It was sunset on the Arno. Far down the river, over mountain ranges where snow yet lingered, a warm tint, half rose and half amethyst, glowed along the horizon; beside the low parapet that bordered the street people were loitering back from their afternoon promenade at the Cascine: here a priest, there a soldier, now an Englishman on horseback, and then a bearded artist; sometimes an oval-faced contadina, the broad brim of whose finely-woven straw hat flapped over his eyes of mellow jet; and again a trig nurse, with Saxon ringlets, dragging a petulant urchin along; and over all these groups and figures was shed the beautiful smile of parting day; and by them, under graceful bridges, flowed the turbid stream, its volume doubled by the spring freshets. I surveyed the panorama from an overhanging balcony, where I stood awaiting the appearance of a friend upon whom I had called. Hearing a movement behind, I stepped back into the salon, and found a middle-aged gentleman seated on a divan near the window. We exchanged salutations and began to converse. He alluded, in unexceptionable English, to the beauty of the hour. ‘I came here from Geneva,’ he said. ‘There I work—in Italy I recreate; and it is wonderful how this country ministers to intellectual repose, even by the very associations it excites. We feel a dream-like relation with the past, and enter readily, for a time, into the dolce-farniente spirit of the people; and then return to task-work invigorated and with new zest.’ There was a bland, self-possessed, and paternal look about this chance acquaintance that insensibly won my confidence and respect. He was the image of a wise and serene maturity. His ample brow, his strong physique, his affable manner, and kindly eye, suggested experience, intelligence, and benignity. I was certain that he was a philosopher of some kind, and fancied him an optimist; but the utter absence of pretension and the simple candour of his address gave no hint of a man of renown. Accordingly, I soon found myself engaged in a most pleasant, and to me instructive colloquy. Following up the hint he had thrown out, I spoke of the difficulty of combining mental toil with health—reverting in my own mind to our American race of scholars, a majority of whom are confirmed invalids. ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘there is vast error on this subject. Be assured that we were intended for intellectual labour, and that there is a way of making it subservient to health. I will tell you a few rules founded on experience. Vary the kind of work—let it be research one hour, meditation another; collation to-day, and revision to-morrow. Do this on system; give the first part of the day to the hardest study, the afternoon to exercise, and the evening to social intercourse; let the mind be tasked when the brain is most vigorous—that is, after sleep; and woo the latter blessing, not in the feverish hour of thought and emotion, but after the gentle exercise of the mind, which comes from pastime and friendliness.’ I looked at the hale, contented face of the speaker, about whom no sign of nervous irritability or exhaustion was discoverable, and asked myself what experience of mental toil could have led him to such inferences. He looked like a temperate country gentleman, or unambitious and well-to-do citizen. He then spoke of the changes he observed upon each successive visit to Italy, of the climate of Switzerland, and the society of Geneva; then he referred to America, divining at once that it was my country, and exhibiting entire familiarity with all that had been accomplished there in literature. He betrayed a keen sense of enjoyment, recognized a genial influence in the scene before us, and gradually infected me with that agreeable feeling only to be derived from what poor Cowper used to call ‘comfortable people.’ I led him to speak of his own method of life, which was one of the most philosophical order. He considered occasional travel and prudent habits the best hygiène for a man of sedentary pursuits; and the great secret both of health and successful industry the absolute yielding up of one’s consciousness to the business and the diversion of the hour—never permitting the one to infringe in the least degree upon the other. I felt an instinctive respect toward him, but at the same time entirely at home in his company; the gentleman and the scholar appeared to me admirably fused in, without overlaying, the man. Presently the friend we mutually expected came in, and introduced me to Sismondi. I was fresh from his Italian Republics and Literature of the South of Europe, and he realized my ideal of a humane and earnest historian.
