Chapter III: Part 3

There has been lately published the following personal description of a great writer whom I will not especially designate. It runs as follows: ‘The first impression one gets is of a small man with large feet, walking as if for a wager, arms swinging hither and thither, and fingers briskly playing imaginary tunes in the air as he goes. Then, as the eccentric shape comes nearer, one is aware of a stubby beard and peeping eyes expressive of mingled distrust and aversion; a hideous hat is clapped down on the broad brow, which hat, when lifted, displays a bald expanse of skull bearing no sort of resemblance whatever to the counterfeit (_sic_) presentiments of Apollo; and yet, incongruous though it seems, this little vacuous, impatient, querulous being is no other than—’ And then there is named one of the greatest masters of language whom the world has ever owned.

Yet who, having read this infamous portrait of physical defects, whether it be truth or libel, can ever again entirely divest his memory of it, can ever wholly prevent its arising in odious ridicule between him and his rapturous sense of the perfect music of a great style? Shakespeare cursed those who would not let his bones alone; the living genius may with equal justice curse those who will not let alone his living form and features. There are only two classes of persons who may be certain of seeing every physical fault or deformity or affliction in face or form brutally written down in print: they are the man of genius in the reports of his contemporaries, and the escaped criminal on the handbills and search-warrants of the police. Renan and Arton receive exactly the same measure.

The vulgar, the Herr Omnes of Luther, cannot comprehend the hatred, the loathing of observation and comment, which are of the very essence of the poetic temperament. Yet it is strange to think that being mobbed can be agreeable to anyone. The sense of being pursued by incessant curiosity, as often as not a merely malignant curiosity, must poison the hours of life to the proud and sensitive nature. Such curiosity existed, no doubt, in the days of Ovid, in the days of Alkibiades; but modern inquisitiveness is far worse, being armed with all the modern powers to torture. The intolerable Kodak, the intolerable interviewer, the artifices of the press, the typewriter, the telegraph, the telephone, the greedy, indelicate, omnivorous mind of the modern public—all contribute to make of celebrity a Gehenna.

Creation is the paradise of the artist or poet; sympathy, if it be also true, is balm to him; for the opinion of others he will never greatly care if his lips have been truly touched with the coal from the altar, yet the sense of his influence over them will be welcome to him; but the espionage of the multitude will be always to him irritating as mosquito bites, pestilent as a swarm of termites, darkening like a locust flight the face of the sun.

It is hard to think that one who has an illustrious name cannot idly gossip with an intimate friend without every careless word being stereotyped. One is grateful to Mr Knowles for telling us that Tennyson declared he would shake his fists in the face of Almighty God if He, etc., etc. One rejoices to know of this outburst of honest indignation at the unpitied sufferings of the helpless and the harmless, this grand flinging of the phylacteries in the face of a hypocritical and egotistic world. At the same time it is surely impossible to admit that such a spontaneous and impassioned expression of emotion ought, by any hearer of it, to have been, in cold blood, put on record and produced in print?

Poor dead singer of Ida and Œnone! The ruthless inquisitors who poisoned his life still pursue him even beyond the cold waters of the Styx! There is something infinitely pathetic in the knowledge of how, all his life long, Tennyson endeavoured to avoid the intrusion of the crowd, and of how utterly useless all his wishes and endeavours were, and how those whom he trusted and confided in, bring out the dead children of his spoken thoughts naked in the sight of the multitude whom he shunned.

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.

Lombroso confuses in a most unscientific manner the passion of love and the bond of marriage. Because Michael Angelo says that art is wife enough for him, Lombroso supposes that no passion, good or evil, ever moved him. The fact that a man or woman has not married does not prove that they have had no amours: the probability is that their ardour and caprice in love have withheld them from the captivity of a legal union, which is usually the tomb of love. Everything which disturbs the odd conclusion to which it has pleased him to come is put aside and left out by a writer whose treatise pretends to be based on an inexorable accuracy. He carefully omits all reference to the men of old who would, almost without exception, disprove his theory. The three greatest of these are surely Mahomet, Alexander and Julius Cæsar: all this triad were famous for sensual indulgence almost without limit. So far as the fact may be considered to honour genius, its alliance with the joys of voluptuous passions is fully established, and no ingenuity in paradox of a perverse hater of it can contravene the fact. As for the poets, from Catullus to Burns, they rise in their graves and laugh in the face of the biologist. Sterile? They? As well call sterile the red clover which yields its fecundating pollen to the bee in the glad sunlight of a summer day.

