ABOUT INFERRING THE MAN FROM THE BOOK. A CASE OF NON SEQUITUR. BY FRANCIS JACOX. ONE of those essays which the author of "The Caxtons" collected into a volume, a quarter of a century at least before he devoted his practised pen to the every way riper series entitled "Caxtoniana," takes for its theme the difference between Authors and the impression conveyed of them by their works. Sir E. B. Lytton, in that essay, expresses his belief that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; and that it is usually in the "physical appearance" of the writer —his manners, his mien, his exterior, that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him-rarely in his mind. The feeling of disappointment is accordingly treated as usually a sign of the weak mind of him who experiences it," a foolish, apprentice-sort of disposition, that judges of everything great by the criterion of a puppet-show, and expects as much out of the common way in a celebrated author as in the lord mayor's coach."* That shrewd and sensible people are apt, nevertheless, to utterly miscalculate the man in the author, is an every-day truism in practical life. "Had any one formerly brought me to Erasmus," writes Montaigne, "I should hardly have believed but that all was adage and apophthegm he spoke to his man or his hostess." Whereas Erasmus, depend upon it, cast no such pearls as epigram or rhetorical flourish before any such swine as the body-man that ran his errands, or the crone that did his chares. But Montaigne's impression was one common in all ages, and to, and about, all sorts of men. Izaak Walton tells us that many and many turned out of their road purposely to see Richard Hooker, in his parsonage at Borne, whose life and learning were so much admired. But what went they out for to see? a man clothed in purple and fine linen? a man of stately presence and enthralling gifts of speech? "No, indeed; but an obscure harmless man; a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a coarse gown or canonical coat; of a mean stature, and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his soul; of so mild and humble a nature, that his poor Parish-clerk and he did never talk but with both their hats on, or both off, at the same time." Pilgrims had to pause and take breath before they could identify that threadbare, blushing parson with him that penned Ecclesiastical Polity. Kant's style of conversation was so popular and unscholastic, that any stranger acquainted with his works, would have found it difficult to believe that in this delightful and genial companion he saw the profound author of the Transcendental Philosophy.§ *See, passim, the opening pages (3-14) of "The Student." † Essais de Montaigne, 1. iii. c. ii. De Quincey, The Last Days of Kant. Walton's Life of Hooker. Almost all the tragic and gloomy writers, it has been remarked, have been, in social life, mirthful persons. The author of the Night Thoughts, says Moore,* was a fellow of infinite jest; and of the pathetic Rowe, Pope says, "He! why, he would laugh all day long-he would do nothing else but laugh." Of La Fontaine, the larmoyant German novelist, over whose rose-coloured moral-sublime, as Mr. Carlyle has it, what fair eye has not wept? we are told that Varnhagen von Ense† found him a man jovial as Boniface, swollen out on booksellers' profits, church preferments and fat things, "to the size of a hogshead ;" and not allowing his pretty niece to read a word of his romance-stuff, but "keeping it locked from her like poison."-As Mr. Thackeray says of the tragical paintings of Alexander M'Collop, "No one would suppose, from the gloomy character of his works, that Sandy M'Collop is one of the most jovial souls alive." And among the variety of painters whom Clive Newcome associated with at Rome, there were some, we read,§ with the strongest natural taste for low humour, comic singing, and Cyder-Cellar jollification, who would imitate nothing but Michael Angelo, and whose canvases teemed with tremendous allegories of fates, furies, genii of death and battle. Describing his first introduction, by Wordsworth in 1808, to "Mr. Wilson of Elleray," De Quincey says that, "(as usually happens in such cases,) I felt a shock of surprise on seeing a person so little corresponding to the one I had half unconsciously prefigured."|| Christopher North's own daughter and biographer comments on the probable disappointment so many people must feel at Raeburn's beautiful portrait of her father in his fervid youth-"so tidily dressed in his top-boots and well-fitting coat, with face so placid, and blue eyes so mild, looking as if he never could do or say anything outré or startling,—can that be a good picture of him we have seen and heard of as the long-maned and mighty, whose eyes were as the lightnings of fiery flame," &c. &c. Very unlike Christopher of the Crutch, indeed. But very like the author of Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life. Washington Irving with pleasurable surprise found Gifford, whom he met frequently in John Murray's drawing-room, "mild and courteous in his manners, without any of that petulance that you would be apt to expect, ‚"** and quite simple, unaffected, and unassuming. Those who knew Etty "only in his