Cicero maintained the doctrine of universal brotherhood as distinctly as it was afterward maintained by the Christian Church. "Men were born," he says, "for the sake of men, that each should assist the others.... Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason, that he is a man.... Nature has inclined us to love men, and this is the foundation of the law." Marcus Aurelius crystallized the "idea" of free government in one remarkable passage: "The idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed." And here is the idea of forgiveness of injuries, by Epictetus: "Every man has two handles, one of which will bear taking hold of, the other not. If thy brother sin against thee, lay not hold of the matter by this, that he sins against thee: for by this handle the matter will not bear taking hold of. But rather lay hold of it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate; and thou wilt take hold of it by what will bear handling." Here, too, is the idea of the Golden Rule, by Confucius, five hundred years before our era: "To have enough empire over one's self, in order to judge of others by comparison with ourselves, and to act toward them as we would wish that one should act toward us—that is what we can call the doctrine of humanity. There is nothing beyond it." And this is the prayer claimed to have been in use by religious Jews for nearly four thousand years, found by our Lord, improved by Him, and adopted for the use of Christians in all time: "Our Father who art in Heaven, be gracious unto us! O Lord our God, hallowed be thy name, and let the remembrance of Thee be glorified in heaven above and in the earth here below! Let thy kingdom rule over us now and forever! Remit and forgive unto all men whatever they have done against me! And lead us not into the power (hands) of temptation, but deliver us from the evil. For thine is the kingdom, and thou shalt reign in glory forever and ever more." Now hear the saying of King Solomon—wiser than Confucius, or Cicero, or Marcus Aurelius, or Epictetus, or any rabbi: "The thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun."
VII.
INCONGRUITY.
"How contradictory it seems," remarked Washington Irving, writing of Oliver Goldsmith, "that one of the most delightful pictures of home and homefelt happiness should be drawn by a homeless man; that the most amiable picture of domestic virtue and all the endearments of the married state should be drawn by a bachelor who had been severed from domestic life almost from boyhood; that one of the most tender, touching, and affecting appeals on behalf of female loveliness should have been made by a man whose deficiencies in all the graces of person and manner seemed to mark him out for a cynical disparager of the sex." Byron thought it contradictory that the ancients, in their mythology, should have represented Wisdom by a woman, and Love by a boy. "Don't you know," urged Sydney Smith, "as the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen?" In the old church at Hatfield, in England, amongst the antiquities, there is a recumbent statue, which every one believed was a woman, till Flaxman, the sculptor, examined it, and satisfied himself that it was a priest. Madame De Staël's Delphine was thought to contain a representation of Talleyrand in the character of an old woman. On her pressing for his opinion of that work, he said, "That is the work—is it not?—in which you and I are exhibited in the disguise of females?" Bulwer seemed to Harriet Martineau "a woman of genius, inclosed by misadventure in a man's form." A lady, speaking of the works of the poet Thomson, observed that she could gather from his writings three parts of his character: that he was an ardent lover, a great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent. Savage, to whom the remark was addressed, assured her that, in regard to the first, she was altogether mistaken; for the second, his friend was perhaps never in cold water in his life; and as to the third, he indulged in every luxury that came within his reach. Holmes states, in the preface to Elsie Venner, that while the story was in progress, he received the most startling confirmation of the possibility of the existence of a character like that he had drawn as a purely imaginary conception. Mrs. Hawthorne said that men who had committed great crimes, or whose memories held tragic secrets, would sometimes write to her husband, or even come great distances to see him, and unburden their souls. This was after the publication of The Scarlet Letter, which made them regard him as the father confessor for all hidden sins. The Swedenborgians informed Poe that they had discovered all that he said in a magazine article, entitled Mesmeric Revelations, to be absolutely true, although at first they were very strongly inclined to doubt his veracity,—a thing which, in that particular instance, he never dreamed of not doubting himself. Lord Lansdowne and Sydney Smith, with a companion or two, went incognito to Deville, the phrenologist in the Strand, to have their characters read from their skulls, and were most perversely interpreted. Lord Lansdowne was pronounced to be so absorbed in generalization as to fail in all practical matters, and Sydney Smith to be a great naturalist—"never so happy as when arranging his birds and fishes." "Sir," said the divine, with a stare of comical stupidity, "I don't know a fish from a bird;" and the chancellor of the exchequer was conscious that "all the fiddle-faddle of the cabinet" was committed to him on account of his love of what he called practical business. Crabb Robinson, on one of his visits to the British Gallery, where a collection of English portraits was exhibited, was displeased to see the name of the hated Jeffreys put to a "dignified and sweet countenance, that might have conferred new grace on some delightful character." Consistently enough with the delineation of the portrait, Evelyn recorded in his Memoirs that he "saw the Chief Justice Jeffreys in a large company the night before, and that he thought he laughed, drank, and danced too much for a man who had that day condemned Algernon Sidney to the block." An eminent gentleman who inspected the portraits of Luther and Melancthon, as they appear on their monuments in Wittenberg, describes the countenance of the latter as "acute and sarcastic." "Had subtlety and craft been his qualities, I should have thought the portrait expressed them." It is related of one of the philanthropists of France, who at one time held no insignificant place in the government, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her husband's life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel's tail, he exclaimed, "Good heavens, madame, have you, then, no humanity?" In the palace Doria, said Willis, there is a portrait of "a celebrated widow" (so called in the catalogue) by Vandyck,—a "had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap, with hands wonderfully painted." The custodian told the visitor that it was "a portrait of the wife of Vandyck, painted as an old woman to mortify her excessive vanity, when she was but twenty-three. He kept the picture until she was older, and, at the time of his death, it had become a flattering likeness, and was carefully treasured by the widow." Lavater, in his Physiognomy, says that Lord Anson, from his countenance, must have been a very wise man. Horace Walpole, who knew Lord Anson well, said he was the most stupid man he ever knew. Until a few years ago, it is stated, a portrait at Holland House was prescriptively reverenced as a speaking likeness of Addison, and a bust was designed after it by a distinguished sculptor. It turns out to be the copy of a portrait of a quite different person from the "great Mr. Addison."
