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Literary Character of Men of Genius by Isaac Disraeli

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It was with these feelings that I was again strongly attracted to a
subject from which, indeed, during the course of a studious life, it
had never been long diverted. The consequence of my labours was the
publication, in 1818, of an octavo volume, under the title of "The
Literary Character, illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, drawn
from their own feelings and confessions."

In the preface to this edition, in mentioning the fact respecting Lord
Byron, which had been the immediate cause of its publication, I added
these words: "I tell this fact assuredly not from any little vanity which
it may appear to betray;--for the truth is, were I not as liberal and as
candid in respect to my own productions, as I hope I am to others, I could
not have been gratified by the present circumstance; for the marginal
notes of the noble author convey no flattery;--but amidst their pungency,
and sometimes their truth, the circumstance that a man of genius could
reperuse this slight effusion at two different periods of his life, was a
sufficient authority, at least for an author, to return it once more to
the anvil."

Some time after the publication of this edition of "The Literary
Character," which was in fact a new work, I was shown, through the
kindness of an English gentleman lately returned from Italy, a copy of it,
which had been given to him by Lord Byron, and which again contained
marginal notes by the noble author. These were peculiarly interesting, and
were chiefly occasioned by observations on his character, which appeared
in the work.

In 1822 I published a new edition of this work, greatly enlarged, and in
two volumes. I took this opportunity of inserting the manuscript Notes of
Lord Byron, with the exception of one, which, however characteristic of
the amiable feelings of the noble poet, and however gratifying to my own,
I had no wish to obtrude on the notice of the public.[A]

[Footnote A: As everything connected with the reading of a mind like Lord
BYRON'S interesting to the philosophical inquirer, this note may now be
preserved. On that passage of the Preface of the second Edition which I
have already quoted, his Lordship was thus pleased to write:

"I was wrong, but I was young and petulant, and probably wrote down
anything, little thinking that those observations would be betrayed to the
author, whose abilities I have always respected, and whose works in
general I have read oftener than perhaps those of any English author
whatever, except such as treat of Turkey."]

Soon after the publication of this third edition, I received
the following letter from his lordship:--


_"Montenero, Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, June 10, 1822._

"DEAR SIR,--If you will permit me to call you so,--I had some time ago
taken up my pen at Pisa, to thank you for the present of your new edition
of the 'Literary Character,' which has often been to me a consolation, and
always a pleasure. I was interrupted, however, partly by business, and
partly by vexation of different kinds,--for I have not very long ago lost
a child by fever, and I have had a good deal of petty trouble with the
laws of this lawless country, on account of the prosecution of a servant
for an attack upon a cowardly scoundrel of a dragoon, who drew his sword
upon some unarmed Englishmen, and whom I had done the honour to mistake
for an officer, and to treat like a gentleman. He turned out to be
neither,--like many other with medals, and in uniform; but he paid for his
brutality with a severe and dangerous wound, inflicted by nobody knows
whom, for, of three suspected, and two arrested, they have been able to
identify neither; which is strange, since he was wounded in the presence
of thousands, in a public street, during a feast-day and full promenade.
--But to return to things more analogous to the 'Literary Character,' I
wish to say, that had I known that the book was to fall into your hands,
or that the MS. notes you have thought worthy of publication would have
attracted your attention, I would have made them more copious, and perhaps
not so careless.

"I really cannot know whether I am, or am not, the genius you are pleased
to call me,--but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be
one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it
endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never _can_ be,
till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, have
sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further.

"Mr. Murray is in possession of a MS. memoir of mine (not to be published
till I am in my grave), which, strange as it may seem, I never read over
since it was written, and have no desire to read over again. In it I have
told what, as far as I know, is the _truth_--_not the whole_ truth--for if
I had done so, I must have involved much private, and some dissipated
history: but, nevertheless, nothing but truth, as far as regard for others
permitted it to appear.