works," remarks his biographer (and William Blake's),†† often formed conclusions of the man sufficiently wide of the mark; accused him, as he says, of being a shocking " and immoral man;" even those who had heard of the painter as being personally "a decent kind of man," still inferring of his mind that it must needs be " a gross one." By the self-evident portraiture of his autobiography, however, and the testimony of intimates to his simplicity of character and earnestness, and to the singleness and purity of his aims, the real Etty has been proved a very different figure from the Etty of good people's fancy. * Life of Byron, ch. xlvii. The Newcomes, ch. xvii. † Denkwürdigkeiten (1837-8). Memoir of John Wilson, vol. i. p. 127. See Life of W. Etty, R.A., vol. ii. pp. 254 sq., 317 sq. So again, in Mr. Trimmer's Reminiscences of J. M. W. Turner and his Contemporaries, reference being made to the dictum that you may tell a man by his paintings as you may by his handwriting, John Constable, R.A., is thus mentioned, in opposition to that maxim. "I knew Constable's paintings long before I knew Constable, and formed a very wrong estimate of his character. His paintings give one the idea of a positive, conceited person, whereas any one more diffident of his powers could not be." ""* Mrs. Gore somewhere says, à propos of Byron, that everybody knows, who knows a great poet, that poets are the least poetical of God's or the devil's creatures, unless when hanging over a sheet of wirewove, crowquill in hand. "Did I tell you that I met Wordsworth at Mackintosh's last week," writes Jeffrey, "and talked with him in a party of four till two in the morning? He is not in the very least Lakish now, or even in any degree poetical, but rather a hard and a sensible worldly sort of a man."t Possibly Wordsworth, on this occasion, in his insuperable distrust of his Edinburgh reviewer, kept a mask on his face, and a bridle to his lips, all night, purposely that he might not be seen as he was. But divers accounts of his companionship, from quite other quarters, corroborate the impression here produced. It is not wholely and solely caricature that Mr. Poole indites, in his picture of Little Pedlington's Bard, as seen at a conversazione. Simple in appearance, unaffected in manners [so Mr. Rummins describes him]-instead of the popular poet, you would be inclined to set him down for nothing more than one of yourselves. . . But so it ever is with genius of a high order." And, truly, records the author of "Paul Pry," depicting the scene and the company, there sat the illustrious poet, neither attitudinising, nor sighing, nor looking either sad, solemn, or sentimental, nor in any manner striving after effect, but unaffectedly swallowing tea and munching hot muffins, with as much earnestness as if, to repeat Rummins's phrase, he had, indeed, been "nothing more than one of ourselves."+ 66 Leigh Hunt has pictured Handel, with all his sublimities, and even his delicacies and tricksome graces, as a 66 gross kind of jovial fellow," who announced by a plethoric person (to use the Gibbonian style) the ample use he made of his knife and fork.§ Of Leigh Hunt himself, by the way, an accomplished American bears witness, that" of all the literary men I have known, no one, it seems to me, so thoroughly corresponded in his person, manner, and impression to the idea one would form of an author from his works. There was the same exquisite charm in both. His conversation was like his essays, full, rich, genial, and pervaded with a delicate perfume.”|| Mr. Sala knows an enthusiastic amateur of music who posted to Berlin to see the illustrious composer of the Huguenots,—and was bitterly disappointed to be introduced to a "little, snuffy, old Jew-man." The half-crippled dotard, it is further remarked, whom the children at Chelsea used to run after and point at, and call “ Puggy Booth," could not have *Life of J. M. W. Turner, vol. ii. p. 78. † Jeffrey to Cockburn, 30th March, 1831. Little Pedlington, ch. ix. § Round Table Essays: On the Poetical Character. Letter of W. W. Story to Thornton Hunt, 4th March, 1861. satisfied many that he was Joseph Mallard Turner, the painter of "Carthage" and the "Shipwreck." The flabby lame gentleman, Mr. Sala adds, who had a horror of growing fat, and drank more Hollands-andwater than was good for him, scarcely realised that exquisite Ideal in the turn-down collar and Albanian costume, engraved on steel as a frontispiece to the "Giaour.”* Byron, indeed, we find urging Moore to assure society that he is not the misanthropical and gloomy gentleman commonly supposed, "but a facetious companion as loquacious and laughing as if I were a much cleverer fellow."+ And he tells the same correspondent, four years later, of a visit he has just had, at Ravenna, from an American heroworshipper: "But I suspect that he did not take quite so much to me, from his having expected to meet a misanthropical gentleman, in wolfskin breeches, and answering in fierce monosyllables, instead of a man of this world." A more distinguished American testified of the noble poet, to their common friend, Francis Jeffrey, § that there was nothing gloomy or bitter in Byron's ordinary talk, but rather a wild, rough, boyish pleasantry, much more like nature than his poetry. "Dr. Channing small and weak!" exclaimed a Kentuckian inquirer, who was a fervent admirer of his writings; "I thought he was six feet, at least, in height, with a fresh cheek, broad chest, voice like that of many waters, and strong-limbed as a giant." 