Isaac Disraeli

“ 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! ”

“ One of the legitimate ends of satire, and one of the proud triumphs of genius, is to unmask the false zealot; to beat back the haughty spirit that is treading down all; and if it cannot teach modesty, and raise a blush, at least to inflict terror and silence. It is then that the satirist does honour to the office of the executioner.
The quarrel between Parker and Marvell is a striking example of the efficient powers of genius, in first humbling, and then annihilating, an unprincipled bravo, who had placed himself at the head of a faction. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Wit, ridicule, and invective, by cabal and stratagem, obtained a seeming triumph over a single individual, but who, like the Farnesian Hercules, personified the force and resistance of incomparable strength. “The Bees of Christchurch,” as this conspiracy of wits has been called, so musical and so angry, rushed in a dark swarm about him, but only left their fine stings in the flesh they could not wound. He only put out his hand in contempt, never in rage. The Christchurch men, as if doubtful whether wit could prevail against learning, had recourse to the maliciousness of personal satire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a minion of the fancy, which his secret pride supports, not always by the most scrupulous means. Hence the system itself, with all its novelty and singularity, turns out to be nothing more than an ingenious deception carried on for the glory of the inventor; and when his followers perceive they were the dupes of his ingenuity, they are apt, in quitting the system, to give up all; not aware that the parts are as true as the whole together is false; the sagacity of Genius collected the one, but its vanity formed the other! ”

“ 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. ”

“ From that moment, in losing the greatest patron for the greatest work, Leland appears to have felt the staff which he had used to turn at pleasure for his stay, break in his hands.
He had new patrons to court, while engaged in labours for which a single life had been too short. The melancholy that cherishes genius may also destroy it. Leland, brooding over his voluminous labours, seemed to love and to dread them; sometimes to pursue them with rapture, and sometimes to shrink from them with despair. His generous temper had once shot forwards to posterity ”

“ 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. ”

“ After all, one may perceive, that though the good-humour of poor Cibber was real, still the immortal satire of Pope had injured his higher feelings. He betrays his secret grief at his close, while he seems to be sporting with his pen; and though he appears to confide in the falsity of the satire as his best chance for saving him from it, still he feels that the caustic ink of such a satirist must blister and spot wherever it falls. The anger of Warburton, and the sternness of Johnson, who seem always to have considered an actor as an inferior being among men of genius, have degraded Cibber. ”

“ About three months after, Heron sunk under a fever, and perished amid the walls of Newgate. We are disgusted with this horrid state of pauperism; we are indignant at beholding an author, not a contemptible one, in this last stage of human wretchedness! after early and late studies—after having read and written from twelve to sixteen hours a day! O, ye populace of scribblers! before ye are driven to a garret, and your eyes are filled with constant tears, pause—recollect that few of you possess the learning or the abilities of Heron. ”

“ They only degrade us—they are polished cynics! But what are we to think of the tremendous cynicism of Machiavel? That great genius eyed human nature with the ferocity of an enraged savage. Machiavel is a vindictive assassin, who delights even to turn his dagger within the mortal wound he has struck; but our Hobbes, said his friend Sorbiere, “is a gentle and skilful surgeon, who, with regret, cuts into the living flesh, to get rid of the corrupted.” It is equally to be regretted that the same system of degrading man has been adopted by some, under the mask of religion. ”

“ Labour had been long felt as voluptuousness by Leland; and this is among the Calamities of Literature, and it is so with all those studies which deeply busy the intellect and the fancy. There is a poignant delight in study, often subversive of human happiness. Men of genius, from their ideal state, drop into the cold formalities of society, to encounter its evils, its disappointments, its neglect, and perhaps its persecutions. When such minds discover the world will only become a friend on its own terms, then the cup of their wrath overflows; the learned grow morose, and the witty sarcastic ”

“ The quarrel between Camden, the great author of the “Britannia,” and Brooke, the “York Herald,” may illustrate these principles. It has hitherto been told to the shame of the inferior genius; but the history of Brooke was imperfectly known to his contemporaries. Crushed by oppression, his tale was marred in the telling. A century sometimes passes away before the world can discover the truth even of a private history.
Brooke is aspersed as a man of the meanest talents, insensible to the genius of Camden, rankling with envy at his fame, and correcting the “Britannia” out of mere spite. ”

