Very certainly there is more hope for a nation in thorough but loving ignorance of art-caring, for instance, for pictures in the way a child cares for a picture-book-than in a state of knowledge of which the only result is a sick indifference to the things of our own time, and a spurious devotion to whatever is foreign, eccentric, archaic, or grotesque. I may perhaps try to show my readers in a future article a few of the more evident absurdities involved in the new criticism and decoration; for the present I bid gladly adieu to the worst gospel I have ever come in contact with-the Gospel of Intensity.' HARRY QUILTER, in Macmillan's Magazine. THE SEAMY SIDE OF LETTERS. To Jerome Cardan, the celebrated physician, mathematician and astrologer, posterity is indebted for one remark at least in which he appears to have sacrificed a familiar truth to an ambition of epigrammatic exactitude. In his Treatise on Wisdom the Milan doctor tells us that the wise man is happy, and the happy man wise. Both parts of this apothegm seem equally open to exception. The former indeed is contradicted not only by scriptural authority, but by his own example. Solomon, or the Alexandrian Jew, or whoever wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes, found much wisdom to be much grief, and laid it down as a general proposition that he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. The most cursory examination of Cardan's biography will show this first of astrologers to have been himself the victim, mainly in consequence of his learned labor, of slander and conspiracy, of poverty and imprisonment, of insult and exile. Surely at last must he have learned of the familiar demon, by whom the enlightened public of his time supposed him ever attended, that erudition is a thing not to be desired by him who has it not, while he who has it should regard it as a jewel purchased at a great price, and only to be preserved with constant care and danger. From the time of Homer, if we may believe in his existence, to that of Chatterton-from the days of the old vagrant, blind, and a beggar, to those of the indigent and afflicted poet who poisoned himself before he was eighteen with a dose of arsenic, history has never been at a loss for examples of the calamities of a learned life. Numerous as the leaves in Variombrosa's plain are the names of the men who have found much study something more than a weariness of the flesh. Are they not written in the books of the Chronicles of Valerian and Cornelius Tollius, of Gabriel Naudé and Isaac Disraeli? Ancients and moderns, poets, philosophers, orators and historians, over and over again their weeping ghosts are summoned to warn us of the evils attached to a literary life. We learn that Pythagoras was burned or starved, that Empedocles cast himself into Etna, or was taken up into heaven like Enoch, or translated alive like Elijah without any warning; that Euripides was torn to pieces by dogs or women set on him by the envy of his rivals; that Aristotle, il maestro di color che sanno, drowned himself in the Euripus, owing to his inability to explain the causes of its currents; that Demosthenes drank poison in order to escape slavery; that Lucretius was maddened by a love potion of Hippomanes administered by a too devoted wife; that Tully had his head cut off; that Seneca and Lucan died from excessive self-inflicted phlebotomy; and that Terence when a young man pined away from grief at a loss by sea of his Translations of Menander. Such men as these are the coryphæi of old, the moons of literature; how many of the lesser lights have untimely died, blown out by the rude gusts of circumstance? What a fry of literary folk has perished by fire or famine, poison or the sword, whose meaner names are all too numerous to be enrolled in Libitina's records of the famous dead! Nor are modern writers a whit more lucky. The ordeal of flame, the mighty purifier of books and men in the middle ages, has burned more than Savonarola and Urban Grandier; suicide seduced more than Carey and Creech; madness befooled more than Collins and Cowper; imprisonment fettered more than Davenant and De Foe. The innumerous victims of poverty and her family in every age among the herd of learned moderns, those who have fought with famine and wrestled with disease, and contended with insult, show, whatever Dryden may have supposed to the contrary, that it has never been enough for any one age to have "neglected its Mr. Cowley and starved its Mr. Butler." He who runs may read of the leanness of Edmund Castell, and of the rats that battened on his Polyglot Bible; of Robert Greene, who was only saved by a chance charity from starvation in the public street; of Simon Ockley, dating his letters from Cambridge Castle, where he was confined for debt; and of Sale, the well-known translator of