The great singer called Mario was a man of genius in every way, apart from the art in which he was unsurpassed: yet, he was a singularly handsome man, and possessed of magical seduction for women. Of the Spanish poet Zorilla, for whose recent death all Spanish women wept, the same may be said. Longfellow was very handsome, and his life was lovely, noble, and harmonious, from his youth to his grave. The physical beauty of Washington is well known, yet his genius cannot be contested. Vandyke had extreme physical beauty; Raffaelle also; the painters have nearly always been conspicuous for personal beauty, from Leonardo to Millais and Leighton. Gladstone has very fine features and a magnificent constitution; his physical strength is wonderful, yet his intellect has always been at full stretch, like a racing greyhound. The personal beauty and fine stature of Tennyson were accompanied by the most keen intellectual ardour, extant until the very latest day of his life. The beauty of Milton and of Goethe has become traditional in their respective countries. Wellington and Marlborough were singularly handsome men. Napoleon was a man of short stature, but his face had a classic beauty which resisted even death, as may be seen in the mask taken from his dead features at St Helena. Take Lamartine; place his verse where you will, it is impossible to deny his genius, the genius of intense poetic sympathy and insight, of eloquence, of magical music of utterance, of comprehension of all creatures which live and suffer; he himself was his finest poem, and as to his wonderful physical beauty there can be no dispute. Of three typical men of genius of modern times take Shakespeare, Goethe and Henri Quatre; all were of much beauty of person, and masculine vigour was not lacking in any; in the two latter it was even excessive. The hero of Arques and Ivry was the lover of more fair women than peopled the harem of Sardanapalus. Yet he had supreme genius; the genius of command, of wit, of intuition, of magnetic charm over the minds and wills and hearts of men; a charm which has been stronger than death, and has kept the fascination of his memory green throughout the length and breadth of France. Many more similar examples might be quoted. These, however, suffice to prove the inexactitude of the envious calumnies cast upon genius by Lombroso, who actually asserts that genius is never separated from physical degeneracy, and that the splendour of the brain is always paid for by atrophy of other organs! Were this true, the wretched, deformed, stunted creatures, the arrest of whose physical development is artificially obtained by the most cruel torture, and constitutes a trade in the Cevennes and the Pyrenees, would all of them become Napoleons, Goethes, Byrons, Mussets, Racines and Bismarcks. The manufacture of cripples would be the manufacture of heroes and poets! The favourite theory of scientists that genius is _caused_ by physical imperfection is manifestly untrue, and grossly calumnious. It means, if it means anything, that the physically imperfect creature is the intellectually perfect; that the scrofulous and hunchbacked dwarf is the light-giver of the world, the Apollo Citharædus of the arts. What facts bear out such a theory?

Equally calumnious and false is the conclusion by Lombroso, that the man of genius (like the madman) is born, lives and dies, _cold_, _solitary_, _invisible_. A more abominable libel was never penned by mediocrity on greatness. The sweet, bright humour of Scott, buoyant even beneath woe and bodily pain; the gay, delightful kindliness of Molière, the cheerful, serene philosophies of Montaigne, the superb resistance to calamity of Cervantes, the playful, indulgent, affectionate temper of Thackeray, the noble tranquillity in adversity of Milton, the happy whimsical humour of Horace, the calm and fruitful leisure of Suetonius, the adoration of Nature of all the poets, from Theocritus to Lecomte de Lisle—all these and a thousand others arise to memory in refutation of this ignoble libel. Who held that the saddest things on earth were—

‘Un cage sans oiseaux, une ruche sans abeilles,
Une maison sans enfans?’

Victor Hugo: the master of one of the most fertile, puissant and imaginative minds ever known on earth. That genius seeks solitude is natural: it is only the fool who is afraid of his own company; the meditations and intellectual memories of genius must always be more delightful to it than the babble of society.