Many a famous name, it has been truly said, has been indebted for its brightest lustre to things which were flung off as a pastime, or composed as an irksome duty, whilst the performances upon which the author most relied or prided himself have fallen still-born or been neglected by posterity. Thus Petrarch, who trusted to his Latin poems for immortality, mainly owes it to the Sonnets, which he regarded as ephemeral displays of feeling or fancy of the hour. Thus Chesterfield, the orator, the statesman, the Mæcenas and Petronius of his age, and (above all) the first viceroy who ventured on justice to Ireland, is floated down to our times by his familiar Letters to his Son. Thus Johnson, the Colossus of Literature, were he to look up or down (to adopt the more polite hypothesis), would hardly believe his eyes or ears, on finding that Bozzy, the snubbed and suppressed, yet ever elastic and rebounding Bozzy, is the prop, the bulwark, the key-stone of his fame; "the salt which keeps it sweet, the vitality which preserves it from putrefaction." We have it upon the authority of old Thomas Fuller, that "when a French printer complained that he was utterly undone by printing a solid, serious book of Rabelais concerning physic, Rabelais, to make him recompense, made that his jesting, scurrilous work, which repaired the printer's loss with advantage." "It was impossible to tell beforehand," said Northcote to Hazlitt, "what would hit the public. You might as well pretend to say what ticket would turn up a prize in the lottery. It was not chance neither, but some unforeseen coincidence between the subject and the prevailing taste, that you could not possibly be a judge of. I had once painted two pictures—one of a Fortune-teller (a boy with a monkey) and another called The Visit to the Grandmother; and Raphael Smith came to me and wanted to engrave them, being willing to give a handsome sum for the first, but only to do the last as an experiment. He sold ten times as many of the last as of the first, and told me that there were not less than five different impressions done of it in Paris; and once, when I went to his house, to get one to complete a set of engravings after my designs, they asked me six guineas for a proof impression! This was too much, but I was delighted that I could not afford to pay for my own work, from the value that was set upon it." Cervantes, who was fifty-eight when he published the first part of Don Quixote, had, like Fielding, "written a considerable number of indifferent dramas which gave no indication of the immortal work which afterward astonished and delighted the world. He was the author of several tales, for which even his subsequent fame can procure very few readers, and would certainly have been forgotten if the lustre of his masterpiece had not shed its light upon everything which belonged to him. It was not till he was verging upon three-score that he hit upon the happy plan which was to exhibit his genius, and which nothing previously sufficed to display. Fielding was equally ignorant of his province. Writing for a subsistence, trying everything by turns, having the strongest interest in discovering how he could lay out his powers to the best advantage, he mistook his road, and only found it by chance. If Pamela had never existed, it is more than possible that English literature might have wanted Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia." Scott's conversation about his own productions, as recorded by Moore in his Diary, is curious, showing that he rather stumbled upon his talent than cultivated it originally. "Had begun Waverley long before, and then thrown it by, until having occasion for some money (to help his brother, I think), he bethought himself of it, but could not find the MSS." When he did, "made 3,000 pounds by Waverley."
