Text: Signed “C” (Unknown), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), January 4, 1845, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 10-12

[page 10, column 2, continued:]

”IS GENIUS CONSCIOUS OF ITS POWERS?”

Not the shadow of a peradventure rests upon the question. By cock and pye, the best oath that I am acquainted with, yea! But if any darkness encompassed the matter, that essay of Hazlitt's in which he attempts to prove the contrary dispels it. “No really great man ever thought himself so,” begins the essayist, and before he drops his pen, makes these depreciating remarks upon himself: —

“If the reader is not already apprised of it, he will please to take notice that I write this at Winterslow. My style there is apt to be redundant and ‘excursive. At other times it may be cramped, dry, abrupt; but there it flows like a river, and overspreads its banks. I have not to seek for thoughts or hunt for images: they come of themselves, I inhale them with the breeze, and the silent groves are vocal with a thousand recollections —

“Here I came fifteen years ago, a willing exile; and as I trod the green sward by the low wood-side, repeated the old line,

I found it so then, before, and since; and shall I faint, now that I have poured out the spirit of that mind to the world, and treated many subjects with truth, with freedom and power, because I have been followed with one cry of abuse ever since for not being a government tool? Here I sketched my account of that old honest Signior Orlando Friscobaldo — which, with its fine, racy, acrid tone, that old crab-apple, G**ff**d, would have relished or pretended to relish, had I been a governmental tool! Here, too, I have written Table Talks without number, and as yet without a falling off, till [page 11:] now that they are nearly dune, or I should not make this boast. I could swear (were they not mine) the thoughts in many of, them are founded as the rock, free as air, the tone like an Italian picture.”

This rather sounds like attaching a just estimate to one's own performance, and I do not remember among all the commendations of the Genius of the Essayist, of seeing any thing more commendatory than these lines by his own hand.

But Hazlitt's false conclusion that greatness is blind to its own dimensions, arises from his confounding a consciousness of superiority with an unconsciousness of its cause. A man who has given ten years to the study of Greek, is perfectly well aware of the source of his acquirements, as well as of their extent. But the learned Blacksmith who gets a knowledge of Greek in ten days, is not the less aware of his gettings, because he knows not how he got the power to get. The writings of all great minds are full of instances of self-consciousness. Shakspeare and Milton, are fuller, perhaps, than any others. With what an oracular certainty they both promise immortality to the names mentioned in their verse! To quote instances, would seem to imply a doubt of ignorance on the part of the reader that I do not entertain. Every body knows that Milton promised his great epic many, many years, before a line of it was penned; the interval between the promise and the performance was the period of gestation. It required the audacity of Genius to make a prediction that only a Genius could fulfil. Cool, unblushing egotism is almost a sure indication of greatness. There can be no greatness without it. The vauntings of impudence are a very different matter.

In naming Burke, Hazlitt says: “Because his rank in letters is become a settled point with us, we conclude that it must have been quite as self-evident to him, and that he must have been perfectly conscious of his vast superiority to the rest of the world. Alas! not so. No man is truly himself, but in the idea which others entertain of him.” Regarding his rank in letters Burke could not have been over-confident, because he knew that rank depends almost as much upon accident as merit, but his superiority to the rest of the world was a fact which there are abundant reasons for believing he trusted in as firmly as any of his admirers do now. The very powers which make a man great, also make him the best perceiver of his own greatness. Who has ever read Burns without being startled at the judgments he pronounces upon himself? and the gentle Sir Walter swore the most terrible oaths at Blackwood, the publisher, for presuming to suggest that an improvement might be made in one of the Tales of my Landlord; and the kind of omnipotent contempt which he expressed for Jeffrey, when the critic reviewed one of his poems with a slight qualification of dispraise, scarcely perceptible to the common eye, is to me stronger evidence of his Genius than the poem itself.

