Even in its advancement beyond the intelligence of its own age genius is but progressive. In nature all is continuous; she makes no starts and leaps. Genius is said to soar, but we should rather say that genius climbs. Did the great VERULAM, or RAWLEIGH, or Dr. MORE, emancipate themselves from all the dreams of their age, from the occult agency of witchcraft, the astral influence, and the ghost and demon creed?
Before a particular man of genius can appear, certain events must arise to prepare the age for him. A great commercial nation, in the maturity of time, opened all the sources of wealth to the contemplation of ADAM SMITH. That extensive system of what is called political economy could not have been produced at any other time; for before this period the materials of this work had but an imperfect existence, and the advances which this sort of science had made were only partial and preparatory. If the principle of Adam Smith's great work seems to confound the happiness of a nation with its wealth, we can scarcely reproach the man of genius, who we shall find is always reflecting back the feelings of his own nation, even in his most original speculations.
In works of pure imagination we trace the same march of the human intellect; and we discover in those inventions, which appear sealed by their originality, how much has been derived from the age and the people in which they were produced. Every work of genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events, of the times. The Inferno of DANTE was caught from the popular superstitions of the age, and had been preceded by the gross visions which the monks had forged, usually for their own purposes. "La Cittá dolente," and "la perduta gente," were familiar to the imaginations of the people, by the monkish visions, and it seems even by ocular illusions of Hell, exhibited in Mysteries, with its gulfs of flame, and its mountains of ice, and the shrieks of the condemned.[A] To produce the "Inferno" only required the giant step of genius, in the sombre, the awful, and the fierce, DANTE. When the age of chivalry flourished, all breathed of love and courtesy; the great man was the great lover, and the great author the romancer. It was from his own age that MILTON derived his greatest blemish—the introduction of school-divinity into poetry. In a polemical age the poet, as well as the sovereign, reflected the reigning tastes.
[Footnote A: Sismondi relates that the bed of the river Arno, at Florence, was transformed into a representation of the Gulf of Hell, in the year 1304; and that all the variety of suffering that monkish imagination had invented was apparently inflicted on real persons, whose shrieks and groans gave fearful reality to the appalling scene.—ED.]
There are accidents to which genius is liable, and by which it is frequently suppressed in a people. The establishment of the Inquisition in Spain at one stroke annihilated all the genius of the country. Cervantes said that the Inquisition had spoilt many of his most delightful inventions; and unquestionably it silenced the wit and invention of a nation whose proverbs attest they possessed them even to luxuriance. All the continental nations have boasted great native painters and architects, while these arts were long truly foreign to us. Theoretical critics, at a loss to account for this singularity, accused not only our climate, but even our diet, as the occult causes of our unfitness to cultivate them. Yet Montesquieu and Winkelmann might have observed that the air of fens and marshes had not deprived the gross feeders of Holland and Flanders of admirable artists. We have teen outrageously calumniated. So far from any national incapacity, or obtuse feelings, attaching to ourselves in respect to these arts, the noblest efforts had long been made, not only by individuals, but by the magnificence of Henry VIII., who invited to his court Raphael and Titian; but unfortunately only obtained Holbein. A later sovereign, Charles the First, not only possessed galleries of pictures, and was the greatest purchaser in Europe, for he raised their value, but he likewise possessed the taste and the science of the connoisseur. Something, indeed, had occurred to our national genius, which had thrown it into a stupifying state, from which it is yet hardly aroused. Could those foreign philosophers have ascended to moral causes, instead of vapouring forth fanciful notions, they might have struck at the true cause of the deficiency in our national genius. The jealousy of puritanic fanaticism had persecuted these arts from the first rise of the Reformation in this country. It had not only banished them from our churches and altar-pieces, but the fury of the people, and the "wisdom" of parliament, had alike combined to mutilate and even efface what little remained of painting and sculpture among us. Even within our own times this deadly hostility to art was not extinct; for when a proposal was made gratuitously to decorate our places of worship by a series of religious pictures, and English artists, in pure devotion to Art, zealous to confute the Continental calumniators, asked only for walls to cover, George the Third highly approved of the plan. The design was put aside, as some had a notion that the cultivation of the fine arts in our naked churches was a return to Catholicism. Had this glorious plan been realized, the golden age of English art might have arisen. Every artist would have invented a subject most congenial to his powers. REYNOLDS would have emulated Raphael in the Virgin and Child in the manger, WEST had fixed on Christ raising the young man from the dead, BARRY had profoundly meditated on the Jews rejecting Jesus. Thus did an age of genius perish before its birth! It was on the occasion of this frustrated project that BARRY, in the rage of disappointment, immortalised himself by a gratuitous labour of seven years on the walls of the Society of Arts, for which, it is said, the French government under Buonaparte offered ten thousand pounds.
