How far this century, and indeed the spirit of the world in all centuries, has succeeded in counteracting this beneficent change, and in fastening again upon poverty the disgrace entailed, on it by the pagan system, each one can judge for himself. Nay, many have a personal standard by which they can judge of it. One cannot read the life of any person of merit in any branch of learning without this pathetic element constantly cropping out. Here we have Kepler, the astronomer, struggling with constant anxieties, telling fortunes for a livelihood, and saying that astrology, as the daughter of astronomy, ought to keep her mother. “I supplicate you,” he writes to a friend of his, “if there is a situation vacant at Tübingen, do what you can to obtain it for me, and let me know the prices of bread and wine, and other necessaries of life; for my wife is not accustomed to live on beans.” He had to accept all sorts of jobs; he made almanacs, and served any one who would pay him. The gentle, melancholy Schiller wasted by necessity much of his time in literary hack-work at a period when the pay of authors was so miserable that they could hardly exist by the pen: he translated French books at “a shilling a page.” Even Goethe, whose fortune was quite independent, could not add to his income by his talent; and when Merck, the publisher, offered three pounds sterling for a drama of his, the old poet might well ask: “If Europe praised me, what has Europe done for me? Nothing. Even my works have been an expense to me.”
Perhaps no life has ever been so continual a struggle as that of Oliver Goldsmith. From his very childhood he was used to starvation; for family difficulties caused him to go to Dublin University, not as a pensioner (as he had hoped), but as a sizar. He had to sweep the courts, wait at table, and perform other menial tasks of the same sort. It was a bitter price to pay for learning, but his after-life was no sweeter in its manifold experiences. Before he left college, his father died, and he was thrown on his own resources, when he often had to pawn his books, and at last took to writing street-ballads, which he disposed of at five shillings per copy. Twice the shiftless scholar tried to make his way to America, and failed; his pretensions to Anglican orders were crushed by his failure to pass his examination, and his venture as a tutor was equally unsuccessful. His good genius, his uncle, Mr. Contarine, sent him to Edinburgh to become a physician, and this was the last of the regular professions which he tried. We find him wandering through Flanders, singing and playing his flute at the houses of the peasantry, in order to obtain a supper and a night’s lodging; then attending chemical lectures at the Universities of Leyden and Louvain; taking part in the open discussions on philosophical subjects held on certain days in the convents and colleges of Italy, and returning to England without a farthing in his pocket; then taking a fortnight to reach London from Dover, begging, performing, or playing on the road. He went among the London apothecaries, “and asked them to let him spread plasters for them, pound in their mortars, or run with their medicines.” It was through a poor journeyman printer, a patient of his, that he first gained the notice of a great publisher; but his troubles were only increased by his literary ventures. Now he is in a garret, with the milk-woman knocking at the door, pressing him for a trifling milk-score, which he is too poor to pay; now he repeatedly loses the chance of good situations, because he has not a decent suit of clothes to his back. Once a publisher provided him with clothes, in advance, for four reviews for his magazine; but before Goldsmith has finished his work, his landlord is dragged away by bailiffs to pass his Christmas in prison for debt. The impulsive author has no money, but immediately runs and pawns his clothes, liberating his miserable host, and rejoicing the poor family. Left starving himself, he gets a trifling loan from a friend on the four books to be reviewed, when the publisher makes a sudden and peremptory demand for the clothes and books, or payment for the same. Goldsmith begs him, as a favor, “for fear of worse happening to him,” to put him in gaol. The pay he received for his ceaseless work was ridiculously slender; for his Plutarch’s Lives he got eight pounds a volume. The novel which has immortalized his name, the Vicar of Wakefield, was sold for sixty pounds, and in the most unceremonious fashion possible. Johnson, the author’s fast friend, gives the story of the transaction thus: “I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion.... I desired he would be calm; ... he then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merits, told the landlady I should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent.” The famous novel, so hastily disposed of to stave off actual starvation and imprisonment, was thought so little of by its new owner that it was eighteen months before he published it. Although his fame grew with years, Goldsmith remained in distress; for he never could keep what he earned. Indiscriminate generosity, often lavished on unworthy companions, swallowed up his growing but always transitory income; and the week after a gorgeous supper or a tailor’s bill of extravagant items duly receipted, we yet find him writing a short English grammar for five pounds, and, later on, borrowing one pound from his publisher.
The young poet Chatterton, impulsive, gifted, and unfortunate, the contemporary and friend of Goldsmith, was another victim to the fickleness of the muse. Starving and desperate, he at last committed suicide in a miserable London garret, in a dirty street leading out of Holborn, a neighborhood not much more desirable than Baxter Street, New York. There was no one to claim his body, and it was finally taken to the “bonehouse” of St. Andrew’s, and buried in the pauper burial-ground in Shoe Lane.
