Literary Character of Men of Genius. Disraeli Isaac
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in an urn, he presented them to his grandfather, with a narrative of his Patroclus or Sarpedon. We seem here to detect, reflected in his boyish sports, the pleasing genius of the author of Numa Pompilius, Gonsalvo of Cordova, and William Tell. BACON, when a child, was so remarkable for thoughtful observation, that Queen Elizabeth used to call him "the young lord-keeper." The boy made a remarkable reply, when her Majesty, inquiring of him his age, he said, that "He was two years younger than her Majesty's happy reign." The boy may have been tutored; but this mixture of gravity, and ingenuity, and political courtiership, undoubtedly caught from his father's habits, afterwards characterised Lord Bacon's manhood. I once read the letter of a contemporary of HOBBES, where I found that this great philosopher, when a lad, used to ride on packs of skins to market, to sell them for his father, who was a fellmonger; and that in the market-place he thus early began to vent his private opinions, which long afterwards so fully appeared in his writings.
For a youth to be distinguished by his equals is perhaps a criterion of talent. At that moment of life, with no flattery on the one side, and no artifice on the other, all emotion and no reflection, the boy who has obtained a predominance has acquired this merely by native powers. The boyhood of NELSON was characterised by events congenial with those of his after-days; and his father understood his character when he declared that, "in whatever station he might be placed, he would climb, if possible, to the top of the tree." Some puerile anecdotes which FRANKLIN remembered of himself, betray the invention and the firm intrepidity of his character, and even perhaps his carelessness of means to obtain a purpose. In boyhood he felt a desire for adventure; but as his father would not consent to a sea life, he made the river near him represent the ocean: he lived on the water, and was the daring Columbus of a schoolboy's boat. A part where he and his mates stood to angle, in time became a quagmire: in the course of one day, the infant projector thought of a wharf for them to stand on, and raised it with a heap of stones deposited there for the building of a house. With that sort of practical wisdom, or Ulyssean cunning, which marked his mature character, Franklin raised his wharf at the expense of another's house. His contrivances to aid his puny labourers, with his resolution not to quit the great work till it was effected, seem to strike out to us the invention and decision of his future character. But the qualities which would attract the companions of a schoolboy may not be those which are essential to fine genius. The captain or leader of his schoolmates is not to be disregarded; but it is the sequestered boy who may chance to be the artist or the literary character. Some facts which have been recorded of men of genius at this period are remarkable. We are told by Miss Stewart that JOHNSON, when a boy at the free-school, appeared "a huge overgrown, misshapen stripling;" but was considered as a stupendous stripling: "for even at that early period of life, Johnson maintained his opinions with the same sturdy, dogmatical, and arrogant fierceness." The puerile characters of Lord BOLINGBROKE and Sir ROBERT WALPOLE, schoolfellows and rivals, were observed to prevail through their after-life; the liveliness and brilliancy of Bolingbroke appeared in his attacks on Walpole, whose solid and industrious qualities triumphed by resistance. A parallel instance might be pointed out in two great statesmen of our own days; in the wisdom of the one, and the wit of the other—men whom nature made rivals, and time made friends or enemies, as it happened. A curious observer, in looking over a collection of the Cambridge poems, which were formerly composed by its students, has remarked that "Cowley from the first was quaint, Milton sublime, and Barrow copious." If then the characteristic disposition may reveal itself thus early, it affords a principle which ought not to be neglected at this obscure period of youth.
Is there then a period in youth which yields decisive marks of the character of genius? The natures of men are as various as their fortunes. Some, like diamonds, must wait to receive their splendour from the slow touches of the polisher, while others, resembling pearls, appear at once born with their beauteous lustre.
Among the inauspicious circumstances is the feebleness of the first attempts; and we must not decide on the talents of a young man by his first works. DRYDEN and SWIFT might have been deterred from authorship had their earliest pieces decided their fate. SMOLLETT, before he knew which way his genius would conduct him, had early conceived a high notion of his talents for dramatic poetry: his tragedy of the Regicide was refused by Garrick, whom for a long time he could not forgive, but continued to abuse our Roscius, through his works of genius, for having discountenanced his first work, which had none. RACINE'S earliest composition, as we may judge by some fragments his son has preserved, remarkably contrasts with his writings; for these fragments abound with those points and conceits which he afterwards abhorred. The tender author of "Andromache" could not have been discovered while exhausting himself in running after concetti as surprising as the worst parts of Cowley, in whose spirit alone he could have hit on this perplexing concetto, descriptive of Aurora: "Fille du Jour, qui nais devant ton père!"—"Daughter of Day, but born before thy father!" GIBBON betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in his "Essay on Literature," or his attempted "History of Switzerland," JOHNSON'S cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler simplicity of his earliest years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they afterwards excelled in. RAPHAEL, when he first drew his meagre forms under Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal beauty which one day he of all men could alone execute. Who could have imagined, in examining the Dream of Raphael, that the same pencil could hereafter have poured out the miraculous Transfiguration? Or that, in the imitative pupil of Hudson, our country was at length to pride herself on another Raphael?[A]
[Footnote A: Hudson was the fashionable portrait-painter who succeeded Kneller, and made a great reputation and fortune; but he was a very mean artist, who merely copied the peculiarities of his predecessor without his genius. His stiff hard style was formality itself; but was approved in an age of formalism; the earlier half of the last century.—ED.]
Even the manhood of genius may pass unobserved by his companions, and, like. Æneas, he may be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates. The celebrated FABIUS MAXIMUS in his boyhood was called in derision "the little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his disposition. His sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his equals, induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid. The greatness of mind, unalterable courage, and invincible character, which Fabius afterwards displayed, they then imagined had lain concealed under the apparent contrary qualities. The boy of genius may indeed seem slow and dull even to the phlegmatic; for thoughtful and observing dispositions conceal themselves in timorous silent characters, who have not yet experienced their strength; and that assiduous love, which cannot tear itself away from the secret instruction it is perpetually imbibing, cannot be easily distinguished from the pertinacity of the mere plodder. We often hear, from the early companions of a man of genius, that at school he appeared heavy and unpromising. Rousseau imagined that the childhood of some men is accompanied by this seeming and deceitful dulness, which is the sign of a profound genius; and Roger Ascham has placed among "the best natures for learning, the sad-natured and hard-witted child;" that is, the thoughtful, or the melancholic, and the slow. The young painters, to ridicule the persevering labours of DOMENICHINO, which were at first heavy and unpromising, called him "the great ox;" and Passeri, while he has happily expressed the still labours of his concealed genius, sua taciturna lentezza, his silent slowness, expresses his surprise at the accounts he received of the early life of this great artist. "It is difficult to believe, what many assert, that, from the beginning, this great painter had a ruggedness about him which entirely incapacitated him from learning his profession; and they have heard from himself that he quite despaired of success. Yet I cannot comprehend how such vivacious talents, with a mind so finely organised, and accompanied with such favourable dispositions for the art, would show such signs of utter incapacity; I rather think that it is a mistake in the proper knowledge of genius, which some imagine indicates itself most decisively by its sudden vehemence, showing itself like lightning, and like lightning passing away."
A parallel case we find in GOLDSMITH, who passed through an unpromising youth; he declared that he was never attached to literature till he was thirty; that poetry had no peculiar charms for him till that age;[A] and, indeed, to his latest hour he was surprising his friends by productions which they had imagined he was incapable of composing. HUME was considered, for his sobriety and assiduity, as competent to become a steady merchant; and it was said of BOILEAU that he had no