THE HUNDRED GREATEST MEN.*
[FIRST NOTICE.]
Tins is a formidable, but refreshing idea. There is a youthful literary ardour about it which flavours of America. It is some- what consoling, when criticism is so incessantly teasing us by picking holes in our pet but questionable heroes, to fall back on the feeling of security the unquestionably great give us, those whose greatness remains when all smaller things have filtered through the sieve of history into oblivion, described poetically by Mr. Emerson in his rather tall preface. "The great men of the past did not slide by any fortune into their high place. They have been selected by the severest of all judges,—Time. As the snow melts in April, so has this mountain lost in every generation a new fragment. Every year new particles have dropped into the flood, as the mind found them wanting in per- manent interest, until only the Titans remain." This idea of ' collecting the Titans together may strike some minds as much American conversation does, as young and naff, as touching what we all know with the excited eagerness of a new discovery. But it may be questioned whether the old intellectual literary world, which gives itself airs and is blasé, invariably knows its alphabet well enough to justify its airs ? Are we not all, in these days of so-called culture, too much inclined to indulge in the pleasures of criticising, and not enough in the pleasures of appreciation ? Being up to the passing writing of the day, and forming an opinion thereupon, is doubtless more socially useful than being up in the writings of the Titans, the truths of all days, and being animated by a, righteous enthu- siasm for them.. In ordinary literary society, there is nothing very brilliant to be made out of thoroughly knowing your Bible, your Homer, or your Shakespeare; smart criticism on such works does not come easy, and sounds at best out of place. Such works do not afford much scope for display or discus- sion. It is only the very groat men, the Gladstones, who dare take much . vivid interest in school-day literature. In every-day society, doing honour to the great is gener- ally felt to be a bore, and besides producing less effect, it requires some real trouble. But, after all, the great are the great, and the best minds feed on the best things, for they have in them the truth of all times. As each important subject crops up, you have but to go the Titans, and they will say better things about the wraie verite of the matter than can be found in the highest-toned periodical literature, though this will be
* The flundred Greaten Men. Portraits of the Hundred greatest Men of History, reproduced from Fine and Rare Steel Engravings. Vol. 1., Poetry.—Posto. Dramatists, and Novelists. London : Sampson Low and Co.
most infinitely useful in directing the way to the truths of the Titans on the passing interests of the day. For men who have to act, that is the practical use of book-learning, and of course is the idea which makes the study of classics in schools so universal. But the truths of all times, truths the study of which it may be right to begin life with in the school-room, cannot certainly be fully seized or understood there. It re- quires the experience of life to appreciate them, to acknowledge, enjoy, and profit from their infinite superiority. It is well enough to give the highest standard from the earliest years ; but we must not forget that the keenest and most vivid interests of those early years are not generally attached to the school- room, but to the cricket-field, or some other equally unliterary arena, and that it is only when the best of the mind is bent on a subject that the really lasting lessons are learnt from it. The sentimental side of the Titans is very telling, and comes in use- fully at college, when the sensibilities are awakening to the romantic side of life ; but the great weight of their wisdom is only fully appreciated in the wide field of life when, so often, they are fading into dim shadows in the minds of men of action. There is no doubt the world reads too much of what is only pass- ing literature. It may be good to read some, but in life there is not time enough for everything, and if we want really right and high. culture, we must not forget our Titans. We must keep them, a living source of wisdom,in our minds, to apply to when time for action comes, and to help us in gauging the powers of contemporary aspirants to the Titan's crown.
