Isaac Disraeli

“ A parodist or a burlesquer is a wit who is perpetually on the watch to catch up or to disguise an author’s words, to swell out his defects, and pick up his blunders—to amuse the public! King was a wit, who lived on the highway of literature, appropriating, for his own purpose, the property of the most eminent passengers, by a dextrous mode no other had hit on. What an important lesson the labours of King offer to real genius! Their temporary humour lost with their prototypes becomes like a paralytic limb, which, refusing to do its office, impedes the action of the vital members. ”

“ Sometimes I seek for more delicate minds, that my taste may imbibe their delicacy; sometimes for the gayer, that I may enrich my genius with their gaiety; and, although I constantly read, I make it less my occupation than my pleasure. In religion, and in friendship, I have only to paint myself such as I am—in friendship more tender than a philosopher; and in religion, as constant and as sincere as a youth who has more simplicity than experience. My piety is composed more of justice and charity than of penitence. ”

“ The genius of Elizabeth created her age; surrounding herself by no puny favourites of an hour, in the circle of her royalty were seen the most laborious statesmen our annals record, and a generation of romantic commanders; the secretaries of state were eminently learned; and the queen was all these herself, in her tried prudence, her dauntless intrepidity, and her lettered accomplishments. The energies of the sovereign reached the people, and were responded to; the spirit-stirring events rose with the times: it was a reign of enterprise and emulation, a new era of adventure and glory. ”

“ Vast labours attest the enthusiasm which accompanied their progress. Such men have sealed their works with their blood: they have silently borne the pangs of disease; they have barred themselves from the pursuits of fortune; they have torn themselves away from all they loved in life, patiently suffering these self-denials, to escape from interruptions and impediments to their studies. Martyrs of literature and art, they behold in their solitude the halo of immortality over their studious heads—that fame which is "a life beyond life." ”

“ At present all our human bullion is sent to be melted down in an university, to come out, as if thrown into a burning mould, a bright physician, a bright lawyer, a bright divine—in other words, to adapt themselves for a profession preconcerted by their parents. By this means we may secure a titular profession for our son, but the true genius of the avocation in the bent of the mind, as a man of great original powers called it, is too often absent! Instead of finding fit offices for fit men, we are perpetually discovering, on the stage of society, actors out of character! ”

“ What then was this irresolution but the vacillations of a mind broken and confounded? He had exercised too constantly the highest faculties of fiction, and he had precipitated himself into the dreariness of real life. None but a poet can conceive, for none but a poet can experience, the secret wounds inflicted on a mind of romantic fancy and tenderness of emotion, which has staked its happiness on its imagination; for such neglect is felt as ordinary men would feel the sensation of being let down into a sepulchre, and buried alive. ”

“ Believe me, gentlemen! to pretend to the favours of fortune it is only necessary to render one's self useful, and to be supple and obsequious to those who are in possession of credit and authority; to be handsome in one's person; to adulate the powerful; to smile, while you suffer from them every kind of ridicule and contempt whenever they shall do you the honour to amuse themselves with you; never to be frightened at a thousand obstacles which may be opposed to one; have a face of brass and a heart of stone; insult worthy men who are persecuted; rarely venture to speak the truth ”

“ Let me add, that the finest genius of our times, is also the most delightful man; he is that rarest among the rare of human beings, whom to have known is nearly to adore; whom to have seen, to have heard, forms an era in our life; whom youth remembers with enthusiasm, and whose presence the men and women of "the world" feel like a dream from which they would not awaken. His bonhomie attaches our hearts to him by its simplicity; his legendary conversation makes us, for a moment, poets like himself. ”

“ It cannot be denied that our great poet never exercised his invention in the fables of his dramas; thus he spared himself half the toil of his work. He viewed with the prophetic eye of genius the old play or the old story, and at once discovered all its capabilities; he saw at once all that it had and all that it had not; its characterless personages he was confident that he could quicken with breath and action, and that his own vein, allowed to flow along the impure stream, would have the force to clear the current, and to expand its own lucid beauty. ”

“ DREAMS AT THE DAWN OF PHILOSOPHY. Modern philosophy, theoretical or experimental, only amuses while the action of discovery is suspended or advances; the interest ceases with the inquirer when the catastrophe is ascertained, as in the romance whose dénouement turns on a mysterious incident, which, once unfolded, all future agitation ceases. But in the true infancy of science, philosophers were as imaginative a race as poets: marvels and portents, undemonstrable and undefinable, with occult fancies, perpetually beginning and never ending, were delightful as the shifting cantos of Ariosto. ”

