanish poets, as well as the poet
Alonzo de Ereilla, were victims of long and severe incarceration because
they dared to translate the Biblical Songs of Solomon into Spanish.
James Howell, the English author, wrote his "Familiar Letters" in the
Fleet Prison. So popular were they, that he had the pleasure of seeing
ten editions of them published in rapid succession; this was about the
year 1646. William Penn and Roger Williams, both founders of States in
this country, suffered imprisonment. The former wrote his well-known "No
Cross, No Crown" in the Tower of London. Oakley, the great Oriental
scholar, whose remarkable Asiatic researches have rendered his name
famous, wrote his work on the Saracens in jail. Cobbett, the political
satirist, was no stranger to the inside of a prison; and we all remember
Cooper, the English chartist, who made himself famous by his "Prison
Rhymes," written behind the frowning bars. Montgomery suffered the same
chilling influences for daring to make a public plea for freedom of
speech. Theodore Hook, the novelist, delightful miscellaneous writer,
and unrivalled wit, was for a long period imprisoned.[103]
Richard Lovelace, the English poet, was a gallant soldier who spilled
his blood for his king in the civil war and impoverished himself in the
same cause, was imprisoned for political reasons, and died poor and
neglected at the age of forty. He wrote to "Lucasta,"[104] when going to
the wars, that fine and often-quoted couplet:--
"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more."
Lucasta (_Lux casta_, "pure light"), to whom his verses were dedicated,
was Lady Sacheverell, whom he devotedly loved, but who married another
after having been deceived by the false report that Lovelace had been
killed. He was liberated from prison under Cromwell, but lived a
wretched life thereafter. Leigh Hunt, the most genial of essayists, was
imprisoned for two years, when he was visited by Lamb, Byron, and Moore.
His offence was a libel on the Prince Regent, afterwards George the
Fourth. Madame Guyon wrote the most of her beautiful poems--so greatly
admired by Cowper--while a captive for four years in the Bastile. The
great public library of Paris contains forty octavo volumes of her
writings. Why does not some popular author give us a book upon this
theme, and entitle it "Behind the Prison Bars"? The suggestion is freely
offered, and is perhaps worth considering. Disraeli tells us: "The gate
of the prison has sometimes been the porch of fame."
The reference to Lovelace reminds us that sometimes the female favorites
of poets are selected from rather questionable positions, and certainly
with very questionable taste. Prior poured out his admiration in verses
addressed to Chloe, a fat barmaid; and Bousard addressed poems to
Cassandra, who followed the same refining occupation. Colletet, a French
bard, addressed his lines to his servant-girl, whom he afterwards
married. No doubt that oftenest the poet's mistress has no actual
existence, but, like the sculptor's ideal, is the combined result drawn
from several choice models.
Gilbert Wakefield, the erudite scholar, theologian, and author, suffered
two years' imprisonment for publishing his "Enquiry into the Expediency
of Public and Social Worship." "The sentence passed upon him was most
infamous," says Rogers, who, in company with his sister, visited the
prisoner in Dorchester jail. While incarcerated here, Wakefield wrote
his "Noctes Carcerariæ" ("Prison Nights"). Matthew Prior, the poet,
diplomatist, courtier, and versatile author, was the son of a joiner,
though it is not known exactly where he was born. Chancing to interest
the Earl of Dorset, he was educated at the cost of that liberal
nobleman. He[105] was one of those, as Dr. Johnson said, "that have
burst out from an obscure original to great eminence." Thackeray says of
him, "He loved, he drank, he sang; and he was certainly deemed one of
the brightest lights of Queen Anne's reign." His contempt for pedigree
was very natural, and was wittily expressed in the epitaph which he
wrote for himself:--
"Nobles and heralds, by your leave,
Here lies what once was Matthew Prior;
The son of Adam and of Eve:
Can Bourbon or Nassau claim higher?"
Schumann, the German musical composer, author of "Paradise and the
Peri," in a fit of mental depression threw himself into the Rhine, but
was rescued. Goethe, Alfieri, Raphael, and George Sand all struggled
against a nearly fatal temptation to end their earthly careers. The last
named declared that at the sight of a body of water or a precipice she
could hardly restrain herself from committing suicide! "Genius bears
within itself a principle of destruction, of death, and of madness,"
says Lamartine. De Quincey, who was never quite sane, was given to queer
habits in connection with his literary work. He was wont to keep his
manuscripts stored in his bath-tub, and carried his money in his
hat.[106] Cowper, after a fruitless attempt to hang himself, became a
religious monomaniac, "hovering in the twilight of reason and the dawn
of insanity."[107] Moore, the gay, vivacious, witty, diner-out, sank
finally into childish imbecility. John Clare, the English peasant poet,
was born in poverty; his early productions accidentally attracted
attention and gained him patrons, but after a brief, irregular, unhappy
career he died in an insane asylum. So also died Charles Fenno Hoffman,
our own popular poet, editor, and novelist, who wrote "Sparkling and
Bright." Cruden, the industrious author and compiler of the Biblical
Concordance, suffered from long fits of insanity; and so did Jeremy
Bentham,[108] though he lived to extreme old age, and died so late as
1832. Congreve said it was the prerogative of great souls to be
wretched; and Jean Paul, that great souls attract sorrows as lofty
mountains do storms. Lenau, the Hungarian lyric poet, died in a
mad-house; in the height of his fame he refused, when invited, to visit
an asylum, saying, "I shall be there soon enough as it is." It would
seem but charitable to attribute fits of insanity to Carlyle, who
pronounced most of his contemporaries "fools and lunatics." His wife
confessed that she felt as if she were keeping a mad-house. Vaugelas
died in such poverty that he bequeathed his body to the surgeons at
Paris for a given sum with which to pay his last board-bill. In his will
he wrote: "As there may still remain creditors unpaid after all that I
have shall be disposed of, it is my last wish that my body should be
sold to the surgeons to the best advantage, and that the purchase-money
should go to discharge those debts which I owe to society, so that if I
could not while living, at least when dead I may be useful." Vaugelas
was called the owl, because he ventured forth only at night, through
fear of his creditors.
