Views and Opinions

by Ouida

The confidential utterances of great men and women should no more be desecrated by being told to the public than tears and kisses should be profaned by the publicity of a railway station.

The general reader can no more understand why Tennyson suffered so intensely at seeing a chestnut tree felled in full flower than they can understand the course in the heavens of Argol or Altair. To spread out before them these delicate, intricate, bleeding fibres of the soul is to slay Pegasus and Philomel to make a workhouse meal.

Mr Knowles alleges that it is necessary for him and other intimate friends of Tennyson to say all they thought of him, and repeat all he said, because a similar record of Shakespeare’s conversations would be so precious a treasure to the world. This, also, is a questionable premiss. Shakespeare, happy in so much, was happiest of all in the obscurity in which his personality is sheltered; and the world is to be congratulated that it knows too little of the man to squabble and dwarf and disfigure him to the detriment of his works, as it does Byron and Shelley. What the man is matters so little. Psychology is but another name for curiosity, envy, or dénigremené. Whether the orchid grow on a rotten tree, or the lily on a dunghill, affects not the beauty of the orchid or the fragrance of the lily. What Horace was, or was not, at the Augustan Court cannot touch the exquisite grace of his style, the lovely lines of his pictures in words. The more we look at any writer the less we are likely to do justice to his creations, because his personality will exercise upon us either a great attraction or a great repulsion. It would be better for all works if, like Cologne Cathedral, they were without known progenitors.

Could Dante Rossetti ever have dreamed that Mr Leyland would preserve the poor, pathetic little note asking for the gift of more wine in his last illness, which Mr Val. Prinsep saw fit to publish in the Art Journal of September 1892? If we may not trust our most intimate friends with our necessities, in whom can we confide? The whole of this aforesaid correspondence of Rossetti was never intended for, nor is it fitted for, publication. The general world has a right to see any artist’s completed work, and judge it as they may choose to do, but they have no right to be made acquainted with the hesitations, the self-torment, the fluctations, the depression, the exultation, which preceded its birth. These are the ecstasies and the agonies which precede all gestation and parturition, and are not for public exhibition. Mr Leyland, loving Rossetti well, should have burned all these letters before, or immediately after, the artist’s death. Mr Leyland was a man who knew his generation, and must have known the use which would be made of them. If a friend grant me a favour, and afterwards blab of that favour to our common acquaintances, I should prefer that such a favour had never been accorded. I think that most people will agree with this feeling. Yet reticence concerning favours done is not common in our times. Such reticence ought to be held the simplest obligation of honour; but the majority of persons do not so regard it. There is hardly a letter of any length ever written in which there are not some sentences liable to misconstruction, or open to various readings. It is grossly unfair to place any letter before those who are not in the possession of its key; that key which can alone lie in an intimate knowledge of its writer’s circumstances and temperament. If Rossetti were not rich enough to buy the wine he wanted in his weakness, the shame is not his, but that of the world which left him poor. To think that he was too poor even to ever see Italy is an intolerable disgrace to his contemporaries. He would have been wiser to have left his patrons and to have lived in Italy on a black crust and a plate of bean soup.

If the man of genius amass wealth, he is accused of avarice or of mercenary sale of his own talent. If he remain poor, or be in trouble, no language can sufficiently condemn his extravagance, his improvidence, his immorality. If he live with any kind of splendour, it is display and profligacy; if he endeavour to avoid remark, it is meanness, hauteur or poverty.

