Cornhill was first started, an eventful | stood in its place in the dining-room. time in our lives. Some voices are those which speak to us; others speak for us. The first belong to the immortals who dwell apart somewhere beyond the boundaries of common life and moods, and it is, perhaps, for that very reason they are best able to give utterance to oracles; the others belong to humanity itself, and among these latter voices, who would not reckon Carlyle's? From behind the old screen came Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, carrying her little Tom, who, seeing a fellow-baby, uttered three deep notes, and in them was some strange echo of the familiar voice that had filled the house so long, and reached how far beyond its walls! ANNE RITCHIE. From The Spectator. DOES GENIUS DWINDLE AS TALENTS MULTIPLY? WE often hear an outcry as to the growing rarity of men of genius, which, by-the-way, as insanity is on "I wish you could get Carlyle's miscellaneous criticisms," wrote my father in 1839, in a letter to his mother. "I have read a little in the book. A nobler one does not live in our language, I am sure, and one that will have such an effect on our ways of thought and the increase, ought to stagger Mr. J. F. prejudices. Criticism has been a party | matter with us till now, and literature is a poor political lacquey. Please God we shall begin, ere long, to love art for art's sake. It is Carlyle who has worked more than any other to give it its independence." I went out with my father one evening in the winter of 1863, and as we were driving along in the dusk by the Serpentine we passed Carlyle walking across the park, and my father seeing him leant forward and waved his hands. "A great benevolent shower of salutations," Carlyle called it, when he spoke in after days of this last meeting. After Mrs. Carlyle's death, it was Carlyle that we used to go and see in the old drawing-room, which he took to inhabiting altogether. It was no surprise, when his history was told, to realize that he had been sometimes cross and often contrary; but that passion of tender love and remorse and devotion came as a revelation all the more moving that one had almost guessed it at times. It was when my own father died that something was revealed to us of his deep and tender feeling. After Carlyle himself was laid to rest I went for the last time to look at the house which I remembered all my life; my little boy was with me, and he began crowing and pointing to the old screen full of pictures, some of which his grandfather had drawn. It still Nisbet as to the truth of his theory that men of genius are the happy accidents which emerge from the caprices of nervous disease, and yet there certainly never were in England at any one time anything like the number of lucid and pleasant writers, both in prose and verse, that there are at the present day. Any reviewer whose opinion is worth consideration would admit that he could find in any year of criticism enough able writers, both in prose and verse, to have made as many reputations as any decade had produced in the last century, perhaps as any quarter of a century had produced, so much is there of admirable and concise description, of skilful irony, of subtle insight into character, of vigorous reasoning, even of vivid fancy and imagination. Then, again, how admirable is the popular scientific exposition of the day. We have more of it, a great deal more, in a single year, than our great-grandfathers had in a generation. What a sensation the article which Professor Garner wrote on "The Language of Apes," would have made, had it been possible (which, of course, without the phonograph it was not) in the early days of philological research, when Grimm and Bopp were speculating on the interchangeability of different letters. Nobody can maintain for a moment that the amount of competent literary work is on the decline, — nay, that it is not rapidly increasing, though, of course, with its increase comes a different distractions which solicit the much larger increase of incompetent attention of cultivated men, and not literary work, which is just as little sur-only solicit but engage it. This is, of prising as the fact that, with the in- course, essential to the great strides of crease of any kind of skilled labor, there scientific invention. It is by vast imis to be found a much more consider-provements in the art of registering able increase of either unskilled or little small changes - small vibrations of skilled labor, which vainly strives to do, sound or light—that science has been or does inadequately, what the skilled enabled to push on so rapidly in recent labor succeeds in doing. The number years. The phonograph, the telephone, of minor poets, - very readable minor and Mr. Edison's still more wonderful poets, who are produced every ten years, is, we venture to say, a great deal larger than the number that was produced in a century, a century ago; and amongst them are many whose names, had they emerged in a time of dearth, would have remained as permanent landmarks in English literature to the end of time, upon or above the level of such names as those of Kirke White, or even Collins or Thomson, but who will be forgotten simply because they wrote at a time when there were so many capable of inspiring as much or more interest, that they never achieved special distinction. Is there any reason why, with so much second-rate ability as English literature now yields, there is not at least a proportionate amount of first-rate genius? Why, with such a crowd of writers whom the last century could never have produced, do we find fewer in proportion of that highest of all ranks in which only the immortals stand? One might suppose that, with the growth of the ability and taste necessary to appreciate the higher efforts of literature, there