CHAPTER V.

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."