Literary Character of Men of Genius | Page 9

whom such a mortality occurs in its nurseries;
such as the writers of the single sermon, the single law-tract, the single
medical dissertation, &c.; all writers whose subject is single, without
being singular; count for nothing the inefficient mob of mediocrists;
and strike out our literary _charlatans_; and then our alphabet of men of
genius will not consist, as it now does, of the four-and-twenty letters.]
[Footnote B: The cause is developed in the chapter on "Want of Mutual
Esteem."]
[Footnote C: See BUTLER, in his "Elephant in the Moon." SOUTH, in
his oration at the opening of the theatre at Oxford, passed this bitter
sarcasm on the naturalists,--"_Mirantur nihil nisi pulices, pediculos--et
se ipsos_;"--nothing they admire but fleas, lice, and themselves! The
illustrious SLOANE endured a long persecution from the bantering
humour of Dr. KING. One of the most amusing declaimers against
what he calls _les Sciences des faux Sçavans_ is Father
MALEBRANCHE; he is far more severe than Cornelius Agrippa, and
he long preceded ROUSSEAU, so famous for his invective against the
sciences. The seventh chapter of his fourth book is an inimitable satire.
"The principal excuse," says he, "which engages men in false studies, is,

that they have attached the idea of learned where they should not."
Astronomy, antiquarianism, history, ancient poetry, and natural history,
are all mowed down by his metaphysical scythe. When we become
acquainted with the idea Father Malebranche attaches to the term
learned, we understand him--and we smile.]
[Footnote D: See the chapter on "Puck the Commentator," in the
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii.; also p. 304 of the same volume.]
A new race of jargonists, the barbarous metaphysicians of political
economy, have struck at the essential existence of the productions of
genius in literature and art; for, appreciating them by their own
standard, they have miserably degraded the professors. Absorbed in the
contemplation of material objects, and rejecting whatever does not
enter into their own restricted notion of "utility," these cold arithmetical
seers, with nothing but millions in their imagination; and whose
choicest works of art are spinning-jennies, have valued the intellectual
tasks of the library and the studio by "the demand and the supply."
They have sunk these pursuits into the class of what they term
"unproductive labour;" and by another result of their line and level
system, men of letters, with some other important characters, are forced
down into the class "of buffoons, singers, opera-dancers, &c." In a
system of political economy it has been discovered that "that
unprosperous race of men, called men of letters, must necessarily
occupy their present forlorn state in society much as formerly, when a
scholar and a beggar seem to have been terms very nearly
synonymous."[A] In their commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing
view of human nature, addressing society by its most pressing wants
and its coarsest feelings, these theorists limit the moral and physical
existence of man by speculative tables of population, planing and
levelling society down in their carpentry of human nature. They would
yoke and harness the loftier spirits to one common and vulgar
destination. Man is considered only as he wheels on the wharf, or as he
spins in the factory; but man, as a recluse being of meditation, or
impelled to action by more generous passions, has been struck out of
the system of our political economists. It is, however, only among their
"unproductive labourers" that we shall find those men of leisure, whose

habitual pursuits are consumed in the development of thought and the
gradual accessions of knowledge; those men of whom the sage of Judea
declares, that "It is he who hath little business who shall become wise:
how can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and whose talk is of
bullocks? But THEY,"--the men of leisure and study,--"WILL
MAINTAIN THE STATE OF THE WORLD!" The prosperity and the
happiness of a people include something more evident and more
permanent than "the Wealth of a Nation."[B]
[Footnote A: "Wealth of Nations," i. 182.]
[Footnote B: Since this murmur has been uttered against the degrading
views of some of those theorists, it afforded me pleasure to observe that
Mr. Malthus has fully sanctioned its justness. On this head, at least, Mr.
Malthus has amply confuted his stubborn and tasteless brothers.
Alluding to the productions of genius, this writer observes, that, "to
estimate the value of NEWTON'S discoveries, or the delight
communicated by SHAKSPEAKE and MILTON, by the price at which
their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in
which they have elevated and enchanted their country."--_Principles of
Pol. Econ._ p. 48. And hence he acknowledges, that "some
unproductive labour is of much more use and importance than
productive labour, but is incapable of being the subject of the gross
calculations which relate to national