Thus also it has happened, that we have possessed among ourselves great architects, although opportunities for displaying their genius have been rare. This the fate and fortune of two Englishmen attest. Without the fire of London we might not have shown the world one of the greatest architects, in Sir CHRISTOPHER WREN; had not a St. Paul's been required by the nation he would have found no opportunity of displaying the magnificence of his genius, which even then was mutilated, as the original model bears witness to the world. That great occasion served this noble architect to multiply his powers in other public edifices: and it is here worth remarking that, had not Charles II. been seized by apoplexy, the royal residence, which was begun at Winchester on a plan of Sir Christopher Wren's, by its magnificence would have raised a Versailles for England.
The fate of INIGO JONES is as remarkable as that of WREN. Whitehall afforded a proof to foreigners that among a people which, before that edifice appeared, was reproached for their total deficiency of feeling for the pure classical style of architecture, the true taste could nevertheless exist. This celebrated piece of architecture, however, is but a fragment of a grander composition, by which, had not the civil wars intervened, the fame of Britain would have balanced the glory of Greece, or Italy, or France, and would have shown that our country is more deficient in marble than in genius. Thus the fire of London produces a St. Paul's, and the civil wars suppress a Whitehall. Such circumstances in the history of art among nations have not always been developed by those theorists who have calumniated the artists of England.
In the history of genius it is remarkable that its work is often invented, and lies neglected. A close observer of this age pointed out to me that the military genius of that great French captain, who so long appeared to have conquered Europe, was derived from his applying the new principles of war discovered by FOLARD and GUIBERT. The genius of FOLARD observed that, among the changes of military discipline in the practice of war among European nations since the introduction of gunpowder, one of the ancient methods of the Romans had been improperly neglected, and, in his Commentaries on Polybius, Folard revived this forgotten mode of warfare. GUIBERT, in his great work, "Histoire de la Milice Française," or rather the History of the Art of War, adopted Folard's system of charging by columns, and breaking the centre of the enemy, which seems to be the famous plan of our Rodney and Nelson in their maritime battles. But this favourite plan became the ridicule of the military; and the boldness of his pen, with the high confidence of the author, only excited adversaries to mortify his pretensions, and to treat him as a dreamer. From this perpetual opposition to his plans, and the neglect he incurred, GUIBEBT died of "vexation of spirit;" and the last words on the death-bed of this man of genius were, "One day they will know me!" FOLARD and GUIBERT created a BUONAPARTE, who studied them on the field of battle; and he who would trace the military genius who so long held in suspense the fate of the world, may discover all that he performed in the neglected inventions of preceding genius.
Hence also may we deduce the natural gradations of genius. Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear. Before HOMER there were other epic poets; a catalogue of their names and their works has come down to us. CORNEILLE could not have been the chief dramatist of France had not the founders of the French drama preceded him, and POPE could not have preceded DRYDEN. It was in the nature of things that a GIOTTO and a CIMABUE should have preceded a RAPHAEL and a MICHAEL ANGELO.
Even the writings of such extravagant geniuses as BRUNO and CAEDAN gave indications of the progress of the human mind; and had RAMUS not shaken the authority of the Organon of Aristotle we might not have had the Novum Organon of BACON. Men slide into their degree in the scale of genius often by the exercise of a single quality which their predecessors did not possess, or by completing what at first was left imperfect. Truth is a single point in knowledge, as beauty is in art: ages revolve till a NEWTON and a LOCKE accomplish what an ARISTOTLE and a DESCARTES began. The old theory of animal spirits, observes Professor Dugald Stewart, was applied by DESCARTES to explain the mental phenomena which led NEWTON into that train of thinking, which served as the groundwork of HARTLEY'S theory of vibrations. The learning of one man makes others learned, and the influence of genius is in nothing more remarkable than in its effects on its brothers. SELDEN'S treatise on the Syrian and Arabian Deities enabled MILTON to comprise, in one hundred and thirty beautiful lines, the two large and learned syntagma which Selden had composed on that abstract subject. LELAND, the father of British antiquities, impelled STOWE to work on his "Survey of London;" and Stowe's "London" inspired CAMDEN'S stupendous "Britannia." Herodotus produced Thucydides, and Thucydides Xenophon. With us HUME, ROBERTSON, and GIBBON rose almost simultaneously by mutual inspiration. There exists a perpetual action and reaction in the history of the human mind. It has frequently been inquired why certain periods seem to have been more favourable to a particular class of genius than another; or, in other words, why men of genius appear in clusters. We have theories respecting barren periods, which are only satisfactorily accounted for by moral causes. Genius generates enthusiasm and rivalry; but, having reached the meridian of its class, we find that there can be no progress in the limited perfection of human nature. All excellence in art, if it cannot advance, must decline.