Maturin Ballou - Genius in Sunshine and Shadow

These words were addressed to Miss Anna Seward, of Lichfield. It was in the grammar school of this ancient cathedral town that Addison, Dr. Johnson, 788788and Garrick received their early education, and Johnson was a native of the place. Miss Seward's father was the canon resident of Lichfield Cathedral. In his family there was a beautiful young lady named Honora Sneyd, a companion to his daughter. John André, a cultured London youth, fell in love with Honora, and was tacitly accepted. The young man was somewhat suddenly called back to the metropolis on business, and a separation thus ensued which seemed to wean the lady's affections from him, so that she soon after married a Mr. Edgeworth and in the course of time became the mother of Maria Edgeworth, the well-known novel-writer. 48 48 Sir Walter Scott greatly admired Maria Edgeworth's novels, complimenting "her wonderful power of vivifying all her persons and making them live as beings in your mind." Lord Jeffrey honored "their singular union of sober sense and inexhaustible invention." She died in 1849, in her eighty-second year. John André remained faithful to his first love, and came to America carrying in his bosom a miniature of Honora suspended from his neck. His sad fate during our Revolutionary War is well known to all. He was the Major André whom Washington reluctantly executed as a spy, and whose memorial is now conspicuous in Westminster Abbey.

Peter Corneille, the great French dramatic poet, had nothing in his exterior that indicated his genius. As to his conversational powers, they were simply insipid, and never failed to weary all listeners. Nature had endowed him with brilliant gifts, but forgot to grant him the ordinary accomplishments. He did not even speak correct French, which he never failed to write with perfection. When his friends represented to him how much more he might please by not disdaining to correct these trivial errors, he would smile and say, "I am none the less Peter Corneille!" We learn from Rogers that in the early days of his popularity Byron was quite diffident in society, or at least never ventured to take part in the conversation. If any one happened to let fall an observation which offended him, he never attempted to reply, but treasured it up for days, and would then come out with some cutting remarks, giving them as his deliberate opinion, the result of his experience of the individual's character. Southey 49 49 Southey was marvellously industrious, as over one hundred published volumes testify. Few men have been students so long and consecutively. He possessed one of the largest private libraries in England. He says: "Having no library within reach, I live upon my own stores, which are, however, more ample perhaps than were ever before possessed by one whose whole estate was in his inkstand." He generously supported the family of Coleridge, who were left destitute. His first wife was a sister of Coleridge's wife. was stiff, reserved, sedate, and so wrapped up in a garb of asceticism that Charles Lamb once stutteringly told him he was "m-made for a m-m-monk, but somehow the co-co-cowl didn't fit."

Racine made this confidential confession to his son: "Do not think that I am sought after by the great on account of my dramas; Corneille composed nobler verses than mine, but no one notices him, and he only pleases by the mouth of the actors. I never allude to my works when with men of the world, but I amuse them about matters they like to hear. My talent with them consists not in making them feel that I have any, but in showing them that they have." The well-remembered saying about Goldsmith's lack of conversational power is excellent because it was so true; namely, that "he wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll." 50 50 "To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous," says Hazlitt; "even if he did, you would find fault with him as a pedant." Fisher Ames and Rufus Choate were distinguished for their conversational powers. Stuart, the American painter, was remarkable in this respect; and so were Washington Allston, Edgar A. Poe, Margaret Fuller, and the late Caleb Cushing. The lady just named was considered to be the best talker of her sex since Madame de Staël. Indeed, those who knew her well said she talked even better than she wrote, which was saying much.

Charles Sumner used to relate a talk in a company where Daniel Webster was present. The question under discussion was what were the best means of culture. Webster was silent until all had spoken. He then said: "Gentlemen, you have overlooked one of the means of culture which I consider of the first importance, and from which I have gained the most; that is, good conversation." 51 51 There is a sort of knowledge beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had in conversation: so necessary is this to understanding the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books. — Fielding.

Whipple has said in one of his essays that "real, earnest conversation is a kind of intellectual cannibalism, where strong minds feed on each other and mightily enjoy the repast."

Charles Lamb's most sportive essays, which read as though they came almost spontaneously from his pen, are known to have been the result of intense brain labor. He would spend a whole week in elaborating a single humorous letter to a friend. Lamb was so sensitive concerning proof-reading as to be the dread of the printers. It is said of the poet-laureate of England that he has been known to re-write a poem twenty times and more before he was satisfied to give it to the printer. Dickens, when writing a book, was accustomed to shut himself up for days together, and to work with fearful energy until the task was completed; after which he would come forth presenting the appearance of a person recovering from a fit of illness. The free-and-easy spirit which characterizes his pages affords no evidence of the travail through which their author passed in giving them birth. Bulwer-Lytton took matters much more philosophically. He always worked at pen-craft leisurely, never more than three or four hours a day; and yet by carefully observing a system the aggregate of his productions was very large. Balzac, after thinking over a subject, would retire to his study and write it out half a dozen times before he gave the manuscript to the printer, whom he afterwards tormented to the very verge of exasperation by his proof alterations. To come nearer to our own time, we may remark that Longfellow, whose versification seems always to have flowed with such ease and fluency from his pen, was a slow and painstaking producer, sometimes altering and amending until the original draft of an essay or poem was quite improved out of sight.

Dr. Channing nearly drove his printers crazy; after his manuscript – almost illegible by corrections and interlineations – had been returned to them with alterations, omissions, and additions on the first proof-sheets, he would ponder over, alter, and amend three or four successive proofs before he finally allowed the result to meet the public eye, – a new edition involving another series of alterations. The lyric which cost Tennyson the most trouble was "Come into the Garden, Maud." It is said to have been held back from the public after it had been a year in his hands, going through repeated processes of alteration. What time indorses, requires time to create and finish. To this determination of Tennyson to condense all his thoughts into the smallest space, and never to expand when by patient labor he can contract, we owe the few lines in which he states in the "Princess" the whole nebular theory of the universe as expounded by Kant and Laplace; and how much reflection must have been required to condense the description of the fundamental defect of English law, on which volumes have been written, as he has done in "Aylmer's Field: " —