Goldsmith tells us, speaking of Waller's Ode on the Death of Cromwell, that English poetry was not then "quite harmonized: so that this, which would now be looked upon as a slovenly sort of versification, was in the times in which it was written almost a prodigy of harmony." At the same time, after praising the harmony of the Rape of the Lock, he observes that the irregular measure at the opening of the Allegro and Penseroso "hurts our English ear." Gray "loved intellectual ease and luxury, and wished as a sort of Mahometan paradise to 'lie on a sofa, and read eternal new romances of Mirivaux and Crébillon.' Yet all he could say of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, when it was first published, was, that there were some good verses in it. Akenside, too, whom he was so well fitted to appreciate, he thought 'often obscure, and even unintelligible.'" Horace Walpole marveled at the dullness of people who can admire anything so stupidly extravagant and barbarous as the Divina Commedia. "The long-continued contempt for Bunyan and De Foe was merely an expression of the ordinary feeling of the cultivated classes toward anything which was identified with Grub Street; but it is curious to observe the incapacity of such a man as Johnson to understand Gray or Sterne, and the contempt which Walpole expressed for Johnson and Goldsmith, while he sincerely believed that the poems of Mason were destined to immortality." The poet Rogers tells us that Henry Mackenzie advised Burns to take for his model in song-writing Mrs. John Hunter! Byron believed that Rogers and Moore were the truest poets among his contemporaries; that Pope was the first of all English, if not of all existing poets, and that Wordsworth was nothing but a namby-pamby driveler. De Quincey speaks of "Mr. Goethe" as an immoral and second-rate author, who owes his reputation chiefly to the fact of his long life and his position at the court of Weimar, and Charles Lamb expressed a decided preference of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus to Goethe's immortal Faust. Dr. Johnson's opinion of Milton's sonnets is pretty well known—"those soul-animating strains, alas! too few," as Wordsworth estimated them. Hannah More wondered that Milton could write "such poor sonnets." Johnson said, "Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones." He attacked Swift on all occasions. He said, speaking of Gulliver's Travels, "When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest." He called Gray "a dull fellow." "Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people call him great." Talking of Sterne, he said, "Nothing odd will last long. Tristram Shandy did not last." See how Horace Walpole disposes of some of the gods of literature. "Tiresome Tristram Shandy, of which I could never get through three volumes." "I have read Sheridan's Critic; it appeared wondrously flat and old, and a poor imitation." He speaks of wading through Spenser's "allegories and drawling stanzas." Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, he said, are "a lump of mineral from which Dryden extracted all the gold, and converted it into beautiful medals." "Dante was extravagant, absurd, disgusting: in short, a Methodist parson in Bedlam." "Montaigne's Travels I have been reading; if I was tired of the Essays, what must one be of these? What signifies what a man thought who never thought of anything but himself? and what signifies what a man did who never did anything?" "Boswell's book," he said, "is the story of a mountebank and his zany." Pepys, in his Diary, speaks of having bought "Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies." Scaliger called Montaigne "a bold ignoramus." Paley used to say that to read Tristram Shandy was the summum bonum of life. Goldsmith said its author was a "block-head." Goethe told a young Italian who asked him his opinion of Dante's great poem, that he thought the Inferno abominable, the Purgatorio dubious, and the Paradiso tiresome. Coleridge, talking of Goethe's Faust, said, "There is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of the work is to me very flat. Moreover, much of it is vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous." "Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, is, I think," says Southey, "the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw." Johnson told Anna Seward that "he would hang a dog that read the Lycidas of Milton twice." Waller wrote of Paradise Lost on its first appearance, "The old blind school-master, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the fall of man; if its length be not considered a merit, it has no other." Curran declared Paradise Lost to be the "worst poem in the language." When Harvey's book on the circulation of the blood came out, "he fell mightily in his practice. It was believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, and all the physicians were against him." Who has forgotten the fierce attack of the Quarterly Review on Jane Eyre, in which the unknown author, who was a clergyman's daughter, is pronounced "a person who, with great mental powers, combines a total ignorance of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion"? "If we ascribe the book to a woman at all," continues the keen-sighted