The commerce and conversation of the majority of persons is wearisome, trivial, dull; it is not wonderful that one who can commune in full harmony of thought with Nature, and with the wisdom of old, turns from the common babble of the common herd, and seeks the shelter of the library, or the silence of the forest and the moor. But such an one will always give more human sympathy than he can ever receive. None can see into his soul; but the souls of others are laid bare to him. To others he is a mystery which they fear; but others are to him as children whom he pities. If their folly and deadness of heart arouse his scorn, he yet weeps for them, because they know not what they do. They cannot hear, as he hears, the sigh in the leaves of the fallen tree, the woe in the cry of the widowed bird, the voices of the buried nations calling from the unseen tombs: no, in that sense he is alone, as the seer is alone and the prophet; but this loneliness comes not from the coldness of his own heart, but from the poverty of the hearts of other men. Who dares to say that those who alone can put into speech the emotions of a humanity, in itself dumb and helpless, are incapable of feeling those emotions which without them would find neither utterance nor interpreter.

Lombroso speaks exultingly of the cruelty to women of Musset, Byron, Carlyle and others; he has evidently no conception of the intense irritation roused in sensitive natures by uncongenial and enforced companionship. Jane Carlyle was a woman of fine wit and character, but she had no tact and little patience, and her sharp retorts must have been as thorns in the flesh of her bilious and melancholy Saul, as his uncouthness and ill-breeding must have been cruel trials to her. But this was no fault of either of them: it was the fault of that sad mistake, so common in the world, of an ill-assorted marriage, in which the prisoners suffered only the more because they were, in their different ways, of fine character, with a sense of duty so acute in each that it was a torture to both alike. What Lombroso calls the brutality of Carlyle was probably little else than the morbid gloom caused by a diseased liver, this disease in turn caused by the constraint and asphyxiation of a town life in a small house to a man born of hardy, outdoor, rustic stock, and farmed to breathe the strong, keen air of solitary Scottish moors and hills, to be braced by storm and sunshine, to battle with snow and wind and rain. The terrible folly which drives men of talent into cities, and leave them only the vitiated air of close and crowded streets, of feverish gatherings, and of unhealthy club-houses, is the origin of that alliance, so often seen in the present age, between the gifted mind and the suffering body, or the restless nerves, of a _névrosé_, of a hypochondriac, or of a bilious diabetic.

Lombroso, in the malignant spitefulness with which the scientists throw mud and stones at all genius, calls Byron a _Rachitique_, on account of his deformed foot; but when we remember Byron’s splendid swimming powers, his endurance in the saddle, his passion for the mountains and the sea, his heroic calmness on his lonely deathbed, we must, if we are sincere, admit that this _Rachitique_, even apart from all his superb genius, was a man of no common courage and no common force, and that, whatever might be at birth the physical weakness accompanying his great physical beauty, he had known how to make himself the equal of the strongest even in outdoor sports. When we think of that great beauty before which women went down as corn before the flash of the reaping-hook, of the incomparable romance of that life, passing from the crowds of St James’s to the pine solitudes of Ravenna, from the adulation of Courts to the silence of Alp and ocean, from the darksome glens and braes of Scotland to the azure light on the Hellespont and the Adrian Sea—when we think of its marvellous compass brought within the short span of thirty-six years, of its god-like powers, of its surpassing gifts, of its splendour of song, of wit, of melody, of passion, and of inspiration, of its tragic close, which broke off the laurel bough in its green prime, as Apollo would have it broken—when we think of this life, I say, it is easy to understand why its effulgence has been the mark for every petty malignity and jealous mediocrity ever since the light of the sun died down at Missolonghi.

Byron’s must ever remain the most ideal, the most splendid, the most varied life which ever incarnated in itself the genius of man and the gifts of the gods: what joy, then, to the petty and the envious to point to his club foot, and to assure us he was _Rachitique_! The puling versifiers who spend their lifetime in elaborating artificial sonnets based on early Italian methods, straining, refining, paring, altering, transforming, trying to replace by effort all which is lacking to them in inspiration, may well be unable to comprehend aught of that fiery fury of scorn and invective, of that Niagara-like rush of thought and word and imagery, which made verse as natural an utterance to Byron as the torrent of its song is natural to the nightingale in the months of spring. To the grand verse of Byron there may be rivals, there may be superiors; but to the poetry of his life there is no equal in any other life. What greater, more unpardonable sin can he have in the sight of mediocrity?

