With these explanations of what are called the vanity and egotism of Genius, be it remembered, that the sense of their own sufficiency is assumed by men at their own risk. The great man who thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his fire. It is indeed otherwise with his unlucky brethren, with whom an illusion of literary vanity may end in the aberrations of harmless madness; as it happened to PERCIVAL STOCKDALE. After a parallel between himself and Charles XII. of Sweden, he concludes that "some parts will be to his advantage, and some to mine;" but in regard to fame, the main object between himself and Charles XII., Percival imagined that "his own will not probably take its fixed and immovable station, and shine with its expanded and permanent splendour, till it consecrates his ashes, till it illumines his tomb." After this the reader, who may never have heard of the name of Percival Stockdale, must be told that there exist his own "Memoirs of his Life and Writings."[A] The memoirs of a scribbler who saw the prospects of life close on him while he imagined that his contemporaries were unjust, are instructive to literary men. To correct, and to be corrected, should be their daily practice, that they may be taught not only to exult in themselves, but to fear themselves.
[Footnote A: I have sketched a character of PERCIVAL STOCKDALE, in
"Calamities of Authors" (pp. 218—224); it was taken ad vivum.]
It is hard to refuse these men of genius that aura vitalis, of which they are so apt to be liberal to others. Are they not accused of the meanest adulations? When a young writer experiences the notice of a person of some eminence, he has expressed himself in language which transcends that of mortality. A finer reason than reason itself inspires it. The sensation has been expressed with all its fulness by Milton:—
The debt immense of endless gratitude.
Who ever pays an "immense debt" in small sums? Every man of genius has left such honourable traces of his private affections; from LOCKE, whose dedication of his great work is more adulative than could be imagined from a temperate philosopher, to CHURCHILL, whose warm eulogiums on his friends beautifully contrast with his satire. Even in advanced age, the man of genius dwells on the praise he caught in his youth from veteran genius, which, like the aloe, will flower at the end of life. When Virgil was yet a youth, it is said that Cicero heard one of his eclogues, and exclaimed with his accustomed warmth,
Magna spes altera Romæ!
"The second hope of mighty Rome!" intending by the first either himself or Lucretius. The words of Cicero were the secret honey on which the imagination of Virgil fed for many a year; for in one of his latest productions, the twelfth book of the Æneid, he applies these very words to Ascanius. So long had the accents of Cicero's praise lingered in the poet's ear!
This extreme susceptibility of praise in men of genius is the same exuberant sensibility which is so alive to censure. I have elsewhere fully shown how some have died of criticism.[A] The self-love of genius is perhaps much more delicate than gross.
But this fatal susceptibility is the cause of that strange facility which has often astonished the world, by the sudden transitions of sentiment which literary characters have frequently exhibited. They have eulogised men and events which they had reprobated, and reprobated what they had eulogised. The recent history of political revolutions has furnished some monstrous examples of this subservience to power. Guicciardini records one of his own times, which has been often repeated in ours. JOVIANUS PONTANUS, the secretary of Ferdinand, King of Naples, was also selected to be the tutor of the prince, his son. When Charles VIII. of France invaded Naples, Pontanus was deputed to address the French conqueror. To render himself agreeable to the enemies of his country, he did not avoid expatiating on the demerits of his expelled patrons: "So difficult it is," adds the grave and dignified historian, "for ourselves to observe that moderation and those precepts which no man knew better than Pontanus, who was endowed with such copious literature, and composed with such facility in moral philosophy, and possessed such acquirements in universal erudition, that he had made himself a prodigy to the eye of the world."[B] The student, occupied by abstract pursuits, may not indeed always take much interest in the change of dynasties; and perhaps the famous cancelled dedication to Cromwell, by the learned orientalist Dr. CASTELL,[C] who supplied its place by another to Charles II., ought not to be placed to the account of political tergiversation. But the versatile adoration of the continental savans of the republic or the monarchy, the consul or the emperor, has inflicted an unhealing wound on the literary character; since, like PONTANUS, to gratify their new master, they had not the greatness of mind to save themselves from ingratitude to their old.
[Footnote A: In the article entitled "Anecdotes of Censured Authors," in vol. i. of "Curiosities of Literature.">[