"I do not know whether you have seen those MSS.; but, as you are curious
in such things as relate to the human mind, I should feel gratified if you
had. I also sent him (Murray), a few days since, a Common-place Book, by
my friend Lord Clare, containing a few things, which may perhaps aid his
publication in case of his surviving me. If there are any questions which
you would like to ask me, as connected with your philosophy of the
literary mind (_if_ mine be a literary mind), I will answer them fairly,
or give a reason for _not_, good--bad--or indifferent. At present, I am
paying the penalty of having helped to spoil the public taste; for, as
long as I wrote in the false exaggerated style of youth and the times in
which we live, they applauded me to the very echo; and within these few
years, when I have endeavoured at better things, and written what I
suspect to have the principle of duration in it: the Church, the
Chancellor, and all men, even to my grand patron, Francis Jeffrey, Esq.,
of the _Edinburgh Review_, have risen up against me, and my later
publications. Such is Truth! men dare not look her in the face, except by
degrees; they mistake her for a Gorgon, instead of knowing her to be
Minerva. I do not mean to apply this mythological simile to my own
endeavours, but I have only to turn over a few pages of your volumes to
find innumerable and far more illustrious instances. It is lucky that I am
of a temper not to be easily turned aside, though by no means difficult to
irritate. But I am making a dissertation, instead of writing a letter. I
write to you from the Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, with the islands of Elba
and Corsica visible from my balcony, and my old friend the Mediterranean
rolling blue at my feet. As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for
Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions, and resist or
endure those of others.

"I have the honour to be, truly,

"Your obliged and faithful servant,

"NOEL BYRON.

"To I. D'Israeli, Esq."

The ill-starred expedition to Greece followed this letter.

* * * * *

This work, conceived in youth, executed by the research of manhood, and
associated with the noblest feelings of our nature, is an humble but
fervent tribute, offered to the memory of those Master Spirits from whose
labours, as BURKE eloquently describes, "their country receives permanent
service: those who know how to make the silence of their closets more
beneficial to the world than all the noise and bustle of courts, senates,
and camps."




LITERARY CHARACTER.



CHAPTER I.

Of Literary Characters, and of the Lovers of Literature and Art.


Diffused over enlightened Europe, an order of men has arisen, who,
uninfluenced by the interests or the passions which give an impulse to the
other classes of society, are connected by the secret links of congenial
pursuits, and, insensibly to themselves, are combining in the same common
labours, and participating in the same divided glory. In the metropolitan
cities of Europe the same authors are now read, and the same opinions
become established: the Englishman is familiar with Machiavel and
Montesquieu; the Italian and the Frenchman with Bacon and Locke; and the
same smiles and tears are awakened on the banks of the Thames, of the
Seine, or of the Guadalquivir, by Shakspeare, Moliere, and Cervantes--

Contemporains de tous les hommes,
Et citoyens de tous les lieux.

A khan of Tartary admired the wit of Moliere, and discovered the Tartuffe
in the Crimea; and had this ingenious sovereign survived the translation
which he ordered, the immortal labour of the comic satirist of France
might have laid the foundation of good taste even among the Turks and the
Tartars. We see the Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an
English critic, Lord Bolingbroke, for decisive authority on the peculiar
characteristics of the historian Guicciardini: the German Schlegel writes
on our Shakspeare like a patriot; and while the Italians admire the noble
scenes which our Flaxman has drawn from their great poet, they have
rejected the feeble attempts of their native artists. Such is the wide and
the perpetual influence of this living intercourse of literary minds.

Scarcely have two centuries elapsed since the literature of every nation
was limited to its fatherland, and men of genius long could only hope for
the spread of their fame in the single language of ancient Rome; which for
them had ceased to be natural, and could never be popular. It was in the
intercourse of the wealth, the power, and the novel arts of the nations of
Europe, that they learned each other's languages; and they discovered
that, however their manners varied as they arose from their different
customs, they participated in the same intellectual faculties, suffered
from the same wants, and were alive to the same pleasures; they perceived
that there were no conventional fashions, nor national distinctions, in
abstract truths and fundamental knowledge. A new spirit seems to bring
them nearer to each other: and, as if literary Europe were intent to form
but one people out of the populace of mankind, they offer their reciprocal
labours; they pledge to each other the same opinions; and that knowledge
which, like a small river, takes its source from one spot, at length
mingles with the ocean-stream common to them all.

