Literary Character of Men of Genius | Page 7

of writing a letter. I write to you from the Villa
Dupuy, near Leghorn, with the islands of Elba and Corsica visible from
my balcony, and my old friend the Mediterranean rolling blue at my
feet. As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can
partly soften or subdue my other passions, and resist or endure those of
others.
"I have the honour to be, truly,
"Your obliged and faithful servant,
"NOEL BYRON.
"To I. D'Israeli, Esq."
The ill-starred expedition to Greece followed this letter.
* * * * *

This work, conceived in youth, executed by the research of manhood,
and associated with the noblest feelings of our nature, is an humble but
fervent tribute, offered to the memory of those Master Spirits from
whose labours, as BURKE eloquently describes, "their country receives
permanent service: those who know how to make the silence of their
closets more beneficial to the world than all the noise and bustle of
courts, senates, and camps."

LITERARY CHARACTER.
CHAPTER I.
Of Literary Characters, and of the Lovers of Literature and Art.
Diffused over enlightened Europe, an order of men has arisen, who,
uninfluenced by the interests or the passions which give an impulse to
the other classes of society, are connected by the secret links of
congenial pursuits, and, insensibly to themselves, are combining in the
same common labours, and participating in the same divided glory. In
the metropolitan cities of Europe the same authors are now read, and
the same opinions become established: the Englishman is familiar with
Machiavel and Montesquieu; the Italian and the Frenchman with Bacon
and Locke; and the same smiles and tears are awakened on the banks of
the Thames, of the Seine, or of the Guadalquivir, by Shakspeare,
Molière, and Cervantes--
Contemporains de tous les hommes, Et citoyens de tous les lieux.
A khan of Tartary admired the wit of Molière, and discovered the
Tartuffe in the Crimea; and had this ingenious sovereign survived the
translation which he ordered, the immortal labour of the comic satirist
of France might have laid the foundation of good taste even among the
Turks and the Tartars. We see the Italian Pignotti referring to the
opinion of an English critic, Lord Bolingbroke, for decisive authority
on the peculiar characteristics of the historian Guicciardini: the German
Schlegel writes on our Shakspeare like a patriot; and while the Italians

admire the noble scenes which our Flaxman has drawn from their great
poet, they have rejected the feeble attempts of their native artists. Such
is the wide and the perpetual influence of this living intercourse of
literary minds.
Scarcely have two centuries elapsed since the literature of every nation
was limited to its fatherland, and men of genius long could only hope
for the spread of their fame in the single language of ancient Rome;
which for them had ceased to be natural, and could never be popular. It
was in the intercourse of the wealth, the power, and the novel arts of
the nations of Europe, that they learned each other's languages; and
they discovered that, however their manners varied as they arose from
their different customs, they participated in the same intellectual
faculties, suffered from the same wants, and were alive to the same
pleasures; they perceived that there were no conventional fashions, nor
national distinctions, in abstract truths and fundamental knowledge. A
new spirit seems to bring them nearer to each other: and, as if literary
Europe were intent to form but one people out of the populace of
mankind, they offer their reciprocal labours; they pledge to each other
the same opinions; and that knowledge which, like a small river, takes
its source from one spot, at length mingles with the ocean-stream
common to them all.
But those who stand connected with this literary community are not
always sensible of the kindred alliance; even a genius of the first order
has not always been aware that he is the founder of a society, and that
there will ever be a brotherhood where there is a father-genius.
These literary characters are partially, and with a melancholy colouring,
exhibited by JOHNSON. "To talk in private, to think in solitude, to
inquire or to answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders
about the world without pomp or terror; and is neither known nor
valued but by men like himself." Thus thought this great writer during
those sad probationary years of genius when
Slow rises worth, by poverty depress'd;
not yet conscious that he himself was devoting his days to cast the

minds of his contemporaries and of the succeeding age in the mighty
mould of his own; JOHNSON was of that order of men whose
individual genius becomes that of a people. A prouder conception rose
in