Quite in contrast with this tranquil and robust votary of letters was the appearance and manner of Silvio Pellico. No one who has ever read the chronicle of his imprisonments can forget the gentle and aspiring nature just blooming into poetic development, which, by the relentless fiat of Austrian tyranny, was cut off in a moment from home, intelligent companionship, and graceful activity, and subjected to the loneliness, privation, and torments of long and solitary confinement; nor is the spirit in which he met the bitter reverse less memorable than its tragic detail—recorded with so much simplicity, and borne with such loving faith. When I arrived in Turin he was still an object of espionage, and it was needful to seek him with caution. Agreeably to instructions previously received, I went to a café near the Strada Alfieri, just at nightfall, and watched for the arrival of an abbé remarkable for his manly beauty. I handed him the card of a mutual friend, and made known my wishes. The next day he conducted me through several arcades, and by many a group of noble-looking Piedmontese soldiers, to a gateway, thence up a long flight of steps to a door, at which he gave a significant knock. In a few moments it was quietly opened. He whispered to the old serva, and we tarried in an ante-chamber until a diminutive figure in black appeared, who received me with a pensive kindliness that, to one acquainted with Le Mie Prigioni, was fraught with pathos. I beheld in the pallor of that mild face and expanded brow, and the purblind eyes, the blight of a dungeon. His manner was subdued and nervous, and his very tones melancholy. I was unprepared to find, after years of liberty, the effects of his experience so visible, and felt almost guilty of profane curiosity in having thus intruded upon his cherished seclusion. I had known other victims of the same infernal tyranny; but they were men of sterner mould, who had resisted their cruel fate by the force of will rather than the patience of resignation. Pellico’s very delicacy of organization barbed the arrows of persecution; and when at length he was released, loneliness, hope deferred, and mental torture had crushed the energy of his nature. The sweetness of his autobiography was but the fragrance of the trampled flower—too unelastic ever again to rise up in its early beauty. A smile lighted up his brooding expression when I told him of the deep sympathy his book had excited in America, and he grasped my hand with momentary ardour; but the man too plainly reflected the martyr. The stifling air he breathed under the leads of Venice and the damps of his Spielberg cell seemed yet to weigh upon his soul; no glimmer of the patriotic fire which beams from Francesca da Rimini, no ray of the vivacious observation that beguiled his solitude and quickened his pen, redeemed the hopeless air of the captive poet; the shadow of the power he had braved yet lay on his form and face; and only the solace of filial love and the consolations of religion gave hope to his existence.
That is but a vulgar idea of authorship which estimates its worth by the caprices of fashion or the prestige of immediate success. Like art, its value is intrinsic. There are books, as there are pictures, which do not catch the thoughtless eye; and yet are the gems of the virtuoso, the oracles of the philosopher, and the consolations of the poet. We love authors, as we love individuals, according to our latent affinities; and the extent of the popular appreciation is no more a standard to us than the world’s estimate of our friend, whose nature we have tested by faithful companionship and sympathetic intercourse. He who has not the mental independence to be loyal to his own intellectual benefactors is as much a heathen as one who repudiates his natural kin. Indeed, an honest soul clings more tenaciously to neglected merit in authors as in men; there is a chivalry of taste as of manners. Doubtless Lamb’s zest for the old English dramatists, Addison’s admiration of Milton’s poetry, and Carlyle’s devotion to German favourites, were all the more earnest and keen because they were ignored by their neighbours. In the library, an original mind is conscious of special and comparatively obscure friends; as the lover of nature has his pet flower, and the lover of art his favourite old master. It is well to obey these decided idiosyncrasies. They point, like the divining-rod, to hidden streams peculiarly adapted to our refreshment. I knew an old merchant that read no book except Boswell’s Johnson, and a black and hump-backed cook whose only imaginative feast was the Arabian Nights.
No one really can, indeed, love authors as a class without a catholic taste. If thus equipped, how inexhaustible the field! He is independent of the world. Is he retrospective in mood? Plutarch will array before him a procession of heroes and sages. Does he yearn for conviviality? Fielding will take him to a jolly tavern. Is he eager for intellectual communion? Landor is at hand with a choice of ‘imaginary conversations.’ Would he exercise causality? Bishop Butler will put to the test his power of reasoning. Is he in need of a little gossip by way of recreation? Horace Walpole will amuse by the hour. Is the society of a sensible woman wanted? Call in Maria Edgeworth or Jane Austin. Is the bitterness of a jilted lover in his heart? Locksley Hall will relieve it. Would he stroll in the forest? Evelyn or Bryant will take him there in a moment. By the sea-shore? Crabbe and Byron are sympathetic guides. Are his thoughts comprehensive and inclined for the generalities of literature? Open De Staël or Hallam.