That “no man is truly himself but in the idea which others entertain of him,” is a vile pernicious untruth, which, if believed in, would destroy all greatness. All confidence and boldness would be at an end, and men would go tottering about, afraid to speak or act, because they could not know in advance, what opinions would be entertained of them. No luau ever was great, whose opinion of himself was not independent of the opinions of others. Self-confidence is the only foundation upon which any great work was ever erected. It is the fuel which gets up the steam, without which the engine is useless matter. To undertake a task for which I had not a conscious fitness, would be the reverse of modesty; and modesty is as natural an accompaniment to genius, as self-confidence. [column 2:]

“What a pity,” said one, “that Milton had not the pleasure of reading Paradise Lost.” What a pity, say I, that a man of genius, like Hazlitt, who had often been steeped in the delights of composition, should have echoed such a misleading pity. Can it be believed that any body has ever taken half the pleasure in studying Paradise Lost, that the author did in composing it? What recompense would the poet have, if he gained none in his work? Can any poet look upon the reward which his labours have brought him, and declare that they afforded him as much pleasure as the labours themselves? I verily believe, that great as the delight has been which Jack Falstaff has afforded the world, that his author received more pleasure in creating him, than all the rest of the world has received from reading him. He heard all the jokes of the fat knight, uttered in the rich oily voice, and saw the accompanying grins and shaking of the fat heavy sides, and mock solemnities, that we can never hear or see; and moreover, he saw and heard a thousand characteristic traits that could not be put upon paper. The portrait of Jack appears plump and real enough to us, but compared with the original that was present to the poet, he is a mere shadowy outline. And it is for this reason that authors have such a disgust for their own productions. To the reader the attempted descriptions of what the author saw, call up some faint resemblance of the original objects, and even these resemblances, faint as they are, give a degree of pleasure; but to the author himself, his lines only impart a sickening sense of the feebleness with which he has depicted the glories which inflamed his imagination. “I sometimes try to read an article which I have written in some magazine or review, but stop short after a sentence or two, and never recur to the task,” says Hazlitt. Yet another person can read this article or review two or three times with renewed pleasure. Mr. Dickens has furnished a confirmation of the truth of my argument in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit. He says, “If my readers have derived but half the pleasure and interest from its perusal, which its composition has afforded me, I have ample reason to be satisfied; and if they part from any of my visionary friends with the least tinge of that reluctance and regret which I feel in dismissing them, my success has been complete indeed.”

This is the most candid confession that any author has yet made. So then, great as our delight has been in the society of Sairey Gamp, Mr. Dickens has been twice as much delighted as any of us. And yet he will never seek her society again, as the rest of us will, in his own pages. His Sairey and our Sairey are different personages: Ours is only a shadow, but he has enjoyed the reality. But, reluctance is not the right word to express the sensation which we experienced in taking leave of Sairey Gamp and the Junior Bailey; a much stronger term might be used without exaggeration.

Hazlitt did not himself believe in his own theory. Like all dealers in paradox, either intentionally or by accident he continually upsets his own arguments. All the instances that he names, especially those of the painters, directly contradict his assertions. He could hardly have named a great man who seems to have possessed himself in such perfect confidence of genius as Michael Angelo. I doubt whether an instance of a great man wanting in a just appreciation of his own powers, can be named. The timidity of Cowper, even, was nut owing to mistrust of what he had the ability to do; he was bold enough to undertake the task that he felt himself equal to performing. Whoever has enjoyed the privilege of personal intercourse with men of genius must have noticed many accidental bursts of conscious might [page 12:] which would have appeared in lesser men the very sublime of conceit. I know an artist who said very deliberately one day, that he could paint as well as Titian, and draw much better. Such an expression as this would have made Hazlitt's hair bristle, but if he had seen the artist work, he would not have said of him as he did of Annibal Caracci for making the same boast, that “he was wrong.” But the same artist would have inscribed “faciebat,” upon his work notwithstanding. Doctor Johnson said that he could write a better cookery book than any body had ever produced. I am inclined to believe that he could have done it, but he was too busy with his dictionary.

“The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading,”says Hazlitt, but any book that gives pleasure in reading must have given twice as much pleasure in composing. Let no author ever flatter himself that what has given him pain to produce will ever give any body else pleasure to read. Critics would be spared all their cruel fun of damning a poor book, if authors would only test their writings before publishing, by the sensations which their production cost. If there be truth in this, and I appeal to all book-makers for testimony, what an ocean of delight must those happy dogs Cervantes and Fielding, Rabelais, and Sterne have floundered in, while composing their immortal fun.

C.