the Koran, borrowing alternately a shilling and a shirt. Many more than Toland have found philosophy an unprofitable study; many more than Churchyard poetry barren of reward. Toland, the English Lope in fertility of production, and a greater than Lope in variety of talent, died, we are told, in the utmost distress in a room he rented of a poor carpenter at Putney. Tom Churchyard, Spenser's Palæmon, singing until he grew hoarse while alive, made little money by it, but when dead pointed an excellent moral in the following ragged rhyme which composed his epitaph "Poverty and poetry his tomb doth inclose; Those afflicted with poverty among the learned are not so scarce that Dr. Johnson need have coupled, in his two instances in the Vanity of Human Wishes, Lydiat with Galileo. Lydiat was a man so little known that the printers seem to have substituted Lydia, and we read in the Gentleman's Magazine of a correspondent asking for information about Lydia's life. The allusion to this learned scholar was, according to Disraeli, a matter of mystery to Boswell himself. Poverty is, indeed, so common a color in the patchwork of woes which is often the only coat of the wise for themselves not wise, that it may be considered the rule rather than the exception of their lives, and has been, therefore, not incongruously called Learning's Sister. Besides the greater evils of suicide and exile, poverty and imprisonment, sorrows worthy of the tragic buskin, we read of the exposition of authors to the minor miseries of injustice, mockery, and contempt. Their works are admired, but they themselves are dishonored. When they ask for bread, they are presented after some little indignant delay with a stone. Mellow fruits are offered to their manes, but they themselves dine on bitter herbs. An ungrateful public, careless as the revelers of ancient Egypt, worships the gods, while the gaunt god-makers are spurned from their marble thresholds. To these unhappy ones fortune behaves, we are told, like a terrible stepmother, and when not engaged in preparing for them a potion of lurid aconite, assiduously persecutes them with the arrows of calumny and abuse. Such are a few of the misfortunes of the learned which books record. But in these things, as in all others, how difficult it is to ascertain the truth! There is disagreement even in books. Aristotle, for instance, according to some of these, so far from committing suicide in despair of ascertaining the cause of the currents of the Euripus, died of a chronic disorder in his stomach; and our tears are scarcely dried from off our faces after reading in one volume how the hungry Otway choked himself with the first bite of a penny roll-a circumstance which, for some reason as mysterious as his ultimate employment of orange peel, Dr. Johnson was unwilling to mention-when we read in another, on the authority of Dr. Doran, that he was killed by a cup of cold water, injudiciously drunk by him when overheated. Pope says the poet died of a fever occasioned by his exertions in the pursuit of a thief. And yet another version of the story declares, with at least equal likelihood of unequal politeness, that Otway was not the pursuer but the pursued. The deaths of literary men have often met with a poetical treatment, in which such discordant accounts are given by various artists as remind the perplexed reader of the series of contradictory circumstances represented as attendant upon the funeral of Dryden. To take a single instance. French and Italian histories of men of letters owe no trifling debt to Goldsmith for some information about authors of their respective nations of which they appear to have been grossly ignorant. In his Citizen of the World he informs his readers that Vaugelas was surnamed the Owl from his being obliged to keep in all day and daring to venture out only at night, through fear of his creditors, and that he was exceptionally honest enough Ito order his body to be sold for their benefit. He is represented as saying, "If I could not while living, at least when dead I may be useful." Not a word of all this appears in the best French biographies. Equally oblivious have Italian editors been of Bentivoglio's ultimate mishap. Bentivoglio, poor Bentivoglio!" so mourns the man of whom, says Macaulay, strict veracity was never one of the virtues, chiefly demands our pity. The author whose comedies, we are informed, will last with the Italian language, dissipated, according to honest Goldsmith, whom Boswell loved to hear talking away carelessly, a noble fortune in acts of charity and benevolence; but, falling into misery in his old age, was refused admittance into a hospital which he himself had erected. 