The relation of authorship to society varies with political influences and average culture. The class of degraded penwrights so often alluded to by Fielding, the ferocious quarrels recorded of and by Pope and Johnson with critics and publishers, are phases of literary life, which, if not extinct, have become essentially modified with the progress of civilization. Yet a quite recent quarterly reviewer speaks of this class of men as ‘a kind of ticket-of-leave lunatics;’ and modern experiences, if less dark than old annals of Grub Street, include some quite as remarkable instances of reckless extravagance in prosperity and barbarous neglect in adversity. The Bohemian class is confined to no epoch or country. Yet charming is the group of authors that illustrate and signalize every period of British history—an intellectual alleviation to the monotony of fashionable, and the rancour of political life. Every era of French government also has its brilliant salon of philosophers and poets. Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Montagu assembled, in their day, as exclusive a coterie as used to cluster about Dryden’s chair, dine with Sir Joshua Reynolds, keep Burns’s birthday at Edinburgh with Scott at the head of the table, rally at Jeffrey’s call, dispute with Hume, chat over Rogers’s breakfast, fraternize with the lakers at Keswick and Grasmere, or pass an evening with Lamb. From the days of Shakspeare to those of Evelyn and Sydney Smith, from La Fontaine to Lamartine, from Klopstock to Goëthe, and from Mather to Channing, every cultivated city abroad and at home has boasted its author circle, to which kindred tastes ever revert with zest, and whose traditions as well as ‘works’ prolong a spell more refined and memorable than any other social prestige. Weimar, Bordeaux, Florence, Edinburgh, and Boston, as well as London and Paris, are thus consecrated by reminiscences of Goëthe, Schiller, Montaigne, Alfieri, Wilson, Mackenzie, some Concord Sage, or Spanish Historian, some Autocrat, Wizard of the North, or Ettrick Shepherd of the pen. To have seen Niccolini on the ‘Lung’ Arno; Elizabeth Browning at a Casa Guidi window; Rossini, the historical novelist, at a bookstore in Pisa; Hillhouse under the New Haven elms; Hawthorne at the Athenæum; Elia at his India-house desk; poor Heine on his ‘mattress grave,’ or Freiligrath at his bank-counter, requires but the perspective of time to be as impressive or winsome an experience as the first survivors of Pope, Chatterton, Milton, or Burke realized in rehearsing their personal cognizance of these famous authors. Such is the instinctive attraction of congenial or eminent authorship. If this subject were nomenclated and analyzed in the naturalistic way, there is scarcely a sphere of humanity or a form of character which might not be identified with or illustrated by authorship; the mad, the mendicant, the charlatan—combative, contemplative, heroic, and sybarite,—are but a few of the varieties which literary biography reveals. Their amours, diseases, profits, calamities, triumphs, quarrels, personal tastes and habits, domestic life, and most individual traits and fortunes, have been minutely recorded, so as to form, on the whole, the best and most accessible psychological cabinet for the student of human nature. Of no other class of men and women with whom we never had personal acquaintance, do we know so many details; Chatterton’s despair, Young’s skull-light, Milton’s organ, Berkeley’s tar-water, Coleridge’s opium, Swift’s lady-loves, Cowper’s hymns and hares, Rogers’s table-talk, Scott’s dogs, Steele’s debts, Lamb’s folios, are as familiar to us as if they appertained to some neighbour or kinsman. The prisons of Cervantes, Raleigh, Pellico, Hunt, and Montgomery, have a pathetic charm which no other record of captivity boasts. Even the self-delusions of authors awaken a considerate interest; the mistaken judgment of Petrarch and Milton, in regard to the comparative merit of their writings; and the exaggerated estimate of their own verses by such able statesmen as Frederic and Richelieu, tend to enhance the mysteries of the craft and sanction its illusions. But it must be confessed that the romance of authorship is fast disappearing in its reality; so numerous have become the votaries of a once rare pursuit, so common the renown, so universal the practice, that the individual and characteristic, the curious and interesting elements thereof, are more and more merged in the commonplace and familiar.
A distinction has often been insisted on between the critical and the creative in literature; but modern criticism, in its best development, is essentially reproductive; so intimate, deep, and affluent is its dealing with authors, that they often are restored in all their vital worth; and the process has endeared such writers as Lamb, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Arnold, and St. Beuve, as true intellectual benefactors. Such philosophical and æsthetic interpreters of authorship have engendered an eclectic appreciation and enjoyment of authors, and made us what Allston calls ‘wide likers.’ Hence the prevalence and promise of what may be called a cosmopolitan, in distinction to a provincial taste, whereby we learn to value the greatest diversities of style, subject, and character in literature. Fastidious and severely disciplined minds, indeed, coldly ignore certain authors, and warmly espouse others; but to a spirit at once generous and cultivated, sympathetic and intelligent, though a special charm will invest favourite authors, all of the fraternity who are genuine have a recognized claim to grateful recognition; and even the unequal and incongruous development of modern English literature, incident to the absence of what Matthew Arnold calls ‘any centre of intelligent and urbane spirit,’ like the French Academy. Desirable as such a discipline and standard is in quelling eccentricity and incorrectness, the free and energetic development, the honest, though sometimes rude, exercise of authorship in our vernacular, is no small compensation. We confess a partiality for the richly-diversified phases of mental life thus induced—an eclectic relish for the varieties of national and personal characteristics. The artistic French, the