I lately saw a tourist of small stature, mean appearance, and awkward gesture, criticising unfavourably the attitude of the beautiful Mercury in the Vatican Rotonda. I was irresistibly reminded of certain versifiers and newspaper essayists of the present moment criticising Byron!

Lombroso asserts that ‘the man of genius has only contempt for other men of genius; he is offended by all praise not given to himself; the dominant feeling of a man of genius, or even of erudition, is hatred and scorn for all other men who possess, or approach the possession of genius or talent.’ A greater libel was never penned. It is natural that those who are masters of their art should be less easy to please, less ignorant of its demands and beauties, than the crowd can be. The great writer, the great artist, the great composer, can scarcely fail to feel some disdain for the facility with which the public is satisfied, the fatuity with which it accepts the commonplace, the second-rate, the imitation, the mere catch-penny, as true and original creation. But this scorn for the mediocre, which is inseparable from all originality and is its right and privilege, does not for a moment preclude the ardent sympathy, the joyous recognition with which genius will salute the presence of kindred genius. What of the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth, of Byron and Shelley, of Flaubert and George Sand, of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson? Scarce a year ago two illustrious men conversed with sympathy and friendship under the green leaves by the waters of Annecy. Philippe Berthelet narrates how ‘sous les vieux noyers de Talloires ils discutèrent pour la première fois de leur vie, Renan défendant son cher Lamartine, et Taine son poëte préféré Musset; je garde un pieux souvenir des nobles paroles de ces deux grands hommes qu’il m’a été donné d’entendre ce soir de Septembre sur le bord du lac limpide, au pied de la Tournette couronnée de neiges.’

The public likes inferior production; as a rule prefers it, because it understands it more easily; and this preference may irritate the supreme artist into a burst of wrath. Berlioz gave the _Damnation de Faust_ to empty benches, and his Titanic disdain of his contemporaries for their preference of weaker men has been justified by the verdict of the present generation. But this sentiment of scorn is as far removed from the petty malignity of envy and injustice as the fury of the tempest amongst the Alps or Andes is unlike the sputtering of a candle guttering in a tin sconce. To the poet to see the poetaster crowned; to the great man to see his miserable imitator accepted as his equal; to the planet on high to know that the street lamp below is thought his rival, must ever be offensive. But this offence is just, and has grandeur in it; it is no more meanness and jealousy than the planet is the gaspipe or the Alpine storm the candle.

To the great artist it is a great affront to see the imitator of himself, the thief, the dauber, the mimic, the mediocre, accepted as an artist by the world. He is entitled to resent the affront and to scourge the offender. The intolerance of genius for mediocrity is called unkindness: it is no more unkind than the sentence of the judge on the criminal. In our time the material facilities given to production have multiplied mediocrity as heat multiplies carrion flies; it should have no quarter shown to it; it is a ravaging pest.

Cheap printing makes writers of thousands who would be more fittingly employed in stitching shoes or digging ditches; and the assistance of photography makes painters or draughtsmen of thousands who would be more harmlessly occupied whitewashing sheds or carding wool. Genius is as rare as ever it was in all the arts; but the impudent pretensions of nullity to replace and represent it increase with every year, because it finds readier acceptance from the ever-increasing ignorance of a universally educated public. The men of genius who do exist do not say this loudly enough or often enough: they are afraid to look unkind and to create enemies. It is not excellence which is malignant, envious, slanderous, mean: it is inferiority; inferiority dressed in the cheap garment of ill-fitting success.

There is a draughtsman who is very eminent in our time, and whose drawings have brought him in alike celebrity and wealth. He is esteemed one of the first artists in black-and-white of the century. Yet he never draws a line of any figure without resorting to his immense collection of photographs of all kinds and conditions of persons, in all attitudes and in all costumes, whence he selects whatever he may want to reproduce. This habit may perhaps not impair his skill as a draughtsman; but it certainly makes him a mere imitator, a mere copyist, and robs his works of all spontaneity, originality and sincerity. To draw from a photograph is mere copying, mere cheating; it is not art at all. Yet this popular draughtsman has not the least shame or hesitation in avowing his methods; nor do his public or his critics appear to see anything to censure or regret in them. If the true artist, who is sincere and original in all his creations, who draws from life, and would no more employ a camera than he would pick a pocket, feels, and expresses the contempt which he feels, for the draughtsman who is dependent on photographs, he is not moved either by hostility or jealousy, but by a wholesome and most just disdain. It is a disdain with which the general public can have little sympathy, because they cannot estimate the quality of the offence which excites it.