66 What, however, Goldsmith says concerning the circumstances of the death of François Cassandre, the translator of Aristotle's Rhetoric, seems to be generally supported. Cassandre was Boileau's Damon, the great author who amused for so long both town and country, but at last, tired of losing in rhyming both his labor and his means of living, of borrowing everywhere and earning naught, without clothes, money, or resources, made his exit overwhelmed with misery. The deathbed scenes of such men as Voltaire and Payne are not invariably drawn in the same way. The philosophic version represents them passing quietly in contemplative repose; in the religious tract they utter wild cries for a clergyman, and end their infidel existence in raging convulsions of unutterable horror and remorse. Many a literary skeptic has been stuck up in the garden of the true believer as a theological scarecrow or Aunt Sally who died, it may be, with more placidity than the most pious and orthodox of Christians. There are those who believe that the Earl of Rochester did not use his last breath in denouncing Hobbes's philosophy. Even the expiring exclamation of Pitt is considered a fable by Macaulay. The affecting "O my country!" is relegated by that historian to the region of Grub-street elegies and afterdinner speeches, prize declamations and Academic poems The lives no less than the deaths of men of letters have been embroidered by the hand of the artist. Their fame has brought into bold relief such evils as are to no class of men exclusively peculiar. The motes of dust which are universal are seen most distinctly in the sunbeam. Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail," including the "garret," for which the " patron" was substituted by Johnson as a delicate compliment to Chesterfield, assail other lives than that of the scholar. These ills are unhappily not confined to men of letters. They are of the thousand shocks to which all human flesh is heir. They are the common calamities to which the universal race of man is born. It is not the author alone who is subject to defamation. Other laborers than those in the field of letters, as worthy or worthier, are defrauded of their hire. Disease and despair are the lot of fools as well as of philosophers. There is no reason, because a man has written a book, that he should be exempt any more than the peer and the peasant, the king and the cobbler, from ache, penury, imprisonment, and other whips and scorns of time, or be released from the unalterable conditions of suffering humanity. In the enumeration of the sorrows of a literary man as opposed to other men, only those should enter which naturally arise from the profession of letters and are beyoud his own control. Not of this kind are his most frequent assailants-the blindness of pride, the infection of envy, the sting of ambition, the sickness of evil speaking, the weight of avarice, and the deformity of strife. Particular trades have certain well-defined injurious tendencies, arising from the absorption into the artisan's system of mineral, vegetable, or animal molecules, from constrained posture, from insufficient exercise of the body, or too great use of any portion of it. The plumber's colic is traceable to the action of the white lead with which he works; the painter's cough, the grinder's rot, the chimney-sweep's cancer or soot-wart, originate in nothing but their respective professions. The amaurosis of the founder and the watchmaker's myopia are the result in ninety-nine cases in a hundred of the flaming forge and the magnifying lens. The chief ills which appear necessarily to result from a constant devotion to literature may be reduced ultimately to a want of exercise or of fresh air, to a confined position of the body, or a too ardent exercise of the brain. But the three first of these inconveniences are also common to the tailor and the cobbler, and the whole of them to the city clerk. There are not then any ills exclusively proper to the literary man. No sole right has he in any bodily or mental suffering. The calamities of the man of letters are those of the individual, not of the occupation. It is scarcely fair, to attribute Prynne's cropped ears to his numerous citations on the unloveliness of lovelocks. Toland's Pantheisticon and his Tetradymus, with all his other numerous publications, cannot be convicted of bringing him to his death in the poor carpenter's room at Putney, if, indeed, it was the carpenter's, for there are who say the whole house was his The spirit which prompted his very first work, Christianity not Mysterious, might have brought him to equal or greater grief had he never written a line. It was desistance from study, according to Dr. Johnson, that led to the madness of Swift. Was Steele's distress the result of his Chistian Hero, or his Conscious Lovers, rather than the natural consequence of his speculative scheming and careless generosity? The morbid tone and dissipated habits own. |