GENIUS AND CHARACTER.
There are critics who profess a dealre to hear nothing, or as little as may be, of the lives of great artists, whether their instrument of art was the pen, or the brush, ox the chisel, or the strings and ceeda of mualo. With those critics perhap* moat of us agree, when we read booki tbat goasip about Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron. " Give ua their poetry," we. lay. "and leave their characters •lose j we do not want tattle abont Olalre and chatter about Harrlest, we want to be happy with 'The Skylark' or 'The Cloud.' " Possibly thia instinct isoor reet, trhere inch a poet aa Shelley Is conoerned, whose life, as hla poetry, was as " the life of winds and tides," whoße genius, unlike the ikylark'a. was more true to the point of heaven than the point of home. But reflection shows ua that on the whole, as Mr Thaokeray says, a man's genius must be baiidedon tbe foundations of bis character. Where that genius deals with the mingled ■tuff of human life — sorrow, dealre, love, hatred, kindness, meanness — then the foundation of charaoter Is eßpeolally important. People are sometimes glad that we know ao little of Shakespeare, the man ; yet who cen doubt that a true revelation of hia character would not be leas worthy, noble, and charming than the general effect of hla poems 1 In him, It is certain, we should always find an example of nobility, of generosity, of charity, and klndoess and self-forgetful' seas* Indeed, we find these qualitiep, as m rule, m the biographies of the great aympathetic poets and men of genius of tne - pan— -1 do not aay m the Uvea of rebels of genius, " meteoric poets " like Byron. The aame baßls. tbe same foundations of rectitude, of honor, of goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth underlie the ait of Moliere, of Scott, of Fielding, and, aa the new correspondence Bhows, of Thackeray, — Andrew Lang, m "Good Words."
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Ashburton Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 1830, 2 May 1888, Page 3
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331GENIUS AND CHARACTER. Ashburton Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 1830, 2 May 1888, Page 3
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