would be likely to spring up also the creative power to gratify that appreciative critical spirit. That, however, is a very slender ground for such an expectation. It is obviously not true that because the moral power to appreciate genius may be a necessary condition of its growth, it is in any sense a sufficient reason why it should be produced. In some directions it would seem that a highly cultivated critical atmosphere is not as favorable to the growth of genius as one that is appreciative but not critical, that can merely wonder and enjoy. The chief note of such a literary age as our own is the immense number of kinetograph, by which not only the should never have had a Wordsworth, | we can clearly see is, that so far as the just as in the nineteenth century we special influence of the nineteenth cencould not in any case have had an tury is concerned, it acts distractingly Isaiah or a Micah. Genius such as rather than favorably on gifts of this Shakespeare's, or Milton's, or Words- unique order. We think we can see in worth's, or Scott's, or Tennyson's, is the case of Browning, for instance, how almost inconsistent with the multiplied the genius of the man was frittered distractions of a highly intellectual and away by the distractions of society, and critical age. The multifarious wonders the multiplied interests which attracted and interests which cultivate the under- his shrewd intelligence. What he wrote standing, and awaken the curiosity, and while he was comparatively unknown discipline the reason, and suggest skil- was occasionally hardly intelligible to ful experiments, and train lucid expo- the world (as in the case of "Sorsition, and educate fine discrimination dello"), but for the most part it was and judicious criticism and intelligent written under a profound sense of intelappreciation, are not only not subser- lectual compulsion, or, as the old world vient to, but are positively inconsistent said, inspiration. But, with one great with, that concentration of the imagina- exception, "The Ring and the Book," tion on high themes and vivid anticipa- which was more or less due to the petions of the whole drift of human life riod of seclusion which followed the and emotion, which are essential to the death of his wife, and a few smaller higher genius. One of the most po- exceptions, especially among the "Dratent of all reasons why genius of the matic Idylls," his later poems gave no higher kind is now so seldom vouch- impression of the same kind of subduing safed to us, is that for all ability and intellectual necessity and ardor. They intelligence of the second-rate kind are often gritty in thought and jolting there are such infinitely varied occupa- in expression, as well as very obscure, tions and interests, that there is hardly and embody none of the passion conany opportunity afforded for so dream-tained in such poems as "Pippa ing and musing and following the Passes," or "Two in the Campagna," deeper currents of human suggestion, or "El-Karshish, the Arabian Physias the prophets and poets of the greatest cian," or "The Bishop orders his Tomb moments of literature have always at St. Praxed's Church," or "Bishop dreamed and mused and sounded the Blougram's Apology," or "Christmas depths of their own hearts. The great Eve and Easter Day," or even "The difference between the kinds of ability Grammarian's Funeral," or twenty and capacity which are now more com- others. The distractions of the world mon than ever, and the higher forms told upon him, and diverted him from of genius, is, we think, this, that the that concentrated devotion to the former depend upon the due division of themes most suited to his own genius labor, the careful study of appropriate which was essential to their perfect means and methods of intellectual dis- rendering; so that when he came to cipline, in a word, on the accumulation write, he only gave us a hasty and conof suitable intellectual experience; fused version of his own meditations. while the latter depend upon the care- The distractions of a world of scientific ful fostering of unique and only half- research and astounding discoveries, understood instincts and powers, such and inventions so ingenious that the as induced the prophets of the Jewish human mind itself seems almost people to retire into the wilderness, or dwarfed by its own newest instruments, in our own century sent up Wordsworth all militate against that cherishing of to his retreat amongst the Cumberland the half unconscious instincts of true hills, Thomas Carlyle into his Dum- genius essential to the meditative mafriesshire fastness, and Alfred Tennyson turing of great gifts. to his seashore ruminations. Now, what For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents. 258 RONDEAU. SOMETHING passes in the breeze, Something sighs within the sigh And in spring with birds that fly. Painter, grasp it ere it flees, If you can, its pleading cry; Speaker. "UNO DE MILLE." A. P. D. ONE OF THE THOUSAND OF GARIBALDI. LAKE COMO. [One April day in 1890 I saw a steamer draped in black bring home to Como for burial a soldier of the immortal One Thousand of Garibaldi. By a strange and dramatic coincidence his comrade, an eloquent scholar of Como, died a few hours later at his desk, while preparing for the morrow a tribute to his friend's memory, and on the next day the boat bore his own body to his own kindred. W. B.] ANOTHER gone of The Thousand brave; "Uno de Mille"! Who is he? Home, by her rippling waters blue, Strew with roses the hero's way, Strew with roses the hero's way, Thus mused his comrade through the night, The pen has fallen from his grasp, Not as he deemed. The morrow's work would be unwrought. His comrade dead to Como's shore, keep To bear him too where his kinsmen sleep. Lake Como sings one song to me: Blackwood's Magazine. WALLACE BRUCE. |