To the creator, whether of prose, of poem, of melody, picture, or statue, who is sincere in all he creates, to whom conscious imitation would have all the baseness of a forgery, and to whom sincerity and originality are the essence of creative talent, the fraud of imitation disgusts and offends as it cannot do the mere outsider. Such disgust, such offence, are no more envy or jealousy than the sublime fury of the storming-party is the secret stabbing of the hired bravo.

Oh, the obscure! the vile obscure! what shafts dipped in gall will they not let fly from the dusky parlour in which they sit and look with envious scowl out on the distant splendour of great lives!

The sweetest singer who ever sang on the classic Tyrrhene shore—Shelley, who soared with the skylark and suffered with the demi-god—Shelley leaves unhappily behind him a piteous little letter telling his friend Williams, in Dublin, of his poverty, and asking for the loan of five-and-twenty pounds; and this poor little letter is basely preserved and is sold by auction in London in the month of March of last year for the sum of eleven sovereigns! _O beati insipientes!_ who cares whether you borrow five-and-twenty pounds, or five-and-twenty pence, or five-and-twenty thousand? Who cares to keep your humble request, your timid confession? Who cares whether you got what you craved, or were left to die of hunger? You, the mediocre, the commonplace, the incapable, are left in peace; but the sorry, carking, humiliating need of the beautiful boy-singer, whose name is blessed for all time, is dragged into the auction-mart and bid for rabidly by the curious! What joy for you, you well-fed, broad-bellied, full-pursed hordes of the commonplace, to think that this sensitive plant shivered and sickened under the vulgar hand of dun and bailiff, and withered in the sandy waste of want! He could write down the music of the lark, and hear the laughter of the fairies, and paint the changing glories of the sea, and suffer with the fallen Titan as with the trodden flower—but he was once in sore need of five-and-twenty pounds! _O beati insipientes!_ Here lie your triumphs and your revenge. Clasp your fat palms above your ample paunch, and grin as you embrace your banker’s pass-book. Take heed to keep that little letter of the poet of the ‘Prometheus’ safe under glass for all time, to comfort the jealous pains of the millions of nonentities whom you will continue to procreate until the end of time! Such are the consolations of inferiority.

Genius offends by its unlikeness to the general; it scorns their delights, their views, their creeds, their aspirations; it is at once much simpler and much more profound than they; it suffices to itself in a manner which, to the multitude, seems arrogance; the impersonal is always much more absorbing to it than the personal; there are qualities in it at once childlike and godlike, which offend the crowd at once by their ignorance and by their wisdom. In a word, it is apart from them; and they know that, they feel that, and they cannot forgive its unlikeness.

_O Beati Insipientes!_ Unwatched, you eat and drink and work and play; unchronicled are your errors and your follies; would you weep, you may weep in peace; would you take a country walk, no spy, notebook in hand, will lurk in the hedges; when you pour out your trivial nonsense in the ear of a friend, he will not treasure it up to turn it into printer’s copy as soon as you shall be cold in your coffin.

_O Beati Insipientes!_ You know not what safety, what peace, what comfort are gained for you by your mantle of obscurity. You know not, and you would not believe though angels and archangels descended to tell it you, that the splendour of the sunlight of fame is darkened for ever to those whose path lies through it by the shadow which follows, mimicking, prying, listening, grinning, girding, slobbering, eagerly watching for a false step, cruelly counting the thorns trodden amidst the flowers—that shadow which dogs without mercy the whole of a life, and thrusts its prying fingers through the cere-clothes of death, that shadow of merciless and malign curiosity which follows genius as the assassin followed the fair youth Crichton through the streets of Mantua: the crime of Crichton being to excel!