But those who stand connected with this literary community are not always
sensible of the kindred alliance; even a genius of the first order has not
always been aware that he is the founder of a society, and that there will
ever be a brotherhood where there is a father-genius.

These literary characters are partially, and with a melancholy colouring,
exhibited by JOHNSON. "To talk in private, to think in solitude, to
inquire or to answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders
about the world without pomp or terror; and is neither known nor valued
but by men like himself." Thus thought this great writer during those sad
probationary years of genius when

Slow rises worth, by _poverty_ depress'd;

not yet conscious that he himself was devoting his days to cast the minds
of his contemporaries and of the succeeding age in the mighty mould of his
own; JOHNSON was of that order of men whose individual genius becomes that
of a people. A prouder conception rose in the majestic mind of MILTON, of
"that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have
consented shall be the reward of those whose PUBLISHED LABOURS advanced
the good of mankind."

The LITERARY CHARACTER is a denomination which, however vague, defines the
pursuits of the individual, and separates him from other professions,
although it frequently occurs that he is himself a member of one.
Professional characters are modified by the change of manners, and are
usually national; while the literary character, from the objects in which
it concerns itself, retains a more permanent, and necessarily a more
independent nature.

Formed by the same habits, and influenced by the same motives,
notwithstanding the contrast of talents and tempers, and the remoteness of
times and places, the literary character has ever preserved among its
followers the most striking family resemblance. The passion for study, the
delight in books, the desire of solitude and celebrity, the obstructions
of human life, the character of their pursuits, the uniformity of their
habits, the triumphs and the disappointments of literary glory, were as
truly described by CICERO and the younger PLINY as by PETRARCH and
ERASMUS, and as they have been by HUME and GIBBON. And this similarity,
too, may equally be remarked with respect to that noble passion of the
lovers of literature and of art for collecting together their mingled
treasures; a thirst which was as insatiable in ATTICUS and PEIRESC as in
our CRACHERODE and TOWNLEY.[A] We trace the feelings of our literary
contemporaries in all ages, and among every people who have ranked with
nations far advanced in civilization; for among these may be equally
observed both the great artificers of knowledge and those who preserve
unbroken the vast chain of human acquisitions. The one have stamped the
images of their minds on their works, and the others have preserved the
circulation of this intellectual coinage, this

--Gold of the dead,
Which Time does still disperse, but not devour.

[Footnote A: The Rev. C.M. Cracherode bequeathed at his death, in 1799, to
the British Museum, the large collection of literature, art, and virtu he
had employed an industrious life in collecting. His books numbered nearly
4500 volumes, many of great rarity and value. His drawings, many by early
Italian masters, and all rare or curious, were deposited in the print-room
of the same establishment; his antiquities, &c. were in a similar way
added to the other departments. The "Townley Gallery" of classic sculpture
was purchased of his executors by Government for 28,200_l_. It had been
collected with singular taste and judgment, as well as some amount of good
fortune also; Townley resided at Rome during the researches on the site of
Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli; and he had for aids and advisers Sir William
Hamilton, Gavin Hamilton, and other active collectors; and was the friend
and correspondent of D'Haucarville and Winckelmann.--ED.]




CHAPTER II.

Of the Adversaries of Literary Men among themselves.--Matter-of-fact
Men, and Men of Wit.--The Political Economist.--Of those who abandon
their studies.--Men in office.--The arbiters of public opinion.--Those
who treat the pursuits of literature with levity.


The pursuits of literature have been openly or insidiously lowered by
those literary men who, from motives not always difficult to penetrate,
are eager to confound the ranks in the republic of letters, maliciously
conferring the honours of authorship on that "Ten Thousand" whose recent
list is not so much a muster-roll of heroes as a table of population.[A]

Matter-of-fact men, or men of knowledge, and men of wit and taste, were
long inimical to each other's pursuits.[B] The Royal Society in its origin
could hardly support itself against the ludicrous attacks of literary
men,[C] and the Antiquarian Society has afforded them amusement.[D] Such
partial views have ceased to contract the understanding. Science yields a
new substance to literature; literature combines new associations for the
votaries of knowledge. There is no subject in nature, and in the history
of man, which will not associate with our feelings and our curiosity,
whenever genius extends its awakening hand. The antiquary, the naturalist,
the architect, the chemist, and even writers on medical topics, have in
our days asserted their claims, and discovered their long-interrupted
relationship with the great family of genius and literature.

