“Fortune at last suffered herself to be touched by my sorrows. Three years had I been vainly seeking some humble form of employment, when, urged by a terrible necessity in the beginning of 1804, I sent a letter and verses to M. Lucien Bonaparte. My gold watch had been long where I left it pledged at the Mont de Piété. My wardrobe had dwindled to three old patched and often mended shirts, a threadbare overcoat also carefully adorned with patches, with one pair of trousers with a newly discovered hole in the knee, and a pair of boots which filled me with despair whenever I cleaned them, they grew so rapidly worse. I had posted to M. Bonaparte four or five hundred verses, and had told no one that I had done so, so many applications had been fruitless.”
One day, while sitting in his garret, needle in hand, eyeing lugubriously the rent in his trousers, and thinking over some bitter misanthropical verses which he was then writing, a letter was brought to him. It seemed a letter of consequence—the handwriting was strange. Trembling with excitement, he broke the seal. Joy! joy! joy! The Senator Bonaparte desired to see him!
“It was not,” he wrote, “my fortune that I first thought of, but Glory! My eyes were full of tears, and I thanked God, whom in my moments of prosperity I never forgot.”
And yet of such men as these Thackeray wrote: “Bread is the main incentive. Do not let us try to blink this fact or imagine that the men of the press are working for their honour and glory or go onward impelled by the inevitable afflatus of genius.”
The elder Disraeli, who said, “Great authors sustain their own genius by a sense of their own glory,” when Dr. Johnson expressed views on this subject according to some extent with Thackeray’s, called them “commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing views of human nature,” and complained that they lowered genius to the level of a machine, only to be set in action by a force exterior to itself.
But doctors disagree, and opinions on every subject always differ. As mentioned by me elsewhere, one of the first poets who tried to live by his pen was Robert Greene, whose melancholy story is one of the most degrading and painful passages in literary biography. He lived in the days of good Queen Bess, and has left his own records of forlorn and miserable experience. Isaac Disraeli calls him “the great patriarch and primeval dealer in English literature, the most facetious, profligate, and indefatigable of the Scribleri family.” Quaint Anthony Wood, sneering at him and his entire fraternity, as he often did, said, “He wrote to maintain his wife and that high, loose course of living which poets generally follow;” one accusation being about as true as the other, for so far from maintaining his wife, he shamefully deserted both her and her child, leaving her foodless; and the Elizabethan poets are said on the whole to have been thrifty, god-fearing men, leading sober and steady lives. Charles Knight wrote of him as one who was made desperate and reckless by wrongs and neglect, but the pamphlet he wrote called ‘The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts,’ taken with his other confession, shows him to have been, as Mr. A. H. Wall said (in his ‘Poets and Players of Shakespeare’s Time’), “an entirely bad and worthless fellow, who disgusted his fellow-poets of the Bankside, and plunged into such disgraceful excesses that he became shunned and contemned by them, finding a welcome nowhere but in the lowest haunts of vice and profligacy.” This was the man who fell foul of his fellow-players and the player-poets, calling them “apes,” “rude grooms,” “buckram gentlemen,” and “painted monsters,” who attacked young Shakespeare when he was dressing up, improving, and re-writing old plays, “as an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,” and aroused our great bard’s many friends to anger and indignation by saying he had “a tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, and was a bad actor, conceited enough to suppose himself as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best, one who was vain enough to imagine himself an absolute Johannes Factotum, the only Shakespeare in the country:” accusations which even Henry Cheetle, who was concerned in their publication, afterwards denounced as slanderous and spiteful, saying, “I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself hath seen his (Shakespeare’s) demeanour no less civil than he is excellent in the quality he professes, besides divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art.”
Greene spent his time now in debauchery and drunkenness, now homeless, penniless, and starving, one extreme following the other with fearful frequency and rapidity. A contemporary poet, Gabriel Harvey, wrote of him as follows:
“Who in London hath not heard of his (Greene’s) dissolute and licentious living, his fond disguisinge of a Master of Arts with ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company, of his vaine glorious and Thrasonicall brassinge; his piperly extemporising and Tarletonizing; his apeish counterfeiting of every ridiculous and absurd toy ... hys villainous cogging and foisting, his monstrous swearinge and horrible forswearing, his impious profaning of sacred textes; his other scandalous and blasphemous ravinge: his riotous and outrageous surfeitinge: his continual shifting of lodgings; his plausable musteringe and banquettynge of roysterly acquaintance at his first comminge; his beggarly departing in every hostesses debt; his infamous resorting to the Banckside, Shoreditch, Southwarke, and other filthy haunts; his obscure lurkinge in basest corners; his pawning of his sword, cloake, and what not, when money came short?” etc.
a catalogue of monstrous crimes, vices, and follies (which fills page after page) fully borne out by Greene’s own confessions.
He wrote of himself,