66 In racy contrast with which, take Thomas Moore's journalised impression of the author of "Gebir" and the "Imaginary Conversations," whom he met for the first time at Mr. Milnes' (now Lord Houghton), together with Messieurs Rogers, Robinson, Carlyle, and Spring Rice. Savage Landor a very different person from what I had expected to find him; I found in him all the air and laugh of a hearty country gentleman, a gros réjoui; and whereas his writings had given me rather a disrelish to the man, I shall take more readily now to his writings from having seen the man."¶ Grimm (Baron, not Brother, either Brother) takes note that the greater number of comic poets have been bilious and melancholy people, and that "M. de Voltaire, who is very gay, has written tragedies only-gay comedy being the one sole composition in which he has not succeeded;"** the alleged explanation being, that he who laughs, and he who makes laugh, are two very different men. It is in allusion to some such discrepancy that M. Cuvillier-Fleury observes, in a notice on Madame d'Arbouville, that "Le monde, et surtout le monde des lettres, est plein de ces contrastes. L'auteur du Malade imaginaire était triste, l'auteur du Resignation passait pour enjouée."++ The author of Letters to Eusebius has laid it down as a general rule, that all satirists are amiable men; and points to our English satirists as having been eminently so. Poor gentle Cowper, in his loving frenzy, as Mr. Eagle words it, wielded the knout stoutly, and had it been in his religion, would have whipped himself like a pure Franciscan; and yet he loved his neighbour. And it is our * Travels in the County of Middlesex. † Byron to Moore, March 10, 1817. § See Life of Jeffrey, II. 205. Diary of Thomas Moore, May 22, 1838. **Grimm, Correspondance, t. vi, Ibid., July 5, 1821. Life of Channing, part iii. ch. vii. †† Dernières Etudes, I. 383 belief that Swift was good and amiable, and as little like a yahoo as those who depict him as one.' ""* Father Garasse, who engaged in a paper war against Etienne Pasquier, which produced such grands flots de bile et de fiel-so inordinate a secretion of bile and gall-has been thus portrayed by a devoted admirer of his antagonist: "L'auteur de tant de fougueuses diatribes fut en effet un ecclésiastique réglé dans les mœurs, doux et facile dans le commerce habituel de la vie, d'un caractère devoué et généreux."† M. Deltour, in a chapter on the Irritable Character of Racine, reminds us that this poet, 66 so prompt and so terrible in taking literary vengeance," was he of whom Madame de Sévigné said that he was cruel in his verses only; and that he was, au fond, like Boileau, the most devoted of friends, the most benevolent and generous of men. The "arrogant and vituperative Warburton," writes Isaac Disraeli-who, by the way, professes always to consider an author as a being possessed of two lives, the intellectual and the vulgar; so that "in his books we trace the history of his mind, and in his actions those [sic] of human nature"§-the bullying Bishop, says Literature's old Curiosity-shopman, "was only such in his assumed character; for in still domestic life he was the creature of benevolence, touched by generous passions."|| The Abbé Prévôt is described by Rousseau as being, in private, a very amiable and extremely simple man, whose heart gave life to his writings, and who, in society, showed nothing whatever of the spleen and sombre colouring observable in his works. Southey, in one of his letters, is full of a "most extraordinary book" ""** by Dr. Ezra Stiles, sometime President of Yale College, than which nothing more thoroughly rancorous could have been written by Hugh Peters himself. "And yet Ezra Stiles was a kind, simple-hearted creature, so that the milk of his nature, and the vinegar and gall of his prejudices, make the strangest compound in the world."+t Contrasting the personal pleasantness of Joseph de Maistre with his polemical 'cruelty," M. Nisard wants to know how to reconcile so much bitterness with so much bonhomie; and adds: "M. de Maistre n'en est pas le seul exemple. Le dix-septième siècle en offrirait plusieurs, à commencer par Bossuet si sévère comme docteur de l'Eglise, si bienveillant et si accommodant comme l'homme."‡‡ There is a passage in Boileau averring, or bidding others aver, Madame d'Arblay expresses her agreeable surprise at finding in "Mr. Professor Young, of Glasgow," not a caustic satirist, but a bonhomme with a face that looks all honesty and kindness, and manners gentle and humble. "It was a most agreeable surprise to find such a man in Mr. Professor Young, as I had expected a sharp though amusing satirist, from * Essays from Blackwood, by Rev. John Eagles, p. 250. † Léon Feugère. Les Ennemis de Racine par F. Deltour, ch. v. Preface to Quarrels of Authors. ** History of the Three Judges. †† Southey to Charles Wynn, Sept. 29, 1821. Etudes d'Histoire, par D. Nisard, p. 64. Les Confessions, 1. viii. §§ Epître x. |