meditative German, the practical English writers, have each their attraction and use; the desultory style of Richter, the quaint individuality of Lamb, the verbose dignity of Johnson, the mosaic finish of Gray, the grotesque eloquence of Carlyle, the flowing rhetoric of Macaulay, Wordsworth’s pastoral isolation, Scott’s feudal enthusiasm, Byron’s intense consciousness, Shelley’s disinterested idealism, the homely images of Crabbe, and the sensuous luxury of Keats, are all, in their way and at times, accordant with our mental wants, congenial to our receptive moods. Why should not we tolerate and enjoy the various elements of literature as fully and fondly as those of nature and society? Does it not argue a narrowness of mind inconsistent with genuine intellectual and moral health to perversely confine our appreciation of authorship to certain schools, forms, and individuals? Are not the philosophical, the piquant, the earnest, the playful, the solemn, gay, impressive, winsome, acute, wise, and humorous traits and triumphs of written thought as legitimate, in their infinite variety, as means of human culture, discipline, and pleasure, as the myriad tints and tones of nature, and the diversities of character and manners? A true lover of authors will not only find something to enjoy and appropriate in the most diverse forms of expression and qualities of genius, both in the literature of power and in that of knowledge as finely discriminated by De Quincey; but will separate the inspired and the journeyman work of each author, and do justice to what is genuine while repudiating the conventional. If what Goëthe maintained is literally true, and genuine authorship is the reflex of consciousness upon outward life, then all its spontaneous products must have a vital element of human life, love, and truth, more or less congenial to all readers of candid, clear, and humane instincts: for we agree with a liberal and acute critic, when he says that the gift of literary genius ‘lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere—by a certain order of ideas; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations, making beautiful works of them.’
It is a new and glorious era in our experience of books when the vital significance of authorship is heartily realized; dilletantism, excusable in the novice, gives place to the worship of truth. To write for the mere sake of writing, to amuse with the pen, becomes in our estimation what it is—a thing of less interest than the most simple and familiar phenomena of nature. As life reveals itself, and character matures, we long, above all, for reality; we perceive that growth is our welfare, and that earnestness, faith, and new truth are the only joy of a manly intellect. Then we read to nerve our moral energies, to extend the scope of perception, and to deepen the experience of the soul: the butterflies of literature allure no longer; the imitators we pass by; but the deep thinkers, the original, the brave, lead us on to explore, analyze, and conquer. ‘Literature,’ says Schlegel, ‘according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infamy, a pastime, a dry labour, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue;’ and this diversity is true, not only of authors in general, but sometimes of the same individual. Many a poet, whose early utterance was inspired, has degenerated into a hack, a truckster, and a mercenary penman; and many a youthful dabbler in letters, by some deep experience, has been matured into the bold advocate or heroic pioneer in the world of thought.
We soon learn heartily to sympathize with one of the unfortunate originals of Goëthe’s Werther, and declare with him,—‘I have resolved in future to take good care how I write anything to an author, save what all the world may see;’ only extending the prudential resolve to conversation,—for whatever advance has been made in refinement in the use of language, in the abuse of confidence modern writers are so destitute of scruples, that the sanctities of life and social intercourse have no greater or more profane intruder than the author.
Nor is the ‘heart of courtesy’ the only high quality risked by the vocation; it almost seems, in vain and unchivalric natures, to sap manhood itself. Some one has said,—‘The man who has learned to read has lost one portion of his courage; if he writes verses, he has lost a double portion.’ There is a fatal fluency, an arrogant expressiveness, whereby the robust and honest material of character is, as it were, evaporated in words; for nothing characterizes the genuine author more than a reticent tone, an integrity of utterance, which makes it apparent that his authorship, instead of a graft, is a growth of his best humanity. So proverbial is the social barrenness of the craft, in its average conventional scope, that a facetious Florentine barber, in one of the best of modern historical novels, Romola, is quite appropriately made to say,—‘I am sorely afraid that the good wine of my understanding is going to run off at the spigot of authorship, and I shall be left an empty cask, with an odour of dregs, like many other incomparable geniuses of my acquaintance.’ All meanness is disenchanting; but selfish economy of intellectual treasures, and egotistical insensibility to the merit of others, not only robs the author of all sympathetic charm, but almost invariably signalizes his essential mediocrity or unfounded pretensions.
Under the two diverse aspects of an inspiration and a career, authorship thus offers the extremes of attraction and antagonism to candid and earnest souls; if the spontaneous gift and charm of the former are justly endeared to all lovers of humanity, the artificial conditions, worldly motives, and forced relations of the latter, often dispel the illusions of fame in the realities of vulgar notoriety and mercenary zeal. We can well understand how a reverent, delicate, and true nature, like Maurice de Guèrin, shrinks from professional authorship, when the original beauty and truth of his utterances led his friends to urge that vocation upon him: ‘The literary career,’ he writes, ‘seems to me unreal, both in its own essence and in the rewards one seeks from it; and, therefore, fatally marred by a secret absurdity.’