[Footnote B: Guicciardini, Book II.]
[Footnote C: For the melancholy history of this devoted scholar, see note to the article on "The Rewards of Oriental Students," in "Calamities of Authors," p. 189.]
Their vengeance, as quickly kindled, lasts as long. Genius is a dangerous gift of nature. The same effervescent passions form a Catiline or a Cicero. Plato lays great stress on his man of genius possessing the most vehement passions, but he adds reason to restrain them. It is Imagination which by their side stands as their good or evil spirit. Glory or infamy is but a different direction of the same passion.
How are we to describe symptoms which, flowing from one source, yet show themselves in such opposite forms as those of an intermittent fever, a silent delirium, or a horrid hypochondriasm? Have we no other opiate to still the agony, no other cordial to warm the heart, than the great ingredient in the recipe of Plato's visionary man of genius—calm reason? Must men, who so rarely obtain this tardy panacea, remain with all their tortured and torturing passions about them, often self-disgusted, self-humiliated? The enmities of genius are often connected with their morbid imagination. These originate in casual slights, or in unguarded expressions, or in hasty opinions, or in witty derision, or even in the obtruding goodness of tender admonition. The man of genius broods over the phantom that darkens his feelings: he multiplies a single object; he magnifies the smallest; and suspicions become certainties. It is in this unhappy state that he sharpens his vindictive fangs, in a libel called his "Memoirs," or in another species of public outrage, styled a "Criticism."
We are told that COMINES the historian, when residing at the court of the Count de Charolois, afterwards Duke of Burgundy, one day returning from hunting, with inconsiderate jocularity sat down before the Count, and ordered the prince to pull off his boots. The Count would not affect greatness, and having executed his commission, in return for the princely amusement, the Count dashed the boot on Comines' nose, which bled; and from that time, he was mortified at the court of Burgundy, by retaining the nickname of the booted head. The blow rankled in the heart of the man of genius, and the Duke of Burgundy has come down to us in COMINE'S "Memoirs," blackened by his vengeance. Many, unknown to their readers, like COMINES, have had a booted head; but the secret poison is distilled on their lasting page, as we have recently witnessed in Lord Waldegrave's "Memoirs." Swift's perpetual malevolence to Dryden originated in that great poet's prediction, that "cousin Swift would never be a poet;" a prediction which the wit never could forget. I have elsewhere fully written a tale of literary hatred, where is seen a man of genius, in the character of GILBERT STUART, devoting a whole life to harassing the industry or the genius which he himself could not attain.[A]
[Footnote A: See "Calamities of Authors," pp. 131—139.]
A living Italian poet, of great celebrity, when at the court of Rome, presented a magnificent edition of his poetry to Pius VI. The bard, Mr. Hobhouse informs us, lived not in the good graces of his holiness, and although the pontiff accepted the volume, he did not forbear a severity of remark which could not fall unheeded by the modern poet; for on this occasion, repeating some verses of Metastasio, his holiness drily added, "No one now-a-days writes like that great poet." Never was this to be erased from memory: the stifled resentment of MONTI vehemently broke forth at the moment the French carried off Pius VI. from Rome. Then the long indignant secretary poured forth an invective more severe "against the great harlot," than was ever traced by a Protestant pen—MONTI now invoked the rock of Sardinia: the poet bade it fly from its base, that the last of monsters might not find even a tomb to shelter him. Such was the curse of a poet on his former patron, now an object of misery—a return for "placing him below Metastasio!"
The French Revolution affords illustrations of the worst human passions. When the wretched COLLOT D'HERBOIS was tossed up in the storm to the summit of power, a monstrous imagination seized him; he projected razing the city of Lyons and massacring its inhabitants. He had even the heart to commence, and to continue this conspiracy against human nature; the ostensible crime was royalism, but the secret motive is said to have been literary vengeance! As wretched a poet and actor as a man, D'Herbois had been hissed off the theatre at Lyons, and to avenge that ignominy, he had meditated over this vast and remorseless crime. Is there but one Collot D'Herbois in the universe? Long since this was written, a fact has been recorded of CHENIER, the French dramatic poet, which parallels the horrid tale of Collot D'Herbois, which some have been willing to doubt from its enormity. It is said, that this monster, in the revolutionary period, when he had the power to save the life of his brother André, while his father, prostrate before a wretched son, was imploring for the life of an innocent brother, remained silent; it is further said that he appropriated to himself a tragedy which he found among his brother's manuscripts. "Fratricide from literary jealousy," observes the relator of this anecdote, "was a crime reserved for a modern French revolutionist."[A] There are some pathethic stanzas which André was composing in his last moments, when awaiting his fate; the most pathetic of all stanzas is that one which he left unfinished—
Peut-être, avant que l'heure en cercle promenée
Ait posé, sur l'émail brillant,
Dans les soixante pas où sa route est bornée,
Son pied sonore et vigilant,
Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupière—
At this unfinished stanza was the pensive poet summoned to the guillotine!