[Footnote A: His series of pictures for the walls of the meeting-room of the Society of Arts in the Adelphi.—ED.]
POUSSIN persisted in refusing a higher price than that affixed to the back of his pictures, at the time he was living without a domestic. The great oriental scholar, ANQUETIL DE PERRON, is a recent example of the literary character carrying his indifference to privations to the very cynicism of poverty; and he seems to exult over his destitution with the same pride as others would expatiate over their possessions. Yet we must not forget, to use the words of Lord Bacon, that "judging that means were to be spent upon learning, and not learning to be applied to means," DE PERRON refused the offer of thirty thousand livres for his copy of the "Zend-avesta." Writing to some Bramins, he describes his life at Paris to be much like their own. "I subsist on the produce of my literary labours without revenue, establishment, or place. I have no wife nor children; alone, absolutely free, but always the friend of men of probity. In a perpetual war with my senses, I triumph over the attractions of the world or I contemn them."
This ascetic existence is not singular. PARINI, a great modern poet of Italy, whom the Milanese point out to strangers as the glory of their city, lived in the same state of unrepining poverty. Mr. Hobhouse has given us this self-portrait of the poet:—
Me, non nato a percotere
Le dure illustri porte,
Nudo accorra, ma libero
Il regno della morte.
Naked, but free! A life of hard deprivations was long that of the illustrious LINNÆUS. Without fortune, to that great mind it never seemed necessary to acquire any. Perigrinating on foot with a stylus, a magnifying-glass, and a basket for plants, he shared the rustic meal of the peasant. Never was glory obtained at a cheaper rate! exclaims one of his eulogists. Satisfied with the least of the little, he only felt one perpetual want—that of completing his Flors. Not that LINNÆUS was insensible to his situation, for he gave his name to a little flower in Lapland—the Linnæa Borealis, from the fanciful analogy he discovered between its character and his own early fate, "a little northern plant flowering early, depressed, abject, and long overlooked." The want of fortune, however, did not deprive this man of genius of his true glory, nor of that statue raised to him in the gardens of the University of Upsal, nor of that solemn eulogy delivered by a crowned head, nor of those medals which his nation struck to commemorate the genius of the three kingdoms of nature!
This, then, is the race who have often smiled at the light regard of their good neighbours when contrasted with their own celebrity; for in poverty and in solitude such men are not separated from their fame; that is ever proceeding, ever raising a secret, but constant, triumph in their minds.[A]
Yes! Genius, undegraded and unexhausted, may indeed even in a garret glow in its career; but it must be on the principle which induced ROUSSEAU solemnly to renounce writing "par métier." This in the Journal de Sçavans he once attempted, but found himself quite inadequate to "the profession."[B] In a garret, the author of the "Studies of Nature," as he exultingly tells us, arranged his work. "It was in a little garret, in the new street of St. Etienne du Mont, where I resided four years, in the midst of physical and domestic afflictions. But there I enjoyed the most exquisite pleasures of my life, amid profound solitude and an enchanting horizon. There I put the finishing hand to my 'Studies of Nature,' and there I published them." Pope, one day taking his usual walk with Harte in the Haymarket, desired him to enter a little shop, where going up three pair of stairs into a small room, Pope said, "In this garret AUDISON wrote his 'Campaign!'" To the feelings of the poet this garret had become a consecrated spot; Genius seemed more itself, placed in contrast with its miserable locality!
[Footnote A: Spagnoletto, while sign-painting at Rome, attracted by his ability the notice of a cardinal, who ultimately gave him a home in his palace; but the artist, feeling that his poverty was necessary to his industry and independence, fled to Naples, and recommenced a life of labour.—ED.]
[Footnote B: Twice he repeated this resolution. See his Works, vol. xxxi, p. 283; vol. xxxii. p. 90.]
The man of genius wrestling with oppressive fortune, who follows the avocations of an author as a precarious source of existence, should take as the model of the authorial life, that of Dr. JOHNSON. The dignity of the literary character was as deeply associated with his feelings, and the "reverence thyself" as present to his mind, when doomed to be one of the Helots of literature, by Osborn, Cave, and Miller, as when, in the honest triumph of Genius, he repelled a tardy adulation of the lordly Chesterfield. Destitute of this ennobling principle, the author sinks into the tribe of those rabid adventurers of the pen who have masked the degraded form of the literary character under the assumed title of "authors by profession"[A]—the GUTHRIES, the RALPHS, and the AMHURSTS[B]. "There are worse evils for the literary man," says a living author, who himself is the true model of the great literary character, "than neglect, poverty, imprisonment, and death. There are even more pitiable objects than Chatterton himself with the poison at his lips." "I should die with hunger were I at peace with the world!" exclaimed a corsair of literature —and dashed his pen into the black flood before him of soot and gall.