DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AUTHORS AND THE IMPRESSION CONVEYED OF THEM BY THEIR WORKS.

THIS is one of those subtle and delicate subjects which Literary philosophers have not taken the trouble to discuss; it is one which is linked with two popular errors. The first error is in the assertion that Authors are different from the idea of them which their writings tend to convey; and the second error is in the expectation that nevertheless Authors ought to be exactly what their readers choose to imagine them. The world does thus, in regard to Authors, as it does in other matters — expresses its opinions in order to contrast its expectations. But if an Author disappoint the herd of spectators, it does not follow that it is his fault. The mass of men are disappointed with the Elgin Marbles. Why? Because they are like life — because they are natural. Their disappointment in being brought into contact with a man of genius is of the same sort. He is too natural for them, — they expected to see his style in his clothes. Mankind love to be cheated: thus the men of genius who have not disappointed the world in their externals, and in what I shall term the management of self, have always played a part, — they have kept alive the vulgar wonder by tricks suited to the vulgar understanding, — they have measured their conduct by device and artifice, — and have walked the paths of life in the garments of the stage. Thus did Pythagoras and Diogenes, — thus did Napoleon and Louis XIV. (the last of whom was a man of ‘genius if only from the delicate beauty of his compliments,) — thus did Bolingbroke, and Chatham, (who never spoke except in his best wig, as being the more imposing,) — and above all Englishmen, thus did Lord Byron. These last three are men eminently interesting to the vulgar, not so much from their “genius as their charlatanism. It requires a more muscular mind than ordinary to recover the shock of finding a great man simple. There are some wise lines in the Corsair, the peculiar merit of which I never recollect that any of the million critics of that poem discovered: —

 

“He bounds — he flies, until his footsteps reach

The spot where ends the cliff, begins the beach,

There checks his speed; but pauses, less to breathe

The breezy freshness of the deep beneath,

Than there his wonted statelier step renew,

Nor rush, disturbed by haste, to vulgar view;

For well had Conrad learned to curb the crowd

By arts that veil and oft preserve the proud:

His was the lofty port, the distant mien

That seems to shun the sight, and awes if seen;

The solemn aspect and the high-born eye,

That checks low mirth, but lacks not courtesy.

 

In these lines — shrewd and worldly to the very marrow — are depicted the tricks which Chiefs have ever been taught to play, but which Literary Men (Chiefs of a different order) have not learned to perform. Hence their simplicity, — hence the vulgar disappointment. No man was disappointed with the late Lord Londonderry, but many were with Walter Scott; none with Charles X. — many with Paul Courier; none with the late Archbishop of * * * * — many with Wordsworth. Massillon preserved in the court the impression he had made in the pulpit: he dressed alike his melodious style and his handsome person to the best advantage. Massillon was a good man, but he was a quack; it was his vocation, — for he was also a good courtier.

This, then, is the difference between the great men of letters and the great men of courts: the former generally disappoint the vulgar — the latter do not; because the one are bred up in the arts that hide defects and dazzle the herd, and the other know nothing but knowledge, and are skilled in no arts save those of composition. It follows, then, that the feeling of disappointment is usually a sign of a weak mind in him who experiences it, — a foolish, apprentice-sort of disposition, that judges of everything great by the criterion of a puppet-show, and expects as much out of the common way in a celebrated Author as in the Lord Mayor’s coach. I hear, therefore, the common cry, that a great man does not answer expectation, with a certain distrustful scorn of the persons who utter it. What right have they to judge of the matter at all? Send them to see Gog and Magog; they will not be disappointed with that sight. Is it not, in fact, a great presumption in the petty herd of idlers to express an opinion of the man, when they can scarcely do so of his works, which are but a part of him? Men who knew not, nor could have known, a line in the Principia, thought themselves perfectly at liberty to say that Sir Isaac Newton was quite a different man from what might have been expected. There is scarcely a good critic of books born in an age, and yet every fool thinks himself justified in criticising persons. “There are some people,” said Necker, in one of his fragments, “who talk of our Pascal — our Corneille. I am thunderstruck at their familiarity!”.

In real truth, I believe that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; it is usually in the physical appearance of the writer,—’ his manners — his mien — his exterior, — that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him — rarely in his mind. A man is, I suspect, but of a second-rate order whose genius is not immeasurably above his works, — who does not feel within him an inexhaustible affluence of thoughts — feelings — inventions — which he will never have leisure to embody in print. He will die, and leave only a thousandth part of his wealth to Posterity, which is his Heir. I believe this to be true even of persons, like La Fontaine, who succeed only in a particular line; men seemingly of one idea shining through an atmosphere of simplicity — the Monomaniacs of Genius. But it is doubly true of the mass of great Authors who are mostly various, accomplished, and all-attempting: such men never can perfect their own numberless conceptions.