critic, "we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, forfeited the society of her own sex." Schiller's intimate friends decided against the Indian Death Song, which Goethe afterward pronounced one of his best poems. When Andersen published his Wonder Stories told for Children, which fixed his place in literature and in popular affection, the reviewers advised him to waste no more time over such work; and he said, "I would willingly have discontinued writing them, but they forced themselves from me." Warren says that the first chapter of the Diary of a Late Physician—the Early Struggles,—was offered by him successively to the conductors of three leading London magazines, and rejected, as "unsuitable for their pages," and "not likely to interest the public." Scott tells us that one of his nearest friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder, one of the most comprehensive thinkers and versatile authors of Germany, adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles V. Montesquieu, upon the completion of The Spirit of Laws, which had cost him twenty years of labor, and which ran through twenty-two editions in less than as many months after its publication, submitted the manuscript to Helvetius and Saurin, who returned it with the advice not to spoil a great reputation by publishing it. Wordsworth told Robinson that before his ballads were published, Tobin implored him to leave out We are Seven, as a poem that would damn the book. It turned out to be one of the most popular. That charming and once popular Scottish story, The Annals of the Parish, by John Galt, was written ten or twelve years before the date of its publication, and anterior to the appearance of Waverley and Guy Mannering, and was rejected by the publishers of those works, with the assurance that a novel or work of fiction entirely Scottish would not take with the public. St. Pierre submitted his delightful tale, Paul and Virginia, to the criticisms of a circle of his learned friends. They told him that it was a failure; that to publish it would be a piece of foolishness; that nobody would read it. St. Pierre appealed from his learned critics to his unlearned but sympathetic and sensible housekeeper. He read—she listened, admired, and wept. He accepted her verdict, and will be remembered by one little story longer than his contemporaries by their weary tomes. Molière made use of a person of the same class to criticise his plays. "I remember," says Boileau, "his pointing out to me several times an old servant that he had, to whom he told me he sometimes read his comedies, and he assured me that when the humorous passages did not strike her, he altered them, because he had frequently proved that such passages did not take upon the stage."
It would be curious to know how much chance or accident has had to do with even the best of the productions of literature. Wordsworth, in a conversation with one of his friends, gave an account of the origin of the Ancient Mariner. It was written in Devonshire, where he and Coleridge were together. It was intended for the Monthly Magazine, and was to pay the expenses of a journey. It was to have been a joint work, but Wordsworth left the execution to Coleridge, after suggesting much of the plan. The idea of the crime was suggested by a book of travels, in which the superstition of the sailors with regard to the albatross is mentioned. Mark Lemon, it is said, loved to tell an anecdote which related to the period when Hood became a contributor to Punch. Looking over his letters one morning, he opened an envelope inclosing a poem which the writer said had been rejected by three contemporaries. If not thought available for Punch, he begged the editor, whom he knew but slightly, to consign it to the waste-paper basket, as the writer was "sick at the sight of it." The poem was signed "Tom Hood," and the lines were entitled "The Song of the Shirt." The work was altogether different from anything that had ever appeared in Punch, and was considered so much out of keeping with the spirit of the periodical that at the weekly meeting its publication was opposed by several members of the staff. Lemon was so firmly impressed, not only with the beauty of the work, but with its suitableness, that he stood by his first decision and published it. The Song of the Shirt trebled the sale of the paper, and created a profound sensation throughout Great Britain. Scott told Ticknor that he once traveled with Campbell in a stage-coach alone, and that, to beguile the time, they talked of poetry and began to repeat some. At last Scott asked Campbell for something of his own, and he said there was one thing he had written but never printed that was full of "drums and trumpets and blunderbusses and thunder," and he didn't know if there was anything good in it. And then he repeated Hohenlinden. Scott listened with the greatest interest, and when he had finished, broke out, "But do you know that's devilish fine; why it's the finest thing you ever wrote, and it must be printed!" Scott told Leslie that he had known a laboring man who was with Burns when he turned up the mouse with his plow. Burns' first impulse was to kill it, but checking himself, as his eye followed the little creature, he said, "I'll make that mouse immortal!"
