Literary Character of Men of Genius / Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions

by Isaac Disraeli

But in the character of the higher female we may discover a constitutional faculty of docility and enthusiasm which has varied with the genius of different ages. It is the opinion of an elegant metaphysician, that the mind of the female adopts and familiarises itself with ideas more easily than that of man, and hence the facility with which the sex contract or lose habits, and accommodate their minds to new situations. Politics, war, and learning, are equally objects of attainment to their delightful susceptibility. Love has the fancied transparency of the cameleon. When the art of government directed the feelings of a woman, we behold Aspasia, eloquent with the genius of Pericles, instructing the Archons; Portia, the wife of the republican Brutus, devouring burning coals; and the wife of Lucan, transcribing and correcting the Pharsalia, before the bust of the poet, which she had placed on her bed, that his very figure might never be absent. When universities were opened to the sex, they acquired academic glory. The wives of military men have shared in the perils of the field; or like Anna Comnena and our Mrs. Hutchinson, have become even their historians. In the age of love and sympathy, the female often receives an indelible pliancy from her literary associate. His pursuits become the objects of her thoughts, and he observes his own taste reflected in his family; much less through his own influence, for his solitary labours often preclude him from forming them, than by that image of his own genius—the mother of his children! The subjects, the very books which enter into his literary occupation, are cherished by her imagination; a feeling finely opened by the lady of the author of "Sandford and Merton:" "My ideas of my husband," she said, "are so much associated with his books, that to part with them would be as it were breaking some of the last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object. The being in the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his marks and notes, will still give him a sort of existence with me. Unintelligible as such fond chimeras may appear to many people, I am persuaded they are not so to you."

With what simplicity Meta Hollers, the wife of Klopstock, in her German-English, describes to Richardson, the novelist, the manner in which she passes her day with her poet! she tells him that "she is always present at the birth of the young verses, which begin by fragments, here and there, of a subject with which his soul is just then filled. Persons who live as we do have no need of two chambers; we are always in the same: I with my little work, still! still! only regarding sometimes my husband's face, which is so venerable at that time with tears of devotion, and all the sublimity of the subject—my husband reading me his young verses, and suffering my criticisms."

The picture of a literary wife of antiquity has descended to us, touched by the domestic pencil of genius, in the susceptible CALPHUENIA, the lady of the younger PLINY. "Her affection for me," he says, "has given her a turn to books: her passion will increase with our days, for it is not my youth or my person, which time gradually impairs, but my reputation and my glory, of which she is enamoured."

I have been told that BUFFON, notwithstanding his favourite seclusion of his old tower in his garden, acknowledged to a friend that his lady had a considerable influence over his compositions: "Often," said he, "when I cannot please myself, and am impatient at the disappointment, Madame de Buffon reanimates my exertion, or withdraws me to repose for a short interval; I return to my pen refreshed, and aided by her advice."

GESNER declared that whatever were his talents, the person who had most contributed to develope them was his wife. She is unknown to the public; but the history of the mind of such a woman is discovered in the "Letters of Gesner and his Family." While GESNER gave himself up entirely to his favourite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and poetry, his wife would often reanimate a genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, and often exciting him to new productions, her sure and delicate taste was attentively consulted by the poet-painter—but she combined the most practical good sense with the most feeling imagination. This forms the rareness of the character; for this same woman, who united with her husband in the education of their children, to relieve him from the interruptions of common business, carried on alone the concerns of his house in la librairie.[A] Her correspondence with her son, a young artist travelling for his studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively terms "a gathered mind." Imagine a woman attending to the domestic economy, and to the commercial details, yet withdrawing out of this business of life into the more elevated pursuits of her husband, and at the same time combining with all this the cares and counsels which she bestowed on her son to form the artist and the man.

[Footnote A: Gesner's father was a bookseller of Zurich; descended from a family of men learned in the exact sciences, he was apprenticed to a bookseller at Berlin, and afterwards entered into his father's business. The best edition of his "Idylls" is that published by himself, in two volumes, 4to, illustrated by his own engravings.—ED.]

To know this incomparable woman we must hear her. "Consider your father's precepts as oracles of wisdom; they are the result of the experience he has collected, not only of life, but of that art which he has acquired simply by his own industry." She would not have her son suffer his strong affection to herself to absorb all other sentiments. "Had you remained at home, and been habituated under your mother's auspices to employments merely domestic, what advantage would you have acquired? I own we should have passed some delightful winter evenings together; but your love for the arts, and my ambition to see my sons as much distinguished for their talents as their virtues, would have been a constant source of regret at your passing your time in a manner so little worthy of you."

How profound is her observation on the strong but confined attachments of a youth of genius! "I have frequently remarked, with some regret, the excessive attachment you indulge towards those who see and feel as you do yourself, and the total neglect with which you seem to treat every one else. I should reproach a man with such a fault who was destined to pass his life in a small and unvarying circle; but in an artist, who has a great object in view, and whose country is the whole world, this disposition seems to be likely to produce a great number of inconveniences. Alas! my son, the life you have hitherto led in your father's house has been in fact a pastoral life, and not such a one as was necessary for the education of a man whose destiny summons him to the world."

And when her son, after meditating on some of the most glorious productions of art, felt himself, as he says, "disheartened and cast down at the unattainable superiority of the artist, and that it was only by reflecting on the immense labour and continued efforts which such masterpieces must have required, that I regained my courage and my ardour," she observes, "This passage, my dear son, is to me as precious as gold, and I send it to you again, because I wish you to impress it strongly on your mind. The remembrance of this may also be a useful preservative from too great confidence in your abilities, to which a warm imagination may sometimes be liable, or from the despondence you might occasionally feel from the contemplation of grand originals. Continue, therefore, my dear son, to form a sound judgment and a pure taste from your own observations: your mind, while yet young and flexible, may receive whatever impressions you wish. Be careful that your abilities do not inspire in you too much confidence, lest it should happen to you as it has to many others, that they have never possessed any greater merit than that of having good abilities."

One more extract, to preserve an incident which may touch the heart of genius. This extraordinary woman, whose characteristic is that of strong sense combined with delicacy of feeling, would check her German sentimentality at the moment she was betraying those emotions in which the imagination is so powerfully mixed up with the associated feelings. Arriving at their cottage at Sihlwald, she proceeds—"On entering the parlour three small pictures, painted by you, met my eyes. I passed some time in contemplating them. It is now a year, I thought, since I saw him trace these pleasing forms; he whistled and sang, and I saw them grow under his pencil; now he is far, far from us. In short, I had the weakness to press my lips on one of these pictures. You well know, my dear son, that I am not much addicted to scenes of a sentimental turn; but to-day, while I considered your works, I could not restrain this little impulse of maternal feelings. Do not, however, be apprehensive that the tender affection of a mother will ever lead me too far, or that I shall suffer my mind to be too powerfully impressed with the painful sensations to which your absence gives birth. My reason convinces me that it is for your welfare that you are now in a place where your abilities will have opportunities of unfolding, and where you can become great in your art."