Next to the "Newgate Calendar," it has been said, the biography of
authors is the most sickening chapter in the history of man. "Woe be to
the youthful poet who sets out upon his pilgrimage to the temple of fame
with nothing but hope for his viaticum!" wrote Southey, in 1813, to a
young man who had consulted him. "There is the Slough of Despond, and
the Hill of Difficulty, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death upon the
way." Coleridge's exhortation to youthful literati may be summed up in
one sentence: "Never pursue literature as a trade." Béranger's advice
was by no means to be despised. He spoke as one having authority, and he
certainly had experience.[109] "Write if you will," he says, "versify if
you must, sing away if the singing mood is an imperative mood, but on no
account give up your other occupation; let your authorship be a pastime,
not a trade; let it be your avocation, not your vocation." Even the
successful Washington Irving speaks of "the seductive but treacherous
paths of literature." He adds: "There is no life more precarious in its
profits and more fallacious in its enjoyments than that of an author."
But these lines were addressed to his nephew, and must be taken _cum
grano salis_. He had genius, his nephew had not; he never could have
acquired so much money had he, like Halleck, become a clerk,--even the
clerk of Mr. Astor. The truth is, most writers have failed in authorship
because they have not had talent enough to write books that an
intelligent public would buy and read, and because their vagabond habits
deterred them from being employed by merchants and tradesmen as salesmen
and clerks. Real genius now obtains a remuneration always higher than
that of clerks and tradesmen. It is mediocre writers who mourn in our
days; but they should never have taken as a profession a role they were
incompetent to fill. They are like doctors who cannot obtain patients,
and lawyers who cannot attract clients.
But we were considering the past, not the present. Robert Heron, author,
scholar, teacher, who wrote much that will live in literature, died in
hopeless poverty. His "History of Scotland" and his "Universal
Geography" are still among our best books of reference. He says of
himself in a paper written just before he died: "The tenor of my life
has been temperate, laborious, humble, and quiet, and, to the utmost of
my power, beneficent. For these last three months I have been brought to
the very extremity of bodily and pecuniary distress, and I shudder at
the thought of perishing in jail." Yet such was his fate; he died in
Newgate. Thomas Decker, the English author, and collaborator with Ford
and Rowley in the production of popular dramas, died in a debtor's
prison. Christopher Smart, the personal friend of Dr. Johnson, produced
his principal poem while confined in a mad-house. Richard Savage, the
English poet, experienced a life which reads like fiction.[110] The
natural son of an English earl and countess, he was abandoned by his
mother to the care of a nurse who brought him up in ignorance of his
parentage. Before he was thirty years of age he was tried and condemned
for murder; and, though finally pardoned, he died in jail. During a
considerable portion of the time that Savage was engaged upon his
tragedy of "Sir Thomas Overbury," he was without lodgings and often
without meat; nor had he any other convenience for study and composition
than the open fields or the public streets. Having formed his sentences
and speeches in his mind, he would step into a shop, ask for pen and
ink, and write down what he had composed upon such scraps of paper as he
had picked up by chance, often from the street gutters.
Thomas Hood, the famous English humorist, began at first as a clerk in a
store, then became apprentice to an engraver; but his genius soon led
him to seek literary occupation as a regular means of support. He was
endowed with an unlimited fund of wit and comic power. His "Song of the
Shirt" showed that he had also great tenderness and pathos in his
nature. He edited various magazines and weekly papers, and published two
or three humorous books; but his career was far from a success in any
light. His life was occupied in incessant brain-work, aggravated by
ill-health and the many uncertainties of authorship. He finally died
poor in his forty-seventh year, leaving a dependent family.
William Thom was an English poet of genius, but very humbly born. He was
at first a weaver and afterwards a strolling pedler, often only too
glad to obtain a lodging in a country barn. The poor fellow said,
"There's much good sleeping to be had in a hayloft." In one of these
deplorable shelters his only child, who followed him, perished from
hunger and exposure. Thom published so late as 1844 a collection of his
poems entitled, "Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Weaver." The volume
was well received, and the author was given a dinner by his London
admirers. He died at the age of fifty-nine in extreme poverty. We find
two admirable poems by him in Sargent's "British and American Poets."
The reader who has perused these pages thus far will doubtless have come
to the conclusion that even talent is not developed as a rule in calm
and sunshine, but that it must encounter the tempest in some form before
the fruit can ripen. Byron, in the third canto of "Childe Harold," thus
gloomily declares the penalties of becoming famous:--
"He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find
The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;
He who surpasses or subdues mankind
Must look down on the hate of those below.
Though high _above_ the sun of glory glow,
And far _beneath_ the earth and ocean spread,
_Round_ him are icy rocks, and loudly blow
Contending tempests on his naked head,
And thus reward the toils which to those summits led."
Longfellow's idea is true and forcible: "Time has a doomsday book, in
which he is continually recording illustrious names. But as soon as a
new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in
illumined characters never to be effaced."
Thackeray's tender and beautiful thoughts upon this subject occur to us
here: "To be rich, to be famous? do these profit a year hence, when
other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under
ground, along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? Only true
love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessings, or
pervades you and intercedes for you. _Non omnis moriar_, if, dying, I
yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am lost and hopeless, living, if
a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me."