CITIES OF ITALY

Whatever may be the opinion of Europe as to the political advantages accruing to it from the independence of Italy, it must be mournfully confessed that the losses to art and to history through it are greater than any which could have been caused by centuries of neglect or long years of hostile occupation and devastating war. It is scarcely to be measured, indeed, what those losses are; so immense are they in their extent, so incessant in their exercise, so terrible in their irreparable infamy. No doubt it could never be foreseen, never be imagined, by those who brought about and permitted the consolidation of Italy into one kingdom, that the people, nominally free, would become the abject slaves of a municipal despotism and of a barbarous civic greed. None of the enthusiasts for Italian independence possessed that power of foresight which would have told them that its issue would be the daily destruction, by hordes of foreign workmen, of its treasures of art and its landmarks of history. Yet there is no exaggeration in saying that this, and nothing less than this, is its chief issue.

Hermann Grimm published a powerful appeal to the scholars and artists of Europe against the Italian destruction of Rome. Having for thirty years written on Italian cities and their art and history, with scholarship and devotion, he had gained the right to raise his voice in indignant protest and scorn against the mercenary and vulgar shamelessness with which the Roman municipality is so dealing with the splendid heritage which it has received, that soon scarcely one stone will be left upon another of the sacred city. He said, and with truth, that the portion of the Italian nation which has the eyes to perceive and the soul to abhor all that is being done is so small a minority, and one so spiritless, hopeless and discouraged, that it is for all practical purposes non-existent. He appealed to what he termed that larger Rome which exists in the hearts of all who have ever known Rome with a scholar’s knowledge, or an artist’s love. The appeal may be powerless but at least it may be heard; and though it will scarcely be able to pierce through the thick hide of smug vanity and rapacity in which Italian municipalities are enveloped, it will put on record the courage and the scorn of one man for what is the greatest artistic iniquity of our time. It is idle and untrue for Italians to say that the rest of Europe has no right to interfere with what they do with the legacy they enjoy. In the first place, without the aid and acquiescence of Europe, the Italian kingdom as a unity could never have existed at all; without the permission of Europe the entry into Rome could never have been made at all. Europe has the title to observe and to condemn the manner in which the superb gift, which she permitted to be given to those very various peoples who are called Italians, is being squandered away and destroyed. The United Kingdom of Italy may, as a political fact, disappear to-morrow in any European war or any great Socialistic uprising; but historic Italy, classic Italy, artistic Italy, is a treasure which belongs to the whole world of culture, in which, indeed, the foreigner, if he be reverent of her soil, is far more truly her son than those born of her blood who violate her and desecrate her altars. Italy cannot be narrowed to the petty bounds of a kingdom created yesterday; she has been the mistress of all art, the muse and the priestess of all peoples.

What are the Italians doing with her? It is sickening to note and to record. Nothing can ever give back to the world what, day by day, municipal councillors having houses to sell, syndicates and companies merely looking for spoliation and speculation, contractors who seize on the land as a trooper seizes on a girl in a sacked town, are all taking from the fairest and the most ancient cities and towns on earth. The sound of the hatchet in the woods and gardens of Italy is incessantly echoed by the sound of the pickaxe and hammer in the cities and towns. The crash of falling trees is answered by the crash of falling marbles. All over the land, destruction, of the vilest and most vulgar kind, is at work; destruction before which the more excusable and more virile destruction of war looks almost noble. For the present destruction has no other motive, object, or mainspring than the lowest greed. It is absolutely incomprehensible how, after having been the leaders and the light of the far centuries, the Italians have, by common consent and with pitiable self-congratulation, sunk to the position of the most benighted barbarism in art. In everything which is now constructed the worst and most offensive taste is manifest, whilst that which has existed for centuries is attacked and pulled down without remorse. I wholly fail to account, on any philosophic or psychological grounds, for the utter deadness of soul which has come on the Italians as a nation. Born with loveliness of all kinds, natural and architectural, around them, the æsthetic sense should be as instinctive in them as their movements of limbs or lungs. Instead of this, it is entirely gone out of them. They have no feeling for colour, no sense of symmetry, and little or no sense of reverence for the greatness and the gloriousness of the past.