Men and women of genius when they have money are too generous with it, and when they have it not are too careless about the lack of it. Shakespeare, we are told, had the prudence to put his money together and to buy houses and lands, with shrewd eye to the main chance; but this is, after all, mere supposition on the part of posterity. We know so little of the circumstances of his life that, for aught we can tell, he may have had some sharp-eyed, true-hearted friend or factor, who thus transmuted the poet’s loose coins into solid fields and freeholds, as George Eliot had behind her George Lewis. I cannot believe that Titania’s laureate ever quarrelled over deeds of copyhold and questions of fees and betterments with the burgesses and notaries of Stratford-upon-Avon. More likely, far, that he was lying in the sun, dreaming, deep cradled in cowslips and ladysmocks, as his winged verses flew up with the bees into the budding lime boughs overhead, whilst some trusty friend or brother did battle in his name with the chafferers and the scriveners in the little town. And when all was settled, and the deeds of transfer only wanted signature and seal, that trusty go-between would shout across the meadows to waken Will from his day-dream, and Will would lazily arise and come across the grass, with the pollen of the bees and the fragrant yellow dust of the cowslips on his clothes, and, with his sweet, serene smile, would scrawl his name to parchments which he scarcely even read. That is, I would take my oath, how the stores of Shakespeare increased, and how New Place became his. Pembroke’s friend and Rosalind’s creator never cared much for lucre, I am sure; for land he might care, because he loved England: he loved her fields, her woods, her streams, and he saw them as her sons can never see them now, uninjured and undimmed, the Lenten lilies growing tall beneath the untrimmed hedges of hazel and hawthorn, the water meadows spreading broad and fair, without a curl of smoke in sight, save that which rose from the cottage hearths. Elizabethan England was meadow where it was not coppice, park where it was not forest, heathery moorland where it was not reedy mere. It was natural that Shakespeare should care to call his own some portion of that beautiful leafy kingdom of his birth.

Even so Scott loved his Scottish soil, and Tennyson cared to own Farringford and Hazelmere. Even so George Sand’s last dying words were of the trees of Nohant. Passion and pleasure and fame and love were in those last moments naught to her, but the green, fresh, dewy leafage of dead summers was still dear.

The psychologist Lombroso, in a recent essay, which must fill the bourgeois breast with exultation, finding that it is not possible for him to deny the mental fecundity of genius, denies its physical fertility, and endeavours to prove his assertion, after the customary method of scientists, by avoiding and omitting every fact which would in any manner tell against his theory. Evidence when manipulated by the scientist is like the colt when it issues, docked and clipped, from its training stable. Laying down the proposition that precocity is atavistic, founded on the declaration of the biologist, Dr Delaunay, that it is a sign of inferiority, he cites the marvellous precocity of Raffaelle, Pascal, Mozart, Victor Hugo, Mirabeau, Dante, Handel, Calderon, Tasso, and many others, who prove, on the contrary, that precocity is the sign of splendour, strength and durability of genius. He remarks that precocity is a mark of insignificance, and that the small and low organism develops with much greater rapidity than the higher order! Were we not used to the pompous self-contradictions of Science, we should be surprised to see a characteristic of so many great minds pronounced to be a defect and a deformity; it is certainly only a scientist who would dream of classing Raffaelle, Dante, Mozart, Hugo, amongst the lesser organisms.

The whole argument is built on the same quagmire of illogical assertion and false deduction. He first lays down as an axiom that men of genius are physically sterile, and supports it by the strange and curiously incorrect assertion that Shakespeare and Milton had no posterity! He proceeds to quote the saying of La Bruyère: ‘Ces hommes n’ont ni ancêtres ni postérités; ils forment eux-seuls toute une descendance.’ Now, as regards ancestry, it is clear that La Bruyère spoke figuratively: he did not and could not mean that men of genius have no progenitors: he meant that who their progenitors were did not matter to the world which cared only for themselves; in a similar way he spoke of their descendants, not as actually non-existent, but as counting for nothing beside the superior creation of their works.

Amongst the sterile célibataires Lombroso oddly enough includes Voltaire and Alfieri, whose loves and liaisons were famous and numerous. He entirely ignores Victor Hugo, whose philoprogenitiveness was so excessive as to be absurd; the extreme affection for their offspring of Tennyson and Renan, of George Sand and of Juliette Adam, of Millias and of Meissonier, of Mario and of Grisi, and of countless others whose names are famous and whose affections were or are most ardent. The offspring publicly recognised by man or woman is by no means necessarily the sole offspring of either. Allegra is not mentioned beside Ada in Burke’s Peerage. Natural children frequently are not allowed to know even their own parentage; a woman may have children whom she does not openly acknowledge; a man may have children of whose birth even he knows nothing. It is not every celebrated woman who has the maternal courage of George Sand, nor every celebrated man who has the paternal tenderness of Shelley.