The Diving Bell | Page 5

You'll make a good morsel, it must be
confessed; And the world, very likely, will pardon the rest."
[Illustration: THE SPIDER'S TRIUMPH.]
MORAL.
This lesson for every one, little and great, Is taught in that vagabond's
tragical fate: Of him who is scheming your friend to ensnare, Unless
you've a passion for bleeding, beware!

IV.
GENIUS IN THE BUD.
Genius, in its infancy, sometimes puts on a very funny face. The first

efforts of a painter are generally rude enough. So are those of a poet, or
any other artist. I have often wished I might see the first picture that
such a man as Titian, or Rubens, or Reynolds, or West, ever drew. It
would interest me much, and, I suspect, would provoke a smile or two,
at the expense of the young artists.
History does not often transmit such sketches to the world. But I wish it
would. I wish the picture of the sheep that Giotto was sketching, when
Cimabue, one of the greatest painters of his age, came across him,
could be produced. I would go miles to see it. And I wish West's
mother had carefully preserved, for some public gallery, the picture that
her son Benjamin made of the little baby in the cradle. You have heard
that story, I dare say.
Benjamin, you know, showed a taste for drawing and painting, when he
was a very little boy. His early advantages were but few. But he made
the most of these advantages; and the result was that he became one of
the first painters of his day, and before he died, he was chosen
President of the Royal Society in London. How do you think he made
his colors? You will smile when you hear that they were formed with
charcoal and chalk, with an occasional sprinkling of the juice of red
berries. His brush was rather a rude one. It was made of the hair he
pulled from the tail of Pussy, the family cat. Poor old cat! she lost so
much of her fur to supply the young artist with brushes, that the family
began to feel a good deal of anxiety for her pussyship. They thought
her hair fell off by disease, until Benjamin, who was an honest boy, one
day informed them of their mistake. What a pity that the world could
not have the benefit of one of the pictures that West painted with his
cat-tail brush.
And then, what a treat it would be, to get hold of the first rhymes that
Watts and Pope ever made. I believe that Watts had been rhyming some
time when he got a fatherly flogging for this exercise of his genius, and
he sobbed out, between the blows,
"Dear father, do some pity take, And I will no more verses make."
That couplet was not his first one, by a good deal. The habit, it would

seem, had taken a pretty strong hold of him, when the whipping drew
that out of him.
It seems to me that the childhood and early youth of a genius are more
interesting than any riper periods of his life; or rather, that they become
so, when time and circumstances have developed what there was in the
man, and when from the stand-point of his fame in manhood, we look
back upon his early history. What small beginnings there have been to
all the efforts of those who have made themselves masters of the
particular art to which they have directed their attention.
I wonder what kind of a thing Washington Irving's first composition
was. There must have been a first one; and, without doubt, it was a
clumsy affair enough. If I were going to write his history, I would find
those who knew him when he was a mere child, and I would pump
from them as many anecdotes about his little scribblings as I possibly
could, and I would print them, lots of them. I hardly think I could do
the reader of his biography a better service.
I wonder what his first experience was with the editors. These editors,
by the way, are often very troublesome to the young sprig of genius.
Placed, as they are, at the door of the temple of fame, they often seem
to the unfledged author the most disobliging, iron-hearted men in the
world. He could walk right into the temple, and make himself perfectly
at home there, if they would only open the door. So he fancies; and he
wonders why the barbarians don't see the genius sticking out, when he
comes along with his nicely-written verses, and why they don't just
give him, at once, a ticket of admission to the honors of the world.
"These editors are slow to perceive merit," he says