It is, then, in the physical or conventional, not the mental qualities, that an Author usually falls short of our ideal: this is a point worthy to be fixed in the recollection. Any of my readers who have studied the biography of men of letters will allow my assertion is borne out by facts; and, at this moment, I am quite sure that numbers, even of both sexes, have lost a portion of interest for the genius of Byron on reading in Lady Blessington’s Journal that he wore a nankin jacket and green spectacles. Of such a nature are such disappointments. No! in the mind of a man there is always a resemblance to his works. His heroes may not be like himself, but they are like certain qualities, which belong to him. The sentiments he utters are his at the moment; — if you find them predominate in all his works, they predominate in his mind: if they are advanced in one, but contradicted in another, they still resemble their Author, and betray the want of depth or of resolution in his mind. His works alone make not up a man’s character, but they are the index to that living book.

Every one knows how well Voltaire refuted the assertion of J. Baptiste Rousseau that goodness and talent must exist together. The learned Strabo, holding the same error as Baptiste Rousseau, says (lib i.) that there cannot be “a good poet who is not first a good man.” This is a paradox, and yet it is not far from the truth: a good poet may not be a good man, but he must have certain good dispositions. Above all, that disposition which sympathises with noble sentiments — with lofty actions — with the Beauty of the Mind as of the Earth. This may not suffice to make him a good man — its influence may be counteracted a hundred ways in life, but it is not counteracted in his compositions. There the better portion of his Intellect awakes — there he gives vent to enthusiasm, and enthusiasm to generous and warm emotions. Sterne may have been harsh to his wife, but his heart was tender at the moment he wrote of Maria. Harshness of conduct is not a contradiction of extreme susceptibility to sentiment in writing. The latter may be perfectly sincere, as the former may be perfectly indefensible; in fact, the one may be a consequence, not a contradiction, of the other. The craving after the Ideal, which belongs to Sentiment, makes its possessor discontented with the mortals around him, and the very overfineness of nerve that quickens his feelings sharpens also his irritability. For my own part, so far from being surprised to hear that Sterne was a peevish and angry man, I should have presumed it at once from the overwrought fibre of his graver compositions. This contrast between softness in emotion, and callousness in conduct, is not peculiar to poets. Nero was womanishly affected by the harp; and we are told by Plutarch, that Alexander Pheræus, who was one of the sternest of tyrants, shed a torrent of tears upon the acting of a play. So that he who had furnished the most matter for tragedies was most affected by the pathos of a tragedy!

But who shall say that the feelings which produced such emotions even in such men were not laudable and good? Who that has stood in the dark caverns of the Human Heart, shall dare to scoff at the contrast of act and sentiment, instead of lamenting it? Such scoffers are the Shallows of Wit — their very cleverness proves their superficiality. There are various dark feelings within us which do not destroy, but which, when roused, overwhelm for the time the feelings which are good — to which last, occupied in literature, or in purely mental emotions, we are sensible alone, and unalloyed. Of our evil feelings, there is one in especial which is the usual characteristic of morbid literary men, though, hitherto, it has escaped notice as such, and which is the cause of many of the worst faults to be found both in the Author and the Tyrant: this feeling is Suspicion: and I think I am justified in calling it the characteristic of morbid literary men. Their quick susceptibilities make them over-sensible of injury, — they exaggerate the enmities they have awakened — the slanders they have incurred. They are ever fearful of a trap: nor this in literature alone. Knowing that they are not adepts in the world’s common business, they are perpetually afraid of being taken in; and, feeling their various peculiarities, they are often equally afraid of being ridiculed. Thus Suspicion, in all ways and all shapes, besets them; this makes them now afraid to be generous, and now to be kind; and acting upon a soil that easily receives, but rarely loses an impression — that melancholy vice soon obdurates and encrusts the whole conduct of the acting man. But in literary composition it sleeps. The thinking man then hath no enemy at his desk, — no hungry trader at his elbow — no grinning spy on his uncouth gestures. His soul is young again — he is what he embodies, — and the feelings, checked in the real world, obtain their vent in the imaginary. It was the Good Natural, to borrow a phrase from the French, that spoke in the erring Rousseau, when he dwelt on the loveliness of Virtue. It was the Good Natural that stirred in the mind of Alexander Pheræus when he wept at the mimic sorrows subjected to his gaze. When the time for action and for the real world arrived to either, it roused other passions, and Suspicion made the Author no less a wretch than it made the Tyrant.

Thus the tenderest sentiments may be accompanied with cruel actions, and yet the solution of the enigma be easy to the inquirer; and thus, though the life of an Author does not correspond with his works, his nature may.