Such a collection as this portfolio is useful as a reminder of the dates and a catalogue of the chief works of the greatest writers, besides being a portrait-gallery in a very portable form, It is prefaced by a short paper by Emerson, already quoted from, one by Matthew Arnold, and a short note explanatory of
the object of the work. We are told, In the preparation of the present work, an attenipt has been made to separate the facts of civilisation into classes, and to gather together in each class the portraits of the few great leaders, who, from the be- ginning of history down to the present time, have been its representatives." The first volume contains the portraits and short account of the lives and work of Homer, Pindar, ./Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander, Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Molibre, Goethe, and Scott. Before considering the engravings, we Must stop to object to part of Mr. M Arnold's preface, the most important piece of writing in this first volume. He says, " FOr us to-day, what ground of the .superiority of poetry is most evident, the most notable P Surely its solidity. Already we have seen Aristotle prefer it to history on this very ground. Poetry has, says he, a higher wisdom and a more serious worth than history." So far we agree, but Mr. Arnold, we think, over-theorises when he goes on to say, " Compare poetry with other efforts of the human spirit besides history. Compare it with art. It is more intellectual than art, more interpretive. Along with the plastic representation, it utters the idea, it thinks. Poetry is often called art, and poets are classed with painters and sculptors as artists. But Goethe has, with pro- found truth, insisted on. the difference between them. "Poetry is held to be art," he says," and yet it is not, as art is mechanism, mechanical, I deny poetry to be an art. Neither is it a science. Poetry is to be called neither art nor science, but genius." Poetry is less artistic than the arts, but in closer correspondence with the intelligential nature of man, who is defined, as we know him to be, " a thinking animal." Poetry thinks,aud the arts do not." This we cannot think a conclusive reasoning-out of the matter. But before criticising, we must find an excuse for our audacity in daring to disagree with Mr. M. Arnold and Goethe. Perhaps our best excuse lies in the facts that Mr. M. Arnold is a poet, and of such distinction that an undue partiality for his own line of utterance is quite natural, and that, moreover, he has the task here of introducing the great poets of the world ; and that Goethe was also a poet, and lived in a time barren of living art. It may be quite right to class poetry first, because it field of sympathy-. To one who can
appeals to a much wider
really honestly feel a work of art not only to be an intellectual, but a soul-satisfying gain (the effect of really great art on the natures in sympathy with it), a hundred, not to say hundreds, in these literary, but not artistic times, will be found to be really impressed and elevated by poetry. We can all read and write, we cannot only not all paint or " sculpt," but we cannot all see, see in the way of discriminating between what is beauty and what is ugliness, Therefore it is quite right poetry should take the lead. But when Goethe says " art is mechanism, mechanical," in contradistinction to poetry, which is " genius," and Mr. M. Arnold says that the difference is insisted on by Goethe "with profound truth," we think they both go too far. Surely the profound truth in the matter would lead us to a wider concep- tion of the meaning of genius than that which Goethe gives to it. Perhaps, as we are dealing with a work treating on the " greatest men," it is not out of place to think what " greatest " means. It is surely a combination of high abilities, all richly developed and touched by genius, inspiration, or whatever name we like to use for that something beyond and outside human rea- son, which education alone cannot develope; which belongs to the more instinctive parts of our nature, which has to do with the finer sensibilities, and which runs through the whole make of the being who possesses it,—not only through the intellect, but also through the feelings and the senses, making him see and hear, feel and think nearer the truth in all matters ; as Plato puts it, the soul: that comes to the birth, seeing most of the truth of a Divine existence, and therefore putting almost un- consciously into whatever work he has in hand a beautiful reality, which, to the common-place, rougher-made nature, is like a new discovery,—a truth which many intelligences can re- cognise in nature, a clue once being given, but which, to the finer instinct of genius, is the natural reading of the natural world. When Plato says, in his Pluedrus, that those souls who come to the birth seeing most of the truth are artists; lovers, philosophers, ho took a wider view of this finer insight and of art, we think, than either Goethe or Mr. M. Arnold. The word " genius " he would have applied to all complete develop- ments of the highest parts of human nature ; to art, we think, he would have attached the meaning of the power of putting these higher, finer perceptions into a form, whether the form of words, of colour, of form, or of sound. In the highest culture, intellect is not the only power. The Greek mind was eminently com- plete and harmonious in its conceptions, and did not strive for an ideal by an overbalancing of nature, even though the over- balancing might be in the direction of the highest human facul- ties. They gave to physical beauty its right place. They lived, as far as the experiences of their times admitted, at all points. Mr. Arnold, in his most admirable paper on the " French Play in London," says we, as a nation, " are awakening to the sure truth that the human spirit cannot live right, if it lives by one point only ; that it can and ought to live by several points at the same time." So genius, when it flourishes most happily, does not manifest itself solely through the intellect ; it lives at all points. Modern culture lives too much at the purely intellectual point, not sufficiently from the higher instincts of our nature, the religion of the middle-ages and of the Puritans having made a great war against all that is spontaneous in human nature, and leaving in the undisciplined good-for-nothings of society alone a field for nature's own teaching.