"One meets now and then with polished men," says Emerson, "who know everything, have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite superior to letters and science. What could they not, if only they would?" Wrote Byron:—
"Many are poets who have never penned
Their inspiration, and perchance the best;
They felt, and loved, and died, but would not lend
Their thoughts to meaner things; they compressed
The god within them, and rejoined the stars
Unlaureled upon earth."
"On my walk with Lamb," notes Robinson, "he spoke with enthusiasm of Manning, declaring that he is the most wonderful man he ever knew, more extraordinary than Wordsworth or Coleridge. Yet he does nothing. He has traveled even in China, and has been by land from India through Thibet, yet, as far as is known, he has written nothing." "My father," said Charles Kingsley, "was a magnificent man in body and mind, and was said to possess every talent except that of using his talents." Dr. Johnson lamented that "those who are most capable of improving mankind very frequently neglect to communicate their knowledge; either because it is more pleasing to gather ideas than to impart them, or because to minds naturally great, few things appear of so much importance as to deserve the notice of the public." "Great constitutions," says Sir Thomas Browne, "and such as are constellated unto knowledge, do nothing till they outdo all; they come short of themselves, if they go not beyond others, and must not sit down under the degree of worthies. God expects no lustre from the minor stars; but if the sun should not illuminate all, it were a sin in nature." Rogers said of Sydney Smith (of whose death he had just heard), in answer to the question, "How came it that he did not publicly show his powers?" "He had too fastidious a taste, and too high an idea of what ought to be." Disappointment is often felt and sometimes expressed concerning Coleridge, by those who hear so much of his extraordinary intellect. How could he have done more? His was one of those great, homeless souls which fly between heaven and earth; his language was only partly understood in this world, if wholly in another. His best utterances were but incoherencies to the human ears that heard them. Stupid John Chester understood them as well as any.
"Vast objects of remote altitude," says Landor, "must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but as single witnesses to his claims." "Shakespeare," said Coleridge, "is of no age—nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation and reading supplied him with the drapery of his figures." "The sand heaped by one flood," says Dr. Johnson, "is scattered by another; but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare." "Milton is not," says De Quincey, "an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the Paradise Lost is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces." Landor, in his Imaginary Conversations, makes Marvell thus to address Marten: "Hast thou not sat convivially with Oliver Cromwell? Hast thou not conversed familiarly with the only man greater than he, John Milton? One was ambitious of perishable power, the other of imperishable glory; both have attained their aim." Hazlitt and Coleridge being together, some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. Coleridge said "he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare seemed to him a mere stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster." "A rib of Shakespeare," said Landor, "would have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since." Said Goethe, "Would you see Shakespeare's intellect unfettered, read Troilus and Cressida, and see how he uses the materials of the Iliad in his fashion." Said Coleridge, "Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, etc., in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare, with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since." "It was really Voltaire," said Goethe, "who excited such minds as Diderot, D'Alembert, and Beaumarchais; for to be somewhat near him a man needed to be much, and could take no holidays." "To have seen such a man as Dr. Johnson," said Dr. Campbell, "was a thing to talk of a century hence." "Nature," said Heine, "wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe." "Were Byron now alive, and Burns," said Hawthorne, "the first would come from his ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who grew immortal while he stooped behind his plow."