“ Witty calumny and licentious raillery are airy nothings that float about us, invulnerable from their very nature, like those chimeras of hell which the sword of Æneas could not pierce—yet these shadows of truth, these false images, these fictitious realities, have made heroism tremble, turned the eloquence of wisdom into folly, and bowed down the spirit of honour itself.
Not that the legitimate use of RIDICULE is denied: the wisest men have been some of the most exquisite ridiculers; from Socrates to the Fathers, and from the Fathers to Erasmus, and from Erasmus to Butler and Swift. ”

“ In this seraphic mode of criticism, the poem becomes mythic, and the poet a myth; in the power of abstraction, these critics have passed beyond the regions of humanity. We soar with them into the immensity of space, and we tremble as if we stood alone in the universe; we have lost sight of nature, as we seem to have passed her human boundaries. The ancient divinity of poetry itself, even Homer, is absorbed in the Shakespearian myth; for Shakespeare, to snatch a feather from the fiery wing of Coleridge, is “the Spinosistic deity, an omnipresent creativeness.” ”

“ Robertson's notion of adorning history was the pleasing labour of genius—it was to amplify into vastness, to colour into beauty, and to arrange the objects of his meditation with a secret artifice of disposition. Such an historian is a sculptor, who, though he display a correct semblance of nature, is not less solicitous to display the miracles of his art, and enlarges his figures to a colossal dimension. ”

“ LITERARY RIDICULE. ILLUSTRATED BY SOME ACCOUNT OF A LITERARY SATIRE.
Ridicule may be considered as a species of eloquence; it has all its vehemence, all its exaggeration, all its power of diminution; it is irresistible! Its business is not with truth, but with its appearance; and it is this similitude, in perpetual comparison with the original, which, raising contempt, produces the ridiculous.
There is nothing real in ridicule; the more exquisite, the more it borrows from the imagination. ”

“ All, indeed, is a collection of researches and of reasonings: he had the art of melting down his curious quotations with his own subtile ideas. He collects everything; if truths, they enter into his history; if fictions, into discussions; he places the secret by the side of the public story; opinion is balanced against opinion: if his arguments grow tedious, a lucky anecdote or an enlivening tale relieves the folio page; and knowing the infirmity of our nature, he picks up trivial things to amuse us, while he is grasping the most abstract and ponderous. ”

“ It ceases to be a question whether men of genius should blend with the masses of society; for whether in solitude, or in the world, of all others they must learn to live with themselves. It is in the world that they borrow the sparks of thought that fly upwards and perish but the flame of genius can only be lighted in their own solitary breast. ”

“ In a general survey of society, he contemplates on the court and the clergy, glancing through all the diversified ranks of the laity, not sparing the people themselves, as their awful reprover. It was a voice from the wilderness in the language of the people. The children of want and oppression had found their solitary advocate. The prelacy, dissolved in the luxuriousness of papal pomp, and a barbarous aristocracy, with their rapacious dependents, were mindless of the morals or the happiness of those human herds, whose heads were counted, but whose hearts they could never call their own. ”

“ Thus humbled was Horace Walpole to himself!—there is an intellectual dignity, which this man of wit and sense was incapable of reaching—and it seems a retribution that the scorner of true greatness should at length feel the poisoned chalice return to his own lips. He who had contemned the eminent men of former times, and quarrelled with and ridiculed every contemporary genius; who had affected to laugh at the literary fame he could not obtain,—at length came to scorn himself! and endured “the penal fires” of an author’s hell, in undervaluing his own works, the productions of a long life! ”

“ Who, having listened to such, has forgotten what a man of genius has said at such moments? Who dwells not on the single thought or the glowing expression, stamped in the heat of the moment, which came from its source? Then the mind of genius rises as the melody of the Æolian harp, when the winds suddenly sweep over the strings —it comes and goes—and leaves a sweetness beyond the harmonies of art. ”

“ Awakening his last energies with the juvenile passion of his early days, he pledged his life on a new adventure—it was his destiny to ascend the scaffold. He was always to be a victim of state. The day of his trial and the hour of his death told to his country whom they had lost. From the most unpopular man in England he became the object of the public sympathy, for they saw the permanent grandeur of the character, when its lustre was no longer dusked by cloudy interests or temporary passions.
There is no object in human pursuits which the genius of Rawleigh did not embrace. ”

“ I have quoted thus much of this letter, that we may have before us a true image of those feelings which contemporaries entertain of the greater geniuses of their age; how they seek to level them; and in what manner men of genius are doomed to be treated—slighted, starved, and abused. Dryden and Congreve! the one the finest genius, the other the most exquisite wit of our nation, are to be vexed to madness!—their failures are not to excite sympathy, but contempt or ridicule! How the feelings and the language of contemporaries differ from that of posterity! ”