[Footnote A: We have a Dictionary of "Ten Thousand living Authors" of our
own nation. The alphabet is fatal by its juxtapositions. In France, before
the Revolution, they counted about twenty thousand writers. When David
would have his people numbered, Joab asked, "Why doth my lord delight in
this?" In political economy, the population returns may be useful,
provided they be correct; but in the literary republic, its numerical
force diminishes the strength of the empire. "There you are numbered, we
had rather you were weighed." Put aside the puling infants of literature,
of whom such a mortality occurs in its nurseries; such as the writers of
the single sermon, the single law-tract, the single medical dissertation,
&c.; all writers whose subject is single, without being singular; count
for nothing the inefficient mob of mediocrists; and strike out our
literary _charlatans_; and then our alphabet of men of genius will not
consist, as it now does, of the four-and-twenty letters.]

[Footnote B: The cause is developed in the chapter on "Want of Mutual
Esteem."]

[Footnote C: See BUTLER, in his "Elephant in the Moon." SOUTH, in his
oration at the opening of the theatre at Oxford, passed this bitter
sarcasm on the naturalists,--"_Mirantur nihil nisi pulices, pediculos--et
se ipsos_;"--nothing they admire but fleas, lice, and themselves! The
illustrious SLOANE endured a long persecution from the bantering humour of
Dr. KING. One of the most amusing declaimers against what he calls _les
Sciences des faux Scavans_ is Father MALEBRANCHE; he is far more severe
than Cornelius Agrippa, and he long preceded ROUSSEAU, so famous for his
invective against the sciences. The seventh chapter of his fourth book is
an inimitable satire. "The principal excuse," says he, "which engages men
in _false studies_, is, that they have attached the _idea of learned_
where they should not." Astronomy, antiquarianism, history, ancient
poetry, and natural history, are all mowed down by his metaphysical
scythe. When we become acquainted with the _idea_ Father Malebranche
attaches to the term _learned_, we understand him--and we smile.]

[Footnote D: See the chapter on "Puck the Commentator," in the
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii.; also p. 304 of the same volume.]

A new race of jargonists, the barbarous metaphysicians of political
economy, have struck at the essential existence of the productions of
genius in literature and art; for, appreciating them by their own
standard, they have miserably degraded the professors. Absorbed in the
contemplation of material objects, and rejecting whatever does not enter
into their own restricted notion of "utility," these cold arithmetical
seers, with nothing but millions in their imagination; and whose choicest
works of art are spinning-jennies, have valued the intellectual tasks of
the library and the studio by "the demand and the supply." They have sunk
these pursuits into the class of what they term "unproductive labour;" and
by another result of their line and level system, men of letters, with
some other important characters, are forced down into the class "of
buffoons, singers, opera-dancers, &c." In a system of political economy it
has been discovered that "that _unprosperous race_ of men, called _men of
letters_, must _necessarily_ occupy their present _forlorn state_ in
society much as formerly, when a scholar and a beggar seem to have been
terms very nearly synonymous."[A] In their commercial, agricultural, and
manufacturing view of human nature, addressing society by its most
pressing wants and its coarsest feelings, these theorists limit the moral
and physical existence of man by speculative tables of population, planing
and levelling society down in their carpentry of human nature. They would
yoke and harness the loftier spirits to one common and vulgar destination.
Man is considered only as he wheels on the wharf, or as he spins in the
factory; but man, as a recluse being of meditation, or impelled to action
by more generous passions, has been struck out of the system of our
political economists. It is, however, only among their "unproductive
labourers" that we shall find those men of leisure, whose habitual
pursuits are consumed in the development of thought and the gradual
accessions of knowledge; those men of whom the sage of Judea declares,
that "It is he who hath little business who shall become wise: how can he
get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and whose talk is of bullocks? But
THEY,"--the men of leisure and study,--"WILL MAINTAIN THE STATE OF THE
WORLD!" The prosperity and the happiness of a people include something
more evident and more permanent than "the Wealth of a Nation."[B]

[Footnote A: "Wealth of Nations," i. 182.]