Generally, thought Goethe, the personal character of the writer influences the public, rather than his talents as an artist. Napoleon said of Corneille, "If he were living now, I would make him a prince," yet he never read him. "I have often been amused at thinking," says Landor, "in what estimation the greatest of mankind were holden by their contemporaries. Not even the most sagacious and prudent one could discover much of them, or could prognosticate their future course in the infinity of space! Men like ourselves are permitted to stand near, and indeed in the very presence of Milton: what do they see? dark clothes, gray hair, and sightless eyes! Other men have better things: other men, therefore, are nobler! The stars themselves are only bright by distance; go close, and all is earthy." "There is," says Emerson, "somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers everything touching Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,—the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular player,—nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two." "The people of Gascony, who knew Montaigne well," says the biographer of the great essayist, "thought it very droll to see him in print. He had to pay printers and publishers in Guienne; elsewhere they were eager to buy him." Horace Walpole heard a sight-seer, on being shown the bows and arrows in the armory at Strawberry Hill, ask the housekeeper, "Pray, does Mr. Walpole shoot?" One of his titled neighbors told him, that, having some company with her, one of them had been to see Strawberry. "Pray," said another, "who is that Mr. Walpole?" "Lord!" cried a third, "don't you know the great epicure, Mr. Walpole?" "Pho!" cried the first, "great epicure! you mean the antiquarian." The only tradition a visitor could gather in Pope's garden at Twickenham was that a fine cedar was planted there by a famous man a long time ago. An elderly, well-to-do inhabitant of Beaconsfield, of whom the same person inquired where Burke had lived, made answer: "Pray, sir, was he a poet?" During a pilgrimage which we are told Rogers and his friend Maltby made to Gerrard Street, Soho, to discover the house once occupied by Dryden, they came upon a house agent, who, scenting a job, eagerly responded: "Dryden—Mr. Dryden—is he behindhand with his rent?" There is a story of an American who lost his way in the vain attempt to discover the residence of Wordsworth. Meeting an old woman in a scarlet cloak who was gathering sticks, he asked her the way to Rydal Mount. She could not tell him. "Not know," said the American, "the house of the great Wordsworth?" "No; but what was he great in? Was he a preacher or a doctor?" "Greater than any preacher or doctor—he is a poet." "Oh, the poet!" she replied; "and why did you not tell me that before? I know who you mean now. I often meet him in the woods, jabbering his pottery (poetry) to hisself. But I'm not afraid of him. He's quite harmless, and almost as sensible as you or me." A Prussian staff-officer was quartered in Goethe's house after Jena. This officer, being afterward much interrogated by the curious as to his impressions of the great man, replied "that he had thoroughly tested the fellow and found that he had nothing but nonsense in his head!" Rogers told Leslie that when the Pleasures of Memory was first published, one of those busy gentlemen, who are vain of knowing everybody, came up to him at a party, and said, "Lady —— is dying to be introduced to the author of the Pleasures of Memory." "Pray, let her live," said Rogers, and with difficulty they made their way through the crowd to the lady. "Mr. Rogers, madam, author of the Pleasures of Memory." "Pleasures of what?" "I felt for my friend," said Rogers.
No doubt the most genuine and grateful rewards which authors have received were those which came to them as surprises, or in overheard responses, unbidden and natural, from the common heart of humanity. Mrs. Broderip reports of her father's pleasure in the immense popularity of his Song of the Shirt, that "what delighted and yet touched him most deeply was, that the poor creatures to whose sorrows and sufferings he had given such eloquent voice, seemed to adopt its words as their own, by singing them about the streets to a rude air of their own adaptation." Bernard Barton ends a letter descriptive of an endearing girl's village funeral, with telling how "the clergyman, at the close of the service, stated that, by her wish, a little hymn, which was a great favorite with her, would be sung beside her open grave, by the school-children—some five-and-twenty little things—whose eyes and cheeks were red with crying. 'I thought they could never have found tongues, poor things; but once set off, they sang like a little band of cherubs. What added to the effect of it, to me, was that it was a little almost forgotten hymn of my own, written years ago, which no one present, but myself, was at all aware of.'" Goldsmith, in his college career, wrote street ballads, to save himself from starving, sold them for five shillings apiece, and stole out of college at night to hear them sung. "Happy night to him, worth all the dreary days!" exclaims his biographer, Forster. "Hidden by some dusky wall, or creeping within darkling shadows of the ill-lighted streets, this poor, neglected sizer watched, waited, lingered there, for the only effort of his life which had not wholly failed. Few and dull, perhaps, the beggar's audience at first, but more thronging, eager, and delighted, as he shouted forth his newly-gotten ware. Cracked enough, I doubt not, were those ballad-singing tones; very harsh, extremely discordant, and passing from loud to low without meaning or melody; but not the less did the sweetest music which this earth affords fall with them on the ear of Goldsmith."