In thriving America, the El Dorado of the untaught European imagination, the scholar is hardly destined to a happier lot than in the old realms where intellect is supposed to have a traditionary value. Of Nathaniel Hawthorne we have various records of want and manful struggle. Always brave under adverse circumstances, this is how he words his own misfortunes in 1820, when, still a boy, he already edited a small and obscure periodical called the Spectator. Among the obituary notices one day, the following was conspicuous: “We are sorry to be under the necessity of informing our readers that no death of any importance has taken place, except that of the publisher of this paper, who died of starvation, owing to the slenderness of his patronage.” In 1839, he had been so lucky, in a worldly sense, as to have secured the post of head-collector of the port of Salem, Mass.; and, in this uncongenial yet lucrative situation, he felt beyond the reach of necessity. He curiously laments his ludicrous dilemma, and comments on his name, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” which he had fondly hoped from his childhood to have sent forth to the world on the title-page of some important work, now taking wing for the remotest ends of the earth, scrawled in red chalk on the covers of packing-cases, tea-chests, and cotton-bales. Political changes twice ousted him from his position, and the second ejection was definitive—a starting-point in his life. He went home one evening, and announced his dispossession to his wife. There were no provisions in the house, save a barrel of flour and some insignificant adjuncts. The family had hardly any money in hand, but no one complained. Hawthorne told his wife he was going to write in earnest, and they must trust to Providence in the meanwhile. Partly by economy of the most rigid kind, partly by the helping hand of friendly neighbors, the Hawthornes managed to keep the “wolf from the door” till the novel was completed. The evening it was finished, the author, feverish, excited, and emaciated, closeted himself with his wife, and read her the MS. She listened intently, the interest becoming painful, her breath came and went, her color faded gradually, and, at the climax of the wonderful story, fell at his feet almost in convulsions, exclaiming, “For God’s sake, do not read further; I cannot bear it.” Next morning, he sent the novel to a friend of his, a sound judge and unsparing critic in the literary world. The friend raced through the MS., enthralled by its powerful word-imagery, and came himself with his answer. Meeting the author’s little boy, Julian, in the garden in front of the house, he caught him up in his arms, exclaiming: “Child! child! do you know what a father you have?” and rushed into the house, fairly storming the newly revealed genius with congratulations.[214] Thus was the Scarlet Letter produced and Hawthorne’s name made. After that, his success was rapid, and literature proved a sufficient support for her gifted votary.
Another American genius was less fortunate. In Baltimore, a periodical entitled the Saturday Visitor offered a prize for the best poem and story (the amount we cannot precisely recollect). When the candidates’ MSS. were examined, one of them proved to be a collection of clever poems and a story written almost in “copper-plate” hand. The editors looked no further, but said, in joke, “Let us give the prize to the first of geniuses who has written legibly.” The name of the young author was Edgar Allan Poe.
“He came just as he was,” says his biographer, “the prize-money not having yet been sent him, with a seedy coat buttoned up to conceal the total absence of linen, but with shoes whose gaping crevices could not be made to hide the absence of socks.” Mr. Kennedy (the editor) took him to the tailor, and fitted him out as comfortably and completely as possible, after which he was installed as an inmate of his house, and for a little time employed on the staff of the Saturday Visitor. This was in 1833. The vicissitudes of fortune were perpetual, though to his terrible propensity to intemperance much of his constant distress was due. A gentleman despite the squalor of his appearance, a genius despite his uncontrolled vices, he was one of the most unfortunate of men. A few years later, he writes to a friend: “Can you not send me five dollars? I am sick, and Virginia (his wife) is almost gone.” In 1839, his prospects were for the moment not so hopeless, and one who often visited him testified to his home in Philadelphia, “though slightly and cheaply furnished,” being yet “so tasteful and refined, so fitly disposed, that it seemed altogether suitable for a man of genius.” Again, his biographer speaks of him as “always in pecuniary difficulties, and his sick wife frequently in want of the merest necessities of life.” For his poem “The Raven,” first published in the Whig Review, and since become the pedestal of his worldwide fame, he received the sum of ten dollars; and in 1848, while writing for the Southern Literary Messenger, he was content to work for two dollars a page. And yet, so far as fame was concerned, Poe’s name and talent were known beyond the seas, admired by two continents; and when, upon entering an office in New York, he would mention who he was, men turned round to stare at the gifted poet who, all starving as he was, was already enrolled among the great men of America.
The philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, had equal occasion to put his philosophy to the same universal test of patience. Finding a mercantile clerkship ill-adapted to his poetic and vagrant humor, he left Geneva and went to Lausanne, where he tried music as a profession. His experiences were curious. He tried to teach music, but, as he says himself, “The scholars did not crowd, and two or three German boys, luckily as stupid as I was ignorant of my business, were my only pupils. Under my tuition they did not become great croquenotes. One day, I was sent for to a house to teach a little ‘serpent of a girl,’ to whom it gave infinite pleasure to show me a quantity of music I did not know, and then to play one piece for me, ‘just to show the master how it should go.’ I knew absolutely so little of reading that I could not follow a note of my own composition in such a manner as to be able to regulate its execution.” It may be supposed the poor man did not thrive on these means of livelihood; his fare was meagre enough, and he paid only thirty francs a month for his board and lodging in the little inn where he made his home. For his dinner, he had but one dish of soup, with something a little more substantial for his supper at night. Notwithstanding his desire for independence and freedom from the personal thraldom (assujettissement) of a fixed and sedentary occupation, he found out that “one must live.” So he took to copying music at a small remuneration, and so fond did he become of his self-chosen trade (for with him it was not art) that in later life, when in comfortable circumstances, he took to it again. But his musical mania went yet further. He composed an operetta entitled Le Devin du Village—“The Village Astrologer, or Fortune-teller”—and had it executed at Lausanne. He says of its first performance “that it was such a charivari as could not be surpassed; that every one shut their ears and opened wide their eyes; that it was a witch’s sabbath, a devilish hubbub, insupportable and monstrous.” The tide turned one day, and the same play was performed in the court theatre at Versailles, the family and courtiers of Louis XVI. calling the music dream-like, divine, entrancing! This sounds like an anticipation of the diversity of opinion now observable concerning Wagner and Liszt.
Real artists, like Mozart, were hardly more fortunate in their domain of legitimate art than was Rousseau in his queer attempts at music. Although his name was known, his music extolled to the skies, and his person retained as a priceless court treasure at Vienna, Wolfgang Mozart hardly made a competency by his unrivalled and acknowledged genius. His early death was mainly the result of continual anxiety on the score of personal necessities. When the mysterious stranger came and gave the order for the requiem, Mozart was already ill, worn, and exhausted. The stranger’s opportune gift, or fragment in advance, came too late, though it was sorely needed at the time; and, before the order was completed, the great musician was on his death-bed, his wife Constance by his side, his friends rehearsing the finished part of the requiem at the foot of his bed, while his haggard features were lit up to the last by the feverish enthusiasm so soon to be quenched in death.
It would seem as though the greater the genius, the greater the destitution. Hardly one has escaped the furnace of poverty. Curran, the great Irish lawyer and orator, was stranded early in life, without friends, connections, or fortune, conscious of talent above the crowd that elbowed him, and sensitive to a painful degree. He himself thus tells the story of the first fee of any consequence which he received in his profession: “I then lived upon Hog Hill, Dublin; my wife and children were the chief furniture of my apartments; as to my rent, it stood much the same chance of its liquidation with the national debt. Mrs. Curran, however, was a barrister’s lady, and what was wanting in wealth she was well determined should be supplied by dignity. The landlady, on the other hand, had no idea of any other gradation except that of pounds, shillings, and pence. I walked out one morning, in order to avoid the perpetual altercations on this subject, with my mind, you may imagine, in no very enviable temperament. I fell into gloom, to which from my infancy I had been occasionally subject. I had a family, for whom I had no dinner, and a landlady, for whom I had no rent. I had gone abroad in despondence; I returned home almost in desperation. When I opened the door of my study the first object that presented itself was an immense folio of a brief, twenty golden guineas wrapped up beside it, and the name of old Bob Lyons marked on the back of it. I paid my landlady, bought a good dinner, gave Bob Lyons a share of it, and that dinner was the date of my prosperity!”
One of the most Christian and sympathetic authors of France (in a department in which it must be confessed she does not excel—poetry), Alphonse de Lamartine, was both in his youth and in his old age the victim of poverty. Though in his childhood his poverty was not absolutely sordid, like that of many a scholar as talented and even as well born, still it was such that his mother had to exercise the strictest economy on her small property, to help her peasant-servants in many a lowly household task, and was in such straits that the failure or success of her slender vintage was to her the chief event of the year. A noble woman, a Christian Cornelia, she knew how to turn these troubles into lessons for her son; and a more genial, lovable “great man” than Lamartine has seldom claimed our homage, notwithstanding the foibles which necessarily qualify our admiration. Political and diplomatic success gave him far different prospects in middle life. His poems were the first heralds, the joy-bells, of a new school; his name was a talisman. But the shadow of genius—relentless poverty—fell upon him again, and his last days were little better than a pauper’s.