[Footnote B: Since this murmur has been uttered against the degrading
views of some of those theorists, it afforded me pleasure to observe that
Mr. Malthus has fully sanctioned its justness. On this head, at least, Mr.
Malthus has amply confuted his stubborn and tasteless brothers. Alluding
to the productions of genius, this writer observes, that, "to estimate the
value of NEWTON'S discoveries, or the delight communicated by SHAKSPEAKE
and MILTON, by the _price_ at which their works have sold, would be but a
poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their
country."--_Principles of Pol. Econ._ p. 48. And hence he acknowledges,
that "_some unproductive labour is of much more use and importance_ than
productive labour, but is incapable of being the subject of the gross
calculations which relate to national wealth; contributing to _other
sources of happiness_ besides those which are derived from matter."
Political economists would have smiled with contempt on the querulous
PORSON, who once observed, that "it seemed to him very hard, that with all
his critical knowledge of Greek, he could not get a hundred pounds." They
would have demonstrated to the learned Grecian, that this was just as it
ought to be; the same occurrence had even happened to HOMER in his own
country, where Greek ought to have fetched a higher price than in England;
but, that both might have obtained this hundred pounds, had the Grecian
bard and the Greek professor been employed at the same stocking-frame
together, instead of the "Iliad."]

There is a more formidable class of men of genius who are heartless to the
interests of literature. Like CORNELIUS AGRIPPA, who wrote on "the vanity
of the arts and sciences," many of these are only tracing in the arts
which they have abandoned their own inconstant tempers, their feeble
tastes, and their disordered judgments. But, with others of this class,
study has usually served as the instrument, not as the object, of their
ascent; it was the ladder which they once climbed, but it was not the
eastern star which guided and inspired. Such literary characters were
WARBURTON,[A] WATSON, and WILKES, who abandoned their studies when their
studies had served a purpose.

[Footnote A: For a full disquisition of the character and career of
Warburton, see the essay in "Quarrels of Authors."]

WATSON gave up his pursuits in chemistry the instant he obtained their
limited reward, and the laboratory closed when the professorship was
instituted. Such was the penurious love he bore for the science which he
had adopted, that the extraordinary discoveries of thirty years subsequent
to his own first essays could never excite even an idle inquiry. He tells
us that he preferred "his larches to his laurels:" the wretched jingle
expressed the mere worldliness that dictated it. In the same spirit of
calculation with which he had at first embraced science and literature, he
abandoned them; and his ingenuous confession is a memorable example of
that egotistic pride which betrayed in the literary character the creature
of selfism and political ambition.

We are accustomed to consider WILKES merely as a political adventurer, and
it may surprise to find this "city chamberlain" ranked among professed
literary characters: yet in his variable life there was a period when he
cherished the aspirations of a votary. Once he desired Lloyd to announce
the edition of Churchill, which he designed to enrich by a commentary; and
his correspondence on this subject, which has never appeared, would, as he
himself tells us, afford a variety of hints and communications. Wilkes was
then warmed by literary glory; for on his retirement into Italy, he
declared, "I mean to give myself entirely to our friend's work, and to my
History of England. I wish to equal the dignity of Livy: I am sure the
greatness and majesty of our nation demand an historian equal to him."
They who have only heard of the intriguing demagogue, and witnessed the
last days of the used voluptuary, may hardly imagine that Wilkes had ever
cherished such elevated projects; but mob-politics made this adventurer's
fortune, which fell to the lot of an epicurean: and the literary glory he
once sought he lived to ridicule, in the immortal diligence of Lord
Chatham and of Gibbon. Dissolving life away, and consuming all his
feelings on himself, Wilkes left his nearest relatives what he left the
world--the memory of an anti-social being! This wit, who has bequeathed to
us no wit; this man of genius, who has formed no work of genius; this
bold advocate for popular freedom, who sunk his patriotism in the
chamberlainship; was indeed desirous of leaving behind him some trace of
the life of an _escroc_ in a piece of autobiography, which, for the
benefit of the world, has been thrown to the flames.

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