A proof of this is to be found in the fact that when, in ex- ceptionally highly developed natures, where the instincts and feelings are present in as great or greater proportion than the intellectual powers (as in the case of Shelley or our present poet-artists), we find their genius out of tune with the world in general, and the world not appreciating it, because greatness must necessarily not be fully appreciated till posterity has given it its right crown,—not, as Mr. Emerson says of the Titans, till " they have been selected by the severest of all judges, Time,"—and the right usefulness of their line of power is ignored, no natural place is assigned them in the outward movement of culture and civilisation.. The Greeks gave not only a place, but a very high place, to all that related to the side specially belonging to the artistic, for they saw human nature as a more complete power, and in art was found in those days the connecting-link between the works of a higher being- and those of men. Purely intellectual qualities are essentially human, but art, though it does not exclude thought, is more directly concerned with the creative spirit of a higher intelli- gence, is a connecting-link between the God-like and the animal. Plato saw in it a deeper, more complete, manifestation of the whole of nature. Goethe was essentially an intellectual power; his mind always knew what it was about, as Mr. Arnold said in his paper on Wordsworth, lately published in Macinillait,— " No line in Goethe, as Goethe said himself, but its maker knew well how it came there." And he did not see the highest worth of the art which comes almost unconsciously, but as a conse- quence of a high development of the instincts, by no means 4' mechanism, mechanical," and by no means without intellectual power. We must quote once more from Mr. Matthew Arnold, when he compares Rachel and Madlle. Sarah Bernhardt :— .".One talks vaguely of genius, but I had never till now com- prehended how much of Rachel's superiority was purely in in- tellectual power, how eminently this power counts in the actor's art, as in all are, how just is the instinct which led the Greeks to mark with a high and severe stamp the Muses." The art displayed in the engravings of the Poets' portraits is not all that could be wished, though by no means devoid of merit. It is much to be regretted that in publishing works of this kind, more effort is not made to replace engravings by photographs ; especially would the Woodbury process be useful in such work. The art of engraving does not flourish success- fully now-a-days, and photography is infinitely more truthful and, as a rule, more beautiful. The fault in almost all these engravings of the poets is a want of breadth; the shades are cut up by points of high light, the lights by sharp, black shadows, also the style of engraving is not good ; there are fidgeting little patterns in the shading, which add also to the want of the effect of breadth. It is also a fault in the editing, we think, not to give always the name of the original of the engravings, and where they aro to be seen. But a very important merit there is in these copies,—that of a power of rendering expression which makes them interesting as portraits, however deficient as works of art. The Rabelais is very clever in this respect, also the Cervantes. In the Goethe, at p. 80, there is a resemblance to Mr. Gladstone ; and when we read that "one of the distinctive characteristics of Goethe's genius was his insatiable curiosity in every branch of human knowledge," we feel there was something in his character which justified the resemblance. We must refer our readers to the work itself for fuller knowledge of the characteristics of the faces of the great poets. It is a work which ordinary libraries and all schools would do well to possess. We can imagine no better school-prize than one or more of these portfolios would be, and hope schoolmasters and schoolmistresses will adopt the suggestion.
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