It is set down as a striking commentary upon the taste of his contemporaries that Hogarth's six pictures of Marriage à la Mode were sold for nineteen pounds and six shillings, though fifty years afterward they brought one thousand three hundred and eighty pounds. The manuscript of Robinson Crusoe ran through the whole trade, nor would any one print it, though the writer, De Foe, was in good repute as an author. The bookseller who risked the publication was a speculator, not remarkable for discernment. The Vicar of Wakefield lay unpublished for two years after the publisher, Newberry, was importuned by Dr. Johnson to pay sixty pounds for it to save the author from distress. Paradise Lost made a narrow escape. Sterne found it hard to find a publisher for Tristram Shandy. The sermon in it, he says in the preface to his Sermons, was printed by itself some years before, but could find neither purchasers nor readers. When it was inserted in his eccentric work, with the advantage of Trim's fine reading, it met with a most favorable reception, and occasioned the others to be collected. Cowper's first volume of poems was published by Johnson, and fell dead from the press. Author and publisher were to incur equal loss. Cowper begged Johnson to forgive him his debt, and this was done. In return, Cowper sent Johnson his Task, saying: "You behaved generously to me on a former occasion; if you think it safe to publish this new work, I make you a present of it." Johnson published it. It became popular. The former volume was then sold with it. The profits to the publisher, it is said, were at least fifty thousand dollars. Cooper says that the first volume of The Spy was actually printed several months before he felt a sufficient inducement to write a line of the second. As the second volume, he says, was slowly printing, from manuscript that was barely dry when it went into the compositor's hands, the publisher intimated that the work might grow to a length that would consume the profits. To set his mind at rest, the last chapter was actually written, printed, and paged, several weeks before the chapters which preceded it were even thought of. The Culprit Fay, we are told by the biographer of Drake, was composed hastily among the Highlands of the Hudson, in the summer of 1819. The author was walking with some friends on a warm moonlight evening, when one of the party remarked that it would be difficult to write a fairy poem, purely imaginative, without the aid of human characters. When the party was reassembled two or three days afterward, The Culprit Fay was read to them, nearly as it is now printed. Drake placed a very modest estimate on his own productions, and it is believed that but a small portion of them have been preserved. When on his death-bed, a friend inquired of him what disposition he would have made of his poems. "Oh, burn them," he replied; "they are quite valueless." Written copies of a number of them were, however, in circulation, and some had been incorrectly printed in the periodicals; and for this reason was published the single collection of them which has appeared. A mere rumor that Erasmus' Colloquies had got into the Index Expurgatorius, sold an impression of four-and-twenty thousand copies, and made the fortune of the publisher. Fénelon's Adventures of Telemachus, which had hitherto remained in manuscript, was given to the world by the dishonesty of a servant who had been employed to have the work copied, but who sold it to a bookseller without disclosing the author's name. The king, having been told that it was from the pen of the Archbishop of Cambrai, and probably sharing an unfounded suspicion then current, that the book was a satire on the court, took measures to suppress it; but a few copies escaped seizure, and an imperfect edition was printed in Holland in 1699. Others followed rapidly, and for a long time the press was unable to keep up with the public demand. Sir Matthew Hale wrote four volumes in folio, "three of which I have read," says Baxter, "against atheism, Sadduceeism, and infidelity, to prove first the Deity, and then the immortality of man's soul, and then the truth of Christianity and the Holy Scripture, answering the infidel's objections against Scripture. It is strong and masculine, only too tedious for impatient readers. He said he wrote it only at vacant hours in his circuits, to regulate his meditations, finding, that while he wrote down what he thought on, his thoughts were the easier kept close to work, and kept in a method. But I could not persuade him to publish them."
One is tempted to speculate upon the books that never were published. As some of the best books have been written in prison or captivity, so some of like quality may have perished with their unfortunate authors. If so many great authors, like Dryden and Cervantes, and Le Sage and Spenser, almost starved, barely procuring a pittance for their published works, how many good works may not, in despair, have been destroyed by their authors. If so many great works were accidentally discovered in manuscript, how many as great may have perished in that form. "The Romans wrote their books either on parchment or on paper made of the Egyptian papyrus. The latter, being the cheapest, was, of course, the most commonly used. But after the communication between Europe and Egypt was broken off, on account of the latter having been seized upon by the Saracens, the papyrus was no longer in use in Italy or in other European countries. They were obliged, on that account, to write all their books upon parchment, and as its price was high, books became extremely rare, and of great value. We may judge of the scarcity of materials for writing them from one circumstance. There still remain several manuscripts of the eighth, ninth, and following centuries, written on parchment, from which some former writing had been erased, in order to substitute a new composition in its place. In this manner, it is probable, several books of the ancients perished. A book of Livy, or of Tacitus, might be erased, to make room for the legendary tale of a saint, or the superstitious prayers of a missal." Truly, a resurrection of the unpublished, to say the least, would expose an interesting mass of intellectual novelties. The book-tasters, wise as they think themselves, are very far from being unerring in their estimates of brain values, and better things than they have approved may have gone into the basket. The weather or bad chirography may have damned many a production of genius. The rejection of an article for a quarterly may have snuffed out the most promising talents. It is possible that some charitable reformer may have discovered a way to fuse sects and harmonize Christians, but was prevented from showing it to the world by the stupidity of printers!