The only people in whom any of the native feeling for natural and artistic beauty still exists are those country people who dwell far removed from the contagion of the towns, and the marine populations of the Veneto. But even in these it is slighter than any student of the past would expect. The sense of colour is _nil_ in most Italians; they might as well be colour-blind for any heed they take of harmony of tones. They delight in _chinoiseries_, in photographs, in crétonnes, in all the rubbish bought in modern Exhibitions. In the superb and immense halls of a palace of the Renaissance one will see priceless tapestries on the walls, antique marbles on the consoles, frescoes of Veronese, of Giulio Romano, or of Sodoma on the ceilings; and at the same time see arm-chairs and couches, some yellow, some blue, some green, some scarlet; a table-cover of crimson; and the mosaic floor covered with a worthless _moquette_ carpet of all hues, and of a set and staring pattern. I call to mind a similar palace on the Tiber, whose very name is as a trumpet-call to all the glories of the past; there the antique statues have been coloured, ‘because white marble is so cold and sad;’ an admirable copy in bronze of the Mercury of Gian’ di Bologna has had his wings, his petasus, and his caduceus gilded; and the marble floors have been taken up to have French parquet flooring laid down in their stead, and varnished so highly that the woods glisten like looking-glasses; yet the owner of and dweller in this place is a great noble, who, after his own fashion, cherishes art. I have seen a Greek Venus, found in the soil at Baiæ, wreathed round with innumerable yards of rose-coloured gauze by its owner, an Italian princess. The excuse given is, ‘_Senza un’po di tinta sta cosi fredda!_’

It is the same feeling which makes the Italian peasant say of the field-flowers which you have arranged in your rooms, ‘How well you have made those vulgar weeds look! Any one would take them now for _fiori secchi_!’ (artificial flowers). Whence comes it, this absolute blindness of the eyes, this deadening absence of all consciousness of beauty? It is the same thing in their villages and their fairs. Go to a fair on a feast-day in any part of France; go to a kermesse in Belgium or Luxembourg; go to a merry-making in Germany or Austria, and you will see a picturesque and graceful sight; you will see a great deal of what the eyes of Teniers, of Ostade, of Callot, of Mieris saw in their day. There will be harmonised colours, unconscious grace of grouping, arrangements of common goods and simple things so made that beauty is got out of them. But in a village festival in Italy there is nothing, except in the water pageants of Venice, which is not ugly; it is all dusty, uninteresting, untempting; what colours there are, are arranged with the same disregard of fitness as is shown in the yellow, red and green arm-chairs of the palace chambers; and the whole effect is one of squalor and of vulgarity. The carnivals, which used to be fine and brilliant spectacles, are now, almost all, save that of Milan, mere tawdry, trivial, unlovely follies. Who can account for this?

Are we to infer that all the transmitted influences of race count for nothing? Would those who, rightly or wrongly, are tempted to explain all the problems of life by the doctrines of heredity tell me why the living representatives of the most artistic races on earth are almost absolutely deprived of all artistic instincts? Some have suggested that it is the outcome of the artificial habits and false taste of the eighteenth century; but this can scarcely be correct, because this artificiality existed all over Europe, not in Italy alone, and besides, never touched the country people in any way or in any of their habits.

The excuse made for the utter disregard and destruction of beauty in Italy is that the utility of all things is now preferred to beauty. But this is no adequate explanation. It may explain why a dirty steamboat is allowed to grind against the water-steps of the Ca’d’Oro, or why the fair shores of Poselippo and the blue bays of Spezzia and Taranto are made hideous by steam and bricks. But it will not explain why the peasant thinks a wax or cambric flower more lovely than a field anemone or daffodil, or why the nobleman paints his Athene and gilds the wings of his Hermes. This can only be traced to the utter decay of all feeling for beauty, natural or artistic, in the Italian mind, and, though we see, we cannot adequately explain, we can only deplore, it. There is no doubt a tendency all the world over to loss of the true sense of beauty; despite the æsthetic pretences of nations, the real feeling for natural and artistic perfection is very weak in most of them. If it were strong and pure, the utilitarian (_i.e._, the money-getting spirit) would not prevail as it does in architecture, and forest solitudes would not be destroyed as they are; and men would see what hypocrites they be who make millions out of some hideous desecration of nature by factories, iron foundries, or petroleum wells, and think they can purchase condonation, and a reputation for fine taste, by buying pictures for their galleries or inlaying their halls with rare woods or stones. The whole world which calls itself civilised is guilty more or less of the most absolute barbarism; but modern Italy is guiltiest of all, even as he who has inherited a fair home and cultured intelligence is guiltier than he who has never known anything but a vitiated atmosphere and a squalid house. It is the immensity of her heritage which makes her abuse of all her opportunities so glaring and so utterly beyond pardon.

