The true lover of a garden counts time and seasons by his flowers. His calendar is the shepherd’s calendar. He will remember all the events of his years by the trees or plants which were in blossom when they happened. ‘The acacias were in flower when we first met,’ or ‘the hawthorns were in blossom when we last parted,’ he will say to himself, if not to others; and no lovers are happier, or more spiritually in love than those whose sweetest words have been spoken in a garden, and who have fancy and feeling enough to associate their mute companions in memory with their remembered joys. No love can altogether die which comes back upon remembrance with every golden tuft of daffodil or every garland of growing honeysuckle. It is the garden scene in ‘Faust,’ it is the garden scene in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ which embody passion in its fullest and its fairest hours.
O BEATI INSIPIENTES!
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ says the Evangelist: he should have added, Blessed are the fools, the commonplace, the obscure, the mediocre; blessed those who have done nothing remarkable, thought nothing noteworthy, created nothing beautiful, and given nothing fair and fine to their generation! Unmolested may they dwell; unharassed may they live their lives at their own pleasure, unwatched may they take their daily walks abroad, ungrudged may they find happiness, unmolested may they indulge their grief. Their nursery days may rest forgotten; they will not be ransacked for reminiscences of childish petulance or babyish frowardness. Their school years may rest in the past, undisturbed by the grubbing of chroniclers and commentators, amongst the playground dust, and between the pages of the gradus. Their faults and follies will lie quiet in the grave, and no contemporary schoolfellow will recall their thefts of apples or their slips in parsings; or will write to the newspapers how they used a crib or smashed a tradesman’s windows. Unworried, unenvied, unmisrepresented, they will pass through life inglorious, but at peace; and amongst the ashes of their buried years no curious hands will poke and rake in feverish zeal to find traces in their infancy of their bad passions, and drag out the broken pieces of the rattles or the ninepins they destroyed.
How ignorant is genius of what it does when it leaps up to the light of its sunrise! how little it recks of the hornet swarm which will circle round its head, of the viper brood which will coil round its ankles, of the horde of stinging, prying, buzzing, poisoning insects which will thicken the air as it passes, and hide in the heart of the roses it gathers!
It is not only the fierce light which beats upon a throne which genius has to bear, but the lurid glare of the sulphur fires of envy, making livid what is white, making hideous what is fair, making distorted and deformed what is straight and smooth and comely.
The world holds a concave mirror to the face of genius, and judges the face by the reflection.
The calm consciousness of power in the great writer, in the great artist, will always appear vanity to the majority, because the majority is incapable of seeing how entirely different to vanity it is, and how, if arrogant in the world, it is always humble in the closet; if it be conscious of its own superiority to its contemporaries, it will be none the less conscious of its inferiority to its own ideals. The intimate union of pride and of humility, which is characteristic of all genius, and pre-eminently sincere in it, can never be understood by the world at large.
Flaubert, as we know, corrected, effaced, reconstructed, erased and altered every line of his text a hundred times, in careless dissatisfaction with himself; but when an editor of a review asked him to make some corrections in the proof of St Julian Hospitador, he haughtily replied to the meddler: ‘Des corrections?—j’en donne quelquefois, mais je n’en fais jamais!’ Inexorable self-scourger in his study or his studio, the man of genius is high-mettled and arrogant as an hidalgo before interference. How should the fool understand this?—the fool who deems himself perfect when strutting before his mirror, but is downcast before the first mocking glance or ridiculing word which he encounters in the public street!
Humanity loves to scoff, and say that genius is human. No doubt it is; but its humanity is always of a different kind to that of ordinary men. The nightingale is classified by naturalists amongst the tribe of the Sparrows, in the class of the Finches; but this fact does not make the nightingale only a sparrow, or only a finch. The nightingale sees life and nature very differently to the sparrow, though his physical organisation may, in some respects, resemble his kinsman’s. It is one thing to sit on the housetops and drink rinsings from the gutter, and another to sit on a myrtle bough and drink dew from the heart of a rose. How shall those to whom the rinsings are sweet be able to judge those for whom the rose is chalice-bearer?
In a recent monograph upon his friend Meissonier, Alexandre Dumas has quoted some petulant and childish sayings of the great painter which would have been better left in oblivion. Dumas prefaces them by the phrase ‘J’ai entendu Meissonier dire, mais peut-être, il est vrai, ne le disait-il qu’à moi:’ in these last words, ‘ne le disait-il qu’à moi,’ lies the whole gist of the matter, in these few words are contained the confession of the consciousness which should have preserved Meissonier’s impetuous and unconsidered self-revelations from being, after his death, made public by his friend. It is just these things which are said only to us, which are said perhaps foolishly, perhaps hastily, perhaps stupidly, but in any way said in entire good faith, and in the conviction of the good faith of the confidant, which should never be repeated, above all when the ground is closed over the speakers of them. It will be said that there is nothing in this recollection of Meissonier which is in any way to his discredit. There is not. Yet it is none the less a violation of confidence; and in a sense it dwarfs the stature of him. One of the chief characteristics of genius is an extreme youthfulness of feeling and of impulse, often also of expression; the great artist is always in one side of his nature a child. But this fact, which is so lovable and engaging in him in his lifetime, makes him continually, in his careless and confidential utterances, say what is natural, and may even be beautiful in its spontaneity and suitability to the moment of its expression, but which loses its colour, its light, its charm, as a dried and pressed flower loses them when it is reproduced after death in the rigidity of type.