“ The result of a work of genius is contracted to the art of writing; but this art is only its last perfection. Inspiration is drawn from a deeper source; enthusiasm is diffused through contagious pages; and without these movements of the soul, how poor and artificial a thing is that sparkling composition which flashes with the cold vibrations of mere art or artifice! We have been recently told, on critical authority, that "a great genius should never allow himself to be sensible to his own celebrity, nor deem his pursuits of much consequence, however important or successful." ”

“ I have always considered an author as a human being, who possesses at once two sorts of lives, the intellectual and the vulgar: in his books we trace the history of his mind, and in his actions those of human nature. It is this combination which interests the philosopher and the man of feeling; which provides the richest materials for reflection; and all those original details which spring from the constituent principles of man. Johnson’s passion for literary history, and his great knowledge of the human heart, inspired at once the first and the finest model in this class of composition. ”

“ But when a more uniform light of knowledge illuminates from all sides, the genius of society, made up of so many sorts of genius, becomes greater than the genius of the individual who has entirely yielded himself up to his solitary art. Hence the character of a man of genius becomes subordinate. A conversation age succeeds a studious one; and the family of genius, the poet, the painter, and the student, are no longer recluses. They mix with their rivals, who are jealous of equality, or with others who, incapable of valuing them for themselves alone, rate them but as parts of an integral. ”

“ And yet let us not too hastily condemn these unhappy men, even for the violation of the lesser moral feelings—it is often but a fatal effect from a melancholy cause; that hallucination of the intellect, in which, if their genius, as they call it, sometimes appears to sparkle like a painted bubble in the buoyancy of their vanity, they are also condemned to see it sinking in the dark horrors of a disappointed author, who has risked his life and his happiness on the miserable productions of his pen. The agonies of a disappointed author cannot, indeed, be contemplated without pain. ”

“ To imbue ourselves with the genius of their works, even to think of them, is an awful thing! In nature their existence is a solecism, as their genius is a paradox; for their crimes seem to be without guilt, their curses have kindness in them, and if they afflict mankind it is in sorrow.
Yet what less than enthusiasm is the purchase-price of high passion and invention? Perhaps never has there been a man of genius of this rare cast, who has not betrayed the ebullitions of imagination in some outward action, at that period when the illusions of life are more real to genius than its realities. ”

“ Singularity of opinion, vivacity of ridicule, and polished epigrams in prose, were the means by which Horace Walpole sought distinction.
In his works of imagination, he felt he could not trust to himself—the natural pathetic was utterly denied him. But he had fancy and ingenuity; he had recourse to the marvellous in imagination on the principle he had adopted the paradoxical in history. Thus, “The Castle of Otranto,” and “The Mysterious Mother,” are the productions of ingenuity rather than genius; and display the miracles of art, rather than the spontaneous creations of nature. ”

“ Every man of genius has left such honourable traces of his private affections; from LOCKE, whose dedication of his great work is more adulative than could be imagined from a temperate philosopher, to CHURCHILL, whose warm eulogiums on his friends beautifully contrast with his satire. Even in advanced age, the man of genius dwells on the praise he caught in his youth from veteran genius, which, like the aloe, will flower at the end of life. ”

“ It cannot be doubted that the great author, in the solitude of his study, has often created an epoch in the annals of mankind. A single man of genius arose in a barbarous period in Italy, who gave birth not only to Italian, but to European literature. Poet, orator, philosopher, geographer, historian, and antiquary, PETRARCH kindled a line of light through his native land, while a crowd of followers hailed their father-genius, who had stamped his character on the age. ”

“ Genius contracts those peculiarities of which it is so loudly accused in its solitary occupations—that loftiness of spirit, those quick jealousies, those excessive affections and aversions which view everything as it passes in its own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the mediocrity of reality. If this irritability of genius be a malady which has raged even among philosophers, we must not be surprised at the temperament of poets. ”

“ He has made a discovery for us! that never has there been anything important in the active world but what is reflected in the literary—books contain everything, even the falsehoods and the crimes which have been only projected by men! This solitary man of genius is arranging the materials of instruction and curiosity from every country and every age; he is striking out, in the concussion of new light, a new order of ideas for his own times; he possesses secrets which men hide from their contemporaries, truths they dared not utter, facts they dared not discover. ”

“ One mode to obtain such an invaluable critic is the cultivation of his own judgment in a round of reading and meditation. Let him at once supply the marble and be himself the sculptor: let the great authors of the world be his gospels, and the best critics their expounders; from the one he will draw inspiration, and from the others he will supply those tardy discoveries in art which he who solely depends on his own experience may obtain too late. Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised; their progress is like those who travel without a map of the country. ”