oor Authors! Against no class of men have the acutely-pointed shafts of satire been more frequently darted. Congreve, who had so little cause to be ashamed of the name, yet persistently rejected the honour of being supposed to be one of the brotherhood. When Voltaire visited him, the French writer expressly stated that the compliment was addressed to the author, and not to merely Mr. Congreve. The latter remarked that he was a ‘gentleman,’ and not an author. Whereupon the polite Frenchman rejoined that if Congreve had been only a gentleman, he, the French author, would never have thought of calling upon him at all.
A wicked wit, some hundred and odd years ago, made the early pages of Sylvanus Urban lively by inventing a census of surviving English authors. These he set down in round numbers at three thousand, who had produced in the preceding year, of abortive works, 7,000; born dead, 3,000; and not one that survived the year itself. Three hundred and twenty perished by sudden death, and a few thousands went to line trunks, make sky-rocket cases, hold pies, or were consumed by worms. One thousand of these literary gentlemen are said to have died of lunacy, a rather greater number were ‘starved,’ seventeen were hanged, fifteen committed suicide, five pastoral poets died of fistula, others in various ways; while a difference was suggested as to the diet, lives, and deaths of aldermen and authors in a zero, indicating the number of writers who died of ‘surfeit.’
Perhaps one of the most singular reasons for founding a periodical, and undertaking much of the authorship and editorship, presents itself in the case of the celebrated French physician, Théophraste Renaudet. He had a number of nervous, anxious, restless patients, who required little more than to have their minds drawn from the unprofitable occupation of dwelling upon the condition of the body. The great doctor did not wish that the thoughts of his patients should be allowed to dwell very much upon anything. Books of science, politics, or polemical theology, were not at all what he required. The romances of the day were stilted, pompous things, quite as difficult for invalids to read as any of the inflated treatises on scientific, political, and theological subjects. Renaudet may be said to have been a pupil of the philosophical school of Hippias. That self-reliant teacher of Elis maintained that a portion at least of manly virtue consisted in being able to dispense with the assistance of other men. Hippias never allowed any man to help him in any matter wherein he could help himself. He was accordingly his own tailor, shoemaker, hairdresser, laundress, and cook! How the philosopher looked when he went abroad, or how he fared when he dined at home, it is at once awful and amusing to think of! Renaudet did not go quite so far as the Elian; but in case of his patients failing to find help in others, he took the matter into his own hands, and founded the Gazette de France. It was better, if not for himself, at least for his patients, than if he had discovered a new remedy for prevalent diseases. Those pleasant little paragraphs of news were as so many pleasant fillips to the lazy intelligences of the nervous. Those fresh supplies of little scandals were as fresh pinches of rappee to the arid nostril all athirst for dust. Those brief hints and innuendoes were as gentle titillations, not strong enough to exhaust, but just sufficient to exhilarate, refresh, and strengthen. Nervous patients recovered, many who might otherwise have become so did not fall ill, and every one was delighted with Renaudet’s attempt at authorship except his fellow-practitioners, the most of whom then lived upon the nerves of the fashionable public.
Renaudet’s authorship had a benevolent and unselfish motive. As an example of audacity in the same line, I know nothing that can compare with a circumstance which occurred in the middle of the last century. There was at that time in Oxford an honest watchmaker, named Greene. He was a great reader and a great admirer of Milton; but, like the artist who had just finished a painting on a signboard, and contemplated his performance with a commiserating thought of Titian, and the complacent cry of ‘Poor little Tit!’ so the Oxford watchmaker tapped his forehead, like poor André Chenier before execution, and thought he had ‘something there’ beyond any possession that could be boasted of by mortal sons of song. Accordingly, Greene published a specimen of a new version of Paradise Lost, in blank verse of the watchmaker’s own adaptation, ‘by which,’ he modestly remarked, ‘that amazing work is brought somewhat nearer the summit of perfection.’ Poor Greene’s ‘summit of perfection’ might lead one to believe that his ideas of improvement were not directed towards Milton only, but that he wished to give a new version to the old joke, the point of which lay in ‘the height of acme’!
It is a singular fact that one of the best literal renderings of Milton into a foreign language is one into French by Jean de Diur. It is lineal, metaphrastic, and literal; consequently you have, as it were, the words of the song, but only faint, or rather no echoes of the music. Nevertheless, the patience and conscientiousness of the translator are to be seen in the fidelity with which he has interpreted the significance of the terms.
Another original phase of authorship may be here recorded, since it is in connection with Milton. While the Oxford watchmaker was carrying Paradise Lost to the summit of perfection by his improvements, Landor was carrying through the press his Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns. The author described the attempt as one hitherto never made in prose or rhyme. The method by which he sought to prove his case against Milton was by naming certain authors whom he supposed the poet to have consulted, and then giving quotations from them to expose Milton’s plagiarisms. The case startled the world only for a while. Competent defenders of Milton’s authorship arose, and they proved that Milton had not plagiarised from the sources named by Landor, but that the latter had forged his quotations in order to traduce Milton! The discovery made every one eager to avoid Landor as a rogue, and to possess his book as a curiosity.
A French author flung his poisoned dart also at Milton. Voltaire accused him of taking his epic from an old Italian mystery, the Adamo, by Andréivi. But Milton has had gallant champions in French authors, too. Their judgment is, that if Milton created his great epic out of the chaos of the old mystery, he, in a certain sense, resembled the Creator, who, out of brute clay, created man in the image of the Creator himself.
Cædmon, in Anglo-Saxon, and St. Avitus, in Latin, likewise treated of the Creation and the Fall, long before Milton. But, as another French author, M. Guizot, has remarked, ‘It is of little importance to Milton’s glory whether he was acquainted with them or not. He was one of those who imitate when they please, for they invent when they choose, and they invent even while imitating.’ True authorship could not be more happily defined than under those words; and they may be applied in reference to another attempt to question Milton’s originality, in the statement that he founded his epic on the old drama Adamo Caduto, by Salandra. Moreover, there is nothing more in common between Milton and his predecessors than that he selected a subject which they had sung before him. Their tune is on an oaten reed; but Milton sits down to the organ, and billows of sound roll forth to awe and enchant the world.
In our own country Milton made but ‘slow way,’ not merely with the general but with the educated public. Dryden supposed he wrote Paradise Lost in blank verse because he was unable to do it in rhyme! Johnson depreciated him by asserting that if he could cut a colossus out of the rock he could not carve heads upon cherry-stones; as if Milton’s briefer poems and sonnets were unworthy of the author of the great epic! Hannah More united with Johnson, not only in thinking these briefer poems bad, but in critically examining why they were so! But there is no end to the vagaries of authors when judging of other writers. Dryden, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, makes Shakspeare the Homer and Johnson the Virgil of dramatic composition; but, in his Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada, he informs us that Shakspeare abounds in solecisms and nonsense, in lameness of plot, meanness of writing, in comedy that cannot raise mirth, and tragedy that cannot excite sympathy; and, most wonderful of all, placing Shakspeare on a level with Fletcher, he says: ‘Had they lived now they would doubtless have written more correctly’! If you would know to what correct level Dryden thought Shakspeare might have been brought, had he had the good luck to live later, the knowledge is vouchsafed in the assertion that ‘the well placing of words for the sweetness of pronunciation was not known till Mr. Waller introduced it.’ This is quite as bad as the criticism of Addison, who bracketed Lee and Shakspeare together, accused them of a spurious sublimity, and gave it as his opinion that ‘in those authors the affectation of greatness often hurts the perspicuity of style’!