But this view is the most partial of all, — and I have, therefore, considered it the first How few instances there are, after all, of even that seeming discrepitude, which I have just touched upon, between the Author’s conduct and his books; in most they chime together — and all the notes from the mighty instrument are in concord! Look at the life of Schiller, how completely his works assimilate with his restless, questioning, and daring genius: the animation of Fiesco — the solemnity of Wallenstein — are alike emblematic of his character. His sentiments are the echo to his life. Walter Scott and Cobbett — what a contrast! Could Cobbett’s life have been that of Scott — or Scott’s character that of Cobbett? You may read the character of the Authors in their several Works, as if the works were meant to be autobiographies. Warburton! — what an illustration of the proud and bitter Bishop, in his proud and bitter Books! Sir Philip Sidney (“Poetry put into action” is the fine saying of Campbell in respect to Sidney’s life true, but the poetry of the Arcadia.) is the Arcadia put into action; — the wise and benevolent Fénelon; — the sententious and fiery Corneille; — the dreaming and scarce intelligible Shelley; — the pompous vigour of Johnson, with his prejudice and his sense — his jealousies and his charity — his habitual magniloquence in nothings — and his gloomy independence of mind, yet low-born veneration for rank; — Johnson is no less visible in the Rambler, the Rasselas, the Lives of the Poets, the Taxation no Tyranny, than in his large chair at Mrs. Thrale’s — his lonely chamber in the dark court out of Fleet-street — or his leonine unbendings with the canicular soul of Boswell. How in the playfulness and the depth — the eccentricity and the solid sense — the ubiquitous sympathy with the larger mass of men — the absence of almost all sympathy with their smaller knots and closer ties, — how in those features, which characterise the pages of Bentham, you behold the wise, singular, benevolent, and passionless old man! I might go on enumerating these instances for ever: — Dante, Petrarch, Voltaire, rush on my memory as I write, — but to name them is enough to remind the reader that if he would learn their characters he has only to read their works. I have been much pleased in tracing the life of Paul Louis Courier, the most brilliant political writer France ever possessed — to see how singularly it is in keeping with the character of his writings. Talking the other day at Paris with some of his friends, they expressed themselves astonished at my accurate notions of his character—” You must have known him,” they said. “No; — but I know his works.” When he was in the army in Italy, he did not distinguish himself by bravery in his profession of Soldier, but by bravery in his pursuits as an Antiquarian! perfectly careless of danger, he pursued his own independent line of occupation — sympathizing with none of the objects of others — untouched by the vulgar ambition — wandering alone over the remains of old — falling a hundred times into the hands of the brigands, and a hundred times extricating himself by his address, and continuing the same pursuits with the same nonchalance. In all this you see the identical character which, in his writings, views with a gay contempt the ambition and schemes of others — which sneers alike at the Bourbon and the Buonaparte — which, careless of subordination, rather than braving persecution, pursues with a gallant indifference its own singular and independent career.

A critic, commenting on writings that have acquired some popularity, observed, that they contained two views of life contradictory of each other, — the one inclining to the Ideal and Lofty — the other to the Worldly and Cynical. The critic remarked, that “this might arise from the Author having two separate characters, — a circumstance less uncommon than the world supposed.” There is great depth in the critic’s observation. An Author usually has two characters, — the one belonging to his Imagination — the other to his Experience. From the one come all his higher embodyings: by the help of the one he elevates — he refines; — from the other come his beings of “the earth, earthy,” and his aphorisms of worldly caution. From the one broke — bright yet scarce distinct — the Rebecca of Ivanhoe, — from the other rose, shrewd and selfish, the Andrew Fairservice of Rob Roy. The original of the first need never to have existed — her elements belonged to the Ideal; but the latter was purely the creature of Experience, and either copied from one, or moulded unconsciously from several, of the actual denizens of the living world. In Shakspeare the same doubleness of character is remarkably visible. The loftiest Ideal is perpetually linked with the most exact copy of the commoners of life. Shakspeare had never seen Miranda — but he had drunk his glass with honest Stephano. Each character embodies a separate view of life — the one (to return to my proposition) the offspring of Imagination, the other of Experience. This complexity of character — which has often puzzled the inquirer — may, I think, thus be easily explained — and the seeming contradiction of the tendency of the work traced home to the conflicting principles in the breast of the Writer. The more an imaginative man sees of the world, the more likely to be prominent is the distinction I have noted.

