[Footnote B: Like Hogarth, when he attempted to engrave his own works, his originality of style made them differ from the tamer and more mechanical labours of the professional engraver. They have consequently less beauty, but greater vigour.—ED.]
But even such pages as those of BARRY'S are the aliment of young genius. Before we can discern the beautiful, must we not be endowed with the susceptibility of love? Must not the disposition be formed before even the object appears? I have witnessed the young artist of genius glow and start over the reveries of the uneducated BARRY, but pause and meditate, and inquire over the mature elegance of REYNOLDS; in the one he caught the passion for beauty, and in the other he discovered the beautiful; with the one he was warm and restless, and with the other calm and satisfied.
Of the difficulties overcome in the self-education of genius, we have a remarkable instance in the character of MOSES MENDELSSOHN, on whom literary Germany has bestowed the honourable title of "the Jewish Socrates."[A] So great apparently were the invincible obstructions which barred out Mendelssohn from the world of literature and philosophy, that, in the history of men of genius, it is something like taking in the history of man the savage of Aveyron from his woods—who, destitute of a human language, should at length create a model of eloquence; who, without the faculty of conceiving a figure, should at length be capable of adding to the demonstrations of Euclid; and who, without a complex idea and with few sensations, should at length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics, open to the world a new view of the immortality of the soul!
[Footnote A: I composed the life of MENDELSSOHN so far back as in 1798, in a periodical publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their notices; a juvenile production, which happened to excite the attention of the late BARRY, then not personally known to me; and he gave all the immortality his poetical pencil could bestow on this man of genius, by immediately placing in his Elysium of Genius MENDELSSOHN shaking hands with ADDISON, who wrote on the truth of the Christian religion, and near LOCKE, the English master of MENDELSSOHN'S mind.]
Mendelssohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a village in Germany, received an education completely rabbinical, and its nature must be comprehended, or the term of education would be misunderstood. The Israelites in Poland and Germany live with all the restrictions of their ceremonial law in an insulated state, and are not always instructed in the language of the country of their birth. They employ for their common intercourse a barbarous or patois Hebrew; while the sole studies of the young rabbins are strictly confined to the Talmud, of which the fundamental principle, like the Sonna of the Turks, is a pious rejection of every species of profane learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls in the understanding and the faith of man, was to shut out what the imitative Catholics afterwards called heresy. It is, then, these numerous folios of the Talmud which the true Hebraic student contemplates through all the seasons of life, as the Patuecos in their low valley imagine their surrounding mountains to be the confines of the universe.
Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelssohn's first studies; but even in his boyhood this conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his spirits, which affected his life ever after. Rejecting the Talmudical dreamers, he caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated Maimonides; and his native sagacity was already clearing up the surrounding darkness. An enemy not less hostile to the enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, presented itself in the indigence of his father, who was compelled to send away the youth on foot to Berlin, to find labour and bread.
At Berlin, Mendelssohn becomes an amanuensis to another poor rabbin, who could only still initiate him into the theology, the jurisprudence, and the scholastic philosophy of his people. Thus, he was as yet no farther advanced in that philosophy of the mind in which he was one day to be the rival of Plato and Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature which was finally to place him among the first polished critics of Germany.
Some unexpected event occurs which gives the first great impulse to the mind of genius. Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician. Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached each other by the same sympathies, and communicating in the only language which Mendelssohn could speak, the Polander voluntarily undertook his literary education.
Then was seen one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the history of modern literature. Two houseless Hebrew youths might be discovered, in the moonlit streets of Berlin, sitting in retired corners, or on the steps of some porch, the one instructing the other, with a Euclid in his hand; but what is more extraordinary, it was a Hebrew version, composed by the master for a pupil who knew no other language. Who could then have imagined that the future Plato of Germany was sitting on those steps!
The Polander, whose deep melancholy had settled on his heart, died—yet he had not lived in vain, since the electric spark that lighted up the soul of Mendelssohn had fallen from his own.