“ A page in a great author humbles me to the dust, and the conversation of those that are not superior to myself reminds me of what will be thought of myself. I blush to flatter them, or to be flattered by them; and should dread letters being published some time or other, in which they would relate our interviews, and we should appear like those puny conceited witlings in Shenstone’s and Hughes’s correspondence, who give themselves airs from being in possession of the soil of Parnassus for the time being; as peers are proud because they enjoy the estates of great men who went before them. ”

“ The malice of faction has long produced this literary calamity; yet great minds have not always degraded themselves; not always resisted the impulse of their finer feelings, by hardening them into insensibility, or goading them in the fury of a misplaced revenge. How delightful it is to observe Marvell, the Presbyterian and Republican wit, with that generous temper that instantly discovers the alliance of genius, warmly applauding the great work of Butler, which covered his own party with odium and ridicule. ”

“ All that boiling rancour which sputters against the thoughts, the style, the taste, the moral character of an author, is often nothing more than practising what, to give it a name, we may call Political Criticism in Literature; where an author’s literary character is attacked solely from the accidental circumstance of his differing in opinion from his critics on subjects unconnected with the topics he treats of. ”

“ Pattison was much loved; he had all the generous impetuosity of youthful genius; but he had resolved on running the perilous career of literary glory, and he added one more to the countless thousands who perish in obscurity.
His first letters are written with the same spirit that distinguishes Chatterton’s; all he hopes he seems to realise. He mixes among the wits, dates from Button’s, and drinks with Concanen healths to college friends, till they lose their own; more dangerous Muses condescend to exhibit themselves to the young poet in the park; and he was to be introduced to Pope. ”

“ The friendship between Pope and Addison was interrupted by one of the infirmities of genius. Tempers of watchful delicacy gather up in silence and darkness motives so shadowy in their origin, and of such minute growth, that, never breaking out into any open act, they escape all other eyes but those of the parties themselves. These causes of enmity are too subtle to bear the touch; they cannot be inquired after, nor can they be described; and it may be said that the minds of such men have rather quarrelled than they themselves: they utter no complaints, but they avoid each other. ”

“ Pope is, perhaps, the finest character-painter of all satirists. Atterbury, after reading the portrait of Atticus, advised him to proceed in a way which his genius had pointed out; but Arbuthnot, with his dying breath, conjured him “to reform, and not to chastise;” that is, not to spare the vice, but the person. It is said, Pope answered, that, to correct the world with due effect, they become inseparable; and that, deciding by his own experience, he was justified in his opinion. Perhaps, at first, he himself wavered; but he strikes bolder as he gathers strength. ”

“ Writers who delight in curious and rare extracts, and in the discovery of new facts and new views of things, warmed by a fervour of research which brings everything nearer to our eye and close to our touch, study to throw contemporary feelings in their page. Such rare extracts and such new facts Bayle eagerly sought, and they delighted Johnson; but all this luxury of literature can only be produced to the public eye in the variegated forms of notes. ”

“ But other qualities of genius must distinguish the great author, and even him who would occupy that leading rank in the literary republic our author aspired to fill. He lived too much in that class of society which is little favourable to genius; he exerted neither profound thinking, nor profound feeling; and too volatile to attain to the pathetic, that higher quality of genius, he was so imbued with the petty elegancies of society that every impression of grandeur in the human character was deadened in the breast of the polished cynic. ”

“ The pride of a great man first led Camden into an error, and that error plunged him into all the barbarity of persecution; thus, by force, covering his folly. Brooke over-valued his studies: it is the nature of those peculiar minds adapted to excel in such contracted pursuits. He undertook an ungracious office, and he has suffered by being placed by the side of the illustrious genius with whom he has so skilfully combated in his own province; and thus he has endured contempt, without being contemptible. The public are not less the debtors to such unfortunate, yet intrepid authors. ”

“ But slander is not always so impotent as you seem to suppose it; men of the best sense may be misled by it, or, by their not inquiring after truth, may never come at it; and the vulgar, as they are less apt to be good than ill-natured, often mistake malice for wit, and have an uncharitable joy in commending it. Now, when this is the case, is not a tame silence, upon being satirically libelled, as liable to be thought guilt or stupidity, as to be the result of innocence or temper?—Self-defence is a very natural and just excuse for a reply. ”