United States or Venezuela ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A century or two ago the greatest wits were known to have pathetically lamented, that the writers, of whose merits I have been speaking, were handed down to us in so mutilated a condition. Now it seems very probable, that, if their works were totally annihilated, it would scarcely call forth a sigh from the refined geniuses of the present age.
"You are both geniuses in your line," agreed Holmes, as we settled down in a couple of kitchen chairs, and I listened while he tried to pull the chef's leg for some cuff-button information; "and I can appreciate your cookery all the more, since I am half a fellow-country-man of yours. My mother was French, as Doctor Watson informed the world in one of my very first adventures." "Ah!
Jim frowned from time to time when he caught the inquisitive glance of some stranger. He had that dislike of being stared at, which comes on geniuses late in life and never leaves the commonplace. Sibyl, however, was quite unconscious of the effect she was producing. Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips.
This is the attitude. This is why many parents either refuse their children the advantages of an education and insist upon their going to work at an early age, or compel them to take a hated schooling. On the other hand, there are parents who consider their children prodigies, geniuses, intended to occupy some great and magnificent position in the world.
For reasons of which we are ignorant, analogous to those that produce a great poet or a great painter, there arise moral geniuses who feel strongly what others do not feel at all, just as does a great poet, in comparison with the crowd. But it is not enough that they feel: they must create, they must realize their ideal in a belief and in rules of conduct accepted by other men.
Fougeres marched along the boulevard in a state of joy which gave to his honest face an expression of pride. He was like a schoolboy protecting a woman. He met Joseph Bridau, one of his comrades, and one of those eccentric geniuses destined to fame and sorrow. Joseph Bridau, who had, to use his own expression, a few sous in his pocket, took Fougeres to the Opera.
"Nae doubt; an' they would see it was the wisest thing they could do. He would be careful o' their health, an' send them early to bed as weel as hae them up at eight sharp. Geniuses' healths is always breakin' doon because of late hours, as in the case o' the lad wha used often to begin his immortal writin's at twal o'clock at nicht, a thing 'at would ruin ony constitootion.
These latter and their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin; Lamb with his bibliomania and creed of pure caprice, the most unique of all geniuses; Leigh Hunt with his Bohemian impecuniosity; Landor with his tempestuous temper, throwing plates on the floor; Hazlitt with his bitterness and his low love affair; even that healthier and happier Bohemian, Peacock.
Indeed, we have biographies of many geniuses, by which we see that they lived with bread, and water all their life, and sometimes, by want of bread, they did pass shivering days, and nights in garrets, with unfinished poems, superior to that of Milton. True, a small part of those poor geniuses, at the end of their painful life, they did find a protector.
It seems to me to have been the work of men who had observed that virtuous indignation, caustic criticism, conclusive argument and instructive pamphleteering, even when done by the most earnest and witty literary geniuses, were as useless as praying, things going steadily from bad to worse whilst the Social Contract and the pamphlets of Voltaire were at the height of their vogue.
Word Of The Day