Nothing can ever give back to mankind what every day the Italian municipalities and people are destroying, as indifferently as though they were pulling down dead leaves or kicking aside anthills in the sand. There is not even the pretext for these acts that they are done to better the state of the people; to execute them the cheapest foreign labour is called in, ousting the men of the soil off it: house-rent is trebled and quadrupled, house-room narrowed, and in many instances denied, to the native population: and contracts are given away right and left to any foreign companies or syndicates who choose to bid for them. The frightful blocks of new houses, the hideous new streets, the filthy tramways, the naked new squares, are all made by foreign speculators who purchase the right of spoliation from the municipalities as the private owners of the soil. A few men are made temporarily richer: the country is permanently beggared.

‘Rome’ wrote Hermann Grimm, ‘represents for humanity a spiritual value which cannot be easily estimated, but which is none the less precious because ideal.’ Yet the vulgar and petty administration of an ephemeral moment is allowed to treat the capital of the world as though it were some settlement of shanties in the backwoods of America, fit only to disappear beneath the mallet and scaffolding of carpenters and masons. He said with justice that to call it vandalism is an injustice to the Vandals, for they, at least, were too ignorant to know the worth of what they destroyed, and acted in mere fierce instinct of conquest, with no ulterior greed; but they who are now destroying arch on arch, tower on tower, temple and church and palace, piling the sacred stones one on another like rubble, and effacing landmarks which had been respected through a thousand years, have the excuse neither of ignorance nor of war. They know not what to do, and we may add that they care not what they do, so long as their gain is made, their pockets filled.

Of all the grotesque barbarisms committed in Rome, the destruction of the cloister of Ara Cœli and of the tower of San Paolo upon the Capitol, to make room for an equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel, has been one of the most offensive and ill-judged. All the world knows the beauty of the Capitol, the immemorial memories connected with it, and the great statue which for so many centuries has felt the Roman sunshine strike on its golden bronze. The placing of a modern statue in juxtaposition with the mighty Aurelian is an act so irredeemably vulgar, so pitiably incongruous, that it is a matter of infinite regret, even for the repute of the House of Savoy, that the present king did not peremptorily forbid such use of his father’s manes. In the Superga, or on the mountain-side of the Piedmontese Alps he loved so well, a statue of Victor Emmanuel would be in keeping with his traditions, but it is a cruelty to him to dwarf him by such surroundings and such memories as are there on the Capitol of Rome. His fame is not of the kind which can bear, uninjured, such comparisons; and were it even ten times greater than it is, there could be no excuse for using the Capitol for such a purpose when there is the whole width of the Campagna for it, and when, in perfect accord with the abilities of modern sculptors, there are all the staring and naked modern piazzas waiting for their works. Will it be credited that it was actually proposed to place a statue of him between the columns of St Mark? In these matters the king could and should, with perfect propriety, intervene, and forbid a pretended homage for his father’s memory being made a pretext and cover for the coarse and common vandalism of the epoch. In Florence, the beautiful wooded entrance of the Cascine was destroyed to make the bald, uninteresting square called the Piazza degli Zuavi, and a large, stony, open place, shadeless and unlovely, was reserved for a monument to Victor Emmanuel; for this the oval brick basement of the pedestal was raised many years ago, and there stands, unfinished and hideous, an eyesore to the city, an insult to the royal House.

There is scarcely a little town, there is no provincial capital on the whole peninsula, which has not some new, staring, stucco street named Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, or some historic and ancient square made absurd and pitiable by being re-baptised Piazza dell’ Independenza. The effect is at once ludicrous and deplorable.

If it were necessary thus to deify the events of the last thirty years, and magnify them out of their true proportions, it would have been easy to build some wholly new city in some vacant spot, which might have borne any name or names deemed fitting, and thus have left in peace the great cities of the past, and not have made the present recall the fable of the frog and the bull.