Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845

The fame of these illustrious men has long been placed beyond the reach of cavil. Criticism cannot reach, envy cannot detract from, emulation cannot equal them. Great present celebrity, indeed, is no guarantee for future and enduring fame; in many cases, it is the reverse, but there is a wide difference between the judgment of the present and that of future ages. The favour of the great, the passions of the multitude, the efforts of reviewers, the interest of booksellers, a clique of authors, a coterie of ladies, accidental events, degrading propensities, often enter largely into the composition of present reputation. But opinion is freed from all these disturbing influences by the lapse of time. The grave is the greatest of all purifiers. Literary jealousy, interested partiality, vulgar applause, exclusive favour, alike disappear before the hand of death. We never can be sufficiently distrustful of present opinion, so largely is it directed by passion or interest. But we may rely with confidence on the judgment of successive generations on departed eminence; for it is detached from the chief cause of present aberration. So various are the prejudices, so contradictory the partialities and predilections of men, in different countries and ages of the world, that they never can concur through a course of centuries in one opinion, if it is not founded in truth and justice. The vox populi is often little more than the vox diaboli ; but the voice of ages is the voice of God.

It is of more moment to consider in what the greatness of these illustrious men really consists — to what it has probably been owing — and in what particulars they bear an analogy to each other.

They are all three distinguished by one peculiarity, which doubtless entered largely into their transcendent merit — they wrote in the infancy of civilization. Homer, as all the world knows, is the oldest profane author in existence. Dante flourished about the year 1300: he lived at a time when the English barons lived in rooms strewed with rushes, and few of them could sign their names. The long life of Michael Angelo, extending from 1474 to 1564, over ninety years, if not passed in the infancy of civilization, was at least passed in the childhood of the arts: before his time, painting was in its cradle. Cimabue had merely unfolded the first dawn of beauty at Florence; and the stiff figures of Pietro Perugino, which may be traced in the first works of his pupil Raphael, still attest the backward state of the arts at Rome. This peculiarity, applicable alike to all these three great men, is very remarkable, and beyond all question had a powerful influence, both in forming their peculiar character, and elevating them to the astonishing greatness which they speedily attained.

It gave them — what Johnson has justly termed the first requisite to human greatness — self-confidence. They were the first — at least the first known to themselves and their contemporaries — who adventured on their several arts; and thus they proceeded fearlessly in their great career. They had neither critics to fear, nor lords to flatter, nor former excellence to imitate. They portrayed with the pencil, or in verse, what they severally felt, undisturbed by fear, unswayed by example, unsolicitous about fame, unconscious of excellence. They did so for the first time. Thence the freshness and originality, the vigour and truth, the simplicity and raciness by which they are distinguished. Shakspeare owed much of his greatness to the same cause; and thence his similarity, in many respects, to these great masters of his own or the sister arts. When Pope asked Bentley what he thought of his translation of the Iliad , the scholar replied, "You have written a pretty book, Mr Pope; but you must not call it Homer." Bentley was right. With all its pomp of language and melody of versification, its richness of imagery and magnificence of diction, Pope's Homer is widely different from the original. He could not avoid it. The "awful simplicity of the Grecian bard, his artless grandeur and unaffected majesty," will be sought for in vain in the translation; but if they had appeared there, it would have been unreadable in that age. Michael Angelo, in his bold conceptions, energetic will, and rapid execution, bears a close resemblance to the father of poetry. In both, the same faults, as we esteem them, are conspicuous, arising from a too close imitation of nature, and a carelessness in rejecting images or objects which are of an ordinary or homely description. Dante was incomparably more learned than either: he followed Virgil in his descent to the infernal regions; and exhibits an intimate acquaintance with ancient history, as well as that of the modern Italian states, in the account of the characters he meets in that scene of torment. But in his own line he was entirely original. Homer and Virgil had, in episodes of their poems, introduced a picture of the infernal regions; but nothing on the plan of Dante's Inferno had before been thought of in the world. With much of the machinery of the ancients, it bears the stamp of the spiritual faith of modern times. It lays bare the heart in a way unknown even to Homer and Euripides. It reveals the inmost man in a way which bespeaks the centuries of self-reflection in the cloister which had preceded it. It is the basis of all the spiritual poetry of modern, as the Iliad is of all the external imagery of ancient, times.

In this respect there is a most grievous impediment to genius in later, or, as we term them, more civilized times, from which, in earlier ages, it is wholly exempt. Criticism, public opinion, the dread of ridicule — then too often crush the strongest minds. The weight of former examples, the influence of early habits, the halo of long-established reputation, force original genius from the untrodden path of invention into the beaten one of imitation. Early talent feels itself overawed by the colossus which all the world adores; it falls down and worships, instead of conceiving. The dread of ridicule extinguishes originality in its birth. Immense is the incubus thus laid upon the efforts of genius. It is the chief cause of the degradation of taste, the artificial style, the want of original conception, by which the literature of old nations is invariably distinguished. The early poet or painter who portrays what he feels or has seen, with no anxiety but to do so powerfully and truly, is relieved of a load which crushes his subsequent compeers to the earth. Mediocrity is ever envious of genius — ordinary capacity of original thought. Such envy in early times is innocuous or does not exist, at least to the extent which is felt as so baneful in subsequent periods. But in a refined and enlightened age, its influence becomes incalculable. Whoever strikes out a new region of thought or composition, whoever opens a fresh vein of imagery or excellence, is persecuted by the critics. He disturbs settled ideas, endangers established reputations, brings forward rivals to dominant fame. That is sufficient to render him the enemy of all the existing rulers in the world of taste. Even Jeffrey seriously lamented, in one of his first reviews of Scott's poems, that he should have identified himself with the unpicturesque and expiring images of feudality, which no effort could render poetical. Racine's tragedies were received with such a storm of criticism as wellnigh cost the sensitive author his life; and Rousseau was so rudely handled by contemporary writers on his first appearance, that it confirmed him in his morbid hatred of civilization. The vigour of these great men, indeed, overcame the obstacles created by contemporary envy; but how seldom, especially in a refined age, can genius effect such a prodigy? how often is it crushed in the outset of its career, or turned aside into the humble and unobtrusive path of imitation, to shun the danger with which that of originality is beset!