I cannot leave this subject — though the following remark is an episode from the inquiry indicated by my title — without observing that the characters drawn by Experience — usually the worldly, the plain, and the humorous — stand necessarily out from the canvass in broader and more startling colours, than those created by the Imagination. Hence superficial critics have often considered the humorous and coarse characters of an author as his best, — forgetful that the very indistinctness of his ideal characters is not only inseparable from the nature of purely imaginary creations, but a proof of the exaltation and intenseness of the imaginative power. The most shadowy and mist-like of all Scott’s heroes is the Master of Ravenswood, and yet it is perhaps the highest of his characters in execution as well as conception. Those strong colours and massive outlines, which strike the vulgar gaze as belonging to the best pictures, belong rather to the lower Schools of Art. Let us take a work — the greatest the world possesses in those Schools, and in which the flesh-and-blood vitality of the characters is especially marked — I mean Tom Jones — and compare it with Hamlet. The chief characters in Tom Jones are all plain, visible, eating, drinking, and walking beings; those in Hamlet are shadowy, solemn, and mysterious — we do not associate them with the ordinary wants and avocations of Earth — they are

 

“Lifeless, but lifelike, and awful to sight,

Like the figures in arras that gloomily glare,

Stirred by the breath of the midnight air.”

 

But who shall say that the characters in Tom Jones are better drawn than those in Hamlet — or that there is greater skill necessary in the highest walk of the Actual School, than in that of the Imaginative? — Yet there are some persons who, secretly in their hearts, want Hamlet to be as large in the calves as Tom Jones! These are they who blame Lara for being indistinct — that very indistinctness shedding over the poem the sole interest it was capable of receiving. With such critics, Maritornes is a more masterly creation than Undine.

We may observe in Humorous Authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; — Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; — Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies, that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; — and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck’s creator. The pleasure or the pain we derive from our own foibles makes enough of our nature to come off somewhere or other in the impression we stamp of ourselves on Books.

There is — as I think it has been somewhere remarked by a French writer — there is that in our character which never can be seen except in our writings. Yes, all that we have formed from the Ideal — all our noble aspirings — our haunting visions — our dreams of virtue, — all the celata Venus which dwells in the lonely Ida of the heart — who could pour forth these delicate mysteries to gross and palpable hearers, — who could utterly unveil to an actual and indifferent spectator the cherished and revered images of years — dim regrets and vague hopes?

In fact, if you told your best friend half what you put upon paper, he would yawn in your face, or he would think you a fool. Would it have been possible for Rousseau to have gravely communicated to a living being the tearful egotisms of his Reveries? — could Shakspeare have uttered the wild confessions of his sonnets to his friends at the “Mermaid?” — should we have any notion of the youthful character of Milton — its lustrous but crystallized purity — if the Comus had been unwritten? Authors are the only men we ever really do know, — the rest of mankind die with only the surface of their character understood. True, as I have before said, even in an Author, if of large and fertile mind, much of his most sacred self is never to be revealed, — but still we know what species of ore the mine would have produced, though we may not have exhausted its treasure.

Thus, then, to sum up what I have said, so far from there being truth in the vulgar notion, that the character of Authors is belied in their works — their works are, to a diligent inquirer, their clearest and fullest illustration — an appendix to their biography far more valuable and explanatory than the text itself, From this fact we may judge of the beauty and grandeur of the materials of the human mind, although those materials are so often perverted, and their harmony so fearfully marred. It also appears that — despite the real likeness between the book and the man — the vulgar will not fail to be disappointed, because they look to externals; — and the man composed not the book with his face, nor his dress, nor his manners — but with his mind. Hence, then, to proclaim yourself disappointed with the Author is usually to condemn your own accuracy of judgment, and your own secret craving after pantomimic effect Moreover, it would appear, on looking over these remarks, that there are often two characters to an Author, — the one essentially drawn from the Poetry of life — the other from its Experience; and that hence are to be explained many seeming contradictions and inconsistencies in his works. Lastly, that so far from the book belying the author, unless he had written that book, you — (no, even if you are his nearest relation, his dearest connexion, — his wife, — his mother) — would never have known the character of his mind.

 

“Hæ pulcherrimæ effigies et mansuræ.”

 

All biography proves this remarkable fact! Who so astonished as a man’s relations when he has exhibited his genius, which is the soul and core of his character? Had Alfieri or Rousseau died at thirty, what would all who had personally known either have told us of them? Would they have given us any, the faintest, notion of their characters? None. A man’s mind is betrayed by his talents as much as his virtues. A councillor of a provincial parliament had a brother a mathematician—” How unworthy in my brother,” — cried the councillor,—” the brother of a councillor of the parliament in Bretagne, to sink into a mathematician!” That mathematician, was Descartes! What should we know of the character of Descartes, supposing him to have renounced his science, and his brother (who might fairly be supposed to know his life and character better than any one else) to have written his biography? — A reflection that may teach us how biography in general ought to be estimated.